“Who is Virgil?” She had moved as far from the dead man as possible.
“He’s the Crow Indian who was with me. I don’t suppose you’ve seen a seven-and-a-half-foot man wearing a grizzly-bear headdress and bear cloak roaming around here anyplace?”
She looked at me, understandably worried. “No.”
I put the sleeping bag next to her along with the satellite phone and my backpack, took the ascent portion from the top, and detached the straps. “This is all I’ve got.”
She took the sleeping bag and covered herself. “The rest of the task force, the marshals?”
I looked at her, trying to decide what to say. She had nice eyes, smart and resilient.
I spoke looking straight at her, so that there wouldn’t be further questions. “McGroder survived. The last time I spoke with anybody they said that he was being transported down the mountain, but everyone else is dead.”
She was looking at me strangely again.
“What?”
Her expression changed from amused to concerned. “Did you know you’re talking to yourself?”
“I am?”
“Yes.”
I laughed through a yawn and nodded. “I have a tendency to do that, but we’ll be all right as long as I don’t start answering.” I yawned again. “Maybe I’ve been up here too long. Anyway, I’ve got to find sensible conversation somewhere.” There was a hip harness in a Velcro panel underneath the ascent pack, and I pulled the straps loose and connected the buckle. I sorted through the supplies I had, dropping the majority onto her lap. “I’ll take one of the water bottles and a little of the food.” I tossed the Fed phone where she could reach it more easily. “The reception on this thing has been going in and out. Strangely enough, it’s when I’m with Virgil that it doesn’t seem to want to work—maybe he’s tall enough that he’s causing interference. The battery is at about half, but keep trying and maybe it’ll work.”
She took the phone, glanced at the ascent pack and then up at me. “Where are you going?”
“After Shade.”
Her eyebrows collided over her bloodshot blue eyes as she leaned a little to the side. “Are you crazy?”
I turned my head and looked out into the gloom. “I’m beginning to wonder about that myself.”
A couple of moments passed as she tried to decide if she was going to argue with me and which point of attack on my lack of logic she was going to take. This was not a pause I was unfamiliar with in my dealings with women. “If you don’t mind me saying so, Sheriff—you look like shit.”
I placed the supplies in the ascent pack and zipped it. “Thanks.”
“I’m not kidding; do you know that the whole side of your head is covered in frozen blood? Did he hit you with one of those shots?”
I turned back to her, an old pro at hiding wounds. “No, I just fell.”
“Lean in here and let me look at your eyes; I think you’re concussed along with being hypothermic and who knows what else.” I didn’t do as she instructed, so she tried another line of attack. “I don’t know what the ambient temperature is or the windchill.”
I smiled at my boots. “Thankfully, the wind’s died down.”
Her voice took on a little edge. “What’s the elevation up here, something like twelve thousand feet?”
“Probably closer to thirteen.”
She shook her head at me. “It’s nighttime.”
“Yep.”
“You’ll die.”
I threw the strap over my shoulder, pretty sure it wasn’t going to fit around my coat. “He’s made it this far.”
She shook her head. “He’s certifiably insane.”
I stared at her. “Look, I don’t know what he’s thinking. I don’t know if he’s planning to sacrifice his life to finally stop those voices and visitations, or if he’s got some sort of escape in his head.” I sighed, pulled the strap of the rifle up, and settled my elbows on my knees. “You were his case psychologist.”
“Yes.” The .40 and the phone were still in her lap. “I wish I knew what he was doing, Sheriff. I was just recently assigned as part of the task force, so I’ve only been familiar with him for about a week.” She reached down, and I imagined she was massaging her ankle. “I’d like to think that he was making progress in coming to terms with what he’d done and what was going to happen to him, but I don’t think he’s suicidal. He initiated the contact with us, no preconditions, nothing. He said he just wanted to show us where the boy, Owen, had been buried.” She took a breath. “Whatever he’s got planned, though, the boy’s remains are key.”
