by Gwen Moffat
‘You can’t get across in a Jeep,’ he told her.
She confessed that she had failed to get up the next hill. ‘But,’ she added cheerfully, ‘I propose to climb to the pass in the morning.’
‘Why?’ His tone was too sharp.
‘To look down the other side.’
‘You got some special interest?’ he asked, and Shelley sighed.
Miss Pink’s expression did not change and firelight was reflected off her spectacles, concealing her eyes. ‘I am going to spend a few days here, at a ranch near Prosper. The Logan ranch. I’ve come for the fall round-up.’
He opened his mouth but Shelley was there before him: ‘I know Ginny and Sim Logan. They’re friends of yours?’
‘No. I’m a friend of a girl called Seale who is staying with them.’
‘I met Seale.’ Shelley turned to Gale. ‘She’s that gorgeous lady you asked about at the Firemen’s Ball, the one in the earrings and the dress off one shoulder?’
‘Chanel Number Five. I remember.’
‘She’d need that,’ Tye said. ‘She’s the hired hand.’
Shelley rounded on him. ‘You didn’t see her at the ball. You stayed in The Covered Wagon that night. All the men watched her like their eyes were on strings.’
‘I saw her once,’ Tye said evenly. ‘And that was in The Wagon. She came in the bar one noon and she was covered in mud and she stank.’
Miss Pink smiled, reflecting that, to judge from the reactions of these people, Seale hadn’t changed.
‘How did you meet her?’ Shelley asked.
‘In Wales. I attended one of her lectures.’
‘What kind of lecture?’
‘She’s a climber and she showed slides.’
‘I’ll bet she was fantastic.’
‘You could put it that way. She’s a poor speaker but the slides were sensational. She held her audience in the palm of her hand.’ She sneaked a look at Tye and saw that a glower had replaced his air of studied boredom. He inhaled sharply. She wondered if there were anything behind the macho façade; if there were not, he was the wrong person to be leading a party through a wilderness area.
‘What’s her background?’ Gale asked, recalling her to the subject of the conversation.
‘Her immediate background is mountains and climbing, but you meant family? Mountaineers aren’t all that curious about each other. I have an impression of two families; her father is in America, her mother in France and married to a politician—a second marriage, of course.’
‘Her stepfather is a count.’ Gale turned to Shelley. ‘Your mother told me.’
‘Paris would explain that dress at the Firemen’s Ball.’
‘Oh, God!’ Tye slumped expressively. ‘Do you talk about the last Firemen’s Ball until the next one? Well, I guess if the population of your town is thirty-seven, the Firemen’s Ball is the event of the year.’
‘It’s sixty-seven,’ Shelley said.
‘With more potential for violence than New York and Chicago put together.’ Gale sounded as if she were quoting. Everyone looked at Miss Pink expectantly.
‘Violence,’ she repeated. ‘In a town of sixty-seven people? In Montana?’
She had picked up her cue. They turned to Tye who was suddenly eager. ‘The West is like the Third World,’ he told her, delighted with her attention. ‘People are primitive here, with only a layer of civilization. Rich peasants. You know what that means?’ She shook her head. ‘So you got this wildness,’ he went on, and looked out beyond the firelight, frowning: ‘—untamed, savage … Life’s cheap in the West. The rights of man got an odd twist this side of the Missouri. A man’s got a right to kill another if he gets in the way, providing the killer’s got the power of course. He always has power—because he’s got a gun, right? And money. Don’t forget the money.’ He paused and waited.
‘Money does mean power to some people,’ Miss Pink murmured.
‘And the sheriff’s one of them,’ he told her.
Shelley looked uncomfortable. Gale and Bullard stared into the fire. ‘He’s researching a story,’ Shelley explained. ‘He’s a writer.’
‘A journalist,’ Tye corrected, but not unpleasantly. ‘I’m doing a story for the New York Times.’
Miss Pink raised an eyebrow. ‘Indeed. What is its theme?’
‘Bribery, corruption, you name it.’ Tye was casual. ‘I’m a crime reporter,’ he added, as an afterthought.
‘On the New York Times! You must have a good story for them to send you here.’
