Skull Moon

by Tim Curran

  The print was over three feet in length, maybe eight inches in diameter. Long, almost streamlined, whatever left it had three long toes or claws in front and a shorter, thicker spur at the rear.

  "Like the track of a rooster almost," Lauters said helplessly.

  "No bird left this," Perry was quick to point out.

  "Jesus, Doc," Lauters said wearily. "The print of a giant."

  Perry moaned and stooped down.

  "Ought to see someone about that back, Doc," the sheriff joked out of habit, but there was no humor in his voice.

  Perry ignored him. He was digging through the mess. His fingers found an iron loop. "Root cellar."

  With Lauter's help, he pulled it up and threw it aside. The root cellar was a five-foot hole with walls of earth that had been squared off. Lying on the frozen mud of the floor was what remained of Nate Segaris.

  "Shit," Lauters said quietly.

  Segaris was a mess. His guts had been cleaved open, the organs torn free, the body cavity hollow as a drum. His arms were broken in several places. Smashed and bitten. The fingers of his left hand were missing, save for the grisly nub of a thumb. His right leg was hacked off beneath the knee, leaving a knob of white ligament to mourn its passing.

  Lauters swore beneath his breath and lowered himself down there. He thanked God it was November. Had it been the warm months…well, he didn't want to think about the stink and the flies.

  "It must've killed him and threw him down there," Perry suggested.

  "No shit, Doc."

  The sheriff wasn't in the mood for Perry's bullshit speculation. He wasn't in the mood for anything these days. He searched around and could find no sign of the man's missing appendages.

  Above him, Perry stared down at the ruin of Segaris' face.

  His left eye was gone, as was most of the flesh around it. But his other eye was wide and staring with an accusatory glare. His mouth was frozen in a scream. The top of his head bitten clean open-even from five feet above, Perry could see the teeth marks sunk into the skull. The brains had been scooped out and, it would seem, the gray splatter in the corner was what remained of them.

  Lauters looked up at the doc with pleading eyes. "God help us," he uttered.

  "I hope God can help us, Sheriff, I really do," Perry said stoically. "But if he can't, then we'd better start thinking about helping ourselves."

  Grumbling, Lauters pulled himself up out of the root cellar, ignoring Perry's outstretched hand. He stood and brushed himself off.

  "It would be interesting to know the turn of events," Perry mused. "In what order they occurred."

  Lauters glared at him with watery gray eyes. "What possible use would that be? A man's dead. Murdered. Half-eaten for the love of Christ."

  Perry nodded patiently. He brushed a silky wisp of white hair from his brow. "What I mean, Bill, is that it would help us to understand our killer if we knew a few things."

  "Like what for instance?"

  "Well, for starters, I'd like to know if Segaris was killed before or after this place was torn apart. If it was after…well, then we're talking about an act of hateful, willful destruction here, an act of vengeance. Hardly an animal characteristic."

  Lauters shook his head. "You look too deep into things."

  "And you," Perry said, "don't look deep enough."

  Lauters ignored him. "Let's get back to town. We've got to get Spence out here with his wagon to cart this body off."

  "'His wagon?'" Perry said. "Hate to be the one to tell you, Bill, but Spence is a woman."

  "That's your opinion." Lauters sighed and sipped from a pocket flask of whiskey. "Sooner we get that body into the ground, sooner folks'll stop speculating about it."

  Perry followed him and mounted.

  "Yes," the sheriff said, finishing off his flask and stuffing it in his saddlebag, "I see trouble on the horizon, Doc."

  Perry said nothing. His eyes, however, looked to the mountains for an answer. There was none. Only wind and cold.

  17

  Later, standing outside his office and listening to the relative calm of a Sunday evening, Lauters kept drinking. He didn't even feel the cold that swept down from the mountains. In his mind he saw only blood, death, and a forecast of more dying.

  Wolf Creek was almost peaceful this night.

