“So that’s why we’re here?” Martha said. “To turn over a plank of wood?”
“Sam had a guide trip in September. I had him put the tin back. If it’s there, then you have nothing to worry about. He’s gone. Maybe he never existed at all.”
At the cabin, Sean turned the plank. The playing card tin wasn’t there. Nothing was there but sawdust and mouse feces.
They looked at each other.
“This place gives me the heebie-jeebies,” Martha said.
* * *
—
That evening, they fished the riffle below their camp at Sunset Cliff, Sean taking two browns on a cone-headed bugger with blue and copper flash that he called the Smith River Special. Martha passed him on the bank as she hiked back to the tent.
“They’re giving me the finger,” she said. “I’ll get the fire started.”
“Here, give one of these a few casts.”
He took a pewter fly box from a vest pocket. The lid was labeled USUAL SUSPECTS, #2, #4, #6. Martha’s look was dubious.
“I thought this was an Atlantic salmon pattern,” she said.
He opened the lid. Held the fly box out toward her like he was offering a tin of mints.
The flies were gorgeous, with rust orange wings, jungle cock eyes, and hackle collars in kingfisher blue. Martha’s eyes were drawn to the glinting gold hook that one of the larger flies was tied on. Her brow furrowed. Those glints of gold didn’t belong to a hook.
She took the fly box from Sean’s hand. She felt her fingers trembling as they stirred the fox fur, guessing what she was going to find before she found it. The gold band was pinned to the sheepskin lining in the box by the hook of one of the flies, the russet wing all but hiding it.
She unhooked the fly and placed the ring in her palm. She looked at Sean, who had knelt in the shallows.
“It was my mother’s,” he said. “My sister sent it to me after she died.”
“Are you asking me to marry you?”
“I’m on my knees in the Smith River in October. The water isn’t warm.”
The ring was a simple gold band with a Celtic design. She turned her hand so that it glinted.
“Aren’t you going to try it on?”
“I don’t have a ring finger.”
“You have one on your right hand.”
“You haven’t asked me yet.”
“Will you, Martha, do me the honor of being my wife?”
“The possibility exists,” she said.
“The possibility exists?”
“Yes,” she said. “You’ve only kept me on the hook for five years.”
“On the hook?”
“Quit repeating what I say. Yes, I’ll marry you. Of course I’ll marry you.” She laughed even as she felt herself trembling, and blinked away the tears in the corners of her eyes.
“Can I get up now?”
“I sort of like you where you are. Oh, okay. Only if you’ll kiss me, though.”
EPILOGUE
The Wolves of Winter
Harold Little Feather’s grandfather liked to say that winter was a wolf. It preyed upon the old who no longer had anything to give back to the herd except the wisdom that they had already imparted. It preyed upon the young who couldn’t keep pace and so strengthened the herd by eliminating the weak. And for those who remained living, the wolf was the night song to remind them to be ever vigilant, for danger could lie anywhere.
Harold had first heard this allegory while hunting elk on a frozen breast of snow on the eastern front of the Rocky Mountains. Before him was a small fire, and above, the diamond dust of the stars, and as his grandfather had spoken, Harold heard the voices of a hunting pack floating down from some faraway basin.
“What do you mean, Grandfather?” Harold had said. He tried not to betray his fear. Beyond the old man, the boy could see the firelight glinting off the barrel of the Winchester that leaned against a tree.
“It means that when you hear something approaching in the night, no matter how faint the sound, that you do not respond as one who hears but does not heed, that where another hunter might add a log to the fire and fall back to sleep, you keep your eyes open and your rifle in reach.
“Today,” his grandfather said, “I am your ears in the darkness and I am your eyes in the light, as I have been since you were born. So was my promise to your mother, and you will remain in my heart into the next world. But there will come a time when I can no longer be vigilant for you, or be your rifle at hand, and then it will be up to you to avoid the jaws of the wolf.”
