The Hider

by Loren D. Estleman

  I think Logan realized what we were doing at the same time I did, because he said, “Can’t we leave this trail for a while?”

  “Can’t track buffalo without tracks,” answered Jack. His eyes searched the ground for signs.

  “And while we’re tracking buffalo, George Crook’s tracking us.” The Indian spoke irritably. His exhaustion was beginning to tell on his usually unruffled nature. “He’s no fool; he knows we’re sticking to this trail by now. He doesn’t even have to work to find us. Let’s head up into the mountains.”

  Jack said nothing.

  Logan cursed. “I went along with this buffalo hunt nonsense because I found it amusing,” he said. “I’ve stopped laughing. It’s time we gave it up and thought about saving ourselves.”

  “You had your chance to take off,” Jack said calmly. “You can still do it, if you’ve a mind.”

  “Thanks a lot. You know I need you just as much as you needed me last night.”

  “Didn’t ask for it.”

  Logan stared at him in disbelief. “Would you rather I’d left you in that cage?”

  “Didn’t say that.”

  The Indian fell into a sullen silence. Then he exploded. “Look, we can’t hunt and stay ahead of George Crook at the same time!”

  “That’s true enough,” agreed Jack. There was something curious in the way he said it.

  “What does that mean?” Logan challenged.

  Jack turned a stony face upon his companion. It was the first time he’d looked at either of us all day. “If you’re planning to stay ahead of your injun law all the way up to Canada,” he said patiently, “you got less brains than I give you credit for. You can’t keep running all the time. Sooner or later you got to stop and turn. And it might as well be while we’re with you.”

  “So what’s stopping you?” The Indian’s tone was half angry, half curious. I don’t think he was sure whether or not he was being called a coward.

  “You are.” When Logan didn’t say anything to that, Jack continued. “I ain’t running,” he explained. “I’m hunting buffalo. When you decide it’s time to fight, we’ll fight. Till then, we’ll hunt. It’s up to you.”

  That ended the conversation. Logan stared at him, his expression thoughtful, but Jack’s eyes were already back on the ancient trail. I don’t think he remembered a word of what he had just said. But the Indian did.

  Chapter Eleven

  On May 1, 1898, as any history book will tell you, Commodore Dewey seized control of Manila Bay and sealed the victory of the United States in the Spanish-American War. That, however, is not the reason that date looms so big in my memory. Be patient, and I’ll tell you why.

  It was the afternoon of the second day after we broke out of the jail in Reuben, and of the sixth after I had first laid eyes on Jack. That morning had found us midway between the towering mountain known as Three-Fingered Jack (“No relation,” quipped the old hider, with a deadpan expression) and the two-mile-high peak of Mount Jefferson in the extreme northeast corner of Linn County. Here we found a huge sink-shaped depression some fifty feet across and nearly eighteen feet deep in the middle of country where there should have been nothing but flat plain. It was full of water, and tall cottonwoods grew along its east shore. It didn’t look like something nature would have made, yet it didn’t quite resemble anything man had put there either. I asked Jack about it as we were letting our mounts drink the muddy water.

  “Buffalo wallow,” he said, munching on a dried apple he had taken from his saddlebag. He offered me one, but I shook my head. Logan accepted one and nibbled at it in silence. “Starts as a mud puddle. During shedding season, buffalo scrub around in it to get rid of extra hair and ticks and such. Gets bigger and deeper every year. This here’s the biggest I seen yet.”

  “Bet our buffalo stopped here,” I said.

  “It did.”

  I looked at him quickly. His attention was on the ground near where his mule had its front hoofs planted in the water. I followed his gaze. My breath caught in my throat.

  The print of a cloven hoof as big as my hand showed deep in the loamy soil at the water’s edge. It could not have been more than a day old. “Is that what I think it is?” I asked. My voice was strangely hushed.

  “Depends,” said Jack. “If you’re thinking it belongs to a buffalo, you’re right.”

  Logan snorted. “A track like that could belong to a lot of things. An elk, maybe. Or it might be you’re hot on the trail of a stray milk cow.”

