Dead Man’s Fancy (2 page)

But a pall had fallen over the wilderness, and she sat in silence except for the assorted groans coming from the direction of Walt's silhouette. The minutes ticked by. “What now?” Walt said finally. “I can probably sit the saddle but I don't know about hobbling out to where it's open enough to mount up. You could keep going, Marth.”

She shook her head. “I'd keep pushing if there was something to push toward. No, we'll check in with IC and then I'll water the horses down at the creek. They're ground-tie trained, but if they get wind of the wolves I'm afraid they'll bolt, so what we'll do is run a high line between a couple trees and tether them to the line. Then build up a fire, keep it going. If that girl wandered down into the basin, she might spot it and come in.”

Martha unholstered her radio. The crackling as she turned the volume knob brought a short snort from Petal and she immediately dialed it down to listen, to see if she'd hear the horse she'd thought she'd heard earlier. Horses that want company talk. It was logical that one separated from its rider would neigh, especially if it heard another horse. But the wilderness was silent.

Jason Kent's voice was broken but audible. He'd been following the crumb trail from Martha's GPS on his computer screen. Bad luck about Walt's foot. He agreed that where they were was as good a place as any to spend the night. Nothing to report on the search except that Harold Little Feather, after following the trail the wrangler had taken, had met up with Bucky Anderson on the headwall. They'd heard the wolves howl, too, but of the woman they'd seen nothing. Nor had they bumped into the wrangler.

“So now we're looking for two people could be in trouble. Citizens want to help, but all they do is make my job harder.” He sounded tired. To Martha, Jason always sounded tired. She told him about maybe hearing a horse in the distance. The radio went silent and Martha could picture the incident commander sipping coffee from his paper cup. “All the more reason for you to stay put.” He said he'd put out the word to the searchers and signed off.

Martha rigged the tarp she'd packed in a saddle bag; it was the time of year when once a week you'd wake up to see the high elevation forests dusted white. An hour later, lying on a rough saddle blanket that smelled of horse with Walt snoring beside her, Martha heard the long, drawn out bugle of an elk. The voice was faint, floating into the basin on the cold sink of night air, and in the light flicker from the fire, she saw Petal cock her ears. But the bugle was not joined by a rival bull, and after a while Petal relaxed her vigilance and Martha felt sleep coming as the fire hissed from the first snowflakes.

W
hen she awoke, it was so light that Martha thought it was dawn. She pulled up her jacket cuff to glance at the luminous hands of her watch. Three a.m. It was just the diffuse light of the moon reflecting off the snow. She unbuttoned the waist of her pants to take the pressure off her bladder. Walt was still snoring, a line of blown snow in the center crease of the hat tilted over his face. The man could sleep through anything. Still, he was, at least marginally, a human being and she would not rather have been alone.

“Oh, quit stalling,” she muttered.

She shuffled off behind the trees. Her face relaxed as she relieved herself. Men on a search, they just unzipped; they could care less she was standing ten feet away. She'd commented on it once to Harold Little Feather, that time when they were hunting elk in the Badger-Two Medicine. He told her that in uniform she was just one of the guys. “It's respect. That's the way I'd look at it.” Then he'd shuffled a few feet away and pissed on the campfire coals. Martha shook her head.
Harold
. She kicked pine needle duff over the lance her urine had cut in the snow and went to check on the horses.

“Hey girl. It'll be light in a jiff now,” she said, coming around the trees and then abruptly stopping. Directly in front of her, a little to the left of the two horses, a bulky shape loomed, blacking out a section of forest. For a second Martha thought it was a moose. But of course it couldn't be a moose; Petal and Big Mike would have gone crazy. Then she heard the nicker and knew the horse that she'd heard earlier had followed its nose into camp. Martha started talking in a low voice and immediately the horse advanced, extending its neck. Martha rubbed her fist under its eye. It was a gelded quarter horse, a bay with a cropped mane and irregular forehead star.