He had described the animal to Harold, this winter wolf, as being bigger than other wolves, and said that it could change shape and represent any face of danger, whereas ordinary wolves could not.
All through Harold’s life, he had heeded his grandfather’s warning, although he had never heard another elder speak of winter wolves, either as the spirit of a season or as an animal of flesh and blood, nor had he found mention of them in the histories of the people. Thus it became his story alone, and he never forgot the lesson or the night it was given, even this many winters after his grandfather’s passing.
So it was that on this night, when he opened a window to air out the fumes from the lantern he’d been burning, his first reaction to the creaking footfalls in the new snow was to check for the Winchester. Slipping it from its case, which he kept unzipped under his bed, he fingered the hole in the stock, where it had been struck by the bullet meant for him six months before. He walked down the steps to the dirt-and-straw floor of the barn, the beam of his flashlight catching the eyes of the resident barn owl, which remained motionless. His leg was much better now, his limp almost unnoticeable. The stick he used to walk up and down steps was only a precaution. He set it down on a hay bale and scratched at the new tattoo on his left bicep, the fox tracks he’d had inked when the cast on his ankle came off and the doctor said he wasn’t going to lose his leg after all.
Assured that there was nothing in the barn but what belonged, he opened the door to the night. He thought for a moment that it might be Marcus, but to Harold’s great satisfaction Marcus had gone back to high school for his final semester, and he had talked to him only a few hours earlier, happy, as he always was, to hear his son call him “Dad.”
Anyway, if it was Marcus, he’d have driven right up to the barn and there would be Cochise. There was no Cochise, and not seeing anyone, Harold’s eyes lit upon his old pickup in the drive. In the moonlight flooding through the windows, he could make out the shoes that hung from the rearview mirror. They were the ruby slippers that the little girl had worn on the night she saw the scarecrow, returned to him, along with his rifle, after his capsized canoe had been recovered. The girl had told Harold that the shoes were magic and would keep him safe. So far they had done so, although they had long since ceased to glow when he pressed on the heels.
The footfalls stopped, and then they started again and Harold saw a figure disengage from the silhouette of the truck, the dark outline bent forward from the waist, the arms hugging the chest.
“Is that you, Harold?”
“It’s me.”
“What is it, like twenty below? I’ve never been so cold in my life.”
“Something like that.”
Now the woman, it was a woman, was illuminated in the light from the naked bulb Harold had switched on. Bringing her fresh cold scent with her, she stepped past him into the barn. He heard the tinkling, icicle quality of her voice that he’d first heard at Camp Baker on the Smith River.
“I parked down at the house. Your sister said where to find you. She didn’t tell me how far a walk it was. I got the impression she didn’t much approve of me coming.”
“When it comes to women, she doesn’t much approve of anyone coming,” Harold said. “What are you doing here, Carol Ann?”
“You
told me if I ever got rid of the bastard and got my daughter off to college, that I could start over and look you up. Well, guess what? I did.” Her laugh was music, though her voice sounded a little shaky. “I hope I didn’t read that wrong. I know it was just one night. I know it’s sort of sudden.”
Then she seemed to find her center, and said, laughing, “As I recall, Harold, the first time I saw you, you were packing a gun and here you are with nothing changed. Maybe I better turn around while the getting’s good.”
Harold set the rifle down next to his stick. “How long have you been in Montana?”
“Since about six hours, I guess. I was in Missouri the day before yesterday.”
Her breath made clouds.
“Wow,” she said. “Wow, that was cold.” And she came into his arms and buried her face against his neck, her nose like ice.
“You’re so warm. You’re just what I need.”
She made no attempt to disengage, and Harold, who was ever vigilant but too often alone, made no attempt to move away.
He switched off the light and they held each other in the darkness.
“Isn’t it beautiful out, though?” she said.
After a while they went up the steps, while below them and above them and all around them winter pulled its satin robe close, and if there really were wolves near enough to hear their songs, whether they were winter wolves or just the ordinary ones, on this night they were silent.
