No Place for Wolverines Read online

  JENNY WILLSON MYSTERIES

  Full Curl

  No Place for Wolverines

  Copyright © Dave Butler, 2018

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purpose of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.

  All characters in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cover image: istock.com/Hämta härifrån

  Printer: Webcom

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Butler, Dave, 1958-, author

  No place for wolverines / Dave Butler.

  (A Jenny Willson mystery)

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-4597-3983-3 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-4597-3984-0 (PDF).--ISBN 978-1-4597-3985-7 (EPUB)

  I. Title. II. Series: Butler, Dave, 1958-. Jenny Willson mystery

  PS8603.U838N67 2018 C813’.6 C2018-900726-5

  C2018-900727-3

  1 2 3 4 5 22 21 20 19 18

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country, and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Ontario, through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Ontario Media Development Corporation, and the Government of Canada.

  Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. L’an dernier, le Conseil a investi 153 millions de dollars pour mettre de l’art dans la vie des Canadiennes et des Canadiens de tout le pays.

  Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.

  — J. Kirk Howard, President

  The publisher is not responsible for websites or their content unless they are owned by the publisher.

  Printed and bound in Canada.

  VISIT US AT

  dundurn.com

  @dundurnpress

  dundurnpress

  dundurnpress

  Dundurn

  3 Church Street, Suite 500

  Toronto, Ontario, Canada

  M5E 1M2

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  DECEMBER 1

  Sue Webb paused. The forest was silent around her, deep snow muffling all sound. The crisp morning air, so clean it could purify lungs in a single breath, smelled and tasted of wild places.

  A curious grey jay landed with a squawk on a branch above her. She looked at the bird but couldn’t shake the disconcerting feeling, like a subtle electric current humming at the back of her neck, that something else was watching her. She scanned the trees, searching the dark places between branches for movement — the blink of an eye, the flick of an ear. Is it tracking me? Will I see it if I keep walking? Or will it remain in the trees, studying me, waiting for another time? She pushed the questions from her mind, slid her gloved hands into the straps of her ski poles, then shuffled higher into the forest, picking a safe route through the conical canopies that avoided tree wells, those deadly spaces between fallen snow and the trunks of trees that can swallow a person whole.

  The early snowpack, a blanket of unconsolidated powder, covered the uneven ground to a depth of almost two metres. Webb’s snowshoes, wide and long, offered much-needed floatation above the deep snow. But as a result, her inner thighs complained, and her knees and hips protested with each repeated motion. Sweat dripped down her flushed cheeks. She understood why the coureurs de bois — the early fur traders known as “runners of the woods” — walked with bow legs, even in summer. Yes, she had volunteered for this. And yes, it had seemed like a good idea at the time. Despite that, she was in agony.

  After five long kilometres, all uphill, in a forest dense with Engelmann spruce and subalpine fir, Webb looked back at her supervisor, Albin Stoffel. He was a hundred metres behind — and below — her and was clearly struggling, his head down, his pace slowed. Suffering is easier to take when it’s shared, she thought. But is it okay to enjoy the fact that Albin seems to be suffering more than I am? She smiled. Absolutely.

  “Are we having fun yet?” she yelled.

  “Jesus,” said Stoffel between deep breaths, “I remember why I love my touring skis … and why I hate these goddamn torture racquets. What a tough way to travel.”

  “It is,” said Webb, “but there’s no way we could get up here on skis. The forest is too dense, too tangled.”

  While she waited for Stoffel to catch up, she sucked on the plastic tube connected to the bladder full of thirst-quenching sports drink in her pack, fuel for her engine. She squinted at her cellphone as the GPS app recalibrated their position. “Less than a kilometre to go,” she said.

  “Excellent,” Stoffel said. “At least we’ll be on a packed trail going back. By the time we get back to the truck tonight, every part of me will be sore. I may never walk like a human again.” He grabbed the front of his jacket and shirt with a fist, flapping the two layers to vent the moist, warm air coming off him. “Shite, I think I pulled a groin muscle coming up that last hill,” he said with a grimace.

  Thirty minutes later, they stopped in a small nat­ural clearing, where subalpine fir outnumbered spruce and light overwhelmed shadow. They were near the headwaters of Collie Creek, in a basin just below the treeline, the amorphous boundary between forest and alpine meadow. To the south, Webb could see slices of the upper valley shining in the sun. Above, a fantail of spindrift blew off the craggy ridges of Mount Collie.

  These December days were short, so Webb and Stoffel shrugged off their packs and immediately got to work. They needed to get back before nightfall. After searching for recent tracks in the fresh snow, Stoffel waddled on his snowshoes over to a spruce tree, its lower branches pruned to a height of about four metres. A single strand of barbed wire spiralled up the trunk. He peered at the wire and then slowly, carefully, pulled a couple of hairs from some of the barbs, placing them follicle-end first in a clear plastic bag labelled with date and location.

