Free When We Were Wolves by Jon Billman Page B

The metallic kitchen sounds were real: knives on sharpening steels and stones, the basset howling, and the tinny buzz of late-night AM radio. And the smell was real, certainly, the smell of garlic and hot goose fat and wild game frying.

    Lizabeth Tanner lived next door. Sometimes at night she could see the shadows of children chasing through the yard. The window-peeking was childish, but she too smelled the food and heard the hound and wondered what life in the church was like. Some days she would see the Count walking and would notice the color of his hair in the sunlight: grayish-white, like a summer coyote’s. Perch knew Lizabeth and liked her because she would sometimes lean over her fence and treat him to a raw hot dog.
    She was a carpenter. Thirty-four and single, she had made herliving following the ski-town booms. Now she was a contractor, mostly doing remodeling work on the older homes in town, though the mine had recently laid off a hundred or so and work was slow. She had time to remodel her own home, do some fishing, read some of the books she had always promised herself she would, and build a dogsled. The sled she donated to the charity auction that followed the Calcutta, the sled-dog-team auction where gamblers wagered on their choices for the upcoming race.

    Like the gypsy circus in the days when Hams Fork had been merely an ashen coal camp, the dog race came to town each February. The day before the Hams Fork leg of the race, pickup trucks with mobile kennels containing the yelping spitz dogs paraded into town, sleds on top, straw and muzzles poking out of the whiffled boxes. The Calcutta had become Hams Fork’s winter version of the Kentucky Derby. Residents would eat from a prime-rib buffet, then bid on their favorite sled teams. Some of the lesser-known teams would go for a mere hundred apiece. Winners would receive a 30 percent cut of the money raised. The bulk of the money went to pay immunization costs for poor children. Chances of winning weren’t great, but in a state with fewer than half a million residents and no lottery, the Calcutta was still the social event of the winter. Following the auction was the dance.

    Except to run, the Count rarely went out in public, but now he leaned nervously against the paneled wall of the Eagles Club and sipped his blush Chablis from a plastic cup as townspeople tried not to stare, and the auctioneer, an overweight man with a brushy mustache and 20x silverbelly Stetson, rattled off bids.
Hunerd dolla, hunerd dolla, I’ve a hunerd, do I hear two, two hunerd,hunerd dolla, I need two
… Box wine and Budweiser, the Calcutta was not fancy, but the building was warm and folks could catch up on gossip with friends from the other end of the county, people they saw maybe once or twice a year.
    The Count, awkward yet privileged in carriage, wore his hair oiled down, navy blazer, white oxford shirt, Levi’s, and handmade Luchese boots. The lobes of his ears and the very tip of his nose were purplish from multiple frostbite. His face was weathered, but he was extraordinarily fit. His leg muscles pressed like a horse’s through his pantlegs. His supposed age around town sometimes varied by thirty years. The Count cupped his wine close to his chest and made his bids in regal gestures with his right forefinger, enduring the hearty bids of several Reno-wise ranchers and miners who had pooled their money in order to afford the big names in the sport.
    The race director, a tan former musher out of Jackson Hole named Hunter, stood in the back wearing a long red drivers parka with coyote-fur trim and dogfood company logos emblazoned on the back. His job was to raise the anemic bids, show enthusiasm in hopes that the bidders would think he knew something they didn’t. At times he would interrupt the auctioneer by walking down the aisle between the bingo tables in his arctic ringleader’s coat and take the microphone. “Now, Dale’s team has been training at altitude all