Free When We Were Wolves by Jon Billman Page A

out at the Cottonwood tops and hovered over the river. Strain cupped the hard hat containing the sample of Horton’s ashes—mixed with ashes of newspaper, MREs, propaganda posters, lumber from the old school—and opened the door. “Care to offer an Indian prayer for the soul of this good man?” Strain asked the pilot.
    Mayday just stared at the few working gauges on the instrument panel. “He sure burned hot,” he said.
    Strain hesitated. He should say something, but what? It was like having to pitch himself out the door. “Go with God,” he said and flipped Horton into the rotor blast. The flakes of carbon blew back through the door, floating around the cockpit like confetti, then settling in the cabin’s seams and cracks. “Goddammit,” Strain said. The two had ash on their faces, in their laps.
    Chances were a few of the ashes had made it to the river, where they would join the Missouri in North Dakota, then drift south to the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico. But a month later most of what remained of the old man would ride with the rich skiers into the untouched backcountry powder of western Montana and northern Wyoming. Then, when the snow turned to fire, Horton would fly fire for as many seasons as the Jet Ranger kept from wearing out or burning up.
    Which happened, a year and a half later, on the Fourth of July.The ship’s bucket cable caught a utility pole. The cable snapped and backlashed into the rotors, shattering the blades and fire-branding Mayday two hundred feet upside down into the south face of a mountain northwest of Buffalo. The explosion lit the night sky like a Roman candle, the humidity dropped, and the wind picked up. That evening Kurt Strain, saw boss on a fire north of Cora, Wyoming, landed two limits of brook trout and the second-or third-largest rainbow of his life. The next Monday the Data General report listed in boldface Horton and Mayday’s ten-thousand-acre, multimillion-dollar complex.

ubert de Sablettes hunted rabbits, on foot, with only a knife and a basset hound in tow. He was a runner. He ran every day—an addiction—even on the coldest winter mornings, twenty, thirty below zero, leaving at dawn his home on Klondike Street that was once the Methodist church, watch cap, a water bottle belted to his waist next to the knife, and a buffalo-horn
cor
to sound the
trompe de chasse
, calling Perch, the hound that ran behind, who could barely keep up. Hubert, gaunt and sinewy, ran up hills, over snowdrifts, into the sagebrush desert until he flushed a snowshoe hare. Then he would chase the white animal, sometimes for hours, until it became too exhausted to go on and just lay there waiting for the knife, or died of an exploding heart.
    That was the hunt, the run, as described by the children who claimed they had seen it themselves. Everyone wanted to have seen it, but the hunts took place well away from town, on the vastwastelands good only for gas wells and sheep grazing. Hubert would sometimes run for five or six hours until his workout ended with the kill. Then he would dogtrot back to town, Klondike Street, carrying the limp hare by its hind legs, grimacing from the pain in his own bramble-scarred legs. Some days he would stop in the Hams Fork River and wade in the cold water until the swelling in his legs subsided. This even in winter.
    Rumor around Hams Fork, Wyoming, is treated with the courtesy of truth, and rumor here had it that Hubert was a rich count and that he was holing up in town, hiding in the high desert, a refugee from France, where he had killed his wife by running her through with a well-honed bayonet after hunting her in a frantic chase in the forest. Around Hams Fork, Hubert was known as the Count. It had become a childhood act of bravery to creep down Klondike Street, into the churchyard at night, friends watching in the bushes across the street, and peer into the lighted stained-glass windows, pretending to be able to see more than vague shadows inside.