The Ardath Mayhar MEGAPACK®

by John Maclay

  Now he lifted his head and listened to the wind. There came a long howl down the gale, and he shivered. He and the wolves had been competing for the scarce supply of animals, as this strange year went forward.

  Instead of being able to make his three-day circle, checking his traps, he had been trapped here, this time, for a week. The jerky was the last of his meat, and meal and coffee and beans would not give a man enough energy to survive in this bitter cold. If the blizzard didn’t die down soon, he would be too weak to run the trap line.

  He rolled another big chunk of wood onto the fire and settled onto the bearskin that served as his bed. Tomorrow, surely, the wind would die down, allowing him to run the trap line!

  * * * *

  When the shutters were outlined with pale light, he rose and poked up the coals, building a new fire from the remains of the old. He wanted to check the morning, but his routine, when cabin-bound, was inflexible. Only when he had drained the iron coffeepot and eaten his can of beans would he open the door to see what this new day had brought.

  When the door swung inward, letting in a mound of new snow, the sparkle of sunlight on the burdened branches of the firs almost blinded him. He began to grin. Today, he would start off on the run. Tonight, at his first campsite, he would eat meat. He only hoped that he would also have wolverine pelts, for the miners in the lower ranges wanted those in particular.

  His snowshoes schuffed over the soft snow, leaving deep prints behind him. The shadows pooled blue on the warm-lit drifts, and the depths of the forest were purple and blue-green, concealing his usual track beneath its carpet of white. But he knew that trap line the way his mother knew her kitchen. He went unerringly to his first trap.

  It held, praise be, a fat porcupine, which would roast well and whose quills would be trade-goods, when he met with any of the Utes who sometimes traveled this way. He wrapped it well in burlap and stuffed it into his game-bag.

  The next trap had held a fox, but only a stiff paw still remained between the steel jaws. Damn! Then he ran out of luck entirely. By the time he hit his campsite, he had found nothing but empty traps. But at least he had food. That would help him along his way.

  * * * *

  The fat sputtered into the fire, as he turned the spit on which he had skewered the porcupine. He heard the snuffle and snarl of wolves beyond the circle of firelight. They hesitated, no matter how hungry they might be, to come near the blaze, but he knew that if he slept long enough to allow the flames to die down, he would wake in the belly of one of the big gray beasts. Often, he thought that they had begun to trail him as he went about his rounds. Sometimes they came up to the cabin and marked it as if it were wolf territory. He was game for their eating, he sometimes thought, which was only fair. He had eaten more than his share of their kind!

  Full of hot porcupine, he rolled into his blanket, propped against a fir tree in such a way that if he sagged, he would fall over and wake. He dozed, rousing only when he needed to replenish the fire. The wolves gave up in the wee hours and went to hunt easier game, but he did not sleep fully, and when the sky lightened he was up, stirring the fire, heating the now frozen meat, opening a can of beans.

  Still there were no wolverines in the traps. Damn! A silver fox, a small lynx, and a polecat were his morning’s catch. His bait was not right, he decided, and he tried resetting the traps with meat from the fox, even though he knew that had failed before.

  He should have been burdened with the weight of the pelts in his pack by now, but he plodded into Camp Two with a very light pack. One more day, and he would be back at the cabin, his work gone for nothing. He could only hope that something with a valuable fur had stumbled into one of his waiting traps on this last leg of the run.

  The tally began badly—one wolverine paw. But his next trap had been sprung and carried away into the brush. Had he caught a bear? His equipment was usually too light to hold one of the big beasts, but perhaps he had caught a young one or a small female. He moved along the furrowed snow-track until it disappeared into a frozen runnel filled with light snow.

  He hung his pack on a branch, removed his snowshoes, and plunged down into the shifting layers. The catch had been buried, probably in the storm of the day before, for the track was only half filled behind it. He smoothed away the snow and stared into the blind eyes of the Frenchman from the other side of the mountain. This was the bastard who liked wolves! He’d had the nerve to jump Herzog for killing the beasts and letting them rot in their hides.

