Stabenow, Dana - Shugak 09 - Hunter's Moon

by Hunter's Moon(lit)

  The voices stopped. Kate stayed where she was.

  Dieter's voice said, "You'll help us." It wasn't a request.

  She opened her eyes and looked Dieter right in the eye. "The best way to go about it is for one of you to hold the rear legs apart while the other uses the knife to open him up. Start at the anus, one cut straight up the belly to the throat, and let the guts fall out. Don't nick any of the internal organs--" or any more than you already have, she thought"--or you'll taint the meat." She paused. "Of course, you'll have to haul him to dry ground first. Might have avoided that if you waited until he'd worked his way on shore, which was where he was heading when you shot him."

  "We're not taking the meat," Eberhard said, his deep voice quietly menacing.

  "Then we're not going back to camp," Kate said, just as quietly.

  If Dieter's face had been red before it was purple now. "You can't talk to me like this! No one talks to me like this!" "Then you're about due. aren't you?" Kate said coolly. She looked up at the sky. "Better get a move on, guys. Sun's headed down, and we haven't got much time left to butcher and get back to camp before dark."

  FIVE.

  Exit, pursued by a bear.

  THEY RETREATED A FEW FEET AND KATE HEARD THE murmur of German, Dieter's voice louder and more insistent, Eberhard's calmer and less ruffled.

  There was some movement and Kate opened her eyes to see Dieter shoulder the pack board and Eberhard hand him his rifle. They waded into the brush, the sounds of breaking branches interspersed with muttered curses.

  Well, shit. Kate sighed. Looked like the boys had called her bluff and decided to head back for camp on their own.

  She got up and eeled her way through the trees to the moose's body, lying where they'd left it, beheaded, half in and half out of the water.

  The blood was still oozing from the jagged flesh of the neck, the bony spine protruding from the skin and hair of the nape.

  There was a rustle in the brush behind her. It was a small rustle so she didn't turn around. The smell of blood had had enough time to spread; an aroma that said

  "Dinner is served!" to every omnivore for miles around. It was a small lake without much flow-through, or in other words not much of a built-in mechanism for self-cleaning, and probably not filled with flesh-eating fish, either. She didn't have much choice and sighed again. Maybe she should have batted her eyes at the guys, just once. Oh well. No help for it now.

  She had a length of line in her pack; she rigged a noose and tossed it over the branch of a nearby cottonwood. The noose tightened around the moose's rear left foot, and after much straining and swearing he rolled toward her, coming to rest on his left side, mostly on the bank and out of the water, where at least he wouldn't foul the lake. She left the line hooked to his foot and took a half hitch around the trunk of the tree with the free end, and then with one swift stroke of her skinning knife opened the moose up, as Abel would have said, "from asshole to appetite." The guts spilled out on the ground, the moose between them and the water and a nice, full-bodied stink rising up to perfume the air and entice the clean-up crew.

  There was a squawk above her head and she looked up to see a seagull, no, two, gliding by with a critical eye to assess the possibilities of the situation. There was another rustle in the brush and Kate looked around, expecting to see a fox, or even a wolf.

  Instead a man who looked like one of the lead singers for ZZ Top stepped into the tiny clearing.

  He was thin to the point of emaciation, with hollow, pock-marked cheeks.

  His jeans were patched at the knee over storklike legs, and held up by a wide, worn leather belt. His shirt was a plaid flannel so faded the checks were indistinguishable, and his beard was long enough to be tucked into his belt with the shirt. He was close enough for Kate to smell how long it had been since his last bath, and it was too late to take those teeth to the dentist.

  His eyes were dark and watchful. Right then, they were fixed unwaveringly on her.

  Without consciously deciding to Kate reached for her rifle. The stock felt infinitely reassuring as it slid into her hands and she felt marginally safer.

  George had said not to talk to Crazy Emmett, not even to look at him, but he hadn't envisioned this scenario. "I'm Kate Shugak," she said, keeping her voice as neutral as possible. "I work for George Perry, the pilot who owns the hunting lodge west of here. You must be Cr--you must be Emmett. Cabin on the lake a mile or so that way?"

  He nodded at the moose. "Yours?"

  Evidently Crazy Emmett did not believe that introductions were necessary. "Belongs to one of the hunters I was guiding."

  "You going to pack him out? If you're not, I'll take him."

  From all reports, that was a long speech for Crazy Emmett, who had had his fill of teaching teenagers who didn't listen, and before he got to the end of it Kate had decided. She hadn't been looking forward to coming back tomorrow and finishing the butchering and packing out the meat, and she didn't feel under any particular obligation to mind Dieter and Eberhard's meat for them. "Sure," she said. "He's all yours. You want some help?"

  "No." Crazy Emmett looked at her again. It was a slow and thorough inspection and at the end of it Kate felt as if she had been stripped naked. "I haven't had a woman in a while."

  The contrast between his precise diction and his Deliverance appearance was disconcerting. Her .30-06 had never felt so comforting in her hands.

  She met his eyes steadily. Never let them see you sweat.

