Crazy Mountain Kiss (30 page)

A
s a man who'd done his share of sleeping in cars, Sean Stranahan always had a change of clothes, a bar of soap, and a toothbrush. He stripped down outside and walked to Etta's bathroom wearing little more than a weary smile. Twenty minutes later she put down a plate of scrambled eggs for him and began painting in the spaces on the cave walls, telling him what the pictographs hadn't.

 • • • 

F
or the first month, Bear Paw Bill McKutchen and Cinderella Huntington had been on the run, traveling underneath the spine of the range from south to north, trying to stay ahead of a manhunt that never materialized. Several times he spotted a single-engine aircraft sweeping the peaks, but was the pilot looking for Cinderella or trying to spot the fire of a lost hunter, he didn't know. As cold nights set in, he shot an elk with his muzzle-loader and brain-tanned the leather to make Cinderella a coat. Meat wasn't a problem, but nutrition was, and with winter's first heavy snowfall, Bear Paw Bill led Cinderella back to the south in a circuitous route, arriving at the shelter he'd built weeks earlier up the South Fork of the Shields River.

The arrangement with his brother, Myron, was similar to those they'd made in past years. About once a month, depending on road conditions, Myron would place a bag of lentils, dried beans, salt, rice and a half-gallon jug of hard apple cider in a five-gallon bucket with a snap-on lid that had a permanent home in a hole in the ground, and over which he rolled an immense boulder. The boulder was along the
trail to the bald ridge, about a quarter mile beyond the Forest Service cabin and accessed by the same road.

Supplemented with venison and the occasional trout Bill caught with his crudely tied flies, the food cache was a hedge against starvation, though hardly an inspiring diet. Bill told Etta that he was ashamed to admit that he'd also scavenged food from the forest cabin, when renters had failed to lock the door upon their departure. It was Cinderella who suggested the chimney. When taking refuge on the night of her rape, she had discovered that she could not only descend it easily, but shimmy back up. If Bill would take her along on his monthly trek to the food cache, she could check the cabin. A locked door wouldn't matter.

As McKutchen told Etta a story of survival in the Crazy Mountains, storms that dropped three feet of snow and temperatures that plunged to thirty below zero, blood from the stump of his leg was slowly dripping onto the floor tiles of her kitchen. Bill said he was sorry for the mess and frowned down at it. It reminded him of the deer blood he used to color the clay with which they had painted the cave walls. Because they didn't want to blacken the cave with soot, they built their fires on the headwall, where Cinderella had filmed him for her documentary. He said that Cinderella was a quick study and did all of the rock art without his guidance, as she was as nimble as a goat and could climb down to the cave, whereas he could not.

At this point in her narration, Etta paused. “I asked him about his foot,” she told Sean. “I wanted to know whether Cinderella had cut it off.”

This was a question Sean had been asking himself since they had found the mountain man, doubting Ettinger's theory that Cinderella had severed it in order to flee from his camp.

McKutchen told Etta that he'd stepped on a nail protruding from a bear door buried in the snow behind the cabin. It had happened when he was trying to break in for food and had not realized it was occupied. He'd stepped on the nails while running away, and over the next few weeks the infection had spread until it was clear that
without a tetanus shot and a course of antibiotics he would not only lose the foot to gangrene, but also his life. To make matters worse, a bear, ravenous after emerging from hibernation, had flipped over the boulder and dug out the last food cache. Bill and Cinderella were surviving on pemmican made from dried squirrel meat, berries, and the rendered fat from a deer, and it had started to turn rancid.

Where before he had taken care of Cinderella's needs, she now attended to him. Using the blade of a Swede saw, she painstakingly sawed a section of log to make a hard surface for the impact of the ax. She placed Bill's leg across the stump. With the ax buried in campfire coals, the only sterilization available, she coaxed Bill to drink the dregs of hard cider left in the jug. The mountain man then bit down on a scrap of elk hide. He had coached Cinderella in ax craft since the beginning of winter, and she raised the head with its thin glowing bevel, and brought it down with all her strength. It took two chops, the second in the gash of the first, before the blade stuck into the wood.