He said coldly: ‘I wasn’t sent. I’m a free-lance. I get the story and sell it to the highest bidder. That way you command a higher price than being on the staff and commissioned to cover a murder.’
‘Murder? There’s been a murder in Prosper?’
He misinterpreted her tone. ‘You don’t have to worry. There’s been no murder—yet. But with what we’ve uncovered—’
‘Irving!’ Shelley was firm, warning. ‘You haven’t uncovered anything—’
‘Oh, come on! With that animal tracked all the way from Yellowstone, and the signal giving out soon as it came to the Silvertips? They knew it crossed the pass. It had to be killed on Cougar Creek, and you know it.’
‘Radios fail anytime. They don’t last forever.’
‘It had just been instrumented! This is a shoot and shovel-up area, that’s for sure.’
There was a tense silence broken by Miss Pink: ‘What kind of animal was this?’
‘Bear,’ Tye said. ‘In these parts scientists put collars on nuisance bears. Those are the ones that are going into campgrounds and feeding on garbage, demolishing tents to get at campers’ food, that kind of thing. They’re re-located to remote areas and kept track of by radio. The bear’s got a transmitter on a plastic collar round his neck.’
‘How do they get the collar on?’ Miss Pink was fascinated.
‘The bears are tranquillized. They’re shot with darts; you’ve seen it on T.V. So there they were, tracking this bear, and it crossed the divide—probably came right past here, following Wolverine Creek—and he crossed the pass and went down Cougar, and then they lost it. Radio stopped transmitting. That bear was shot—and the reason its body was never found, it was buried. And no one talks. It’s happening all the time.’
‘Why shoot a bear?’ Miss Pink asked.
‘Because these people shoot anything. Anything that moves.’
‘Bears kill cows,’ Gale supplied. ‘It’s legal to shoot them if they’re raiding stock.’
‘It’s illegal,’ Tye said coldly. ‘Grizzlies are an endangered species. They’re fully protected, like the bald eagle.’
‘Grizzlies!’ exclaimed Miss Pink on a rising note. ‘I thought you were talking about black bears: the little ones. There are grizzlies here?’
‘No cause for alarm, ma’am.’ Bullard was suddenly gallant. ‘The bear Irving’s talking about was years ago. There aren’t any bears around now or we’d all be wearing bells.’
‘Bells?’
‘In bear country you wear bells on your pack frame to tell them you’re coming. Worst thing you can do with a grizzly is surprise it. When it hears the bells it moves away.’ He grinned. ‘At least, that’s what they say down in Prosper. Me, I’ve never seen a grizzly and I don’t want to. Take it from me, I wouldn’t be here if there were grizzlies about. Nor would Gale.’
Gale looked doubtful. ‘If grizzlies can come wandering into these mountains once, what’s to stop them coming again? And they don’t attack in the daytime; they come at night.’ She shivered and edged closer to Bullard who put his arm round her shoulders.
‘There are no bears in the Silvertips,’ he said comfortably. ‘And there’s no record of any bear attacking without a good reason.’
Gale drew back and faced him. ‘And what reason did those bears have up in Glacier who took two girls in the same night and dragged them out of their sleeping bags and ate them?’ Her voice rose.
Shelley said soothingly:
‘That was Glacier: hundreds of miles away, and a long long time ago.’
‘It’s time for another one,’ Gale said.
‘What happened?’ Miss Pink asked weakly.
It was Tye who answered her. ‘One girl was sleeping close to a garbage dump where bears fed every night, were fed deliberately. It was a mountain cabin in a national park, see, and tourists came there specially to see the grizzlies. They were the main attraction. So this girl was sleeping right on the trail the bears used and—one took her. The other girl was camped by a lake where fishermen gutted their trout and left the entrails lying there. She had a dog with her too. Grizzlies love fish guts, and dogs send them wild. Those two attacks happened the same night. Miles apart and two different bears. No one’s ever been able to explain it.’
‘How big are grizzlies?’ Miss Pink asked.
‘A thousand pounds. Around there.’
‘That’s a big bear,’ Shelley said. ‘Around seven, eight hundred pounds is more like it.’ Miss Pink was silent. Shelley went on kindly: ‘You really don’t have to worry. I’ve been in Prosper for two weeks and there are no bears in the Silvertips, I promise you. My stepfather’s a rancher. He’d know.’
