Hunter's Moon

by Dana Stabenow

  She hid a grin. “I notice.”

  He held out a small box of twenty rounds. “Ammunition from RWS, TUGs, 293 grain.” He ran a swift internal calculation. “For you, eighty dollars American per box.”

  “Uh-huh.” Kate ran her own calculation. Dieter’s ammo was running him about four bucks a bullet. A box of twenty rounds of Winchester 180-grain .30-06 cartridges cost between sixteen and eighteen bucks, or an average seventy-five cents a bullet, and you didn’t have to fly them in from Munich, either. Kate decided she’d stick to the homegrown.

  She stood up and cast a quick eye around the rest of the group, who had been armed with duplicate automatic rifles, .30 calibers at a guess, and duplicate twelve-gauge shotguns, all of some unfamiliar and probably European brand. Kate would bet her homestead that they were half the caliber and a quarter the price of Dieter’s arsenal, which was probably just as well, given the beating they were about to take in inexperienced hands.

  “No, like this,” Old Sam told Hubert, and slammed the rifle in poor Hubert’s shoulder harder than the recoil of a shot would.

  Demetri watched silently as Fedor tried to load his rifle with the bullets backward.

  They traveled in a group down to the firing range George had set up at the foot of the runway. Targets were concentric circles drawn on sheets of typing paper tacked to plywood backboards standing on the edge of the Kichatna. Eberhard declined to take a practice shot, Dieter’s first knocked his target off its two-by-four legs, and Berg flinched just as much from his tenth shot as he did his first.

  The rest of them were similarly skilled, with the exception of Klemens, who was competent if a little rusty. He caught Kate’s eye and gave her an apologetic smile. “It’s been a long time since I shot a rifle.”

  Kate wondered when and where that had been. Klemens looked old enough to have served in World War II. At that moment the Cub was heard on final, and they trooped up the airstrip to meet it. Gunther looked a little green around the gills, but from George’s expression the news was good, and his words confirmed it. “Found us two nice big bulls about three miles up the creek.”

  “How many can I shoot?” Dieter demanded.

  George looked at him sternly. “One. You’ve all got one moose tag, Dieter. You get one moose each, and that’s it.”

  Dieter’s expression came perilously close to a sulk.

  “Unless,” George added, “you can talk one of your people into giving up their tag to you.”

  “Is that legal?” Klemens said in surprise.

  “Well.” George scratched his chin. “It isn’t if you tell someone about it. Don’t.”

  “Okay.” Klemens smiled. “You can have my tag, Dieter.”

  Dieter began to expostulate. Klemens raised one hand, palm out. “Oh, I’ll go, I’ll go, if only to walk around the country a bit. But I’ve done all the killing I need to. You can have my tag, Dieter.”

  Dieter shook his head firmly. “Everyone gets a shot at a moose, Klemens. That’s what we came for, and that’s what we are all going to do.” His tone was final, and Klemens subsided.

  Dieter, having got his way, beamed.

  *

  That afternoon everyone scattered along the Nakochna with rod and reel, mostly light tackle on ten-pound test. There was a lot of snagging at first, of humpies too tired to resist, of deadfall trailing limbs in the water, but after a while Gregor caught and by a miracle landed a two-pound rainbow and everyone began fishing in earnest.

  The guides took turns keeping watch. At four o’clock it was Kate’s turn, and she shouldered her rifle and ambled down to the creek. She found Klemens around the first bend, tucked cozily into a niche made between a couple of boulders.

  He was sleeping, his mouth open, a gentle, inoffensive snore issuing forth in a steady purr of sound swallowed up by the sound of the creek. Rod and reel lay discarded at his feet, and a book lay open on his chest. She rested a hand on one of the boulders and felt the stone warm to the touch. She tried to read the title of the book but he stirred and opened his eyes.

  She smiled down at him. “Hi. Guess you didn’t find any fish.”

  He yawned and stretched, bones popping. “I didn’t look for any. The sun is too hot.”

  “Umm.” Kate turned her face into it. “We’ve got company.” She pointed without looking.

  Klemens raised his head to follow her finger and sat up with a jerk.

