In the Barren Ground

by Loreth Anne White

  It was now just after 3:00 p.m., and she and Crash were huddled with Novak around a smoking fire in the cave dwelling that he’d dug into the black earth of the cliff face. An awning of log beams had been extended beyond the cave mouth from which Novak had draped animal skins to cut the cold. The skins flapped in the wind, and an occasional flurry of snowflakes darted in. It was already growing dark outside.

  The place was thick with wood smoke and the smell of fetid furs, old meat bones. By the fire in front of them a pair of scarred husky-wolf crosses slept. Five pups gamboled over the adult animals and gnawed on bones. Outside the cave, down a small rise, several other shelters had been constructed using rough-hewn logs, bits of plastic, and animal skins. Cracks between the logs had been sealed with a paste of mud and moss that had baked hard beneath the summer sun. Near the shelters several more dogs were tethered by stakes in the ground littered with bones. There was also a homemade dogsled outside.

  From pegs that had been hammered into the cave wall hung a large pair of old gut snowshoes along with metal leghold traps and snares. At the rear of the dwelling, above a fur bed area, long strips of lean meat hung from a line, drying into what Tana presumed would be pounded and mixed with animal fat into a kind of pemmican—balls of which Novak was currently heating in a pot of melted snow over the fire. He was making them stew after he’d finally decided to invite them in to sit down and talk. It was a traditional meal, he’d said, containing chokeberries.

  “The berries grow wild in the muskeg swamps around here,” Novak explained. “And the meat in the balls is caribou. Once it’s dried, you grind it down to a powder and mix it in a one-to-one ratio with rendered animal fat. You form this into balls, and it stays good all winter. A high-energy source the natives used to use, and the old Voyageurs of the fur trade.”

  Tana had read the same information in Henry Spatt’s horror novel. Spatt’s fictional Voyageur guide, Moreau, ate pemmican. Moreau met his fate at the talons of the wendigo beast. He’d had his head ripped off and his heart torn out.

  “Why were you so convinced that Regan and Dakota were murdered, as opposed to killed by animals?” Tana asked, trying to draw him back to the focus of their meeting.

  It was a struggle to maintain composure while talking to Elliot Novak—he did not look fully human, and it was distracting. His hair slicked in oily, gray strands past his shoulders, and his mouth was set in a permanent, peeled-back sneer due to parts of his lips missing. His skeleton-like grimace reminded Tana of Selena Apodaca’s decapitated head with the soft tissue missing.

  His cadaverous frame was swathed in heavy furs that had not been properly cured. Combined with old sweat, it gave him a rank odor. Part of his nose was gone, his nostrils dark, gaping caves. In his truncated fingers, which were stained black with dirt, he clamped a cigarette, and he dragged on it using the intact part of his mouth as he considered her question, blowing the smoke out his cavernous nostrils like a dragon creature.

  That he was mentally unstable was not even a question. His eyes darted around as though constantly searching for things in shadows that were waiting to spring at him, and his thought processes appeared illogical. He jumped from topic to topic. He carried a machete in a sheath at his waist, under his fur cape. On his feet he wore homemade mukluks.

  Questions tumbled through Tana’s mind as she waited for him to answer: Had it been him in his furs that Selena Apodaca had witnessed along the ridge? Could he have gotten there via dogsled without snow cover? How did he get around in summer? Had he read about pemmican in Spatt’s book?

  “The tracks,” Novak said suddenly, pointing his cigarette at her. “It was the human tracks that ran alongside the drag marks made by my daughter’s boots that told me. Someone lured Regan away from our tent, then maybe hit her unconscious, and dragged her into the woods.”

  Tana leaned forward, trying to engage his eyes, but he would not maintain contact at all. “Are you certain that—”

  “Yes, by goddammit, I’m certain! Don’t you start with me, too! The prints were made by two boots, not paws!” His dogs glanced up at the sudden aggression in his tone. One growled softly. Tana did not trust those wolf-animals any more than she trusted fidgety Novak and his machete. She glanced at Crash, who was seated on a log stump next to her. His hand hovered near his own knife. He nodded for her to continue, letting her know he was alert to both the dogs and Novak’s machete.

