The closer Sean approached, the more agitated the dogs became, so he sat down on a log to reduce his height and, hopefully, his threat. The dogs would bound toward him, then veer around, circling, darting forward to nip at his boots, then pulling back. Sean was good with dogs, even better when he had venison jerky in his pocket. After more feints and circling and a couple bits of jerky apiece, two of the three collies that had been nipping at him joined the other dog by the tan material. A jacket?
A dip in the terrain partly obscured the dogs and, as Sean watched, a human arm rose from the tan mound and a hand waved, seeming to beckon to him. The arm and hand were bare. The arm seemed to shiver, then it flopped to the ground, out of sight.
Sean’s mind registered three conclusions in rapid succession. One, whoever the arm belonged to was dead. Two, the limp limb was an indication either that rigor mortis had not yet occurred, and that the person had been dead for only a few hours, or that the rigor had passed and the stiff muscles had relaxed. He would have put money on the latter, based on the forty sheep that had strayed so far afield, and guessing that the herder had probably died the night that Max Gallagher heard the shots. Sean’s third thought was that his initial assessment of the situation, that the dogs were protecting the body of their master, was wrong. The dogs had blood on their muzzles. They weren’t protecting the body. They were eating it.
PART TWO
THE BANGTAIL GHOST
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Sinew and Bone
As it watched the plume of exhaust exhaled by the metallic bird that passed between the dawn clouds, the cat drew back its lips in quest of scent. For a moment, a fire danced in its eyes, and the long tail that made a question mark flicked from one side to the other.
Dropping its head, the cat returned its attention to the house nestled into a fold in the foothills. In the half-light, for the Earth below the sky still slept, the one color the cat’s eyes registered was yellow. As it watched, one of the yellow squares that marked the windows of the house went dark, only to reappear in another location. The cat had anticipated this, having watched the routine of the lights for five mornings as it had grown both steadily bolder and incrementally weaker.
The next light to appear would be the dome light of the truck squatting in the drive. The cat heard the motor cough to life, and as the orbs of the headlights searched down the graveled drive toward the ranch gate, the cat shrank back from where it had taken cover behind the root ball of a fallen tree. It lay motionless but for the last six inches of its tail, which flicked against the ground.
Then the bright eyes of the truck swept past the cat’s position, the truck a blocky silhouette, and the motor idled down and stopped, and the smaller rear eyes blinked shut. The cat waited for the human to step out of the truck. On some mornings this wait was short and on others longer. This was one of the longer times, as the cat, watching the shadow in the driver’s seat, saw the outline of a head move up and down and heard snatches of submerged music that was not the song of birds, the only music besides the running of rivers that it had ever known. It heard the music now, the notes faint and foreign to its ears, and saw the head moving to the rhythm, and waited for the music to stop and the door to open and the human to step outside.
If the routine had not altered, the human would bend down for a long few moments on the far side of the vehicle and be out of sight. Then the truck door would shut and the human would come into view over the hood as it walked a few steps to a gate that consisted of weathered posts strung with barbed wire.
Reaching the gate, the human would use the cheater lever that squeaked as it drew the post far enough back to create the slack needed to slip the wire loop over the top of the post. Then, with practiced movements, the human would step through the V opening created by the slack and replace the wire loop over the post top. It would go to stand at the side of the oiled road and shift its weight from one foot to the other as its head was enveloped by the clouds of its breath and the morning gradually painted the night away into lighter shades.
Five minutes, then ten, the landscape yawning, no sound anywhere. Then a faint rumbling as the bus came up, first heard and then seen coming over a rise, the bus seeming to grow as it slowed to a stop, the hinged stop sign levered out, the diesel engine idling, the fuel smell and the ratchet of the folding door and the human would climb the two steps into the dark interior and the bus would grind away into the progress of the day.
All this time, beginning when she was a shadow moving her head to the beat of the music on the radio and ending only after the bus door shut and she went to sit with her best friend, Jess, fourteen-year-old Marci Mirecourt did not know she had been stalked by a cat. Nor did she know it was starving, its right foreleg withered, its lithe, powerful body reduced to sinew and pain and bone, or that in failing to follow through with its intent to satisfy its hunger on this day, it would of a certainty try again the next.
She did not know that an angel of death had descended from the mountains, and that with the cessation of one fear, another had begun, haunting the land like a dark wind. And that this time, the terror had a name—the “Bangtail Ghost.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The Good Shepherd
Martha Ettinger slapped the afternoon edition of the Bridger Mountain Star on the kitchen table in front of Sean’s cup of coffee. The stories that prompted this reaction were second-day news—yesterday’s paper had reported only the known facts, that a sheepherder had been killed in the Gravelly Range, apparently by a predator, and that mountain lion tracks had been found in the vicinity. Martha had been quoted as saying that valley residents should take precautions, but that the identity of the predator was not confirmed. The new stories included details that had not been released by authorities, specifically that the victim had been eaten by his own dogs, and also stepped over the official line by giving the suspected killer a name.
