Though Not Dead (27 page)

It was old enough to have been built by a young Samuel Leviticus Dementieff, and now that she was looking for them she could see the bones of the original floor plan, which was very like that of Old Sam’s cabin and Auntie Joy’s cabin. And the cabin Kate’s father had brought her mother home to, where Kate had been born and in which she had lived most of her life, until some asshole under the mistaken impression that Kate was inside had burned it down.

It was roughly the same size as the others. She remembered the description on Old Sam’s document of proof.
Part log, part frame, two doors, two windows, shingle roof.
The walls were log, still neatly fitting together although virtually every log had bowed after years of drying and there wasn’t the vestige of a chink left to fill any of the resulting gaps. The roof was intact, Kate suspected in part because it was sod over planks, like the one on Old Sam’s cabin in Niniltna. The two windows, one on either side of the door, faced the hot springs and the mouth of the canyon, although both had been broken out long since and subsequently boarded up. The second door, leading out back to the outhouse, had also been boarded up long ago, and was now covered by one of the tarps.

She got to her feet and picked up the lantern, casting the light up. Yes, there were the posts halfway up the wall that would have supported the sleeping loft across the back half of the cabin. Very likely the loft had been taken down and used for firewood by those too lazy to go chop their own. Upon closer examination, the floorboards looked hand planed. As old and infirm as they were, they reminded her of the floorboards of Old Sam’s cabin in Niniltna.

She thought of all the tools he had in his shop, including the old plane with the sharp blade set into the wooden body. As a little girl she had watched, fascinated, as Old Sam’s large-knuckled hands had run the plane back and forth and the wood came up in long, almost translucent curls.

All the varnish had been worn off the plane by the time she had seen Old Sam using it. She wondered if he had bought it new or if it was one of the tools he had inherited from Quinto Dementieff. If Quinto had had tools, and if he had left them to Old Sam.

Old Sam had never talked much about his father, and now Kate knew why.

It had been a long day, and a longer week. Her body ached suddenly with all the remembered bumps and bruises she had sustained during the past seven days, from the bang on the head to the rollover to the not inconsiderable succession of mental and emotional shocks she had sustained with each new revelation of Old Sam’s life. She had barely enough energy to pull her sleeping bag from its stuff sack and unroll it next to Mutt, sprawled in post-hunt splendor in front of the stove. She put some more wood on the fire, extinguished the lamp, and shucked out of her clothes. The flannel lining of the bag was warm by the time she slid inside. She snuggled down and was asleep in seconds.

*   *   *

The howls woke her hours later. Next to her Mutt was on her feet. Kate sat up, feeling unusually thickheaded. “What is it, girl?”

Then she heard the howls again. She tugged on jeans and boots, grabbed parka and rifle, and opened the door.

The full moon had risen, flooding the canyon with light, the new snow reflecting it back double strength. In a small notch halfway up the canyon wall, figures outlined in the moonlight as if someone was training a spotlight on them, stood three wolves.

As if they had only been waiting for the door to open, the middle one paced forward, put his muzzle up to the sky, and let loose with a long, ululating howl that frightened the living hell out of everything on two and four feet within earshot.

Just outside the door of the cabin Mutt sat down, wrapped her tail around her feet, and waited in composed silence, head cocked a little to one side. When the big wolf was done, he dropped his head and trotted back to his pack mates.

Mutt rose to her feet and sashayed—it was the only word descriptive enough for her gait—sashayed forward. She pointed her muzzle at the moon, opened her mouth, and let loose with a howl that would have shamed James Brown. Earthy, plaintive, wild, it called to more than the hunter, it called to the lover, too.

The three wolves stood there immobile until the last peal was rung. Mutt shook herself and returned to Kate’s side with an unmistakably smug look on her face.

The visitors, released from the spell, gave a few more yips and yowls, but clearly their hearts weren’t in it. They put their muzzles together for a few moments, and then the big one came forward again and let loose with another call, shorter this time, one that seemed to end with a question mark.

Mutt looked up at Kate with imploring eyes.

