He squatted to examine Boger’s dog, which he recognized now—it was one of the males that had followed him home. He ran his fingers along the rib cage, feeling the peaks and valleys, the cold, wet fur. The dog had been lean, fit. He looked up at Boger, who was close enough that Rice could smell the cigarette smoke on him. He wanted to say he was sorry, that if the old man hadn’t knocked him out he’d have hung on to Boger’s dogs until he came to get them.
With his hand on the dog’s chest, he said, “Your dogs were on this property, and you knew it, and everyone knows bear hunting hasn’t been allowed here for about a hundred years. You can’t run your dogs on Turk Mountain without them coming on this property, and I won’t put up with that.” He stood and laid Boger’s collars on the truck’s tailgate.
“So if I start hounds up on the national forest, and they run on y’all’s property, you’re gonna steal the collars?”
“Might not try that again, but I’ll fuck up your hunt one way or another.” Boger didn’t seem the type to press charges under the statute DeWayne Stiller had mentioned, but Rice wasn’t going to push his luck. A court appearance to answer a Class 1 misdemeanor charge was all he needed.
Boger reached inside his jeans jacket, fished his pack of Kools from a shirt pocket. He knocked the pack twice on the heel of his hand, shook out a cigarette, and lit it with a wood match, turning to shield his face from the fresh breeze in the lee of the cab. He shook the match out and tossed it in the truck bed, drew on the cigarette. Squinted at Rice through the smoke.
“And that don’t seem unreasonable to you?”
“It’s completely unreasonable. It’s my job.”
Boger’s glance flicked to the bandage on Rice’s head. “Your job’s gonna get you killed you keep beatin’ on Stiller boys.”
Rice imagined he saw the slightest hint of a grin, or maybe just an amused tightening of the lips under the man’s usual skeptical squint. Clearly there was some animosity between Boger and the Stillers. Might be the only reason Boger was speaking to him at all.
“Nearly got me killed yesterday.” He said it matter-of-factly, not making a joke.
A furry white head rose up in the cab. It was the setter bitch, his companion from the mountain. When he walked over, she poked her nose out the open passenger-side window to sniff his hands and forearms. Her left hind leg was encased in a bright blue fiberglass cast. She rested her head on the door and closed her eyes while he scratched behind her ears.
Holding the cigarette in his lips, Boger picked up dead Monroe and placed him back in the truck’s bed, slammed the tailgate. Then he stood there and smoked and watched Rice and the setter.
“It’s a bad break,” he said.
Rice didn’t look up from the dog’s peaceful face. “You’re a tough old girl, aren’t you.”
“She ain’t but three.”
“What’s her name?”
“Sadie.”
“She looks more bird dog than bear hound.”
Boger didn’t respond to that. He said, “Bilton Stiller still can’t find three of his hounds. One of them was his best dog, or so he says, some big-ass yellow hound.”
“I remember him. That dog was unfriendly.”
“Bilton’s saying you killed them hounds, left ’em up in the woods. Took the batteries out the collars.” Boger didn’t sound like he thought much of the accusation.
“Well I hope you told him different.”
“Ha!” Boger’s smile was broad, a real smile it seemed, but his dark brown eyes were level, reserved. “I don’t tell Bilton Stiller much of anything.” He watched Rice’s puzzlement. “I’m not his kind of people.”
“What’s wrong with you?”
“You really that dumb, or you just pretending? Some politically correct California bullshit?”
“I’m from Arizona.”
Boger just looked at him, expecting an answer. Rice stared, starting to feel dumb indeed, noticing the lines radiating out from the corner of Boger’s eye, fanning above his high cheekbone, those dark, dark brown eyes, the sclerae not quite white, more an eggshell shot with red, like he’d been up all night looking for his dogs, which he probably had.
“So you’re saying it’s a race thing?”
“Yeah it’s a race thing. Us Negro-Cherokee half-breeds what live up Sycamore Creek ain’t good enough to wax Bilton Stiller’s monster truck.”
