Crazy Mountain Kiss (18 page)

“Maybe not, but that doesn't mean he didn't have her when the mood struck.”

“What now?”

“We wait. I don't see him wandering very far without his rifle.”

Stranahan walked to the muzzle-loader and thumbed the hammer to half cock. He pried off the percussion cap. “Let me have your Swiss Army knife and a ChapStick,” he said.

Martha handed the knife over and he used the head of the small screwdriver to dig out the explosive material inside the cap. Then he smeared the ChapStick into the priming hole of the nipple. He replaced the cap and lowered the hammer. The rifle was nothing but a club now, but McKutchen wouldn't know that, even if he cocked the hammer. He'd see the reassuring glint of the cap.

Stranahan noted Martha's look of mild surprise. “Sam builds these things, I've shot them a bit,” he said.

They retreated thirty yards and took cover behind a jumble of downfall. The minutes ticked by in uncomfortable silence, their sense of anticipation blunted by the awkward position, their butts cold against damp ground. The jays that had perched in the tree flew back down to the ground. They hopped about, pulling at something in the
brush. Stranahan watched their antics, his mind on Bear Paw Bill. But his eyes kept coming back to the birds. Gray jays—the old-timers called them whiskey jacks—were scavengers. They weren't pecking for bugs as he'd initially assumed. Probably they had something dead in there. It could be the carcass of a rabbit that McKutchen had skinned, or whatever other animal he'd collected when Sean and Katie had heard the shot. He glanced at Martha, drew a question mark with his index finger.

Ettinger peered through her rifle scope. “It looks like a piece of tack, something leather,” she whispered.

Stranahan nodded and they stood up, the jays flitting away. As they approached, it became clear that the birds had been pecking at a boot, or rather a moccasin made of tanned elkskin. The moccasin was as big as a small beaver tail and it wasn't until they were standing over it that they saw what the birds had been eating. Martha slung her rifle over her shoulder and bit at the knuckles of her right hand.

“Jesus, Stranny.”

They were looking at a foot. It was a left foot, severed a few inches above the collar of the moccasin. Flesh around the bone had been dug out by the sharp bills of the jays, so that the bone stub protruded. The bone wasn't splintered but appeared to have been cut clean, as if by a heavy cleaver.

Grim-faced, Martha walked to the shelter. Before, they had given it no more than a cursory going-over, expecting McKutchen's imminent return. Now there was no hurry—if he did come back, they'd have plenty of warning. Sean found a long peeled stick with twists of snare wire at regular intervals and puzzled over them only a moment before realizing it was a crude fly rod.

Ettinger crooked a finger. She pulled back the skins on the larger bed to show Sean where they were stained with blood. Her eyes ran over a King James Bible on a shelf affixed to the back wall of the lean-to. A pair of scratched reading glasses rested beside it. She looked under the framework of the sleeping platform and drew out a drawstring leather bag and a metal canister with a screw lid. The label
read
FFG BLACK POWDER
. She shook it. About half full. She opened the bag and rolled half a dozen lead balls into the palm of her hand. “What do you figure, fifty caliber?”

“Or fifty-eight.”

“You find anything on the girl's side?”

“There's a couple cans with dried clay in them. No food, though. No clothes. No personal items. I'm guessing she came up here with nothing but the clothes on her back and left the same way.”

“Except for the elkskin jacket Harold found,” Martha said.

“Except for that.”

Ettinger shook her head. “You're still thinking this is platonic, him giving her her own quarters, but what I'm seeing is that she waits for him to fall asleep and brings the ax down on his ankle.”

“Where do you suppose they keep their food?”

“Probably hanging in a tree. Bears get hungry after the winter nap. Only a fool leaves his food in camp.”

“I didn't see anything hanging.”

“It would be over by the creek. They can get food and water on the same trip.”

“You have an answer for everything but where he is, Martha.”

“We'll see about that. He's minus one of his paws now. He can't have gone far.”

