“You see that overhang yonder, wraps under the cliffs?” MacAllen had pointed with his paddle. “Bunch of swallow nests plastered against the walls? You get back up under there, it’s all pictographs, must be three, four dozen. I came by here about the last day you could wade across. It seemed like a good place to build ’cause a lot of floaters would notice, and then when I saw what I saw, I backed away like a yeller dog.”
“Show me,” Harold barked, betraying his impatience to get on down the river and find Marcus.
“You’re antsy as a worm in hot ashes. Won’t take but a few minutes,” Jewel had said.
From the bank, a well-trod trail led uphill from the willows, passing a discreet sign requesting floaters not to touch the native art.
“You made a scarecrow here?” Harold had not seen a scarecrow marked at this place on the map the ranger had given him.
“Done about half of one,” Jewel said. “Like I tole you, what I seen squelched the appetite.”
The overhang was tall enough for Harold to stand, the ochre-colored pictographs appearing to be as sharp as when they’d been made. A handprint was most prominent, and Harold had to stretch to his full height to raise his own hand to cover it.
“Tall sum bitch,” Jewel said.
“For his time.” Harold nodded.
“It’s around to the right. Just got to foller up around this ledge a piece.”
He had told the truth. The top half of a scarecrow was propped against a rock, its head woven from green willow shoots.
“He’d have been my masterpiece, I ever got around to finishing him. I had plenty material and this overhang’s ’bout as good a location as any. It’s protected, but not too dark under the ledge a body can’t see it from the river.”
He led Harold across a scree slope scattered with slabs of limestone that had cracked off the overhang. His bony index finger pointed to the right, where two gray jays were industriously digging their bills underneath the edge of a flat rock.
“They had to be a dozen last time I was here. I got to work and paid no never mind, but you know how it is, you got a curious nature to you. I never did lift a rock I didn’t know better, and me from Florida, where you as likely to find a moccasin underneath as a nightcrawler. I seen stuff worse, that’s for sure, but all the same I’d as soon not repeat the experience. I’ll stay right here, guard all these pictographs from miscreants the like of me while you have your look.”
Harold remembered the river ranger pointing him to the scarecrow in the barn and saying be my guest. His gut told him that whatever these birds were working at would be worse. With the day warming, the breeze had shifted and Harold skirted the rock to get upwind before scattering the jays. The rock was heavy enough he had to use both hands to turn it over.
Harold swallowed. What he was looking at was a human head. It was facedown, and Harold was looking at two whorls of stiff blonde hair encompassing bald spots, one above the left ear, the size of a nickel, the other on the crown, as big as a fifty-cent piece. There was no apparent injury if you didn’t count the fact that the head was unattached to a body. Harold took photos with his phone, then glanced around for a stick, finding a suitable one a short distance down the slope. Careful not to touch the head with his hand, he worked the stick under it and turned it faceup. No sign of injury on that side, either. The decapitation appeared surgical, a clean, nearly bloodless cut with a pepper of bone chips where, Harold guessed, a saw with close-set teeth had sawn through the joint of the second and third cervical vertebrae.
He heard a rock tilt, then Jewel’s voice. “He was clean-shaved I found him. Folks say hair and fingernails grow after a body’s dead, but I seen corpses two and three days in the heat and what it is, it’s the skin dehydrates and shrinks and it exposes the hair under it.”
“Where did you find it?” Harold said.
“Right where you’re standing.”
“Was the rock covering it up?”
“Yeah. You could see a little hair you bent down. You’d think the sum bitch that done it would have buried it a little deeper.”
“You’d think,” Harold said. “The head, was it faceup, or facedown?”
“Down. I didn’t turn it over.”
“Were there this many maggots?” The severed head seethed with the writhing of tiny white worms.
“Not that I recollect.”
“You sure?”
“I woulda recalled.”
