Hunter's Moon

by Dana Stabenow

  He nodded at the moose. “Yours?”

  Evidently Crazy Emmett did not believe that introductions were necessary. “Belongs to one of the hunters I was guiding.”

  “You going to pack him out? If you’re not, I’ll take him.”

  From all reports, that was a long speech for Crazy Emmett, who had had his fill of teaching teenagers who didn’t listen, and before he got to the end of it Kate had decided. She hadn’t been looking forward to coming back tomorrow and finishing the butchering and packing out the meat, and she didn’t feel under any particular obligation to mind Dieter and Eberhard’s meat for them. “Sure,” she said. “He’s all yours. You want some help?”

  “No.” Crazy Emmett looked at her again. It was a slow and thorough inspection and at the end of it Kate felt as if she had been stripped naked. “I haven’t had a woman in a while.”

  The contrast between his precise diction and his Deliverance appearance was disconcerting. Her .30-06 had never felt so comforting in her hands. She met his eyes steadily. Never let them see you sweat.

  “You aren’t going to have one today, either,” she said, fighting the urge to take a step back. Retreat to Crazy Emmett would look like surrender and an invitation to attack.

  He gave her a long, assessing look, estimating his chances of getting the rifle away from her before she shot him. He shifted where he stood and her eyes dropped involuntarily to see his erection strain at the front of his faded jeans. Is that a gun in your pocket or are you just glad to see me, she thought, and slid her right forefinger oh so casually inside the trigger guard of the .30-06. The safety was already off.

  They stared at each other for what felt to Kate like a very long time. Crazy Emmett broke first, setting his rifle against a tree to unshoulder a small pack. He pulled out a long and extremely sharp skinning knife.

  Kate backed up, one careful step at a time. Crazy Emmett, in an about-face that was disconcerting, acted as though she were no longer there. His indifference was not reassuring; she had the feeling that if she tripped he’d be on her before she hit the ground. She took the utmost care not to.

  When enough brush was between her and him she turned and moved smartly up the trail, ears tuned for any pursuit. Mercifully, there wasn’t any. There were other rustles in the brush going the opposite direction, though. Crazy Emmett wasn’t going to have any problem disposing of scraps.

  Somehow Kate didn’t think there would be all that many.

  She had to hand it to Dieter and Eberhard; they’d made it a whole three hundred yards before losing the trail. Their revised course would have had them stumbling into Anchorage in three or four weeks. She was interested to see that Dieter, not Eberhard, was carrying the trophy. Hanging from the back of a packboard, insecurely fastened with loose-fitting and ill-tied rope, the moose looked as disgusted as Kate felt.

  As she came up on them, Dieter was loosening the straps of the board, trying to shift the load in what appeared to be an attempt to ease a twinge in his back. He’d set his rifle down, butt to the ground, and then one of the brow tines got caught in his pants pocket. He turned and another brow tine caught the Merkel’s trigger.

  Of course the Merkel’s safety was off. The rifle boomed. Dieter spun around like a top. A bullet sang over Kate’s head and instinctively she ducked. So did Eberhard, hauling his Weatherby up in a defensive stance.

  Dieter stopped spinning. He staggered a few steps in Kate’s direction and then stood where he was, staring down at his upper arm, a white, shocked look on his face as rich red blood welled from a neat crease bisecting his right bicep. He said something in German, his voice dazed.

  Kate got slowly to her feet, feeling a little light-headed herself.

  Dieter blinked at her. “I shot myself,” he said, enunciating each word with studied care.

  “You sure did,” Kate said, and she wasn’t smiling.

  “I—I shot myself,” he repeated. He touched the blood with one finger and stared at it. “But how? The safety, I know I put the safety on.”

  Yeah, right, Kate thought. “You’d better let me take a look.” Eberhard made as if to get in the way and she halted him with a glare. “I used to be an EMT, an emergency medical technician. It’s just a crease, Eberhard, I think I can handle it.”

  She had a first aid kit in her pack, which included a packet of gauze, and she wrapped this around Dieter’s arm and knotted the ends. He was swearing in German by the time she was done. There was aspirin in the kit, too, and Kate shook out two tablets and handed them over. “We’ve got something stronger at camp,” she said, “but first we have to get there. Can you make it?”

