“Well,” says the Big Man, mollified a bit by my gushing, “I guess the Ayatollah isn’t watching, is he?” That got us all laughing and Jack started asking him about the revolution of the imams and what was going to happen in that sorry country while I poured us all a good-sized dollop of Scotch and then Josey came in with some gooseliver canapes and we stoked up the fire while Gates, the valet, served us more drinks and before you knew it, everybody was happy and looking forward to tomorrow and the Big Sheep Hunt with the Little Gun.
After dinner—it was a very nice salmon mousse with dill sauce, both the fish and the herbs home grown: Josey was a damn fine cook—Jack went down to the river to check the moorings on the boats and the plane. I went with him.
“Listen,” I said, “what are you trying to do? Don’t lean on that guy so hard. You’ll queer this whole deal.”
“What deal?”
“I mean the hunt. Jep’s trying to get this guy to invest in the company. He needs more development money and Mummad-Afi’s got millions just lying around collecting bank interest. He figures the gun-nut approach is the way to reach him.”
“Well, fuck Jep’s deal. I don’t like this small-caliber crap. You waste game that way, and also people can get hurt. There was a fellow from Vegas down on Admiralty a few years back hunting browns with a .222 and he hit one all right but then they had to go in after it. It was Buddy Prewitt’s party and the bear grabbed Buddy and ate his head for an hors d’oeuvre. If Mummad-Afi wanted to go for bear with that pea shooter of his, I wouldn’t take him. As it is, I don’t like the notion of going for billies that much either.”
“Well, he’s got to be good if he’s collected all he says he has with it.”
“His tracker told Charlie that he took two of those Asian sheep from a helicopter, and he shot the desert bighorn down in Mexico from a Land Rover.”
“But he hit ’em.”
“It’s not the same thing. I’m going to keep a close eye on him and back him with the ’06 on anything tricky.”
Jack tightened up the lines on the jetboat and we walked back up the dock. Through the windows of the big cabin we could see one of the houris walking back and forth. The light was on in the bedroom. I guess it was the other girl’s turn and this one didn’t want to watch.
“That’s another thing,” Jack says. “I don’t like taking these twists up there with us either. Usually the guys you send me bring women who know the mountains and the woods, or at least can handle it without a lot of pussy stuff. These two look like the farthest they ever walked was to the bidet.”
“I’ll take care of them, and Gates will be along to help.”
“How do you figure that Gates? He’s a close-mouthed bastard, looks tough. Did you notice at dinner? He’s carrying.”
“Probably an ex-merc. There’s hundreds of them working for the Arabs these days now that Africa’s lost its attraction.”
Jack sat on an oil drum at the foot of the dock and I lit a cigar. The moon was just easing up, low over the glacier, and the light was that deep-sea blue it gets, with silver highlights off the boulders and the ice, and the moraines weaving in and out in the glimmer like black snakes.
“We’ve come some distance, pally, haven’t we?” I told him.
“A ways, yeah,” he said, nodding. “I’ll be sixty next month. An old fart. Kind of hard to believe.”
“I just pretend it isn’t happening,” I told him. “But try to tell that to your pecker.”
We laughed and he went back into the lodge. The houri was still walking back and forth in front of the window as I passed on my way to my own cabin. I wondered what would happen if I whistled her out to look at the moon.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
THE WEATHER held fair under a high Arctic sky, the blue dome broken only by a scattering of those pancake-shaped lenticular clouds that look like melting UFOs. The ride to the first camp was a short one, a mere fifteen miles, because Jack believed in easing his clients into the rigors of the hunt and seeing how they responded along the way. Even at that my crotch, after the first five miles, felt like it had split halfway to my bellybutton. Mummad-Afi was a seasoned horseman, though, sitting the saddle as light as a lancer with a rifle tucked in the boot under his right leg and a heavy handgun on his hip. He was dressed in dark brown whipcord and knee-high riding boots with a flat-brimmed black vaquero’s hat on his head, and you could have taken him for a grandee the way he rode. Surprisingly, the houris too were good riders, though they complained to one another anyway in high nasal voices, just to keep their tongues in shape, I figured. As we climbed away from the river, you could see the glacier sprawling below, and beyond it the ragged rise of the Dead Mounties.