“Hunh.” Rice hadn’t realized the social dynamics of northwestern Turpin County were so complicated.
“You don’t know what that means either, do you?”
“I know what a monster truck is.”
“It means people like the Stillers need to believe there’s somebody they’re better than. You also didn’t know they was messing with you at the Beer & Eat when they sent you up to my place looking for a bear hound.”
“You heard about that.”
“Sent that ol’ boy up Sycamore Holla, yuk yuk yuk, he might never come out. It was quick thinking, you talking to me about honeybees. If I’d known you were gonna accuse me of bear poachin’ I might’ve shot you and buried you behind the kennel. I would’ve for sure if I’d known you was going to kill Monroe.”
He pinched the butt of his cigarette, tossed it in the bed with the match and the box kennels and Monroe’s carcass, and pulled out his soft pack. Rice wondered if the guy was a heavy smoker or if he was just worked up.
“That big yellow hound still had his radio collar on the last time I saw him. They should’ve been able to find him. You think I ought to stop by the store and have a talk with Mr. Stiller?”
“Might be an interesting conversation. From what I hear, old Bilton’s a fool for his hounds. One thing he has on his boys. They could give a shit about the hounds. Or anything else.”
“Would they use bait?”
“Bait’s only good if it gives you a place to start your hounds, where they can pick up a scent. You got to set up your bait in different places, keep adding popcorn and rotten apples and whatnot. It’s a lot of extra work on top of everything else. I don’t know any houndsmen who do it.”
“What if you’re not using the dogs, what if you put out your bait and climb up in a tree with a crossbow and sit there until the bears show up. You said yourself you’d found dead bears that’d been baited.”
“That’s different. You find another one?”
“I found two. You all’s dogs found them yesterday.” Sadie whined and Rice looked over. She was asleep, her cheeks puffing out as she half-barked, half-whimpered. Dreaming. He swept his palm from her eyebrows back over the top of her head and down her neck. He’d read that dogs like to be petted because it reminds them of their mothers licking them when they were young. Her eyes half-opened and then shut again. She must be on pain meds. “It was way up in that canyon, near the top of the cliffs. The bears were missing their gallbladders and paws, and like you said before, the wounds were broadhead cuts, some white powder in ’em.”
“It ain’t a canyon. Nobody says ‘canyon’ here.”
“What do you say? It looks like a canyon to me.”
“It’s a holler.”
Rice nodded, waiting for him to pick up the thread of their conversation again, but Boger just looked at him through a cloud of fresh cigarette smoke.
“So what do you think?” Rice prodded. “About the bait? Will the Stillers come back, add more bait like you said?”
“Somebody’ll come back.”
“Not the Stillers?”
“Stiller boys ain’t that enterprisin’.”
“You think it’s somebody else?”
“I’ve heard some things.”
“But you’re not going to tell me what you’ve heard.”
“Not sure I like your attitude.”
Rice shook his head but didn’t respond.
“What I think,” Boger went on, “is you’ve decided you’re gonna take care of this little problem yourself. Maybe you figure you can handle these redneck poachers dumpin’ moon pies and
stale doughnuts in your precious old-growth forest. Shootin’ them pet bears.”
“Yeah, I’m pretty interested. I don’t see why you’d protect them.”
Dempsey glared at Rice like he was about to tell him to go to hell, but the moment passed and he cleared his throat, which turned into a cough, a smoker’s hack forcing him to turn away from the truck and hold his fist to his mouth.
The setter was awake again, probably reacting to the tension in the men’s voices. She stood in the seat and turned around in a circle, knocking her cast against the dashboard, and lay down on her side and scootched her hips out, rolled onto her back. With her cast sticking straight up in the air, she didn’t look comfortable. Rice reached in and rubbed her belly. He tried a shift in subject. “How are those bees doing?”
“They’re all right.”
“I’ve been eating a lot of that honey. It will fire you up.”
