by Urban Waite
The rifle sounded again and Will heard the cut of the bullet as it tore through the air and then he saw the puff of the dirt appear on the ground just to the side of the bear. He heard a man curse then he heard the clack of the bolt again and Will looked to the bear who now was smelling the place the bullet had struck, as if this were some new game Will had set up for him to play.
Will turned over again, he could not see the men up on the hill but he could hear them and he knew almost without any doubt that they were firing on the bear and they were trying to kill it. Will looked one last time to his cabin, but the sun had grown lower and the rays that flooded down were blinding.
He sat now, knowing in some way he was not the target and he took the rifle from his shoulder and pushed forward the safety then raised the scope to his eyes. The first shot he took sprayed rock and dirt up over the snout of the bear. And the bear, as if knowing Will had betrayed him, now turned to regard Will where he sat on the lowermost part of the hill. Will ejected the casing then loaded another. There were men talking now as they came down the hill, laughing and calling to each other and now calling to Will, but Will did not hear them, and he raised the rifle again, set the sight on the bear, putting crosshairs right over the ear before pulling the trigger. The bullet, as far as he could tell, buzzed right by the ear and set the bear to running.
Just as the bear came to the far belt of trees at the other edge of the meadow it paused and looked back. Will watched it through the scope. He watched the bear taste the air. He watched the eyes roam and settle on Will and the men that now approached from up on the hill. When the next rifle shot sounded, Will could not tell if the bullet had struck home. He saw only that the bear jumped and then, like it had never been there at all, it was gone, passed away from the visible world into the dark thicket of trees that lined the stream farther on.
Will turned and saw John Seed moving down through the grass, a rifle in his hand with a wood stock and bolt-action lever, the gray smoke that came from the barrel curving up and over his shoulder like some sort of serpent. His men, including Lonny, all followed behind. All of them carrying weapons and all spreading outward as they came on Will and now circled him where he sat in the grass, his own Remington rifle held close in his lap.
“You’re a man who likes to play at dangerous games,” John said as he came up. “I remember how you used to drink. I remember what state you were in when you came and asked us to help you. Are you still that man, Will?”
“No.”
“That’s good to hear, Will. That’s very good to hear. It looked for a moment there like you might have forgotten.”
“How did it look?”
“Like maybe you were trying to make friends with the set of fangs that might kill you one day.”
Will ran his eyes from John over to Lonny. When he looked back at John he asked if they had found the bear in the pit.
“That’s why we came here,” John said. “Lonny suggested it. He said you can track just about anything. That true?”
Will moved his eyes to Lonny again. “Since you all set me up at this place, I’ve hunted nearly everything that walks or crawls on four legs. What is it you’re looking for here?”
“We got us a bit of a situation and we’d like you to solve it. You think you could find someone for us?”
“Someone?”
“A girl has gone missing.”
“I’m not any kind of detective, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“I’m not asking you to be. I’m asking can you track her through these woods and bring her back in for us?”
“You’re asking me to hunt down a human being?”
John smiled. “I’m not really asking.”
II
Once I was lost in the wilderness and as I came to understand the wilderness, I too became wild, and out of this wilderness I was fostered anew, not just as a man, but as an animal, clothed in the blood of my kill, wild in the heart, and with a powerful hunger for all those who would trespass against me and the wilderness I now called my home.
—THE FATHER, EDEN’S GATE
Hope County, Montana
WILL HALF SLID, HALF CLIMBED DOWN ALONG THE SLOPE, following the path of broken branches and flattened leaf matter. The truck was on its side another fifty feet down. He could only see the bottoms of the tires and the metal undercarriage where the drive shaft went straight through from the front of the truck to the back. He carried his pack and wore his hat. He also carried the rifle he used for hunting. It had sat between his legs as he’d come up the mountain, riding shotgun, listening to John tell him which way he’d thought the girl had gone and why.
“You understand we mean to help her?”
“That’s why you want to find her?” Will had asked.
“That’s why. We want to save her. We want to give her a new life, just like the one we gave to you.”
Will looked away out the side of the passenger window. He had his hands resting on the rifle, watching the trees and vegetation blurring past. A deer stood off to the side of the road and he watched it as they passed. He watched it all the way until he couldn’t see it anymore and the road had curved away behind them. Will’s eyes fell on a tarp in the bed of the truck. One corner coming loose.
“What’s back there?” Will asked.
John glanced across to see what Will had seen. “My oldest brother Jacob has been tracking wolves in the mountains nearby. It’s some of his equipment.”
Will tried to see what was there but the tarp would not stay still.
“The concept is pretty simple,” John said. “You hunt one and then tag it with the signal. Once you have one you let it go and then you use the tag to home in on it, and instead of having one, you now can find the whole pack. That’s why we need you out there tracking Mary May, Will. We need to bring her back. We need to help her see that she is part of something bigger. We need her to believe as you do, and as I do, that we can help everyone here in this county. Help them to see how strong they can truly be if they could only come together.”
