by Gwen Moffat
Their eyes followed a flotilla of ruddy ducks drifting past, stiff tails at the point. ‘I was used,’ he said, but calmly for him. ‘Would you believe Calvin Brewer could do that to me? The more I see of humans the more I prefer animals.’
She forbore to remind him that there might be exceptions, including present company. He went on: ‘The fellow knew that if he told me why he was sending the boy here, I’d never have had him on my land, let alone in my home. The man’s as criminal as the son!’
‘Young Brewer never had a chance,’ she murmured, but he didn’t hear her.
‘Money!’ he exploded. ‘They think it buys everything. It didn’t buy the son’s good behaviour. I entertained a killer at Sweetwater.’
‘You didn’t know that at the time.’
‘That’s what Ingrid says. A maid strangled: one of the Brewer maids, and he was a suspect. A family alibi!’
‘What would you have done in Calvin Brewer’s place? Don’t you remember telling me that if you discovered that one of the Indians was a murderer, that you and Myron would take care of it?’
‘That’s different. Indians are children, not psychopaths. I know one thing: I would never have sent the Indian to one of my friends for sanctuary. I might have provided an alibi, I could very well have employed lawyers to make sure he wasn’t charged. But I wouldn’t hand over an animal to be tortured and finally killed by someone else; why should I do less for a human being than I would for an animal?’
‘You’re on hazardous ground.’ She stood up.
‘Not with you. And don’t back-track. You asked me what I’d have done in Calvin Brewer’s place.’
They untied their horses and rode slowly along the dikes. A red-tailed hawk floated over the reeds and for a few minutes the babble of conversation from feathered throats was hushed. Nielsen said: ‘I can’t think why the shooting didn’t drive those pumas away for ever.’
‘The female was running ahead of the shots until she reached the escarpment, then she let Brewer get ahead of her. As for the male, there were the last two rifle shots and the pistol shots certainly, but he’d heard the female coming by then.’ She smiled. ‘Miss Ginny could tell you a few things about feline passion.’ He glanced at her sharply but her face was innocent. ‘The male waited a few minutes after Emma fired but he knew the female was close, and perhaps he associated the shots with the man, and Brewer was no longer in any condition to harm him.’
‘He didn’t touch Brewer either. That must have been an awkward moment for you, watching. Would you have fired if he’d started to maul Brewer?’
‘What an inquisitive man you are. I didn’t have the gun.’
‘Emma and Simon are going to the Virgin Islands,’ Ingrid said, bringing sherry to Miss Pink on the terrace.
‘Good.’ Miss Pink amended that: ‘How kind of Jack; they’ll enjoy themselves in the Caribbean.’
‘It was my idea. They can come back fresh and put all this unpleasant business behind them, forget about it.’ Her eyes met those of her guest. ‘Not forget,’ she corrected, ‘but recover. With help—Ah, Simon! Come and join us.’ He approached them and sat down, his face polite but wary. ‘We were talking about Emma,’ Ingrid went on, and turned back to Miss Pink. ‘There’s a colt ready to be broken. Jack suggested that Emma should try her hand at breaking it in, and then it will be hers, of course. It will take a long time.’
‘She’s not sure whether she can do it,’ Simon said, ‘but she’s going to give it a try.’
The high ground was black against a wash of colour. Above, small clouds like lambs were outlined with coral light. ‘I should get my camera,’ Simon said, but he didn’t move.
‘There’s plenty of time,’ Ingrid told him. ‘You’re not going anywhere.’
Emma came out, accompanied by Jack Nielsen. She sat down beside Simon and when the small bustle of providing drinks was over and he had returned to his place, there was a silence like a concerted sigh as they leaned back and relaxed, watching the gorgeous glow in the west, listening to the waterfowl while, from the far distance, came the gloaming song of the coyotes setting out on the night run through the canyons of the Last Chance Range.
