Hunter's Moon

by Dana Stabenow

  Mutt leapt up, front paws on Kate’s shoulders, and anointed Kate lavishly with her tongue. “All right, all right,” Kate said. “Enough. I’m okay.”

  Mutt looked her over critically, decided she was telling the truth and dropped down to all fours with a satisfied “Whuff.” She fell in next to Kate as they trotted after George, all three heading for Jack, who was standing next to a mound covered with a blue plastic tarp.

  “Who?” George said, voice tight.

  “Fedor.”

  “One of the kids?”

  Jack nodded. George swore, long and fluently, but swearing didn’t make it not so.

  “Was he shot here?” Kate said.

  “No. Up the creek. We brought him in.”

  “You moved him?” Kate said. “You moved him, Jack? What, are you out of your mind? You wish to experience firsthand the effective methods of rehabilitation as practiced by the Alaska Department of Corrections, is that it?”

  “I didn’t move him,” Jack said shortly, and Kate shut up. It was obvious he was restraining his temper and that the effort was taking considerable control. “They had him in a makeshift sling made out of some tree branches and their coats and were halfway home by the time Gunther and I caught up with them.”

  “Oh my,” Kate murmured, “the troopers are going to just love this.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know,” Jack said glumly. “The other hunters told me where they found Fedor; I can probably find it again. I tried to get Klemens to show me where he was shooting from so I could at least mark the area, but he can hardly talk, he’s so broken up. Poor bastard.”

  “Not Klemens,” Kate said, dismayed. “It wasn’t Klemens, Jack, was it?”

  He took a deep breath, let it out. “Yeah. It was Klemens.”

  “Damn.” Kate thought of yesterday afternoon, and Klemens dozing contentedly in the sun on the banks of the creek. “Poor Klemens.”

  “Correct me if I’m wrong,” George said with mounting fury, emphasized by his extreme care with his words, “but I believe you were supposed to be with Gunther and Klemens?”

  “I was,” Jack agreed. “I don’t have any excuse, George. He got away from me. I was setting Gunther up for a shot at one of those bulls, and when I looked around Klemens wasn’t there. I didn’t even hear him leave. I figured he’d stepped behind some bushes to take a leak or something, that he’d be right back. Only he wasn’t.” He looked George straight in the eye. “I screwed up. I’m sorry, George.”

  George, about to reply with even more care, caught Kate’s eye and was put forcibly in mind of other events that had taken place that afternoon. It took a visible effort but he swallowed what he had been about to say.

  Pulled back, the tarp revealed the pallid face of Fedor, the life drained out of him like wine from a bottle, leaving only the hollow vessel behind. His fair lashes lay thick upon his cheeks, an innocently incongruous contrast to the bullet hole in his forehead, just beneath his hairline and slightly off-center. He was lying on another tarp, and without moving his head Kate could see that most of the back of his skull was gone.

  George tossed back the tarp. “I don’t get it. Klemens and Eberhard are the only two nimrods in this bunch who know one end of a rifle from the other.”

  “He said he saw the brush rustle, a flash of brown. He thought it was a moose and shot.”

  George flicked up the tarp again. Over his safari suit Fedor had zipped the fluorescent orange vest that George demanded all his hunters wear before he’d take them out on the trail, especially in a group this large. “Who was supposed to be watching Fedor? Old Sam?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, why wasn’t he!”

  “George,” Jack said. “You know it happens.”

  Kate gave him a sharp look. Who was he trying to convince, himself or George?

  “It doesn’t happen on my hunts,” George snapped. He ran his hands through his hair. “Oh, hell.”

  Berg, Senta, Eberhard and Dieter were approaching. Jack looked around at the sound of their footsteps and saw Dieter. “Jesus, what happened to Dieter?” He looked down at Kate. “What did you do to him?”

  “I didn’t do anything to him,” Kate snapped. “Why does everyone keep asking me that?”

  Senta was a little ahead of the three men. She saw the group standing around the blue plastic mound and the blond eyebrows on the lovely brow creased. “What is it?”

