Bearskin

by James A. McLaughlin

  Rice thought about this. It wasn’t far-fetched. “You’d need a programmable high-frequency scanner and some clue about how to use it. That stuff’s pretty easy to get. Military surplus.”

  “I was imagining an evil electronics genius.”

  He shook his head. “Probably just a local with skills. If they killed twelve bears, and they sold the gallbladders for a couple hundred each, that’s a lot of money around here.”

  It wouldn’t be enough to interest the mafia, he thought, but the organized crime guys wouldn’t be out there shooting bears anyway; they would be the buyers, the exporters. More money in that. He would try to find out tonight. He’d driven out to a truck stop on the interstate where they still had pay phones—he wasn’t going to risk any more calls from the lodge—and called the number from the Beer & Eat again. Now that Rice had some galls to sell, the unpleasant buyer was willing to talk. They were meeting sometime after nine. Rice was supposed to call him again around seven and find out where, which was a pain in the ass, but the guy had insisted.

  “It’d be a lot of money to me,” Sara was saying. Her lips compressed and she raised her mug and finished the coffee, returning the heavy mug to the table with emphasis. “Assholes.”

  Rice found this reaction interesting. He stood and offered a refill. “I’ve met one guy who seems okay, a bear hunter from . . . around here.” He’d almost said from Sycamore Hollow but remembered at the last second that that was where she’d been raped. “He’s the guy who came up and vacuumed the bees in the cabin. He’s pretty upset about the poaching himself. The fact that they just leave the carcasses seemed to offend him.”

  Sara was nodding, staring at the coffee he’d just poured.

  “He also says the bears up here have no respect because they’re not hunted enough. He knows locals come on the property, though, and I got the impression he does it himself. Seems to be part of bear hunter culture. Property boundaries and state regulations are for other people.” Rice felt guilty about pushing, but he asked the next question anyway. “Did you ever catch any bear hunters up here?”

  “Couple times,” she said. “They drove ATVs around the Forest Service gate, came down the fire road. It was before Starr had the fence put in. When I ran into them on the mountain they acted like I was on their land. I asked them to leave and they got belligerent, made a point of showing me their guns, said they were looking for their dogs. Apparently that’s what they always say. I called the game warden on my cell and they got in trouble, had to pay fines.” She shrugged as if to say it was no big deal, probably had nothing to do with anything. “You make good coffee, for a bachelor.”

  “Thanks. The secret is to use enough.” His antennae were a-tingle but it was pretty clear she was changing the subject.

  “Most bachelors are cheapskates,” she said. “They make watery coffee.”

  “Not me.”

  “You’re living high on the hog up here.”

  The conversation flagged uncomfortably. They drank their coffee. Rice wondered what “high on the hog” really meant, where the expression came from. Maybe the best meat comes from up on the shoulders? But bacon comes from the belly, and everyone loves bacon. He thought about asking Sara, but she seemed tense. She stood and walked to the sink, looked out the kitchen window. He watched her still silhouette, and he wondered about bear hunters who would brandish their weapons at a woman out in the woods by herself, and what they might do to get back at her for calling the law.

  Outside, the clouds had lowered and darkened. He had hoped to be on the mountain by now. He’d walked up there every day this past week, looking for boot prints, cigarette butts, sardine tins, ATV tracks, anything. He wanted to put in a couple of hours before he drove to the truck stop to call the buyer.

  Still looking out the window, Sara asked, “What are you going to do if you catch those bear hunters on the property?”

  “I told Starr I’d take their picture. Then we can call the law, like you did.”

  She turned and smiled at him like she knew him better than that. Shaking her head, she said “That’s just lame.”

  She’d marked six heavy boxes in the closet with red X’s, and they moved them out to the car in two trips, Rice carrying two, Sara insisting on carrying one herself each trip. Four fit in the cargo area of her car after removing the UPS box she said was from Starr, and Rice slid the last two onto the messy back seat, shoving aside a pile of junk mail, biology textbooks, student papers, workout clothes, empty grocery bags.