‘Shoot, shovel and shut up,’ Tye said meaningly. ‘They don’t talk.’
‘He’s trying to put a scare into you,’ Shelley assured Miss Pink. ‘No bear, no story, see?’
‘I’m not sure that I have this straight,’ Miss Pink confessed. ‘The bear is an endangered species and people are killing the animals? What’s the penalty?’
‘You’re allowed to kill them in season.’ Shelley was concerned to get the record straight. ‘But only twenty-five.’
‘And you can reckon at least four times as many are destroyed illegally,’ Tye said. ‘The penalty’s peanuts.’
‘Not any longer,’ Bullard put in. ‘Not with ten thousand dollars reward and the chance of your licence being revoked.’
‘This sounds like big business.’ Miss Pink’s tone was encouraging. This was something she could understand, and she welcomed the diversion.
‘That’s the trouble,’ Shelley said darkly. ‘There’s so much illegal killing going on—not here of course but around places like Glacier and Yellowstone, that the Audubon Society is offering ten thousand dollars for information to make an arrest—’
‘To secure a conviction,’ Tye corrected.
‘—And there’s talk of ranchers getting their licences revoked if they’ve killed bears. That’s the licence to graze cattle. Stockmen have a home ranch, you see, that they use in winter and where they grow their hay, but in summer they put the cattle in the mountains on land rented from the Forest Service or the B.L.M. That’s the Bureau of Land Management,’ she added, for the benefit of the foreigner. ‘If you had no summer grazing you couldn’t keep cattle and you’d have to go out of business.’
Miss Pink looked at Tye. ‘And you’re proposing to write a story on this?’
He smiled pleasantly. ‘Right. It’s called investigative reporting. It’s a scoop. So far as I know, this kind of thing’s never been exposed ’til now. It’s got everything: the threat of extinction to a legendary animal; it’s got savagery and corruption and a conspiracy of silence—and all this set in the West. Isn’t that fantastic?’
‘It could be dangerous,’ Miss Pink said.
He shrugged. ‘That’s what a crime reporter’s all about. I thrive on it. In any case,’ he added casually, ‘I’m armed.’
Miss Pink’s jaw dropped. ‘Armed?’
He patted his hip. ‘Sure. I’m always armed. I’d feel naked without my Magnum.’
Chapter 2
‘Why does Irving carry a gun? Is he afraid of people or of animals?’
‘Nothing could frighten Irving,’ Shelley said. ‘You’ll get used to people carrying guns in the West. It’s legal providing they’re not concealed.’ She grinned. ‘But a lot of them are. Concealed, I mean. In glove compartments. Women specially keep them in glove compartments.’
‘Why?’
Shelley looked surprised. ‘Would you carry a gun on your hip? I mean, it looks neat on a man …’
Miss Pink said: ‘I meant: why carry guns at all?’
Shelley hesitated. ‘Do you mind if I tell you something?’
‘You’re going to say that if I ask that question in Prosper I shall be classed with the anti-gun lobby. Which is why I asked you. I thought you might—fill me in.’
Shelley looked stubborn. ‘All right. People carry guns against guys pretending to be innocent hitch-hikers, muggers, all that. The world is a very violent place.’ She was reproving.
Miss Pink agreed, sighed inwardly, and transferred her attention to her surroundings. It was a beautiful morning after a heavy frost. She had been snug in her Himalayan sleeping bag and double-skin tent but it had been a hard chore to dress and emerge into the bitter morning. The glade faced west and the trees behind it would shield the sun until the day was well advanced. The other tents were still tightly closed when, dressed for survival, she went down to the lake to wash. Puddles on the track were skinned with ice and she guessed the night temperature must have been in the low twenties.
Two hours later she strolled with Shelley along a path beside a blue lake that sparkled in the light, and she was comfortably warm. The sky was cloudless, like one of the halcyon autumn days that come far too seldom in British hills.
