Fool's Gold (4 page)

He finished the trap he was working on and looked up. He had a good face, square and roughly handsome, like most Ojibways. His nose was unbroken and not mapped with boozer's veins. He was a steady citizen, I figured. He still said nothing so I plunged in. "I'm a friend of Jim Prudhomme's family."
 

"Yeah?" he said at last. He wiped his greasy hands on the dry grass and reached for makin's in his top pocket. I let him roll a cigarette, then pulled out the motel matches and struck one. He leaned into the flame, sucked down smoke, and said, "What's on your mind?"
 

"I'm just talking to the people who found him. Spoke to the police chief, he told me you found the body for them when Prudhomme didn't show."
 

More smoke. Then he said, "Yeah."

"I read what you put in the report they wrote, down at the station. You never mentioned any bear tracks there. Did you see any?"
 

I knew this was forcing the pace. I should have talked about the weather for a while, then his trapping and plans for the winter. Maybe, if I'd been cynical enough, I should have brought out a pint of rye. But I didn't want him thinking I knew anything about Indian protocol, and I don't believe in pouring drinks for people who may not need them. He stared at me for long enough to finish his cigarette. I waited politely and finally he said, "What makes you think there wasn't no tracks?"
 

"Figure a guy like you would've made a guess at the size of the bear if there had been," I said. "Only reason you wouldn't is if there wasn't a track."
 

He dropped the shriveled little butt, stepped on it, and picked up another trap. "Didn't see none," he said.

He greased another trap without speaking. I stood and waited, sizing him up. He was just under six feet but couldn't have gone more than a hundred and forty. He looked as if he could walk the bush all winter with nothing more to eat than the meat he took from his traps, washed down maybe with the occasional pot of tea. He was one of the toughest men I'd ever seen. He could have been anything from thirty-five to sixty.
 

He looked up as he selected another trap. "You're the guy that beat on that big fella at the motel," he said. Fame!

"There was a scuffle, not really a proper fight. I figure he must've been drunk." I've been in the violence business long enough to know you underplay everything, wins as well as losses, you never know which side your audience is on.
 

Misquadis grinned. "Nephew of mine was up at the bev'rage room. Says you fixed him good."

I shrugged. "I don't like fights. I stopped him, that was all there was to it."

Misquadis looked at me out of ancient brown eyes. "He beat up on my brother's kid one time. Kid was drunk. He broke his jaw." I waited and his leathery face split open like a slashed football. "I been waiting for him to pick the wrong guy. An' you was it."
 

Good, I decided. I had made all the brownie points I needed. I grinned an Aw Shucks kind of grin and waited and at last he talked to me. "You was right. No sign of bear tracks, no bear shit, nothin'."
 

I waited and he spat and went on. " 'Nother thing, this was an island, not very big. I figure you could camp there safe. A bear's big as this one would've stayed on the mainland."
 

I put my question slowly. "You're saying there was no bear on that island?"

He sniffed. "We wasn' there long. I look aroun' a bit but not all over." I waited and he went on, "Only thing it looked like to me, it looked like the tracks was cleared up."
 

"Cleared up?" I felt the old familiar hunting jolt shoot through my arms and clear up to my brain.

He nodded. "I never seen nothin' like it before, not trappin' It look to me like somebody swep' the trail with a branch, something."

I whistled. "So there was a guy there, clearing up after the killing."

He shrugged. I paused to see if he was going to speak but when he didn't I asked him, "Why didn't you tell the chief about this?" I put the question gently. I didn't want to sound aggressive, that would shut him up completely.
 

He picked up another trap silently. I figured he was over quota on words. Probably he hadn't talked so long at one time in a month. It was my turn. I changed the subject.
 

"The way the head was chewed, and the hands. That wouldn't happen if the bear had killed him, only if he'd found him dead," I suggested carefully.
 

He nodded slowly. "A bear maul you, he rip you with his feet, front feet, back feet, he don't care."

I went slowly. "Did you tell any of this to the police chief?"

Misquadis spat carefully. "He never ask me."