  Webb crossed to the far side of the clearing, where, in late October, just before the first snowfall, they’d strapped a surveillance camera to the trunk of one of the fir trees, two metres above what they’d estimated the eventual snow depth would be here. Motion triggered, it captured a
120-degree view of its surroundings. Webb opened the waterproof case, replaced the batteries, and popped the memory card out onto the palm of her hand, staring at it for a moment as if she could see its contents. After sliding an empty card into the camera, she tucked the used one into a plastic bag in her breast pocket. “I can’t wait to see what’s on this baby,” she said. “It’ll be like Christmas.”

  She turned to see Stoffel wrestling a fourteen-kilogram skinned beaver carcass out of her pack. Frozen solid, it had been tightly wrapped in plastic bags, yet the musky aroma was unmistakable. They’d picked it up that morning from a local trapper who had no use for it once the body and the valuable pelt had parted company. As the volunteer on the team who was lowest in the pecking order, Webb had landed the job of carrying the carcass up the hill. Now it was time for the next step in the process, so she stepped out of her snowshoes.

  Stoffel, stronger and taller than Webb, boosted her up the tree, trying not to snag her or her clothing on the barbed wire. Grunting with the effort, Webb tied the ­carcass to the tree with baling wire, and then, with the flat end of an axe, she pounded a long spike through it, deep into the scaly trunk. The pounding echoed around the basin. To a branch above the carcass she added a scent lure that stank of rotting meat, designed to attract hungry carnivores from kilometres around. With a whisper, a cloud of snow slid down from the tree’s upper branches and entered every opening in their clothing.

  “Okay, I’m done,” said Webb. “It’s not going anywhere.” She dropped to the ground and turned to face Stoffel. She had tree sap smeared across one cheek and spruce bark and snow on her toque, face, and shoulders. The arms of her jacket, its chest panels stained and smelling of rancid beaver, had been shredded by the sharp barbs of the wire. “If I didn’t already have a husband,” she said, “there’s no way I’d get one looking like this.”

  “I don’t know, Sue, you look and smell like the kind of woman that old trapper would love to snuggle with during the long winter.”

  They both laughed.

  “Jesus,” said Webb, grinning, “I’m going to burn this jacket when the season’s over … and stay the hell away from that trapper.”

  “Good idea on both counts,” said Stoffel.

  Later that evening, Webb and Stoffel huddled at a desk in their office in Golden, B.C. It was an old log building on the north bank of the Kicking Horse River, the cheapest place they’d been able to get as a home base for the research project. After the long trip down the Blaeberry River valley to town — partly on snowshoes, partly on snowmobiles, the rest in a pickup truck — they’d picked up, then devoured a fully loaded pizza. The stained empty box now sat abandoned on a table behind them. Taking a final sip from a bottle of beer, Webb pulled the memory card from her pocket and pushed it into a slot on the laptop that was open in front of them. “Let’s see if we had any visitors,” she said. The light from the screen reflected the anticipation in her eyes.

  With Stoffel peering over her shoulder, Webb clicked steadily through the images on the card, creating the effect of a rough animation. The camera’s shutter had not only opened whenever the sensor detected movement, but also every twenty seconds until the motion had stopped for longer than a minute. Each image showed the date and time it was captured.

  In the darkened office, the two researchers watched as a parade of animals investigated the first carcass they’d staked to the same tree five weeks earlier. Because the camera was inactive when there were no animals around, the hundreds of time-lapse photographs, errat­i­c­­­ally strung together like an early black-and-white movie, made the tree look like Grand Central Station for wildlife.

  Some animals visited during the day and were easily identified. Others came at night, like ghosts; shadows and shapes and glowing eyes. Some, like a wolf pack in mid-November, circled the tree, looking up, their tongues lolling, unable to reach the carcass. Defeated, they moved on, not to be seen again. Others — martens, weasels, and fishers — climbed the tree often, gnawing on small bites ripped from the frozen carcass. A lynx appeared three times to do the same.

  Finally, in an image captured just the previous week, they saw the beast emerge from the forest. It paused, staring directly at the camera, unblinking, fearless, as if it knew it wasn’t alone and didn’t care. In the next, it was in mid-leap to the frozen beaver. Next, it had grabbed the carcass in its powerful jaws, doing its best to rip it from the tree. For ten minutes, the beast went up and down the tree, trying to wrest the prize from its perch. The intermittent images made it appear hyper­active, easily distracted, but its goal was always clear. The second-to-last picture showed the animal hanging from the carcass with its full weight, its jaws sunk deep into the icy meat, its head and limbs blurred with motion, scrambling, tearing. In the last image, taken forty seconds later, the carcass had been torn free. The beast stood over it on the ground, staring directly at the camera. In that stare they saw tenacity, ferocity, and perhaps a hint of smug satisfaction.

