Hunter's Moon

by Dana Stabenow

  Since Kate enjoyed a certain measure of these qualities herself, they were easy to recognize in Dieter.

  She wished she knew more about computers. She also wished she could speak German. She checked behind the bush. Her plate was clean. She picked it up and carried it to the lodge, where Demetri and Old Sam were washing the dinner dishes. “Demetri,” she said in a low voice, “keep your ears open, okay?”

  Old Sam gave her a sharp look. Demetri finished rinsing a handful of silverware and picked up a towel. “What for?”

  “Anything,” she said. “When these nimrods start talking, listen in. Do they know you speak German?”

  “I think George told them so.”

  “Hell. Well, pick up what you can.”

  Demetri and Old Sam exchanged glances. “Why?”

  Her slight smile was a little shamefaced. “I’m not sure, exactly. I’ve got the heebie-jeebies about this bunch.”

  “Fedor’s death got you spooked, girl?” For once, Old Sam’s voice wasn’t jeering.

  “I don’t know. It won’t hurt us to be careful, though.”

  He winked at her. “I’m always careful, girl.”

  Popping the top on a can of Diet 7Up, she stood in the doorway for a moment, watching the people around the campfire over the top of the can.

  Hubert and Gregor, Demetri’s hunters and the two Kate was least familiar with, sat close together, murmuring in low voices. She was close enough to make out the name of Fedor and something that sounded like Microsoft. Gregor jerked back from Hubert, his expression stunned, and Hubert, seeing Kate standing almost directly behind them, shook his head in warning. They waited until she returned to her seat on the log before making their goodnights and heading for bed. Gregor looked like a veteran of many a convention, who would be much more at home in the hotel bar with a scotch in one hand, alert for any lone female to make the mistake of being in the same city with him. He had a wide wedding band on his left hand that looked loose, all the better for removing when expedient. He had an incipient bay window pushing at the waist of his pants, and the pouched, red-veined eyes of the heavy drinker.

  Hubert looked marginally fitter, but his shoulders had the faint stoop of someone who spent most of his days hunched over a computer. His glasses were thicker even than Berg’s. His hair was so thin on top it looked like he’d had a tonsure, which matched the vaguely ascetic cast of his face and the inward look of his eye, as if on one level he were always absorbed in some ongoing internal debate between himself and—who? Or what? Kate had no idea. This evening he was regarding a plant held in one hand. On closer inspection Kate saw that it was the limb of a soapberry bush, half a dozen berries ranging in color from red to yellow depending from stems. Hubert was sketching it in a notebook, high on the corner of one page, the rest of which was filled with cramped writing.

  Klemens was the éminence grise of the group and Kate would have said the steadiest of the lot. He seemed secure in himself, with a latent twinkle in his eye that invited one to enjoy the joke, whatever it was. He also had an erect carriage that smacked of long practice of marching in step. You could always tell an old soldier; they never slumped, and their clothes were usually perfectly ironed, too, even, in Kate’s experience, the clothes of old soldiers in the Alaskan Bush, where irons and the electricity to power them were often hard to come by.

  Her father had been such a man. Drunk or sober, his shirts had been ironed, his shoepacs shined. He’d been a soldier, too.

  Tall, spare, long of jaw, Klemens had big hands and fingers with knuckles so large Kate wondered how they fit through the trigger guard. They had today. Too bad Klemens hadn’t insisted on staying in camp and doing the fishing he would have preferred. She thought of him by the creek the day before, content to laze in the sun, taking the odd grizzly in stride. After today, that man would never return to this world, and she was sorry for it.

  Dieter seemed less than downcast. One might even say, judging from his frequent brays of laughter, that he was positively jubilant. He’d scrubbed off in the creek and arrived at dinner in a fresh set of immaculate khakis, his cuffs unbuttoned so he could roll up his sleeve and display his wound at a moment’s notice, which he did a minimum of four times while Kate was watching. Somehow, without actually saying so in so many words, Dieter managed to convey the impression that he’d received the wound in hand-to-hand combat with his moose, the head of which was propped up against the log to stare out over the campsite with a vacant look in its glassy eyes.

