Hunter's Moon

by Dana Stabenow

  I fly free clean through glowing

  Cat’s eye aquamarine

  Filled with light air breath

  Swaddled in this cocoon

  this dense and lifeless mass

  Yet weightless I

  soaring with it shall be for you

  Light bright shining

  The poem, the words and the meaning behind them were so overwhelming and so unexpected that the breath left her body and she couldn’t seem to find it again.

  He saw her expression and his own relaxed. “Don’t, Kate. Don’t look so scared. It’s just the way I feel. It’s the way it is for me.” His smile was crooked. “Light bright shining.”

  She opened her mouth and nothing came out. Again, he filled the gap. “I’m thinking of retiring.”

  She gaped at him. “What?”

  “I’m thinking of retiring,” he repeated. “I’ve got over twenty in, I’m eligible, and as you know the state is trying right, left and center to cut the budget. They’re offering a good buyout to unload a few of us older employees, so they can hire someone in our place at half the salary and a quarter of the benefits.”

  She was still staring. “What would you do instead? You’re only forty-five, Jack. Not quite time to put yourself out to pasture.”

  He knotted his hands over his head and stretched, comfortable now with the poem out of the way. Romantic gestures did not come easily to Jack Morgan, especially when they came from the heart. “I don’t know yet.”

  Around the sudden lump in her throat she managed to say, “Were you thinking of moving?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh.” The lump grew bigger.

  His voice came as if from a great distance. “I was thinking I might try the Bush lifestyle for a while, see how I liked it year-round.”

  She stopped breathing. “Bush lifestyle?”

  “Uh-huh.” He met her eyes. “I know someone with a cabin. It’s one room, might be a little cramped for the three of us, but if she was willing we could always add on.”

  “You mean my cabin?” Her voice scaled up in disbelief.

  “Yes.” Jack was watching Kate very carefully, alert to every change of expression.

  She stared back at him. “I—I—I don’t know what to say. What about Johnny?” Johnny was Jack’s twelve-year-old son, currently bunking with his best friend’s family in Anchorage and greatly miffed at having to go to school instead of being allowed to come on the hunt. He had his father’s dark blue eyes, which also like his father’s saw too much, and an impish charm all his own. “How does he feel about this? There aren’t any video arcades on my homestead, or in Niniltna, either, for that matter. The last I saw, anyway.”

  “We’ve talked about it some.” Jack grinned. “After this summer, up the creek with your aunties, picking fish with Mary Balashoff and out on the Freya with Old Sam, he’s looking at Bush life through rose-colored glasses. And of course he’s more in love with you than I am, always has been. Johnny won’t be a problem.”

  She was mute. He gave a sudden laugh. Bristling was an easy response for her and so she went with it. “What? What’s so funny?”

  Still laughing, he said, choking over the words, “You should see your face. You look like a deer caught in the headlights. Jesus!”

  Defensive, now that she knew what she was supposed to be reacting to, she said, “Can you blame me? Jack, I’ve never shared living space before, not with you, not with anyone, not since I was a little girl. I haven’t had a roommate since I was in college. I just—I don’t—”

  He waved her to silence with one hand while he tried to bring himself back under control. Knuckling an eye, he said, “Look, Kate. I’ve pretty much made up my mind to take that retirement package. I’ve given some thought to starting up as a contractor, offering training and investigative services.” He gave her what he obviously thought was a reassuring smile. “That part of it has nothing to do with you.”

  The smile faded. “This does. You’re my light bright shining, Kate. I love you. When we were apart those eighteen months, I tried like hell to get over you, between most of the clean sheets in town and a few others besides. It didn’t work. I’ve made you a part of my life, a necessary part.”

  He paused. She was back to staring, dumb, paralyzed, and he nearly started laughing again. It would be fatal to his cause if he did and he knew it, so he choked it back and said, “It doesn’t mean I can’t live without you. It doesn’t mean I can’t go on seeing you while not living with you.” He spread his hands. “But I want more if I can get it.”

  He let his hands drop and regarded her steadily.

  “Can I?” He raised one hand up, palm out. “Don’t answer me now. Just think about it, okay?”

