CHAPTER TWO

Ursa Major

The grizzly sow wasn’t picky. She’d attempted to dig up the human body earlier in the spring, when the surface of the earth at nine thousand feet was as hard as a pool table slate. Her two cubs were no bigger than furry basketballs then. Now, grown to the size of border collies and with as much restless energy, they watched with twitching noses as their mother wrenched the decomposed body from the earth. Though it could only charitably be called flesh, even one putrid mouthful was worth a dozen mountain voles and had the great advantage of staying still. She greedily tore at the tatters of clothing, exposing the sickening parchment of the skin. She bent her head to jerk out a section of haunch.

Suddenly she swung round to face downslope, one huge foreleg poised on top of the rib cage, which cracked abruptly under her weight. She lifted her nose, questing, then with a woof bounded into a screen of undergrowth, closely followed by the swarming, up-and-down shuffle of her cubs.

•   •   •

Harold Little Feather was the first to crest the rise of land. He’d heard the bones cracking, which from a distance sounded like a small-caliber rifle shot, and had climbed with great caution until reaching the lip from which the timbered bench lowered into view. Immediately registering the mangled remains of the body, he turned and put a finger to his lips. Sheriff Martha Ettinger, a few steps down the ridge, raised her eyes.

Little Feather pressed down with his hand. Stay low. He tapped his nose. “Bear.” Just mouthing the word.

Ettinger signaled the recovery team below her to stay put. Katie Sparrow, twenty feet down the slope, squatted to place a reassuring hand over Lothar’s neck. The wind, which had been drifting uphill when the sow caught the dreaded human scent, had changed its mind, and the odor of the bear was thick in the nostrils of the shepherd. Katie could feel the cabled neck muscles quiver under her hand.

Kneeling behind her, Sheriff’s Sergeant Warren Jarrett drew back the bolt of his .338 Winchester Magnum to chamber a cartridge. He hadn’t wanted to pack the nine-pound rifle up the mountain, but protocol dictated a heavy-caliber weapon in areas of high bear activity. The modified Mauser action, worn slick after thirty elk seasons, made a barely audible click as the bolt closed on the round. Doc Hanson, the Hyalite County medical examiner, was the straggler of the group. Having struggled with the altitude all morning, he placed his hands on his knees to breathe deeply. The hairs of his walrus mustache, more salt than pepper, drifted slightly with each exhalation.

Martha Ettinger popped the safety tab off her canister of UDAP pepper spray. Impatient by nature, she looked hard at the back of Little Feather’s head, as if she could will him to turn around and explain the holdup. Is the bear in sight? What about the crack that sounded like a gunshot? She hated not knowing. She wrinkled her nose at the cloud of odor invading her nostrils—the sour dog smell of the bruin coupled with the putrid tang of the decomposed body.

Ten minutes passed, a heartbeat at a time.

Finally, Little Feather turned and hooked a finger. Ettinger climbed up the ridge, gave him a what’s up? look.

“Bear excavated the body, winded us, left. Probably halfway around the mountain by now. Was best to stay patient, make sure he was gone.”

“Ursa Major or Ursa Minor?”

Little Feather picked up a stick and walked forward a few steps, tapping it on the ruptured earth.

“Not a black bear,” he said. “Griz. Sow, she’s got a cub. No, two cubs. Good thing about the wind giving us away. Come on her unawares—well, you know how perturbed mama grizzly bear can get.”

“Should I call up the troops?”

“Bring them to the lip. No farther ’til I work out the tracks. Probably only human print is Katie’s yesterday. Still, I’d like to be sure before everyone mucks it up.”

They’d been conducting the conversation in whispers, not so much because of the bear but because it was the way hunters communicated, and this was a hunt in the sense that they were working out tracks, trying to solve a riddle etched onto the surface of the earth.

Ettinger turned and called down the hill. “Come on up.”