  He nodded, washing the pills back with water from the bottle of Evian he pulled from a pocket attached to his belt. Next to it was a pocket for a Swiss army knife. Another larger knife with an ebony handle protruded from a leather sheath on the other side of his waist. A compass dangled from one belt loop and a thermometer from another. Kate squinted. It was fifty-three degrees Fahrenheit. Not bad for an afternoon in late September.

  “Okay, let’s go,” she said. “We’ve got plenty of time, we’ll take it slow and easy.”

  Eberhard shouldered the trophy, and neither man said anything when Kate turned and headed back in the direction from which they had come. Neither did they say anything when she found the correct trail and headed west.

  They gained the top of the ridge two hours later. There was no sign of Berg, Senta or George. “Wait here,” she said to Dieter and Eberhard, and went in search.

  Berg was easy to find. He was a big man and unskilled in wilderness navigation; he’d left a trail through the brush three moose wide. He was lying in the middle of a blueberry patch, fingers and mouth stained blue, a deep, phlegmy snore issuing forth, thick-lensed glasses folded neatly and protruding from his pocket protector, along with a couple of pens and a ruler marked in centimeters. His rifle was leaning against the fork of a small alder some twenty feet away, the stock barely discernible between the leaves.

  Kate gave his foot an ungentle kick. He woke with a snort and gawped up at her.

  “Enjoying the blueberries?” Kate said.

  Berg sat up, brushing the twigs from his hair and shirt, face serene. He didn’t appear to realize that he’d been lost up until a couple of minutes ago. “Yes,” he said. “The berries are very good.”

  “Yes,” Kate agreed. “He thinks so, too.” She pointed.

  Berg couldn’t see what she was pointing at so he lumbered to his feet and craned his neck around a small stand of mountain hemlock. A stick broke with a sharp crack beneath his foot, flushing a group of ptarmigan, noted blueberry aficionados, into startled flight. In the same moment Kate heard footsteps coming up the path behind her.

  Berg met the startled eyes of a half-grown black bear picking berries not ten feet from where he was sitting. They regarded each other for a split second, and then the man let out a yell and the cub let out a squall and the big man galloped off in one direction and the little bear in another.

  “Exit, pursued by a bear,” Kate said, unable to stop herself, and burst out laughing. Seconds later Dieter came around her with his Merkel clutched in his hands. Evidently the aspirin had taken effect.

  Kate stopped laughing and said severely, “Put that down, Dieter, that little cub didn’t do you any harm. There isn’t enough meat on him to feed a mouse and what there is will taste like fish anyway at this time of year.” Her voice rose as he galloped by. “He’s not big enough for a rug or a trophy, dammit, and it’s not bear season yet anyway!”

  Eberhard followed, Weatherby at the ready. Kate swore and lit out in pursuit. The two men sounded like a couple of water buffalo crashing through the brush and the cub’s frightened squalls must have been audible for ten miles. Kate hoped most sincerely that the cub was on his own.

  She caught up with the three of them in a small clearing. The bear cub was frantically scrabbling up a knobby young cottonwood with Dieter, red-faced, sweating and determined, c
lose behind. The Merkel had been cast off and Dieter now had the ebony-handled knife clenched between his teeth. Eberhard watched from the ground, Weatherby held at the ready in case the vicious animal attacked his boss, who probably outweighed the poor little bear by fifty pounds.

  “Oh for crying out loud,” Kate said, disgusted, and kept a weather eye peeled for the bear’s mama. He looked even younger up a tree, and he was letting the world know of his distress.

  The cottonwood wobbled back and forth across the sky with the howling cub clutching to the trunk twenty feet in the air. Dieter was shinnying up from below, looking like a pirate who had lost his ship. The cub looked over his shoulder and beheld Long John Silver at his heels. He’d been in the berry patch for the same reason Berg and the ptarmigan had, and it was all too much for him; with one terrified bawl his sphincter muscle gave out and he cut loose with about a gallon of half-digested berries that engulfed Dieter in a reeking flood of dark bluish brown. Dieter gave a cry of outrage, a mistake, let go of the tree to paw at his mouth, and slid ignominiously down the trunk to land hard on his fanny. He threw up immediately, and kept on retching, until the cub’s blueberries and that morning’s breakfast and that afternoon’s sandwiches had all landed in his lap, until there couldn’t be so much as a teaspoonful of fluid left in his stomach.

