Stabenow, Dana - Shugak 09 - Hunter's Moon

by Hunter's Moon(lit)

  FIFTEEN.

  I was afraid you were dead.

  TIME PASSED.

  It began to rain, at first only a gentle pattering against the leaves above, increasing to a hard, cold, steady downpour that penetrated even that dense canopy before it ceased, to leave everything wet and dripping.

  Kate sat with her arms around Jack, rocking back and forth, rocking, rocking, rocking.

  Mutt whined, a questioning sound. Kate didn't hear her.

  Rocking.

  Mutt heaved herself painfully to her feet, staggered a few steps and fell heavily.

  Kate didn't notice.

  Rocking.

  Mutt hauled herself across Jack's body, crowding Kate.

  Kate didn't notice.

  Rocking.

  Mutt whined again, licked Kate's cheek, rough tongue scraping damp skin.

  Nothing.

  Rocking.

  Mutt barked once, sharp, right in Kate's face.

  She'd never done anything like that before in her life, and Kate blinked at her.

  Mutt did it again.

  The rocking stopped.

  Kate looked down at Jack, eyes closed, slight smile on his lips, gaping wound in his side, warmth leaving his body even as she tried to hold it in with her arms, with her spirit, with her love.

  In that moment she almost gave up.

  "Jack," she said. "Jack."

  The words were torn from her lips by the increasing wind, which ruffled the tops of the trees, the boughs creaking and groaning with the strain.

  A stray draft blew through, although she could barely feel it, which seemed odd. All she had on on top was the T-shirt she had worn beneath her flannel shirt and jeans and tennis shoes, and everything was soaked from the dew and the rain. She should be freezing. Instead, she felt warm. Warm and sleepy.

  Lassitude crept over her and her eyelids drooped. Never mind, she thought. Her eyelids drooped, her shoulders sagged, her head nodded.

  Never mind. Let it go, just let it go.

  A momentary silence fell, a lull between gusts.

  In the single, still moment of serenity that followed, Kate heard, or thought she heard, the call of a bird, three notes only, descending, one after the other, a pure descant of sweet, trilling sound.

  Kate stiffened, coming back as if from a long, long distance.

  The three notes repeated, three long trills, separate, piercing, true.

  "Emaa?" Kate whispered. "Emaa?"

  The notes were not repeated a third time, or were obscured by the resumption of the wind, escalating in speed from a boisterous laugh to a bad-tempered growl.

  It couldn't have been, anyway; the golden-crowned sparrow was a spring bird, and this was fall.

  There was more rain coming; she could smell it. If the temperature dropped enough it could even be snow. If it caught her like this, she would die of exposure. She had to find dry clothes, and food, and she had to do it now.

  She had to try.

  She stripped the shirt from Jack's body and put it on, noting in some detached portion of her mind that the bits of gut and the blood had dried hard. She covered Jack's body with leaves piled high. "Stay," she said to Mutt when Mutt would have followed her out of the clearing.

  Mutt whined.

  "Stay," Kate repeated.

  Mutt growled, something else she had never done.

  "Stay," Kate repeated, her face a frozen mask. "Stay. Guard."

  In some detached portion of her brain she noticed that she was thirsty.

  She weaseled her way toward the sound of the creek, that detached portion of her mind that had seemed to take over rational thought ensuring that she made no unnecessary noise. She reached the edge of the bank and peered out from beneath the concealing branches of the willows.

  There was no one to be seen, and the bend in the creek was far enough down that she should have warning of someone coming.

  She slid down the bank and went to kneel next to the stream. The water was clear and cold. It felt good on her torn wrists, better on her aching scalp and best of all in great sweet gulps, numbing the inside of her throat. She felt as if she could inhale the entire creek. She found a rusty tin can and filled it and carried it to Mutt, leaking all the way. She didn't look at the still mound beneath the dead leaves.

  Afterward, she found a seat on a boulder just inside a fold of earthen bank, providing shelter from the rain, easy access to both bank and streambed and a vantage point from which to keep watch upstream and down.

  When she emptied them out, the contents of her pockets seemed meager indeed. The Swiss army knife, a quarter, two nickels and a penny, an aged stick of gum, a box of matches with two matches in it, a couple of rubber bands, and the otter, still in its little velveteen bag. She took it out and put it on a rock, where it perched, looking at her expectantly.

  She should go back and rifle Jack's pockets but she simply couldn't bring herself to do it.

  She unwrapped the gum and chewed it slowly, stolidly, entirely without enthusiasm, extracting the last bit of sugar for the minuscule amount of energy it would provide. It flooded her tongue and taste buds with warmth and sweetness and an odd flavor of normality, and in some strange way provided a kick start to her brain.

  Jack was dead.

  Mutt was wounded, perhaps fatally.

  She acknowledged both facts. The resulting feelings of pain and rage and grief almost brought her to her knees.

  Almost.