“Wild honey will do it.” Boger slid in behind the wheel and the setter put her head in his lap. For a moment he looked down at her like he’d never seen a dog before. “You eat enough of it, you’ll turn into one them bears you’re so worried about. The Stillers’ll come after you for real.”
He shut the door and started to speak through the open window, but another, shorter coughing fit took him. He pounded his chest and examined the dwindling cigarette in his hand. Didn’t know where it had come from. Didn’t want it anymore. He reached it forward to the ashtray, stubbed it out. Looked up at Rice with watery eyes. The man needed to go home and get some sleep.
“You and them folks own the place got to remember there’s families around here been hunting bear up on that mountain ever since their great-great-granddaddies run off the Real People two hundred years ago, and there ain’t a thing in the world you or anyone else can do to stop ’em. You keep on like you are, it’ll turn into a war, one you won’t like much.”
“Maybe. I was told pretty much the same thing yesterday,” Rice said. He was cold, and he crossed his arms over his chest. “What about the Cherokee? Did they hunt bear up there? Before they got run off?”
“Not much. That mountain’s haunted—they called it ooh joo teeah nee sew ee ohdah. Many Others Mountain.” He snorted and turned the key in the ignition. He was grinning, without much goodwill in his eyes. “I know you know what I’m talking about.”
Then he put his truck in gear and drove slowly down the driveway.
Twenty-Five
Rice found the blister pack of same-key padlocks and opened the last one with his key. The second lock was way up on the mountain, protected by wasps inside that steel box on the Forest Service gate. Later this week he would hump a half roll of barbed wire up there and repair the fence he was sure the Stillers had cut on their way in.
He laced his boots, poured a whole pot of coffee into a big plastic convenience store mug, and walked down the driveway. A leisurely hike, he hoped, would help clear his head. The day was quiet except for a weak breeze that rose occasionally to a gust, shuffling branches. His boots crunching in the gravel. The ubiquitous crickets; crows cawing in the distance. A few dead leaves came off and blew overhead, translucent, backlit and glowing briefly in the sun.
Many Others Mountain. Boger had to be making that shit up.
At the entrance, the gate was shut—probably the Stillers had left it swung wide but Boger couldn’t bring himself to drive away from an open gate, no matter how mad he was. Rice opened the mailbox, thinking maybe the Stillers had come back and put a live rattlesnake inside, but it was so full of junk mail there wouldn’t have been room anyway. Must’ve been a while since he’d last emptied it: mass mailings, free local newspapers, nonprofit solicitations for Sara that didn’t get forwarded, thick booklets of coupons for shit he didn’t want. He left it, promised himself he’d clean it out soon. Nothing in there would be addressed to him. Any mail sent to his old address in Tucson had been forwarded to P.O. boxes he didn’t intend to visit again.
A red pickup with a lift kit and straight pipes roared around the turn just past the driveway. Rice stepped back onto the shoulder as the driver nearly clipped the mailbox and gunned it down the straightaway, headed toward Stumpf. The passenger turned to look out the back window, laughing, white teeth in a sparse black beard. No one Rice recognized. A translucent sticker across the top of the window read FEAR THIS in bold letters, a twist on the NO FEAR stickers the local teenagers seemed to like. Rice wondered if those boys could know anything about fear. He wondered if they had any idea what their stupid stickers were saying.
He pulled the gate shut behind him and locked the chain with the new laminated steel padlock. After some searching, he found the old lock in the weeds, its shank cut. It wasn’t a small lock, but now its twin, or triplet, looked flimsy hanging there against the latchpost. The chain that had felt so reassuring every time he’d wrapped it around the end of the gate seemed insubstantial as well. He could buy some better hardware, a new lock and chain, though if he did he would have to mail keys to a list of folks who were supposed to have access: STP wanted one in Tucson for some reason, and both the sheriff and the game warden were supposed to have keys. The fire department too. Also, as he’d already seen, Sara apparently got one.