  The ranch hands had stayed home. The miners had stayed up at the silver camps. Few people ventured out of doors. Maybe it was the frigid temperatures or the blowing snow. But maybe it was something else. Something that killed people for sport as well as food. Maybe this is what kept people behind locked doors.

  Lauters took another pull from his silver flask.

  Even the old Blackfeet beggars were nowhere to be seen. Come to think of it, he hadn't seen any injuns around for some time. Since the killings began, it seemed. This stopped the flask at his lips.

  Was that worth considering? he wondered.

  Could the Indians have something to do with the murders? Maybe. Maybe not. The local Blackfeet tended to steer clear of town for the most part, being that a lot of folks tended to harass them for no good reason. And when a major crime like a murder or robbery came down, they were nowhere to be found. Again, because if a scapegoat was needed, an injun was always a good bet.

  Thinking of this, made the sheriff remember the time that Blackfoot was hanged.

  He scowled and took another drink.

  The Blackfoot's name was Red Elk. He was being held in connection with the rape and murder of a local white girl, name of Carpenter. The girl had no family. She was new to Wolf Creek. Red Elk had supposedly surprised her one night as she left the dry goods store she worked at, forced himself on her and then cut her throat.

  The second night the injun was in jail, the vigilantes came. They wore black hoods with eye and mouth slits. Nine of them pushed their way into the jailhouse.

  "We want the injun," the leader said. "And we plan to have him."

  "You boys better clear out of here," Lauters had told them.

  The vigilantes all carried guns and they were all on the sheriff.

  "You don't understand," the leader said. "We want that murdering redskin and we'll kill you if need be to get 'em."

  Lauters had gone for his gun, but the men were already on him. They knocked him senseless with the butts of their rifles and tied him to his chair. When he came to later, it was all done with. His deputy-Alden Bowes-had returned from delivering a prisoner to Virginia City and untied him.

  Red Elk was hanged from an oak in the square across the street.

  There were a few questions after that, but none Lauters couldn't answer. The men had worn masks, he couldn't identify them. They had overpowered him and he had the bruises to show for it. And why had he sent his deputy away to deliver a prisoner to Virginia City with a volatile situation brewing and anti-Indian sentiment running high? He'd thought no one would try such a thing.

  The questions were answered to everyone's satisfaction.

  Besides, the man they'd strung up was just an Indian, a Blackfoot. And he'd killed a white. Case closed. The only ones really concerned were the Blackfeet people and they didn't count.

  Everyone else believed Lauters.

  They never guessed he was lying about it all.

  Knowing this, Lauters drank more. It was a year ago this week that the injun had been lynched and duly swung. In his mind, he could hear the creaking of that limb the noose was strung over.

  It made him shiver.

  18

  The blizzard had been threatening for several days. On around midnight of the day Nate Segaris' body was discovered and carted away in Wynona Spence's funeral wagon to be plucked and polished in secret, it hit. It came down out of the Tobacco Root Mountains, urged forward by shrill, squealing winds that forced the mercury well below freezing. Several feet of heavy, blowing snow were dumped over Wolf Creek, the wind sculpting it into four and five foot drifts that looked like frozen waves crashing ashore on some alien beach.


  Around four, the storm passed.

  The world was white. Drifting, swirling, frozen. In the foothills of the mountains, Curly Del Vecchio waited in an old abandoned mine shaft wondering when death would come. His horse threw him the night before, a short distance away, breaking his leg in the process.

  Now it was night again.

  He was alone.

  Thankful only that he found the old shaft. Thankful there was a firepot in it and a heap of kindling left behind when the miners sought greener pastures. Enough wood to burn for three, maybe four days. Maybe by then, he hoped, someone would find him.

  Maybe not.

  Curly fed the fire only when he had to. This way the blaze would last for days, he figured. The only other thing he did was look at his leg and the bloody knob of bone that had burst through the skin. If he moved too much, the pain was so intense he lost consciousness.

  So he sat and fed the fire.

  The rest of the time was spent in a feverish half-sleep in which shadows mulled around him. Shadows with claws and teeth that reached out for him as the moon brooded above, a yellow, dead winking eye.

