The Oath

by Frank E. Peretti

  Steve didn’t know what to expect, but when he saw Evelyn lying on the white sheets, pale and weak but safe and cared for, the sweet knowledge that she was alive overwhelmed him, and he began to cry.

  Audrey turned and her face lit up. She spoke in a hushed, bedside voice. “Steve! Oh, hello,” and then she rose and embraced him as tears filled her eyes. They held each other for as long as it took to exchange comfort, sorrow, understanding. There were no words. What could be said? Steve thought.

  He looked at Evelyn. Her face was turned his way, but her expression was listless. She gave no hint that she recognized him. Audrey kept one arm around Steve as she followed his gaze to the bed.

  “She’s still in shock, I think.”

  Steve approached, bent down, and looked into Evelyn’s eyes. “Evie?” he said softly. “It’s Steve.” For a moment there was no response. Then, like a delayed reaction, her eyes came to life and looked into his. Her lips quivered slightly, then formed a very weak and slurred “Steve . . .”

  She’d been through something horrible, Steve thought. Her curly black hair was still matted with dried blood, her face and hands marred with cuts and bruises.

  Gently he placed his hand on hers. She managed to wrap her thumb around one of his fingers, and then slowly she smiled. It wasn’t even close to the usual Evelyn smile that could light up a room, but Steve welcomed the sight of it.

  “How you doing, kid?”

  For a moment it seemed she hadn’t heard him. Then she said, “Cliff is dead.” Her eyes grew watery, but she seemed so far away, so out of touch with her emotions and her direct situation, that her words came out in a dull monotone, a stupored statement of fact.

  “Just rest, Evie. We’re all here now.”

  She smiled weakly and gave his finger a barely discernible squeeze.

  Audrey spoke in the same hushed voice. “Samuel and Travis are staying with us. They were just here. They went home with their Grampa.”

  Samuel and Travis, ages fifteen and eighteen. Good boys, well raised, Steve thought. Evelyn wouldn’t be alone.

  He patted Evelyn’s hand in a gentle good-bye. “I’ll be back. I’m going to go out and talk to the deputy now. You take care.”

  “You, too,” she managed to say.

  Steve and Tracy Ellis found a conference room and sat at one end of the long table.

  Tracy was hesitant. “How are you doing?”

  Even the thought of answering that question brought Steve’s emotions to the surface. He just shook his head, afraid to answer, for fear he would lose control.

  “We can wait on this.”

  “No.” He sat up straighter and wiped away the tears that were forming at the corners of his eyes. “No, we’ve got to get going on it. We can’t waste any more time.”

  She toyed with the pen in her hand and said softly, “All right.”

  Something about her made him ask, “And how are you doing?”

  “I’m—” She opened her folder again, perhaps just for something to do. “I’m not very fine, you may have gathered.”

  “Well, these are not exactly fine circumstances.”

  She shook her head with a weak smile of agreement. “No, they sure aren’t. And things are going to get rougher before they get better. I think you need to brace yourself.”

  “I’m working on it,” he said, then changed the subject. “Has Evelyn been able to tell you anything about what happened?”

  “I was going to ask you the same thing.”

  He shook his head. “No. She’s really out of it right now.”

  “That’s best, believe me.”

  Tracy had the folder open on the table and was perusing what information she had. “A truck driver found her on the logging road up on Wells Peak.” She began unfolding a Forest Service map of the area. Steve pulled his chair around so they could both view it right-side up. “She was incoherent, hysterical, covered with blood. She still had a hunting knife in her hand and . . . and the truck driver says she attacked his truck, went after it with the knife.”

  Steve leaned forward at that. “Excuse me?”

  Tracy scanned her notes and pointed to the quote from the truck driver. “ ‘I thought she was unconscious, but then, when she saw my truck, she jumped up screaming and started attacking it, trying to stab it.’ ” When I talked to the trucker he was quite agitated. He’d never seen anything like it. He said he had to wrestle her off his truck and she just about stabbed him.”

  Steve was trying to imagine Evelyn doing such a thing. She was an even-tempered woman, mature and responsible. More importantly, she and Cliff were experienced in the outdoors. Evelyn had hunted with Cliff, had shot and dressed out game, including a large black bear during a trip in Montana. She could be quite protective of people she loved, and she was no pushover, but this reported behavior was not Evelyn.