The big tomcat that had killed Clarice Kincaid had gone by several names. The list included the “Madison Valley Mauler,” the “Specimen Ridge Man-eater,” “Old Broken Tooth,” and the “Silicone Canyon Man-eater”—someone having leaked that the cat had excised one of its victim’s breast implants with its claws. None of the names had been acceptable to Martha, who hated trigger words, especially those that triggered panic.
Sean had suggested that this time she preempt matters by naming the new cat herself. She’d come up with the “Bangtail Ghost.” The Bangtails were an isolated mountain range in the north of Hyalite County. Closer to home, a trickle of water known by locals as Bangtail Sally Creek tinkled out of the Tobacco Root Mountains. Then, too, in eighteenth-century England, a “bangtail” was a prostitute, and the creek had been named for one of the more notorious madams who serviced gold miners in the 1860s. Clarice Kincaid being in the trade, the name made sense.
“Sounds good to me,” Sean said. He’d added yet another caveat. A “bangtail” was the name for a horse whose tail was cut straight across, as was Martha’s Appaloosa mare.
So it was settled. Martha had introduced the name at the emergency meeting of the task force the day before. Less than twenty-four hours later, Gail Stocker, the Star’s reporter, had put it in print, attributing it to a source close to the hunt for the cat.
What grated on Martha was not so much that Stocker had appropriated the name, her name, but that someone in the task force had to have leaked it.
“It’s like she can read your mind,” Sean said, a teasing note in his voice.
Martha said, “Yeah. That and she’s screwing someone on the task force. I wonder who it could be. Wait a second. Anyone. They’re all men but me.”
“So I’m a suspect, too?”
“You’re top of the list.”
“You got to admit, Martha, she looks good in her Wranglers.”
“I don’t got to admit anything. She’s a munchkin. Take off the hat and she’s so short y
ou have to pick her up so she can drink out of a fountain. Yeah, yeah, I know, not PC. So sue me.”
But it wasn’t the release of the name that really upset her. It was one of the three sidebar stories. The first was a biography of the victim as far as it was known, and noted the financial and emotional plight of Peruvian herders in general. The second was an interview with a survival expert who talked about dogs eating their owners. Apparently, a canid reacted to starvation no differently than a hominid from the Donner party. It was the third story that Martha deemed inflammatory, in that it focused on naguals and the victim’s kinship with pumas. The reporter had even been privy to the information that the herder had a puma tattooed on his chest.
“Just what I need,” Martha told Sean, “a bunch of shape-shifters growing claws and howling when the moon comes up.”
Sean knew the source of this last story, and wondered if Gail Stocker had somehow known to contact Max Gallagher, or, more likely, if it had been the other way around. But he kept his mouth shut. No need to add fuel to the flame of Martha’s already considerable ire.
Instead, he finished his coffee, kissed her on the top of her head as she bent over the paper—“I love you, anyway”—and took his day pack from the nail in the mudroom. Buster Garrett had been a no-show at the task-force meeting, but Drick Blake was a surprise attendee, and he had offered to hike up to the scene of the attack to see if he could spot anything that the WHART team had overlooked. Martha had grudgingly given consent, on the condition that Sean accompany him.
A little less than two hours after Sean left Martha’s farmhouse, the olive Rover Sean had seen parked outside Blake’s yurt grumbled to a stop before a locked Forest Service gate where the two had arranged to meet. Sean hadn’t seen Blake for months, and he had grown a beard that partially shrouded the puttylike appearance of his cheeks. With his pelt of body hair hidden behind clothes, he was, Sean had to admit, a good-looking man. Even the broadened nose, which his sister had said was the result of cosmetic surgery to make the face more catlike, merged seamlessly with the accentuated bone structure of his face. Blake might not be able to complete a transformation into a spirit animal, but he had a good start on it.
With little in the way of greeting, they began to hike toward the open park where Sean had backtracked the sheep herd. Except for a few chips of bright color that were male bluebirds squabbling over nesting sites, and a pair of vultures circling idly above a treeless knob in the distance, the basin seemed devoid of life. Apparently, another herder employed by one of the ranches had moved the sheep to a different pasture. But it was the absence of the two guard dogs, which no one had seen over the past several days, that piqued Sean’s interest. Where had they gone? For that matter, where had they been when he discovered the body?
Reaching the wall tent, Sean pointed out the few possessions that served only to emphasize the emptiness.
“A lonely existence,” Blake offered. He picked up the Bible and turned to a passage marked by a silk ribbon.
“Juan Dies,” he said. And speaking in Spanish, “I say unto thee, he who does not enter the sheepfold by the door, but climbs up some other way is a thief and a robber. But he who enters by the door is the shepherd of the sheep.”
He smiled at the question in Sean’s eyes.
“I was part of a jaguar study in Belize. The Cockscomb Basin Wildlife Sanctuary. Either learn the language or scream with the howler monkeys.”
Back outside, Sean led the way to the latrine. “I don’t know what you’re thinking we’ll find,” he told Blake. “Buster Garrett told me that four days is about the limit for the hounds to trail. We’re past that.”