"But he must've seen maulings before this, if he's been here all this time."

Misquadis looked up at me, still working the bear grease into the release of the trap. "He just been here a year. Before that he was down south someplace. He just hear me say bear and that was it. When it come time to write it down, he done it and read it to me."
 

I stood and thought about that for a while. Gallagher had looked like an old-time pro. But he might have fallen into the veteran's trap of looking for easy solutions to vexing problems. Maybe he had forced the pace. But that didn't mean he was the only guy who had made a mistake. There was the coroner to consider. He had said the facial damage was compatible with a bear's physique. This meant that Gallagher had gone to the end of his own experience and then allowed other people to fill in the appropriate blanks for him. Only they had left more than they had filled in.
 

"What about the doctor? What'd he say?"

Misquadis laughed. "Him? He was too busy lookin' at the teeth marks. 'Bear did that/ he said. 'First bear bite I've ever seen.' "
 

I had learned as much as I was going to learn here.

Misquadis wiped his hands again and dug once more for his makin's. "The chief tell you about the bounty?" he asked.

"Bounty, on the bear?" I was surprised. "Haven't heard about that at all."

He accepted a light and sucked in smoke. "Yeah. The chamber of commerce put a bounty on the bear, five hundred bucks. Been guys up there all week tryin' shoot 'im."
 

"And they came up empty?"

He grinned, grinning around the butt in the center of his mouth. "They're not Indian," he said.

"Yeah, but there must've been some Indians went out after that kind of money," I argued.

He looked at me without speaking, and for the first time I could see the pride that filled him. "They wouldn't go until I go," he said.
 

"And when do you plan to do that?"

"Tomorrow," he said softly, and then added the words I was hoping for. "You ever hunt bear?"

"Not yet," I said, and let it hang there while he finished his smoke. Then he asked me, "Got a gun?"

"Yeah, in the trunk." I don't hunt, but I was just back from an investigation in Toronto where a gun would have been useful so this time I had stuck the station rifle in its case and put it in the trunk. Call it a veteran's precaution, a reflex after a bad experience.
 

Misquadis nodded. "We take your car maybe." He waved to one side of his shack where an aluminum canoe lay upside down. "I got some rope."
 

"Good, when?" I was falling back into the pattern of working with up-country people, white or Indian, no spare words at all.

"First t'ing," he said, and turned back to his traps as if I were not there. I nodded at his back, got into the car, turned it in the space on top of the bare rock in front of his cabin, and headed out toward town. I wasn't sure what I would find at the bear hunt but at least it would get me to the place where the body had been found, otherwise I was going to have to hire a helicopter and that would cost.
 

I was puzzled. If Misquadis hadn't seen a bear then there probably hadn't been a bear on the island. And if there wasn't, either Prudhomme had been killed somewhere else and moved or else somebody had killed him using bear's teeth and claws. And why would anybody do that? And if they did, why would they take so much trouble going over and over the exposed flesh until it was unidentifiable? It didn't make any sense. Unless maybe it was some grudge killing, some maniac hated the poor guy so badly that he had disfigured the body out of anger. And what had caused Misquadis to think the scene had been tidied up? None of this sounded right to me.
 

Still doing the same plodding things I would have done as a policeman, I drove back to the center of town where the tiny hospital stood. Like most of the other buildings it was made of white clapboard, square and ordinary. I guessed the builder had used the same plan he had used for the original school, it was the only way he knew how to build anything bigger than a house.
 

Inside it was like any other hospital, only scaled down. There was a comfortable-looking clerk on duty, tapping away on a manual typewriter, and a nurse behind the counter. The nurse was fiftyish and brisk. I went up and introduced myself and asked if Dr. Clarke was in. He wasn't, it seemed. There was a medical convention in Dallas, Texas, she explained helpfully. He would be back on Tuesday. I hung in, even then, explaining who I was and why I was there and pumping her very gently about Prudhomme.
 

