Four

Just try to make sure nobody shoots anybody else in the ass, okay?

THE NEXT MORNING George convened the guides in the lodge for a brief meeting. His manner was brisk and businesslike as he pointed out their various routes on a U.S.G.S. map of the area mounted on cardboard. “Demetri, Jack and Old Sam, you take your people up the road to Blueberry Ridge. If you decide to overnight it, remember there’s a spike camp on the point of the ridge overlooking the creek where it forks, right side. If you get into trouble and need help, fire three shots, bang, one-one thousand—”

“Bang, two-one thousand—” Old Sam said.

“Bang,” said Jack.

“—and we’ll come on the run,” George said, unperturbed. “Same here.” He dropped his voice. “I don’t know that we’re going to bag anything first day, not with this bunch. Just try to make sure nobody shoots anybody else in the ass, okay?”

“Okay,” Demetri said, stolid as always. Jack nodded and shouldered his rifle. Old Sam grunted and spat.

George turned to Kate and grinned. Kate braced herself for the worst. “You and I, dear heart, are heading east. You know that little pear-shaped lake about four miles thataway?”

Kate sighed. There were about fifty lakes between the camp and the Yentna River, but, unfortunately, they’d been to this lake on previous hunts and she knew where it was. “You mean the one on the other side of Backbreak Ridge? The one across Mud Ass Swamp? The one just this side of the Youngstown Bend? That lake?”

George’s laugh had a distinctly sadistic flavor to it. “That’s the one. I found us a nice big fat bull grazing on the diamond willow growing next to the creek feeding into that lake.”

“Oh, joy,” Kate said.

The screen door banged as George stepped into the yard. “Come on, folks, get your gear on. We’ve got a ways to walk today.”

Senta paused in the act of buckling her packboard on. “You mean we have to walk the whole way? No flying?”

“No flying,” Dieter said, boisterous and beaming and brimming with macho. “This is Alaska! The Last Frontier! I wanted us to have the true wilderness experience!”

From the expressions on a few faces, it wasn’t a desire shared wholeheartedly by his employees, but although Dieter’s face bore nothing but good humor, there was no give in it. No one said anything and there was no outward mutiny. Kate wondered what would have happened if they’d been on a spring hunt, complete with thigh-deep slush and mosquitoes fresh out of their larvae and ravenous for their first meal.

Old Sam and Demetri got the four-wheelers out of the garage, two Honda FourTrax Foremans with four-wheel drive and towing capacity. The four-wheelers alone would have set George back six grand each; fortunately, the previous spring a couple of bear hunters from Anchorage got liquored up and went hoorahing across country with Park Ranger Dan O’Brian in hot pursuit. They’d wound up in Kate’s front yard, the fashion of their arrival bringing irresistibly to mind that immortal stage direction by Shakespeare, “Exit, pursued by a bear.”

Dan had hauled them off to the pokey, abandoning the four-wheelers to Kate’s tender mercies. She had sold them to George for a thousand each, who, after he bought two new trailers seating six each, was out less than the price of one Foreman new. Everybody was happy, except maybe the original owners, and they were still in jail, so it didn’t matter.

Jack hopped on board the second trailer as it rolled past, and grinned at Kate. “Don’t worry, Kate, I’ll give you a foot rub when we get back.”

That’s not all you’ll be rubbing, buddy, Kate thought.

He read her mind as he often unnervingly did, and flashed a grin. “Hold that thought.”

The two-vehicle convoy purred up the airstrip. Jack waved a smug good-bye as the second trailer vanished into the undergrowth as surely as the bear by the creek had the day before.

“Okay, let’s move like we got a purpose,” George said, shouldering pack and rifle.

They moved like they had a purpose. Mutt, left behind on guard duty, sat sulking at the edge of the yard as they crossed the strip and entered the trees on the other side.

They were over Backbreak Ridge before they realized they’d lost Berg. “Well, shit,” George said. “How the hell’d he do that? I been hiking drag ever since we left camp.”