  Tracy outlined the area on the map. “He found her about here, up this logging road. That’s about twelve miles above the town of Hyde River. She and her husband were camping near the ridge, right here, near the end of the Staircase Trail. No one’s ever seen a grizzly on Wells Peak, but the Fish and Game people are guessing it might be a large bear . . . it’s tagged, Number Three-eighteen. He’s been sighted, well, not near Wells Peak at all, but—” She pointed to another mountainous area at least thirty miles to the north. “—up in here, in the North Paddox Range.”

  Steve studied the map. “That’s not unusual. Grizzlies can travel pretty far when foraging. Does anyone know if this bear is habituated, used to people?”

  “I understand he’s getting that way, and that’s what makes him a prime suspect. He’s raided the landfill near Swiftwater.” She pointed out the tiny village on the map, again, some thirty miles north of Wells Peak. “And a few homesteads there have had their garbage gone through.” Tracy shook her head, her expression troubled. “But this—attack—well, nobody expected it.”

  “Has anyone checked the site of the attack?”

  Her shoulders sagged, and she looked uncomfortable. “Sheriff Collins and I went up there this morning, first light,” she said. “We didn’t know what we were looking for. We knew Mrs. Benson had come down the Staircase Trail, and we knew there’d been trouble, but—” She paused. “Dr. Benson, it wasn’t pretty.”

  He knew she was trying to protect him. But he needed to hear the truth. “Go ahead.”

  She fumbled just a little, leafed through her notes, and groped for words. “We found the campsite: a small tent, a firepit some distance downhill, two backpacks. The food provisions were properly stored in containers in some trees far from the camp, again, downhill.”

  “Hung on a rope stretched between two trees?” Steve suggested.

  Tracy nodded. “That’s right.”

  “At least seventeen feet off the ground?”

  “Exactly.”

  Yeah, Cliff and Evelyn always did that. It was a standard method for protecting food stores—and campers—from scavenging bears. Not only was the food inaccessible, it was also far from the actual campsite and downhill, which meant downwind at night. So far, Steve thought, they’d done all the right things.

  Tracy found a crude map of the site she’d made while there. She handed it to Steve. “But that’s where we found your brother’s body, down here near the food stores, in a grove of trees about eighty yards from the camp.” The spot was marked with an X.

  Both Cliff and the bear could have been at the food cache at the same time for the same reason and surprised each other, Steve thought.

  “We called the coroner, and he and I packed the body out. It was transported over to Carson General Hospital in Oak Springs for autopsy. We should have the report by sometime tomorrow.”

  Tracy gathered up the notes, put them back in the folder, and closed it with a snap.

  Steve could see that she was finished giving him information, at least for now, so he let it rest. Considering the day she’d had, the horrors she’d seen, the gruesome task of packing Cliff�
��s body out of the mountains, he didn’t blame her. She had done a good job, too. He was beginning to realize that he’d misjudged her.

  “You’ve had quite a day,” he said quietly.

  “Yes sir. And I’m terribly sorry.”

  “Thank you.” More awkward silence. “That was—that had to be quite a job, carrying Cliff out of there.” Cliff was a big man, as tall as Steve and heavier.

  That didn’t seem to comfort her. She sat there, looking down at the folder and nervously biting her lower lip. Finally she asked, “So what are your plans?”

  “I’ll need to see the—” He was going to say he’d need to see the autopsy report, but this was Cliff he was talking about. Cliff’s body. He didn’t want to envision it. He’d seen what a grizzly could do. He’d seen a jaw removed with one swipe of the six-inch claws, an arm torn away and eaten while the victim was still alive, a complete face lying in a bloody heap in the weeds, a child’s body opened and emptied from the pelvis to the rib cage. No amount of time could dim the images, the sounds, the smells.

  Cliff, dying that way? Steve had to block out any thought of it. “I—I think I’ll, well, someone needs to read the autopsy report and let me know the conclusions. I might look into it myself, but right now, I just don’t know.” Vaguely, he noted that she seemed to be relieved to hear he didn’t want to read the report. “But at any rate,” he continued, “I do need to contact Marcus DuFresne. I won’t be surprised if he contacts me first once he finds out who the victim was. But we’ll—we’ll get on with it.”

