“Jesus,” I said. Didn’t wolves go after the weak or the sick? Cows and calves? Maybe the bull was old.
The bull stood his ground against two of the wolves, menacing them with his antlers but that freed one to nip at his back legs. He lashed out and the wolf flew five feet and rolled, came up again and back towards the bull. This was not a weak or sick bull. This was a giant buck full in his prime.
The other two wolves succeeded in turning the herd away. The herd ran off to my left. Goldie got some good shots of them leaving. Now, the bull was on his own.
Goldie circled as the wolves worried the bull. He wouldn’t run. He faced one, then two, then three of them, all the while being worried by any wolf he was not directly facing. It didn’t look like hard work but foam came from his mouth and his sides were heaving.
Then he broke and ran and the wolves worked him into a circle, two wolves chasing him and nipping him, three holding back and taking turns. Jack moved between the bull and me. He pulled out his knife and then disappeared into the long grass.
The bull was growing tired. Even so, he caught one wolf that got too careless and tossed him twenty feet. The wolf lay still.
Three wolves shot forward and snapped at his legs while only one stayed in front.
The bull ran forward at the wolf. The wolf darted out of the way-I saw it was Akela. The bull was running straight towards me.
I saw him running directly at me, his eyes focused ahead, seeing his only chance and going for it. I could feel his hooves pounding through the soles of my shoes. I couldn’t seem to hear anything; all sound had disappeared from the world.
Jack leaped from where he had been hiding in the grass. In two eight-foot bounds, he was running just to the side of the bull’s head. Without stopping, the bull brought his head down to bring the antlers to bear on him. Jack leaped and caught them. He was in the air with his knife hand below the throat of the bull. The bull tossed his head back to throw Jack aside and the force of it drove the knife deeply in and across his throat.
Jack was thrown in the air, landed curled and rolling, bounced to his feet and ran after the elk.
The bull staggered, blood pouring from his throat as if from a bucket, ropes of it hanging from his muzzle. He shook his head slowly. Jack caught up with him and drove the knife into his eye. The elk fell, boneless and flaccid, to the ground.
Jack didn’t say anything for a long second. Then, he punched the air with his fist and cried out: “Yes!”
“Jesus,” I said.
Jack heard me, looked up at me and grinned.
I had never seen so much blood in my life. The ground was stained with it ten feet around the bull. The wolves were covered with it as they merrily tore the elk apart. Goldie stood on my shoulder and took sequence after sequence. This was great footage.
“Did you see that?” he said standing next to me. Jack was drenched in elk blood from neck to knees, his fur coarse with it, his hands burnt red to the elbows. “Did you just see it?” He shook his head and grinned at me. “I’ve wanted to do that for years. Since I was a kid.” Still grinning, he looked around.
“I bet,” I said, watching Goldie in the monitors.
After a moment, I noticed Jack had grown silent.
I looked up from the monitor and didn’t see him. “Jack?” I called.
“Over here.”
I followed his voice over a small rise and found him in the deep grass. He was tending to the fallen wolf. There was an angry set to his mouth. The wolf’s whole side had been opened and I could see the ribs and muscles exposed. Mostly, the wolf panted but every now and then he yipped as Jack probed the wound. Once, he snapped at Jack’s fingers.
“It’s not as bad as it looks,” Jack said suddenly and I wondered who he was trying to convince: himself or me.
“It looks pretty bad.”
Jack didn’t say anything for a moment, his lips thin. “Well,” he said finally. “It is pretty bad. But he’ll have two months to heal before the winter sets in. If this had happened in the winter it would have been all over for him. Winters are hard.” He leaned back and looked at the wolf. “Of course, we would never have attacked an elk like that in the winter.”
He pulled a capsule out of his rucksack and broke it under the wolf’s nose. The wolf lay down and closed his eyes. “I have about twenty minutes now.”
“Is that long enough?” I said. I checked and made sure Goldie was getting this.
“Sure,” he said as he pulled out his instruments. He cleaned out the wound expertly and splashed it with disinfectant and then sprinkled what I assumed was antibiotics over it. Then, with one practiced move after another, he sewed the wound shut. Once he had finished that, he plastered a bandage over it. The wolf was stirring as Jack measured out something from a vial and injected him. The wolf didn’t even flinch.
“He’ll walk back with me. There are enough voles for all of us back with Raksha. For now, we’ll just let him sleep for a while.”
“He’ll make it back?”
“Oh, yeah. It’ll take us most of tomorrow to walk back with him. Akela will probably run on back to Raksha. But me and him will take our time.”
A good portion of the fallen elk was gone when we returned. The four wolves were lying near the carcass looking very pleased with themselves.
I squatted next to it. There was nothing remaining of the bull’s haunting grandeur; he had become just another meal on the prairie. The air was thick with the smell of meat, bone and blood.
“I didn’t think wolves attacked anything this big.” I said.
“You didn’t like the show?”
“I was surprised.”
“Yeah, well, it was a little risky,” he conceded. I thought for a moment he was embarrassed. “But it’s still summer and we’re all in good health. Not like the winter.”
“So you said.” I stood up. “So you said.”
I pulled out my phone. I wondered how long I would have to wait for Sam to pick me up.
After three weeks in Montana, my apartment felt very warm and small, a friendly sheltered spot in the middle of Manhattan. I took a long, hot shower, an even longer bath, and then another shower. I sat in my big stuffed chair and had Chinese food and drank Italian beer for dinner. New York was still hot but the air conditioning was quite cool. I slept under a light sheet for twelve hours dreaming of elk. After that, I was ready to start.
The trick was to figure out the right tack for the story. There are a million events and tales but only a limited number of points of view. That’s how you manage a story. Every human experience is unique but the uniqueness prevents it from being usable. Like great art, the experience has to be brought down to a common theme that can be universally embraced: good versus evil, coming of age, man against nature, man for nature, conflict, resolution, corruption, purity. Once you connect one of these points of view to something that happened, you have a story. The closer the connection is to something with universal appeal determines the attractiveness and durability of the story, its legs.
I checked and made sure Goldie had been fully downloaded and went over what I had. It was even better than I had expected. First, I knocked together a story just using some of the footage I had from Sam and Jack and some pictures of the puppies. A long shot of the hunt gave the sense of reality I was looking for. Then, I did the intro, the voiceover and the outtro. That would be for the human interest section for the news feeds. That took me a couple of days. I held off submitting it for the moment.
Then, I contacted some anthropologists and psychologists and put together a nice half hour segment about Jack and the wolves. Something public broadcasting would like. Suitable for a segment of a larger show on something like human adaptation, for example. I reformulated some of the outtakes and made a second segment for the wildlife sites. That took a couple of weeks. Then, I submitted the news segment at a rock-bottom price as a teaser.
Using the public broadcasting segment as a base, I built a stand-alone show on Jack himself. This was on spec. I wasn’t sure if Jack had the legs for that. I worked on that while I submitted the news segment.
Two of the big feeds bought the same segment-unusual but not rare and the it took off. In an hour, Jack had a
