Stabenow, Dana - Shugak 09 - Hunter's Moon

by Hunter's Moon(lit)

  After twenty minutes of hearing and seeing nothing more alarming than a raven soar overhead, Kate slipped beneath the birch's trunk and down the bank to kneel and examine the tracks on the road: two four-wheelers with trailers, day old, indentations puddled with rainfall. She tried to remember the tread on the four-wheelers. Would this be going or coming?

  Going, she decided. There was a third set, newer and coming back.

  Eberhard and Senta on their triumphant trip home. She repressed the surge of rage the sight caused, and forced herself to concentrate.

  No new tracks since, wheel or shoe, other than an occasional cloven hoof or bear claw, normal enough for the area and a far more reassuring sight.

  She set off up the track at a stiff jog, willing her limbs, which had become stiff and sore with the wait, to warm again. Her clothes had dried on her body but she didn't seem to be able to get warm. Cold she was, cold from the inside out, so cold she couldn't even shiver.

  She was numb in more than mind.

  After half a mile the road became a series of switchbacks up the face of the three-thousand-foot ridge. Kate paused and tried to think. It had taken forty-five minutes the last time she'd hiked from the base to the ridgetop.

  The last time she'd hiked it had been the week before, with Jack, when Kate hit the slope with grim-faced determination, emptying her mind of anything else but the need to get to the spike camp. The grade was steep and punishing and her legs were aching before she reached the first hairpin turn. The good news was that she was definitely warmer.

  She concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other, in mastering the dizziness brought on from fatigue and hunger, on ignoring the loud thump of blood in her ears. The switchbacks helped, giving her a short, attainable goal, and hindered, by giving her what seemed to be an endless series of more goals each time she gained a turn. If she'd had the energy, she would have been glad of the overcast. She couldn't see through it to tell how much farther she had to go.

  Two-thirds of the way up she came out of the tree line to emerge on the tundra. The banks of the track fell away and the trail became a four-foot-wide, hard-packed dirt path between lichen-covered rocks and thick, low-lying vegetation. The fog was right down on the ground now, but it wasn't so thick that she couldn't see the blueberries for which the ridge had been named, clustering close to the edge of the trail's banks and ripe and ready to fall into her hand. She swept up handfuls as she passed and they burst on her tongue, so tangy, so sweet. She thought she'd never tasted anything so wonderful. They made her thirsty, though, and she was sorry she'd left the creek behind.

  When she got near the top of the ridge she ducked down and scuttled up the few remaining feet. There were bushes thickly clustered along the edge, berry bushes mostly. She didn't see any bear, but she knew they were there. They always were this time of year, the salmon mostly spawned out and the berries ripe. Time for dessert before the long winter snooze.

  She caught herself. She must be a little lightheaded. She had to get some real food in her, and soon.

  Again, she peered over the top of the ridge. She listened. She sniffed the air. She wanted to climb over the edge and head for the spike camp, where she knew there was food and a stove and fuel and a sleeping bag.

  She could taste the tea, sweetened with a cube of sugar, she could smell the freeze-dried stew boiling on the little Sterno stove, she could feel the warmth of the tiny flame on her hands and face.

  She waited, motionless.

  Nothing. Nothing except the continuing, monotonous pattering of rain falling all around her in a steady, unceasing flow, not just a shower but not quite a downpour, either. It didn't matter; by now Kate was soaked through to her skin. She'd been keeping warm by keeping moving.

  It hadn't taken long after she stopped for the chill to set in again.

  She needed food, hot food, and dry clothes, or at least a sleeping bag in which to regain some of her body heat.

  Still she waited, listening, the memory of the assault at the lodge fresh in her mind, making her wary of coming out over the edge of the ridge and into the open.

  Again, she heard nothing, saw nothing, smelled nothing. Except--she thought for a moment she heard a muted groan off to her right.

  Nonsense. But No she had definitely heard a groan, because she had just heard another.

  Flattened to the ground, she slithered over the brush, soaking up quantities of water with the front of her shirt, Jack's shirt, trying to peer through the mist that had closed in around the top of the ridge.

  The moan came again. "Hello?" she said in a low voice, conscious of the way sound carried in a fog. "It's Kate. Who is that?"

  In the next moment she bumped into a body.

  It was Dieter. He was lying with his head twisted at an odd angle, eyes open and staring at nothing, all the arrogance and bombast drained away, leaving only the empty shell behind, a shell someone hadn't had even the decency to bury.

  Again she felt the welcome flicker of rage, but the flame seemed much dimmer and less powerful. She put out a shaking hand and closed his eyes. She looked for his rifle and couldn't find it.

  The moan came again, galvanizing her into action, crawling through the brush, getting wetter and wetter until at last she ran into another body.

  It was Old Sam this time. He lay still, unmoving as Dieter. "Uncle?" she said, her voice quavering. Her hand went to his shoulder.