  Jack shook his head. “Elk puts all his weight forward; back of his hoof don’t show. And the print’s too deep for any ordinary cow or bull. Buffalo carries most of his weight up front. Cow carries hers in back. It’s a front hoofprint, and it’s deep. Buffalo, all right, and fresh. If we wasn’t slowed up in Reuben, we’d of caught him up to his hocks in water.” He backed the mule out of the wallow. “Let’s see where he come out.”

  We picked up the beast’s trail again on the other side of the depression, a clear path that turned up dirt and left the tall grass bent back in the direction from which it had come. An angry buzz of flies drew our attention to a pile of fresh manure heaped in the middle of the trail. We guided our mounts around it and continued riding. The Indian made no more comments after that.

  The trail grew faint as we left the soft earth of the plains and passed into the rocky strata where the mountains had heaved themselves out of the ground ages before, but Jack led the way with the certainty of a man who had lived in the area all his life and knew exactly where he was going. Along about noon, however, our pace began to slow, and finally, in a wooded area near the base of Mount Jefferson, Jack drew up. Logan and I followed suit.

  Jack got down and spent a few minutes walking around the area. He took up much of that time studying the ground and the various bushes that grew there, and when he returned to his mule his face wore a puzzled expression.

  “Something?” I asked.

  “He left the trail,” he said. “Headed east, into the mountains.”

  “Why would he want to do that?” Logan wanted to know.

  Jack unslung the canteen from his saddle horn and treated himself to a healthy swallow. “There ain’t but one thing would make a buffalo turn off of the run he’s following,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “And that there’s it.” He nodded toward the west.

  Logan and I looked in that direction. The Indian stiffened and drew his revolver. A group of ten men in sweat-stained hats and bib overalls that had long since faded to a neutral color were advancing through the trees with the measured pace of a party of hunters. They were carrying rifles and shotguns. As they drew near, the apparent leader, a big man with a massive head and a neck like a bull’s, raised a thick arm in greeting. I wasn’t taken in by this display of friendship. Reaching into my bedroll, I pulled out the reliable Winchester and jacked a shell into the chamber. The noise it made was crisply metallic in the silence of the forest. They pulled up short at the sound.

  “Hello, sir,” said the leader. He had a funny kind of accent that I couldn’t identify at first, but which turned out to be German.

  “Howdy,” said Jack. His tone was noncommittal. He had freed his Sharps from his saddle scabbard and now he stood holding it casually but ready to use.

  The German took off his hat and drew his sleeve across his forehead to clear away the sweat. He had dark hair that looked as if it had been cut with a bowl over his head, and his eyes were hidden beneath the black thatching of his brows. His nose was a knob in the middle of his broad face. I figured him to be about forty years old. “You are maybe having good fortune?” he asked.

  “I reckon that depends on what you think we’re doing.” Jack’s voice remained even, but I noticed his knuckles tighten on the big rifle.

  The leader appeared surprised. A look passed between him and the rest of the men in his party. One of them growled something in German. “You are not from Salem?” the leader asked Jack.

 
“No. Should we be?”

  More murmurs. “That is where last week we posted the notices,” said the leader. “Are you here for the bounty?”

  “Mister, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Maybe you better start by telling me who you are and what you’re doing here with all this iron.”

  “Iron?” The word puzzled the big German. “Eisen? Ich nicht verstehe—I do not understand what you mean by ‘iron.’ My English, it is not so good yet.”

  “Guns,” said Jack, his impatience showing in his tone. “You got enough firepower here to fight the war twixt the states all over again. What is it, a lynching party?”

  “Oh,” said the other, and his swarthy face was split by a broad grin of understanding. “Iron; guns. I see. Very colorful. No, sir. This is not, as you say, a lynching party. Honest men do not take the law into their own hands. This much I have learned since coming to this country. No, we are hunting.”

  “Buffalo hunting?” I blurted out. I regretted it immediately, for Jack turned and fixed me with a look that made me shrivel in my saddle.