The words sounded jarringly loud and she immediately regretted them, feeling as if she had breached an unwritten code of conduct. She turned back to Harold to gauge his reaction, and as she did there was a popping sound from the screen of brush to her left. She knew it was a bear chopping its teeth before she saw the head bulge out from the tangle of downfall. In the time it took her to shift her eyes to Harold, the bear was on him and Harold was down as if struck by a bat, the bear shaking him, issuing horrible grunting sounds as it worried his left arm. Ettinger fumbled the canister of bear spray out of the holster, inadvertently pressing the trigger before it was withdrawn and spraying the ground in front of her. The cayenne mist brought her to her knees. But then Katie was flashing by, right through the red cloud from Martha’s canister to empty all eight ounces of her own spray into the face of the bear. Below them, thunder crashed as Warren Jarrett shot his rifle into the air as a diversion.

And like that it was over. The bear, a blur, then a crashing in the underbrush, gone from sight. Martha gasping. Katie flat on the ground, having inhaled enough pepper spray to discourage an elephant. Little Feather lay curled on his side, his right hand behind his head in a protective posture and his left hand a bloody claw of fingers, sticking out at a grotesque angle from the forearm.

Warren Jarrett took the last steep steps at a run. He instantly inventoried the carnage and had just started for Little Feather when he was brought up short by a rasping sound. One of the grizzly cubs had started backing down a lodgepole pine tree thirty yards away. He could hear the mother chuffing from somewhere beyond the tree, encouraging the cub. Jarrett froze, knowing that if he put the cub back up the tree, the sow would return and then God knows what would happen. The last thing he wanted to do was have to shoot her and orphan two cubs. The cub reached a fork in the lower limbs of the pine and stopped. Again, Jarrett heard the chuffing.

“Come on, little bear. Come on,” he said under his breath. He deliberately kept his head down, not looking at the cub.

Again came the rasping sound. Jarrett, his eyes watering from the cayenne mist that permeated the air, didn’t look up until the cub had reached the ground and shambled off, encouraged by more chuffing from its mother. Jarrett took the remaining five step to Harold Little Feather and bent over him.

Doc Hanson arrived on the bench, his legs shaking and his breath stentorian.

“My God, Warren. Is everybody all right?”

•   •   •

Later, much later after the Air Mercy chopper had evacuated Harold Little Feather to Hyalite Deaconess and he’d been the beneficiary of a blood transfusion, the puncture wounds to his upper chest drained and dressed, his broken radius set, his left shoulder relocated into its socket, his body pumped full of antibiotics, and his condition downgraded from serious to stable, Hanson would live to regret the comment. The four who had accompanied Little Feather on the body recovery, plus Janice Inderland, Harold’s sister from Pony, and Sean Stranahan, who had befriended the Blackfeet tracker the previous summer, were crowded into room 223B. Seven hours had passed since the bear attack and the gray mood had just lifted, as Harold emerged from a drug-induced stupor to utter labored words of thanks to those who effected his rescue. The crowded room smelled herbally of smoke. Janice Inderland had burned a braid of sweetgrass and conducted a smudge ceremony to cleanse her brother’s body of bad spirits.

The nurse, a hips-forward, severe-looking woman who clipped her words, had to shush them twice. Under ordinary circumstances she would have booted them out, allowing no more than three or four visitors at a time. But the patient was Native American. Chanting, sweetgrass incense, and standing room only were cultural norms that the hospital staff recognized.

Martha Ettinger added her signature to those already decorating the cast on Harold’s left forearm and hand. She hesitated, then followed her scrawl with an X in the red felt marker. Harold squinted at his arm.

“Is that a kiss you put on it, Martha? How about one for my cheek.”

Martha kissed him brusquely, then tossed her head back to cover up the burn in her face.

“Picture this, Harold,” she said. “Old Doc here’s last to arrive on the scene. There’s blood over a ten-foot radius. There’s bodies on the ground, two of ’em aren’t moving. Then there’s this human skull the bear dug up like something out of a nightmare, staring up with empty eye sockets. And Doc says—what was that you said, Doc? Oh yeah: ‘Is everybody all right?’”

The coroner tugged at the wings of his mustache, his cheeks bright cherry. He muttered something about the power of positive thinking.