  What in hell was he doing over here? In a blizzard? Getting into Herzog’s trap? The man felt a hot surge of fury, as he dragged the stiff body up the embankment and stretched it on the snow.

  The other trapper had not been driven into the storm by starvation—he was still well fleshed. His buffalo-fur robe was new, and his double moccasins were little worn. Why had he risked everything in that blizzard? Had his cabin burned? Herzog had known men, suddenly without shelter, to freeze in these mountain storms. Probably that was it, but it made no difference. The puzzle was why the wolves hadn’t eaten him, as he lay in the snow, helpless for a while and dead for a lot longer.

  Now a powerful notion was taking hold of Wilhelm Herzog. If nothing he tried for bait worked, in this strange year, why not try something new, something strange, something that might attract wolf and wolverine alike? Why not use this damned Frenchman? Otherwise he would be wasted.

  He skinned off the fur robe, the tanned deer hide shirt and leggings. Those were quilled, and he wondered what had happened to Villeneuve’s Ute wife. Had she burned too? Or had he beaten her once too often and found himself driven out of his cabin at knife-point? Herzog chuckled at the thought. He made it a point to take his Indian women first and kill them afterward. There was no risk that way.

  When he had the body naked, blue-chilled on the icy stream bank, he tried his knife on the marble-like flesh. But it was hard as stone. He would have to be thawed before he could be cut properly for trap-bait.

  It was not the time or the place to camp, but Herzog forced himself to build a fire, thawing out a circle to the bare needles of the forest floor. There he butchered his new-found animal with care, setting the chunks of meat carefully into his pack and putting the raw skeleton back into its former bed for the wolves to gnaw. That done, he covered the fire and set off again, baiting the empty traps with bits of Frenchman.

  He came back to the cabin filled with satisfaction. Something told him that this was the turning point. His luck was about to change; he could feel it in his bones. He turned in that night warmed with more than his ritual slug of whiskey.

  The blizzards set in again in the night. But in two days it cleared, and he was able to start out to run his traps.

  There was an ermine in the first trap set with Villeneuve. A silver fox was in the second. Wolverines filled three, five, and seven. The rest ranged from rabbits to lynx, and a pair of wolves were still snarling and chewing on their paws in the last two. He dispatched them with his rifle and loaded up his bulging pack of pelts, grinning widely.

  He had stashed the rest of the Frenchman in his cold-room at the cabin, and as long as the man lasted, his catch was superb. He had stretchers of hides stacked against the walls, and he knew that his bales of furs would bring him all the supplies, all the whiskey, and all the women he could handle when he went back down the mountain in the spring.

  Unfortunately, he ran out of Villeneuve all too soon. He’d been a big man, but there was only so much of him after all. And once he returned to baiting with fox or wolf-meat, the catches dwindled abruptly. Wolverine, in particular, had loved the man-flesh, and he caught no more of the wily creatures.

  So his spring selling trip netted him less by far than he had hoped. Yet, as he wandered around the trading post, he watched the other people there with new eyes. They were not men for the bragging with or women for the taking. They were not Indians who might turn into
enemies or Frenchmen who were contemptible simply because they were French.

  No. They were bait!

  He left early, climbing into the summer forests and meadows, where hunting parties and prospectors ranged during the fine weather. He didn’t go very far, and when he stopped he hid in the thickest of the woods and watched to see where men went, and how long they stayed.

  Many approached the snowline, tapping at the rocks with little hammers or hunting the mountain goats. He considered their habits for some time. Then he set his traps.

  By late fall, he had nineteen bodies stashed safely in the snows on the heights, and when winter set in again, he brought them down, one by one, to be butchered for bait.

  His fresh crop of furs was incredible, and he went out, late in January, to run his traps with his hopes running high. He already had about as many as he could carry to trade. He could save the rest of the bait, safe up there in the deep snows, for the next year.