  The German laughed, a booming baritone that echoed loudly in the still woods. “You are having fun with me, young sir. I have been here long enough to know that the magnificent beast of which you speak exists no longer. What we are hunting, sirs, is a dog.”

  “A dog?” repeated Logan, staring at him from the back of his horse. “Are you sure you don’t mean a wolf?”

  “No, sir. We have wolves even in my country, and I would not mix them up.” The German presented Logan with an expression that was not entirely friendly. We were close to the Warm Springs Indian Reservation, and I suppose he’d had his troubles with the red man before this. He turned toward Jack once again. “It is not an ordinary dog we seek,” he explained, “but one that is afflicted with the disease of the brain. He is—how do you say it?—mad.” To demonstrate, he bared his teeth and wiggled his fingers in front of his mouth to indicate foaming.

  “Hydrophobia?” Jack prompted.

  The German nodded vigorously. “Yes, sir. That is it. The fear of water.”

  Jack said, “I seen some dog tracks on the way here. What’s the bounty?”

  “One hundred dollars.”

  I whistled.

  “It is a small amount to pay, young sir, for our peace of mind.” There was no trace of mirth in the German leader’s manner now. “Our women and children have been unable to leave their homes for days. Each morning we find fresh tracks in our yards. Our crops will fail if our families do not help us work them, yet none of us is willing to expose his loved ones to the danger.”

  “Mad or sane, all animals head for higher ground,” said Jack. He gazed off toward the east. “You tried looking for him in the mountains?”

  The foreigner looked reluctant. “Many times we have tracked the beast into the mountains, sir. Many times we have turned back. Always his trail is lost among the rocks. No one wishes to continue when he knows not whether he is the hunter or the one who is hunted.”

  Jack said, “Anything that touches the ground leaves signs. They’re hard to find sometimes, but they’re there. You just got to know what to look for.”

  The German’s face brightened. “You are a good tracker?”

  “I been told that. I usually get what I go after.”

  “You would consider maybe going after mad dog?”

  Jack appeared to think it over. “I might.”

  The grin returned to the German’s face. I stared at Jack and was on the verge of saying something when Logan put a hand on my arm and silenced me.

  “You have our gratitude, sir,” said the leader of the Germans, and, turning to his companions, spoke to them rapidly in their own language. Soon they were all smiling. They babbled among themselves and at us like geese in a pen at feeding time. The big man seized Jack’s hand in his and pumped it energetically. “I am called Eric Morgenmueller. You will know me as Eric. The names of my friends you will learn in time. It is time we returned to our homes for dinner. I would be honored if you and your young friend would eat at my table.” His eyes flickered toward Logan and he added, “The Indian gentleman is also welcome.”

  The “Indian gentleman” said nothing, but his jaw tightened.

  “We’d be right honored to accept,” replied Jack reservedly. “I’m Jack Butterworth. The boy’s Jeff Curry. The injun calls himself—”

  “Sleeping Bow,” Logan cut in.

  “Sleeping Bow,” repeated the other without hesitation. “It appears you got yourself three dog hunters, Mr. Morgenmueller.”

  “Eric,” corrected the German, and he threw his arm around Jack’s shoulders as if they had known each other since childhood. The group started walking westward. Logan and I followed on horseback and in silence.

  Eric Morgenmueller’s spread turned out to be the biggest in the cluster of a dozen or so German-owned farms that occupied the rich territory of northwestern Oregon. It seemed that he and the others had come to America soon after the Franco-Prussian War to escape the inflated taxes imposed on them by Otto von Bismarck after the victory at Sedan. The immigrants had dug into their life savings to buy passage on a wagon train west, and when the government auctioned off several thousand acres that had belonged to a local cattle baron for back taxes they had pooled what was left to purchase the land where their homes now stood. All this we learned from Morgenmueller during the trek to his house. As we drew near, the other members of the hunting party trickled off one by one toward their own dinner tables until we were alone with the big farmer.

  Logan and I were dismounting in front of the German’s modest two-story dwelling when the screen door opened to a complaining of springs and a woman came out. Jack removed his hat.