The party had not kept together. Bullard and Gale were some fifty yards in the rear, Tye was prancing ahead. In daylight and stripped to T-shirt and jeans, he was a powerful fellow who, with a load heavier than Bullard’s, carried it without a sign of effort. On the contrary, he often left the trail to bound lightly up a slope and stand outlined against the sky like a stallion smelling the wind. The sun flattered his profile but in that strong light it was noticeable that he was growing a little thick about the waist. Nearer forty than thirty, Miss Pink thought sourly, fascinated by the gun on his hip.
The light was kinder to the women. Gale had stuck a feather in her plaited headband and, despite her long blonde hair, looked like a screen idol playing a squaw. And Shelley, in an embroidered shirt and tight jeans, was no longer dumpy, merely well-built. She was wearing a flat tweed cap which suited her gamine face to perfection.
Miss Pink might still deplore the ubiquitous running shoes but she took comfort in the knowledge that these people would be crossing the treeless pass in the middle of the day. By nightfall they would be well down in the timber on the northern slope. In this country timber meant a fire and fire meant survival.
The land rose like a giant’s staircase: sharp risers followed by scooped treads of rock and meadow where blue tarns were rippled by wanton drafts of air. Ahead on their left a mountain revealed itself as they climbed and Miss Pink’s eyes lingered on its southern ridge, bare of snow and surely innocuous.
‘Irving is set on climbing a mountain.’ Shelley had followed her gaze.
‘He won’t.’ Miss Pink was cool.
‘Why not?’
‘There’s snow on the peaks above the pass and he has no axe. He would slide on hard snow. If it’s soft it will be too exhausting for him to make any progress.’
‘Why should he have an axe?’
‘To cut steps. To brake if he falls.’
‘Oh, you mean an ice pick. Irving won’t fall. He’s an expert climber.’
‘Yes,’ Miss Pink said dully, then pulled herself together. ‘I would like to read some of his work. Where has he been published?’
‘He sent stuff to the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco papers. He did a story about people growing marijuana in the Sierra forests—he was nearly killed getting the background for that. And he did another on the Coastguard and drugs coming in to L.A. by sea. Then there was a story about a smuggling ring bringing Mexicans across the border. Illegal immigrants. That’s big business in California, run by the Mafia.’
‘He writes well?’
‘I’ve not read his stuff. All his
clippings are in San Francisco, in his apartment.’ Miss Pink was silent. Shelley went on quickly: ‘I haven’t known him long. He came to Chicago to do a story for the Tribune and that’s where we met. I was—I wasn’t working at the time—trying to get my act together, thinking I’d like to come home, visit with Mom for a while, and I did that—eventually. Irving came along. He thought a story on bears would be interesting. Gale came because she’d given up her apartment and she had nowhere to live until after the wedding. Gale’s my best friend and she and Joe are getting married soon.’
‘She looks a little elegant for the wilderness.’
‘You should see her on skis. And we used to go hiking in Michigan, sailing on the lake. Joe has a boat. We may look like townies but we’re not. You’re staring at Warrior Peak again. I believe you want to climb it.’
‘I may go a little way up that ridge for the view. Perhaps I shall see you in Prosper?’
‘You won’t be able to avoid us. There’s nothing at Prosper between seasons. There’s a bar and a gas station and a lot of empty cabins. The tourists have gone and the hunters won’t come until elk season starts at the end of October. So everywhere’s closed. And that population of sixty-seven: it’s mostly scattered among the ranches. Call me tomorrow evening. We’ll be camping on Cougar Creek tonight but we’ll be coming out tomorrow. The number’s in the book—under Otis Lenhart at the Lazy S.’
Had there been a trace of hardness when Shelley pronounced her stepfather’s name? Miss Pink gave it a moment’s thought and then dismissed it as, waving to the following pair, she turned aside and started up a grassy depression towards the south ridge of Warrior Peak.
Broadly speaking it was a dull mountain but strange and exciting in its intimate detail. She did not stop to rest but paused occasionally to study a map of green lichen on a rock, to inspect a hole, newly excavated, to stoop and peer into a slit at the back of a low overhang. This place must be alive with animals in the brief summer, and drifted with flowers. The only wildlife abroad this morning was a pair of ravens, although once she heard a sound that was so familiar that in this alien environment she could not identify it. She raised her binoculars, saw brown forms move on grey scree and realized that the Rockies, like the Alps, had their colonies of marmots.