  She recovered, slowly, manhandling them into one corner of her mind and locking them there for the time being. If she let them escape, they would sap every last bit of her endurance and her will to survive.

  Contained, they would goad her into action and once she was moving, keep her moving.

  She wrenched her mind to what she might find on Blueberry Ridge, excluding everything else.

  Nobody got the drop on Old Sam, nobody, not in eighty-odd years, and Demetri had an extra edge in that he spoke fluent German. He could have caught any signals in time to run for cover. They might even be on their way back right now, and they might even be coming down the creek, especially if Senta and Eberhard had run off with the four-wheelers. The cliff from ridge to creek bed was formidable but with care, negotiable, up and down, and the creek bed at low water was practically an interstate from the foot of the cliff to the lodge.

  And if they were dead, she had to know. She owed it to them, and to Edna, Demetri's wife, and to his children.

  And if they were dead, and there was no help for her there, there was always the spike camp at the top of the ridge. It would have at the very least food, a tent and a sleeping bag.

  And if they were dead, they had both been armed, and she might find a weapon.

  Of course, Eberhard and Senta had probably already figured this out and could be waiting for her at the ridge.

  On the other hand, it was just as possible that Senta and Eberhard would let Kate run herself into the ground and trust to the Bush to take care of her.

  There was a hubris that accompanied the perfect crime, or what was thought to be one, the almost uncontrollable urge to brag, to share and celebrate the triumph in however perverse and unconscionable a manner.

  The night before, Eberhard and Senta had been swollen with pride, boastful, vain even.

  They had been fearless, Kate thought, secure enough to strut naked around the campsite. Why?

  She sat up. Was there a third member of the party, back trailing them, backing them up, lending them that security?

  If so, who? Gunther, the eager beaver with the brown nose, so young, so inexperienced, so easily led? Hubert the herbalist? Gregor the lounge lizard? Berg, obviously in love with Senta, equally obviously too stupid to make a useful tool?

  Whoever it was, it wasn't Dieter. One thing she was sure of; everything that had happened on this trip was tied into the discoveries made in the cabins. From the bullet in the stream, it looked like someone wanted to frame Dieter for Hendrik's death. If it was a frame,
Eber hard and Senta were pulling it. Maybe Dieter was supposed to have run amok and shot up all his hired hands, corporate and sporting, and Senta and Eberhard were the only two to have escaped.

  And if they were the only two survivors, who could disprove their story?

  The Alaskan Bush was often loath to give up its secrets. Look at Baker Bob, the serial killer from Anchorage who had kidnapped strippers and hookers and turned them loose on the Mat-Su River delta so he could hunt them down again. It was years before he'd been caught, and the bodies hadn't been found until he led the authorities to them himself.

  For that matter, look at Crazy Emmett, with all those alleged trespassers six feet under his property. Would anyone ever really know?

  Most likely not until he was dead and gone and someone went into his property with a backhoe, and Crazy Emmett was a long way from dead.

  She looked up. Alow ceiling of impenetrable gray rested on the tops of the trees. George, not knowing of any reason to rush, might fly as far as Skwentna to check out the weather. He'd fly partway into this soup to see how thick it was and how far it extended, after which he'd go back to Anchorage to sit out the storm, so no help there. After all, George wouldn't be worried, it was only the--what?

  She looked at her watch, a Seiko automatic with a black rubber wristband and a scarred crystal face. Was it really only the thirtieth, only the fifth day of the hunt? Kate felt as if she had been on the run for a week, and instead, time seemed to be passing with glacial slowness.

  The thirtieth of September. Tomorrow would be the first of October, when they should have ended the hunt for moose and begun the hunt for bear.

  Jack. The memory slipped beneath the mental roadblock she'd thrown up against it. Jack lying over her, moving in her, coming with her, the hollow roof of the empty diesel tank sounding out his need. Jack, the roughly planed angles of his face dissolving into laughter in the moonlight.

  Jack, lying facedown in his own blood, moving slowly, painfully toward the trestle table, intent on making an opportunity for her to escape.

  Jack, his life's force seeping out even as she held him in her arms and begged him not to go.

  And Mutt. Her right side, Mutt's side, felt naked.

  No. She forced the thoughts back into their place, shut them in again, this time twisted the key off in the lock. Her head throbbed with the effort. She touched her scalp gingerly. Her braid was fraying from its weave and very sore at the base. She felt again Eberhard's hand using her braid like a leash, to haul her to her feet, to drag her across the yard, to sling her into a chair. The rope of hair felt like the rein on a horse, the chain on a slave, ready for the next master, or the same one, when he caught up with her again.

  She gave her head an angry shake and looked again at the contents of her pockets. So. A box of matches, a watch, a knife, some change, a couple of rubber bands and a talisman. She had the water from the creek. She didn't have food, but she knew where she could find some, and until then she'd make do with what she could find in the woods.