  She smiled at him. He was struck by the warmth, the comfort her smile gave him.

  She stood and said, “If you’re planning on staying in the area for a while, I could recommend the Tamarack Motel here in West Fork. It’s not the Holiday Inn, but it’s quaint and it’s clean. I could get in touch with Marcus and let him know you’re here, and then if you’d like, I could take both of you up to the site tomorrow, let you look it over.”

  But Steve was thinking about the passage of time and what that did to a trail, to signs a bear might leave behind. He was thinking about nature’s way of cleaning up a campsite: rain, sun, wind, and scavenging animals, all of which could quickly erase vital clues to what had happened.

  He looked up at Deputy Tracy Ellis, who appeared tired, who’d already been up to the site and back. Then he looked at his watch, considering the remaining daylight, and made a decision. “How long would it take to get up there?”

  . . . ANNOUNCING . . .

  Dinner and Barn Dance in celebration of Benjamin Hyde’s birthday. Hyde Hall September 20, 7–10 P.M. Music by The Silver Settlers

  Bring a hot dish and a dessert. Drinks will be provided. So that all may take part, the second shift will be excused at 5 P.M.

  Come One, Come All!

  Hyde Mining Company Flyer September 1879

  NOTICE

  To the second shift foremen:

  Owing to the shorter workday last week, the second shift will work a full shift this coming Sunday. No exceptions. Regular shifts and regular hours will resume on Monday.

  Fun is one thing; production is another. All foremen will advise their crews, and extend my thanks for the nice party.

  Bulletin from Benjamin Hyde’s office September 1879

  TWO

  THE BEAR

  VIC MOORE knocked off and went home early, leaving the church roofing job undone. There’s no big hurry anyway, he thought. Let Reverend Woods stew about it. The weather was supposed to be pretty good for a while, and he had other things on his mind.

  Well, one thing, actually. Right now he was standing in front of his bathroom mirror again, scrubbing at the discoloration over his heart. Soap hadn’t worked too well, so now he was using a petroleum-based, grease-cutting hand cleaner. He kept scrubbing and rinsing, then scrubbing again. It wasn’t working, and he was getting nervous. The mark, the stain, the blemish, whatever it was, was only getting darker, and all the scrubbing was only making the area raw.

  He threw down the washcloth. Now what? He looked out the bathroom window toward the mountains, the south-facing slopes with their countless regiments of pine and fir awash in the afternoon sun. A beautiful sight, but it brought only one thought: Night was coming.

  They say it always happens at night.

  Vic could feel fear creeping up on him, but he shook it off with angry defiance. Huh-uh, no way, he thought. Not me. This is where the rules change, folks. Nobody has to see this, nobody’s going to see it, and most of all, Vic Moore is not going to cave in! I’ve never been afraid of anything, I’ve never let anybody play around with me, and I’m not starting now. With that decided, he dried his chest with a towel and put on a shirt.

  He needed a tall cold one. He decided to kill some time down at Charlie’s, the local watering hole. He’d kick back, shoot some pool, be with his buddies.

  He went into his bedroom to get his wallet, then stopped, eyeing the small cabinet beside the bed. He walked over to it, yanked the top drawer open, and grabbed his .357. Now how could he carry it without it being seen? Carrying a gun around here wasn’t so unusual. Hyde Valley was full of hunters, ranchers, and sportsmen; guns were common here. But his buddies would ask him about it, and he’d have to explain himself. They might think he was afraid of something.

  He slipped the revolver into a soft leather shoulder holster and concealed it under his jacket. A jacket on these warm days was going to be miserable, but Vic Moore was going to be ready.

  IT WAS three o’clock when Tracy Ellis, out of her uniform and into the same hiking gear she’d worn that morning, signed out the county’s Jeep Cherokee and began the trek with Steve up to the site of the attack. The drive from West Fork up the Hyde River Road to the town of Hyde River was thirty miles and would take about forty minutes; the drive up the bumpy, rutted logging road to the Staircase Trail was twelve miles and would take another hour or so; and the hike up the trail to the campsite would take about an hour and a half. So they hoped to get to the site by a little after six, leaving them enough daylight to thoroughly investigate the site and get back down to their vehicle before dark.