Gates had been hanging back with the Pathan and Charlie Blue who were leading the four pack horses, but now he trotted up and reined into step with me. He sat his horse heavily but with no concern, not a practiced rider but reasonably at home with it.
“How did the range get its name, Mister Healey?”
“Back during the war,” I told him. “There was a party of Japanese Imperial Marines on the prowl in here, interdicting the Alaska Highway where it came up through the Yukon and veered west into Alaska. They were running raids on the work camps, blowing culverts and such. The Canucks sent a patrol of Mounties in to ferret them out but the Japs laid an ambush, killed the lot.”
“Fascinating,” says Gates, his eyes glittering. He had a big beefy face starred with old acne scars and square, hard-looking hands with nicks on his knuckles. Some valet. “What happened to the Japanese?”
“Probably died off finally, with the weather and all. They never found them. Charlie Blue, the old Indian back there, says he met them a few times during his travels in the mountains, but you can’t believe what he says. Half the time he lives in his head, back in the tribal past. At any rate, they haven’t made trouble for anyone since the mid-1950s, when they apparently scragged a party of molybdenum prospectors who were working the country.”
“Maybe we’ll run across them,” he says with more avidity than I felt.
“You’re more than just a gentleman’s gentleman, aren’t you, Gates? I get the feeling you’ve been around.”
“Here and there,” he says. “Malaya. The Congo. Rhodesia and Namibia. In those days you took what you could get. There wasn’t much money in it. None of those governments could pay the way the Arabs and the Persians can. We did it more for love than anything else.”
“I don’t care much for the rough stuff anymore,” I said. “Back when I was a young punk I helled around some, but now I’m too slow. Old Mike, though, he looks like a pretty tough cookie.”
“He’s very good, yes. Especially with the rifle. But his hands have hardened up on him. He can’t do this anymore.”
Gates made a flicking motion with his right hand, toward the pommel of his saddle, and sudden as a conjurer he had a squat blue revolver in it. Pointed dead on my Adam’s apple. He spun it in a blue blur and it was gone.
“Took care of gentlemen, did you?”
“Yes,” he said with a sudden, brilliant smile. “Rewarding work that, taking care of gentlemen.”
We stopped for lunch in a high saddle where a spring bubbled out of the rocks and a flat boulder served us as a table. Josey had packed a lunch of cold partridge, smoked salmon and potato salad. A cooler of beer and white wine accompanied these goodies, though the two houris preferred a puff on their hookah followed by iced tea. The ganja loosened them up some and they actually chatted with us heathen feringis, commenting for the first time on the scenery.
“Is a bleak black cawntry this,” said Victoria de los Pueblos. “Cold. Brrr.”
“This is a nice warm day, lady,” said Strang, the other wrangler. “You put a couple clouds over that sun and you’ll feel what it can be like, even in midsummer. I’ve seen it snow in July here.”
“Like Dagestan and the Pamir,” said Svetlana Liberté. “I thought I had cut myself loose from all that. But Mickey,
he like the wild places.”
“Why didn’t you two stay back at the lodge?” Strang asked. “You’d have been a lot more comfortable there.”
“Mickey need us,” says Victoria. “Only we two can read his fortune for him. One alone cannot do it. Not with Mickey.”
Strang cast an admiring look at the Persian. He shook his head.
“Waaaal,” he drawled in his best Texican accent, “Ah shore wouldn’t mind a little look-see under the skirts of the future. Anytime you two gypsy ladies want to moonlight a bit, jest keep me in mind.” He hitched at his crotch and winked broadly. The ladies giggled. Mummad-Afi snapped something in a gobbledygook lingo and they sobered up quick, gathered their gear together and moved over to a rock near where the horses were picketed.
“What are those small creatures out there in the rocks, Jack?” asked Mummad. “Marmots?”