  She flexed her hands. They seemed to be working properly, all senses restored, although her wrists looked as if she'd gone for them with a dull knife. Eberhard had wound the duct tape tight, tight enough perhaps to leave scars. She felt for the scar on her throat, the roped line of tissue rough to her fingertips. What were a few more to add to the collection?

  She stood up and pocketed the matches, the change, the rubber bands and the otter.

  To the ridge then, as quickly as possible, to look for other survivors and weapons and food.

  And then back to the lodge.

  Definitely back to the lodge. Alone or with help, hungry or fed, empty-handed or armed.

  Back to the lodge, and retaliation.

  They would pay for what they had done, Senta and Eberhard.

  They would pay.

  It was an oath taken by a warrior.

  It was a curse laid by a witch.

  Senta and Eberhard would not survive a day longer than Jack Morgan.

  "This I swear," Kate said, raising her face to the rain, which had begun again, a slow drizzle that oozed out of the air and coalesced into fat, oily drops in leaves, bark, stone and skin.

  "This I swear!"

  Her words echoed off the mist.

  Only one more thing to do and she could be on her way to fulfill her vow.

  Stony-faced, she grasped her braid in one hand, and with the big blade on the Swiss army knife sawed off the thick rope of hair at the nape of her neck. The blade was sharp. The braid thumped to the rocks behind her.

  Never again would Eberhard be able to haul her around by the hair.

  No one would.

  Ever.

  She folded the knife and pocketed it and walked out of the shelter of the creek bank and into the rain. She didn't look back.

  The creek bed narrowed after two miles and the banks steepened, forcing the water into a confined channel much deeper than the downstream flow.

  To keep her drying feet from getting wet all over again she had to climb the bank and re-enter the trees.

  She did so cautiously, knowing the makeshift road that led first to the old gold mine and then followed the creek up to the ridge was very near at this point. She listened, but there was nothing to hear other than the rain on the leaves overhead, no footsteps, no four-wheelers, no cocking of triggers. Good. Between the fog and the dense undergrowth she couldn't keep Blueberry Ridge in sight as a landmark and a goal, but so long as she kept the sound of the creek on her left she would know she was going in the right direction.

  She fought her way through the brush, pausing when she came to a stand of high bush cranberries. They were tart but she gobbled handfuls of them, ravenous. The tangy taste burst inside her mouth, making her stomach growl for more. Farther on there was a patch of wild rose hips.

  She ate those, too, seeds and all.

  She was looking for blueberries when she stumbled into a clearing and nearly fell in a pile of brush and leaves and deadfall. A powerful stink emanated from the middle of the pile.

  The hairs on Kate's neck rose. She raised one branch and peered beneath.

  It was a dead moose, with its stomach and genitals missing.

  Bear always went for the soft parts first.

  By all the mercies she had managed to stumble into a bear kill while the bear was away, drinking out of the creek maybe, or sleeping off the first course. There were at least two and probably three courses left, so he wouldn't be very far away, or away for very long.

  She moved smartly out of the area. She would have run if she'd had the room, but the game trail she'd been following vanished almost immediately, and the trees and the brush began to close in on every side. She ran her shoulder into the branch of a low-hanging birch, wriggled through a stand of close-knit alders, and was scratched until she bled by a patch of devil's club.

  It took ten minutes to travel twenty-five feet. She stopped, gasping for breath. The light was dimmer, the air seemed closer, the oxygen rarer in here. She was going to have to take to the four-wheeler track after all.

  It more or less parallelled the creek, both traveling north from the camp toward Blueberry Ridge, the first real foothill of any size in the Alaska Range closest to the lodge.

  Putting the bear cache at her back and walking directly east, or what she hoped was east, she bulled her way through the brush. The trail eluded her long enough for her to wonder if she was lost. She pressed forward dully, pushing brush out of her way, tripping and falling over a tangle of soapberry, stinging her hand on a patch of nettles.

  And suddenly there she was, on the west bank of the trail, nearly over it before she caught her balance She slumped down and gulped in great, grateful breaths, face turned up to the low-lying fog that, gray as it was, was still lighter than the twilight darkness of the all-enclosed brush.

  Her wrists ached, the slashes from the devil's club stung her cheeks, her shoulder hurt where she'd run into a branch, and she had long since st
opped feeling the cold and the wet, but all that was better than being shot for carelessness, and she waited.

  This section had been cut, and banks four and five feet high rose on either side. The track itself ranged from eight to twelve feet wide, a great, gravelly scar inflicted on the landscape by the sharp, pitiless blade of a tractor thirty years before. Alders, those prolific, subarctic weeds, were growing up along the middle of the track, threatening to take it back, in company with wild roses and berry bushes and devil's club. Its roots exposed by erosion and its white bark peeling away in crumbling rolls, a white birch leaned over the roadway at a forty-five-degree angle, ready to fall at the slightest provocation.