I stood, aware that depleting my reserves with even a short conversation wasn’t wise. “The fellow who was with me, Virgil? He’s got a knack for showing up at some of the most unpredictable places. He’s hurt, and if he appears, keep him here. He’s kind of scary looking but don’t let that put you off.”
She picked up the semiautomatic. “I could stop you by shooting you.”
I yawned again; a big one this time. “You could, but I’m so tired I’m not sure if I’d notice.”
She nodded and then translated it into shaking her head. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll look for your friend. What else have I got to do?” She pulled at the sleeping bag. “How am I supposed to keep him here if he shows?”
I thought about it. “Tell him stories; he likes stories.” I pulled the goggles down over my eyes and watched the world turn amber-glow again. I wondered how long I could wear them outside in the darkness. I pointed at some of the candy in her lap. “Give him a Mallo Cup; he really likes those.”
I took out my gloves, careful to keep the bone lodged in my jacket. “This whole thing with Shade, it’s kind of gotten personal.”
“Between you and him?”
I pulled up the balaclava, fixed the rolled collar of my jacket, and pushed my hat down on my head. “Well, yes, and between Shade and Virgil; Owen White Buffalo was his grandson, and even with a slug and a half in him, Virgil is some kind of formidable.”
She looked at me, incredulity playing across her face. “You’re worried about Raynaud Shade?”
“At this point . . .” I reached over to get the dead man’s snowshoes, unbuckling the more modern version of the ones Virgil had left upside down on the trail. “I’m worried about all of us.”
I smiled at her one last time, but with my frozen features, who knew what it looked like. I turned and walked out into the steadily falling snow.
I trudged up the mountain not expecting to find much, relatively sure that Shade had continued toward his final goal, which I assumed was the top of Cloud Peak. There was a slight depression in the snow where he’d made his way, but I couldn’t see any tracks where Virgil might’ve followed.
The spot beside the cairn where he’d lain near the edge was still evident. I knelt and brushed some of the snow away. There was blood, and I could see where the round from my rifle had hit the lip of the rock and had splintered it, effectively turning it into shrapnel. The majority of the frozen blood was near where his head and shoulders would’ve been.
I’d gotten him, but he was still moving.
I readjusted the goggles; it didn’t seem to make much difference with or without them. I knew that if I followed the cirque up the last scree field, I would finally get to the Knife’s Edge, a redoubtable spine about as wide as a city sidewalk that dropped off a thousand feet on either side.
I’d probably take my goggles off for that.
Then it would be a case of simply bulling my way up the incline that led to the lightning-hammered top of Cloud Peak. At that point, there would be nowhere else for Raynaud Shade to go, or me either, for that matter.
I rose, turned my back to kingdom come, and started up, steadying my rate into the mule pace that had gotten me this far. That’s how I was thinking about myself as of late, like some Marine mule that didn’t have enough sense to lie down and die. It wasn’t the most comforting of thoughts, but it got me up the hill.
Thankfully, the m
ajority of the snow had been swept from the ridge, making it easier to spot solid footing. It was now fully dark, and the only good thing about that was that I couldn’t see the passes that led east and west thousands of feet below.
The wind seemed to have let up, and I was glad that of all the elements I was contending with, the ever-prevalent Wyoming wind had been the one to decide to give me a break. That was a miracle in itself.
Maybe the Old Cheyenne in the Camp of the Dead or the Crow from the Beyond-Country were holding back the wind for me with their arms outstretched, battered by the gusts and ceding none.
Sacred lands for the Cheyenne and the Crow, we whites had been in the Bighorns for only a couple of hundred years—they had been here for thousands. There is a knowledge that comes of a place you’ve lived in for that long. These high mountain canyons that had served as highways for the indigenous peoples, allowing them passage from one hunting ground to another and relief from the summer heat below and the gathering of medicines, are their most hallowed grounds. At the center of all this grandeur and history was the mountain that I was climbing—Cloud Peak, 13,167 feet of geologic event.