“Yep.”
“I would like to see if the sights on the .17 are still in alignment. Would it disturb our hunting plans if I took a few shots?”
“We’re far enough away from where we’ll be hunting that it won’t be a problem,” Jack says. Mummad-Afi snapped his fingers and Gates brought the rifle from the saddle boot. It was a Weatherby Mark V, custom modified for the .17 Magnum round, with a stock in Circassian walnut and the receiver and trigger guard chased in gold. The fore end was knurled, Mannlicher fashion, and Mike pointed out the carving to us with pride: a flattened tiger, about to spring, the knurl its broad, evil-eyed head. The tail sinuated down and wound tensely around the floor plate. You almost expected to see it twitch. The rifle had a set trigger plated in gold, as was the hair trigger forward of it.
“A beautiful weapon,” says Jack.
“It shoots even more beautifully,” Mummad replied. He wound the sling tightly on his forearm and took an elbow rest on his knees. The rifle cracked and three hundred yards down the slope a marmot exploded in gouts of red meat. The others dove for their holes but Mummad worked the bolt swiftly and nailed another as it was about to disappear. That shot was even longer. He could shoot all right.
“Would you like to take a poke?” he says to Jack, proffering the rifle.
“No. I kind of like those little guys, and anyway I don’t think they’ll be showing their heads for a bit.”
Mummad shrugged and looked back down the slope. A pair of ravens, attracted by the gunfire, appeared in the distance and swept rapidly in when they spotted the marmot bodies. With a lightning movement, Mummad raised the rifle to his shoulder and blasted a raven out of the air. As it fell limp and twisting in a cloud of feathers, he worked the bolt and sighted in on the second. Jack sprang forward and knocked the rifle barrel upward.
“Dammit, no!” he said hoarsely. “You don’t shoot ravens.”
Mummad looked around, his hawk’s eyes black with rage. His jaw tightened as he stood up.
“Never lay hands on my weapon,” he said in a kind of hiss. Then he regained control of himself and relaxed his shoulders. He smiled icily. “What is that? Why not shoot ravens? They are carrion eaters, filthy birds, robbers of nests and eaters of the young.”
“We don’t shoot them,” Jack said. “In this country they’re gods. Even a starving man would think long and hard before he’d kill a raven, and if he did, it would go down hard.”
Mummad laughed. “Gods,” he said. “Heathen nonsense, I say, though if you feel strongly about it of course I shall shoot no more.”
When Jack had slapped at the rifle, I saw Gates’s hand go to his waistband. So that was where he carried the piece, forward on the left side. A good item to remember.
Charlie Blue was upset. He stood there, wrinkled and disheveled as always, but with a dreadful woebegone look on his flat face. He kept shaking his head from side to side and muttering under his breath. The Pathan, whose name was Sayed, asked him something in their muckaluck lingo and Charlie pointed to the sky. There were tears in his old eyes. The Pathan nodded, as if in agreement. The old gods live, all right, at least back in the drear mountains wherever they stand.
We got to camp before dark. Dude rode out to meet us with a thermos of hot coffee, a flask of brandy and bad news.
“There were four nice rams up in the col where we nailed that big one two years ago,” he told Jack. “Good rams, curl and a half and then some. All by themselves. Hadn’t joined up with the ewes yet. That was day before yesterday and I kept close watch on them till dark. This morning when I went back up there they had split. I followed their sign across the col and down the far side into that little valley where the waterfall comes in from the east, and they were feeding along slow and easy-like. Then something spooked them and they made tracks to the north.”
“What did you see?”
“I thought maybe it was griz. The horses were acting funny that night. But I couldn’t find any sign.”
“Men?” (Gates had come up to listen and now his eyes lit up again the way they had when I told him about the Japs.)
“No smoke. No horseshit that I could spot. No tracks. But they could have been afoot. That’s all hard rock down there. You know the place. Maybe Charlie could see something that I missed.”
“No. We’ll have a look in the morning, but they probably just spooked for the hell of it. The rut’s coming on fast now and they get twitchy.”
