the wailing wind,
the cold,
the cold rooted in marrow,
ascended through blood, exploded from flesh,
nowhere to go but dying,
all memory so vivid and fading—the emissary come to guide you
through that shifting and turbulent veil
In the cold, every breath drawn is realized, every exhalation witnessed in minor billows of carbon dioxide. The poison leaves in exchange for life and reminds of my impermanent body. I focus on that, in something like a meditation. Hard-packed snow gives and crunches beneath my boots. The dome of the world is slate, and without a cloud, and ashen birches watch me with knotted eyes. There is the wolf. There is me. There is nothing else. I find his scat, still steaming in the snow. His tracks are deep and fresh and taunting. He is there, and he isn’t there. It has been a trek for hours, and I am no closer, no farther from him. He is in my mind, sprinting then slowing, leaving piss for me to smell and find, hearing my increasingly clumsy gait puncture the snow, hearing my curses. These the signals to begin his mockery over again. I am too old for this.
***
He had killed two of Hal Monroe’s cattle, and Hal calls his closest neighbor, eleven miles away:
“I need you to kill a wolf.”
His voice is in a mournful way, but still hard, because Hal is a hard man, but parted like a river around something he can’t or won’t say out loud into the world. Loss for the lonely tucks us in lonelier.
“Hal, I want to help, but it’s been a long time.”
“Goddammit, you’re old, but not as old as me, not as broken. I won’t allow what cattle I got left get killed.”
A pleading bleeds into his voice, and there is no way I can refuse.
***
A long road through a dark morning. Spruces like sacred sentinels at my flanks, revealed in the unnatural light of my truck. Towering. Omnipresent. They slip behind me and are gone, left to their unassailable council.
***
He greets me with a trembling handshake, unsteady on his walker, and I close the distance quickly to embrace him so he doesn’t fall. One man holds onto what he was, the other holds onto what he’ll be.
***
We come in off the deck of his cabin, and I situate him in the sofa and sit across him on a coffee table made of a cedar log halved lengthwise and lacquered all to hell. I find it distasteful.
I hadn’t seen him for months before the wolf. A phone call here and there to check in, but that’s all. He looks older since the last I’d seen him. Crumpled and defeated. But his eyes are lucid, infernos in the windows of a dilapidated house.
The cabin is in good order.
I said, “Meredith is still making her rounds.”
He’s insulted because it’s true.
“She’s here four days out the week. Kathryn won’t let her come no less than that.”
Kathryn is his daughter, a lawyer in Missoula.
I look around the place, satisfied he’s looked after.
“Goddammit,” he says.
I look at him.
“Everyone is my fucking babysitter.”
I start to say something, but he interrupts.
“The wolf.”
I settle, “The wolf.”
“I caught sight of him a few days ago. The day after he’d killed…”
He chokes up, gives me a look that stops me leaning forward.
“The day after he’d killed Josephine and Ethel.”
Josephine and Ethel.
He collects himself.
“He’s a big grey. Young. Cocky. A long black stripe along his nose. Good-looking sonofabitch. A shame to kill him, but it needs done.”
He looks at me.
It isn’t legal to kill a grey wolf unless human life is endangered. He knows this.
“I’ll get him.”
He relaxes and crumples even more into the couch, an old casino that was once the talk of the town before its inevitable demolition.
***
A snag of fur on a fallen tree. Paw prints. Scat. Urine. I am no closer. I sit on a felled spruce to think. There is only my breathing. I have no intention of killing the grey. A .357 is on my hip for the random encounter, but the rifle fires a dart. I won’t kill at the behest of a vengeful old miser; there must be a greater cause.
***
There is a yelp of pain, then whining, and I set off in its direction. The snow is deep here, and my legs burn. He’s in a clearing; front paw caught in a snare. I squat across him just far enough that his lunges don’t reach me; before long, he tires and whimpers, and I get close. His wrist is bleeding, the snare looped tightly. He is indeed young and strong. I look about the clearing, and it’s right for camp. Too late to try to make it back to my truck before dark. I leave him to gather wood, and he mewls after me.
***
I put him out with a dart to get the snare off and tend to his wrist. When I’m done, I watch him breathe evenly in the light of the fire. A lone wolf that surely would have died had Hal not sent me out to kill him.
***
In the night, I keep the fire going as long as I can. I can’t handle the cold how I used to; every joint hurts. I swear this the last time I put myself at hazard. But the wolf stirs in some wild dream, his eyes flicker, and in my heart, I know I can’t abandon such a wonder, lest he needs me when he wakes. I make an oath.
I can fight the exhaustion no longer and lean against a big pine a few feet further from the fire, and in short order, the grey and I dream together.
***
When I wake to a pale blue morning, he is gone; a thin steam rises from the embers of the fire. A strong odor of urine makes me more wakeful, and there is a dark stain on my coat. The sonofabitch pissed on me. In that interminable quiet, I stare at where he was, follow his tracks to my side, trace with my finger the impression of his haunches. How long did you sit here? I look around that wood, my breath pluming white in the air, and I repeat the oath it appears we both took.
Kahlil Benson is expected to play at right tackle and right guard verses the Rams in the preseason game. He's trending toward starting this year. He would be the first rookie mini-camp invitee to start his career as a Week 1 starter in league history.
In 2018, the first year of the Andy Reid/Patrick Mahomes era, Kareem Hunt rushed for 827 yards and seven touchdowns in 11 games before being released from the team.
With Kenneth Walker III, that kind of consistent production on the ground is back in Kansas City. It will be a vital component in reclaiming the AFC West.
Mahomes is the best Quarterback in the NFL. After last year's downturn and his injury, the doubters in media are loud and proud.
This year he will remind the media, and the league, who he is.
Xavier Worthy and Cyrus Allen had some injury scares yesterday and fans freaked out, and immediately wanted Stefon Diggs in the building.
That's a hard no for me. KC doesn't need to put him in the same locker room as Rice and double the chances of some off field distraction, never mind the cost of the contract.
KC has what they need in the receiver room. Chad O'Shea is being seriously undervalued by people.