“Where did you come from?”

She switched on the low beam of her headlamp and ran it across the saddle. A braided lead rope was neatly coiled and secured to a D-ring ahead of the left fender, indicating the rider probably hadn't dismounted before separating from the horse.
Thrown?
Martha added a stop to the high line so the quarter horse couldn't trample into Petal or Big Mike, clipped the lead to the halter and considered the sky. She went back to the shelter and buckled on her duty belt. She thought of waking Walt, but what was the point? He couldn't go where she was going. And she
was
going, for the moon was showing only because it had found a hole in the clouds. It could snow again at any time, and the tracks the horse had left would be erased.

In the skiff, the impressions of the horseshoes were sharp sided. Martha backtracked them down to the creek, across and up and then a quarter mile farther to the north, down and across another creek. From there she backtracked the horse steadily upslope, her lungs straining and her legs quaking from the buildup of lactic acid. She had reached an open park some thousand feet or so below the escarpment. Snow was deeper here, the tracks pockmarks without definition. It had still been snowing when the horse reached this point, but had quit shortly after it entered the tree belt. Martha's smile was grim, for she understood that the window of opportunity to discover why and where the horse had separated from it rider was closing. She was now deciphering the trail of a horse whose tracks had been filling in as soon as they were made, and the higher she climbed, the more snow would have accumulated. She could be left knowing the end of the story without its beginning.

Martha turned to look at the roll of forest through which she'd been climbing. The camp was marked by smoke that was visible as a ghostlike smudge over the trees. No stars, just the hazy half aureole of moon and the mountain deathly still in the grip of night. She shuddered and placed two fingers to the side of her throat, searching for her pulse. Strong and steady.

“Get a grip, Martha,” she said out loud. “You're the sheriff of Hyalite County.”

When she picked up the track, her professional mask was firmly in place. But there was no longer a trail to follow. The tracks had disappeared. She cast upward and found where the horse's hooves had cut furrows, kicking up dirt. When a horse is at full gallop, there is an interval in its gait when all four hooves are in the air, resulting in gaps in its stride. Martha understood this horse's tracks had disappeared for twenty feet not because they were filled with snow, but because the horse had been plunging down the face of the mountain. A startled horse can run a long way—she had once witnessed a packhorse scared by a grizzly bear run at least a quarter mile across a scree slope before falling over a cliff—but most mountain horses had the sense to settle to a trot fairly quickly. She felt she had to be close to the place where the horse had panicked, where logic dictated it had bucked its rider.

Two hundred yards up the slope, a patch of timber made a black blot against the satin hump of the mountain. The horse had come from the direction of the trees, but as Martha continued to climb, the tracks became less distinct and then disappeared completely. She ran her front teeth across her chapped lower lip. “Don't give up, Martha,” she muttered under her breath. She switched off her headlamp, which had gradually been dimming, and reached for the Carnivore tracking light holstered on her utility belt. The light had a two-position switch. In the tracking mode, a cluster of red and blue LED bulbs were activated to highlight the color red. A spot of blood would seemingly jump off the ground and appear to suspend in midair. In its normal mode, it was a simple flashlight, but the five lumen xenon bulb threw a much more powerful beam than her headlamp. Martha switched the light on in the normal mode and cast it on the trees. She had not been able to backtrack the horse for the last fifteen minutes, but had evidently followed the course of its flight precisely, for the snow at the lower end of the timber was littered with pine boughs that the horse had snapped in its panic.

She paused to catch her breath. For the first time since leaving camp, she found herself reluctant to follow the trail. Instinctively, she sought the leather strap that secured her sidearm in its holster. She withdrew the Ruger .357 magnum, felt its reassuring heaviness and replaced it in the holster, leaving the strap unsnapped. Stepping cautiously, she entered the trees and began to backtrack the trail of branch litter. She had climbed perhaps thirty yards and was still in the thicket when she noted a place where the horse's hooves had dug in sharply, kicking up dirt. She swept the cone of light back and forth, illuminating a small opening to her left. Her eyes were drawn to what appeared to be a section of log and as she stepped toward it, not looking at the ground, she slipped on a branch under the snow and fell heavily.