  Quick as a snake his gnarled old hand flashed up to grab her. Pain radiated down her arm from the broken skin of her wrist, and she only just managed to bite back a whimper. Still, she was so glad to see him that she almost burst into tears. "It's me, it's Kate, uncle."

  He blinked at her. "Ekaterina."

  "Yes. Let go, you're hurting me."

  His grip relaxed. With a fair imitation of his normal acerbic style, he said, "Where the hell you been, girl? It ain't like I'm having a whole hell of a lot of fun lying out here getting pissed on by Mother Nature."

  "What's wrong with you?"

  He shifted. A spasm crossed his face. "Leg's broke, I think."

  His right leg was broken, just below the knee. Kate could feel the lump beneath his jeans. "It's a closed fracture," she said, relieved.

  "Gee, that makes me feel a whole hell of a lot better."

  "Less chance of infection." But his leathery brown skin looked flushed.

  She put the back of her hand to his cheek. It was hot. "What else is wrong with you?"

  He gestured toward his left arm. "Got shot."

  The bullet had passed through the flesh of his inner arm, punching holes through shirt and T-shirt on both sides. "You were lucky, uncle. Missed your humeral artery and didn't hit your chest."

  He grunted. "Yeah, well, I was moving fast enough. Was probably only luck she got me at all."

  "Senta?"

  He nodded.

  I will kill her for this, Kate thought. Among other things. It was a vow, and it steadied her. "What happened, uncle?" "Beats the hell out of me," he said.

  "Sssshhh," she said. "Keep it low. I don't know who else is around, or what side they're on."

  He looked at her, awareness sharpening his eyes. He noticed the blood on her shirt. "What happened to you, girl?" He struggled to rise.

  "Are you hurt?"

  She pushed him back firmly. "No. You first. Tell me what happened. I want to get to the spike camp as soon as possible and get you a sleeping bag and some food. Did you go to the ridge?"

  He let her push him down, which frightened her, and answered her question without prevarication, which frightened her even more. "Yes.

  Rode the four-wheelers all the way up. Took damn near three hours, because we had to stop every five minutes for Hubert to pick his friggin' plants."

  Kate remembered the jar on the table next to Hubert's computer. "He's into herbs."

  Old Sam met her eyes. "He was."

  She took a deep breath. "I see. I found Dieter, uncle."

  "He dead?"


  She nodded.

  "Figured. Anyway, it didn't hurry us along any when Senta started following old Hubert into the brush. Helping him, she said." Old Sam snorted. His voice grew stronger in the telling, and Kate had to shush him again.

  "We all knew what kinda help she was offering. He wasn't buying though, old Hubert wasn't. The first time she followed him he came a-roaring outta the bushes like a nun with a crusader on her tail, his shirt unbuttoned and his glasses crooked and his face all flushed."

  "She made a move on him."

  "She tried." Even Old Sam, who boasted all the moral fiber of an alley cat on his eighth life, appeared slightly scandalized by Senta's blatant behavior. "And then they argued the second time, and he came out of the brush even faster. That was the last time he made us stop."

  "What were they arguing about?" "They were arguing in German, so I don't know. I thought I heard Hendrik's name, though." Kate thought. "Fedor and Hendrik were a couple. Fedor worked for Klemens in finance, Hendrik with Hubert in research and development."

  Old Sam shifted. "Whatever. I thought I heard his name. I don't know for sure."

  "So you get to the ridge. What happened then?"

  "Everybody got out their cameras. Somebody opened the knapsack and passed out the snacks and drinks. It was windy, but the clouds were holding off in the east, and you could see Denali, big as life and twice as natural. There was a lot of oohing and ahing, as you might expect.

  Myself, I went up the hill a ways to take a leak." And to get a better look at the view, Kate thought, but Old Sam would never admit to taking a purely aesthetic pleasure in anything, fearing that it would downgrade his status as one hundred percent manly man.

  "I wasn't gone that long, maybe ten minutes or so, when I hear shots from the ridge below, three of them. One's that Weatherby of Eberhard's, the other two sound like they might be from that elephant gun of Dieter's. I hadn't seen any game on the way up, but you don't figure to when you're roaring through the woods on a four wheeler, so I come on the run, thinking something four legged snuck up on Demetri and he might need some help."

  He stopped. "Are you cold, uncle?" Kate said. Her hands went to the buttons of her shirt. Jack's shirt.

  One gnarled fist closed over both of hers. "I'm fine. Let me finish, and then I want to hear what happened to you." "All right," she said, letting her hands fall.

  "Like I said, I come on the run, but I must of went higher up than I thought because before I get all the way back I hear one of the four-wheelers start up and somebody else start to scream in German.

