LUCKY HAD THOUGHT ONLY as far as descending the river. When Du Pré asked him what arrangements there were for getting back out, Lucky smiled sunnily and shrugged.
Du Pré was enraged. He went down to the shingle and walked along, kicking stones. Bart came up behind him, laughing.
“It’s all right,” he said. “I called, they’ll be here for us tomorrow. Calm down. Lucky put all his thoughts into the trip and nothing more.”
“His goddamn antenna fell down,” said Du Pré. He was out of bourbon, too, and there was nothing available in the settlement. The Inuit forbade alcohol.
All the newspeople were gone. There wasn’t anything to do.
There is something not right about all of this, Du Pré thought. I am tired and disgusted and I just wish that I was moving somewhere. Just moving.
What’s not right? I need Benetsee.
He thought of the mangled, tortured bird. Some sick bastard did that.
That woman reporter, she was right—it is not Chase. He is sick and treacherous, but he is weak.
Du Pré and Bart stood there, smoking. After a while, Bart left Du Pré alone.
Du Pré stared out over the bay; the sun was beginning to set. A flock of ducks in the light, white wing patches flashing. A lone blue heron flapping, long legs dangling behind.
There was some weather coming, low dark cloud on the far horizon.
Du Pré reached in his jacket pocket and found the slingshot. He bent to the shingle and picked up a rounded stone and slung it out over the water. The stone was not balanced, and it curved off to the left before sending up a little tower of water.
His mind was full. He kept slinging stones, kept looking down. Kept thinking but could make no sense of it.
As he began to put the sling away, his hand touched a stone in his pocket. It was almost perfectly spherical, he had found it upriver, drawn to its perfection for the slingshot.
He got off the shingle and began to move through the low shrubs, toward the trees.
A Canada jay sat on the top of a willow.
Du Pré whirled the slingshot.
The bird flew. Du Pré put some arm into the last whirl and popped the thong.
The bird flew and the stone flew, drawn to the same point. A puff of gray and white feathers.
Du Pré’s belly sank. The last thing he had thought possible was that he would hit the jay. Now he’d killed something for not one good reason. He poked around in the tree line till he found the crushed bird, blood running from its beak, eyes glazed, skeleton crushed from the rock.
He put the bird up in the fork of a tree so something would find and eat it.
You practice this till you snap like a bow made of bois d’arc, old Benetsee had said. Osage orange, the finest bow wood in North America. Old times, a Sioux would trade a horse and a blanket for a bow of Osage orange. They could drive a killing arrow into the chest of a buffalo or a bear up to the feathers, the nock, sometimes clear on through.
He’d just done that. He remembered the spring, how a ripple of force seemed to have begun at the soles of his feet and flashed to the pocket of the shot fast as an arc of light.
So it was like that. Du Pré had begun to hunt when he was seven, with his father, Catfoot, who started him with a BB gun and worked him up to a .25-20. To this day, Du Pré did not sight a rifle. He just looked with both eyes open at what he was trying to hit and swung and squeezed the trigger. He’d shot antelope at four hundred yards, the good shot which clips the spine from the skull. Running antelope.
What had foxed him was that he was the force behind the stone, his muscles, not the tamped charge of guncotton that pushed a bullet. But it was in a way the same.
I just step back in time ten thousand years, Du Pré thought. This white time, it is very new and not much good for anything but pissing you off. Here I worry about I got to wait a day for a ride out of here. I don’t think a thousand years ago I would have been so upset.
He headed back toward the little village and the piles of duffel. He still had some tobacco somewhere in one of his bags.
Bart was sitting on a stump near the pile of duffel, talking and laughing. Must be Michelle. He waved Du Pré over. He handed the phone to him.
“Hello, Gabriel,” said Michelle. She sounded clear and crisp. These phones were some sort of magic.
“ ’Lo,” said Du Pré.
“So you guys made it down all right.”
“Yes,” said Du Pré. He didn’t tell her his thoughts.
“Everything has been mercifully quiet around here,” she said. “Oh, the usual ruck of drive-by shootings and all, but I guess that’s just a part of American life now.”
Yours maybe, Du Pré thought. You drive by and shoot in Montana, you have people shoot back. They got better aim, too, since they aren’t moving.
“Will you come here with Bart?” said Michelle.
“I need to get home,” said Du Pré. “I got a car parked over at the end of a road. So maybe they drop me off, I don’t know.”
See my Madelaine. See my home.
He gave the telephone back to Bart and walked away to give Bart some privacy. Though you could hear the big man laughing and talking a long ways off. Well, he was happier than Du Pré had ever seen him.
Du Pré dug around in the duffel till he found the bag with his tobacco in it. He was shoving his hand around the bottom when he hit a flannel shirt with something hand-sized and long in it…a bottle of whiskey he had missed.
“There is a God,” said Du Pré aloud. I get home, I go to Mass a few times; it will make Madelaine feel better.
Nappy and Felix were putting up a tent. Du Pré went to help them and shared his find with them. They were laughing and tired. It had been a tense trip, wondering about who was off in those dark trees with a scoped rifle maybe.
“This time, each time, I feel like my own shadow,” said Nappy. “Wonder why I came on this trip. It does not seem real to me now. I will not remember it until later.”
“Uh,” Felix added, “Ever’ time I go out in that forest, I am some scare, you know, and I go out there all my life.”
Du Pré sipped his whiskey, they ate some cold beans and turned in. The trip was over arid they were tired because of it.
Just before Du Pré dropped off, he wondered where Lucky and the others were.
Talking with the Inuit, he decided.