  Curly didn't even move to relieve himself. He pissed his pants and his crotch steamed with spreading warmth. If he moved his head just a few inches, he could see the mouth of the shaft and the world beyond. A huge drift had insinuated itself there now and he could see only a few feet of the world. He saw parting, rolling clouds and cold stars. And a sliver of moon growing fat by the day like a spider gorging on flies.

  Long before dawn, a savage, primal baying rode the screaming winds. Curly wondered again when death would come.

  Then, before sunup, with the decayed stink of an old slaughterhouse, it did.

  19

  It was two days later when Joseph Longtree approached Wolf Creek.

  He came from the southeast, across the Madison River on a night of blowing snow and subzero winds. He paused astride his black on a ridge outside town, looking down at the sprawl of houses, buildings, and farms below him. Wolf Creek was a mining town, he knew, its blood running rich from transfusions pumped in from ore veins. There were miners here and ranchers. That and a lot of hatred between the whites and local Blackfeet tribe. Tom Rivers had told him this much.

  Not that he needed to be told.

  Whites hated most Indians as a rule.

  And the Blackfeet, he knew, were a hostile bunch. They'd fought whites and, before them, other Indians. And with a vengeance next to which even the Dakotas often paled. But Longtree knew the Blackfeet weren't a bad lot. Not really. Just fiercely territorial and unrelentingly proud.

  Longtree held no prejudices against them.

  In his line of work, he couldn't afford to. Such things blinded a man's judgment. And the last thing he ever wanted was to arrest a man and see him brought to trial (and possibly the gallows) simply because of his skin color.

  Longtree accepted long ago, that although he might've been a lot of things, no one would ever accuse him of not being fair or honest.

  20

  Joseph Smith Longtree was born in 1836, the son of William "Bearclaw" Smith, a mountain man, and Piney River, a Crow Indian. His father had died fighting Commanches in 1842. Longtree had barely known him. In 1845, a Sioux raiding party attacked Longtree's village on the Powder River, killing everyone but himself and a few others that had scattered. His mother was among the dead. Longtree was taken away by a local missionary priest to a mission school in Nebraska. After seven years of strict Catholic upbringing and schooling, Longtree left.

  He ran away, making his way west.

  He fell in with a reformed gunman named Rawlings who was canvassing the Wyoming and Montana Territories in his new profession as a Baptist preacher in search of a congregation. Rawlings still carried a gun; only a fool didn't in the Territories. During their months together, Rawlings, very impressed with Longtree's knowledge of the Bible and other matters spiritual, taught him how to shoot. Getting the boy an old. 44 Colt Dragoon, he drilled him every day for hours until Longtree could knock an apple out of a tree from forty feet with one swift, decisive movement.

  In southeastern Montana, Rawlings and Longtree went their separate ways. Longtree sought out his Uncle Lone Hawk, who'd been away on the day the Sioux raided their village and hadn't returned until long after Longtree had been carted away by the missionary. Lone Hawk and his family had a cabin on the Little Powder River and it was here that Longtree spent the next five years.

  His mother's brother was a practical man.

  He knew the old ways were dying fast and a new world was beginning for the Indian. He himself lived more like a white man than a red one. He knew a young man needed a trade, a skill with which to eke out a living. But he also believed one should be acquainted with and be proud of one's ancestral heritage. He found a way in which he could bestow both upon young Joe Longtree-he would train him in the time-honored ways of the Indian, he would school him as a scout.

  For the next five years, under Lone Hawk's tutelage, Longtree learned how to "read sign": tracking animal and man, learning a wealth of information from such subtle clues as footprints, hoof marks, and bent blades of grass. He learned the fine art of pathfinding. He learned how to doctor wounds with expertise. He learned how to live off the land-what plants and roots could be eaten, which could not, and which could be used as medicines; how to locate and stalk game; how to find water and dozens of other tricks. He learned how to hunt and fight with a knife, a hatchet, the bow and arrow, the lance. He received advanced instruction in shooting and navigation by the sun and stars. He was taught the arts of stealth and concealment.