  Sounded like a man. Then I hear this godawful crash, bang, thump, crunch and some more screaming, and what sounds like somebody beating on somebody else. Well, hell, Kate, it was beginning to seem like I might maybe oughtta slow down a little, but by then I was going so fast I couldn't stop.

  "So I bust out of the bushes and Senta's standing there with Dieter's gun and one of the four-wheelers and its trailer is just going over the side of the ridge and Eberhard's throwing Hubert after it." He paused.

  "Goddamndest thing I ever saw," he said, not without admiration. "Just stiff-armed him up and over, pitched him the way you or me would pitch a fish. That is one big tough son of a bitch."

  "I know."

  The sharp old eyes examined her face, but he didn't comment, not yet.

  "So I managed to put some turn in my forward motion and kept on going, right over the edge of the ridge about twenty feet from where the four-wheeler went over." His lips tightened. "I woulda made it, too, except for that goddamn blonde. She shot me just before I got over, and I fell and broke my goddamn leg." He fumed.

  "You're alive," Kate said. "Right now, I'll settle for that."

  The lack of animation in her tone alerted him. "What happened your end?"

  She told him, voice flat, face expressionless. When she got to where she'd been knocked unconscious, Old Sam noticed her missing braid for the first time. "What the hell happened to your hair, girl?" "I cut it off," Kate said.

  Old Sam was very old and very wise. "Jesus," he said with a disgusted look. "Women. I get shot up right, left and center and you take time out for a new hairdo."

  "When I woke up, I had my hands and feet tied with duct tape. Someone had dumped me next to the log. Jack was lying in the middle of the yard.

  He had been shot. I thought he was dead, but he wasn't. Senta and Eberhard showed up then, in a celebratory mood. They invited me to join in. Jack tossed a box of cartridges into the fire and when they went off, Jack and I lit out."

  Old Sam frowned. "I underestimated that old gal," he said finally. "I figured she was just another pretty face."

  So did I, Kate thought.

  Never again.

  "How the hell did they think they could get away with it?" Old Sam demanded.

  "If they're the only ones left alive, uncle, who's going to say any different? If Senta had Dieter's gun, they must be thinking of framing him for the whole business. It makes a weird kind of sense, if you don't have any evidence to the contrary--his company is being sued by everybody and his brother for what sounds like everything under the sun.

  Jack--" Her breath caught. "Jack," she went on evenly, "Jack said Dieter wasn't the most stable person at the best of times, partying with the jet set, stuff like that. My guess is they're going to say he lost his mind and started shooting everything that moved."

  She added, still in that odd, flat voice, "They'll probably sue George for not providing adequate safety measures on the hunt."

  "Where is Jack?" Old Sam said bluntly.

  "Let's see to that break, uncle." She found an alder limb of the right length and size and used his boot laces and Dieter's shirt to splint his broken leg. "There." She sat back. "You hear anything I should look out for?"

  He shook his head, disgusted with his own weakness. "I been in and out.

  All I been hearing is my ears ringing."

  She looked up. The rain was tapering off but the mist was becoming thicker and hanging lower. "Stay here, uncle. I'll get you that sleeping bag."

  "Kate? Where's Jack?"

  She left him without answering.

  It took ten minutes to gain the ridge, and by the time she did the mist had closed in, a solid, disorienting pall. A couple of times she had to stop and think which way was up, and when she at last emerged on level ground it took another five minutes to feel her way to the group of fifty five-gallon Chevron barrels that constituted the spike camp.

  They were only twenty-five feet away and stood next to the largest tree on the bluff, to make it easy to find. It was only easy if you could see the tree, and she couldn't.

  She was shivering uncontrollably, wet, cold, a hunger too long ignored gnawing at her stomach like acid. Somehow she was at the barrel, somehow her numbed hands were unclipping the lid. She raised the flat circular metal disc and grabbed the first thing she found, which was a sleeping bag.

  A voice said chidingly, "My, how cold you look, meine kleine Katerina."

  She looked up and saw Eberhard emerge out of the mist like a ghost traveling between dimensions. He had in his hands what Kate now recognized as not his own Weatherby but Dieter's Merkel. It was the same gun he had had the previous night at the lodge, the gun whose appearance had bothered her so fleetingly.

  "At least you're alive," Eberhard said. He smiled. "I was afraid you were dead. That would have spoiled all my fun."

  SIXTEEN.

  Who knows what goes on in the mind of a man like that?

  SHE LET THE SLEEPING BAG FALL BACK INTO THE BARREL and stood very still, hands grasping the lid so tightly that the edges cut into her skin.

  "How did you get here so fast?" she said stupidly, the first words to come to her mind.

  He shrugged, that terrifying grin unimpaired. "When I got back to camp last night, I doctored Senta's back. She is not happy with you, Katerina. She doesn't want you for a toy anymore, she wants you dead, and dead right away. So I took the four-wheeler and drove here
and camped. I knew you would come here to look for your friends, food, a weapon."