GRIZZLY TRAIL
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 1
The golden eagle drifted across the divide at Dead Horse Pass to circle the screes below the headwall, hunting for marmots. As the bird banked, air whispered through a gap in the spread pinions. It was only the slightest sound but the marmot sentry identified it a moment before the shadow swept the screes and at the first note of his whistle the rocks were alive with brown forms scuttling for their dens.
The eagle lifted and moved south, following the line of Wolverine Creek. Its shadow slipped over humpy bedrock striated by ancient glaciers, down dark crags, across still lakes reflecting the sky. Behind him the Silvertip peaks stood above the divide, gleaming from a recent snowfall; ahead, beyond the rocky plateau, the timbered spurs of the range sloped in folds to the river valley. Scattered among the timber were buff patches that marked natural meadows. The eagle concentrated on these places where rodents might be abroad, or maybe the carcass of a cow left behind when the cattle were taken down from their summer pasture.
The intent gaze noted every movement below: a couple of bull moose browsing in a swamp, a maverick cow with her calf following a trail under yellow aspens. The eagle ignored them and looked for gophers: for one unwary gopher that would dare to venture just a little too far from its hole for a dandelion leaf that had escaped the frost.
Southward the line of the creek narrowed to a canyon before it debouched in the valley where the river meandered in silver loops against the sun. That was bald eagle territory and the golden bird turned back before the canyon’s mouth, losing a little altitude to investigate a dark shape that crawled up the only road on this side of the divide. The raptor circled, watching.
A thousand feet below, the dull green Jeep lurched up the track at walking pace, inching across shelves of bedrock, spurning loose boulders, edging through shallow pools as it followed the old and scarcely visible marks left by the trucks of summer visitors. Its slow but steady advance gave an air of confidence to its progress, belied by the solitary occupant who spun the wheel with sweating hands, and whose eyes, behind thick spectacles in sage-green frames, flickered nervously under the brim of a delapidated cowboy hat.
A fallen tree lay across the road, its trunk sawn through to allow a narrow passage if one climbed a bank. There were no tracks on the slope. Frost had heaved the soil and sun had melted it to a deceptively rough surface masking a bed of slime.
The Jeep climbed and canted, traversed at a slant for a few feet, and slid sideways. There was a thud and a jarring scrape. The Jeep ploughed on and stopped. The driver climbed down and walked slowly to the off-side to stare at a long dent in the paintwork.
‘First blood,’ Melinda Pink murmured wryly, patting the snub snout of her latest acquisition. ‘We’ll take it faster on the way back. We’re learning.’
There was a sudden explosion of noise, very close. She cringed and felt the reassuring pressure of metal at her back while her eyes searched to discover, on a bough fifteen feet above her head, a red squirrel, every hair jerking with fury and the volume of its own noise. A pine cone was slipping from its grasp.
There was a pause in the tirade. ‘I have no intention—’ Miss Pink began, but her voice was too much for the squirrel which dropped the cone, ran back to the trunk and down it. Wide-eyed, Miss Pink moved towards the driver’s open door—which br
ought her closer to the tree. The squirrel hit the ground, made a short rush towards her, reared to its full height and—there was no mistaking its attitude—threatened again.
Miss Pink retreated to the far side of her vehicle, broke a branch from the fallen tree, and edged towards the haven of her seat, presenting her weapon. A shadow slipped across the slope and she heard the needles shift under the squirrel’s racing feet, heard too a flutter in the air. She ducked and looked up to see great wings fingering the sky, one wing with a missing pinion.
She climbed heavily into her seat and leaned back, breathing deeply: a solid, elderly lady in a blue workman’s shirt and fading Levis, a lady over five thousand miles from home, wondering what else the Rocky Mountains might hold in store for her.
She continued on her way, climbing by hairpins through the forest, to a rock lip above a waterfall where the dense stands of lodgepole pines gave way to a tall spruce the branches of which came almost to the ground. In the basin beyond the waterfall a group of mallard drew arrows across the sapphire surface of a tarn.