  “Besides, what would have made Regan go upriver alone in the dark like that?” Novak snapped. “She wasn’t a brave kid. It was someone out there. Someone she knew and trusted who lured her. Had to have been. Someone who hit her with that bloodied log I found. It had Regan’s hair on it.”

  “No one else saw those human tracks, Elliot,” Tana said gently. “I’m just following up on all bases. As a fellow officer I’m sure you can understand this. Besides, I’m not certain it was animals, either.”

  That got him. He angled his head and studied her in silence while the fire crackled and popped and the skins flapped in the wind. “So … is that why you’re here? To help me solve this?”

  “Yes. We all want to solve this. And any information you can give us will be helpful.”

  He nodded and tapped his knee rapidly with his free hand while he inhaled deeply again on his cigarette. He nodded his head again as smoke billowed out his cavernous nostrils. “Go on. Go on. Ask me questions, then.”

  “What was it about Dakota’s case that made you so certain she’d also been murdered?”

  “I don’t know why they thought it was me. Fucking bastards. They thought it was me, you know, who could have done it?”

  She nodded. “I know. But you believe Dakota was being stalked. Did you have any reason to think your daughter might have been stalked as well, prior to her death?”

  He rubbed his brow. “In the Barrens of the soul, monsters take toll, they come with hunger and ice in their heart.”

  “Excuse me?”

  He repeated the line. She shot a glance at Crash. He was watching Novak intently.

  Clearing her throat, she said, “Elliot, where does that come from?”

  His eyes lit briefly on hers, then his gaze darted off to the shadows at the back of the cave. “Words. Words. They were written on a piece of paper and stuck to Regan’s locker at school.”

  Tana’s pulse quickened. “And you remember these words?”

  He nodded. “She showed the piece of paper to me. It was odd. Very odd. Of course I remembered them. I read them over and over, trying to figure them out. She told me that someone had followed her home from school, in the dark, the day before she found that note stuck to her locker. She was scared. I thought it was some prank, one of the boys at school. So I took her camping, to lighten things up.”

  “Was that the only reason you took her camping?”

  He stopped talking and turned his body away.

  “Elliot,” she said gently. “I need to ask you some personal questions, do you mind? It will help—it could help clear you of suspicion once and for all.”

  He tossed his cigarette butt into the fire, grabbed a stick off the ground, and stabbed it into his pot. He stirred his pemmican stew, which had started to bubble and roil steam into the air. The motion released a rancid, meaty smell that hit Tana in the stomach like a punch. She almost gagged.

  Clearing her throat, she said, “There was another reason you took Regan camping that weekend, wasn’t there? It was to make up for an affair. You wanted to rebuild family relations.”

  He got up so fast that Tana reeled back, almost toppling off the wobbly wood stump on which she sat. Novak began pacing up and down, up and down, jabbing his hands at his thighs. Crash tensed. So did the dogs.

  “Who was she, Elliot?”

  He swirled around to face her. “It’s none of your business.”

  “Did you break it off, or did she?”

  “None of your business! She’s gone, left town years ago. Irrelevant.” The larger wolf-husky came to his fe
et, and walked slowly around the fire to Novak’s side from where he eyed Tana warily. Novak dug irritably into a leather pouch that hung from his belt and pulled out a bent packet of Marlboro cigarettes with shaking hands. With his cropped fingers he managed to extract a cigarette and wedge it between his teeth. He lit a stick in the fire, ignited the end of his smoke, and inhaled deeply. It seemed to calm him. Tana thought of the health care worker that Jennie Smithers had mentioned—the woman who’d left town, and who’d told Jennie about the affair. She wondered if it could actually have been her who Novak had been involved with. She scanned the cave again as her mental wheels turned. Most of Novak’s belongings had been fashioned from the wilds, apart from some tools, his knife and axe and machete, plus basic materials like plastic, which he could have brought out with him when he first moved here. She wondered how much contact he had with outsiders on the whole.

  “Where do you get those cigarettes?” Tana asked, changing her tack.

