He reached her, water at his waist, both feet already turning numb, he grabbed her shoulders, heaved, dragged her toward the edge of the pond, the ski caught, he dropped her on her back with her face above water and followed her leg to her ski boot and found the catch and popped the binding and her foot came free and he snagged the ski and tossed it back on firm snow. Popped the other binding, tossed the second ski to follow the first. Hoisted her across his shoulders, waded through crunching ice shallower and shallower until he found solid ground under his feet.
She screamed. That was good. That meant she had air in her lungs instead of bog water and rotting cattail leaves. But he could feel ice already forming on her clothes, felt the same stiffening around his knees. Cold cold wind, they had to get warm, get dry clothing. He kept slogging through the drifts, ignoring her fists pounding on his back, ignoring her shouted commands to put her down, dammit, or she’d fucking sue.
Into the boathouse, into the kitchen, woodstove cool, just coals left from cooking breakfast, into his room with the stove hot, he dumped her back on her feet. On her feet and soaking wet and steaming mad. She looked like a drenched chicken and sounded about the same.
“Get out of those wet clothes. I’ve got some stuff that will keep you decent until your own’s dry enough to wear.”
“Screw you. I’ve got spares in my pack.”
And she started to strip, wet jacket and pants and sweater, not even bothering to turn her back to him, and he backed out of the room and shut the door behind him. Curses followed him. Curses, and the sight of wet underwear that didn’t hide a thing.
He stoked up the kitchen stove, kept his own pants on, waited while muffled damns and fucks and shitheads and pricks bounced off his ears. All of it in English. Maybe she had been born in the USA. She cussed like it, anyway, with an inner-city vocabulary.
Then silence, and the door opened. She was dressed. She wore dry clothing, hair only damp under a fresh ski cap, her backpack already settled on her shoulders but bulging with a fast job of packing stuff just any which way.
“Thank. You.” She bit each word off, no sign that she meant them, but at least she went through the form.
And then she was out the door again, collecting her skis and poles from where they lay scattered, setting the bindings again, heading out again. But this time, she kept to the track. Dennis shook his head, closed the door behind him, and started to change out of his own wet clothing. The heavy wool stank of bog muck. It’d probably have to be dry-cleaned.
Bitch.
VIII
Susan unclipped her cross-country skis from the rack on top of the old Dodge, wiped road salt from their bases and tops, and debated whether yesterday’s wax would still do for this morning’s snow conditions. Someday she was going to scratch up the cash to buy a set of those no-wax skis with the fish-scale base, better suited for the kind of off-track skiing she did, in and out of the woods and sun, covering ten different snow types in a hundred yards.
But until the governor decided to cough up a raise, these would do. Laminated wood skis, bamboo poles, three-pin bindings, pine tar base and arcane color-coded waxes, they weren’t just last year’s technology but last century’s. Boards strapped to your feet. Hell, Carlsson’s Neanderthal ancestors had used the same design. He had a snowmobile, he’d admitted it, snarl-fart scourge of winter peace and clean cold forest air. She sniffed that air, out here on the point and damn near as far east as you could get and still stand on US soil. No trace of two-stroke engine smog.
She loved this place. It felt more like home than that state trailer, any day.
Quiet icy air, barely a breath of wind, salty from the bays to either side, frozen resin tang of spruce and pine and fir. Bottle it and sell it for a tonic in D.C. or L.A.
Shotguns popped in the distance, the sound carrying miles across the water and the stillness. They didn’t bother her. Sea-duck hunters, probably, though it might be alarm guns at the fish-farm salmon pens, scaring off cormorants.
Guns. Everyone in Maine had guns. She patted her jacket, feeling the unfamiliar weight and hardness there. The deputy had told her to get a gun. Told her of a gun dealer she could trust. Warned her that killing your dog was the backwoods equivalent of Pew passing the black spot in Treasure Island, of the orange pips in that Sherlock Holmes story. Killing a person’s dog meant “Get the fuck out of here. You’re next.”