“You aren’t in heat, are you?” Kate said.

Mutt looked back at the wolves.

“Oh, go ahead,” Kate said, and even before the words were all the way out of her mouth Mutt had exploded from her side, heading up the side of the canyon at the speed of light. The big wolf had enough time to take a half step back before Mutt cannoned into him. The two of them went into his pack mates with no perceptible diminution of speed and the resulting ball of fur and teeth resolved into a yipping, nipping mass that rollicked over the edge and spilled down the side of the canyon and nearly precipitated itself into the top pool of the hot springs.

Mutt executed a grand jeté that culminated in a neat and graceful four-point landing that Mikhail Baryshnikov would have wept to have seen. The big wolf screeched into a hairpin turn, while the smaller of his pack mates, a white female, couldn’t stop herself and skidded over the side and into the water with a yip and a splash. There was a split second when Kate could have sworn that the other three stood there, laughing at her. She wasn’t in the water for long and then the chase was on again, up and down the little canyon, over and around the seven pools, once in a circle around the cabin, through a clump of trees in which a great snowy owl was peacefully slumbering. He woke with an indignant squawk and launched himself into the air, his four-foot wingspan a vast and outraged sail against the half moon visible between the high walls of the canyon.

Kate, enchanted, sat down with her back to the door and lost all track of time, watching as the four of them hurtled in and out of the moonlight, playing tag and tug-of-war and capture the flag like a bunch of kids on a playground. An arctic hare whose black-lined ears had tips bent back by the velocity of his flight burst out of the undergrowth to take the first pond in a single panicked leap and vanished into a heap of snow-covered rocks, losing only a bit of his tail. A pure white ptarmigan exploded out of the other side of that same pile of rocks and beat frantically at the air to gain some desperately needed elevation, sharp teeth nipping at her all the way. She, too, escaped death by inches. But then Mutt and her new friends weren’t trying that hard.

Kate herself was ignored as if she wasn’t there. At some point she became aware of wetness on her cheek. Sitting on this ground, her back against this door, watching this scene play out over the homestead he had staked for whatever reason when he was younger than she was now, she felt more connected to Old Sam than she ever had before. The realization that she would never see him again, never talk to him again, never be yelled at by him again, never be tossed into Alaganik Bay by him again, never benefit from his wisdom and his counsel again, struck like a knife. Old Sam had been an irascible, mocking, unsympathetic son of a bitch as a general rule, but he’d been a giant of her childhood. The shadow he had cast was long, and its absence would be acutely felt for the rest of her life.

She bent her head and let the tears slide down her face and into the snow in his honor.

When she looked up again the moon and the moonlight had vanished, along with the wolves. Mutt was gone, too, but Kate wasn’t alarmed. Mutt would escort them on their way to some boundary predetermined in her lupine brain and return.

Kate went back inside, added wood to the drum strove, and climbed back into her sleeping bag. She fell asleep as though felled by an ax.

Nineteen

She came awake the second time that morning as she usually did, fully conscious and aware.

And knew that she wasn’t alone.

She didn’t move, but whoever it was must have sensed that she was no longer asleep. “Get up,” they said.

She thought about it, considering and dismissing options.

There was an ungentle nudge in her back. “Get up,” the same voice said. It was a male voice, not one she recognized, although the man would have to say more before she was sure.

She threw back the sleeping bag and rolled to her feet in one swift motion, balanced and ready. The man swore and jumped back.

He stood in the doorway clad in parka, bibs, and boots. He wore a dark blue balaclava pulled down over his face, and he had a bolt-action rifle in his hands, a Savage Model 110, easily recognizable even by non-gun nuts like Kate by its homeliness and by the barrel locknut. Hunters were willing to put up with its lack of aesthetics for its accuracy. A lot of Demetri’s clients carried them, or the serious ones did.

The safety was off. She looked up. “What do you want?”

“Same thing you do. Where is it?”

She cocked her head, trying to memorize the tone and timbre of the voice so she would know it again. He kept himself very still, no betraying mannerisms or tics. His gear wasn’t new. Neither was the rifle.