  “Friend brings them.”

  “What friend?”

  Silence.

  “Can’t be a Native friend,” she said. “Or at least not a Twin Rivers local. Most won’t come into the badlands from what I hear.”

  “Cursed place. Yes, it is. I live in a cursed place. In summer it’s all buggy swamp dotted with tussock for mile after mile. You need to know where the channels lie, which way to go, or it will suck you down. They won’t come here. I’m safe here.”

  “Do you have any books to read out here?”

  “No. Lost my glasses. Need glasses.”

  “When you did have glasses, did you ever read a book called The Hunger?”

  He began to pace irritably again, the jerky movements releasing the odor of his furs, and his unwashed body. “It was written by that man,” Novak said. “The one who stays at the lodge every year. He had a book signing at the diner when it first came out.”

  “Did you read it?”

  “I don’t remember. Maybe. Yes. Perhaps.”

  She moistened her lips. “So, do you know about the recent wolf-bear mauling? Two biologists?”

  “I heard.”

  “How did you hear?”

  “I get visitors sometimes.”

  “Your friend?”

  “Maybe. But it wasn’t wolves or bear that killed those two biologists,” he said. “The animals came after.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I just know. It was the same with Regan and Dakota. The animals came after. Someone else was there first.”

  “Do you have any idea of who might have been there first, then?”

  He drew hard on his cigarette. “Someone from around here. Around Twin Rivers. Someone bad. Very bad. Evil. Someone who is still here.”

  “Do you consider yourself ‘bad’ or ‘evil,’ Elliot?”

  He shot her a brief glance. “Everyone’s got some bad. Evil is relative to who is judging.”

  “Were you drunk the night Regan left the tent?”

  He went stock-still. Tension swelled inside the cave. The fire cracked and the stew bubbled noisily into the quiet. He crumpled suddenly onto his log stump. Tears began to glisten on his cheeks above his beard. He nodded.

  “Is that why you might not have heard her screaming?”

  He nodded.

  “You couldn’t have hurt Regan yourself, could you? In a blackout? Maybe by mistake, even?”

  He shook his head, and his body bowed forward.

  Tana cleared her throat. “You sure you can’t tell me who your friend is, Elliot?”

  He shook his head again.

  Crash took a piece of jerky from his pocket. He reached down, and using the dried meat he coaxed one of the pups over. The adult dog observed with hostile eyes as the puppy wiggled closer and closer to Crash’s fingers. As the pup snapped at the jerky, Crash grabbed the animal, flipped it quickly onto its back. A small reddish-brown mark had been branded onto its belly.

  “It’s trapper Eddie,” Crash said quietly. “It’s him who’s been coming to see you, isn’t it, Elliot? That’s where you got your sled dogs. This is how Eddie brands his pups. This is one of his. He recently brought you a new supply of dogs.”

  Novak scuffed his mukluked feet.

  “And I think it was Eddie who showed you how to run trap lines, and how to feed yourself out here. He gave you some dogs and helped you build that sled you’ve got outside. Because Eddie would do that, help others. It’s in his nature. Eddie isn’t from these parts, either. He believes in different myths, not the ones about these badlands. It wouldn’t worry him to come here.”

  Novak grunted.

  “But here’s the thing,” Crash said, leaning forward, resting his forearms on his thighs. “Eddie hardly ever comes into town, maybe once or twice a year, so I don’t think it’s him who brings you those Marlboro cigarettes. Is there another friend who brings those?”

  “Maybe.”

  But no matter how Crash and Tana tried, this was the only information they managed to elicit from the ex-cop who’d gone bush.

  Tana felt a sadness for him as they made their way back down past the other shelters to where they’d parked their snowmobiles. It was still snowing heavily, and full dark, and they’d needed to don their headlamps in order to find their way. The dogs outside lunged against ropes and snarled at them, steam coming from their hot breaths. She was sure the animals would tear them apart if they got free. Her mind went again to the wolves that had ripped Apodaca and Sanjit into pieces, and she felt sick.