But right now, it was just cold as hell.
I tried to distract myself by thinking of other things; I thought about the story that Virgil had told me about how he had lost his grandson that sunny October afternoon. I’d wondered about the animosity that seemed inherent in the relationship that he had with his son, a man who, after not seeing his father for so many years, had responded by spitting in his face. I could only imagine the panic that must’ve overtaken Virgil when he’d returned to the truck to find only the indentation in the saddle blanket seat cover. To not know what had happened to the boy—it was almost as if the gods themselves, the ones from the giant Crow’s stories, had come and whisked Owen White Buffalo away.
The boy stands, and there was no fear in him; he could see the other that would welcome him and make him whole again. He dreams of the truck from which he was taken, silent now without his breathing. It is almost as if it is as it was meant to be, in that he never saw himself as a man; never saw himself as tall and broad-shouldered.
He sees the knife the almost-man carries at the side of his leg and worries for his grandfather, the one who has blamed himself for so many things. The one who will sit in the tin shack, the television the only voices to hold the silence of lost battles away—one more tragedy to take the place of all the others. The sound of breaking glass thrown against the thin walls as the boy’s memory stands before him, eagle-armed, waiting to be lifted by his grandfather and the gods.
Shade’s bullet had detoured at the thirty-fourth canto, which described the lowest ring of hell, the ninth circle, reserved for those who would betray. Traitors—Virgil’s last remark. He had warned me about the driver, just as he’d taunted me with the words innocent people, over and over again.
Granddaughter.
Had Virgil developed shaman tendencies since cloistering himself in the mountains? He’d made those prophecies with so much certainty, just as he’d predicted the death of someone close to me as we’d crossed the frozen surface of Lake Marion. I don’t think he’d meant his own death or mine—but then, whose?
Granddaughter.
I was glad it was a girl, if it was at all. I continued to cultivate the fantasy. She would look like my daughter; she would look like my wife. I held that thought since it comforted me above all the others.
I tripped over something, stumbled and caught my balance. I looked to see what it was and saw that I’d angled toward the very edge of the cliffs between Cloud Peak and Bomber Mountain and almost stepped blithely into the limitless void.
The ice water that ran through my bowels wasn’t figurative.
There were swirling masses of snowflakes that changed direction with the brief gusts that moved the air—and then nothing—blackness, farther than I could see, a thousand feet at least.
I breathed in and consciously told my feet to step back. I must’ve been getting close to the Knife’s Edge; as a matter of orienteering, it should’ve been just to my left.
Pushing the goggles up, I glanced in that direction but everything was still invisible. It was as if the world fell away from me in all directions.
I was feeling disoriented and dizzy, so much so that I was afraid I might fall down and a hell of a lot farther than I wanted. I planted the butt of the rifle stock in the snow and kneeled in front of the raised lip at the precipice. My stomach surged, and I felt nauseous, almost as if I had fallen.
My lungs burned as I forced air in and out, and I finally laughed at myself for coming so far to almost end like this. The laugh echoed across the divide and bounced back at me again and felt so good, I did it a few more times.
It was a good thing I’d stumbled over the stones at the edge, or I’d have joined the Thunderbirds of Crow legend. I thought about how it would’ve felt flying for those few brief seconds before I dropped like a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound side of beef.
I reached out and patted the rocks piled at the edge that had up to this point resisted the urge to follow their brethren below. The flat of my hand thumped against their raised surface.
It didn’t feel right.
The snow was stubborn where it had melted from the warmth of something underneath and then frozen again. The rifle fell to my side and clattered in an attempt to throw itself over the edge, but I slapped it still and pulled it back to me. I finally pushed the chunks of ice and snow away, revealing what appeared to be the great, silver-humped back of a grizzly bear.