  “Someone’s been shot,” George said bluntly.

  She gasped, one hand going to her mouth. “What? Who? One of us? Who is it, George?”

  “Fedor.”

  “Fedor?” Senta stood very still, her face blank. “Fedor has been shot? Dead?”

  “See for yourself,” George said, all trace of lover banished for the moment.

  Eberhard walked around Senta and raised the tarp. He and Dieter looked in silence on Fedor’s still face. Senta fell back a step, said something in a shaken voice that Kate couldn’t catch and whirled to come face to face with Dieter. For a moment nobody moved. Then Senta broke and ran for the lodge.

  Berg took one look and fainted dead away, landing full length on his back on the gravel with a thump that raised a small dust cloud. No one rushed to his aid.

  Eberhard let fall the tarp and exchanged a glance with Dieter. Dieter said something in German. Kate thought she heard Klemens’s name. But Eberhard and Dieter hadn’t been anywhere near them when Jack had told them who had done the shooting; they couldn’t have heard that Klemens had pulled the trigger.

  Eberhard saw Kate watching them. He gave her a long, unsmiling look, and took Dieter’s elbow to move him out of earshot.

  “Goddammit anyway.” George gave a heavy sigh. “Okay, I’ll fire up the radio, see if I can reach anybody, get a call into the troopers.”

  “Troopers?” Eberhard said sharply, halting. “That is like the police, yes?”

  “Yes,” George said shortly.

  Eberhard opened his mouth. Dieter said, “Nein.” Eberhard looked at him and Dieter rattled off some more German.

  “Dieter,” Kate said. “Dieter!”

  Dieter broke off in midstream and looked around. “Something you wanted to share with the rest of us?” she said.

  He stared at her for a moment. “Nein.”

  “Dieter,” George said, “you might want to do some thinking here.”

  “About what?”

  “About whether you want to continue this hunt.”

  Dieter stared. “What?”

  George nodded at the blue mound. “We’ve lost a man, your man. You want to pack it in? It’s up to you, you’re paying the freight.”

  “Pack it in? Is that like quit?”

  George nodded. Dieter’s face flushed a deep red Kate had seen before, and he said with a force filled with the kind of heavy-handed menace typical of most bullies, “We are not quitting this hunt. You signed a contract. You guaranteed this hunt. I pay, we stay, we hunt.”

  “Is there a penalty clause in that contract, George?” Jack said. Dieter glared at him. Jack didn’t appear noticeably terrified. Poor Dieter. Kate thought dispassionately, there just wasn’t enough cower in the Alaskans he’d met so far.

  “No, but if I break the contract by quitting early he could turn me into the Fish and Game if he wanted,” George said glumly. “And it looks like he’d want to.”

  Berg stirred and opened his eyes. He stared at the sky for a few mystified moments before sitting up and blinking around him. When he saw the tarpaulin-covered mound, his face went white and Kate thought he might faint again. Instead, he got unsteadily to his feet and staggered off to camp.

  “You want to talk this over with the others first?” George said to Dieter. “They might not want to stay after this.”

  “They do what I say,” Dieter snapped.

  George shrugged. “Okay. But tomorrow you don’t hunt. Or all of you don’t.”

  Dieter bristled. “Why?”

  “Because I say so,” George said
evenly. “Second because I’m flying Fedor’s body into Anchorage tomorrow morning, and you’ll be one guide short.”

  “The other hunter can go with one of the other guides.”

  “No, they can’t,” George said flatly. “Two hunters per guide is the best and safest ratio. Although,” he muttered, “so far this hunt’s looking like it should have been one on one.”

  “Say amen somebody,” Kate murmured.

  “Anyway,” George said, “tomorrow morning I’ll be flying the body to town and bringing a trooper back with me.”

  Dieter, predictably, began to sputter. George cut him off with one horizontal slice of his hand. “That’s the way it’s going to be.” He turned and stalked off toward the lodge, ending the argument by refusing to participate in it. Any one of George’s ex-wives could have told Dieter how effective a tactic it was.