  By then, the cub was long gone, having dropped to the ground and lit out for points vaguely southeast, assisted on his way by a shot from Eberhard’s Weatherby that narrowly missed him, the report of which made Kate’s ears ring for some thirty seconds afterward. At the rate he was going, Kate estimated the little cub would be in Tyonek before dark.

  Kate was laughing so hard she couldn’t speak. Dieter was swearing in German again, and from the tone of his voice and the fire in what you could see of his eye, Kate thought a momentary retreat the wisest course of action. She choked back her laughter, although irrepressible little giggles kept surfacing inadvertently. “Get yourself cleaned up,” she said. She dug in her pack and tossed him a box of Wash’n Dri towels. “I’ll see if I can’t find George and Senta. We’ll wait for you by the spike camp.”

  She beat feet back to where the trail crossed the ridge, marked by the three fifty-five-gallon drums that constituted the spike camp. Each contained the bare essentials for a couple of hunters caught outside overnight on a hike: a tent, two sleeping bags and a store of freeze-dried food with a small set of cooking utensils and a Sterno stove. There was a wrench taped to the side of the barrel to open it up, judged too complicated for a grizzly to understand and employ.

  Berg was standing nearby, licking berry juice from his fingers. “You shouldn’t have lit out like that,” Kate told him, “you missed all the fun.”

  Berg looked startled, as if unaccustomed to being directly addressed in civil tones. “Please excuse me,” he said, and sidled over to stand behind a tree, presumably out of range. It must be unfortunate to be that large and to live a life in the preeminent desire to avoid all attention.

  Footsteps thudded up the path, and Kate turned to see George and Senta running the last few feet to the top of the ridge. “What was that?” George said breathlessly, skidding to a halt. “We heard something screaming—was it a bear?—and a shot. Did you get charged?”

  “Not exactly,” Kate said.

  George looked baffled. “What, then?”

  “It was kind of the other way around,” Kate said. Senta’s long blond hair had come free of its intricate knot and now tumbled in glorious disarray around a glowing face. She hadn’t bothered to tuck her shirt back into her belt or her cuffs into her boots. As for George, he virtually radiated that purring gratification specific to the male of the species immediately following a score in the sack.

  Both of them carried rifles in one hand and fanny packs and packboards by their straps in the other. Kate raised an eyebrow, and said in her blandest voice, “So, did you manage to find Berg?”

  “Berg?” George said in a blank voice, and then had the grace to look a little guilty, just a little, not a lot. He exchanged a furtive look with Senta and said, “Uh, no, we didn’t.” He looked at the sun, seemed to realize how much time had passed and checked his watch. “Christ! I mean, he’s still lost? You haven’t found him either?”

  “I was minding my own hunters,” Kate said virtuously, “and Berg’s name was not included on that list.”

  George shouldered his rifle. “Well, let’s leave our gear here and go—”

  Hearing his name, Berg stepped reluctantly into the open. “Here I am.”

  George looked from him to Kate. “So you did find him.”

  “Yup.”

  “Well then, why—” The words trailed off as George looked over Kate’s shoulder. His jaw dropped. “What the hell?”

  Even Kate, who knew what she was going to see when she turned, was impressed by the view.

  Dieter was a marvelous sight. He was scraped cleaner than he had been when he slid down the tree but face and shirt were nonetheless dyed an arresting shade of deep blue, with here and there an interesting streak of moose blood, slowly going brown. The colors complemented the dark red stain on the gauze binding his upper arm, which had started to bleed again.

  Eberhard trailed a very distant second, the moose rack bobbing on his pack. Even absolute loyalty went only so far.

  George drew in a breath of pure enjoyment before recollecting who and what Dieter was. “Jesus, Kate,” he said in a low voice as Dieter approached, “what the hell did you do to him? I know the guy’s an asshole, but he is a paying customer.”