  The box from STP had been mailed to Sara’s address in Blacksburg from a company in Wisconsin. Apparently she’d had it sent to Sara because she was worried UPS would just leave it at the locked gate to be stolen. He cut the box open with his pocketknife. Inside were five “digital wildlife cameras” with cable locks, a bunch of memory cards, rechargeable AA batteries, and a battery charger.

  “You got Starr worried about the bears. I hope it’s okay. You’re kind of a whiz with the data.” She sat on the steps to the cabin with one of the cameras and started trying to pry apart the plastic blister pack. “Starr asked if I thought you could use these to document the bear population, keep track of it over time. I told her you could use sites on the existing habitat survey grids, so the integration of the data should be seamless. You’d pick up a lot of data on other species, too, not just the bears. I’m really sorry, it was partly my idea, and it means more work for you.”

  He lifted another of the boxed cameras and slit the otherwise-impenetrable plastic with his pocketknife, held the camera in the light, opened up the back. The copy on the package said Professional high output covert infrared. This was high-quality equipment, much nicer than what he’d used in Arizona. He’d always called them trail cameras—you usually set them up along a game trail to take pictures of the animals that walked past.

  Sara gave up on her blister pack and handed it to Rice, launching into what he was afraid would be a long explanation of why the additional data would be worthwhile. She said bear numbers had been stable on the preserve throughout the twentieth century, even when bears were scarce everywhere else, which he knew from the old logbooks. Her bear biologist friend suspected that the long-term isolation from human disruption and the uninterrupted availability of dead and dying large-diameter den trees, the kind you only find in old-growth forest, might have fostered a unique bear population here. For one thing, the biologist predicted they would find a lot of older bears on the preserve, but more interestingly, he’d said the bear “culture” would be intact. While not social in the manner of wolves or lions, black bears could live forty years if no one was trying to shoot them, they were smart and omnivorous, and their ranges typically exhibited a high degree of overlap and mutual use. A complex social network could arise in a protected place, where decades-long reciprocal relationships would develop among a large number of bears.

  He was intrigued by the concept of bear culture. It wasn’t something he’d considered before, and he wondered if shared knowledge particular to a population could reside in the oldest bears and persist over time, and maybe even be communicated across generations. Sara’s disquisition veered off into statistical analysis and he interrupted, told her the idea for the cameras was fine, that he didn’t mind the extra work. He asked if she’d like to see inside the cabin.

  Bare bulbs hanging from the ceiling lit up when he hit the wall switch. He realized it didn’t look like much. The smell was earthy from the open crawl space and woody from the plywood and the sawdust left by the plumbers and electricians drilling through the old joists. His pistol was in a box in the back, but he didn’t think she would see it.

  “The kitchen and living space will be one room. Full bath next to the kitchen. Bedroom’s back there.” He pointed toward the west end of the cabin, feeling like he was selling the place. He suspected Sara was STP’s secret agent, here to check on his work, which was reasonable, given that STP had left him here unsupervised for more than six months, and the Traver Foundatio
n was pouring money into the remodel without STP or the board having seen so much as a photograph.

  She nodded and made perfunctory noises of approval, walked across plywood sheets into what would be the kitchen area, glanced around as if imagining cabinets, appliances. Then she turned to face him, took a deep breath, and put her hands on her hips. She looked nervous. “I have to tell you something. I hope it’s not going to be a problem.”

  He waited.

  “I’ve applied for the first fellowship.”

  It took him a second to realize what she was talking about. “You mean with the foundation, to live here. Why would that be a problem?” The thought of someone else—anyone else—living up here still gave him jitters, but Sara seemed reasonably tolerable.

  “Well, I used to have your job. You might think I’m horning back in on it, like I’m watching you, or judging whether you’re doing it right.”