“Oh, Virgil.” My voice sounded strange in my mouth, and my eyes risked tearing; I could feel them freezing in the stubble on my face. “Even dead you find a way to save me.”
16
I sat there for a while with my hand on his immense back and then carefully stacked a rock cairn at the edge of the cliff with the few loose stones that I could find so that if anything happened to me, someone would recover his remains.
It was the closest I’d come to just quitting, sitting down in the snow and going no farther. I would just stay here with my buddy and collect snow till the spring thaw.
But that wasn’t what he wanted.
I thought about all the things that Virgil had told me and wondered what he’d been thinking about when he died. I imagined that he was probably thinking about the same thing I’d be thinking about when my journey ended: about his family, his loved ones—and even the not so loved.
Rising up slowly, I was aware of the weakness in my legs, the numbness in my feet and hands, and the fog in my head—it was as if I could feel myself, bone by muscle by tendon, slowly coming apart. The headache had returned with a dull thumping and with pain behind my eyes. I thought about the dreams I’d been having, what they meant, and maybe even who could’ve sent them.
I looked down at the mass of fur, once again covering with snow.
He wanted his grandson back, and I was the only one here to do the job.
Feeling the bone in my pocket, I knew it was time to go get the rest of Owen White Buffalo. I could feel the cold, creeping ruin that Raynaud Shade brought with him, an infection that trailed him like a curse. He and I were coming down to it now. There would be nowhere to go for either of us.
I picked up the rifle that I’d left lying in the snow and turned east. I looked at Virgil for just a moment more. “A-ho, baa-laax.”
I stepped down onto the Knife’s Edge on my numb feet, my hobbled legs, and with a headache that split my skull with the shearing force of a blue-green glacier.
A lot of people who try to climb this mountain make it this far but no farther. You can convince yourself that you’re on solid ground and nothing’s going to happen to you up to this point, but when you have nowhere to look but down, the game changes. I had the benefit of not being able to see very far, but it was as if the dancing flakes snapping into the distance and disappearing from view were pulling at me, reaching and trying to take me with them into the darkne
ss.
I thought again about the spirits that I’d encountered in the mountains more than a year ago and the resonance they’d placed in my life, even though I still refused to believe that they existed. Maybe they’d left me, deserting me in the same manner in which I had deserted them.
There was a high ridge to the left that flattened and then sloped away, unlike the one on the right side that just fell off precipitously. If I fell, I was going to concentrate on falling to my left.
The snow was deeper on the downhill side, making it that much more treacherous, so I found myself listing to the ridge. I put a gloved hand along the edge, using it like a rail, and kept my vision sturdily planted ahead of me in hopes that my meandering boots wouldn’t lead me astray.
There were shadows ahead, indistinct and nebulous, writhing with the flying snow. I tried to concentrate on the shapes, but as soon as I looked, they would swirl away and dissolve in the dark air.
It was getting a little spooky so I did what I usually do when I got those feelings; I took off my one glove and slipped the .45 from my holster. The long gun was fine, but I couldn’t see further than twenty feet and decided the sidearm would do for indiscriminate shooting. There wasn’t anyone else up here other than Raynaud Shade, so it wasn’t like I was going to hit anybody who was innocent.
There was no reason for it, but I stopped, hesitating on taking that next step almost as if I were standing in a minefield. My head was killing me, but I must’ve heard the faint click in my synapses. He was somewhere out there, and it was possible that he was seeing better than I was.
“Move.”
I threw myself to the left helped by an aberrant gust that seemed to propel me, and fell against the spine of the Knife’s Edge. I felt the air move along with the two rounds from the Armalite as they bored holes through the snowflakes like angry, hunting eyes. Both shots passed through the spot where I’d been standing only a second ago.
Lying there in the snow, I tried to triangulate the fire at least enough to give me an idea of where he might be—with the visibility as limited as it was, he had to be close.
Walt Longmire 07 - Hell Is Empty Page 22