Bill bit all the way through the elk hide, but never passed out. He directed Cinderella to knot a rawhide tourniquet, and she had applied the entire tube of antibiotic ointment they'd found in a medicine kit in the forest cabin. That night Bill fell into a delirium. He dreamed, as the Crow warrior Plenty Coups had dreamed more than one hundred fifty years before, of the chickadee, the tree in which it perched the sole survivor of the four great winds. In Bill's mind the chickadee was Cinderella, and to him the dream meant she must return home, for the tree was trembling now and mountains no longer afforded her sanctity.

He called Cinderella to his side and explained what was to be done. She would hike out of the mountains while she still had her strength and find her way to Myron's house in the Bangtails. The season for the cabin rental had ended, so she could climb down the chimney and spend the first night there and build a fire to warm up. With an early start the next morning, avoiding roads and cutting cross country, she could make it to Myron's by nightfall. Bill stressed
the importance of having Myron notify the sheriff before trying to get in touch with her mother. Under no circumstance was she to see her stepfather until her story was told. That was for her own protection.

Cinderella had argued. He'd been there for her; now she would stay at his side until he recovered. You must go for the sake of the baby, he told her. It must not be punished for the sins of the father, and there was no longer any food. Still, she was intractable. Finally, Bill had unbuttoned his greatcoat and pulled up his shirt. On his left side were several circular pink scars and a seeping wound. Bill told Cinderella that he had been shot with buckshot the same night he stepped on the nail. He hadn't mentioned it then because the wounds seemed minor and he didn't want to frighten her. But now he had become sick to his stomach and wondered if he'd got lead poisoning. He'd tried to pry out the pellets with his knife and just made things worse. The pain had become excruciating.
You would not want to see me die, would you?

And so he prevailed over her objections, and it was as much to save Bill's life as the life of her child that she agreed to the plan. She left the next day in a light snowfall, and Bill, watching after her, had seen several magpies, those cousins of the crow that dress in black tie, their starched white shirtfronts sewn of breast feathers, and worried it was a bad omen. She had turned then and said the last words he would ever hear her say.

“Don't worry, Bill. I can fly.”

Two weeks later, starving and in excruciating pain, he had spotted a coyote lingering at the edge of his camp, and thought perhaps it was Cinderella come to lead him to heaven. He had spoken to the coyote, and, getting no response, had begun to doubt its existence.
Maybe I'm hallucinating,
he thought. So he shot his muzzle-loader into the air. It was the shot that Sean and Katie Sparrow had heard when they found the bear window at the cabin. The coyote had lifted its head at the shot, then in a fluid movement melted into the trees. So it was simply an animal. He would live, perhaps, a little longer. The next day he
began to crawl out of the mountains, and had made it a quarter of a mile before Ettinger and Stranahan picked up his track and found him.

 • • • 

S
ean had not moved so much as a hand in the hour Etta recited Bill's story, and he found the coffee in his cup to be cold.

“It still doesn't explain how Cinderella got stuck,” he said, placing a hand over the cup to indicate he didn't want any more.

She set down the pot and he watched a tear track down her right cheek. She rubbed it away.

“I have a theory, if you want to hear it.” He waited for her to nod.

“When I heard Bill had the same type of foot injury, I thought it probably happened when they were together at the cabin. But her injury was minor and had only started to become infected. Did he say anything about her being injured to you?”

She shook her head.

“Then it must have happened the night she left his camp. It was dark. There was a storm coming and she was in a hurry to get the ladder up. Probably she wasn't paying attention to where she was stepping. If you drove a nail through your foot, it would have been more than painful, it would be debilitating. She would have to favor that foot when she climbed down the chimney. Maybe it happened as she was stepping down with her other foot. Maybe that foot slipped and she shot down the chimney and the other knee got wedged up under her.”

Etta pressed her lips together. “Or maybe it was because she was five and a half months pregnant and she was bigger, did you think of that? That's what I thought of. But it doesn't matter. It doesn't change anything at all.”