  He started to grin but stifled it, not sure how sensitive she was. “I don’t worry about things like that. I bet you have a good shot at the fellowship. Starr seems to think highly of you.”

  She reddened, and he saw her realize that her rehearsed speech, her concern about his reaction, had been misplaced, that it was, or should’ve been, pretty obvious, and she should’ve figured it out over the past hour or so. She tumbled into an overexplanation of her own motives, her reluctance to take advantage, her decision driven by the fact that it would be hard to finish her paper any other way.

  “Easy access to skinks,” he said. “Skinks out the back door.”

  “You got it.” Her smile was grateful. She turned and gestured dramatically at the gutted interior of the cabin. “So, what are you thinking for the paint in here? A nice light eggshell might look nice.”

  “I hadn’t really thought about it.”

  “Now I’m messing with you.”

  “But you’re right. I guess I figured it’d be white.” He looked around with new eyes. “Shit, Starr’s gonna want to see paint chips.” He imagined conversations about color shades and the moods they evoke.

  “Don’t worry, they have that stuff online now. On the In-ter-net? Once the drywall is up, you email her pictures of the interior and she can do a mock-up with the different colors. She can decide what she wants and order it herself. You pick it up at the paint store and Bob’s your uncle.”

  “Ah. Good to know.” He walked out onto the front stoop. Sara, he guessed, had been the intended recipient of the first fellowship from the beginning, maybe even the main reason for its creation. Rice’s job was to build a new living space for Sara and relieve her of the caretaker duties.

  She stood beside him. They gazed amiably up at the weather. The rain was still holding off, but it wouldn’t for much longer. “I promise if I get the fellowship you’ll hardly know I’m here.”

  “Who’s Bob?”

  “What? Oh. It’s an expression. British, I think.” She paused. “You know, I don’t have a clue who Bob is, or why exactly it would be a good thing to have him as your uncle.”

  “You can look it up. On the In-ter-net.” Fearing he might’ve triggered a lengthy extension to their conversation, he stepped down from the porch and headed for the car, willing her to follow. She got the hint but stopped with her hand on the car door handle.

  “One last thing.” She opened the door and turned to look at him. “Have you seen a cat?”

  “You mean that black house cat?”

  “You didn’t shoot her.”

  He shook his head. He’d glimpsed a small black cat two or three times but never got a good look at it. “Is it yours?”

  “Not really. She was feral, I saw her on the side of the road a few times, I thought she was a weasel at first, so skinny, linear. She was in the bushes by the mailbox one day, and I spoke to her, I don’t know what I said, but the next morning she showed up here, and started following me around, she would just appear, like a spirit or something, sitting up in the rafters on the porch, or under the steps, absolutely still, and watch me. It was a little spooky. If I tried to pet her she would come alive and slip away, disappear.”

  “You’re supposed to shoot cats up here. You know where the rifle is as well as I do.” He nodded toward the lodge and saw her grin. After her miscue earlier, she was reading him better now. “Think of the wood thrushes,” he said, “the meadowlarks, the skinks.”

  “I know, I just couldn’t do it. I tried to trap her in that big Havahart in the shed, I was going to take her to the vet and get her spayed, talk my brother into adopting her. But she wouldn’t go near it. I bought a can of wet cat food and put it in the trap. She didn’t even seem tempted. Never acted hungry, just interested, watchful.”

  Sara seemed likely to continue the cat conversation, but Rice had a meeting with a bear gall buyer tonight and there were some things he had to do first. He paused long enough that she went ahead and sat in the driver’s seat, looking up at him.

  “I’ll keep an eye out for her,” he said. He hadn’t seen the cat for a month or so, and he wouldn’t be surprised if the coyotes had killed and eaten her—at least two good-size packs spent time on the property—but he didn’t say so. “What’s her name?”

  She shut the door and started the car, rolled down the window. “How do you know I named her?”