  Crash stopped at one of the sheds, and poked his head inside. His body stiffened. “Hey, Tana,” he said. “Come here, look at this.”

  She came into the doorway beside him. On the shed wall hung tools. One of the tools was a claw-shaped, plow-like thing with four sharp, curved prongs, and a long handle. It looked as though it was made from heavy metal. She went inside to take a closer look. Under the beam of her headlight she could discern no blood on it, or at least none that was immediately apparent. She removed her gloves and took some photos with her phone, plus a few more of the other tools in the shelter. Then her attention turned to the mud floor. And there, frozen in mud, was a print with a familiar tread pattern. Baffin Arctic.

  She crouched down, her flak vest once again pinching her stomach. “Shit,” she whispered. “See here?” She pointed where her beam lit up a ragged mark through the lugs of a left boot print. “It’s the same pattern.”

  Crash crouched down beside her. “There’s another one there. Also the left foot. Same tear mark in the sole.”

  Hurriedly, she snapped more photos, using her glove as a comparative measure because she didn’t have her forensic ruler with her.

  “They’re not Novak’s,” Crash said, pushing back up to his feet, staring at the prints. “Novak was wearing mukluks, like Eddie always wears, and he has some seriously big feet—bigger than a twelve, I’d venture.”

  “So, you don’t think these prints could be Eddie’s?”

  He shook his head. “Unless things have changed, Eddie is convinced all modern footwear is bad for you. He has this harebrained notion that the reason he’s pigeon-toed is because his mother forced him to wear regular shoes as a kid. He told me ages ago that as soon as he could, he started making his own mukluks, and has worn them since.”

  “That means Novak does get another visitor out here. But who?”

  “Same person who brings him cigarettes, maybe.”

  “Who do you know who smokes Marlboro?” she said.

  “Several of the crew at WestMin do. Viktor Baroshkov—I’ve seen his pack on the counter of the bar at the Red Moose. A couple of Damien’s friends from Wolverine Falls. It’s one of the three most common brands in North America. But just because Novak smokes that brand doesn’t mean he smokes it all the time, or that the person who brought him the cigarettes does, too. They might not even smoke at all.”

  “What do they want from him, then, coming out here? It can’t be friendship—the guy’s cracked.”


  “Yeah,” he said, glancing up as wind suddenly gusted through the shed. “We should get going, Tana. It looks like we’ll need to find a safe place to hunker down tonight if this storm gets any worse, and I sure as hell don’t want to stay here.”

  CHAPTER 37

  Tana cradled her steaming mug in both hands and sipped her soup. It had been made from a packet on a small gas burner using melted snow, and she and Crash snuggled in thermal gear and sleeping bags in a tiny orange dome of a tent as the wind plucked and tugged and pushed at them from the darkness outside, and snow continued to pile in drifts. A small battery-powered lantern swung from the apex of the tent dome, casting an intimate halo of yellow light.

  They’d managed to set up camp before the full brunt of the storm had hit, pitching their tent on a level area in the lee of a rise. Their snowmobiles were parked behind the tent and fast becoming buried in snow.

  “Do you think it could be Novak who’s been doing this?” Tana said, taking another tentative sip. Her lips were so cold that even the lukewarm soup scalded them.

  Crash considered her question for a moment, and she watched the shadows on his face. She liked looking at his face. His eyes were beautiful, and the lines around them told stories. She wondered about the things he’d seen and done, and her heart squeezed.

  “He’s psychotic—clearly he’s lost touch with reality,” Crash said. “Plus he’s mobile with his dogs.”

  “A dog sled wouldn’t have gotten up over the cliff behind which Apodaca and Sanjit were killed.”

  “He could have left it and hiked over on foot. According to your notes from the scene, Heather said Selena had mentioned seeing a man in fur. Elliot wears furs.”

  She sipped again, listening to the wind, thinking of the endless, barren land all the way up to the arctic. “There wasn’t enough snow for a sled yet when Apodaca and Sanjit were attacked.”

  “So maybe he hiked the whole way. It would have taken a long time, but he could have been camping out there already, hunting, perhaps even watching the kids working day after day, planning.”