3 Virgin Voyage

KYLE AND I got to ride herd for two weeks during the summer. Phile and Caitlin weren’t happy about it because they had to stay close to home without us to watch them. We had a little responsibility on the range but it was all where we loved to be—on our horses. The guys taught us what we were supposed to watch for during the long days in the saddle.

“I’m glad you’re up here for a couple weeks,” Rafe said. He was our ranch foreman and we rode up with him to where the two summer hands and Jess, our other full-timer, were. Jess and Rafe traded a week on the upper range and a week at the ranch. “Mostly we just want you to circle the herd like we do. You don’t have to even keep an eye on them that much. Pay attention to what’s outside the herd. Birds suddenly scattering. Things getting quiet. We’re more concerned about predators this year than we’ve been in the past.”

“What are we looking for?” Kyle asked. “Mountain lions?”

“I’m not saying there aren’t any out there,” Rafe answered. “But folks are talking more about wolves than ever. And we can hear them sometimes. Mostly at night, but wolves will track in the daylight, too.” We nodded our heads and were hoping we’d get to see one.

Cattle scatter all over everywhere to graze, unlike what is usually in a movie where they’re all bunched up. A cowboy can ride five miles to circle a herd of three hundred head. Half the time they are lying down chewing their cud. We rode the perimeter letting our horses graze and watching like Rafe said. A couple times we heard them way off in the distance. Guess we hadn’t been hearing wild dogs after all. We kept our rifles with us all the time, but unfortunately, we never saw a wolf.

When Kyle and I rode down from the upper pasture, we spent one night camped out, not wanting to go back to the ranch yet. We made a fire and just stared up at the night sky while we lay back on our bedrolls. I loved being out there with just the two of us.

“You gonna do it, Ramie?” Kyle asked softly.

“Do what?” I asked. Sometimes he starts off a sentence in the middle of a conversation he’s been having with himself all day.

“You gonna, you know. Try to time travel on your birthday?”

“That old story,” I sighed. “Look up there. There’s a million stars out there. Why travel in time instead of traveling out there to a different world? It makes just as much sense.”

“You know they believe it, no matter what they say.” We saw a shooting star and pointed as we made a wish. “I sorta believe it, too.”

“I know you do. But, hell, Kyle, it’s just too weird. It would be easier if he said he dreamed it all. I’d believe that.” My eyes were getting heavy.

“Still,” Kyle whispered. “I’m going to try.”

Moms and Pa agreed! I get to stay in the bunkhouse.

I was freakin’ pumped. It wasn’t like Kyle and I spent all our time together, but we were near each other and somehow that made me feel better about the whole school year.

Kyle didn’t let up on me trying to time travel. Of course, in Kyle’s book, that meant finding somebody to have sex with on my 16th birthday.

“Look around you, Kyle. There isn’t a boy here I’d let anywhere near my coochie. Yuck!”

“Oh, come on. There’s 350 kids in our class, give or take. Statistically, half of them are guys. That’s 175 eligible guys.”

“174,” I said, looking at him. I wasn’t going to sleep with my brother. If he wasn’t my brother ... Damn!

“Picky, picky. You could go with an older guy. There’s 350 of them. Another 175 if you take a freshman. Pure. Innocent. Gullible.”

“Kyle! I am not laying down my virginity in order to chase after some fantasy. Besides, we always go hunting on my birthday. What do you think I’m going to do? ‘Hi Moms and Pa. This is John Doe. He doesn’t need any other name. He’s just here for the sex.’ That is so not going to happen!”

My sixteenth birthday came and went. The wolves got my elk. I kept my virginity.

We finally saw the elk herd just below us and moving up. There were about twenty of them and we discussed which one was the best for me to take my shot at. There was only one elk tag available in this region and I got it. The herd never got close enough to take a shot.

One minute they were moving toward us, the next there were half a dozen wolves between them and us and another half dozen streaking in from the sides. Two of the herd were down before any of us could react. I pulled my rifle up but Pa put his hand on me and told us to get out our cell phones and start recording what we saw.

“Pa, we gotta do something. They’re killing them!” The big bull hooked one of the wolves with his antlers and threw him clear across the meadow. But two more were on him and in seconds, he was down. I figured they had their kill and the rest would escape, but the wolves kept attacking.