They’d been following an overgrown game trail down the far side of the ridge, and it didn’t take any encouragement at all to get the party to stop for a breather. The brush, after thinning out over the top of the knoll, had begun to thicken again, and since most of the alders were hanging grimly on to their leaves in spite of the season, there were places where they couldn’t even see the sky, let alone each other. It was dark and sweaty going in the undergrowth, sometimes with only the sound of brush breaking ahead to guide you down the track. And it was steep going, up and down over a razor’s edge of rock thrust upward by a geologic strength of will that had defeated even time’s efforts to wear it into a gentler slope. Even Kate’s thigh muscles were protesting.

“I’d better go back and roust him out,” George said in disgust. “Sorry, Kate. Don’t know how I got to be so sloppy.”

“Not your fault,” Senta said. “Berg is always wandering off. Sometimes in body, sometimes in mind. Always in spirit. Not what you would expect from someone who heads up quality control, but there you are.” She smiled, a light film of perspiration giving her already flawless skin a rosy glow. The effect was dazzling enough to require sunglasses, which George was not wearing. George and Senta had been trailing the rest of them, lagging farther behind with every turn of the trail, and Kate had heard Senta laughing a lot. It could be just her suspicious mind, but that might have had something to do with George not noticing Berg’s disappearance.

George shed his packboard. “What do you do again, Senta?”

The smile became even more dazzling. “I’m the head of human resources for all of DRG.”

“All of DRG’s resourceful humans are damn lucky.” He reshouldered his rifle. “Want to backtrail with me?”

Kate waited confidently for Senta to tell George in no uncertain terms that there was no way this three-piece suit was going up and down that ridge one more time than necessary, no matter what her boss said.

Senta smiled again. “Sure.” She doffed her packboard and readjusted her fanny pack.

“Great,” George said, a matching smile spreading across his face. Kate thought sourly that he might trip over his tongue if he wasn’t careful. “Kate, take Dieter and Eberhard on to the lake. Don’t want to let that big fat bull get away now, do we?”

“What do you mean we, white man,” Kate muttered.

George didn’t hear her or pretended he didn’t, and started back up the ridge with Senta in tow. Ten steps up the trail he stopped and turned. “And Kate, if you run into Crazy Emmett, just move on, okay? Don’t say hi, don’t look at him, just pretend you don’t even see him. He hates being noticed. He’ll leave you alone if you leave him alone.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Kate said, and waved Dieter and Eberhard on as Senta and George started back up the ridge.

“This Crazy Emmett,” Eberhard said, speaking for the first time that morning. “Who is he?”

Kate nodded in the direction of the horizon. “He lives on a lake over there. Kind of a hermit. Likes his privacy. He’s harmless. Let’s get a move on, shall we?”

They followed the game trail into Mud Ass Swamp and walked for what seemed like forever to Kate, who didn’t like getting her feet wet and who spent the entire time sending out feelers to her toes to see if the waterproof job on her boots was holding. They emerged eventually on a low, rocky knoll covered with lichen and blueberry bushes. About a quarter mile distant they could see the lake glinting through a stand of white spruce. Kate checked the wind. What there was of it was in their faces.

She looked back at the ridge and didn’t see anyone coming their way. She hadn’t really expected to; she had a feeling George and Senta were experiencing a close encounter of the third kind, and taking their time over it. She only hoped Berg hadn’t had a close encounter of his own with a bear in the meanwhile. He had a rifle, of course; they all had, but that didn’t mean he had either the skill or the presence of mind to use it.

“Okay, guys,” she said. “Looks like you get first crack at that bull. We’re downwind of him, so if we take it slow and quiet he shouldn’t hear us coming. Let’s have some lunch first, though.”

“No, let’s go,” Dieter said, shifting his rifle from one shoulder to the other. “Maybe he’ll get away.”

Kate shook her head. “He’ll be there, and we haven’t had anything to eat in four hours. A shaky hand isn’t going to do your aim any good. Come on, sit down.” She met his glare with a steady, implacable gaze.

