Monster (14 page)

Jimmy put his hand on Reed just to hold him steady—and quiet. “Reed, listen,” he whispered, “you don’t want to get lumped in with those people. They’re drunk, they might be on drugs—”

“But they—”

“Reed! They’re bad for you. They’re two fruitcakes who did everything a stupid camper can do to attract a bear!”

“But it wasn’t a bear!”

“Shh!
Don’t!”
Jimmy looked around, clearly afraid that someone may have heard that. “Reed. Look at me. I’m talking as your friend. This could be a real break. This has to be the same bear, which means we have a fresh trail. We might even be able to backtrack from here and get some kind of lead on Beck. Now . . .” He put his finger in Reed’s face to hold him in check. “Reed, I’m telling you—don’t ruin it. We’ve got plenty of volunteers ready to work with us
as long as
they’re good and clear on what it is they’re doing. If there’s a bear to be tracked down and killed, they’re with us. But if you start going on about some big, hairy . . .” He looked around again. “They’re talking already. Some of them are having some real doubts about what we’re doing and about you, and you don’t want that. You want them on your side.”

Headlights illumined the camp as a truck pulled up.

Jimmy searched Reed’s face a moment. “Reed, am I getting through?”

Reed whispered hurriedly, “You don’t believe me, do you?”

“What difference does it make as long as we find Beck?”

The blinding headlights obliterated anything and everything behind them until the engine quit, the lights winked out, and four men walked into the dull orange glow of the campfire. All four were armed with rifles. The first two were Steve Thorne, the buzz-cut “marine,” and a close partner Reed recognized right away, the man with the near-white hair, whose “money was on Shelton.” Ol’ White Hair had one of his picnic-table buddies with him, the kid in the Mariners cap, Sam Marlowe. The fourth was the hunter named Janson.

“Hey, guys,” said Jimmy. “Probably won’t need you till we get some light.”

“Couldn’t wait,” said White Hair. “We brought the overnight gear. We can camp out here ’til morning.”

Reed eyed him steadily but did not offer his hand. “I’m Reed Shelton.”

The man just eyed him back with a wry smile on his face. “Wiley Kane, from Missoula. Glad to be along.”

Reed shot a glance at Jimmy, then engaged Wiley Kane one more time. “Looks like it’s happened again.”

Kane nodded emphatically. “Oh, yeah. It’s a rogue bear all right. I’ve seen this kind of thing before.”

“Yeah. Right. A bear.” Reed stole one more look at Jimmy, who returned his look approvingly.

“Reed?” It was Sing’s voice, coming from behind Cap’s light near the edge of the woods. “Can we see you a second?”

“Excuse me.” He was more than glad to be somewhere else. He made his way through the grass to where Sing and Cap awaited him, dark shapes against the white, wiggling background of flashlight beams in the fog.

“Come on,” said Sing, “and step where we step.”

He followed them, his flashlight on their feet, as they moved through the grass in a single file toward Pete Henderson and the man helping him. Immediately to their left, peeking through the creeping fog and smoke, a trail of bent-over grass skirted the edge of the woods and then broke into clear ground.

Pete was on his knees and bent over, measuring a print while his assistant held a light at a low angle along the ground, bringing out the shadows. Without looking up, he said, “Reed, I think it’s your critter.”

They encircled a patch of bare ground next to a dry streambed, flooding it with their flashlight beams. When the stream ran during the rainy months, this patch of ground was a shallow eddy of standing water, the bottom lined with a thick layer of silt. The water had receded for the summer, leaving the silt in a smooth, moist state, perfect for registering a footprint— which it had done.

“This is big medicine,” said the assistant, holding his light steady as Pete measured and sketched in his pocket notebook.

Pete looked up. “Reed Shelton, this is Marty Elkhorn. He runs the store down in Kamayah. The campers used his phone to call us.”

Reed offered his hand. “Have you met Cap and Sing?”

Elkhorn nodded, his face grim, his wrinkles deep in the bouning light of the flashlights. He looked up at Sing. “Pete tells me you’re Coeur d’Alene.”

She nodded.

“Shoshone,” he replied. He gazed at the print that was starkly lit like a feature on the moon. “So you must know the warnings, the things our fathers taught us.”

