Goats, Boats, and Killer Cutthroats

by David F. Berens

  “Wow, that’s quite a responsibility you’re taking on.”

  “But I enjoy it. We all do. Just look at this place. All these magnificent columns surrounding us are Douglas fir.” He waved his outstretched arms to the two rows of three-story-tall tree trunks holding up the roof. “This lobby is two hundred feet long and one hundred feet wide. Let me give you a tour.”

  Everything about this place was incredible—long, grand hallways, massive mahogany staircases, and elevators that had that cool accordion gate thing and an attendant in a red and black tuxedo. But as we made the rounds up and down the halls, I realized there was a slight datedness to the building. It had geometric carpet, brass doorknobs, and a faint smoky smell. I couldn’t help but be reminded of the Overlook Hotel from The Shining.

  Samuel’s exuberance was almost overwhelming, but he did give me lots of good content that I could use in my article. After we finished, I went up to my room to begin writing. I figured Jack would be back soon, and after lunch we would be off to our next lodge.

  __________

  I couldn’t believe what I had just witnessed. The guy with the pick was looking around, and he pointed up toward me. It was a perfect face shot so I took it. But I didn’t dare move. Could he have seen a reflection off my lens? The sun was pretty far up in the sky, but it was a little bit in front of me, too.

  The boss went to his Jeep and came back with a pair of binoculars. I quickly spun my camera around and tackled my tripod so there was no possibility of them seeing a reflection. Then I lay there, face-down, perfectly still. I really wanted to see if he was looking at me, but I didn’t dare move. I was certain they would hear my heartbeat thrumming in my chest if they listened hard enough.

  I waited at least three minutes, then risked peeking their direction. They didn’t appear to be looking my way, but it was impossible to be sure without my telephoto lens.

  Moving at a glacial pace to keep everything quiet, I detached my camera from the tripod and aimed it at the men again to get a better look. The boss looked my direction through his binoculars, and I snapped a picture. He stared right at me for a while longer. When he put his binoculars down, I packed up my gear as quickly and quietly as I could and started creeping out of there. I didn’t stand up straight until I couldn’t see them any more at all, and then I headed as fast as I could on the uneven ground back toward the lodge and Alison. I wondered if she’d want to write an article about a possible murder!

  __________

  After finally getting a successful interview with Samuel, I felt much better. I jotted down a few notes and started to rough in the opening paragraph of my article. When I was satisfied with what I had written, I stretched and checked the time. Jack was taking longer than I expected. I pulled out my phone to call him, but either due to the remote location, or the heavy building I was in...I still had no signal.

  I trekked down the hall, rode the elevator with the tuxedo guy, and went outside to look for Jack. I knew he went out to take pictures, so I looked around for the most photogenic sights, but that didn’t narrow things down any. Everything around me was photogenic.

  I found a man trimming hedges on the side of the building. He looked like he might be a hundred years old and wore a light blue jumpsuit with worn spots on the knees. I asked him if he had seen anyone taking pictures recently.

  “Ma’am, everybody takes pictures around here.”

  “But this guy uses a real camera; not an iPhone!”

  The old man just stared at me.

  “My age, tall and thin, real thick hair, sort of wavy?”

  “Sorry, ma’am,” the man said, wrinkling his face in empathy. “Ain’t nobody out here like that, but if I see him, I’ll surely tell him you’re lookin’ for him.”

  I thanked him and started walking around the lodge. Let me tell you, that’s a long walk! I saw a big pond with a gazebo and a few tourists milling around, so I detoured over there. No Jack. A creek was feeding the pond, so I followed it a ways into the woods. But after a short while, I felt like I was just wasting time and turned back toward the lodge.

  Back inside, I asked at the girl at the front desk if Jack had shown up. It was a new girl I didn’t recognize. Apparently, there had been a shift change. So, I went through my spiel about Jack again.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t know anything about your boyfriend.” She looked down at her counter and picked up a sticky note. “Wait, are you the couple in room 206?”

  “Yes,” I replied, excited.

  “Housekeeping needs you to move your things out of your room so they can clean it. Checkout was at eleven.”

  I trudged toward the stairs to pack up. I never said Jack was my boyfriend. I put my stuff back in my suitcases and zipped them shut. All that Jack had out was his toiletry bag. I put it in his little suitcase and zipped it shut, too. Is Jack really my boyfriend?

  I called down to the front desk and asked if I could leave our bags there until Jack showed back up. She said no problem, so I hauled our bags out of the room and over to the elevator. I clicked the call button, but nothing seemed to happen. It didn’t light up like it had before, summoning the attendant and his fancy gate up to my floor.

  That’s when I noticed the out of order sign on the ground next to me. Apparently, it had fallen to the ground, its tape not doing its job. With no baggage cart of any kind nearby, I dragged our bags to the stairs. They blocked the whole hallway, and I had to stop and line them up against the wall for an older couple to pass by—the same couple from the fireplace the previous night. One of the bags fell over, and the nice man picked it back up for me. He was wearing a flannel shirt with pictures of moose on it. His belt buckle said Al.