  “My wife Katerina,” said the farmer, indicating the thickset woman with a shy, friendly face and blonde hair done up in odd-looking braids coiled on either side of her head. She wore a white blouse buttoned up to her neck and a black skirt under a flour-streaked white apron. As her husband introduced us, she sank into a deep curtsy, but said nothing. “My wife speaks very little English,” the farmer explained. Turning to her again, he said “Wo ist Ilse?”

  Katerina Morgenmueller answered him in German and nodded toward the red-painted barn across the yard.

  “Ilse!” shouted the big man. “Come out and meet our guests!”

  After a moment Ilse appeared from inside the barn and walked toward us with hesitant steps. I confess that I stood and stared at her like the village idiot; in my defense, I can only say that I had good reason.

  It was not hard to see that, before age had added lines to her face and inches to her waist, Katerina had once looked much like Ilse. But while the woman was merely pretty, the girl was beautiful in a way that the farmer’s wife could never have been; and, while Katerina’s hair was corn-yellow, Ilse’s was as blindingly blonde as a ripe field of wheat under a bright sun. They resembled each other in hairstyle and dress, but other than that there was no longer any comparison between the two. The girl looked to be about seventeen.

  “Yes, Papa?” she said when she had joined Morgenmueller in front of the house. Her crisp blue eyes flickered over the group of strange men who stood in her yard. I thought they lingered on me for an instant, but don’t go trusting my judgment too much because I was in love. I will state definitely that she blushed ever so slightly.

  The big farmer told her our names, after which she did a graceful imitation of her mother’s Old World curtsy. As she came back up, I noticed the fine dust of freckles at the tops of her cheeks. “I am very pleased to meet you, sirs,” she said, with just a trace of an accent.

  “Ilse, see that Herman unsaddles and feeds our guests’ horses. They are staying for dinner.” Morgenmueller shooed his wife into the house and motioned for us to follow. He came last. As the screen door closed, I caught a glimpse of Ilse helping a lanky, sullen-looking young man lead our mounts toward the barn. Why is it that other people’s farm hands always seem to be so at odds with
the rest of the world? Or was I just jealous?

  The ground floor of the farmer’s house was taken up by a single room that served both as parlor and kitchen, with a square linen-covered table standing in between to designate the dining area. A carved wooden crucifix hung on the wall above the stone fireplace. Lace doilies decorated the simple upholstered chairs and the tired-looking sofa, and an oaken buffet in the corner sported a scarf embroidered in many colors on its top. In one of the chairs sat an old lady in a black lace dress fastened at her neck with a big turquoise brooch. Her face was smooth and her gray hair was streaked with white. She regarded Jack with interest.

  “Gretchen Steiner, my wife’s mother,” Morgenmueller told us. “She speaks no English at all.” He introduced us to her in rapid German.

  She smiled, nodded, said “Guten Tag”—and all the time she kept her bright little eyes riveted on Jack. He nodded to her a little uncomfortably. At this, Logan smiled for the first time since we had met the hunting party out in the woods.

  “And now, gentlemen,” said the head of the household, “a race. The first man to reach the washbasin receives the benefits of clean water.”

  “Eric!” chided his wife. “Still!” She turned to us. “My husband, he is joking always, sirs. Clean water you will find much of on the back porch.”

  During dinner, which turned out to be a thoroughly American assortment involving two roast ducks with dressing, a salad, biscuits, mashed potatoes, beans, asparagus, and a fresh rhubarb pie for dessert, Eric Morgenmueller revealed that for a little while he had served in the Army of Prussia. That set the tone of the conversation, and for the next twenty minutes he and Jack swapped war stories that grew steadily more outlandish and unbelievable as the meal progressed. Nevertheless the talk was not without its controls. Every time the farmer touched on a subject that did not seem fitting for polite company, his wife would clear her throat loudly, and without an instant’s hesitation he would veer off onto a different track. This had a tempering effect on Jack as well. Most of the tales he related dealt with humorous incidents that had taken place between battles. The upshot of it was that the rest of the diners were forced to sit and suffer through some of the dullest war stories that had ever been told.