  Dieter charged off up the strip, Eberhard following. Jack moved closer to Kate and raised a hand to her face. She rubbed her cheek against his palm and then, as natural as breathing, stepped forward into his embrace. “Are you all right?” she said, voice muffled in his chest.

  “I am now,” he said, mouth against her hair, arms tight around her. “I am now.” He pulled back and looked down at her, framing her face with both hands. “My light bright shining.”

  “What?”

  “A line from a poem. You’re my light bright shining, Kate.”

  “Don’t be so mushy,” she said, but she blushed and had to fight back a smile. “What happened, Jack?”

  Jack looked around. Dieter and Eberhard had walked up the runway a hundred yards and paused to converse in low-voiced, rapid German. As they watched. Dieter gave a sudden laugh, a braying, almost triumphant sound that echoed down the gravel strip.

  “I guess it is pretty funny,” Jack observed, “losing one of your top employees like that.”

  “A barrel of laughs,” Kate agreed.

  Jack was silent for a moment, still watching the two Germans, who were strolling back in their direction now, attitudes indicating not a care in the world to be shared between them.

  “Come on,” Kate said. Taking him by the hand, she led him down the strip and through a scattering of alders to the base of a tall, square steel tank with a ladder up one side.

  “What is this? Oh, a fuel tank.”

  “Yeah,” Kate said. “Back when this was a gold mine and needed diesel to run the generators, tankers would fly in and fill it up. George doesn’t use it.” She climbed up, Jack following. The top of the tank sank to echo hollowly beneath their feet, giving off faint booms reminiscent of Dieter’s Merkel with every step. There was a wooden bench perched at the edge of the tank facing northeast. Jack sat down and pulled Kate into his lap. “Man, I was glad to see you, girl.”

  “Me, too,” she said, looping her arms around his neck. “What happened, Jack?”

  He kissed her in lieu of an answer, and she kissed him back, long, slow, sweet kisses that comforted and soothed and aroused. He responded with increasing urgency, pulling her shirt free to cup and caress her breasts, unfastening her braid to spread her hair over her shoulders, tugging at her belt and pulling at her zipper to slide his fingers between her legs and into her flesh.

  “Jack—”

  “Shut up. Just shut up. God, you’re wet.”

  She arched her back to receive him with a gasping sigh, the power and purity of his need purging the memory of Crazy Emmett’s brutish stare. They tumbled off the bench, falling to the top of the empty fuel tank with a thud that echoed like a bass drum and landing in a tangle of limbs and clothes. She tried to remove her boots but he was so frantic for her that she gave up and let him tug her jeans over them. He cradled her hips in his hands and set his mouth to her, suckling greedily. She arched upward in surprise and pleasure, hurled right over the summit without warning, and without giving her a chance to slide safely down the other side he rose up and kneed her legs farther apart and came into her.

  He was forceful and demanding and wholly concerned with his own need but she came again anyway, and this time she couldn’t stop the cry that ripped from her throat. She raked her fingernails down his spine and that was all it took to push him over the edge, the husky, inarticulate growling sound from deep in his throat almost taking her with him a third time.

  They lay there in a jumble of denim and flannel and a hundred percent cotton, breathing hard, heat radiating off them in waves. Kate couldn’t hear over the thudding of blood in her ears, and opened her eyes to see nothing but stars. She blinked. There were stars overhead, emerging one by one in the twilight sky.

  The sun was setting in a blush of glory, the moon rising over the opposite horizon, almost full and softly radiant. The tips of Foraker, Hunter and Denali rose like ghosts against the northern horizon, hinting at the force and fold of geologic age beyond, whose names murmured a litany of beauty and challenge, Pioneer Ridge, Silverthrone, Mount Deception, Ragged Peak. The air was calm and still warm from the day, and everything would have been simply perfect if it hadn’t been for the blue-shrouded mound at the edge of the airstrip.

  Finally Jack stirred and mumbled something. “What?” Kate said muzzily. “What did you say?”