Going down with the light tight in her right fist, she jammed the hand to stop her fall, inadvertently switching the button to the tracking mode. She felt her breath catch. Before her, the circular opening in the trees appeared to be dusted pink, the snow pushed up into irregularly spaced moguls. It was as if someone had spilled dozens of weakly flavored cherry snow cones, ranging in size from baseballs to beach balls. Martha stood and tentatively toed the snow under her boot. Immediately, it shone with brilliant crimson dots that appeared to levitate a few inches above the ground. It was blood. She knew then that it was all blood. Because it had been sifted over, the color did not jump into the air but rather pulsed from beneath the snow. The effect was startling, the forest floor all around her appeared to be radioactive with a diffused neon glow.

Her nostrils flared at the iron metal scent. “Oh, shit,” she said under her breath. She rested her thumb on the hammer of the revolver. Again, her attention was drawn to the log. She turned her eyes from it and then back; something was ticking at her brain. Why wasn't it covered with the snow that blanketed the other downfall? She took a step toward it, she took another, she stopped. She knew it wasn't a log.

In the eerie pinkish light, the man appeared younger than she'd thought he'd be. With his innocent, almost serene expression, he looked little more than a boy who had laid down and fallen asleep with his eyes open. Or at least his right eye, for his face was tilted to the side. She was so focused on the face that for a moment she did not notice that his posture, his body bent backward, was caused by the bulk of what he was lying on top of. She felt the hairs lift at the back of her neck. A sharp pain pulsed behind her eyes. She shook her head to clear it. It was not a mound of snow, as she had first thought. The young man was draped over the eviscerated rib cage and front quarters of an elk carcass.

Martha thought of the wolves she and Walt had heard earlier. But if the elk was a wolf kill, where were the tracks? And the man, had he died from head trauma or from spinal fracture when the horse bucked him and he fell onto the carcass? She swept the Carnivore light over his body, the LEDs reacting to a large stain of blood in the area of the groin. Though she could see no obvious sign of injury, the fabric under the waistband of the man's jeans was tented up, as if a stick were protruding. Martha's smile was sour. If Walt was here, he'd make a comment, say something about the man going out with a hard-on, dying happy. “Humpff.”

She bent down, then jerked back up as her gorge rose. She swallowed bile, steeled herself and gingerly unsnapped the man's jeans. She worked the zipper down and pulled the fabric over the protrusion. It looked like a sharpened stick had stabbed upward into the man's back and punctured the lower abdomen, from which it protruded four or five inches. Martha touched the object with the back of her fingernail. Hard as bone.

She turned her back on the body and drew out her radio.

“What do you have, Martha?” Jason Kent's voice had some gravel in it after relaying messages all night.

“I found the wrangler. His horse wandered into camp and I backtracked him to where he got thrown. He's dead.”

Kent told her to stay where she was. He'd relay her coordinates to Harold, who was the searcher closest to her, up on the headwall.

“So you figure he died in the fall?”

“That was my first thought, but I don't know, Jase. He has an elk antler sticking out of his gut.”

“Maybe you better tell me about it.”

“I'll tell you about it. But right now I got to throw up.”

She made it to the edge of the timber before heaving. She grabbed a handful of snow to wash her mouth out, found that her hands were trembling and sat down on a log that actually was a log. She felt empty inside, but the bad taste was gone, replaced by something else, not exactly a taste but more of an odor that exuded from her body. It was the odor of fear. She'd smelled it before when she found herself on a heartless breast of snow in wilderness, felt the dread gathering in the limbs of the trees. The scream that came from her lungs, she couldn't believe she'd made it.
God help me
, she thought. But it was real. It had to be. For the wolves had heard. The first one answered from a long way off. The second was closer.