Sing gazed over Pete’s shoulder at the print, her face eerily cold and statuesque in the weak light. “
Tsiatko?
”

Elkhorn nodded, the fear in his eyes chilling. “The wild men.”

Pete looked up from his work. “Marty, I do appreciate your traditions, but this is an
animal
.”

“No! Don’t think that! The Indians didn’t make up the
tsiatko
. They were here before we were! We knew about them before the white man came, and they have always been with us! Every tribe has its own name for them.
Oh-Mah,
the hairy giants.
Skookum,
the evil wood-spirits.”

Sing offered, “And I believe the Salish word is
sess-ketch.
”

Elkhorn nodded. “When the white man came, he pronounced it his own way:
Sasquatch.”

The mist crawled on their skin and the darkness closed in on them as every eye focused on the print, deeply impressed in the black silt. The heel was distinct, with clear dermal ridges, but the forward half of the foot had shifted in the track, leaving a smeared impression.

Reed was just as mesmerized as the others but had to be sure, at long last, that he could accept his own memories. “Pete, what in the world is it?”

Pete finished jotting down his measurements. “Fifteen inches long, six wide. It’s not a perfect match with the other prints we found, but those prints were nowhere as clear as this one, so we might allow for that.” He pointed. “Four clear toe impressions, and this dip here must be the fifth. No claws. I’m gonna figure he was at the cabin last night, and at the waterfall.” He glanced toward the wrecked camp where Jimmy and the hunters were combing through the mess. “This ol’ boy’s temper is sure a match.”

Elkhorn was getting more agitated the more they talked about it. He finally rose to his feet. “We can’t stay here. This is big medicine.
Tsiatko
has taken this ground.”

“It has my wife!” Reed objected.

“Of course it does! That’s what
tsiatko
does when it finds men on his ground.” He looked at the others, then pointed at the print. “And you think this is the only one? There are more. They’ve come to these woods, and you won’t see them either, not before they come in the night and take you!”

Sing tried to explain to the others, “Many of our parents raised us to believe that, if we weren’t good, the giants would come and take us away.” She added, as politely as possible, “For some of us, these traditions are ingrained in our thinking.”

Elkhorn, all the more resolute and fearful, stood eye to eye, nose to nose with Reed. “It has your wife. What more do I need to say?” Suddenly, in what seemed an act of madness, Elkhorn dropped the flashlight, threw up both his hands, and shouted to the forest in a shrill voice, “Elkhorn is leaving! Do you hear me? Elkhorn will never set foot on this land again! His wife and his children will never set foot here! Do you hear me?”

Now the campers, hunters, Jimmy, and Sheriff Mills were looking.

Elkhorn bolted and ran across the meadow, through the tattered campsite, and to his old car. He opened the driver’s door but stood to shout one more time, his arm upraised, “Elkhorn is gone, do you hear? He will never come here again!” Then, with his engine roaring and his wheels spewing gravel, he got out of there.

Jimmy hollered to Pete, “Where’d you get
him
?”

“Crazy Injun,” said Kane.

“Pete! What are you looking at over there?”

“Prints,” Pete answered.

“Okay,” Jimmy said. “This bear’s a regular camp raider. Tomorrow we put up some bear stands and put out some bait.”

“Good idea,” said the white-haired Kane. “I’ll take the first shift.”

“I’ll back you up,” said Thorne.

Jimmy rubbed his hands together briskly. “Okay, you two guys set up at the cabin. Janson and Sam, you take this site. We’ll have both locations covered. It’ll be a shooting gallery.”

Pete waited, but Jimmy’s attention was elsewhere. “Won’t even look at ’em,” Pete muttered. “Reed, maybe you can hold the light.”

Reed picked up the flashlight and stooped down, once again illuminating the print in the silt. “Pete, what is it?”

Pete had to consider a moment before answering. “Could I please not have to answer that—at least ’til an answer comes to me? I’ve been tracking in and around this county for fifteen years, and I’ve never seen a track like this one. No question, though: whatever it is, it’s one mean critter and we’ve gotta find it.”

Sing snapped some photos and then said in an aside to her husband, “Cap . . .”

“What?” Then he wagged his head. “No, no, I’m not jumping to any conclusions—and neither should you.”

“Conclusions about what?” Reed asked, impatient.

“I’ve seen how it works,” Cap said. “People believe what they want to believe, and if they want to believe something badly enough, they can see things that aren’t there or not see things that are.”