Harold knew that maggots appeared within twenty-four hours of tissue becoming flyblown. The man had been dead only a short time before MacAllen had discovered the head, or else he would have seen maggots.
“What day did you say you found it?”
“I didn’t. But it was day before yesterday.”
Harold photographed the face, the everyman’s countenance of regular features, bloated now, the pale skin, the ghostly blonde hair, the strange red tint of the sunken eyes.
“I ain’t knowed but one albino in my life,” he heard Jewel say. “Black kid I growed up with, got out of the draft ’cause his eyes was so bad. What about you? You know this feller?”
Harold, tight-lipped, shook his head.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The Wisdom of Beavers
It was, now that he looked back upon it from the perspective of a man chained in a cave, not technically a lie.
Fitz Carpenter had not been part of the interview process when Harold was hired, and their conversations, the few they’d had, were conducted by phone. He had met his supervisor at Division of Criminal Investigation face-to-face on only one occasion. That had been back in early March, at the Willow Creek Cafe and Saloon on the Jefferson River. Carpenter had picked the meeting place, he told Harold, because it was partway between Helena, where the state office was located, and Pony, where Harold lived at his sister’s place. They had taken a seat under an eagle sculpture at a back table, and it was when Carpenter turned his head to the waitress taking their order that Harold noticed the unusual whorls of hair. It had reminded him of photographs of hurricanes approaching a mainland that were taken from space, the counterclockwise cowlick of the whirling white clouds.
Carpenter told him that the department had decided to take advantage of Harold’s anonymity—he had yet to wear the uniform and was relatively unknown outside of Hyalite County—and insert him into a sting operation involving the poaching of grizzly bears for the Asian traditional medicines trade.
The man who had acted as a go-between bridging seller to buyer had been discovered and turned, the charges against him dropped in return for photographs, incriminating documents, and a sworn statement. But he had failed to meet an appointment with Carpenter and had never given his statement; in fact had never been heard from again. Carpenter suspected he had been blown and then eliminated. He gave Harold the name of a bar in Belt, the Harvest Moon Saloon, where the leader of the poaching ring was known to favor the Arndt Burger, a hefty patty of prime Angus slathered in sauerkraut and topped with Swiss cheese.
Carpenter had paid the bill for the lunch and they had gone outside, where he handed Harold the details he’d need in a sealed envelope that, besides containing background on the poaching ring and possible avenues of introduction, included topographic maps showing the locations of several bear carcasses, two inside Yellowstone National Park, three others in the greater Yellowstone region to the north.
“Welcome to the big leagues,” Carpenter had said, and told Harold to burn the contents after memorizing them.
At the time it had seemed like a bit much, and Harold had smiled at the subterfuge. That was until he insinuated himself into the ring and met the man who threatened to cut out his gall bladder with his knife.
“I done know what it looks like,” Jewel said.
Harold, returning from his thoughts, said, “What’s it look like?”
“Like I done it. Yo
u still going to let me free, we reach Parker Flat?” Parker Flat was a boat camp four miles downstream from Table Rock. “That compound I was telling you ’bout, where I left my truck, it ain’t but far from there on a two-track, you get on up above the cliffs.”
Harold had fully intended to let him go, having no reason to suspect that MacAllen had committed a serious crime. But now there was a dismembered body to consider, and the circumstantial evidence linking Jewel to what looked certainly to be a murder was impossible to ignore. Yet he was puzzled. If Jewel had killed the man, why did he lead Harold to the crime scene? The half-built scarecrow wasn’t visible from the river. They could have just floated by, Harold none the wiser. And there were larger questions, starting with what the hell was Fitz Carpenter doing on the Smith River only three days after he’d ordered Harold up here to investigate the scarecrows?
Words echoed from a not-so-distant past as he stared at the maggots swarming the severed head.
Why, handling a knife is an art. All my life, I never seen no one could work a blade to compare.
“This man you met at the bar in White Sulphur,” Harold said. “I believe you called him Jobson. You think he could have something to do with this?”