“Don’t let them get to you,” Harold said thickly. “I know who kept the blood from leaking out of me. I get to thinking straight, I’ll give you a proper Blackfeet name. Right now I want to know what happened up on that bench.”

“Well, I believe the sow would have taken off,” Warren Jarrett said, “but one of her cubs went up a tree. When Martha called down for us, she read threat and reacted. Just being a grizzly. If Katie hadn’t come through—”

Little Feather cut him off. “No, I mean the body. What did you find out?”

“We didn’t find out anything. We haven’t been back,” Ettinger said. “If I can clear my morning, we’ll make another climb tomorrow. But it’s a cold case, literally. Doc thinks the body’s been buried since freeze-up last winter.”

“The mountain might tell you something, you let it talk to you.”

“Maybe, but without you, who’s going to know what it says?”

“Take Sean. He took the man-tracking school I taught up in Great Falls. Come to game sign, he’s damned near savvy as I am.”

“I’ll consider it.”

The nurse’s Crocs clapped down the hall.

“Everybody out,” she said. “You know the visiting hours. You can come back tomorrow.”

She flared her nostrils at the smoke scent. “You want to chase any more spirits, make your fire outside. This man was dying, I’d make an exception.”

She smiled with her eyes at Harold, shifting gears. “How are you feeling?” Her voice, minus the edge, had gone up an octave.

“Like a man who made the mistake of climbing into bed with a she-bear. You think you can put a little more of that white man’s candy into the drip?”

Outside the hospital, Ettinger and Stranahan lingered until everyone else had left. They had been bumping into one another and lingering right through the March thaw, through the April rains and the pale leaves of June, without either of them working up the nerve to acknowledge the arithmetic of coincidence.

“Good thing Nurse Ratched threw us out,” Martha said. “The smoke was getting to me.”

“I think she has a soft spot for Harold,” Sean said. He leaned back against the driver’s side door of his Land Cruiser.

“I can’t blame her.”

“I know you can’t.” The words were out before Sean could stop them. Martha’s reaction was to pull her head back, as if dodging a blow.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Sorry. It’s none of my business.”

A silence fell between them. It was a small town. Like everyone else, Stranahan had heard the talk. There had been talk, just the other day, about Martha and Harold being spotted in the Painted Horse Cafe, their heads bent to each other. There had been talk, last autumn, about a horseback hunting trip up along the Two Medicine River that each had mentioned without mentioning the other, one and one making a suspicious two, and there had been a lot of talk in the spring about Harold’s rehiring onto the county force as deputy and resident CSI. The fact that Harold was Indian with a strong face and an ebony braid just added spice to the conversation. “She been touched by a feather,” was the way some people put it. Stranahan didn’t know any more about Martha and Harold’s relationship than anyone else did, and had told himself the same thing he’d told her, that it was none of his business. Except it was. It was hard to fathom where he stood with Martha without knowing where she stood with Harold.

He stared off at the southern horizon, the sun pegged high this close to the solstice, despite the evening hour, the ridges still carrying puzzle pieces of snow on the north slopes.

“So how about it?” Martha said, bringing him back to the present. “You want to climb a mountain tomorrow? Or do you have a client?”

“I do and I don’t.”

“Good. Oh-six hundred. Parking lot at Law and Justice.” She strode off toward the white Jeep Cherokee parked a few cars away.

Stranahan smiled at her back. Typical Martha.

He called after her. “So does this mean you’re going to deputize me?”

Ettinger gunned the Cherokee to life. She regarded him from the open window.

“Nah. I can’t have you getting a bigger head than you’ve got. And last summer, that was a breaking crisis. I don’t have the authority to deputize a citizen unless it’s a breaking crisis.”

“You’re the sheriff, Martha. You can do anything you want.”

Ettinger fought back her own smile and drove off, leaving Stranahan to glance once again at the sun.

“Time to go fishing, Rusty.”

He smiled to himself. Naming your truck was one thing, a western eccentricity and no more said. But talking out loud as if it could hear, that was the mark of a man who needed a woman.