  "You aren't going to have one today, either," she said, fighting the urge to take a step back. Retreat to Crazy Emmett would look like surrender and an invitation to attack.

  He gave her a long, assessing look, estimating his chances of getting the rifle away from her before she shot him. He shifted where he stood and her eyes dropped involuntarily to see his erection strain at the front of his faded jeans. Is that a gun in your pocket or are you just glad to see me, she thought, and slid her right forefinger oh so casually inside the trigger guard of the .30-06. The safety was already off.

  They stared at each other for what felt to Kate like a very long time.

  Crazy Emmett broke first, setting his rifle against a tree to un shoulder a small pack. He pulled out a long and extremely sharp skinning knife.

  Kate backed up, one careful step at a time. Crazy Emmett, in an about-face that was disconcerting, acted as though she were no longer there. His indifference was not reassuring; she had the feeling that if she tripped he'd be on her before she hit the ground. She took the utmost care not to.

  When enough brush was between her and him she turned and moved smartly up the trail, ears tuned for any pursuit. Mercifully, there wasn't any.

  There were other rustles in the brush going the opposite direction, though. Crazy Emmett wasn't going to have any problem disposing of scraps.

  Somehow Kate didn't think there would be all that many.

  She had to hand it to Dieter and Eberhard; they'd made it a whole three hundred yards before losing the trail. Their revised course would have had them stumbling into Anchorage in three or four weeks. She was interested to see that Dieter, not Eberhard, was carrying the trophy.

  Hanging from the back of a pack board insecurely fastened with loose-fitting and ill-tied rope, the moose looked as disgusted as Kate felt.

  As she came up on them, Dieter was loosening the straps of the board, trying to shift the load in what appeared to be an attempt to ease a twinge in his back. He'd set his rifle down, butt to the ground, and then one of the brow tines got caught in his pants pocket. He turned and another brow tine caught the Merkel's trigger.

  Of course the Merkel's safety was off. The rifle boomed. Dieter spun around like a top. A bullet sang over Kate's head and instinctively she ducked. So did Eber hard, hauling his Weatherby up in a defensive stance.

  Dieter stopped spinning. He staggered a few steps in Kate's direction and then stood where he was, staring down at his upper arm, a white, shocked look on his face as r
ich red blood welled from a neat crease bisecting his right bicep. He said something in German, his voice dazed.

  Kate got slowly to her feet, feeling a little lightheaded herself.

  Dieter blinked at her. "I shot myself," he said, enunciating each word with studied care.

  "You sure did," Kate said, and she wasn't smiling.

  "I--I shot myself," he repeated. He touched the blood with one finger and stared at it. "But how? The safety, I know I put the safety on."

  Yeah, right, Kate thought. "You'd better let me take a look." Eberhard made as if to get in the way and she halted him with a glare. "I used to be an EMT, an emergency medical technician. It's just a crease, Eberhard, I think I can handle it."

  She had a first aid kit in her pack, which included a packet of gauze, and she wrapped this around Dieter's arm and knotted the ends. He was swearing in German by the time she was done. There was aspirin in the kit, too, and Kate shook out two tablets and handed them over. "We've got something stronger at camp," she said, "but first we have to get there. Can you make it?"

  He nodded, washing the pills back with water from the bottle of Evian he pulled from a pocket attached to his belt. Next to it was a pocket for a Swiss army knife. Another larger knife with an ebony handle protruded from a leather sheath on the other side of his waist. A compass dangled from one belt loop and a thermometer from another. Kate squinted. It was fifty-three degrees Fahrenheit. Not bad for an afternoon in late September.

  "Okay, let's go," she said. "We've got plenty of time, we'll take it slow and easy."

  Eberhard shouldered the trophy, and neither man said anything when Kate turned and headed back in the direction from which they had come.

  Neither did they say anything when she found the correct trail and headed west.

  They gained the top of the ridge two hours later. There was no sign of Berg, Senta or George. "Wait here," she said to Dieter and Eberhard, and went in search.

  Berg was easy to find. He was a big man and unskilled in wilderness navigation; he'd left a trail through the brush three moose wide. He was lying in the middle of a blueberry patch, fingers and mouth stained blue, a deep, phlegmy snore issuing forth, thick-lensed glasses folded neatly and protruding from his pocket protector, along with a couple of pens and a ruler marked in centimeters. His rifle was leaning against the fork of a small alder some twenty feet away, the stock barely discernible between the leaves.

  Kate kicked his foot gently. He woke with a snort and gawped up at her.

  "Enjoying the blueberries?" Kate said.

  Berg sat up, brushing the twigs from his hair and shirt, face serene.

  He didn't appear to realize that he'd been lost up until a couple of minutes ago. "Yes," he said. "The berries are very good."

  "Yes," Kate agreed. "He thinks so, too." She pointed.

  Berg couldn't see what she was pointing at so he lumbered to his feet and craned his neck around a small stand of mountain hemlock. A stick broke with a sharp crack beneath his foot, flushing a group of ptarmigan, noted blueberry aficionados, into startled flight. In the same moment Kate heard footsteps coming up the path behind her.