Things must have been slack for her because she opened up like a flower, tutting over the poor shape the body had been in when the chopper lowered it into the hospital parking lot. "I thought I'd seen everything after twenty-three years in town," she said with a touch of pride. "I've had men in here with arms and legs gone from mill accidents. Bullet wounds we get by the score, every damn hunting season. I've taken fishhooks out of every portion of the male anatomy." I grinned at that one the way she expected me to, and she smiled and went on, "But this was something. The whole face had gone."
 

I said something sympathetic and she continued more briskly. "It's lucky for Chief Gallagher that Dr. Clarke was here at the time."
 

"Yes, I can see that," I agreed cautiously. "He's the only doctor within seventy-five miles, I guess."

"Oh, more than that," she said, giving her head a proud little lift that made her starched uniform rustle and let me realize that she was probably in love with her boss but would carry the secret to her grave. "Much more important than that. Dr. Clarke is possibly Canada's foremost authority on animal bites."
 

I looked properly respectful and she filled me in. "Yes, when he came up here first he was a young GP. There was no chance of getting out again to specialize anywhere, the town just couldn't spare him. So he decided to put the isolation to good use. He made a study of animal bites. We get all kinds of them here. Some of the trappers are incredibly careless."
 

She embroidered on this theme for about ten minutes, painting a picture of her employer as a Dr. Schweitzer of the north, toiling with microscope and textbook over the gnawed hides of an ungrateful population and taking his reward in the papers he read occasionally at conventions like the current one in Dallas.
 

Some world expert, I thought. The guy probably knew everything about a bear's dental structure but nothing about bears. He probably spent hours in his office, studying the way animal jaws closed around people, but had seen only a few real bites of any kind. Ah well, some medical fields are less crowded than others.
 

I thanked her and left and went to the greasy spoon in the plaza for a cup of coffee and a homemade donut. I scored the coffee five out of ten for quality, but the donut was great. The place was half full of men, nursing coffees and psyching themselves up for another round of calling at the mine sites, looking for jobs that had all been filled before news of the strike made the general pages of the papers in Toronto. I sat and looked over my notes. The only other witness to talk to was the chopper pilot, but he figured to be working through the day out of the chopper base about thirty miles away at a motel on the highway. No sense driving up there right now. Which left me what? I had an encore on the donut and read through the rest of the file. It seemed that Prudhomme had parked his gear at the motel while he was in the bush. I could ask about that when I got back.
 

I called the waitress back along the counter. She was a bright pretty girl around nineteen. In the city she would have been a secretary, at least. Here she would work in the restaurant until some young miner married her. The prospect didn't seem unpleasant to her, she was cheerful and happy to please. She knew all about Keepsakes.
 

"Yeah, sure. It's downtown, near St. Michael's on Mill Street. Just a house, eh, with the sign outside."

I thanked her and stood up. "What do they sell, souvenirs, that kind of stuff, Indian crafts?"

She laughed, a nice crinkling of her face. "Nothing fancy. What he is, Mr. Sallinon, he's an animal stuffer, you know, taxidermist."

I walked out, wondering what a taxidermist could have sold Jim Prudhomme for three hundred dollars. As far as I knew, the guy had never shot a buck or caught a fish in his life. Maybe he wanted a moose head for his rec room.
 

Arnie Sallinon was a white-blond Finn in his forties, soft and overweight, with skin so pale he looked like the Pillsbury Doughboy. He was standing in the converted parlor of his house, surrounded by a dead menagerie. Skunks and porcupines, a lynx and a couple of marten, seven or eight lake trout and pickerel, and a couple of moose heads filled the walls and the shelf space. He was something out of Charles Addams, even in his attitude. "What my customer buys is his business," he said firmly after I'd introduced myself. "I don't have to tell anybody."
 

"No, you don't" I agreed, sweet reason itself. "But the widow is a friend of my wife's"—ex-wife would cut no ice with a Scandinavian—"and Chief Gallagher was kind enough to help me and he gave me a list of all the evidence he had. It included the contents of Jim's pockets and that led me here. I'm just killing time until I can talk to the other witnesses and I thought I'd ask you what Jim bought."