W
hen Martha saw a light flicker up the mountainside, she switched the beam of the tracking light on and off a few times. She waited until her signal was answered, then her eyes fell to the revolver in her lap. She fingered the latch to swing out the cylinder, removed one cartridge and replaced the cylinder so that the hammer rested over the empty chamber. She holstered the revolver.

Harold was riding his paint. He dismounted and pulled his braid out from under the collar of his jacket. Martha made room for him on the log. She breathed in Harold's odor that wasn't sweat exactly, but dark and organic. Familiar. They had shared more than logs before, before Harold took back up with his ex-wife.

“Aren't you going to tie off your horse?” she said after a short silence.

“Only white people lose their horses.” And after another stretch of silence: “I see you're packing the Ruger again.”

“I can shoot it. I can't shoot those damned semi-autos. Besides,” she said, “I'm a Western sheriff, I have to look the part.”

“Got to please your public, famous woman like yourself.”

Martha grunted. It had been more than a year since she'd shot a U.S. congressman in these mountains some twenty miles to the north, the congressman a murderer and the shooting cleared by a coroner's inquest, but no one had ever looked at her the same way since. Nor had Martha looked at herself the same way.

“Those wolves did some talking tonight, didn't they?” she said. “I thought one of them was going to walk right in on me a while back.” She put nonchalance into her voice, but felt her heart beat waiting for Harold's reply, wondering if he'd heard her screams a half hour earlier.

“My understanding was FWP wiped out that Black Butte Pack,” Harold said. “Back when they got into the cattle that last time. Looks like a new one moved in.”

He wouldn't say if he had heard, Martha thought.

“You want a piece of corn cake?” Harold was unfolding a square of wax paper on his knee. Martha told herself to let him get around to it in his own time. Talking about anything other than what brought two people together under unusual circumstances was a trait shared by many westerners, but perfected to an art form by Native Americans. Harold retrieved a thermos of tea from a saddlebag and they sat in easy silence, trading sips from the screw-on plastic cup.

“You make good tea,” Martha said. “What is it?”

“Whatever was in the cupboard at my sister's. Why don't you tell me what you saw tonight, starting with that horse wandering into your camp?”

“Did Jason tell you about the guy with the elk antler sticking out of his gut?”

“He did. I can smell the blood. But we'll be able to read the white book a whole lot better in an hour or so. Just muddy up tracks if we go in now.”

So she told him, omitting only the scream. Harold refolded the wax paper and put it in his jacket pocket. “Couple things,” he said. “Did you notice any other tracks besides the horse's? Wolf? Human?”

Martha said no, but that didn't mean they weren't there. Once her light registered the blood bath, her attention had centered on the body.

Harold nodded. It was gradually growing light. Martha could see the barred blue grouse feather that Harold wore in his braid flutter in the wind.

“Okay, last question. Did you circle around to see where the horse entered this stand of trees?”

Again, the answer was no.

“Then that's the first thing we'll do. I need to know if the horse was already running, which means something up above spooked him, or if he was walking. If he was walking, then what made him bolt was the kill. Horse coming from upwind, he could have stumbled right into the blood before it registered. Things go sideways in a hurry when a horse smells blood.”

—

“R
eading the white book” was an expression that Harold had picked up from his grandfather, who'd taught him to track on the escarpments of the front range that bordered the Blackfeet reservation. It was the skill of deciphering stories written in snow, the pages turning as each animal went about the business of his day. Who came here, what was his name, whom did he fear, in whose teeth did he die? In early autumn, many pages in the white book were blank, while others were written in a disappearing ink, for the snow came and the snow went, often in the same day. When Harold and Martha circled the trees to find where the horse had entered them, Harold figured he had several hours before the snow melted and the book shut. He examined Martha's boot tread so he could identify it and told her to follow two steps behind, placing her boots exactly in his own tracks.

