The Loop Read Online Free PDF

surely hope so, Mr Prior. And so does Clyde here, as you can imagine.’ He put his arm around his son-in-law’s shoulders. Clyde didn’t look too comfortable about it, but managed a stern nod.
    ‘What are you planning on doing once you’ve found them?’
    ‘I think we need to know a little more before we decide on that,’ Prior said. ‘I can sure appreciate how upset you must be, but if it’s any consolation, there’s never been a case anywhere in North America of a healthy wild wolf killing a human being.’
    ‘Is that a fact?’
    ‘Yes sir. In all probability this one was only ever after the dog. It’s kind of a territorial thing.’
    ‘Oh is it now? Tell me, Mr Prior, where do you come from?’
    ‘I live in Helena, sir.’
    ‘No, I mean originally. Where you were born and grew up. Somewhere back east is my guess.’
    ‘Yes, as a matter of fact. I come from Pittsburgh.’
    ‘Pittsburgh. Hmm. Grew up in the city.’
    ‘Yes sir, I did.’
    ‘So that’s your territory?’
    ‘Well, in a manner of speaking, yes, I guess it is.’
    ‘Well, let me tell you something, Mr Prior.’
    He paused and Luke saw the look in his father’s eyes, that flash of smiling contempt which all his life Luke had dreaded, for it always heralded some crushing remark, some witty, withering flourish of words that left you wanting to crawl away and hide under a rock.
    ‘This here is our territory,’ his father went on. ‘And we’ve got “kind of a territorial thing” about it too.’
    There was a tense space of silence across which his father held Prior in a vise-like gaze.
    ‘We don’t want wolves here, Mr Prior.’

3
    B uck Calder was baptized Henry Clay Calder III but he had never been too keen on the idea of being third or even second to anyone, and both to those who liked him and to those who didn’t, he’d always been much more a Buck than a Henry.
    The nickname came when, at fourteen, he carried off every prize on offer at the high school rodeo, revealing only when all was safely won that he had two broken fingers and a cracked collarbone. Even back then, the name’s more carnal connotation was not lost on the more knowing of his female classmates. He was already the object of wide-eyed whispers and once of a stern and exclusively female inquisition when his name was found on a wall of the girls’ toilets, coupled in rhyme with a word from which it differed by only one letter.
    Had any of these girls seen fit to share such secrets with their mothers, they would perhaps have found less surprise than they might have expected. For a previous generation of Hope schoolgirls had flushed with similar feelings for his father. Henry II, by all accounts, had practiced a particular method of kissing that a girl never quite forgot. A winning way with women, it seemed, swam strongly in the male Calder gene pool.
    Of Buck’s grandfather, Henry I, no such intimate detail endured. History bore witness only to his great resilience. It was he who in 1912 had loaded a few cows and chickens, a young bride and her upright piano onto a train in Akron, Ohio, and headed west.
    When they got there, they found all the best land had already gone and Henry ended up filing a claim way out by the mountains where no one had yet been rash enough to try. He built his homestead where the big ranch house now stood. And while countless others gave up, driven out by drought, wind and winters that killed even the hardiest stock, the Calders somehow survived, all but the piano, which after the journey never quite sounded the same.
    Henry bought the land his neighbors couldn’t make pay and, little by little, the Calder ranch spread wider and deeper down the valley toward Hope. With dynastic ambition, he named his first son after him and set about making the linked HC brand something to be proud of.
    Buck’s father never went to college but every moment he wasn’t chasing women, he spent reading everything he could lay his hands on about rearing