“They’re killing them all!” Kyle shouted.

“God damned killing machines!” Mom Ash shouted. She fired her rifle in the air.

“Why aren’t we shooting the wolves?” I begged. A young bull was surrounded and staggering. A cow had her belly ripped open.

“It’s against the law,” Pa said. “Touching one of those wolves is worth a quarter million dollar fine and five years in prison. This is what the fucking conservationists want.”

Only three of the herd were untouched and as soon as one bolted, a wolf was on her. The whole thing took about fifteen minutes. Pa had us switch back and forth with our cell phones so someone was always recording but we weren’t running out of battery or storage space.

I was crying. Every single elk in the herd was down. And they weren’t eating them. Not all of them. You could still hear the cows bellowing as their calves were ripped out of their stomachs. In an hour, the gorged wolves slunk off leaving fresh carcasses scattered over the field.

“Let’s go down before the scavengers get there,” Pa said. “We can’t interfere, but we can sure plaster this video all over the Internet.” We recorded the whole scene. They killed three or four for every one they ate. Buzzards were already circling overhead. We could hear coyotes moving in. Pa had us move back. My phone was dead. I looked at Kyle and he shoved his in his pocket.

I couldn’t eat anything Mom Mar cooked at camp that night. Caitlin and Phile had juvenile tags for pronghorns and hadn’t seen what we saw. It was a good thing. Even Mom Ash was crying when we got to camp.

“Why, Pa?” I asked again. “Why couldn’t we save them?”

“When a predator kills prey, it’s called natural selection. Unless the predator is a human. Someplace along the line we lost the idea that humans are part of the equation. Conservationists wanted to re-introduce wolves into our ecology. Except these wolves were never part of our ecology,” Pa said. “When we met with the FWS, we were told what we could expect if we touched one of their wolves. We weren’t asked for input. We weren’t listened to. We were simply warned.”

I didn’t get much sleep that night and we were all pretty tired the next day. I kinda figured that was my last birthday hunting trip.

Then Kyle started in.

“I’m gonna do it. Ramie, I just know that I’ll go time traveling and I’ll find treasure and be rich and everything.”

“Kyle, we’re already rich if any of what Pa told us is true. What do we need? Why do you want some old treasure? And who are you going to get to do the deed?” It was a little bit of a dig. Neither Kyle nor I had dated anyone. I didn’t know who he thought he’d get to sleep with him on his sixteenth birthday. Pa had to sleep with his cousin.

“Um ... Annie Wilcox said she would.”

“Kyle! No! No, no, no. You can’t just go buy it.”

“She said she’d do it for free.”

“Yeah. Like a drug dealer gives away the first hit. Aren’t you interested in somebody? Someone who’s interested in you instead of one who gives head for twenty bucks a pop?”

“Who am I going to find like that, Ramie? Look around you. They’re all way out of my league.”

“Kyle, there’s 350 people in our class. Statistically, that means that 175 are eligible girls,” I mocked.

“174.” We looked at each other and busted out laughing.

“Let me handle it, Kyle. You’ll have to go on some dates and romance her,” I said.

“How am I going to go on a date? I can’t drive yet.”

“I can.” Kyle looked at me blankly. “Ain’t you glad you got a big sister who got her drivers’ license when she turned sixteen?” I said sweetly.

“You’d drive me on a date?” he asked.

“We’d have to double. I’ll tell Moms that I want to go out but I don’t want to get stranded with some boy thirty miles away so I want to drive and I want you to double date so I have a chaperone. They’ll think it’s really cute.”

“But Ramie. I don’t mean to sound like a pig, but I’m a pig. She’s got to be cute.”

“Oh Kyle, what girl in our entire school wouldn’t be cute if you got her naked?”

“Um ... Millie maybe.”

“All right. I’ll give you that one. Don’t worry. I’ve seen this one naked.”

“When? I mean you know someone already? Who?”

“One, in the locker room. Two, yes. Three, Aubrey Diaz.” That shut him up.

“Aubrey is...”

“Don’t you dare say she’s fat. She isn’t. Maybe she’s not skinny, but believe me, what’s there is all girl.”