The horse had entered the copse of pines at the upper northeast corner, where the trees were sparsest. Harold pointed with a stick. The pockmarks were spaced at regular intervals, faint scoops in the vanilla swirl.

“He was walking, huh?” Martha said, and cursed herself for commenting on the obvious. Notwithstanding the personal baggage of their relationship, she always felt inadequate following Harold while he tracked. He didn't suffer fools and was disinclined to honor any but intelligent questions with an answer.

She followed him down into the thicket. Harold pointed again. “See where he crow-hopped?” The horse had kicked up dirt over the snow where it jumped. “And here, here's where the rider bailed.” He was pointing to two narrow impressions—the snow-covered tracks of a man. “He landed on his feet.” Harold's voice was matter-of-fact. “Good horseman.”

Martha felt the quick tremor of a vein in her neck. She rubbed at it and put her hands on her hips. The corners of her mouth turned down. “If he was bucked off here, how does he end up on the sharp end of an antler yonder down the hill?”

A momentary tightening of his cheeks was Harold's only response. He tucked his braid under his jacket collar and pushed through the wall of branches. As Martha followed him, she watched where his stick tapped the snow, but if there were tracks she couldn't see them. When they reached the edge of the clearing, Harold motioned to Martha to stay put while he conducted a perimeter search and disappeared into the trees. Martha squatted twenty feet from the elk carcass. It didn't look as ominous in the dawn. The face of the wrangler was hidden by the bulk of the elk and most of the blood was at a remove under the snow.
I should be tired
, she told herself. Instead, she found herself snapping her fingers, sending Harold telepathic signals to hurry.

Harold was back. He drew his belt knife before squatting next to her and whittled a stick into a toothpick. It shifted around as he worked it with his teeth.

Martha fought her impulse to break the silence. And lost. “What's the book tell us?”

Harold spit out the stick. “The pack that took down the bull is four, maybe five strong. They've probably been feeding on it couple days, hanging about the vicinity. They left just after it started snowing.”

“I didn't see any wolf tracks.”

“You wouldn't. They're more shadows than anything physical.”

“Did the wrangler spook them when he rode in? Maybe that's why the horse bucked.”

“No, I'd say the wolves left about an hour before the wrangler got here. But it wasn't just the wrangler. There were two others.”

“Two?” Martha felt the breath slowly leave her lungs. Her lower ribs pressed against the muscles of her abdomen.

“They came in an hour or so after the snow started and it was snowing for a couple hours after they left, so we're talking dents. You look close, half the dents are about two inches longer than the others. And neither has a square heel. Wrangler's boot has a square heel. That tells me two other people were here.”

“Were they together?”

“Same time frame, but I don't think so. The wrangler, we know he came on horseback. He stumbled into the opening from above. Call him person one. Person two came on foot from the timber flank there”—he pointed with his stick to the south—“ninety-degree angle to the route the wrangler took. Left the same way. His track's wider than the wrangler's track. The smaller track, person three, came in from the north, opposite direction from person two. Also on foot. Also left on his backtrack. Spacing says he was running on the way out. Tripped and fell down once, down below in the trees. Running blind, down timber all around, no more sense than the horse.”

“Or a woman.” Martha scratched the soft skin under her chin. “You said the third set of tracks are shorter. Why couldn't they be a woman's? That's who's missing on this godforsaken mountain.”

“Could be at that. Make sense if she came onto the scene, saw him dead like this.”

“I damn near bolted myself.”

“No, Martha, you didn't. You just walked out to the edge of the trees where I found you and threw up and kicked some snow over it.”

“Damned white book,” she muttered under her breath. “Any idea where number two and three came from?”

Harold shook his head. “Once you get in the open, the tracks are windblown. Odd thing, though. There's a drag mark near the elk carcass, a little dirt kicked up. Like someone dragging a heavy branch. Hard to tell with the snow cover.”

Martha fingered the point-and-shoot in her breast pocket.