“I was going to head back down to the lodge in the morning with Strang and two of the ponies,” Dude said after a bit. “Maybe we’d better stay. With those sheep gone you may have to work up to number two in a couple of days. And you could use the extra eyes.”
“We’ll see in the morning.”
I walked over to where Charlie and the Pathan were standing beside their horses. Charlie looked sadder than ever. I put my arm around him and tried not to smell the stink of him: stale grease and woodsmoke and an old man’s coppery sweat.
“What’s the matter, Shaman?” I asked him. “You still fretting about Raven?”
“You damn right, Sammy. That was a dumb move.” He shook his wattles. “And now the sheep are gone. Let’s hope that’s the worst of it. Something bad comes of this, you damn right it does. Even this old Indian here,” and he pointed to the Pathan, “feels it coming. Look out there.” His eyes went west. A few skinny tendrils of cirrus were weaving up over the horizon, blood red in the last light. “Weather on the way. Snow. You smell it?”
“All I can smell is you, Charlie.”
“You’re no goddam lilac bush yourself, Sammy.”
“Too much horseback,” I said. “It pounds all the farts out my pores.”
But he was right. There was weather on the way, snow probably at this time of year. But that would work as much in our favor, provided it wasn’t a blizzard, as it would against us. Though it would make the sheep, with their white hides, harder to spot against the hills we’d be glassing, it would show us which way they were moving when we found their trail.
We headed down into camp—a low log cabin set in against the cliffs, its roof built of slate from the rockfalls, a thin blue ribbon of smoke coiling up from the stovepipe and then flattening when it hit the cold air that was moving in ahead of the front from the west.
Long after midnight, as is the aging man’s prerogative, I slipped out the door of the cabin to take a pee. Norman Ormandy says that there’s nothing sadder than an old fag who can’t get it up anymore. I say there’s nothing sadder than a sixty-year-old former bush pilot turned pimp and oil promoter who lusts for young ladies and yet can only get a hard-on thanks to his weakened kidneys. A piss hard-on, that’s what we call it. The kind you fuck your hand with. Can’t let it go to waste, you know. Not a rarity like that.
And I was the guy who fought it out on the dock, with that strange light turning everything to hard-edged death, the moss-grown logs, the splinters crackling underfoot, those faces glaring bone-white, hollow-eyed, mouths full of dark vapors going silver in the glare, like salmon rolling when you snag them in the riffles—illegally, of course—or the inside of a bear’s
mouth when he comes for you through the prickles and a ray of weak sunlight stabs him in the tonsils, and all the while—God, how great that night was!—I’m moving and shifting and up on my toes, not even feeling the bones break in my hand on Gainey’s ugly pan, no, not quite: feeling them crack and feeling the first deadened sting of it up to my shoulder but then the pain itself lighting a spark in my eyes that feeds like a firetongue on his black blood, races, roars, not caring now about the Colt in the crab pot, knowing I can take this fat cuckold and prove to these apes I’m king of the cannery town—what a crown, what a realm!—but if I don’t kill his raggedy ass I may as well haul tail back to Illinois and peddle shoes again: no: never that no more no more: stunted towns and stinking culverts and the big thrill of the year when they plug Tuohy coming down the El staircase, weak old bandit: but then when I’ve suckered Gainey the way I want him, young as I was then, tough, knowing how to use the weight, and I have him set up, confident with his slow swing to my ribs that he can take me out with one punch, and I open him up like a can of peaches and set and deliver: the reward of that well-thrown fist gathering interest in a bank long gone bust: and then he merely staggers. Well. That was the frigging end of me all right.
And now.
An old man pissing in the snow.
Yes, as Charlie predicted, it was snowing now, slow flakes, no wind behind them, a good tracking snow. In the morning, they would go out after sheep and I would lie like a goat waiting to try my shot at the houris. All Jep wanted was for the hunt to go smoothly. Nothing I could add to that aspect that I hadn’t already. Jack was working good, and Dude was going to stay.
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