The next afternoon I waved at him again and this time he didn’t wave me away.
I eased down from the rock and walked as non-threateningly as possible over to them.
Raksha lifted her head and examined me for an instant, rose and trotted over to her cubs.
Jack watched her leave. “I guess this is as good a time as any. What do you want to know?”
“Tell me about the modifications,” I said. This was a sure opener for every person I’d ever met who’d undergone elective modification. Like hospital patients, it was the one reliable subject they all wanted to talk about. Jack Brubaker and your Aunt Edda getting her gall bladder out had a lot in common.
“Yeah,” said Jack. “It’s all common sense stuff, really. You figure I had to be out here on my own all year around, I needed certain things. Thick skin. A summer and a winter pelt. Some brown fat to generate heat when I need it. A little more strength in my arms, legs and back. A little more stamina. Better hearing. Better sense of smell. Better eyesight. You can guess the drill.”
I pointed at his knees and hips. “What about those?”
He stared at his own knee for a minute, not quite understanding. “Oh, yeah,” he said suddenly. “I know what you mean. Bigger points for muscle attachment and just to generally beef things up. A sprained ankle would likely kill me. Even so, I got a strained ligament last winter. If it hadn’t been for Raksha, I wouldn’t have made it.” He looked into the distance for a moment. “Winters are hard.”
“So, are you as good a wolf as they are?”
“I’m not a wolf,” he said looking straight at me. I had clearly hit a nerve. “They accept me into the pack. I’m a sort of brother to Akela. An uncle figure. The idea was to live with the wolves, not become a wolf.”
“Interesting distinction.”
Jack scowled a moment. “I guess. Maybe I could have been modified into a wolf but it would have cost a lot more money than I had.”
I couldn’t have asked for a better segue. “How did you pay for it? Modifications like this are expensive.” I cued Goldie to concentrate on his face. Briefly, I looked up. As usual, she was one step ahead of me.
“Sam didn’t tell you?”
“Sam didn’t tell me much. He left me pretty much to my own devices.”
Jack chuckled and gestured to the empty landscape around us. “I expect he did. I won the Colorado lottery. Ten million dollars.”
“Come on. If a lottery millionaire had chosen to become a wolf-”
He glanced at me coldly.
“-chosen life with the wolves,” I amended. “I would have heard of it.”
“Yeah,” he said quietly. “Sam and I came to the same conclusion. So, I lost the money at the Golden Hind Casino of Macau. It’s a neat trick. You contract for something illicit or secret and pay for it by losing. The casino takes ten percent. Had all the work done there, too, along with a couple of years of physical therapy to recover. Then, snuck back here through Canada broke as a penny.” He laughed. “Now, that was a pain in the ass. I look more or less normal if I depilate every day but it makes me itch like Hell.”
“Why choose this?”
He looked up at me as if I were crazy. Maybe to him I was. He looked back at Raksha. “It seemed the right idea at the time.”
“So, your whole life you spent thinking about wolves.”
He shrugged. “I saw a movie once that made it look pretty good. That’s about it.”
“Any regrets?”
“Quiet,” he said suddenly and his nostrils flared. “Akela’s coming.”
Akela was black with just a hint of brown along his belly. He had come up over the same ridge I had come the previous day. As soon as he saw us, he started running. It was at least a mile back to that ridge but he covered the ground quickly.
“Hold still,” said Jack.
That was okay for him to say. I’ve dictated live stories while mortars were exploding forty feet from me without losing a comma. But not this time. Maybe there is something to racial memory. All I knew was a black wolf was racing towards me Hell bent on evil. I remembered images out of folklore-legend, myth and majesty-and suddenly I was terrified. I turned and ran. I didn’t get two steps when Jack grabbed me by the jacket and hurled me to the ground. Then, he sat on me.
“Son-of-a-bitch,” I swore.
“Oh, shut up.”
“That wolf’s going to kill me.”
“True. He might,” Jack said judiciously. “You got a better chance with me sitting on you.”
Akela was much, much bigger than Raksha. He had to have been easily a hundred and fifty pounds. Unlike the trusting examination I’d gotten yesterday, Akela sniffed me over one end to the other.
When he was finished figuring out where I had been for the last several years by my smell, he walked stiff legged to face me. He made no sound but he was clearly considering whether or not to attack. A very slight huff came from Jack. Akela gave no sign of having heard. After a moment, though, he opened his mouth and seemed to grin. He leaped gracefully over my head and bowled Jack over. It was like having two Olympic wrestlers working out on my back.
Cautiously, I rose to my feet and turned around. Akela and Jack were rolling around on the grass. Jack grabbed Akela around his chest and started to roll over with him but Akela escaped and pushed him over.
I watched them dismally. I had been here two days and gotten some great footage but I knew almost nothing. It was time to start checking deep background.
Every HIR has his own techniques. I like to get just enough background to understand what I’m looking at before I start to interview the subject. This way the material always feels fresh. Other people do things differently. I know one HIR who won’t interview a subject without knowing everything down to the family tree.
My technique, though, is predicated on the subject cooperating. Usually it works out. Even people who are hostile to the idea will cooperate in some way-anger and hate are a form of emotional contact after all. It wasn’t working here. It wasn’t that Jack disliked cooperating. He just didn’t care. Somewhere in the back of people is a need to talk about themselves. It’s basic to our makeup. It’s fundamental. Jack didn’t seem to have it; he was just being polite. It was time I looked into alternatives. As I said, I was wired into the North American Communications Grid through my tent. Sam was only a few numbers away.
I could tell from the furniture behind him that Sam was in his office. His eyes were red and his expression surly. He was probably drunk.
“What do you want?”
“To talk to you. Jack’s not the only story here, you know.”
He looked at me suspiciously. “What do you mean?”
I smiled at him. “You’re part of this, too. After all, you run Beck-Lewis. He lives in your backyard, so to speak. You knew all about him. Why did you let him stay here?”
Sam didn’t say anything for a moment. “Didn’t want to arrest him. We grew up together.”
“Really?” I had guessed a connection of this sort. “Was he always like this?”
“Like what? Covered with hair? Nowadays, his dick and scrotum retract up into his belly. Did you think he was like that in high school?” Sam reached off camera and pulled back a bottle. “His dad ran the hardware store in Schmidt, north of the lake. He didn’t do very well at it and Jack was always helping out. Jack was almost always busy. He was the kind of kid that you could get to cooperate if you asked him but you’d run into a stone wall if you tried to force him. He hated taking orders or having anyone tell him what to do-it compromised his freedom, I guess. But if you asked him, he’d do everything he could for you.” Sam chuckled softly.
I wanted to yell: but how did he come here? That wouldn’t work. Sam had to tell the story in his own way.
“Whenever he had the chance, he lit out camping,” Sam said. He leaned forward into the screen. “You got to understand that Jack was talented. Look, as soon as he was old enough he got a hunting license. Every deer season he went out with a rifle and bagged the limit. Every time. Some guys go for years before they bag their first buck. Nobody gets his limit every year. Jack started out using his Dad’s 30-06, an old Springfield. That was too easy. Jack could take down a buck from a mile away and let you pick where to put the hole so it wouldn’t show when it was mounted. After a while, he went to a smaller bore and then to black powder. That got too easy so he went to bow hunting. He was fourteen years old at that point and bringing home a deer every time. Every time. That got too