He dropped the broken lock in his empty coffee mug and started back up the driveway, walking fast, then jogging, which made his head hurt worse than it already did. The lock rattled in the mug. He pushed himself harder. Boger was right: Rice intended to handle the poaching problem himself, but he’d been completely ineffective. Two more bears had been killed. The Stillers were driving ATVs through the preserve with impunity. He’d relinquished his precious self-control and started a fight with DeWayne that had ended with Rice knocked into semiconsciousness with his own firewood. He’d let Boger’s dogs run off to be killed and injured, and now the one local he thought he’d connected with, his one ally, was telling him to back off.
He jogged all the way to the meadow, where he stumbled and almost fell, then bent over and vomited his coffee in the grass. He sat in the driveway for a while. He gently pressed his fingertips against the swollen cut at his hairline; a dark bruise had already spread from the cut to the right side of his forehead. He’d hacked away the hair with scissors and razor, washed the cut with soap and water, then dabbed it with isopropyl alcohol. When the bleeding stopped, he’d applied two butterflies and smeared it all with Neosporin.
After the two kills at the bait station, the poachers might stay away for a while, or they might start restocking the bait again right away, but sooner or later they were coming back—the preserve’s bear population had to be irresistible. And that’s when he would catch them. He would be out there at night, haunting the mountain like one of the ghosts Dempsey had mentioned. Dempsey had warned Rice about his excessive tactics, but what the man didn’t realize was that Rice had been holding back, and his holding back was the problem. One of the few lessons Rice’s father had managed to pass along before he died was that when you slack off, what you’re really doing is choosing to fail because you didn’t try hard enough. It was a rational choice, his father had said, for people who would rather fail on purpose than risk finding out they’re not good enough, but if you made that choice you should at least be honest with yourself about what you were doing.
His shirt was sweaty, clammy, so he took it off and tied it around his waist. Instead of continuing up the driveway he walked north along the edge of the forest, eventually coming to the open locust grove visible from the front porch of the lodge. The trees sheltered an old livestock graveyard, bleached white cattle bones partly hidden in the grass, glowing in the sun like the remains of some ruined miniature city. He had no idea where they had come from. There was nothing in the old logbooks about anyone running cattle in the meadow.
He picked up a cow skull, peered into the shaded eye sockets lined with green lichen. The thin bone at its nose was chipped and cracked. Another totem for the office. He set it down with his coffee mug. A pelvis bone tangled in the grass ca
me free with a little tugging. He brushed it clean and turned it over in his hands. Bleached white in the sun, it was intact, symmetrical, curved gracefully and shaped like a helmet. In the front were two oval holes that seemed to stare. He set this next to the skull.
Moving into the sunstruck meadow, he stooped to pick up a rib from among the other bones, two feet long and curved like a sickle, square-stemmed at its base where a knob came out at a right angle. The inside edge of the rib was surprisingly sharp. He swung it at a tall thistle. The top half of the plant lifted, trembling, and tumbled into the grass. He swung the rib again, harder, cutting the thistle closer to its base.
He was falling into one of his trances, an angry version. His senses sharpened, the bright sunlight clanging around him, a breeze bending the hairs on his skin. For a long time he’d stepped on any hint of the violent part of himself that had caused so much trouble last year. But what could he hurt here? He stalked through the meadow until he found a copse of twelve-foot-tall pokeweed, where he lay about with the rib like Samson with his jawbone. A desperate and frenzied rage took him, his cutting strokes growing more violent, the soft, juicy stalks bursting in a spray of sap, the big plants heeling over to fall in slow motion, purple berries raining down. When he’d exhausted himself, he stopped and regarded the shattered pokeweed stalks, the green and purple carnage. It was just vegetation.
In the shelter of a small rise he found four oval impressions in the grass where deer had bedded. He curled up in one. The deer had made the ground comfortable, and no sticks or pebbles poked into his bare flesh. He would rest here until he felt better. The meager warmth from the sun was not enough to offset the chill of the breeze that puffed over his skin, raising goose bumps.
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