The Veteran

by Frederick Forsyth

  At half past four the white mantle on the mountain broke away and swept down to the plain, a quietly seething tidal wave that moved like a wall over the rock, tumbled into the narrow creek and filled it to the brim. Half a mile into the Silver Run it finally stopped. The skies began to clear.

  Two hours later Sheriff Paul Lewis stood at the edge of the forest and looked to the south. The mountains were white. The east was pink with the promise of a bright new day and the sky was indigo, turning duck-egg blue. He had kept his radio next to his body all night for warmth and it had worked.

  ‘Jerry,’ he called, ‘we need you down here, with the Jetranger, and fast. We’ve had a blizzard and things look bad . . . No, we’re back at the edge of the forest, where you evacuated the mercenary yesterday. You’ll find us all there.’

  The four-seater came whirling out of the rising sun and settled on the cold but snow-free rock. Lewis put two deputies into the rear and climbed up beside his pilot.

  ‘Go back to the mountain.’

  ‘What about the sharpshooter?’

  ‘I don’t think anyone’s going to be shooting right now. They’ll be lucky if they are alive.’

  The helicopter retraced the line the posse had ridden the previous day. Lake Fork Creek was marked only by the tops of some pine and larch. Of the five men inside there was no sign. They flew on towards the mountain. The sheriff was looking for the spot where he had seen the pinprick of a campfire in the sky. The pilot was nervous, staying wide and high; no hovering at 600 feet.

  Lewis saw it first. The inky black mark on the face of the mountain, the mouth of a cave, and in front of it a snow-dusted shelf of rock wide enough to take the Jetranger.

  ‘Take her down, Jerry.’

  The pilot came in carefully, scanning for movement among the rocks, a man taking aim, the flash of a gun using out-of-date black powder. Nothing moved. The helo settled on the shelf, blades turning fast, ready for a getaway.

  Sheriff Lewis jumped from the door, handgun at the ready. The deputies clambered out with rifles, dropping to the ground to cover the cave mouth. Nothing moved. Lewis called out.

  ‘Come on out. Hands high. No harm will come to you.’

  There was no reply. Nothing stirred. He ran a zigzag course to the side of the cave mouth. Then he peered round.

  There was a bundle on the floor and nothing more. Still cautious, he moved in to investigate. Whatever it had once been, probably an animal skin of some kind, it was rotted by age, the fur gone, strands of hide holding it together. He lifted the mouldy skin away.

  She lay underneath in her white silk wedding dress, a cascade of frosted black hair about her shoulders, as if asleep in her bridal bed. But when he reached to touch, she was cold as marble.

  Holstering his gun and mindless of any crouching gunman, the peace officer scooped her up and ran outside.

  ‘Get those sheepskins off and wrap her,’ he shouted to his men. ‘Get her into the back and keep her warm with your own bodies.’

  The deputies tore off their warm coats and shrouded the body of the girl. One climbed into the rear seats with the young woman in his arms and began to chafe her hands and feet. The sheriff pushed the other man into the spare front seat and shouted at Jerry: ‘Get her to the clinic at Red Lodge. Fast. Warn them you’re coming with a near-death hypothermia. Keep the cabin system at maximum all the way. There may be a tiny chance. Then come back for me.’

  He watched the Jetranger hammer away across the plateaus of rock and the huge spread of forest that led out of the wilderness. Then he explored the cave and the shelf in front of it. When he was done he found a rock, sat and stared north at the almost unbelievable view.

  In the clinic at Red Lodge a doctor and a nurse began to work on the girl, stripping away the chilled wedding dress, chafing hands and feet, arms, legs and ribcage. Her surface temperature was below frostbite level and her core temperature into the danger zone.

  After twenty minutes the doctor caught a faint beat deep inside, a young heart fighting to live. Twice the beat stopped; twice he pumped the ribcage till it came back again. The body core temperature began to rise.

  Once she stopped breathing and the doctor forced his own breath into her to make the lungs resume. The temperature in the room was at sauna level and the electric blanket wrapping her lower limbs was at maximum.