Blake nodded. “As far as that goes. But if I can find a physical track, then I can identify the cat a week from now, or a year. You said you saw pugmarks. Where exactly?”
Sean showed him the muddy depression where he’d seen the lion tracks, but they had been obliterated by rain, as he suspected they would be.
“What happened to Buster, anyway?” Blake said.
“The sheriff has tried to reach him at least a couple times. Apparently he’s off the grid.”
“You might try his ex. He still lives at the house part of the time. Or did. I haven’t seen him since that day at Law and Justice. Hazel sanded the rough edges to make him presentable, and give her all the credit, but Buster is an alcoholic, and he has a mean streak. He’s a guy you tiptoe around for your own good. Hell of a houndsman, I’ll give him that.”
Sean nodded. “Come on,” he said, “I’ll show you the kill site. It’s just over the rise. But the WHART guys will have picked it clean, I’m afraid.”
He was right. All the bits and pieces of the body that the dogs hadn’t eaten had been carted away and rain had washed the ground clean.
They decided to split up and search farther afield. Sean headed toward the knob where he’d seen the vultures circling earlier, while Blake hiked downhill toward the closest heavy cover, the natural line of retreat if the cat had been driven away from the kill site by the dogs.
The buzzards were no longer in sight, but as Sean reached the top of the knob, the country beyond came into view and he saw them, bald-headed, heavy-bodied, ungainly, as they rose with a great fanfare of flapping, then, steadied, sailed away on their spread wings. The smell would have given him the answer if his eyes hadn’t. It was a dog, or had been, much of it having been devoured by scavengers. Its coat was the color of the camel-hair coat Sean’s mom used to wear to church. He could see the spikes in the dog’s collar glinting in the sunlight. Another pile of blood and bone was farther down the hill, and for a few hopeful moments Sean thought it could be a lion. The color was right, but the furry extremity Sean took for a tail turned out, on closer inspection, to be a branch covered in dried moss. It was the other akbash.
The bodies of both animals had been scavenged so completely that Sean knew it would be difficult to determine cause of death. He saw no apparent fang marks on the throats, or on the dogs’ muzzles, as there would be if a lion clamped down on the nose to suffocate them. For that matter, he doubted that the lion would have taken on the dogs. One, perhaps, but the two together?
He heard footsteps as Blake came down from the knob behind him.
“What do we have here?” he said. It was not a question that required an answer and Sean gave none. Blake knelt down and passed his hands over the flanks of the nearer dog. If the odor bothered him, he didn’t let it show.
“What do you think?”
“If I had to guess?” Blake said. “Poison. Poison or a bullet. I don’t see any marks to suggest a lion did this.”
“How old?”
He shrugged. “My eyes tell me a week. My nose tells me more. Why don’t you have a look at this one while I check out the other.”
He went down the hill, and once more Sean thought back to his talk with Max Gallagher. The writer recalled hearing five shots. Sean had assumed that the shots were fired by the herder while he was trying to protect himself from an attack by a lion. It had bothered him that the rifle he found nearby was fully loaded. That meant the herder had fired all the rounds that Gallagher had heard, and then had reloaded, but had not had the opportunity to shoot again before the lion killed him. It made more sense that the herder had never had time to fire even once before the animal was on top of him, and that all the shots Max Gallagher had heard were fired by someone else trying to protect himself from the guard dogs.
Sean knelt beside the dead akbash. He knew that bullets often expended their energy inside the body and came to rest under the skin on the off side from the entrance wound, not retaining enough oomph to exit. He began to pass his hands over the dog and felt what Blake had missed, a small lump under the skin of one of the hindquarters. He prised the skin apart with his knife. It was a bullet, all right, mushroomed and misshapen. The intact part of the slug was approximately as big around as Sean’s ring finger b
etween the two joints. It had been fired from either a large-caliber handgun, such as a .44, or a similarly bored rifle.
Sean showed the slug to Blake when he came back up the hill.
“Maybe a horn hunter shot the dogs,” Blake said, “somebody scouring the winter range for shed elk antlers.” He rubbed his fingers together to indicate cash. Freshly shed antlers were worth good money, and in the spring the lower elevations crawled with young men looking for a windfall.
Sean nodded. It was a reasonable assumption, but he remained unconvinced. Most shed hunters carried bear spray, but relatively few burdened themselves with weapons. More likely, he thought, that it was a bear hunter. Spring bear season was open until the end of the month and a bear hunter would be adequately armed to deal with angry dogs.
Sean pocketed the slug. Returning to the site where the herder had been killed, they decided to give it one more hour, which turned into two, and were finally ready to head back to the rigs when Sean noticed what looked like a tan shoelace. It was partly hidden under damp leaf litter midway between the primitive latrine and the kill site. Sean had searched the ground in between when they’d first arrived, and didn’t see how he could have missed it. But miss it he had, and, stooping to pick it up, he saw that what appeared to be a shoelace was actually a loop of rawhide. The rawhide had been threaded through a hole in the cartilage sheath that attached to a curved claw. It was a good luck talisman. It wasn’t the first time he’d seen it. The first time it had been around Buster Garrett’s neck.
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