Acknowledgments
A Death in Eden is a work of fiction, and the characters and the organizations in the novel are fictional. However, a very real cloud hangs over the Smith River Canyon. Whether that cloud is dark or light depends on the position you take on a copper mining operation proposed in the Smith’s headwaters, which critics fear will poison the river. Tintina Resources, an international mining company with controlling interests in Australia, is the driving force behind the Black Butte Copper Project, which would mine copper ore under Sheep Creek, the Smith’s most important spawning tributary. The company promises that its operation will not harm water quality. Environmental groups, including American Rivers, which listed the Smith as our country’s fourth most endangered river in 2016, disagree vehemently.
To research this novel, I spoke with many people on both sides of the issue, attended public forums on the mine conducted by the Montana Department of Environmental Quality, which must sign off on the project before an environmental analysis is begun, and joined a tour of the mine site led by Jerry Zieg, the senior vice president of exploration for Tintina. At the time, I thought I might write about this issue for Field & Stream, where I am an editor. For their courtesy in answering my questions, and for their thorough and honest presentation of the project from a pro-mining perspective, I thank Mr. Zieg, as well as Bob Jacko and Chance Matthews, who are also associated with the project.
On the other side of the controversy, I thank Scott Bosse, the director of the Northern Rockies region of American Rivers, and Mike Fiebig, the associate director, for answering questions and reviewing parts of the novel for accuracy. I also am indebted to biologist and environmental lawyer Jory Ruggiero, for his help in deciphering legalities involved in licensing and operating hard-rock mines. Any mistakes of fact are my own. And despite the rough treatment I gave them in the novel, I wish to thank the U.S. Forest Service and Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks’ workers who supervise the Smith River floating operation and help make it a wonderful experience.
For reviewing my book from the Native American perspective, I am indebted to historian, college instructor, storyteller, poet, and writer Dr. Joe McGeshick, a member of the Sokaogon Chippewa tribe, who was raised on the Assiniboine and Sioux reservations in northern Montana. I also wish to thank Dr. Shane Doyle, a member of the Crow tribe and an instructor of Native American studies for Montana State University.
Down at water level, I thank my brother, Kevin McCafferty, for organizing our expeditions down the Smith River, and Joe Gutkoski. Joe has floated the Smith more than fifty times, and his insight into the river’s history and pictograph sites proved invaluable. I also thank authors/river explorers Alan Kesselheim and Marypat Zitzer for allowing me to steal the identity of their three-legged dog Beans, who is Cochise in the novel.
For inspiration during the writing of the book, I often turned to a limited-edition print of a Monte Dolack painting called Smith River in June. Monte painted this landscape masterpiece for Montana State Parks’ seventy-fifth anniversary, and he has come closer than anyone in portraying the splendor of this canyon in an artistic medium.
Of course there would be no A Death in Eden if not for Dominick Abel, my literary agent, and Kathryn Court, the publisher of Penguin Books, and her team, including Victoria Savanh, Bruce Giffords, Ben Petrone, and Sara Chuirazzi. They are the best.
For their early morning moral support, I thank my friends at Wild Joe’s—Kaila Gill, Erica Brubaker, Sarah Grigg, Sydney Knox, and Sammy Haight.
Last but far from least, I thank my wife, Gail, my first and best editor, and my children, Jessie and Thomas, for journeying with me down the Smith and through life.
About the Author
Keith McCafferty is the survival and outdoor skills editor of Field & Stream, and the author of The Royal Wulff Murders, The Gray Ghost Murders, Dead Man's Fancy, Crazy Mountain Kiss, which won the 2016 Spur Award for Best Western Contemporary Novel, Buffalo Jump Blues, and Cold Hearted River. Winner of the Traver Award for angling literature, he is a two-time National Magazine awards finalist. He lives with his wife in Bozeman, Montana.
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