Wolf Creek Ch. 13

After his successful elk hunting trip, Kincaid returned to visiting the ranch four times a year—he had cut this down to no more than twice in the deep of the Great Depression. And each time he returned, he and Hugh would go up to the Hahn's Peak timberline for three days—and they almost always came back with an elk. Kincaid made clear he didn't want the elk for itself. He only symbolically wanted to conquer the elk, again and again. He was happy to let the ranch have the meat for the supper table and the antlers and hides for whatever decorative or functional use they could be put to.

One afternoon during his fall 1934 visit, several days after his hunting trip with Hugh, J. Harvey and Ada were working on a manuscript in his room and he was standing behind her and rubbing her shoulders. The moment got the best of them, and he found himself running his hands through her luxuriant hair and then kissing the hollow of her neck and running his hands down inside the bosom of her dress and cupping her ample breasts. He hadn't bedded her since before he and Hugh had gone up into the mountains, and he'd be leaving the next day. For these reasons Ada was in heat for him. She turned in the chair and unbuttoned his trouser fly and freed his cock and began making love to it.

In all the intervening years since J. Harvey had first taken Ada on the mountain, they had never made love in the light of day. It had always been in the dark, in his room, with the lights out and the drapes drawn. But now Ada could see him clearly. He was a good fifteen years younger than she was and he was in magnificent shape. She melted to him as he removed his shirt and dropped his trousers while she was making love to his cock. He was handsome and hard and strong bodied.

He swept her up from the chair and carried her to the bed and disrobed her completely. And then he made love to every voluptuous nook and cranny of her with his strong, sensuous fingers and his tongue. She was panting and flowing for him when he gently pushed her legs apart, briefly worked her clitoris with his tongue and teeth and then invaded her deeply with probing fingers. Then, as she lay on her back, her pelvis supported upward by a pillow and her legs spread, he mounted her in a long, stretching slide that had her gasping for him. He encased her body closely with his, applied his lips firmly to one of her nipples, and then just rode up and down on her body with his, holding her close, letting the friction of the swinging gait move his reaching cock up and down inside her, rubbing against her clitoris. She held him close with her arms around his waist and her calves hooked over his, sharing his desire to merge as one, to become one deep-probing, flowing unit.

His beauty and masterful cockmanship overpowered her, and she orgasmed once . . . and then again, as he rocked back and forth on and in her. She was panting and moaning for him and he for her, and then he gave a little lurch and cry and was filling her deep, deep at her center. They rested briefly as they tenderly explored each other's bodies with their hands, lovingly and with awe, as if for the first time. And then J. Harvey turned Ada onto her belly and he placed the pillow under her pelvis and moved between her legs and entered her strongly and deeply again and pumped her hard until she was crying out for him and they were both seeing sparks, together, and their juices were flowing and mingling. They lay there, exhausted and entwined for nearly a half hour more, while he kissed her nipples and the hollow of her neck. Then he whispered that he had an important question for her but that he needed to leave her briefly. He slowly disengaged from her and padded off to the attached bathroom in his suite of rooms.

Ada lay there, fully satiated, purring her good fortune. She drowsily looked around the room and there, on the nightstand, nearly touching her—close enough certainly that when she looked at it, it filled her field of vision—was a framed photograph she had never noticed before. It was of two men standing beside some sort of pole arrangement from which was hanging the carcass of an elk. Two men, both looking very proud and satisfied with each other. One was standing right next to the elk and the other, the taller, older man, was standing at the other side of the youth. The older man had his arm around the youth. Not just a casual touch, Ada realized increasingly as the photography came into focus. It was a possessive embrace. A knowing embrace. An intimate embrace. The older man was J. Harvey Kincaid and the youth was her own son, Hugh Raven. The realization of the pose hit Ada like a strike of lightning.

Kincaid's elk. She had been Kincaid's elk the day Frank had died. And it wasn't her, for her own sake, Kincaid wanted to possess. He just wanted to conquer. And he had done exactly the same thing with her son—just to conquer. It was all in his books. It was the centerpiece of the book she herself had typed again and again, the title changing, but the message never varying, just as Kincaid's readers liked them. And she hadn't seen it. Only the capturing of a moment in time in a black and white photograph told the unfettered truth. A photograph Kincaid kept on his nightstand. The audacity of it. The cruelty. What had happened to her family? How had Kincaid gotten this much control?

When J. Harvey Kincaid came out of the bathroom, Ada was gone from his bed. And she was no where in evidence for the remainder of his fall 1934 visit at the ranch. He left without seeing her again.

Stanfield Walker visited the ranch in late October 1934, in keeping with the reservation he had made the previous year. And Ada Albin Raven Wolf wed Stanfield Profit Walker in the chapel of Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., on 22 December 1934. The wedding was quickly arranged and the wedding party was small. Just as the photograph Ada had seen on J. Harvey Kincaid's nightstand was utterly revealing, so was the official wedding photograph. Everyone lined up on the verdant lawn outside the Gothic-style brownstone chapel—from the few in the groom's family who deigned to make the trip to Washington from New Hampshire, including his two sour-faced old maid sisters; to Dan and Hugh Raven; to Aunt Martha and her Thaddeus; to even the groom himself—looked dazed and confused, as if the whole event had just dropped on them from the sky unexpectedly, as indeed it had. Only the bride looked composed and determined, if a little sad. It wasn't a photograph that the Walkers were ever to display prominently in their home.

Little of the wedding was displayed in the Walker home, actually. The wedding was something Ada wanted to quickly forget. It wasn't until her wedding night that she discovered that Stanfield was impotent. In her hasty and cataclysmic reaction to the revelation of what J. Harvey Kincaid had done to her family, Ada, still a full-blooded and lusty woman, had trapped herself in a sexless marriage. But, other than that, Stanfield Walker was an attentive, doting husband, and a perfect intellectual match for Ada.

The ranch was left nominally in the hands of Hugh Raven to run while the Walkers took up their new posting in Malaya. But an aging Aunt Martha and her husband, Thaddeus, agreed to move to the ranch to help him in consideration of his young age. However, Hugh enjoyed the responsibility and control that management of the ranch gave him, and he did not burden Martha or Thaddeus with a onerous decisions. Hugh had been raised to the life of the ranch and reveled in running both the ranch and the celebrity dude lodge.

The literary and artist visitors continued coming to the ranch. More and more came each year, as the nation pulled itself out of the Great Depression. And J. Harvey Kincaid continued his quarterly visits to the ranch. And each time he and Hugh Raven went up onto Hahn's Peak to hunt elk. And whether or not Kincaid bagged an elk during each hunting trip, he did bag a Raven.

He never dwelled much on why Ada had changed direction so suddenly the day he was going to ask her to come back to Chicago to continue transcribing his books. Kincaid was totally self-involved. Ada agonized every day about the split and what had precipitated it; J. Harvey Kincaid didn't really think about it at all.