A lot of people made the mistake of thinking that a firearm was a great leveler. A lot of people were wrong. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Kate said. “You’re trespassing, you know.”

“I want the map,” he said.

“What map?” she said.

“Don’t play cute with me. You’ve been following the same trail I have, a step behind all the way.”

Arrogant. Kate noted it for future reference. “So you’re the one who coldcocked me.”

The hint of a shrug. “Hand it over.”

“I don’t have it,” Kate said.

The Savage 110’s barrel moved in a little wave. “On your knees,” he said, “hands behind your head.”

She looked past him out the open door. It was too early for the sun to have reached the bottom of the canyon, but it was light out. She saw no movement except for faint wisps of steam rising from the top of the first pond.

He raised the rifle and pointed it in a less general direction. She felt her belly contract in response, and she shivered in her long johns. She hoped it didn’t show.

“On your knees,” he said, “facing away from me.”

She should have tackled him instead of talking. She got on her knees.

“Hands behind your head.”

She put her hands behind her head and felt him approach, but she could feel that he was keeping what he thought was a safe distance, and he was taking his time, which allowed her to formulate a plan.

He took one of her wrists and she felt a loop slip over one hand. She spread her ankles, let her butt slide to the floor between them and pushed off with her knees into a backward somersault, rocking onto her back, bringing her knees together and her feet up in a single sharp kick. He was too tall for her feet to hit his jaw—she noted that for later—and instead both her feet hit him squarely in the sternum, just below his rib cage.

His breath whooshed out, but he didn’t fall, only staggered back several steps. He’d had to tuck the rifle under one arm to deal with her hands, and her kick had knocked it loose.

The impact against the wall forced his lungs to expand and he caught his breath and the rifle before it hit the floor and was bringing it up when she completed the somersault. In the same smooth, continuous motions, she swiveled on both feet with knees bent and launched her right shoulder at his midsection in a tackle that would have earned her a starting position with the Seattle Seahawks. Or it would have if her fucking sleeping bag hadn’t slipped beneath her feet. She lost traction and force and the tackle turned into more of an uncontrolled collision, during which she managed to push the barrel of the rifle to one side. It went off too close to her head and he fell backward with her on top of him.

Her ears ringing, she went for the rifle with both hands. He was bigger than she was and stronger than she was—also noted—but she was quick and slippery and he kept grabbing for her hands where they’d been a moment before and in the meantime she was kicking and biting and clawing and in general keeping him too occupied with protecting his groin to get to his feet.

“Fuck this,” he said, and dropped the rifle for a hand in her hair and another on the seat of her long johns. He threw her across the cabin. As she felt herself sailing through the air, it felt like she had all the time in the world to think about where she was going to hit and how she would prefer to land. She gathered herself into a ball just in time for her butt to smash into the wall directly beneath one of the former loft supports. She bounced to her feet, only to find him there before her, rifle in hand and trained on her again.

“You’d better use that thing,” she said, breathless, “because I won’t get on my knees for you a second time.”

The face beneath the balaclava moved in what might have been a snarl. The rifle came up to his shoulder and she dove for her own rifle tangled in the folds of her sleeping bag, and Mutt came through the door like a silent streak of vengeful lightning.

She hit the intruder in the torso with the full force of her one hundred and forty pounds and he hit the wall again, this time hard enough to shake dirt loose from the roof. He fell to the floor and she went for his gun arm with her teeth.

He let out a yell, his first unrehearsed speech of the morning, and dropped the rifle. There was the sound of tearing Gore-Tex. A cloud of goose down burst around Mutt’s head, and when it had settled the arm of his parka was seen to be dangling from her teeth.

By then Kate had her rifle. “Hey! Hey, asshole, get your hands up! Mutt! Back off! Mutt!”

Mutt ignored her, dropped the sleeve, and attacked again, going for the arm now clad only in a red-and-black plaid shirtsleeve. He managed to roll over and tuck it beneath him. Undeterred, Mutt went for the seat of his bibs. She must have got her a mouthful because this time he screamed like Macaulay Culkin.