  As Tracy drove she gave Steve an informal tour of the meandering miles of narrow gap between mountain ranges known as Hyde Valley. He found her little history lesson helpful in clearing his mind and emotions, and for that he was grateful.

  West Fork, the county seat for Clark County, was named for its location, Tracy told him. The town was first built where the west fork of the Hyde River joined up with the main stream on its rambling journey south. Once a boom town, it now struggled for a good, steady reason to exist without the mining and timber industry that had built it and kept it alive for so long. Steve noted that its downtown was turn-of-the-century brick, its sidewalks were cracked and settling, and its streets had an aggravating number of potholes. Times were good long ago, but prosperity, like a wayward lover, had fled, its promise to return never fulfilled.

  “Back in her better days,” Tracy said, “West Fork was a stopover for flatbottom steamboats coming up the river to pick up logs for the mills downstream and to drop off goods and settlers, and mostly prospectors. There was a real gold rush going. It’s hard to believe now, but West Fork once had over twenty thousand people. Then the gold gave out in the early 1900s and people moved on.”

  Now, she continued, the population remained fairly steady at about three thousand, sustained by a little mining, some logging, some county government, and quite a bit of commuting the thirty miles over Johnson’s Pass into the next county and to the nearest larger city, Oak Springs.

  Steve and Tracy only had to drive a few blocks and cross a bridge over the Hyde River to be out of town. From there, they followed the Hyde River Road north as it followed the river into the wilderness.

  So began the wilds of the north woods, a rolling riot of mountains and timber, checkered at times with clear cuts but often serene with green meadows along the meandering river. Hyde Valley was the main expanse that he
ld the mountains apart, and from it branched other gulches, draws, and deep, shaded valleys stretching far into the hills, each one with its own namesake creek where elk and deer came to drink and coyotes prowled at night. Above the valleys, sheer rock cliffs towered, jagged and broken off by the centuries, the tenacious trees growing out of any available crevice.

  There was solitude and a kind of majesty to this area, Steve reflected, what one expected to find in the wilderness.

  Well, almost the wilderness. People were out here. Not civilization, exactly, but people. Every mile or so, Steve noticed another homestead, farm, or ranch belonging to the descendants of the rugged bunch who first settled there. These were people, Steve thought, who had their own way of doing things and liked to keep their distance from big towns, large groups, strict ideas. They lived in barely-hanging-on log cabins, weathered, teetering shiplapped shanties, and mobile homes crouching under added-on roofs, walls, and carports.

  “What do these people do for a living?” Steve asked.

  “Oh, you name it,” Tracy answered. “Some logging, some mining, some commuting. Then you’ve got the artsy-craftsy types with cottage industries, and you have people on public assistance. But they’re out here because they want to be. Hyde Valley gets in your blood; it really does.”

  Certainly, every resident had to have his own story, his own answer for why he was there. Steve could see several clues along the way: the vast, green pastures with century-old stumps standing black and rotten and twenty or thirty head of cattle lazily passing the day; aging logging equipment, boom cranes and log skidders; metal shops and metal garages with machines being worked on; horse barns and paddocks, their occupants free on acres of green, kicking the air, chasing the wind; satellite dishes popping up like mushrooms, facing this way and that; fire-blackened areas where the dry brush had burned away to clear the way for the spring’s greening; a lumber mill half hidden behind a berm of red sawdust; a Y in the road called Able, with a dismal little tavern for sale, a gas station with one pump, and a mercantile still holding on, its Coca-Cola sign still offering Coke in glass bottles. At the Y in the road, Steve noticed an unpretentious green sign that listed Nugget 5, Yellow Knife 9, Hyde River 15, all up the left fork; a turn to the right would take them up the Nelson Creek Road to Hinders, 12. A gaudy, hand-painted sign encouraged a visit to Randy’s Inn at the road’s end, where you could eat the world’s best hamburgers and try some fly fishing in Nelson Creek.