  Eberhard, sitting next to Dieter, was as enigmatic as always, calmly eating through his meal and responding when necessary to Dieter’s conversation. Because he didn’t feed into it, Dieter’s good spirits were muted. Kate wondered if it was deliberate. She would guess so, and wondered why Eberhard wasn’t running the company.

  But then, maybe he was. It wouldn’t be the first time someone pulled the strings on a figurehead. And if Kate had ever seen someone who could pull strings, Eberhard was it. Eberhard was a big man, as tall as Jack, slow without being clumsy, certain without being arrogant. The scars, one on each cheek, had healed cleanly, unlike the scar on Kate’s throat, but they formed deep creases that would never go away. If he ever smiled, they would be even deeper. His eyes were so light a blue they were almost colorless, and he had a habit of staring that could indicate either myopia or a need to intimidate. Either way, it was unnerving. He was a hard man to figure. He was a man to watch.

  Berg alone went back for seconds. Kate noticed the others avoided sitting next to him. It didn’t seem to bother him. During the after-dinner coffee his glasses steamed up, until he looked like a character from a Little Orphan Annie cartoon. He ate well, concentrating on what was on his plate and how fast he could get it down. He hadn’t worked hard enough during the day to justify that much of an appetite, so he was probably just greedy. Greed would explain his size; Kate figured he weighed in at 275, if not 300: a big barrel of a man. She wondered what quality control involved when you were working on computers. Berg looked as if he’d be more at home swinging an ax.

  Dieter laughed again. Kate was watching Hendrik at the time and saw a look of pure hatred pass swiftly across his face. She didn’t blame him. Young Hendrik had spent the meal in shocked silence, white of face, staring of eye, his plate of food untouched in his lap. He moved like a dancer, and he had hands down the nicest buns of the bunch. Kate admired them as he leaned against a tree, staring out at the wilderness. She remembered Hendrik and Fedor sitting closely together the last two nights, the conspiratorial whisperings, the intimate laughter, and wondered.

  George and Senta had their backs to the log and their feet stretched out to the fire. Kate took her can of pop and went to sit down next to Senta. “Nice evening,” Kate said, looking up at the stars.

  Hendrik heard her and stirred from his misery to say loudly, “I bet Fedor would have thought so.” His face started to crumple, and he fought to bring himself back under control. “If that Nazi hadn’t shot him he might have had a chance to see it!”

  Dieter barked a command in German.

  “I called him a Gottverdammt Nazi!” Hendrik said loudly. “He learned his shooting in the Wehrmacht in World War Two, the miserable son of a bitch. He was the one of ail of us who should have known what he was doing in the verdammt Wald!”

  There was a crackle of twigs where Klemens had been sitting in the dark at the edge of the circle. “You’re right, Hendrik,” he said, his voice strained. “I should have. But I didn’t.”

  There followed a strained silence. With dignity, Klemens walked to the trestle table that did duty as serving line, ammo dump and garbage collector and picked up a plate. He loaded it with cold steak and potatoes, one item at a time, with everyone watching his every move.

  He took his plate to his cabin. No one tried to stop him.

  Eight

  Damn, why does all the fun stuff happen when I’m not there?

  “I DON’T LIKE THIS,” Kate said.

  �
�Don’t like what?” Jack said without looking up from his cards.

  The screen door closed behind Kate with a faint rattle. “Any of it. I don’t like Fedor dying, I don’t like Dieter’s rape, ruin and run attitude, I don’t like the vibe I’m getting from this bunch.”

  “Fifteen-two, fifteen-four, fifteen-six, fifteen-eight, and eight are sixteen,” Old Sam said, and pegged with relish. “Much as I hate to admit it, you got a point, girl. What the hell are they doing here, anyway? Bunch of goddamn city slickers, don’t know one end of a gun from the other. They already shot one of their own stone dead, who’s to say when we take ’em out again they don’t shoot one of us next time? If it were up to me, I’d run the bastards back to town at first light, and come back and do some real hunting, fill up the cache for the winter.”