  After an hour an eyelid trembled and the blue colour began to ebb from the lips. The nurse checked the core temperature: it was above danger level and rising. The heartbeat steadied and strengthened.

  In half an hour Whispering Wind opened her large dark eyes and her lips whispered, ‘Ben?’

  The doctor offered a short prayer of thanks to old Hippocrates and all the others who had come before him.

  ‘It’s Luke, but never mind. I thought we might have lost you there, kid.’

  On his stone the sheriff watched the Jetranger returning for him. He could see it miles away in the still air and hear the angry snarl of its rotors clawing at the atmosphere. It was so peaceful on the mountain. When Jerry touched down Sheriff Lewis beckoned to the single deputy in the front seat.

  ‘Break out two blankets and come over here,’ he shouted when the rotor blades had slowed to idling speed. When the deputy joined him he pointed and said, ‘Bring him too.’

  The young man wrinkled his nose.

  ‘Aw, Sheriff . . .’

  ‘Just do it. He was a man once. He deserves a Christian burial.’

  The skeleton of the horse was on its side. Every scrap of skin, flesh, muscle and sinew had long been picked clean. The hair of tail and mane had gone, probably for nesting material. But the teeth, ground down by the tough forage of the plains, were still in the jaw. The bridle was almost dust, but the steel bit glittered between the teeth.

  The brown hoofs were intact and on them the four shoes nailed in place long ago by some cavalry farrier.

  The skeleton of the man was a few yards away, on his back, as if he had died in his sleep. Of his clothes there was almost nothing left, scraps of rotten buckskin clinging to the ribs. Spreading one blanket, the deputy began to place the bones upon it, every last one. The sheriff returned to those things the rider had once possessed.

  Wind and weather over countless seasons had reduced the saddle and girth to a pile of rotten leather, and also the saddlebags. But among the mess gleamed the cases of a handful of brass cartridges. Sheriff Lewis took them.

  There was a bowie knife, brown with rust, in the remains of a beaded scabbard which crumbled at the touch. What had once been the sheepskin sheath of a frontier rifle had been torn away by pecking birds, but the firearm lay in the frost, clogged with the rust of years, but still a rifle.

  What perplexed him were the two arrows in their quiver, the stave of osage cherry, tapered at both ends and notched to take the string, and the axe. All appeared to be almost new. There was a belt buckle and a length of tough old leather that had survived the elements still attached to it.

  The sheriff took them all, wrapped them in the second blanket, gave a last look round to see there was nothing left, and climbed aboard. The deputy was in the back with the other bundle.

  For the last time the Jetranger lifted away into the sky, back over the two plateaus and on to the green mass of the National Forest under the morning sun.

  Sheriff Lewis looked down at Lake Fork, choked in snow. There would be an expedition to bring back the cadavers but he knew no-one had survived. He stared down at the rock and the trees and wondered about the young man whom he had pursued across this unforgiving land.

  From 5,000 feet he could look down to Rock Creek on his right and see that the traffic was flowing again on the interstate, the fallen pine and the wreckage cleared. They passed over Red Lodge and Jerry checked with the deputy who had remained there. He reported the girl was in intensive care but her heart still beat.

  Four miles north of Bridger as they followed the highway home, he could see a hundred acres of fire-blackened prairie, and twe
nty miles further he looked down at the tonsured lawns and prize longhorns of the Bar-T Ranch.

  The helicopter crossed the Yellowstone and the highway west to Bozeman, dipped and began to lose height. And so they came back to Billings Field.

  ‘“Man that is born of woman hath but a little time to live.”’

  It was late February and bitter cold in the small cemetery at Red Lodge. In the far corner was a fresh-dug grave and above it, on two crossbars, a simple and cheap pine coffin.

  The priest was muffled against the chill, the two sextons punched their gloved hands as they waited. One mourner stood at the foot of the grave in snow boots and a quilted coat, but bareheaded. A cape of raven hair flowed about her shoulders.