  “Okay,” she said numbly, for lack of inspiration.

  He leaned forward to kiss her. “Good girl.”

  Seven

  You get a bunch of nimrods like this out in the Bush and you figure you’re going to have people popping off when they shouldn’t.

  HE LAY BACK DOWN, to all appearances dismissing the subject from his mind. Rough fingers traced the length of her spine. “Is that what they call a hunter’s moon?” he said.

  “I don’t know,” she said, willing to go along with the change of subject. In truth, her thoughts were so fragmented she’d have a hard time coming up with anything to say for herself, and was grateful for the lead he gave her. “It’s a full moon, or almost full. What’s a hunter’s moon?”

  “The first full moon after the harvest moon.”

  She smiled without opening her eyes. “You sound like the encyclopedia. What’s the harvest moon?”

  “I don’t know, but it has something to do with the equinox.”

  His fingers flexed, and she sighed her pleasure. “Sounds like it’s tied up with the old hunting and gathering seasons. Or gathering and hunting. Or something. Um, right there, yes. That’s what Old Sam says, did you know?” She turned and crossed her hands on his chest and propped her chin on them, smiling down at Jack.

  “When we’re on the tender at the beginning of salmon season and we’re getting ready to pick up the first load. ‘Time to hunt and gather, girl,’ he says, and we go to work.”

  “I always knew Old Sam harbored a dangerous partiality for the Pleistocene. I’m surprised he doesn’t wear bearskin and carry a spear.”

  “You ever see him when he’s at home?”

  Jack laughed.

  There was silence. The moon seemed to grow in size and beauty as it rose higher in the sky. “What happened, Jack?”

  He sighed, and his hand dropped away. “Pretty much like I told it to George.” He sat up and began adjusting his clothes. “We found the moose, right where George said they were. You remember that little bend in the creek, before it heads up Blueberry Ridge? That stand of mountain ash that marks the turn?”

  “Yes.” She began buttoning her shirt. He brushed her hands away and did it for her.

  “There were three big bulls, two of them looking pretty ratty and smelling to high heaven and grunting and snorting to beat the band.” He gave a quiet chuckle. “Old Sam is right. There ain’t a damn bit of difference between a drunk chasing girls in a bar and a bull moose in rut.”

  “Did you see the cows?”

  He shook his head. “We heard some rustles off in the brush but we didn’t see any of them. The way the bulls were behaving, they were there somewhere. Anyway, the biggest bull of the three hadn’t come into rut yet, he was chowing down on the mountain ash like he’d never eaten before in his life, and I figured, as long as we were there, we might as well take the one who was going to give us the best meat. George makes such a point of his hunters eating as much of what they shoot as he can stuff down them.”

  “I know, all part of the George Perry Wilderness Adventure Guides, Inc., experience.” She combed her hair back with her fingers. Again he brushed them aside and began braiding her hair himself. He was more acquainted in theory than in practice with French br
aiding, and the process involved much combing out and starting over. Again, Kate closed her eyes and leaned into it.

  “And then there was always the little matter of my freezer and your cache.”

  She smiled without opening her eyes. “Thinking with your stomach again, Jack. It’s what I’ve always loved most about you.”

  His hands checked a moment, and they were both put forcibly in mind of Jack’s declaration moments before, lending weight to Kate’s light-hearted words.

  Jack’s hands resumed braiding. “So, the guides flipped for first shot and I won, and Klemens and Gunther flipped for first shot and Gunther won. We spread out, my group on the left, Demetri’s in the middle, Old Sam’s on the right. The bull was eating his way around the willow, and we were waiting for him to climb up on dry ground when we heard a rifle go off. I looked around and Klemens wasn’t there. Where’s your rubber band?”

  “Wherever you threw it, would be my guess. Here.” She fished for one of the backups she carried in her pocket. It was tangled around the little drawstring bag holding the ivory otter she habitually carried as a pocket piece. He was part talisman, part amulet and part good luck charm, and she didn’t feel dressed without him.