  Jack looked glumly at the cribbage board. Old Sam was an entire loop ahead of him and coming down the home stretch. Skunked again. “So would I. Unfortunately, it’s not up to us, it’s up to George.”

  “And George says it’s up to Dieter, and of course Dieter is hot to shoot anything that doesn’t move or fly out of range in the time it takes him to aim that elephant gun of his,” Kate said.

  “Be fair, Kate,” Jack said. “George signed a contract to provide a ten-day hunt. If he breaks that contract, Dieter could make trouble big time for him with the Fish and Game.”

  “Not to mention the money he’d be out,” Old Sam said, an eternal capitalist, always ready to consider the financial downside of any situation. “What’s he get for a moose hunt nowadays, anyway?”

  “For the full ten days?” Kate said. “Somewhere between five and eight thousand per person.”

  “Uh-huh,” Old Sam said. “For a caribou hunt, it’s something like thirty-five hundred to five thousand apiece for ten days. And a bear hunt runs what? Twelve thousand a head? Fifteen? And these folks are here for all three and whatever else they can get. From their outfits I’d say they’re pretty well heeled. George isn’t the man I know he is if he isn’t charging them the red-shift limit. With or without the dead kid, I’d be a mite reluctant to turn my back on that kind of money myself.”

  Demetri came in.

  “So,” Kate said, “you hear anything?”

  Demetri shook his head. “They see me, they shut up.”

  “Really,” Kate said slowly. “That’s almost as interesting as what you’re not hearing.”

  “Our resident conspiracy theorist,” Old Sam told Jack in a not-so-confidential tone of voice.

  “All right, all right, it’s my imagination. Maybe I am spooked by Fedor’s death.”

  Jack was more understanding. “No, Kate, you just want there to be a reason for his death, and there isn’t one, and it bothers you.” He gathered the cards together. “It bothers me, too.”

  “And me,” Demetri said unexpectedly. “There is something wrong with these people.”

  “I say it’s a wild hair up their collective ass, and I say the hell with it,” Old Sam said definitively, and closed the subject for the night.

  Kate stoked the stove with a couple of logs. Demetri retired to a chair to disassemble and clean an already immaculate Remington .30-06. Jack shuffled three times. Old Sam declined to cut, and Jack dealt six cards each. Old Sam turned up a jack and got an extra point. “Why do I bother?” Jack asked the ceiling and went on to be skunked again.

  Kate swiped Jack’s copy of Mary TallMountain’s The Light on the Tent Wall. Careful to avoid “Light Bright Shining” as an emotional hotbed seething with sinkholes ready to swallow her up whole, she had very nearly committed “Good Grease” to memory by the time Jack gave up trying to beat Old Sam. Old Sam, cackling his triumph, raked in his winnings, which amounted to every spare penny Jack had on him, in addition to five dollars of Kate’s and another five of Demetri’s.

  “Where’s George?” Jack said, pushing back his chair.

  Old Sam cackled again. “If that big old gal let the schnapps do the talking, probably with her.”

  “She’s got a roommate.”

  “Tonight I’m betting that roommate is commiserating with Hendrik on the loss of his roommate,” Old Sam said.

  Even Demetri smiled.

  Jack got to his feet. “Let’s take a walk,” he said to Kate.

  “Ain’t love grand,” Old Sam said.

  *

  They strolled up the airstrip, hand in hand, Mutt trotting a little ahead of them, nose to the ground. Once she stopped in her tracks, looking off to the right. Following her gaze, they saw a pair of moonlit green eyes staring at them unblinkingly from the undergrowth. Jack adjusted the .357 riding on his hip and they paced slowly on. Mutt waited until they were ten feet away before breaking off the staring match and running to catch up.

  It was over a mile from the camp to the dam George had built to divert the wayward trickle of water whose original streambed formed the basis and provided much of the gravel and rock base for the airstrip. The dam was fifteen feet high, a curve of solidly packed dirt with a conveniently placed boulder at the top of the curve.

  “Could have been made for couples to lean against,” Jack said.

  “Who says it wasn’t?” Kate said. “This is George we’re talking about here.”