Okay, I had to learn to think like a man to get past the male chauvinist pigs of college and grad school. Fish and wildlife was a men’s club. Had to learn to talk and act like a man to land this job. Now I have to learn to kill like a man. I can do that.
Me against the world. That’s the way it’s always been. I’m used to it.
The deputy had asked her if she knew how to shoot, and she’d lied yes. Just another story, just another secret. And then he’d walked her through the paperwork for a carry permit. He’d been serious, damn it all, said Sunrise was a big county and mostly empty. Cops covered it with a small sheriff’s force and a few state troopers. One “domestic” call had taken him an hour at full speed, he could almost see the damned house when he started but he’d been down one peninsula when the call came in from the next, had to drive fifty miles to cover the four miles across the water, and he’d been the closest cop. By the time he finally skidded into the driveway, the woman lay stabbed in a pool of blood, dead, dead phone in her hand. The man had had time to kill himself, too, saved the county the cost of trial and jail.
So here she was with an old Walther PPK in her pocket, loaded, James Bond movie special, and she’d still never fired a gun in her life. Probably shoot herself in the foot if she ever needed to use the gun, but at least it fit her small hands and the dealer said the recoil was light.
She pulled her backpack out of the Dart and shuffled through it, running down her preflight checklist just like a pilot. Spare gloves, spare ski cap, spare goggles, spare jacket—check. Polyethylene tube tent and aluminum foil blanket and parachute cord, impromptu camp—check. Food for a night out, high-energy stuff like nuts and candy and meat bars that didn’t need any cooking—check. Two water bottles, full—check. Ski wax kit, emergency ski tip, Swiss army knife, duct tape—check. Medical kit—check. Folding saw and heavy USMC sheath knife and four separate ways of making a fire—check.
She wasn’t going more than a couple of miles from the car but this was Maine, this was winter, and she’d just proven that she needed all that gear. That bastard Carlsson . . . And she’d driven ten miles into the boondocks even by Sunrise County standards, that far from the nearest asphalt. Twice that to a public phone and any public heated space. If the weather broke, this fire road sat about dead last on the tribal list for plowing.
Which made it prime eagle territory. Eagles didn’t like company, one reason she studied them. This place served as her sanctuary, as well as theirs. She needed sanctuary, after finding Bitch slaughtered in the trailer. Yeah, that cleaning crew had worked over the “crime scene”, no trace left, but now she smelled the chemicals . . . .
She ran through the rest of her gear and then strapped the spotting scope and tripod on top of her pack, slung the whole load on her back, stepped into the ski bindings, and locked the clips over her boots. Sidestepping up over the snowplow berm, she settled her skis on the packed track of a snowmobile trail and kicked off. Nasty noisy stinking snowmobiles, Carlsson things, but they left a lovely base for skiing. Light fresh snow covered the track, maybe four inches from recent squalls, but that just made the kick and glide even better.
And the start of the trail headed downhill, toward the shore, the closest she could get to flying. Around people, I’m a porcupine. Come too close and end up with your face full of quills. Out here, I’m an eagle.
Cold air stung her cheeks and burned into her lungs, but she felt the heat grow in her muscles from the old familiar rhythm, kick and pole, kick and pole, heat to balance the cold and bring her blood to life. One of the good things her job gave her—she could
ski on company time. Skiing, bicycling, moving fast by her own muscles in the open air, she never felt more alive.
Indian land, Naskeag land, the trail wove through mixed northern hardwoods and stands of white pine and hemlock, out into blueberry barrens and then down into close dark spruce near the water, old-growth, wonderful trees—the Naskeags managed their forest well. Beautiful land, wild land, eagle land.
Susan didn’t begin to understand the politics involved. It seemed like a space-warp into a different universe, a close-knit cross-race community with the native tribe holding and husbanding wealth in the land, a powerful part of local government, no ghetto and drugs and booze, no hopelessness.
With her on the outside.