  I carried one of my bags down the stairs and went back up for the other one. Al was back, checking on me. He very chivalrously offered to help and carried my remaining bag down the stairs for me. I was so afraid that he was going to fall or have a heart attack or something. I don’t think that he expected it to be as heavy as it was. I’m not a light traveler.

  I dragged all the bags over to the front desk and glared at the woman behind the desk. She did not get the hint that I was struggling and could have used some help, so I intensified my glare. Still no effect. I left everything there except my computer bag and purse, which I kept with me. I parked in a chair facing the front entrance and waited. But before long, I got ancy and started to walk around. I strolled around the Great Hall, stopping to study each moose and deer head trophy on the walls. The antlers were different on each one, but I didn’t know what any of them were called, except the moose. I took a picture of each one with my phone in case I wanted to check later for my article.

  I thought about the animals grazing and just minding their own business when some hunter shot them. It seemed so cruel, but I was sure that the hunters in those days needed that meat. They used the hides for coats and things, and they mounted their trophy heads to display on their walls. I guess that was okay. The main reason that they were hunting in the first place was for food. That was how they survived a hundred years ago, right?

  I circled back to the big fireplace and saw the front door open. I immediately recognized Jack shuffling in. I waved to him, but he was too preoccupied to see me. Odd. I hurried over and finally got his attention.

  “Where were you?” I asked him. “It’s time to check out. And two people called me ma’am!”

  He was visibly shaken—unusual for Jack.

  “Uh, I just witnessed a murder?”

  4

  Tire Tracks And Footprints

  I told Alison everything I had seen, and showed her some of the pictures on the back of my camera. Naturally, she was shocked and I noticed her blinking more rapidly as I described the scene.

  “Oh my god. What do we do?” she asked.

  “I have to show these to the police.”

  “I agree. Do we call 9-1-1?”.

  “I don’t know. I’ll find them. I need to go get my computer so I can download these photo
s.” I opened the memory card door on my camera and popped out the SD card.

  “It’s over here with the rest of our stuff,” she said, pulling me toward the registration desk.

  I walked over to the receptionist. “Is the police station nearby?”

  She balked for a second. I hadn’t meant the question to be so blunt, but I couldn’t take it back. I smiled hoping that might put her at ease.

  “It’s in Browning. The Indian Affairs office.”

  I hesitated a second. “No. I mean the regular police.”

  “They are the police here. We’re in the Blackfeet Indian Reservation.”

  “How can this be an Indian reservation? This is a national park.”

  “Not quite.”

  The woman produced a small Glacier National Park map and laid it out on the counter. I looked at Alison. She shrugged her shoulders.

  “The green line is the park border; we’re right here where it says East Glacier Park.” Her finger was pointing just east of the line.

  “So, basically, this lodge isn’t even inside the national park?” I said.

  “No. All this land is Blackfeet reservation.” She slid her finger down the right side of the map. “Everything east of the park. The Indian Affairs office handles all police duties. Just follow Highway 2.”

  She pointed to the map again. “It runs straight into town. You can’t miss it.”

  “How far is it?” The town didn’t show up on the map. It was off the edge.

  “About twenty minutes. I don’t know where in town the Indian Affairs office is, but I do know it’s in Browning.”

  “Okay,” I told her. I felt unsure about what she had just told me, but she seemed pretty confident.

  She gave me the map, and I turned to Alison, who had been retrieving our luggage from behind the counter. “Do you mind driving while I download these photos?”

  Turns out, the receptionist was accurate with her timing, and twenty minutes after leaving the lodge parking lot, we entered the town of Browning. We pulled in at the first gas station we saw, and I went inside to ask where the Indian Affairs office was. The clerk stared at me like I had three eyeballs and was asking him how to get to Mars. Luckily, a customer overheard me and walked over.

  “Why are you looking for the Indian Affairs office?” he asked.

  He was tall, but stocky. His hair was solid black and board straight. He looked like he might be Indian, but I couldn’t be sure.

  “I need to talk to the police. Somebody told me that they handle all the police duties here.”

  “What kind of police duties?”

  What the hell did I get myself into? I glanced around the store, and nobody else was in there. “Look, I just want to find the office. Can you tell me where it is, please?”

  “Why do you need to find the office?” he asked me again.

  “What difference does it make!” I raised my voice, but then took a deep breath and lowered it again. “I’m looking for the Indian Affairs office. Now do you know where it is or not?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Nevermind. I’ll find it myself.”

  I stepped around the guy and walked out the door. The highway ran straight through town, and we found another gas station right away. The clerk there was a lot more helpful and gave me directions.

  This town looked like any other town from the highway, but as soon as I turned off the main road, everything went pale. The road lost its stripe down the center, the buildings lost their color. Everything looked like it had a beige filter in front of it. The curbs had broken, uneven edges with spurts of grass growing through the cracks. The houses and businesses were all small and one-story. The yards looked like tundra, uneven and unmowed. And everything was covered with dirt. I wondered if we had stumbled into an apocalyptic novel.