“And that works?”
“You know better than I do, Will. You are a hunter. You know that the hunter always uses the best tool he has at hand.”
Will thought about what John had said. He slid the remaining fifty feet and came to a stop just before the front axle of the pickup. Above, moving down toward him with a little more caution, Lonny followed, using the thin branches of the currant thicket, that had slowed and must have somewhat cushioned the truck as it went off the road above.
From everything Will had seen thus far it didn’t seem at all like they were trying to save the girl. Though Will had seen the baptism and what they might be calling salvation these days.
Moving around the end of the truck he looked at the damage. The front windshield had been cracked and there were fresh scrapes along the metal side panel, one of the headlights had been smashed. Will braced himself against the bumper and rocked the truck a little, thinking that it was very lucky the truck had not rolled the remaining distance through the thicket of currant and crushed itself on the pines farther on. When he lifted himself up and looked down into the cab he could see the passenger side window was completely gone, branches and leaves beneath could be seen where they had been pressed under the weight of the vehicle. There was no blood to be seen and Will let himself back down onto the slope and looked it all over again as if seeing it fresh for the first time.
When Lonny met him there, Will said, “I know this truck.”
“I expected you would.”
“What are we into here?”
“Damsels in distress,” Lonny said, smiling at Will.
“In distress from what?”
“Eternal damnation,” Lonny said. “Just like all the rest.”
Will gave Lonny one last look then walked his way down along the truck until he came to the tailgate. “They said she went north?”
Lonny came up beside him, carrying his own pack and leaning slightly
into the slope as he went, one hand out to brace his movements. “She went this way,” Lonny said, pointing to a small opening in the thick green underbrush that could have been an animal track, but that also showed a few small broken branches at chest height.
“They follow her?”
“They followed her as best they could. They said she turned into a goddamn mountain goat just as soon as she hit these woods.”
Will turned and looked back up the slope to where the two church trucks sat. John was watching them. “What did John say to you about all this?” Will asked.
“He said only that we should find her. He said she was saying things about the church that just weren’t true. He said she’s been stirring up the pot back in town, trying to get the sheriff to look into all of us.”
“Is there something to look into?”
Lonny shrugged. “You know her, don’t you?”
“I know her. I went to school with Mary May’s father back when there was a school to go to.”
“Then you know how she can be,” Lonny said. He looked up at John now and then glanced back at Will. “We better get to going. John didn’t bring the both of us up here so we could sit here jawing.”
* * *
MARY MAY CAME UP ALONG THE EDGE OF THE DRY AVALANCHE chute, using the slender branches of juniper to pull herself along. She had quit the forest a little while ago and she climbed now in the open. Her breath laboring with the effort, the slick feel of her own sweat down the inside of her shirt. The sun behind her in the west, the heat felt warm against her back, the metal of the .38 feeling solid and heavy beneath the waist of her pants. The gun and a hooded, zippered sweatshirt were all she’d had time to take from the truck before she’d run.
She had lost John and the rest of his men almost five hours before. She climbed now with the alpine breeze, smelling like cracked rock and melted ice, ruffling at the loose fabric of her shirt and teasing out a couple strands of hair that dangled about her face.
Stopping at the base of the ridge she set the .38 to her side then cupped water from a stream and washed it over her face, up along her hair, and then rubbed it along the back of her neck. She drank from between her hands and then stood there looking at the wavering leaves all around, waiting and watching, hoping they were not still out there somewhere trying to follow her.
Satisfied for the moment, she sat there on a large rock and peeled down the jeans she wore to view the dark bruise where her hip had hit the truck door. The bruise purple and black, three quarters up her thigh stretching under the line of her panties and up along her side. She had scrapes in other places, some from when the truck had gone off the road, others from the brush she had been bushwhacking through most of the day.
There had been a thought at one time to head down toward the road but she had given up on it, knowing John was out there, knowing he was looking for her. And that as she had run from the overturned truck, moving through the trees with the sound of the men behind as they crashed through the underbrush after her, she was certain they were not there to offer her any kind of help.
Twenty minutes later she had cut a sharp path to the east and then ducked in behind a big fir tree that lay along the ground, its wide web of roots still clutching at the rocks and dirt that had once surrounded it. She went along the trunk, keeping low, and as she came to the ball of roots and soil she looked back down the mountain to where John and several of his men were standing no more than a hundred feet away. All of them with their weapons. Bearded and tattooed, their eyes searching out the surrounding wood, trying to discern what path they would pursue.
She held the .38 in her hand and her breath when it came seemed louder than she had ever heard it. Though she knew it was only a whisper, that the fear she felt had only made her think it was all the louder.
“Mary May,” John called, his eyes roaming now around the surrounding wood. “Come out, come out, wherever you are.” He was almost singing and he looked now in the direction of the big windfall fir, but his eyes only passed it by, then continued.