But she had permission from the Tribal Council, even a chanted blessing complete with sweet-grass smoke, as long as she didn’t disturb or harm the birds. Eagle was a spirit, a totem, a power to the tribe, whatever the anthropologist term would be. Eagle found his living on the edge between land and sea, just like the Naskeags. The tribe wanted Eagle to prosper, had just as much interest in Eagle’s health as she did. And this was one of the few places in the Lower 48 where Eagle did still prosper. DDT poisoning, habitat destruction, whatever, the bird was rare or wiped out elsewhere in its former range.
She swooped down the slope like one of her eagles, curving toward the point of land and the eagles’ winter roost, coasting and then rising to a perch on the last low ridge. She paused where another snowmobile trail joined in, fresh tracks on top of yesterday’s snow, really bad idea to meet that machine going forty, fifty on a blind corner and end up splattered like a bug on its windshield.
She sniffed—no lingering reek of two-cycle smoke, even though that damned stuff could hang under the trees for an hour on a morning like this. She listened. Silence answered her now, not even the distant shotguns.
Susan drank the silence of the snow, soft, blanketing the world, sucking sound out of the air, killing even the whine of wind in the spruce and pine overhead, snow hiding the crunchy dead leaves and twigs underfoot. She loved snow. People looked at her funny—strange eyes and brown skin and a heritage that never saw ice outside of a hotel bar, and she loved winter. But it was the quiet, it was the emptiness. Winter forest was clean. Winter forest didn’t have people or bugs or other vermin in it. When she came down here to check on her eagles, she could go for weeks without talking to another human.
A mosquito hum, a fly’s buzz rose in the distance, inland, rose above the faint crash and hiss of breakers on her other side, rose and then faded to silence as it dropped behind another hill. Snowmobile. Why couldn’t the bastards put mufflers on those damned things? Her Dart had ten times the horsepower even in that wimpy slant-six engine, but it made less noise. You could hear a snowmobile five miles away on a day like this. If those bastards had been scaring her eagles . . . .
Yes, her eagles, not Naskeag eagles. A special pair roosted out here, she’d banded both of them, she’d known them for years. The female was younger than the male, Susan had banded her as a fledgling on the nest. She could swear they recognized her, tolerated her—they circled and screamed when she climbed to their nest, banded their fledglings, but didn’t attack. Checking other nests, she needed a motorcycle helmet and leather jacket.
She knew more eagles than she did people in Sunrise County. And cared a lot more about them. Speaking of which, Rick Bouchard had confirmed again that those were eagle nests out on Ghost Point. He had seen the birds, through binoculars, close up and personal. Had seen the fledglings. Downside of keeping away from people, she’d never heard . . . .
Whatever other slimy habits Carlsson might have, he didn’t seem to be a liar.
Swooping down the slope again, cold wind biting her face and snow hissing under her skis, she turned and slid to a stop where the woods opened out to show glittering water and a stand of wind-twisted spruce near the end of the point. Her eagles often perched there, sheltered in the spruces or bold out on dead limbs watching for fish in the open water beyond the ice, and then they’d launch themselves and soar huge and brilliant and dangerous on the wind so that her heart caught in her throat with the joy of watching them. Eagles perched atop the food-chain, free, strong, fierce and unafraid—everything she wasn’t. She scanned the trees, looking for those dark shapes, moved her watch on to the sky in case the birds had taken wing in the still air.
Nothing.
She shrugged to herself. They had other roosts, other hunting territory. Who was she, to tell the eagles where to be? They were supposed to tell her, that was the whole point of her study.
Sometimes they perched low, almost on the ground—those majestic birds looked funny as hell down there like oversized spruce grouse in the branches. She looked lower, down through the dense Japanese brush-ink painting of the spruce, picking out remembered shapes of witches’ broom and dead branch stubs and making sure they weren’t eagles in disguise.
Two dark shapes low, yes, swaying with the gentle breeze this close to water, but the shapes hung below the limb. She felt a chill, under the warm glow of skiing.
If those were her eagles, she didn’t want to scare them. She reached back and fumbled behind her head, easing the scope from the bungee cords that held it, slow and no sudden moves. Eagles were shy. Eagles could see her far better than she could see them, even with the scope.