  Webb and Stoffel turned to look at each other, in awe of the beast, its power, its intelligence. They smiled and bumped fists.

  “Excellent,” Stoffel said. “We’ve now got proof they’re in Collie Creek … and I’ve finally got the first solid pieces of data for my project.” As one, he and Webb turned back to the screen. There stood a full-grown male wolverine in startling clarity, the dark-brown coat thick and gleaming, a light patch across its face and chest, two light stripes running down its flanks. Black eyes glared at them.

  Stoffel pulled his chair back from the desk and raised his arms toward the roof in a noisy stretch. “That was a good day, Sue, but I’m going home. Lyndsey said she’d wait up even though she starts on early shift tomorrow at the hospital. What are you going to do?”

  “I’ll finish my report and then probably crash on the couch here. It’s too late to drive home tonight. I’ll text Bruce to let him know I won’t be home.”

  “You’re welcome to stay at our place.”

  “Thanks, but I’m happy here. You don’t need me as a third wheel. Do you want to take the memory card and hair samples with you?”

  “Yeah, I probably should. I’ll send them to the lab first thing in the morning.”

  With a start, Sue Webb awoke from a nightmare in which she was being smothered by a large, dark mass, unable to breathe. Before she had time to process where she was or what was happening, she began to cough. When she tried to inhale, her lungs filled with acrid smoke. She coughed again and instinctively rolled to the floor. Looking around the large office, she saw that one entire wall, once a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf filled with textbooks, scientific papers, and magazine articles and divided by the only door in or out of the building, was engulfed in flames. Her brain and heart racing, she crawled awkwardly across the rough wood floor toward a window, her lungs desperate for oxygen. In the confusion of the flames and the dark rolling smoke, she slammed headfirst into the corner of a desk, then slumped to the floor, dazed, a gash in her forehead pumping blood across her eyebrow and into her eye. With a final choking cough, Webb’s nightmare became her reality.

  CHAPTER 2

  NOVEMBER 24, ONE WEEK EARLIER

  The Parks Canada administration building oversaw the town of Banff from an elevated perch south of the Bow River. It was a dominating presence, facing north along the congested length of Banff Avenue toward Cascade Mountain. It spoke of permanence, authority, tradition. Constructed as a Depression-era make-work project, the three-storey structure was completed in 1936 and symbolized Canada’s emerging need to manage the wilderness for people. Built of limestone, with sandstone trim and cedar shakes and surrounded by sweeping gardens, it projected an air of calm control, efficiency, and strong management.

  For Park Warden Jenny Willson, the castle-like building sat in stark contrast to the wilderness of Banff National Park. And it represented all she hated about a bureaucracy that often served itself instead of the citizens who paid the bills. She knew there were many good people here ded
icated to the park, their efforts valiant despite the system rather than because of it — those weren’t the people she despised. Her disgust was reserved for the men and women whose sole objective was to climb the career ladder, rung by slippery rung, tossing aside their morals and ethics as they did so, who changed directions with each passing political breeze, and who clawed their way up while shovelling steaming piles of blame onto the hapless rung-climbers below them.

  Willson paused below the stone archway at the building’s east entrance, her face reflected in the ori­ginal stained glass panels, one hand gripping a brass door handle worn and discoloured from eighty years of contact with palms and fingers. She’d gone for a bike ride that morning and, because it was her day off, hadn’t bothered with the tan shirt, dark-green pants, and bullet­proof vest that she normally wore on duty. Instead, she had quickly pulled on jeans, hiking shoes, and a blue fleece jacket over a flannel shirt. Her long brown hair was pulled back tight in a ponytail.

  The last time she’d been in this building, she remembered, two senior officials from Parks Canada’s Calgary office had tried to derail her investigation into wildlife poaching in the park. Despite their attempts to impede her, to prevent her from doing what she knew to be right, Willson had relentlessly chased an American hunter and his accomplices back and forth across the international border. She’d eventually won the race. Then, in classic government style, campaigning politicians took credit for her actions, while one of the two obstructionist bureaucrats resigned quietly and without fanfare. The other crawled up another rung on the government ladder, proof that the Peter principle was alive and well.

  Willson took a deep breath. Every time she passed through this door, her life changed in some way, and never for the better. She could walk away from the agency, but to do what? Reluctantly, she pulled open the heavy door and walked down the empty hallway to the office of Banff Chief Park Warden Frank Speer, her footsteps echoing on the tile floor.

  A thirty-year veteran of the agency, Speer was one of the few people above Willson in the parks hierarchy whom she truly respected. He’d supported her through the tortuous poaching investigation, putting his career and his pending retirement at risk. In fact, he’d been the only one to stand by her.