They walked the perimeter of the camp, looking for a drag mark where the man might have crawled. Most of the snow had melted under the thin tree cover, making the job harder. Martha muttered something about Harold never being around when you needed him. They made a second circle, wider than the first. They were on their fourth circle, about a hundred yards to the south of the camp, where the bench ended and the ridge sloped sharply down toward the canyon bottom, when Sean saw a gouge in the earth and puzzled over it. Ettinger stepped ahead and pointed with the muzzle of her rifle to a pair of deep pockmarks in the ground. And another set, farther along.

“He's made crutches,” she said.

The trail led onto a shaded slope where a dirty sheet of snow clung
like gauze. Now it was no longer necessary to connect the dots, for the single boot that the man wore had pressed through the rotting snowpack and the stump of his left leg had dribbled blood. Here on the steeper slope he'd fallen, then floundered getting back to his feet. A few feet farther along he'd gone down a second time, opening his wound and marking the snow with clots of black blood. On the ground were the crudely made crutches he had discarded. From this point he had crawled, the bloody trough of his progress reminding Stranahan of trails where hunters' horses dragged gutted elk. The skid headed straight down toward inky stands of lodgepole and spruce that marked the creek bottom.

“It's nothing but a shintangle down there,” Stranahan said.

Martha nodded. McKutchen would never be able to climb through the downed timber. The distance he was ahead of them would be measured in feet now, not miles. She removed the cartridge from the chamber of her rifle to sidestep down the slope. Progress was slow, as Ettinger stopped every few yards to glass the forest coming into view below them. Only a few smears of rose and purple marked the twilight. In ten more minutes it would be too dark to see anything beyond the beam of a flashlight. As they reached the skirt of the ridge, an odor invaded Stranahan's nostrils, a dark scent with a taint of sour dog. He heard the subtle click as Martha eased the bolt to rechamber a cartridge.

Ahead, where the trunks of the trees formed a wall, a bearlike figure bulked against a crust of snow. It was making a low moaning sound. The moaning stopped and the figure jerked. They heard a thud, then a crack like a branch breaking. The moaning began again, a lament that reminded Stranahan of the dying note of a wolf's howl. Ettinger tapped the headlamp on her forehead. “When I flick it on, that's when we take him.”

L
ater, it would occur to Stranahan that his first impression of Bear Paw Bill had been on the mark. The man had the broad taut stomach and humped shoulders of a bear, and he breathed like one, his exhalations stentorian, his breath as rank as a grizzly scavenging winter kill. It had been like closing in on a dying bear, too, cautiously approaching from behind, Ettinger's rifle at the ready. The man was on his knees facing the thicket, but as they neared he swiveled his head and opened his mouth as if to roar his agony, an ax brandished in his right fist. But no words came out and he fell forward in parts, the ax falling from his hand, the shoulders slumping, and finally the body losing its battle with gravity. He fell with a soft grunt, facedown, his hair fanned onto the snow.

It took ten minutes to wrestle the body to a tree trunk broad enough to support his back. He was wearing a canvas rucksack, and after they got it off him and lifted him to a sitting position, the man's breathing seemed less labored. For a brief few moments he opened his eyes, the pale orbs swimming and uncomprehending. Ettinger makeshifted a tourniquet from her belt and tore her fleece vest into strips to bandage the stump, while Stranahan gathered up the wood the man had been cutting and built the fire that he had obviously intended to light.

They raised Walt on the VHF and informed him of their position. He and Katie were about an hour away, about how long it would take Martha to bring in the horses.

“I'll do it,” Stranahan offered.

“Do what? Charm them like your sexy librarian and expect that they'll follow? No, you just make sure Bill here doesn't start leaking while I'm gone.”

Ettinger started climbing back the way they'd come, her light bobbing out of sight. Stranahan heard the radio crackle. It was Walt, saying he'd raised Harold and Etta. They'd join up and come in together. “Don't let your guard down,” he cautioned.

Stranahan assured him that the man was hardly a danger.

“It's the hardly dangerous ones kill you,” the ex–Chicago cop said.