  “Shhhh,” she said. She had already unslung her rifle but she didn’t think she was going to need it.

  The grizzly coalesced out of the brush like a great brown ghost made manifest, an immense creature with a silver snout and little pig eyes. As always, Kate marveled at how silently something that large could move when it wanted to.

  “A bear,” he breathed, his eyes enormous.

  “A grizzly,” she agreed, keeping her voice low.

  He wasn’t twenty-five feet from where they sat, and he’d had a good summer, attested to by the rolls of fat sliding around beneath his thick coat of golden brown fur. He ambled out into midstream and took a halfhearted swipe at a dog salmon. Claws scooped and lifted and the dog smacked onto the bank. Weary from its long journey from ocean to birth waters, it flopped once and gave up. The grizzly sauntered out, brown fur tipped with drops of water gleaming crystal in the sun, picked the fish up with his teeth and seemed once more to vanish, leaving nothing behind but the print of a paw in a patch of sand, filling rapidly with water and soon washed downstream with the current.

  Klemens, still sitting bolt upright, said, “I should have brought my rifle.”

  “You always should,” Kate agreed. She looked down with a smile. “I thought we told you that.”

  Klemens gave a grave nod. “You did. I will remember next time.”

  “Good,” Kate said, equally grave.

  Klemens looked across the creek. “He won’t come back?”

  “He’ll eat his fish and take a nap,” Kate said, and closed her eyes against the sun. “We’re okay. For now.”

  There followed a few moments of silence broken only by the lazy gurgle of water flowing next to them. “You were always a guide?” Klemens said eventually.

  Kate smiled without opening her eyes, hearing in Klemens’s words the echo of Jack’s question about the Bush word for Renaissance woman. She liked this old man, who had done all the killing he wanted to and who was now content to laze in the sun with a book, who took the occasional wandering grizzly in his stride. “I was always a lot of things, and still am, but I hunted with my father from the time I was able to walk.”

  “What did you hunt?”

  “Deer, mostly. In the islands in Prince William Sound. And moose.” She opened her eyes, feeling like a lizard as she blinked. “Whatever we could find to put on the table.”

  “So you hunted to eat?”

  “Yes.”

  Klemens was silent for a moment. “A good reason to hunt,” he said at last.

  The only reason, Kate thought.

  He looked at her and she had an uneasy feeling that he could read her thought in her face. She got to her feet. “I’d better check on the rest of the crew. See you later, Klemens.”

  He smiled, it seemed to her, a little sadly. “See you later, Katerina.” At her surprise, he added, “Kate is for Katherine, yes? Katherine is Katerina in German.”

  “Ekaterina,” Kate said.

  “Ah, Russian.” He nodded. “From the Russian Alaskan Company, yes?”

  She smiled. “More or less.”

  He seemed to relax, as if he had regained her favor somehow.

  Klemens was too old and too successful to need the approval of strangers thirty years his junior, Kate thought. Dieter must do one hell of a number on his employees’ egos.

  Four

  Just try to make sure nobody shoots anybody else in the ass, okay?

  THE NEXT MORNING George convened the guides in the lodge for a brief meeting. His manner was brisk and businesslike as he pointed out their various rou
tes on a U.S.G.S. map of the area mounted on cardboard. “Demetri, Jack and Old Sam, you take your people up the road to Blueberry Ridge. If you decide to overnight it, remember there’s a spike camp on the point of the ridge overlooking the creek where it forks, right side. If you get into trouble and need help, fire three shots, bang, one-one thousand—”

  “Bang, two-one thousand—” Old Sam said.

  “Bang,” said Jack.

  “—and we’ll come on the run,” George said, unperturbed. “Same here.” He dropped his voice. “I don’t know that we’re going to bag anything first day, not with this bunch. Just try to make sure nobody shoots anybody else in the ass, okay?”

  “Okay,” Demetri said, stolid as always. Jack nodded and shouldered his rifle. Old Sam grunted and spat.

  George turned to Kate and grinned. Kate braced herself for the worst. “You and I, dear heart, are heading east. You know that little pear-shaped lake about four miles thataway?”