  “Let me see.” She handed rubber band and otter back. The bag’s strings were knotted tight and Jack’s big hands worked patiently to free them. The little creature, so sturdy of form yet so delicately made, sat back on his thick ivory tail, ivory fur soaked and ruffled with water, black eyes bright with curiosity. “Why do you carry him with you. Kate? He’s a piece of art. He could be damaged, banging against your knife or something.”

  She shrugged, and stuffed the otter back in the bag and the bag back in her pocket. “I like having him around.”

  Made of ivory taken from an Inupiaq-killed walrus, carved by a Yupik artist, representing an animal into whose body was reborn Aleut souls, the otter in some curious way formed a link to her ancestors, to the people who had come before. The Great Land, the Aleuts called it, alyeska, so as to distinguish the large body of the mainland from the islands of the Aleutian Chain. The otter connected her to them and to all the people who came after and who with them formed part of her ancestry, Aleut hunter and gatherer, British explorer, Russian trapper, New England whaler, miners and soldiers and sailors and airmen and farmers and fishermen from all over the globe. Somehow they were all encompassed in the tiny ivory figure of the otter, one paw raised as if to run or fight, ears cocked for any warning sounds, a study in survival and a tribute to evolution.

  She could have told Jack this. He would have understood, and even if he hadn’t, he could be trusted neither to laugh nor to scoff. Instead she said, “What did you do when you saw that Klemens was missing?”

  He fastened the rubber band around the end of her braid and admired the result. “At first I thought he’d ducked out to take a leak.”

  “How long had it been since you’d seen him last?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. Gunther and I were watching the moose, waiting. Gunther was excited and I was afraid he’d shoot before he should. You know how I hate to drag a moose out of wherever he’s not supposed to have fallen into.”

  “Don’t we all,” Kate said with feeling.

  “Klemens was to my right and a little behind. He was supposed to be ready to take the second shot if Gunther missed. I got the impression he wasn’t all that hot to shoot something, that he was glad he’d lost the toss.”

  “He tried to give Dieter his moose tag. Said he’d done all the killing he needed to.”

  “Yeah? That’d fit, I guess. Poor bastard.” He paused, thinking. “I remember, I was glad he was there, because it was obvious he’d had some experience shooting. You sure as hell can’t say that about the rest of this crew.”

  “Excepting Eberhard,” Kate agreed.

  “Yeah. Maybe. I haven’t seen him shoot yet. Anyway. The moose heard the shot, too, of course, and naturally he spooked and ran for it. Gunther jumped to his feet and popped off a shot, and then another. Missed, of course, and the moose took off, and up river we could hear brush crashing around like the other two were beating feet, too. You could hear the cows taking off through the brush, then, all right, sounded like a herd of elephants.”

  He closed his fist around her braid and gave it a gentle tug. She lay back against him and felt as much as heard his voice rumble up from his chest. “Well, I was sore, all that backstrap and tenderloin getting away like that, and I may have yelled a few things in the heat of the moment.”

  Jack was the original slow-talking, slow-walking guy, with a slow smile and an even slower temper, but there had been a few cherished occasions when Kate had experienced Jack “yelling a few things in the heat of the moment,” and she could well imagine what his language had been like that afternoon. An immersion course in Alaskan invective, with some new and better words made up right on the spot, was her guess.

  “It was quiet for a few minutes after that,” he said pensively.

  I’ll just bet it was, Kate thought.

  “Then I heard Old Sam yelling, and he was pissed, too.” Old Sam pissed wasn’t a guess, it was a given. “He was too far away for me to make out what he was saying. I told Gunther we’d better backtrack, but he was all hot to go after the moose. Well, like George always says, these are paying customers, and Kate, I just wasn’t expecting any trouble. You get a bunch of nimrods like this out in the Bush and you figure you’re going to have people popping off when they shouldn’t. That’s why we—Old Sam, Demetri and me, I mean—why we lined up in a row all facing the same direction, no circling around so we could get ourselves in a crossfire or some other nonsense.”

  “So you crossed the creek after Gunther.”

  “Yeah.” His chest rose and fell with a deep, heavy sigh. “We’re fighting our way through the brush—that was fun—and then we heard three shots. I told Gunther the hunt was off, we were going back now. He didn’t want to, still wanted to hightail it after that damn moose. I had to persuade him.”

