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accident his fault. With one stroke he had slain his father’s father and best-beloved child, the ancient king and heir apparent of the Calders.
    It was indeed a splendid burden for a boy to carry.

4
    T he red and white Cessna 185 banked steeply against a cobalt dome of morning sky, then seemed to hang weightless for a moment above the rim of the mountains. As he tilted the starboard wing at the sun and pointed the nose for the twentieth time toward the east, Dan looked directly down at the plane’s shadow and saw it falter then fall, like the ghost of an eagle down walls of ancient limestone a thousand feet deep.
    Beside him in the narrow cockpit, Bill Rimmer sat with the radio receiver on his lap, going methodically, again and again, through the list of frequencies of every collared wolf there was from Canada to Yellowstone. There was an antenna on each wing and he constantly switched between them, while both men strained their ears for the unmistakable cluck-cluck-cluck of a signal.
    It wasn’t the easiest country for spotting wolves. All morning they’d combed the peaks and the canyons, using their eyes as much as their ears, squinting into the shadowed spaces between the trees, scanning ridges and creeks and lush green meadows for some telltale sign: a carcass in a clearing, a flock of ravens, a sudden flight of deer. They saw plenty of deer, both white-tail and mule, and elk too. Once, flying low over a wide ravine, they startled a grizzly bear feeding with her cub in a patch of buffaloberries and sent them bounding for the shelter of the forest. Here and there they came across cattle, grazing the ‘allotments’, high summer pastures that many ranchers leased from the Forest Service. But of the wolf or wolves there was no trace.
    Last night Rimmer had driven Dan back into Hope to get his car and they’d gone into The Last Resort for a beer both felt they’d earned. The place was dark, its walls crowded with trophy heads whose unseeing eyes seemed to follow them as they took their glasses to a table in the corner. At the other end of the room a couple of ranch hands were playing pool and feeding a jukebox. The music had to compete with the ball game on the TV above the bar, where a lone drinker in a sweat-stained hat sat recounting the details of his day to the barmaid. She was trying to sound interested and overdoing it a little. Dan and Rimmer were the only other customers. Dan was still seething from his encounter with Buck Calder.
    ‘I told you he was a piece of work,’ Rimmer said, wiping the froth from his mustache.
    ‘Piece of something, anyway.’
    ‘Oh, he’s okay. Reckon his bark’s bigger than his bite. He’s one of these guys likes to test you, see how tough you are.’
    ‘Oh, that’s what he was doing.’
    ‘Sure it was. You stood up pretty good.’
    ‘Well, thanks Bill.’ He took a long drink from his glass and put it down with a clunk. ‘Why the hell couldn’t he wait before calling all those goddamn reporters?’
    ‘They’ll all be out there again soon enough.’
    ‘Why’s that?’
    ‘He told me they’re gonna bury the dog, you know, give it a proper hero’s funeral, tombstone and all.’
    ‘I don’t believe it.’
    ‘That’s what he said.’
    ‘What do you reckon they ought to put on the tombstone?’
    They both thought awhile. Dan got there first.
    ‘Maybe just, “Labrador formerly known as Prince.”’ They laughed like a couple of kids and far longer than such a dubious joke deserved, but it felt good and that and the beer soon put Dan in a better mood. They had another and stayed until the ball game finished. By then the place was getting busier. It was time to go.
    As they headed for the door, Dan heard a voice on the TV say, ‘And in the Hope Valley, a baby’s narrow escape from death when Mr Wolf comes to call. That story coming up. Stay with us.’
    So they did, but stood in the shadows by the door in case they were spotted. And true to his word, after the