She held the scope to her right eye, image jumping around with her heartbeat and panting from the ski run, no tripod to steady her sight, finding a rock in the frame and using it for a reference and moving the image right and up.
Lumps. Two lumps. Strange fruit, hanging from a tree. Hanging, swaying, like the aftermath of a lynching.
Something wrong. Bad wrong. She felt sick.
She tucked the scope into her jacket and slid her skis closer. Closer. Closer. Her eyes told her what she was seeing, but her brain didn’t want to hear.
And then she stood within touching distance. Birds. Hung by lengths of pale tan baling twine. Headless, footless, tailless, wingless birds. Mutilated eagle corpses. She couldn’t breathe.
Tail-feathers for headdresses, eagle claws for necklaces or bracelets, eagle-wing fans. She didn’t know what the heads were for. Desecrated corpses. Indian regalia, showoff fucking fashion for powwows and fancy dances. So much for protecting Eagle. So much for husbanding the land. She saw the hand of the bastards Rick Bouchard was protecting. Her eagles . . . .
She reached out and touched them, fingers sending the same information as her eyes. The brain still didn’t want to receive the message. Maybe these weren’t her eagles. She slipped her right glove off and caressed body feathers, a last goodbye to fierce free flight. The corpse felt cold, but not frozen stiff. She found blood matting feathers, gunshot wound, a single hole. She turned the body as it hung. No exit wound.
Her eyes stung. Blurred. She blinked to clear them. They didn’t want to clear.
Her fingers touched an aluminum ring, twisted into the breast feathers—leg band. The bastards had cut off the feet and taken them, but left the band as a message. She turned the band, fingers working of their own free will, and read the last numbers. 198. The female.
The other corpse also carried a ring, a message. 073, the older male. Banded separately, she knew him by blood brotherhood, she still had a long white scar on her left hand from those wicked talons, an instant’s careless move one summer while she was a grad student. She’d never made that mistake again, when handling netted birds.
She squeezed her eyes shut, hard enough they hurt. The ruined bodies still swayed behind her eyelids. Eagles. Dead meat, just like Bitch. She fought the rage building in her, fought against the scream. Times like this, she flat-ass knew the whole human race was a mistake.
Darwin screwed up—any species that would do this kind of shit has to be a lower life form. Fuck Homo sapiens. To hell with bombing ’em back to the Stone Age, bomb ’em back to fucking bacteria and start over. Where’s Armageddon when you really need it?
; She opened her eyes. The corpses still swayed in the breeze.
This wasn’t happening. Her eagles, dead, murdered, butchered . . . .
Her fingers burned from the cold. Slow waves broke and hissed on the stone shore. Snow creaked under her skis. She breathed deep, salt air tanged with resin from the spruce under her nose.
She slipped her glove back on. She cut the twine off the branch where it hung, saving the knot for evidence. She laid the body on the snow. The blurred body, her eyes still didn’t work right. Plastic sheet from her pack, she cut a rectangle and wrapped the body and the twine and the band all in one bundle. Did the same for his mate. Then she stowed them in her pack, barely enough room for the big light fragile bodies even without wings and tail and head. Stowed the scope.
She moved like some kind of robot. This wasn’t happening.
Snowshoe tracks marked the snow, bearpaw style like Carlsson used, not proving anything there, common oval shape best for moving around in woods and brush. Tracks that led from the snowmobile trail and back again. She filed the picture like a frame on film, just clicking frames, not analyzing them. Not thinking. Not mourning.
Yet.
She took her pack, her ski poles, and started plodding back up the slope, no spring left in her legs, up the spine of the point, back to her car, the thrill lost, no gliding low like a hunting eagle. Her eagles were dead. A nesting pair, dead. One of a few hundred nesting pairs still left in the country, dead.
Why didn’t they hide the bodies? A Federal crime, killing endangered species, yet they’d left the bodies hanging like dead crows as a warning in a cornfield. Why leave the bands, tie the bands to the bodies instead of just letting them fall into the snow and vanish?
Ghost Point Page 9