  Thirteen

  Driving across the old bridge at the west end of town, he glanced through the spaces in the railing without slowing: a street and a dimly lit public parking lot eighty feet down, a few scattered cars parked overnight. He turned right at the far end and drove several blocks into a residential neighborhood before parking on the street. He’d called from the truck stop, and the buyer had made him wait there for half an hour and call back again for the location.

  As he opened his door he reached into the slit in the side of the passenger seat cushion with his right hand and hooked his fingers on the grip of the .45. He paused, hand on the pistol, the foam pressing down on his knuckles. He’d left his holster at the lodge, but he could Mexican-carry, he’d done it before.

  On the other hand, he had a record now, and if he got caught carrying the thing concealed without a permit he would certainly go to prison. Besides, he didn’t need to be armed, it was just old habit—grabbing the gun for a clandestine meeting in the middle of the night. This wasn’t going to be dangerous. Local toughs like the Stiller brothers embraced a kind of residual Confederate bellicosity and would welcome the escalation of a shouting match into a shoot-out, but—he hoped—they weren’t going to simply murder him if he was unable to produce a firearm and defend himself. Besides, his investigation of the bear poaching was unofficial preserve business, and according to his only slightly self-serving interpretation of his employment agreement, he couldn’t carry when he was working. His hand slid from the slit in the cushion, left the .45 where it was.

  What his agreement actually said was that as caretaker of the Turk Mountain Preserve, Rice was prohibited from carrying a pistol on the property, probably because the trustees were afraid a pistol-packing caretaker might shoot a trespasser and they’d get sued. Poachers were trespassers who were armed by definition, though, and he’d considered carrying the .22 target rifle when he was up on the mountain looking for them. The Winchester was a hell of a rifle—when he’d found it in the closet back in March he’d sighted it in at a hundred feet, and if he was careful the thing could put seven shots into a single ragged hole—but it was heavy and unwieldy, not something he wanted to hike with. Instead, as he’d told STP last week, he carried the point-and-shoot digital camera she’d mailed to him in the spring for documenting plant species he couldn’t identify on his surveys. He’d read somewhere that photographing trespassers was more effective than just ordering them to leave the property.

  That camera was buttoned in his shirt pocket tonight. A picture of one of the Stiller brothers looking stupid with a bag of dried gallbladders in his hands might give Rice some leverage, a way to keep them off the preserve.

  Cracked concret
e steps led down from the near end of the bridge to a handful of unmetered parking spots underneath. Water from an evening thunderstorm dripped and echoed in the dark cavernous space, invisible pigeons up in the transoms cooing at his footsteps. Scant ambient light shone from the hazy sky. He moved into the darker shadow of a bridge pillar.

  The night was chill, clearing after the rain, the smells of wet concrete and faint garbage. Crickets chirped, their rhythms slow, sleepy. He exhaled a gray backlit cloud toward the faux-antique streetlamp at the far end of the parking lot. The soft nylon cooler hanging from his shoulder was light, but he set it on the pavement.

  He watched for five minutes, ten. No car pulled into the parking lot. The guy was probably here already. Rice had his flashlight, held it ready in his right fist, thumb on the switch. He thought of flashing the light into the shadows but didn’t want to give himself away: the beam you got with the first push of the switch was unsubtle, something like two hundred lumens. When you pushed the button a second time it switched to a dim but useful light that didn’t drain the batteries as fast. The little flashlight, a gift from Apryl just before everything went sideways in his old life in Arizona, had been weaponized with a sturdy scalloped metal bezel jutting out at each end, one around the lens and one around the push-button switch in the tail cap.

  Fifteen minutes. The buyer was out there somewhere, doing exactly what Rice was doing: waiting and watching, not showing himself.

  Off to the right, a momentary reddish glow in a little picnic area past the parking lot. No streetlights there. He watched and the glow came again, showing a man in a dark Carhartt work jacket—the square white label on his chest was conspicuous—sitting at a picnic table. Rice pulled the bill of his baseball cap down to shadow his face and walked over with the cooler.