  He staggered under the weight of his pack, as he came to the spot, no longer the site of a trap, from which he had tracked that providential Frenchman, whose bones, he was sure, had long since been gnawed to splinters by his friends the wolves. He sighed with satisfaction and went on, killing living catch and skinning out everything, until he came again to his cabin. When he shoved his show shoes off on the porch and stepped to the door, he paused, listening. Something was inside. A bear, wakened unseasonably from his winter sleep? A wolverine, seeking shelter?

  He slipped off his pack and pulled his rifle from its wrappings, working the action to make sure it was not too cold to move. Then he shoved the door open with his foot and stepped inside.

  Something was there. He could feel it. He could see a vague movement in the darkness, as something came toward him.

  He fired convulsively, but the rifle ball did not slow the approach of Villeneuve, the Frenchman. He was a rack of bones, with strips of flesh hanging like fringe, dried now, and useless. The bones were pale now, and hard. His grin was broad and humorless, the long teeth wolf-like in the dimness.

  Behind him came the partially stripped body of the Cree who had been brought down from the heights most recently. Other shapes moved there as well, and he didn’t want to see what they might be, though he caught the click of toenails on the rough wood of the floor. The wolves he had eaten—where they there too?

  Herzog stepped backward, dropping the empty rifle. His hands went up to cover his eyes. He could not believe that this was happening. Dead men did not rise up and walk!

  Something fastened into his calf from behind, and he went down on his back on the porch, landing hard. As he gasped for breath, he moved his arm to see what new enemy threatened him.

  The muzzle of a skeletal wolf, grinning as broadly as the Frenchman had done, loomed over his face. Hot saliva dripped from the lolling tongue onto his cheek.

  “No!” There was no breath to propel the word. It came out as a gasp, but it brought a reply.

  “Yesss...,” came the hissing reply between those alarming teeth in Villeneuve’s skull.

  And then both sets of fangs descended upon his cringing body. And Herzog knew at last what it was to fear and to suffer and to die.

  A COLD WAY HOME

  I love stories of the frontier—especially those with a twist!

  The norther gusted through the big pines, carrying with it a spatter of sleet. A strand of auburn hair flapped against Callie’s cheek, and she tucked it under her head scarf with an icy finger. Behind her, in the wagon, she could hear Jason’s small feet thunk-thunking against the pine box on which he sat.

  She turned to look back at the small, cold figure. “Don’t do that, son. It’s not respectful to Papa.”

  The boy’s cheeks were mottled with cold, his eyes full of tears. Some probably were from the chill, but she suspected the others might be for his father beneath him in the rude coffin. She reached back one-handed, tucked the red scarf more tightly about his neck, and checked the buttons of his outgrown coat.

  “Is it very far, Mama?” he asked, his thin piping almost inaudible in the roar of the wind among the pines.

  She turned back to look ahead at the flanks of the shivering horse, head-down against the cold, the sky still barely touched with a scarlet sunset. “Not very long now, son. Grandpa will have a good fire, and Luke will probably have something good fixed to eat. Be patient. We’ll get there.”

  He huddled into his coat, red hands in its skimpy pockets, and said no more. She sighed and fumbled out the lantern and a sulfur match. It was dark now along the tunnel-like road through the forest.

  It grew darker, even colder. She was shivering, there on the high seat of the wagon. She hoped that her body and that small barrier of the seat sheltered Jason a bit from the blast out of the northwest. The horse was grunting with each step. The light wagon and its small burden couldn’t work him that hard; she suspected that he too was suffering from the chill.

  The sky went entirely dark. Only their tiny circle of lantern light bobbed through a world of rushing blackness. She was wishing so desperately to see the lights of home that when they did twinkle into view she half doubted her vision. But it was.... They rounded a bend, and the square of a window glowed steadily with warm lamplight.

  She stood and shouted into the wind, “Papa! Luke! Papa!”