“So what are you saying?”

“I’m saying . . .” Reed could tell that Cap was trying to be careful. “I’m saying we really,
really
want Beck to be alive. It’s
the
driving force in our minds right now; it’s dominating our emotions.”

“So?”

“So . . . what if we just don’t
want
it to be a bear?”

Now Reed stood to face him. “Now
you
think I’m seeing things, is that it?”

“Reed, maybe we
all
are because we
want
to. I admit, I really
want
to believe that something just picked Beck up and carried her off, because that opens up limitless possibilities, even fantasies that are a whole lot easier to handle than—” His sentence hit a wall. “See? I can’t even say it.”

Pete broke in, his hand outstretched. “Reed, I need that light.”

Still looking testily at Cap, Reed slapped the flashlight into Pete’s hand.

Sing intervened. “Cap, unless I’m wrong, you have it backward.” He looked as though he would have come back with something if he
had
something. “You believe it, Cap, and not because you want to; you
don’t
want to! You’ve been arguing with yourself ever since this whole thing started.”

“Now I know it wasn’t a bear,” said Pete. He shone his flashlight farther up the dry streambed, illuminating a strange, lumpy pile. He approached the new discovery and they semicircled around him like a nature class, flashlights centered on a pile of fresh droppings—lobed lumps loosely connected in a chain by strands of leaves, grass, rodent hair, and paper food packaging.

“It’s only a few hours old,” said Pete. “But no bear leaves scat like this.”

Sing looked at Cap and said softly, “Does it look familiar at all?” She gave him time to ponder while she aimed her camera and took some more pictures.

Cap studied the droppings. From the look on his face, the news was bad, and the longer he looked, the worse it seemed to get. The others fell silent, waiting for his answer.

Finally, after a fleeting glimpse at Sing, he asked Pete, “Can I get a sample?”

“Take the whole thing,” said Pete.

Sing was already pulling out a Ziploc bag. The droppings were soft, loose, and messy; it was difficult to preserve their original shape as she spooned them up. “I’ll get you those hairs as well. And I’ve got a thermos here you should take along. Saliva.”

“Let me get some sleep and I’ll leave for Spokane tomorrow— or is it today?”

“It’s today,” said Sing.

Reed was speechless for a moment, but finally he met Cap’s eyes and said, “You’re the one, Cap. Any help you can give us . . .”

Cap made sure the bag was properly sealed as he replied, “Well, it’s a chance to sleep in my own bed again. But this is a long shot. They may not even let me in the door.”

“Try the back,” said Sing.

Cap weighed that a moment. “If they catch me, I’ll tell them you said it was okay.”

“You do that.” She winked at him.

“So what do we tell Jimmy?” Reed asked.

“Aw,” said Pete, rubbing his tired eyes, “just let him and his boys hunt their doggone bear. Cap’s right; people believe what they want—but it’s gonna be the weirdest bear they’ve ever seen.” He shoved his notebook back in his pocket. “I gotta crawl into my truck and get some sleep. Don’t let anybody mess up these tracks. And, Reed?”

“Yeah?”

“You’re not crazy, so get to work.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Do . . . cop stuff. Find a pattern or something, one of those whatchamacallits . . . an MO. Any information’s useful.” Pete trudged on by. “It’s time somebody else did some of the work around here.”

Reed watched Pete disappear into the darkness and fog, and then met the eyes of Cap and Sing.

Cap looked away a moment, taking in the trashed campsite, the mysterious footprint, and the plastic bag in his hand, then met Reed’s eyes again. “There
is
a chance you’re not crazy.”

“Far from it,” said Sing.

Suddenly Reed had only a vague memory of feeling helpless and despondent in another time, another place. He could recall feeling like a liar even though he’d never lied, but now he had friends who believed. His mind began to turn over like an old car out of mothballs. “So . . . we really do have two occurrences, in two different places—No!
Three
attacks: Randy on Monday—we need to verify from Arlen Peak just when Randy went up there. Did somebody ask him that already? Then Beck on Monday night—and I can place that at about 11:30. Now we have this one, Ted and Melanie . . . ?”

“Brooks,” said Sing.

“Brooks. Okay, you’ve got their contact information?”

“Got it.”

“Cap, you’ll stay in touch, right?”