  Berg met the startled eyes of a half-grown black bear picking berries not ten feet from where he was sitting. They regarded each other for a split second, and then the man let out a yell and the cub let out a squall and the big man galloped off in one direction and the little bear in another.

  "Exit, pursued by a bear," Kate said, unable to stop herself, and burst out laughing. Seconds later Dieter came around her with his Merkel clutched in his hands. Evidently the aspirin had taken effect.

  Kate stopped laughing and said severely, "Put that down, Dieter, that little cub didn't do you any harm. There isn't enough meat on him to feed a mouse and what there is will taste like fish anyway at this time of year." Her voice rose as he galloped by. "He's not big enough for a rug or a trophy, dammit, and it's not bear season yet anyway!"

  Eberhard followed, Weatherby at the ready. Kate swore and lit out in pursuit. The two men sounded like a couple of water buffalo crashing through the brush and the cub's frightened squalls must have been audible for ten miles. Kate hoped most sincerely that the cub was on his own.

  She caught up with the three of them in a small clearing. The bear cub was frantically scrabbling up a knobby young cottonwood with Dieter, red-faced, sweating and determined, close behind. The Merkel had been cast off and Dieter now had the ebony-handled knife clenched between his teeth. Eberhard watched from the ground, Weatherby held at the ready in case the vicious animal attacked his boss, who probably outweighed the poor little bear by fifty pounds.

  "Oh for crying out loud," Kate said, disgusted, and kept a weather eye peeled for the bear's mama. He looked even younger up a tree, and he was letting the world know of his distress.

  The cottonwood wobbled back and forth across the sky with the howling cub clutching to the trunk twenty feet in the air. Dieter was shinnying up from below, looking like a pirate who had lost his ship.

  The cub looked over his shoulder and beheld Long John Silver at his heels. He'd been in the berry patch for the same reason Berg and the ptarmigan had, and it was all too much for him; with one terrified bawl his sphincter muscle gave out and he cut loose with about a gallon of half-digested berries that engulfed Dieter in a reeking flood of dark bluish brown. Dieter gave a cry of outrage, a mistake, let go of the tree to paw at his mouth, and slid ignominiously down the trunk to land hard on his fanny. He threw up immediately, and kept on retching, until the cub's blueberries and that morning's breakfast and that afternoon's sandwiches had all landed in his lap, until there couldn't be so much as a teaspoonful of fluid left in his stomach.

  By then, the cub was long gone, having dropped to the ground and lit out for points vaguely southeast, assisted on his way by a shot from Eberhard's Weatherby that narrowly missed him, the report of which made Kate's ears ring for some thirty seconds afterward. At the rate he was going, Kate estimated the little cub would be in Tyonek before dark.

  Kate was laughing so hard she couldn't speak. Dieter was swearing in German again, and from the tone of his voice and the fire in what you could see of his eye, Kate thought a momentary retreat the wisest course of action. She choked back her laughter, although irrepressible little giggles kept surfacing inadvertently. "Get yourself cleaned up," she said. She dug in her pack and tossed him a box of Wash'n Dri towels.

  "I'll see if I can't find George and Senta. We'll wait for you by the spike camp."

  She beat feet back to where the trail crossed the ridge, marked by the three fifty-five-gallon drums that constituted the spike camp. Each contained the bare essentials for a couple of hunters caught outside overnight on a hike: a tent, two sleeping bags and a store of freeze-dried food with a small set of cooking utensils and a Sterno stove. There was a wrench taped to the side of the barrel to open it up, judged too complicated for a grizzly to understand and employ.

  Berg was standing nearby, licking berry juice from his fingers. "You shouldn't have lit out like that," Kate told him, "you missed all the fun."

  Berg looked startled, as if unaccustomed to being directly addressed in civil tones. "Please excuse me," he said, and sidled over to stand behind a tree, presumably out of range. It must be unfortunate to be that large and to live a life in the preeminent desire to avoid all attention.

  Footsteps thudded up the path, and Kate turned to see George and Senta running the last few feet to the top of the ridge. "What was that?"

  George said breathlessly, skidding to a halt. "We heard something screaming--was it a bear?--and a shot. Did you get charged?" "Not exactly," Kate said.

  George looked baffled. "What, then?"

  "It was kind of the other way around," Kate said. Senta's long blond hair had come free of its intricate knot and now tumbled in glorious disarray around a glowing face. She hadn't bothered to tuck her shirt back into her belt or her cuffs into her boots. As for George, he virtually radiated that purring grat
ification specific to the male of the species immediately following a score in the sack.

  Both of them carried rifles in one hand and fanny packs and pack boards by their straps in the other. Kate raised an eyebrow, and said in her blandest voice, "So, did you manage to find Berg?" "Berg?" George said in a blank voice, and then had the grace to look a little guilty, just a little, not a lot. He exchanged a furtive look with Senta and said, "Uh, no, we didn't." He looked at the sun, seemed to realize how much time had passed and checked his watch. "Christ! I mean, he's still lost? You haven't found him either?"

  "I was minding my own hunters," Kate said virtuously, "and Berg's name was not included on that list."