  “I didn’t do anything,” Kate replied with perfect truth. “Dieter hunts his own dogs, don’t you, Dieter? Or in this case, bears.”

  Dieter caught only the tail end of this remark, and by the unfriendly look he shot Kate it wouldn’t have mattered if he’d heard it all. She had made the cardinal error of being present during two episodes in which he had not appeared to advantage, and he would never forgive her for it.

  “Bears?” George said ominously.

  Kate raised a hand. “Let it be, George. The bear managed to save itself.”

  Dieter caught sight of Senta, refastening her belt buckle after tucking in her shirt, and his face hardened. She returned his look with a long, cool stare of her own, entirely unintimidated. Her eyes drifted down over his body, lingering on the bandaged arm, an eyebrow lifting over the stain, nostrils forming an aristocratic wrinkle when they caught a whiff of the smell. Ice Queen. 1, Dieter, zip. Kate gave a silent cheer.

  They stood staring at each other, blue eyes into blue eyes, identical expressions of obstinacy on identically square-jawed faces. Dieter broke first. “We’re going back to camp,” he said. “Now.”

  It was an order, not a question.

  George looked at the rack bobbing off the back of Eberhard’s packboard, and said, “I see you got one, guys, good for you.” He looked at Kate’s empty packboard, at Dieter’s. “Where’s the rest of it?” Kate could see the alarm, followed by a slow burn. “Kate? Where’s the rest of it?”

  Kate was saved from answering by the distant report of a rifle shot. George spun on his heel to face toward camp, but Kate was before him, hand cautioning silence.

  It seemed more like ten seconds before the second shot came. Another pause, followed by a third.

  “Shit,” George said with emphasis.

  “From camp, do you think?” Kate said.

  “Sounded like it,” George said shortly. “All right, we’ve got trouble, everybody back to camp on the double. Get your gear on and let’s get going. Move, move, move!”

  As they assembled and donned their gear, George drew Kate to one side. “Where’s the rest of the moose, Kate?”

  “I gave it to Crazy Emmett.”

  George paled beneath his tan. “You saw Emmett?”

  “Yeah. Right after the guys took off up the trail with the trophy.”

  “The guys took off?”

  “Yeah, they decided they didn’t want the meat.”r />
  “Goddammit, I—” George’s skin went whiter. “Wait a minute. You were alone when you met up with Emmett?”

  “Yeah,” she said, “you might have told me how needy he is.”

  He grabbed her arm. “Are you all right? He didn’t hurt you, did he?”

  She shook her head. “No. I’m glad I had my rifle, though. He didn’t look to me like a man who’d take no for an answer.”

  “He isn’t,” George said with emphasis. “Remind me to tell you about a little encounter Emmett had with Ramona a while back. All right, people,” he said, shouldering his rifle and moving to stand at the head of the group, “are we ready?”

  There were nods, a curt one from Dieter, a sheepish one from Berg, no response from Senta and Eberhard. “Okay. I’ll take point, Kate, you take drag. The rest of you, keep up.” He directed an unsmiling look at Berg, who blushed and shuffled his feet. He also, Kate noticed as she fell in behind him, had his packboard on backward.

  During the ninety minutes of the forced march back to camp, she wondered what Berg was doing in the Alaskan Bush, on a hunting trip for which it was painfully obvious he lacked inclination, aptitude and skills, or even a basic sense of survival for that matter. Baby bear could have brought Mama along to share the blueberries, and Berg had left his rifle twenty feet away from him when he went for his snack and a nap.

  Between Berg and Dieter, they’d been damn lucky they hadn’t been the ones who’d had to fire the trouble signal.

  Six

  I’m going to move. Really. Eventually.

  WhEN THEY GOT CLOSE ENOUGH to the lodge that the trail was clearly marked, Kate and George trotted ahead, leaving the others to follow in their own time. Jack was waiting for them on the airstrip, his face drawn into stern lines but otherwise looking whole and blessedly healthy. The knot in Kate’s stomach relaxed. Mutt, standing at Jack’s knee, saw Kate first and bounded forward, all irritation gone at being left behind. “Hey, girl,” Kate said.