  Jack laughed and pulled her closer. There was a sudden squawk and thrashing of brush from somewhere behind them, followed by a splash and then, silence. “Dinnertime,” Kate said.

  “Mutt never was one to eat too soon of an evening,” Jack agreed, pulling Kate’s thick braid through a lazy hand. “She might wake up hungry.”

  “That would never do,” Kate agreed. Jack’s shoulder was very comfortable, and the moon was being very obliging in rising straight up the runway, face forward. “Can you see Copernicus?”

  “Where?”

  “Right there, that big meteor crater.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Jack lied. He was more interested in things earthly than lunar this evening. “You been thinking about it, Kate?”

  “I’ve been thinking about almost nothing else,” Kate said readily. “This whole business smells, and I don’t mean Dieter. Senta walked me around the circle that first night and she said Fedor worked for Klemens. Do you think—” His chest shook with laughter and she tipped her head back. “What? What’s so funny?”

  Unsteadily, he said, “What I meant was, have you been thinking about the possibility of cohabitation? Cabin in the Park? You, me, the kid and the mutt?”

  “Oh,” Kate said weakly.

  They both started to laugh at the same time. “Jesus,” Jack wheezed, “I trained you and I still can’t believe how single-minded you are. You’re worse than a ferret at a hole, woman.”

  Mutt reappeared, a satisfied look on her face, and arranged herself in an elegant curl, tucked her tail beneath her nose and to all appearances went soundly to sleep.

  Kate watched her and knew a flash of envy. Life was so much simpler for Mutt. A full stomach, a dry bed, get laid once a year. At the moment it seemed to Kate like the perfect life. “Yeah,” she said slowly. “I’ve been thinking about it.”

  “And?”

  She was silent for a long time, long enough for him to think that was her last word, but it wasn’t. She sat up and laced her fingers around her knees. The moonlight turned her skin to cream silk, her hair to black rain. She closed her eyes and he could see the tiny shadows her lashes cast on her cheeks, the bones beneath high and slanting up.

  “When I was at school in Fairbanks,” Kate said slowly, “I remember one time these two girls on the fourth floor—Lathrop, my dorm, I lived on the fourth floor— anyway, these two girls got into a fight. I don’t remember what it was about, nothing, probably, but it ended when one of the girls shouted at the other, ‘At least I’ve got a man!’” She glanced around at Jack, a faint, wry smile on her face.“That was it. The other girl burst into tears and stumbled back to her room, humiliated. The first girl had won whatever the argument was, just because she had a man.”

  She looked up,
and he followed her gaze. The stars were brilliant in the autumn sky; Orion, the Dippers, Big and Little, the Pleiades, Cassiopeia, all the easily recognized constellations standing out in bold relief against a sky filled with other, lesser stars.

  Kate’s voice was naturally low and made huskier by the scar tissue bisecting her throat. Her words were deliberate and precise, allowing no room for misinterpretation. Jack understood, and waited patiently, attentive, alert to every subtlety, every nuance.

  “I made up my mind then and there that I would never be defined by a man, made right by a man, given validity as a woman just because I had a man in my life.” She turned to face him, dark of hair, tilt of eye, bone of cheek, curve of breast and hip all lit in tantalizing outline by the moon.

  “It was a pretty easy vow to make. Look at my life. I lost both my parents before I was out of grade school. My grandfather was long dead by the time I was born, and Emaa never talked about him. Then, because I kept running away from Emaa’s house, back to the homestead, she agreed to let Abel take me, and Abel, other than seeing to it that I could take care of myself, my weapons and the homestead, in that order … well, none of us, not me, not his own kids, got much affection. Inga died giving him his youngest son, so it was just him and the boys. I loved him, as much as I would any other childhood god, and I was grateful as hell, because him taking me on meant I could stay home. Home with my ghosts. But I didn’t have any urge to go out and find someone just like him.”

  Her face seemed somehow more in shadow. “There were a few men in college. I pretty much decided to lose my virginity there, because I figured it had to happen sometime, and because I sure as hell wasn’t going to sleep with some second cousin once removed back home who would have the news all over the Park by noon the next day.”