  Kate sighed. There were about fifty lakes between the camp and the Yentna River, but, unfortunately, they’d been to this lake on previous hunts and she knew where it was. “You mean the one on the other side of Backbreak Ridge? The one across Mud Ass Swamp? The one just this side of the Youngstown Bend? That lake?”

  George’s laugh had a distinctly sadistic flavor to it. “That’s the one. I found us a nice big fat bull grazing on the diamond willow growing next to the creek feeding into that lake.”

  “Oh, joy,” Kate said.

  The screen door banged as George stepped into the yard. “Come on, folks, get your gear on. We’ve got a ways to walk today.”

  Senta paused in the act of buckling her packboard on. “You mean we have to walk the whole way? No flying?”

  “No flying,” Dieter said, boisterous and beaming and brimming with macho. “This is Alaska! The Last Frontier! I wanted us to have the true wilderness experience!”

  From the expressions on a few faces, it wasn’t a desire shared wholeheartedly by his employees, but although Dieter’s face bore nothing but good humor, there was no give in it. No one said anything and there was no outward mutiny. Kate wondered what would have happened if they’d been on a spring hunt, complete with thigh-deep slush and mosquitoes fresh out of their larvae and ravenous for their first meal.

  Old Sam and Demetri got the four-wheelers out of the garage, two Honda FourTrax Foremans with four-wheel drive and towing capacity. The four-wheelers alone would have set George back six grand each; fortunately, the previous spring a couple of bear hunters from Anchorage got liquored up and went hoorahing across country with Park Ranger Dan O’Brian in hot pursuit. They’d wound up in Kate’s front yard, the fashion of their arrival bringing irresistibly to mind that immortal stage direction by Shakespeare, “Exit, pursued by a bear.”

  Dan had hauled them off to the pokey, abandoning the four-wheelers to Kate’s tender mercies. She had sold them to George for a thousand each, who, after he bought two new trailers seating six each, was out less than the price of one Foreman new. Everybody was happy, except maybe the original owners, and they were still in jail, so it didn’t matter.

  Jack hopped on board the second trailer as it rolled past, and grinned at Kate. “Don’t worry, Kate, I’ll give you a foot rub when we get back.”

  That’s not all you’ll be rubbing, buddy, Kate thought.

  He read her mind as he often unnervingly did, and flashed a grin. “Hold that thought.”

  The two-vehicle convoy purred up the airstrip. Jack waved a smug good-bye as the second trailer vanished into the undergrowth as surely as the bear by the creek had the day before.

  “Okay, let’s move like we got a purpose,” George said, shouldering pack and rifle.

  They moved like they had a purpose. Mutt, left behind on guard duty, sat sulking at the edge of the yard as they crossed the strip and entered the trees on the other side.

  They were over Backbreak Ridge before they realized they’d lost Berg. “Well, shit,” George said. “How the hell’d he do that? I been hiking drag ever since we left camp.”

  They’d been following an overgrown game trail down the far side of the ridge, and it didn’t take any encouragement at all to get the party to stop for a breather. The brush, after thinning out over the top of the knoll, had begun to thicken again, and since most of the alders were hanging grimly on to their leaves in spite of the season, there were places where they couldn’t even see the sky, let alone each other. It was dark and sweaty going in the undergrowth, sometimes with only the sound of brush breaking ahead to guide you down the track. And it was steep going, up and down over a razor’s edge of rock thrust upward by a geologic strength of will that had defeated even time’s efforts to wear it into a gentler slope. Even Kate’s thigh muscles were protesting.

  “I’d better go back and roust him out,” George said in disgust. “Sorry, Kate. Don’t know how I got to be so sloppy.”

  “Not your fault,” Senta said. “Berg is always wandering off. Sometimes in body, sometimes in mind. Always in spirit. Not what you would expect from someone who heads up quality control, but there you are.” She smiled, a light film of perspiration giving her already flawless skin a rosy glow. The effect was dazzling enough to require sunglasses, which George was not wearing. George and Senta had been trailing the rest of them, lagging farther behind with every turn of the trail, and Kate had heard Senta laughing a lot. It could be just her suspicious mind, but that might have had something to do with George not noticing Berg’s disappearance.

  George shed his packboard. “What do you do again, Senta?”