  All in all, everything the Crow had learned in thousands of years of survival were taught Longtree in a few years.

  After five years, Longtree left and signed on as an Indian scout to the army. For the next six years he fought with the whites against the Commanche and Cheyenne.

  Afterwards, his belly full of blood and death and atrocities committed by Indian and white alike, he drifted to San Francisco. Where, among other things, he made a name for himself (Kid Crow) as a barefisted boxer. Made a good run of it until an Irish hothead named Jimmy Elliot gave him a thrashing he wouldn't forget this side of the grave. Restless, tired of hitting and being hit, Longtree headed into the Arizona Territory where he turned his skill as a scout to tracking men as a bounty hunter. After six years of that, with a record boasting of tracking thirty men and bringing them all in (dead or alive), he was appointed as a deputy U.S. Marshal in the New Mexico Territory and later, Utah Territory, and finally, a special federal marshal.

  And now after all the killing he'd done, all the men he'd tracked, all the convicts and murderers he'd brought in, Longtree was going after something a little different.

  A killer that acted like a man.

  But sported the hungers of an animal.

  21

  It was late when Longtree found the body.

  He was just making his way down a slope of scrub oak towards the outskirts of Wolf Creek when he saw what might have been an arm covered with a light dusting of snow. Bringing his gelding to an abrupt halt, Longtree dismounted and fought through the snowdrifts to what he'd seen. The wind was blowing with fierce raw-edged gusts that whistled through the hills. His long buffalo coat flapped around him as he bent down and began to dig through the drifts to expose the rest of the corpse.

  He got his oil lantern out and lit it.

  The corpse wasn't worth revealing.

  Especially on this night of black, howling wind and bitter flurries. Longtree judged the man to be in his mid-forties and this was about all he could tell. The body was mutilated, chest and belly gouged open. The flesh clawed and shredded to the point that it and the ripped garments it wore were knotted into each other. Both legs were snapped off below the knees, skin stripped free. The head was twisted around so it was face down in the snow. Both arms had been pulled off. One was missing, the other nearby, mangled and punctured with teeth marks, a Colt pistol frozen
in its red fist.

  Longtree tried to turn the remains over, but they were frozen into the earth. He poked and prodded gently in the snow with his gloved fingers. There was very little blood around, most of it frozen into sparkling crystals.

  Not enough for a slaughter of this magnitude.

  Longtree surmised from this that the man had been killed somewhere else and dragged here, gutted and dismembered on the spot.

  He looked around for the remains of the cadaver's legs, but they were gone.

  He studied the body again in the dancing light.

  It was hard to say exactly how the man had died, such was the nature of the carnage. His throat was torn out. Little remained of it but a twisted spiral ladder of vertebrae and hacked ligament. He had been opened up in countless places and could've bled to death from any of a dozen wounds. Longtree figured the attack must've been sudden and vicious. But not too sudden; the man had drawn his gun, precious little good it had done him.

  The initial attack must've been savage. Brutal beyond comprehension. The man was dead long before he was dumped here and cannibalized.

  Longtree examined the wounds the best he could in the flickering light.

  From the teeth and claw marks there was no doubt in his mind: Only an animal could have done this. A huge and powerful beast with iron hooks for claws and jaws like razored bear traps. No man possessed the strength. No insane mind, regardless how fevered, could've summoned up the strength to pull a man literally apart. And the tools that would've been needed to create such injuries would have been complex beyond reason.

  The killer in Wolf Creek was an animal.

  Type: unknown.

  Clenching his teeth and sucking in icy air, Longtree picked up the severed arm. It was much like handling a frozen leg of lamb. Wedging the limb between his knees, he began the grisly task of pulling the fingers free of the gun. He had to know if it had been fired. Rigor mortis and the freezing temperatures had turned the hand into an ice sculpture. The fingers snapped like pretzel rods as he forced them away from the Colt. Two popped off completely and fell in the snow.