Stranahan signed off and sat down on the far side of the fire, watching the flames lick gold and green fingers up and down the mountain man's beard and lion's mane of hair. The image reminded him of waterfalls of color he'd witnessed during displays of the aurora borealis.

“We're going to get help for your leg,” he said. “You're going to make it.” They were just words; he didn't expect the man to hear them.

Stranahan heard a cough. Slowly, the right arm of the man lifted and the hand rubbed at the spittle on his mouth.

“Hin.” The word blew out with his breath. “Aappen . . . S-s Sin-er.”

Stranahan walked around the fire to hear better, but the man seemed exhausted by the effort and tilted his head back against the trunk. Stranahan saw that his eyes, fully open, were the same watercolor blue as his brother's. He bent close to speak, ignoring the pungent zoo smell in his nostrils.

“Are you saying ‘Cindy'? Is ‘Sin' ‘Cindy'?

“Cin-her.” He pulled his hand toward his chest.
Move closer.
Stranahan remembered Walt's caution. “I can hear you,” he said, without moving forward. The thick fingers beckoned.
Only a few inches,
Stranahan told himself, and then, with a sudden movement, the snapping of a shadow, a hand clamped on his throat and he began to reel toward unconsciousness, seemed to swim upward into the swirl of stars and then, abruptly, he was back, felt the snow cold underneath him as he stared into the wavering, upside-down image of the face looming over
him. The icicles on the man's beard melted from the fire to drip onto Sean's forehead and sting his eyes.

“Where's my kick . . . a . . . dee?”

Sean tried to speak, but couldn't form the words.

“Lost . . . my kicka . . . dee.”

“Let go,” Sean managed. But the heavy hand wasn't clasped around his throat. It had relaxed and was merely a weight, the knuckles resting against his cheek. The man had gathered him up, like a silverback gorilla pulling one of his sons to his immense chest.

“My kick-a-dee.”

Sean peered up. Bill's head was haloed by his cascade of ringlets, blotting out the handful of stars that challenged the overcast sky. He remembered the moonlike visage captured on the potter's video, the bearlike creature that had run from the cabin where the couple were clasped in their embrace.

“Did . . . Cindy . . . cut off your foot?”

“Proud . . . I'm proud . . . of her.”

“Was . . . she your lover?”

Bill sat back against the tree trunk. “Car-coal. She tell you . . . in car-coal. I made her . . . color.” He shook his head. “Have to . . . find her.” His chest heaved. His breath rattled with the inhalation, caught, then shuddered out. His head tilted back against the trunk of the tree. Gradually, the breaths became regular. Stranahan kneed back to his side of the fire, where he sat heavily. He felt his own chest draw oxygen in a counterpoint rhythm to the mountain man's, then they were breathing as one and the firelight colored behind his eyes as he closed them. The color darkened to the wine of the horizon and his world went black.

 • • • 

L
ooks like Papa and Baby Bear are in for their long winter's nap.” Martha loomed over him, her hands on her hips.

“I fell asleep,” he said.

“Uh-huh. How's the patient?”

Sean got to his knees and fed a branch to the fire from the stack. “Do you have any water? I could use it.”

Ettinger got a bottle from one of the saddlebags and unscrewed the lid. Sean swallowed, feeling the burn where Bill's fingers had closed on his throat. He tried not to let the pain show on his face.

“We had a conversation,” he said, handing the bottle back.

“About what?”

“His chickadee. I think he meant Cindy. He wanted to know where she was.”

“Let's just hope he can hold on until morning when we can get a chopper in here. Meantime our job is to keep him breathing. Here, hold the flashlight while I check that dressing.”

Ettinger switched on her headlamp, the beam glancing off Sean's face before illuminating the slumbering giant. She brought the light back to Stranahan.

“Turn your head. No, the other way.”

“My good side?”

“You've got blood on your clothes.”

Stranahan reached for his right shoulder, his hand coming away wet. “It must have happened when we were putting the dressing on.”

“Bullshit. What the hell happened when I was gone?”