  At the far edge of the graveyard a big man stood under a yew and watched but did not approach. He wore a sheepskin coat against the cold, the insignia of his office pinned to the front.

  It had been a strange winter, mused the man under the tree. The widowed Mrs Braddock, appearing more relieved than bereaved, had emerged from her isolation and taken over the chairmanship of Braddock Beef Inc. She had a hair and facial makeover, wore smart clothes and went to parties.

  She had visited the girl in hospital, liked her and offered her a cottage, rent-free, on the ranch and a job as private secretary. Both had been accepted. By deed of gift she had returned to Mr Pickett the controlling stock of his bank.

  ‘“Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust,”’ intoned the priest. Two snowflakes, drifting on the breeze, settled on the black mane of hair like the blossoms of the wild dog rose.

  The sextons took the cords, kicked out the crossbars and lowered the coffin into the grave. Then they stood back and waited again, eyeing their shovels jammed into the pile of fresh earth.

  In Bozeman the forensic pathologists had taken their time and done what they could. They established the bones must have been those of a man just under six feet tall, almost certainly of great physical strength.

  There were no breaks in the bones, nor any signs of wounds that might have caused death, which was presumed to have been from exposure.

  The dentists had been intrigued by the teeth: straight, white and even, not one cavity. They put the young man in his mid-to-late twenties.

  The scientists had taken over the non-human fragments. Carbon-14 tests had revealed the organic matter, buckskin, leather, fur, to have dated from a period put firmly in the mid-1870s.

  The abiding enigma was the quiver, arrows, bow and axe. The same tests proved these were quite recent. The accepted solution was that a party of Native Americans had visited the cave just recently and left their trophies for the man who had died there long ago.

  The bowie knife was buffed and restored, dated by its bone handle and donated to Professor Ingles, who had hung it in his office. The sheriff had claimed the old rifle. It too had been professionally restored and hung on the wall behind his desk. He would take it into retirement with him.

  ‘“In the certain knowledge of the Resurrection and the Life Hereafter. Amen.”’

  Relieved of their waiting, the sextons restored their circulation by shovelling the earth into the grave. The priest had a few words with the sole mourner, patted her on the arm and hurried away to find warmth in his presbytery. She did not move.

  After a single and singularly unrevealing statement from the girl in hospital, the manhunt had petered out. The press had speculated that the man must have ridden off the mountain in the night and vanished into the wilds of Wyoming, leaving her to die in the cave.

  The sextons filled the grave, quickly made a border of mountain rocks round the earth and filled the space with four sacks of tan gravel.

  Then they tipped their fur hats to the girl, took their shovels and left. The big man moved quietly forward until he stood just behind and to one side of her. She made no move. She knew he was there and who he was. He took off his hat and held it by his side.

  ‘We never did find your friend, Miss Pickett,’ he said.

  ‘No.’

  She held a flower in front of her, a single long-stemmed red rose.

  ‘I guess we never will now.’

  ‘No.’

  He took the rose from her fingers, stepped forward, stooped and placed it on the gravel. At the head of the plot was a timber cross, donated by the good people of Red Lodge. A local craftsman had branded some words into the timber with a hot iron before varnishing. They read:

  HERE LIES

  A FRONTIERSMAN

  DIED IN THE MOUNTAINS

  CIRCA 1877

  KNOWN ONLY UNTO GOD

  R.I.P.

  The man straightened up.

  ‘Is there anything I can do? You need a ride home?’

  ‘No. Thank you. I have my car.’

  He replaced his hat, tipped the brim to her.

  ‘Good luck to you, Miss Pickett.’

  He walked away. His car, bearing the livery of the County Sheriff’s Office, was parked outside the cemetery. He raised his eyes. To the south-west the peaks of the Beartooth Range glittered in the sun.

  The girl stayed a while longer. Then she turned and walked towards the gate.

  A slight breeze from the peaks caught her, blowing open the long quilted coat and revealing the four-month bulge of her belly.