  She sat to flick the horse with the end of a rein. Her voice, she knew, had been carried away by the wind. How could her father and his old servant have heard her amid the uproar of the night?

  Now only a scant half mile separated her from her home. She shouted again, her throat raw with chill and stress. And this time something changed at the house ahead. After a short while, a lantern bobbed into view on the back porch. She gave a sound that was as much a sob as a laugh.

  “We’re home, Jason! We’re home!”

  The boy made no sound. She could hear his teeth chattering like castanets behind her. She whipped up the horse, and the beast, no less ready than she for shelter, stepped out at a trot, the wagon banging and jouncing behind him.

  Waiting in the small yard behind the house was an ancient black man holding high his light. “Miss Callie?” His voice was quavery.

  He caught the horse’s head as she pulled to a halt. The old man was staring into the dimness of the wagon. He nodded when he saw the child, but he was looking for someone else. “Where Marse Will?” he asked.

  A tall old man had come onto the porch, wrapped in a blanket and scarf. She jumped down from the wagon and reached for the child. Then she answered the servant.

  “He’s in the wagon. In the box. He’ll keep. Thank God it turned cold. We’ll tend to him tomorrow, Luke.”

  The old man had staggered down the steps to meet her. “Callie, girl! Come in...come in. We’ve got a good fire. Luke can fix some ham and biscuits real fast. Here, bring the boy inside out of the cold. You both look frozen.”

  She carried her son in and set him down before the huge fireplace, where hickory logs crackled, emitting fragrant smoke. She peeled away the layers of coat and scarf and sweater as the child shivered under her hands.

  Her father was staring at her. “Callie—what has happened? Where’s Will? Why are you home...alone?”

  She glanced up, her amber eyes crackling a command. “Not now. Later, when Jason is asleep.”

  The old man sank painfully into a rocking hair and kept looking from his daughter to his grandson. His puzzled eyes followed every move, but when Luke had the food warmed on the iron cook stove, he knew it at once.

  “Come and eat,” he said.

  Jason looked up. “Grampa Anderson!” he said with pleased recognition. “I ’member you!”

  Callie fed the boy, who was too weary to manage his own meal. He nodded off against her shoulder before he was quite finished, but she lifted him and took him to the trundle bed Luke had pulled from beneath the big four-po
ster. He didn’t stir as she tucked the bright patchwork quilt about him.

  Her father waited while she ate her own supper. Then he drew her over to the fire and sat again in his rocker. “What has happened, Callie? And where’s Will?”

  She sighed, backing up to the flames and lifting her skirt in back to warm her chilled legs. “I loved Will Lightwood, Pa. You know that. I’d have followed him to Hell if he’d asked me to.” She laughed harshly. “I never thought he would ask me to, though.

  “When he wanted to go down and live on the coast, I hated it. You know that...I love the woods and this farm and everything about home. But I went. I bundled up Jason, and we followed Will to Galveston. Lived in hotels. The only thing down there worth seeing is the Gulf of Mexico, and we saw too much of that.”

  She drew up a small splint chair and sat facing her father. “Will took to gambling. After he saw everything there was to see, he seemed to change. He got in with people—not the sort of people my son’s father should associate with, Pa.

  “The Lightwoods have always been respectable people. Not just because they had land and money—because they were good, decent people. But Will took in and lost all the money. Sold the woods his Pa left him and lost that money. He lost and he lost, and it changed him more.”

  Her father reached to pat her hand. “Surely it wasn’t that bad,” he said.

  “It was worse. It got so he’d come home drunk and hit me. Worse than that, he’d hit Jason! The more money he lost, the meaner he got. That last night...he came in wanting me to sign away this place, Pa. That was left to me by my mother’s folks! I wouldn’t, and he threatened to rent me out to the drummers at the hotel so he’d have money to gamble with. And he beat me, though I fought him the best I could. So I decided that it couldn’t go on.