She listened, her face impassive. “And you weren't going to tell me,” she said. He began to protest. “No,” she cut him off. “Is it because you're embarrassed he got the drop, or are you trying to protect him?”

“I think you have the wrong idea. He could have been trying to help that girl and—”

“That's not the way you get your point across. You don't leave me out of the loop. Ever. How can I work with you if I can't trust you?”

“I'm working for Etta Huntington.”

“Not up here you're not. And that's not the issue and you know it. Jesus, Sean. This is cowboy shit. You've got to trust me.”

“I'm sorry, Martha. It won't happen again.”

She blew out a breath. “Go rustle up his rucksack,” she said. “We might as well have a gander.”

Sean brought the rucksack back to firelight and unlaced the drawstring. Chips of obsidian for sparking fire, along with charred strips of cloth for catching the spark, were in a small leather pouch inside the bag. He rummaged further. “This is weird.” He drew out the companion moccasin to the one they'd found with the man's foot inside. Strips of leather had been cut from the top of the moccasin. Several were floating around at the bottom of the rucksack.

“He's wearing a boot,” Stranahan said. “Why would he be carrying the moccasin?”

“A better question is why would he be cutting it up?”

They had to wait another half hour for Harold to arrive and offer a credible explanation.

“I've seen this before on the reservation,” he said. “He's eating his clothes. The man must be starving.”

 • • • 

A
s soon as she dismounted from her horse, Katie Sparrow checked the unconscious man's respirations and heart rate, then began undoing the bone section buttons of his elkskin greatcoat.

“It's his leg that's hurt,” Martha said. But she chastised herself even as Katie continued to peel back layers. How could she have been so negligent? It had never occurred to her that the mountain man's injuries might extend beyond the obvious.

Bear Paw Bill gave credence to the term “dyed in the wool.” The green-and-black stag shirt he wore under the coat had stained his chest and abdomen in a checkerboard pattern and was difficult to remove; the grizzled hairs of his chest were caught in the open weave of the fabric and cemented with dried blood. Katie shone her light on a black button under the ribs that looked like a seeping blister. She wrinkled up her nose.

“This is a puncture wound,” she said.

“It looks like he was stabbed,” Martha said.

“Look at these,” Katie said. She pointed to several pink dots of raised scar tissue. “Like he was shot with a shotgun, but the wounds
healed over. The smell is from the puncture wound. His body's being poisoned from a ruptured intestine and he's burning up trying to fight the infection. We've got to get the fever down. Get me the medical kit in the whatchamacallit, the saddlebag.”

Martha hooked her thumbs in her utility belt as Katie cleaned and dressed the wound. It was snowing again and she lifted her eyes to the occluded sky, goddamning the situation in general.

“Can he hold on until daylight?” she asked Katie. “The chopper's not going up in this shit.”

“I'm a wilderness first responder, not an EMT,” Katie said. “But the sooner we get him out, the better.”

“What about Josh?” Walt said. “His heli's got infrared, AP, he can fly that grasshopper on a night as black as bin Laden's heart.”

“Joshua Byrne, the actor?”

“I told you. He shotgunned with me in Chicago when I had the shield. Wanted to get my speech patterns down for a part.” Five blank stares. He elaborated. Joshua Byrne was a former Navy SEAL who had parlayed his shoulders and square jaw into a civilian career fighting bad guys on the big screen. He owned a working cattle ranch with a helipad in the Boulder River Valley.

“I heard his place is up out of McLeod.” Martha said.

Walt was nodding. “Eighteen hunnerd acres. I saw a muley buck with a rack like a candelabra last day of rifle season. You want to hunt that property, I can get permission.”

“And he can fly on instrument flight rules?”

“That's what I'm saying. He could hoist an elephant off this mountain as the clock strikes midnight, we had mountain elephants, that is. You go back in the fossil record—”

“Walt!”

“I'm just saying it's possible.”

“Has he filed the paperwork with the department?”

“He's good to go.”

“Then for Chrise sakes use the sat phone. Let's make him a real hero.”