  Jack took a deep breath, tapped into his reserve and shifted maybe an inch. Obligingly, she matched his movements, not ready to give him up. He settled down again and sighed his content. “You know,” he said lazily, “a friend of Damon Runyon’s used to say that the only time a man was sane was the first ten minutes after orgasm. Empirical evidence here recently obtained may have proved his thesis to be one hundred percent correct.”

  Kate discovered she had just enough energy left to smile. “I feel kind of like the sack of Troy, myself.”

  “Umm.” He nuzzled into her neck. “Have I ever told you how much I love your hair?”

  “Yes, but tell me again.”

  “I love your hair,” he replied obediently.

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.” Another slow, luxurious sigh. Minutes passed. “I’m going to move. Really. Eventually.”

  “No hurry.”

  “Good. Because I can’t.”

  “Me neither.”

  “Not yet anyway.”

  “Nope.”

  They dozed a little, and woke to the sounds of George and Demetri moving Fedor’s body into one of the planes for the night.

  Footsteps came close to the tank. There was a deliberate and ostentatious clearing of throat. “Jack? Kate?”

  Jack raised his head. “Yeah?”

  “Dieter’s still insisting on staying the full time. If it wasn’t for him and his hired muscle”—without difficulty Kate identified the “hired muscle” as Eberhard—“I think the rest of them would be ready to go tonight. Might be a little insurrection brewing. Just so you know. Could be trouble when I take off tomorrow.”

  “Okay.”

  “Demetri’s cooking dinner.” They could hear the smile in George’s voice. “You want it served out here?”

  “Smartass,” Jack mumbled, and George laughed and moved away. Jack waited until he was out of range before looking down at Kate. What she could see of his expression in the dim light looked sheepish.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know, I guess I’m kind of embarrassed. I didn’t hurt you, did I? I mean I did sort of—I mean I was kind of—”

  “Determined?” she suggested demurely. “Forceful? Overpowering? We might even say, possessing all the finesse of a rampaging bull?”

  He floundered. “Well, I—”

  The bubble of laughter escaped. She pushed him over on his back and rolled on top of him. “Thank you,” she said, and kissed away anything else he might have had to say.

  “Oh,” he said. A smile crept across his face. “Okay, then.”

  His hands slid beneath her shirt, and she snuggled her head into his shoulder. “What happened, Jack?” she said for the fourth time.

  “No,” he said. “I’ve got
something I want to say first. Something I need to say.”

  There was a note in his voice she had not heard before. Her heart gave an uncomfortable thump somewhere high up under her breast bone. “You sound serious,” she said.

  “I am serious,” he said. “We’re both alive, and here, and the stars are out and the moon is full and there’s no one around and I want you to listen to me. No cracks, no getting up and walking away. Just listen.”

  “All right,” she said, uncertain, nervous without knowing why. He looked so serious, his eyes level and almost stern, belying the tangle of hair above, tousled from her hands.

  “Light bright shining,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Shut up,” he said. “That’s what you are. My light bright shining. It’s from a poem by Mary TallMountain, an Athabascan from Nulato.”

  “A poem?” Kate said doubtfully. This was beginning to sound dangerously romantic and potentially sentimental. Kate, who prided herself on the hardness of her head, didn’t do sentimental.

  “No,” he said quickly. “Don’t say anything. Please don’t. Just listen. Listen, Kate.”

  He feared mockery, anticipated ridicule, dreaded her scorn. She saw all that in his face and more, and she knew a sudden shame that he would expect such a reaction from her. The realization silenced her as nothing else would have.

  He took a deep breath and closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them to see her wary expression, his mouth twisted up in a wry smile. “I memorized it, word for word.” He waved a vague hand at their position, the top of the empty fuel tank. “This wasn’t quite how I pictured saying it to you. But here goes.”

  He took a deep breath. His voice was clear and deep, letting the words speak for themselves.

  Companion to me in every place

  You stretch your hand: I see

  Majesties of mountains

  Crowned with living light.

  Your arm flings wide: I see

  Wild little islands wrapt in fog

  Grey luminous: hidden folds

  Of emerald and ermine earth.