  “Um.” Kate wondered how. “And then?”

  “And then we forded the creek and hiked up the opposite bank. And that was where we ran into Hubert and Gregor and Hendrik and Old Sam and Demetri carrying Fedor in that makeshift stretcher, with Klemens bringing up the rear. It was like a goddamn funeral cortege. Spooky.”

  She leaned forward to re-lace her boots. “How long was it, between the time you heard the shot, and when you heard the next three?”

  He thought. “Thirty, thirty-five minutes?” He showed her a bare wrist. “You know I never wear a watch in the Bush.”

  He got to his feet and stretched out a hand to pull her up next to him. She slid her arms around his neck. “Another of those reasons I love you the mostest.”

  His arms tightened. “Kate—”

  “Come on,” she said, pulling free. “Let’s go eat. I’m starving, for some reason.” Her grin flashed through the dark.

  Mutt, wearing an expression of saintly resignation, waited for them at the foot of the ladder. She examined her two dependents with a critical eye, gave a vigorous sneeze and led the way back to camp, tail held at a tolerant angle as if to say, Well, and what could you expect from humans, who hadn’t the sense to confine affairs of the heart to a window of opportunity lasting a few weeks once every year, the way more sensible mammals did?

  Demetri cooked, New York steaks on the charcoal grill and potatoes wrapped in tinfoil and baked in the coals of the fire. A tossed green salad with one of Demetri’s special olive oil and raspberry vinegar dressings rounded out the meal. Everything looked and smelled wonderful. It was a pity, since no one had much of an appetite.

  Kate ate enough to keep Demetri from pouting and disposed of the remainder behind a providentially placed cranberry bush, where Mutt discreetly polished the plate almost to its original high gloss, or as glossy as melamine gets. In the meantime, Kate began a covert examination of the party. She didn’t really know why, except that she felt a sense of un
ease that she could not trace to its source.

  The group was uniformly blond and blue-eyed and tall, or tall compared to herself, at any rate. At five feet nothing, Kate had spent most of her life looking up into people’s faces and she had never learned to like it. At first glance there had been a surface similarity to this group, one to the other, and since they would be out of her life in ten days she hadn’t looked beyond it.

  Now she took a second look, seeing past her preconceptions with an eye sharpened for detail. They sat quietly this evening, in direct contrast to the chatter and laughter of the night before. Gunther, sitting outside the light cast by the campfire but not far enough to hide the spectacular shiner ornamenting his left eye, picked at his food and avoided looking directly at anyone, disappearing into his cabin as soon as he had finished. He was so very young, his skin pink and smooth from lack of age and experience. She remembered his enthusiasm the previous morning, ready to jump in the plane with George, and upon his airsick return still eager for the chase. He had stamina, at least.

  Senta turned up her nose at the steak, ate her potato with a lot of salt, and sat very near George, who ate stolidly from start to finish. George never let anything get in the way of his food.

  Senta had a hard and well-polished surface. She was an enthusiastic practitioner of big hair. She’d even worn makeup on the hunt that day, including bright red lipstick that Kate was sure Senta felt made her pout even more irresistible. Human resources was a natural for Senta; it was obvious she was bent on making the best of her own. Dieter probably put her out front as bait when he was recruiting for top-level jobs.

  Which either did or did not explain why Dieter glared at Senta from time to time. She ignored him with supreme indifference. Kate wondered if one of Dieter’s toys had had the unmitigated gall to allow itself to be played with by someone else.

  Dieter was a bull, all huff and puff and pawing the ground and shaking his horns. John King of RPetCo Oil was just such a man, and a similar bullishness had pushed him to the top of his particular food chain, even if he had had to do some fancy stepping to stay out of jail on a conspiracy to murder charge along the way. Square-headed, square-jawed, Dieter was bluff and blustering and boisterous, but those traits didn’t necessarily preclude intelligence. His most dangerous trait was his arrogance, the inner conviction that his opinion was the only opinion and his way of doing things the only way.