“Hell, man, that’s why I done showed you. He’s trying to put it on me, the dagum sum bitch. Somebody finds this head, he sees the scarecrow, they gonna think I had a hand in it.”
“But how would he know you would build a scarecrow here?”
“It was him suggested it. When I told him what I was planning on doing, for my Pap and the river and all, he said he sympathized and knew this place that would be perfect, that it weren’t but a few miles from the compound. I was saving it for last because it was going to be my masterpiece. Anyway, you best hope it was him that done it.”
“Why do you say that?”
“’Cause if I didn’t do it, and he didn’t, then there ain’t nobody left but you.”
With that thought to chew on, Harold had scribbled a note, folded it several times, and sealed it in an empty sandwich bag. He used his handkerchief to tie it to the half scarecrow. Then he went back down the scree and wrapped a lock of hair around his right forefinger to lift the head, which was as heavy as the bowling balls in Mark Lanes, the six-lane alley in Browning where Harold had whiled away hours as a child. Hiking with MacAllen back to the river, Harold had to stop to rearrange his grip twice when his fingers became white and numb.
At the bank, he washed as many maggots off the head as he could and then placed it on the canoe bottom under the rear thwart. From his seat in the stern, Harold could see it roll back and forth as waves rocked the canoe, the eyes staring up at him like coins turning over. He stepped out of the canoe, and after some rearranging put the head in the smaller of his boat bags. They pushed off and had paddled perhaps a mile when Jewel said, “You best have sealed that bag. We make the turn and get a headwind, you going to be sorry you didn’t zip it ’cause it’s you going to be the one smelling it. You ask me . . .”
But he never finished the question. As they rounded the bend in sight of the uppermost campsite at Table Rock, Harold looking past the bow to try to spot Marcus’s canoe, he saw Jewel MacAllen pitch forward, then jerk back sideways, his body twisted and his mouth coming open in the instant that the crack of a rifle carried the distance. Later, Harold would think that he had seen a puff of smoke from Table Rock itself, though, as modern cartridges use smokeless powders, that seemed very unlikely.
Everything in the next few moments seemed to occur in slow motion. MacAllen spilled over the gunwale, his mouth working like a fish’s, and Harold, going over too as the canoe capsized, heard the dull thud of a second shot from underwater. Panicking, he fought to free his legs from Jewel MacAllen, the two of them having become tangled. He kicked free and thrashed to the surface, grabbed a lungful of air and ducked back under, but found that he was buoyed by his life preserver. He unbuckled the preserver and let it float away, hoping the next shot would find it with no one home.
The canoe had capsized in a boulder field and Harold was being pinballed from one rock to another, even as he tried to stay under the surface. Below him the current slackened, and he realized he would become exposed, dead in the water for all practical purposes, if he continued on course. He surfaced for a breath and craned his neck, looking for any option that didn’t draw him closer into the crosshairs of the shooter.
Where the river bent to the right, the current had undercut the cliffs rising from the west bank, making a deep cavity where water swirled with foam. Harold kicked for it, making for the darkness. He was going to be too late, was going to sweep by just short, when he saw a tree limb protruding from the recess. Grabbing it, he pulled himself against the current back up the limb, dragging his waterlogged hip boots until he was under the bank and, he hoped, out of sight.
Exhausted, he collapsed onto the damp rock floor of what appeared to be a small cavern just above the water level. For a time, ten minutes, fifteen, he listened to the lapping of the water and concentrated on little more than breathing. Harold saw that the limb he’d used to haul himself up was anchored in a mound of sticks that he at first mistook for piled-up driftwood. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he recognized it was a beaver’s house. He saw movement back in the gloom, heard a shuffling, then saw the animal itself as it climbed on top of the mound.
“Ksisk-staki,” he said, using the Blackfeet name for beaver. “Nitsiniiyi’taki”—I thank you.