She drove past pale rock that looked like granite, past a green glade to the back of the depression and a steep hill up which the Jeep ground too slowly. At an incipient curve the wheels shifted and spun in runnels of loose stones. Miss Pink depressed the accelerator, the engine roared a protest, and stalled.
She reversed and tried again but, forced to slow down to climb shelves of bedrock, she couldn’t get up enough speed to take the curve. Moreover, as the wheels spun, the Jeep crabbed sideways, and below there was a nasty drop. Accepting the inevitable she descended backwards and pulled into the green glade.
People had camped here; there were charred logs in a circle of stones, and old beer cans. She looked at the westering sun and the blue water and saw, for the first time, the tip of a snowy mountain above a foreground of crags. The familiar urge came on her to get high and find out where she was.
Pitching her tent was slow work, for she was forced to read the instructions as she went along, but eventually she had it erected, had installed her foam mat and sleeping bag and closed the entrance. She stood back and admired her camp. The tent was green and, along with the Jeep, it merged with its surroundings and looked far more at home here than it had the first time she’d pitched it: on the lawn in front of her Cornish house.
As she worked she was aware that she was closely observed. Large birds in shades of grey watched her with soft eyes or flitted from branch to branch without a sound. Nothing else stirred. There was no wind to ruffle the water, not a twig moved in the statuesque pines. She was alone in the wilderness and probably ten miles from the nearest house beyond the mouth of Wolverine Canyon. As she left the camp site, following a trail marked by deer prints, she thought she heard voices but she put this down to imagination. No one would come here in October—well, no one else—and one was always hearing voices in remote country. It must be the waterfall or the call of an animal.
For an hour she wandered above the craggy basin, always careful to mark the position of the sun in relation to the lake for as she gained height she saw that she was on a high plateau. From a rocky point some five hundred feet above the camp she looked east into another depression and that too held its lake among glaciated boulders, and pines like bottle-green spires. Observing the spiny outlines of a maze of ridges, she guessed that the whole region must be like this, between the timbered spurs towards the valley, and the snow peaks in the north. It would be easy country in which to lose oneself, and already there was a chill in the air. All around her brown flowers were frosted on their stalks. She wondered what kind of temperature did that to whole drifts of flowers in bloom.
Now the sun was balanced on the rim of the plateau and there were mauve shadows in the snowfields of the peaks. Northwards she could see a saddle and as she wondered if this pass might lead to her destination on the other side of the divide, she heard a girl laugh.
Her immediate reaction was resentment. She had come a long way to explore the Rockies and now she was to share her first night in them with other people. Then she chided herself for churlishness—and perhaps the party wouldn’t camp in the glade anyway. She threw one last glance at the Silvertips, their snow touched with gold, and started to descend to the camp.
She was able to observe them before they became aware of her approach: two girls and two men. The men were putting up tents at a discreet distance from her Jeep, one girl was dragging a branch to the fire circle, the other picking up the old beer cans. At sight of that Miss Pink warmed to them and felt that after all sitting alone by her camp fire that night would have been an eccentric gesture.
They accepted each other with the wary courtesy of strangers meeting in the wilderness. Probably the first trappers in the West would have greeted each other like this, aware of potential dangers beyond the circle of firelight, grateful for the fact that, whatever a man’s character, he was human and spoke the same language.
Miss Pink found the situation intriguing. There were no longer dangers in the night but a folk memory persisted. In the wilderness people drew together yet, at least in the initial stages, they restrained their curiosity. Of course the other party were surprised to find that the owner of the Jeep and the functional little tent was a solitary woman, and English at that, but at first their comments were confined to ingenuous envy of her vehicle. They had been dropped at the mouth of the canyon and forced to walk in. They had heard the Jeep pass when they were taking a short-cut across the zig-zags in the timber and had assumed it was carrying hunters. Was she hunting? asked the girl called Shelley. No, Miss Pink said, she was on holiday.
It was not modesty that dictated she should keep quiet about her recent travel book and the Gothic serials from which she made a comfortable living, but her dislike of being the centre of attention. She was not shy but she was well aware that the onlooker sees most of the game, and this group interested and puzzled her.
