24

Eppler’s trip up the creek soon degenerated into a thrash. After a couple of hours he saw a small lake, and approached it carefully. Afraid of being seen, he did not step out on the ice, though he was sorely tempted since the surface snow was drifted smooth and hard. He started to struggle his way through the bush around the lake.

Suddenly he heard an airplane, a distant drone. Through the trees, he spotted it momentarily. Dalziel, almost certainly, and he was dropping into Rabbitkettle Lake maybe, or his camp near the hotsprings.

The sound faded.

Kubla gave a low bark.

“Pretty strange, eh boy? What does it mean? Should we carry on through this jungle or go back?”

Kubla heaved forward and stopped, a front foot lifted. Eppler knelt beside him and cocked his rifle. “Stay,” he whispered.

Something was moving along the shore of the lake, not more than a hundred feet away. Eppler stared, trying to focus on the image flickering through the trees. A pack with a sleeping bag strapped on top. A hooded head.

Which suddenly turned toward him.

“Stick your hands up, mister,” shouted Eppler.

But a rifle was instantly lifted and fired, wide of the mark, blasting wood off a tree a few feet away. And in the time that Eppler blinked, the figure was crouched and floundering off the lake toward the trees. Eppler stood and fired through the trees at a shoulder. The figure lurched but kept going. Kubla bolted, but Eppler grabbed at his saddlebag and was pulled onto his knees.

“Hold it, boy. No runnin’ up the bore of that maniac’s rifle. I got a feeling I’m gonna need you.”

Eppler held Kubla’s collar and eased forward. He could hear crashing ahead, and he soon intersected a snowshoe trail coming up from the lake and heading into the bush.

“He’s running for cover, but unless he’s stupid he’s not going to let you get downwind, Kubla. He’s goin’ back where he came from, and he’ll keep goin’ so long as this breeze holds.”

Eppler examined the tracks. “That’s our boy, isn’t it? Same repairs on his snowshoes. So he was up here all the time. We gotta go around him and get downwind.”

Then he noticed blood.

“We winged him. Good! He’ll have to see to that. C’mon.”

Eppler crossed the killer’s trail and headed straight through the bush, parallel to the lakeshore, hoping to get downwind. Kubla followed.

But Wade, clutching his coat tightly around the burning wound on his arm, had no intention of letting the dog get around him. He circled through the bush and intercepted his own track just before it hit the lake. He was on a broken trail now, and he ran.

Eppler arrived at the point where the tracks met.

“He’s fast, Kubla. Guess we didn’t hurt him all that bad. Look, though. He’s still droppin’ blood. All right. We missed our chance to get around him right now, and we can’t run up his trail without getting blasted, so we’ll zigzag on after him. That’s okay. We want him alive, so what we’ll do is try to wear him down, take the fight out of him. He can’t shake us in the snow.”

Eppler turned and went back to where he’d left the toboggan. He dragged it down to a spot near the lake, tramped down the snow, lit a fire and made tea.

He was strangely happy. “We found the bugger,” he said to Kubla. “We hurt him a bit. Now we’ll play him around as if he’s game and make him pay for Joe.”