  Cruising the street, we found an official looking building with a nineteen-seventies sort of look we thought might be the right place. Signage told us it was indeed some sort of Blackfeet government center. Alison parked the car and we both went inside.

  I told the woman up front what I was looking for, and she directed me to an office down the hall. I walked down. The sign on the door said, U.S. Department of the Interior, Department of Indian Affairs.

  The knob crunched when I turned it, like it was filled with grit. I leaned in and saw a man in a faded denim shirt sitting behind a desk.

  “Can I help you?” he asked.

  I stepped inside and closed the door behind me.

  First, I told the man what I was looking for, and we established that I was in the right place. His name was Bob Burd. I told him I witnessed four men burying a body in the woods and I had pictures. His face showed no evidence of surprise or even hurry.

  “Show me your pictures.”

  I set my laptop on his desk and booted it up. I showed him the photographs I had taken.

  “Hey Mike,” he said to the only other man in the office. “C’mere.”

  “Hang on. I’m in the middle of an email.”

  “I don’t care if you’re in the middle of dirty talking your mistress. You need to see this now.”

  The two Bureau of Indian Affairs agents had me go through everything I did and saw in great detail. It was odd to relive the scene, but the more I told them about it, the more I felt unnerved at what I had witnessed. I gave Agent Burd a flash drive with all the photos. He stood abruptly and jingled some keys in his pocket.

  “Let’s go,” he said, moving around his desk.

  “Wait… what?” I was surprised by the sudden move.

  “We need to get to the site.”

  “Oh, um, like right now?”

  “Crime scenes fade quickly. Every second counts.”

  “Well, ok,” I turned to Alison. Her face was a blank mask of confusion. “But don’t you need to get to your next lodge?”

  She shook her head and her eyes seemed to snap back to the present. She shook her head and pointed to the agents.

  “Many Glacier. It’s fine.” she replied, “You need to go with them. This is a bigger deal than a lodge story.”

  I looked at Agent Burd. “Can she go on? She didn’t witness anything; just me.”

  “Sure.”

  “But how will you meet me after?” Alison asked me.

  I looked again at Agent Burd. His composure never shifted, but realization seemed to dawn on him.

  “You’re going to the Many Glacier Hotel?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Alison answered.

  “Go on. I’ll get him there.”

  With that, Alison got back on the road solo, and I got into an ancient Ford Bronco that showed the rusty evidence of one-too-many winters on salted roads. Burd drove to a nearby building where the other agent, Mike, borrowed a couple shovels, and we headed back to the scene of the crime.

  I directed Burd to where I took off on foot through the woods. He drove a short way farther down the road we were already on, then turned onto a path of two tire tracks just like the one I had seen from my perch on the hillside.

  I must have looked surprised, because Burd looked up into his mirror and said to me, “Roads like this are common around here.”

  Our path split in two, so I pulled out my phone and checked the longitude and latitude against the screenshot I had made the day before. We made two turning decisions based on my phone coordinates—there was a surprising network of those paths back there—then suddenly Mike pointed and said, “Right there.”

  Sure enough, you could see the fresh dirt where someone had been digging recently. I got out of the SUV and looked up to where I had been hiding in the trees. The woods were fairly thick, but it didn’t take long for me to find the exposed knoll where I had been set up with my camera.

  “This it?” Burd asked me.

  “Definitely,” I answered.

  He told me to wait at the SUV while he and Mike took pictures of the tire tracks and footprints. Then they got out their shovels and started digging. It went quickly for them with t
he ground already broken up, but they still had a lot of dirt to move. I offered to help, but they declined. Wouldn’t do to have a civilian messing with a crime scene.

  When they were so deep that they had to get down inside the hole, they took turns so they weren’t hitting each other with their shovels, but it wasn’t long until Burd declared that they were deeper than anyone had dug there before. He demonstrated the fact by plunging his shovel straight down and jumping on the back of the blade. He could only get an inch or two into the ground. The body wasn’t here. Someone had come back and dug it back up.

  __________

  I drove on to the Many Glacier Hotel without Jack. It was a little disconcerting to be traveling alone again and though we’d only been apart for a few minutes, I was missing him.

  Once I got out of town, the GPS in the rental steered me west, and I found myself suddenly struck by conflicting visuals. The three-lane highway looked brand new with bright curbs and sidewalks on both sides of the road. But on the other side of those sidewalks stood dirty houses in disrepair with old cars and travel trailers in their unmown yards. Overhead, a deep blue sky stretched to the horizon in all directions; the land was dead flat—except for straight ahead. In the distance, the white-capped Rocky Mountains jutted out of the ground as abruptly as if they were a wall.

  After an hour and a half of the mountains getting gradually bigger and bigger, I found myself smack dab in the middle of them.

  To my right stood two tall mountains with the valley between supporting a thick sheet of ice that appeared to be frozen in time but I knew was actually flowing ever so slowly. Looking to my left revealed a long blue lake reflecting the snow-capped mountains beyond them, although I barely dared to take my eyes off the road. Ever since I turned off the highway, I had been driving on a deteriorated combination of holes and patches to the point that I began to question if the rented GPS had led me astray.