There was nothing to say to that, and they sat quietly, listening to the early birds. Something was coming to an end. Maybe it already had.

“I guess I better go see Ettinger,” Sean said. “She's not done giving
me the third degree.” He got to his feet. “I'm going to have to tell her about Bill. He's still a fugitive from justice. My advice is to cooperate and give her a full statement. That will probably be the end of it.”

“I gave him money,” Etta said. “And I gave him food, a care package.”

“I might not mention that part. Did he say what his plans were?”

“He said he'd go on a vision quest somewhere, he hadn't decided what range, anywhere but the Crazies.”

She walked him to the door. “I owe you some money. You worked beyond the date of our contract.”

“You don't have to—”

“No, you earned it.”

“Then I'll come back for it.” But he knew he wouldn't, that these mountains had become as haunted for him as they must have become for Bear Paw Bill and for Cinderella Huntington.

“Will you?” Etta said. “Something tells me I might not see you again.”

“You'll see me.” He kissed her forehead, and that's the way they left it, with Sean feeling the weight of her eyes as he walked away, knowing she saw right through him.

 • • • 

W
hen the headlights faded down the road, Etta climbed to her bedroom and pulled the diary from the drawer of her nightstand. It was Bear Paw Bill who had told her where to find it. He said that Cinderella had grabbed it from the stall as she fled the stables, and, knowing how she treasured it, he had made an inside pocket in the elkskin coat he'd sewn for her. In this way, Cinderella had worn her diary next to her heart for several months, working on it with pens found in the cabin. Only days before she left, Bill had helped her unravel the binding and separate the book into sections of a few pages each, before sewing it between the layers of hide that made the coat. Thus it was
undetectable, and Cinderella took comfort that no matter what happened, no one would ever find it.

Etta had hung the coat in Cinderella's room after Sean gave it to her, and when Bill had left the ranch, she cut the threads at the hem, her hand shaking. When she shook the coat, the pages sifted out onto the floor. The writing was legible but the reading tedious, for the diary had been written in pen and pencil over a period of eighteen months, and the ink had smeared here, or had run out there, only to be taken up in another color, and some of the pages were stuck together from moisture. Etta had stayed up all of one night ordering them as best she could, and then had bound them together with a ribbon.

The diary offered a glimpse of Cinderella's thoughts before and after the accident. After the accident the handwriting had become more expressive and artistic as the brain compensated for its injury, and the entries, especially those about Landon, were more romantic and poignant in their tenor. Reading them had made Etta weep.

Perhaps thankfully, no entries recorded Cinderella's rape and flight to the mountains. Bear Paw Bill, upon handing Etta the jacket, had prepared her for the omissions, as Cinderella had confessed to him that the night was too painful to write about. It was her suffering in those first weeks that had led to the pictographs. Bill had suggested writing her story on rock as Indians had, hoping that it would prove a form of therapy. He told Etta that the happiest days of his life were those he had spent with her daughter, mixing vegetable and animal blood pigments and teaching her the art form, for they had practiced on rocks for many days before he led her to the cave.

Untying the ribbon, Etta once again read the last entry, dated April 2.

Last night I felt the baby kick. Bill tells me I must think of it now with everything I do, even though I have not worked up the courage to do some of the things he wants me to. It is scary to watch him hone the ax, knowing what I
must do with it. But it is even scarier to think about leaving and what I must do when I reach the valley. He knows my head is fuzzy and doesn't want me to do anything that would put me in danger. So I will find his brother and tell him about the evil in the valley of men, as he calls it, even though it means I can't go to mother for a few more days. I know she will love the baby and help me to raise it. Bill has made me promise I will raise it to believe in God. He says when I did the vision quest, God was in the wings of the birds flying on the warm air that flows up the mountains. Bill thinks I am a bird too, a chickadee. I do sometimes feel like I am flying, so maybe he is right. But most of the time I am just a girl who wants her mother. When I see her, I will give her a Crazy Mountain kiss.