  The smile became even more dazzling. “I’m the head of human resources for all of DRG.”

  “All of DRG’s resourceful humans are damn lucky.” He reshouldered his rifle. “Want to backtrail with me?”

  Kate waited confidently for Senta to tell George in no uncertain terms that there was no way this three-piece suit was going up and down that ridge one more time than necessary, no matter what her boss said.

  Senta smiled again. “Sure.” She doffed her packboard and readjusted her fanny pack.

  “Great,” George said, a matching smile spreading across his face. Kate thought sourly that he might trip over his tongue if he wasn’t careful. “Kate, take Dieter and Eberhard on to the lake. Don’t want to let that big fat bull get away now, do we?”

  “What do you mean we, white man,” Kate muttered.

  George didn’t hear her or pretended he didn’t, and started back up the ridge with Senta in tow. Ten steps up the trail he stopped and turned. “And Kate, if you run into Crazy Emmett, just move on, okay? Don’t say hi, don’t look at him, just pretend you don’t even see him. He hates being noticed. He’ll leave you alone if you leave him alone.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Kate said, and waved Dieter and Eberhard on as Senta and George started back up the ridge.

  “This Crazy Emmett,” Eberhard said, speaking for the first time that morning. “Who is he?”

  Kate nodded in the direction of the horizon. “He lives on a lake over there. Kind of a hermit. Likes his privacy. He’s harmless. Let’s get a move on, shall we?”

  They followed the game trail into Mud Ass Swamp and walked for what seemed like forever to Kate, who didn’t like getting her feet wet and who spent the entire time sending out feelers to her toes to see if the waterproof job on her boots was holding. They emerged eventually on a low, rocky knoll covered with lichen and blueberry bushes. About a quarter mile distant they could see the lake glinting through a stand of white spruce. Kate checked the wind. What there was of it was in their faces.

  She looked back at the ridge and didn’t see anyone coming their way. She hadn’t really expected to; she had a feeling George and Senta were experiencing a close encounter of the third kind, and taking their time over it. She only hoped Berg hadn’t had a close encounter of his own with a bear in the meanwhile. He had a rifle, of course; they all had, but that didn’t mean he had either the skill or the presence of mind
to use it.

  “Okay, guys,” she said. “Looks like you get first crack at that bull. We’re downwind of him, so if we take it slow and quiet he shouldn’t hear us coming. Let’s have some lunch first, though.”

  “No, let’s go,” Dieter said, shifting his rifle from one shoulder to the other. “Maybe he’ll get away.”

  Kate shook her head. “He’ll be there, and we haven’t had anything to eat in four hours. A shaky hand isn’t going to do your aim any good. Come on, sit down.” She met his glare with a steady, implacable gaze.

  Eberhard touched Dieter’s shoulder and murmured something in German. Dieter’s face cleared and he laughed. It was an unpleasant laugh in any language, and so was the look he ran over Kate. “Yeah, okay, we eat.” He made it sound like a command, and as if on cue, Eberhard dumped his packboard and opened his fanny pack.

  Kate sat a little apart from them and ate her sandwich, apple and cookies, with her rifle on her knees. She hadn’t seen any sign of bears but it never hurt to stay alert. She’d known those who hadn’t, but the friendships were never of a very long duration.

  Dieter completed his meal by crumpling up the Saran wrap his sandwiches had come in and tossing it over his shoulder.

  Kate took a deep breath, held it, and let it out again. “Dieter,” she said, “pick that up.”

  Dieter appeared genuinely confused. “What?”

  She pointed at the wrapper. “Pick that up.”

  “What, the wrapper?” He looked from her to the wrapper, and added something else in German, something that sounded less than complimentary, and again she was reminded of Aleut. It might as well have been Greek; for all she knew, Dieter could have been thanking her for reminding him of his duty as a visitor to the Alaskan Bush. From the look on his face she didn’t think so, though.

  Patience was a virtue Kate neither had in quantity nor particularly admired. “The rule is, leave it how you found it. You pack it in, you pack it out. We don’t leave trash behind on our hunts, Dieter. Pick up the wrapper.” She thought it over, and added—he was a paying customer, after all—“Please.”