After they had eaten they gathered round the fire. It was a cold clear night, probably several degrees below freezing, and although the fire produced enough heat that she was forced to unfasten her down jacket, she was glad of its hood for the back of her neck, and of the corduroy trousers she had pulled on over her Levis. But the men wore only jerseys under their anoraks, and running shoes on their feet. The plump one who had introduced himself as Joe Bullard was surely feeling the cold. He crouched over the fire, tending it, his soft features etched in lines of concentration, his eyes intent. He exuded an air of urgency, as if his life depended on the flames. Miss Pink found him irritating.
The other man, Irving Tye, appeared oblivious to his companion’s restlessness and, indeed, to the cold. Tye was a large fellow, well-proportioned, with a close-cropped head now bared to the night. As he sat relaxed on a log, hands thrust deep in his pockets, the powerful legs stretched to the blaze, he seemed to have set himself apart. The girls made conversation, Bullard fidgeted, but Irving Tye, aloof and unsmiling, took no part in the small talk and stared, not at, but through the flames, remote and handsome and obviously the leader of his group.
The girl called Gale—Gale Harmon, was it?—appeared to be attached to Bullard. She shared his log seat and watched him indulgently: a slim pretty woman with gentle eyes. The hood of her parka was lined with fur that emphasized her fragility. She appeared content and incongruous: an anachronism in the wilderness. Miss Pink tried to picture Gale alone in this glade, without the security of her plump Joe, and failed.
Her friend Shelley was different. She was short and appeared dumpy in a padded jacket but her face, also framed in fur, was vivid, not soft, with a blunt chin. When she was aroused her mouth drooped at the corners, hinting of obstinacy. Miss Pink looked thoughtfully at the girls’ down bootees, from their snowflake mitts to their faces, the one languorous, the other alert, and visualized these two on a ski slope: Gale descending in graceful curves, Shelley ploughing down straight and fast. Gale had the style but Shelley would have the guts.
It was Sh
elley who led the conversation, in light tones spiked with the laughter that had deceived Miss Pink into thinking this was a party of young people. Now she realized that they were all well over thirty, despite their air of inexperience. It was this last that she found puzzling. Where were their walking boots, their heavy trousers, woolly hats? Bullard wore a baseball cap, Tye was bareheaded and his anorak was certainly not windproof. Where would they be in an emergency? What would they do to keep from freezing without a fire?
‘Are you intending to go above the timber-line?’ she asked curiously, and was aware of Tye’s immediate attention. He had not been lost in reverie after all.
‘We’re climbers,’ he told her.
Her eyes flickered. She looked at the men’s running shoes. The point was not lost on Shelley. ‘We’re climbing the pass and going down Cougar Creek,’ she elaborated. ‘We—I live at Prosper.’
‘At Prosper! That’s—’
Miss Pink was interrupted without ceremony. ‘We’ll be climbing mountains,’ Tye said roughly.
Bullard raised doubtful eyes from the fire. Gale smiled. ‘I’d love to climb one of the Silvertips,’ she said. ‘They look so neat.’
‘In bootees or shoes?’ Shelley asked pleasantly.
‘Sorry. We should have brought skis. But then there’s no lift, is there?’
‘We’ll take in a mountain on the way over,’ Tye said.
‘Count us out.’ Bullard’s voice held an undertone of belligerence.
‘I will,’ Tye said, not looking at him.
‘You’re mad, Irving.’ There was admiration behind Shelley’s comment and Miss Pink’s mouth tightened. She asked why they were approaching Prosper on foot. Shelley explained that they had come south from her mother’s ranch that morning; they had thought it would be fun to walk home over the pass. They hadn’t used one of their own cars because someone would have had to fetch it back when they returned to Prosper. They’d accepted a lift from a local guy. ‘It’s just fun,’ she repeated. ‘We’re exploring.’ Tye stared at her then shifted his gaze to Miss Pink.