Harold shook his head. “Pictures will just wash out, all that light bouncing off the snow.”

“I know that. I'm not taking pictures of the tracks. This is just my way of telling you to finish up so I can take the scene photos. If you haven't noticed, there's a man over there who's cooling down to room temperature and he has an antler sticking out of him that's long enough to hang a hat on.”

“That's what I miss about you, Martha.”

“What?”

“Oh, just you being you.”

“That was your choice, Harold.”

“My wife had something to say about it.”

“Your ex-wife.”

Harold looked away. Martha felt her shoulders sag.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “What's going on with you and Lou Anne, it's none of my business. Except . . .” All right, she told herself, I'm just going to say it. “I don't know, you and me, I thought we had something. I keep asking myself what I did to screw it up.”

“You didn't do anything. Lou Anne and I have known each other since we were kids. She's my people. She's got a problem with depression; she wanted to talk about it. I thought I could deal with it without getting involved, and I couldn't. I wasn't going to be two-timing you. You mean too much for me to be anything but honest.” He swept his arm, encompassing the opening in the trees, the pines beyond, putting on their colors as the country came awake. “All this, there's no place I'd rather be than working a story in the snow with you looking over my shoulder, tapping your foot and telling me to get off Indian time.”

“Yeah,” Martha said drily. “We ought to do this more often, get together on a mountain drenched in blood.”

Suddenly she
was
tired, her voice was tired, everything about her was tired. “I better radio Walt,” she said. “He'll be waking up to three horses and wondering where the hell I am.”

“Don't bother. I spotted him when I was searching the perimeter. He's following your tracks, humping it about as fast as a Scotsman reaching for the check.” Harold got his feet. “I'm going to need some time here alone. Keep him out of my kitchen. Same if Bucky Anderson shows up. Jason radioed him the coordinates same as me. He should have been here.” He reached into his jacket pocket and brought out an apple, took a quarter of it in one bite and handed it to Martha. “Give it to Snow. Mind your fingers.”

Now he's telling me how to feed a horse, she thought.

Back on the open mountainside, she clucked to the paint. “Hey there, Jerry Old Snow,” she said, and offered him the apple on the flat of her hand. She could see Walt coming up from below and waved her hat to draw his attention.

“Walt, I'm sorry about this. I should have called in earlier,” she said as she stepped down the slope. She could hear his labored breathing and held out a hand, but he waved her off. “I made it this far. Point of pride to finish the climb.”

“Jesus, you're leaking blood.” She wiped the snow off the log so he could sit at the lower end. “Let me see the damage.”

He held up his left foot. He'd cut the toe off the boot. The sock was torn and his big toe curled out like a plum.

“I thought I heard a scream 'bout fifty minutes ago,” he said. “I was on your track already, but after that I come fast as I could.”

“Those were just the wolves.”

“Then there must have been a werewolf with 'em 'cause it sure sounded human.”

Martha felt a wave of emotion. For all his faults, Walt was the most devoted to her of anyone on the force. She could count on him having her back, even if it meant showing himself in a disadvantageous light. The fact that they had nothing in common beyond the job and that she betrayed her exasperation with him on a daily basis made no inroads on his loyalty. She poured him the last of the tea.

“Jase fill you in?”

He took a sip and nodded. “I take it that wrangler's got himself impaled on an elk antler.”

Martha grunted. “Or maybe he had help.”

Walt frowned. “What makes you think that?”

“Harold says there were two other people here last night. He's working out the tracks.”

“Speaking of the red man,” Walt said.

Harold had materialized at the edge of the trees. He inclined his head for them to follow. “I've tracked lung-shot elk that didn't leave a blood trail as heavy as yours, Walt,” he said, the words tossed over his shoulder. “We finish up here, I can build us a fire and cauterize that toe.”

“Say what?” Walt said.

“I said I got a clean, sharp blade. I can take that toe off, once we're done here.”