The shiny black eyes turned away as the beaver retreated out of sight.
When Harold’s adrenaline subsided, he began to shiver. With trembling hands he pulled off his boots, dumped the water out, and then stripped off his soaking clothes and wrung everything out, including his wools socks, the only item of clothing besides underwear he put back on. The plan that he had half formed, to wait until darkness before slipping back into the river and floating until he was past the danger zone, simply wasn’t going to be an option. His body was shuddering with cold, and he knew that if he was to make a move it had to be soon, before the blood in his extremities rushed to protect his core, rendering his arms and legs useless.
Like most who have lived a life of exposure, and who have witnessed the impersonal malevolence of which nature is capable, Harold was a fatalist. If I die, I die, he told himself, and not for the first time in his life. But still, he looked around for the beaver for guidance, for among the people the beaver was a symbol of wisdom. Not seeing it, Harold smiled to himself, shook his head with the slightest of gestures at the lip service he’d paid this ancient bit of folklore, and slipped back into the river. To his surprise the water felt warm, at least it was warmer than the air, and he floated on his back with his legs downstream to kick off the boulders as he came up against him. How long had he been in the beaver’s den—an hour? Probably only half that time. It was still far from full darkness, but the sun was riding the shoulders of the cliffs, the river running from glitter to shadow, and from shadow to glitter, as it wound a serpentine course between the canyon walls. He’d be harder to spot now, and if he was lucky, the man behind the trigger would have given up, figuring that Harold had been killed by the shots or drowned.
He estimated he had covered about a mile and the squeezed-chest feeling had abated when he spotted the fire on the east bank, the welcoming lick of orange flames, and then, a voice that couldn’t be, yet was.
“Da . . . !” The shout echoing across the river, the last consonant lost in the echo. And again, “Da . . . !”
Dad?
Holding the bundle of his clothes in one hand, he stroked with the other, making for the column of light. He could see a canoe now, pulled up on the bank, its red sides catching the glow of the firelight. It was the canoe that the ranger had lent Marcus. Harold knew it could be a trap, but he also knew that he had to take the chance. Marcus could need him. But even if he didn’t, Harold needed the flames, for his surv
ival kit had gone down with his canoe, taking with it any chance of starting a fire. He touched the bottom and crawled onto the shore, where he collapsed. When he caught his breath, he rose to his knees. He could see a silhouette, dancing at the edge of the light.
“Marcus?”
No answer, the figure dancing, though Harold knew that to be an illusion. It was the fire dancing, the figure warping at the edge of the updraft could be standing still, and Harold rose unsteadily and began to stagger toward the flames. A small shape was darting into and out of the light. Cochise? Harold felt his chest expand as he drew in breath.
“Marcus!”
Then a sudden beam of white light blinded him, and a figure separated from the flames and came toward him. A voice said “tut-tut-tut,” the tone feigning exaggerated disappointment.
“Isn’t like me to miss like that. Not like me at’ll. But then, I recall a time you missed a bear as big as a house, and with this very rifle. I hain’t had occasion to fire it since. Must be a screw loose on the scope mount. Either that or you jinxed it. What do you think? You wouldn’t have a 3/32nd Allen wrench handy? No? Well then, I guess if it comes to shooting you, I’ll just touch the barrel up under your chin. Won’t matter where the sights point then.”
“Marcus,” Harold said, his voice quaking.
“I’d be worrying more about yourself right now.” Harold could see the rifle as the figure drew near, the black river stone in the other hand. He felt the cold steel of the barrel against the soft skin under his chin, the sharp bite of the blade front sight. The pressure lifted his head up and the man he knew as Job was smiling down at him, his beard glowing as if it had caught a shower of sparks from the fire.
“Marcus decided to take a little nap,” he said. “Just a wee one. I had to hit him a little harder than I meant to.”
“Marcus!” Harold called out, swallowing against the steel muzzle. And once more, “Marcus!” the name echoing across the river.
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