“No one’s going to hurt you,” John said. He had taken a few steps and she watched the big magnum revolver he held in one hand as he moved, how he ran it one way then another as if it were some form of divining rod and she the precious water. “No one wants this to go any farther than it has to.”
She waited. She watched him take a few more steps. His men had already gone ahead of him and he was still looking around. The dark shadows of the forest converged all around him and the great canopy of the trees above.
“You come out and we’ll take you to see your brother. We’ll take you right to Eden’s Gate. We can all be friends. We can all just be one big happy family. You. Your brother. Me. And everyone else, The Father, and all who hear his words.”
She watched him till he walked out of sight behind the roots. Then she moved back along the trunk, following him and peeking over to watch where he was going. He spun but she dropped just as fast, her hand still clutching the .38, her face pressed down in the damp forest floor. When she looked again he was another hundred or so feet on, moving in the direction his men had gone. She watched him till she could not see him anymore and then she ran.
A few hours later she had rested at the stream. An hour after that she was climbing the avalanche chute and had come out into the open, using the squat juniper bushes to hold to. Now she came to the top of the windswept ridge and stood there looking down. Steep rock cliffs ran much of the opposite side and stepping closer, she peered now into the dark shadow of a deep abyss. Rock and talus collected three hundred feet below.
She had climbed the ridge hoping to get her bearings, but all she saw was more forest and more hills, mountain after mountain stretching on ahead. Somewhere out there was her brother. All she truly knew about the location of Eden’s Gate was that it rested somewhere along the lake farther on. A place that had been scoured out by glaciers millennia ago, the water deep and the mountains and hills that surrounded it running right down into that blue-green water. But it was still very far from where she was. She looked in the direction she thought Eden’s Gate might be, scanning the ridge she stood upon then running her eyes down along the far side and out into a river valley far below.
Two or three miles on, on the opposite slope from where she stood, she could see the white dots of animals moving in a mountain field. What she thought at first was a herd of mountain goats, now appeared to her as sheep, and as she studied the surrounding grass she saw a man walk out from the edge of the forest and stand watching the sheep then move back beneath the trees.
She stood and took it all in for the better part of five minutes before she picked her way along the ridge and found a small, gradual chute to descend upon the river valley there below.
* * *
WILL KEPT A FEW FEET OUT FROM THE BIG TREE TRUNK AND root ball of the fir. He circled and looked each footfall over. He saw how she had pressed a knee to the ground at one point and how the edges of the depression showed the slight shift of her movements as, he could only guess, she had hidden behind the large trunk and then moved to peer over it at whoever had pursued her.
“What had she been saying?” Will asked.
Lonny turned to look at him. He was standing off a bit in the place Will had gestured for him to go.
“What was she saying to people in town? What made her come out here?”
“Ugly things,” Lonny said. “That we were murderers. That we were hiding things, that we were keeping secrets.”
“Are we?”
Lonny kept his eyes on Will. He gave a half smile and then turned to look back the way they’d come, as if John might be standing there. “We haven’t done nothing that hasn’t needed to be done. You’ve seen the baptized.”
“I’ve seen it but I’m having a hard time remembering it being done quite that way when the brothers first came up from Georgia,” Will said.
“The Father means to cull the herd. He means to separate the weak from those of us w
ho are strong.”
“And which is Mary May?”
“You know her, don’t you? What would you say?”
“I knew her,” Will said. “But that was a long time ago. That was before I came to Eden’s Gate. I knew her family, too. And I’ve seen her brother, Drew, at Eden’s Gate, but I haven’t spoken more than a few words to him since he joined. I wasn’t there when he was baptized and I guess I don’t know his story. As a kid Drew always seemed to idolize his daddy, Gary, following him around like he was Gary’s own shadow, but Gary was always against Eden’s Gate. I guess for Drew that’s changed.”
“Well,” Lonny said. “Things have changed. Things have changed a good deal even from the time I came up here. Even from the time John invited me up here to this place and told me it would be all milk and honey.”
“But it hasn’t been, has it?”
Lonny looked around at the forest, at the fallen fir tree. “This look like milk and honey to you?” he said. “How long do you think it’ll take before we track her down?”
“I’ll track her as far as I can. But it doesn’t mean we’ll find her. She could get down into a riverbed, or she could travel over rock and not leave any trace. Just cause we’re looking doesn’t mean we’ll find her.”
“Well which way did she go?”
Will looked up, ran his eyes away from the trunk and out among the trees. “She went this way and it looks like she was running.”
“You can tell all that?”
“It’s the spacing of the footfalls,” Will said, rising now and pointing several out. “Catching up to her is going to be no easy task.”
“That right?”
Will walked and kept his eyes down along the ground. He followed Mary May’s path up through the forest. The dun of needles displaced here and there where she’d brought a heel down or pushed off with the toe of her shoe.