Eberhard touched Dieter’s shoulder and murmured something in German. Dieter’s face cleared and he laughed. It was an unpleasant laugh in any language, and so was the look he ran over Kate. “Yeah, okay, we eat.” He made it sound like a command, and as if on cue, Eberhard dumped his packboard and opened his fanny pack.

Kate sat a little apart from them and ate her sandwich, apple and cookies, with her rifle on her knees. She hadn’t seen any sign of bears but it never hurt to stay alert. She’d known those who hadn’t, but the friendships were never of a very long duration.

Dieter completed his meal by crumpling up the Saran wrap his sandwiches had come in and tossing it over his shoulder.

Kate took a deep breath, held it, and let it out again. “Dieter,” she said, “pick that up.”

Dieter appeared genuinely confused. “What?”

She pointed at the wrapper. “Pick that up.”

“What, the wrapper?” He looked from her to the wrapper, and added something else in German, something that sounded less than complimentary, and again she was reminded of Aleut. It might as well have been Greek; for all she knew, Dieter could have been thanking her for reminding him of his duty as a visitor to the Alaskan Bush. From the look on his face she didn’t think so, though.

Patience was a virtue Kate neither had in quantity nor particularly admired. “The rule is, leave it how you found it. You pack it in, you pack it out. We don’t leave trash behind on our hunts, Dieter. Pick up the wrapper.” She thought it over, and added—he was a paying customer, after all—“Please.”

His fair skin flushed a dull red. “You pick it up.”

Kate didn’t move. “I’m your guide,” she said flatly, “not the garbage man. Pick it up yourself.” Almost casually, she shifted her rifle so that the muzzle was pointing between his feet.

There was a strained silence. Dieter glared at Kate, face turning even redder. Either he didn’t like women, didn’t like people of color or didn’t like anybody who didn’t have as much money as he had, or maybe it was all three and nobody told him what to do besides. Take a number, Dieter, she thought.

Eberhard broke the impasse by leaning over and picking up the wrapper. He stuffed it in his fanny pack and buckled the pack around his waist. “Those moose don’t stay around forever, do they?” he said. “We’d better get going.” He cradled his Weatherby in his arms, and its muzzle came to rest pointed in Kate’s general direction.

She laughed. He didn’t like it, and neither did Dieter. She managed to control her amusement and jerked her chin in the direction of the lake. “Let’s take it slow and easy, boys. Quiet as you can, okay?”

They took it slow and easy down to the lake, although the strain of carrying fourteen pounds of Merkel at present arms for three hours was beginning to show in Dieter’s face and shoulders. He called for a rest often. Eberhard continued to manage his Weatherby like he would a toothpick.

They crouched in a stand of diamond willow, peering through the thicket to the water on the other side.

“My feet are getting wet,” Dieter said, too loudly.

“Quiet,” Kate said, without heat. Dieter was wearing hiking boots that laced as high as the ankle and no higher, not a lot of support over rough ground and no protection at all in the swamps that grew the best moose browse. She had no sympathy for him; George sent out a list of equipment to each of his hunting parties, including specific instructions about footwear. It wasn’t her fault if Dieter chose not to follow them, although the hike home, particularly if they got their moose, was not looking like a fun time.

The lake was half a mile across, a limpid pool with the barest ripples showing in a silver surface that reflected every needle and leaf and branch of the trees that grew at its edge and the blue sky above. The diamond willow stood twelve feet deep in places around the edge, guaranteeing this lake would be first in the chow line for the local moose.

Since the day before George’s bull had been joined by a second. Kate groaned to herself. Dieter would probably want both.

The first bull was directly across from them, broad butt planted in the lake, head buried in a thicket of diamond willow. He was on the scrawny side, though, and his rack was a little droopy around the edges, giving him the look of a character who had just wandered out of a Disney cartoon.

About a hundred yards on their left, the second bull, nice and firm and fat, was planted with all four knees deep in water, a hundred percent of his attention focused on systematically stripping the bark from a stand of alders clustered at the edge of the lake, one branch at a time, making a leisurely journey around the clump, which direction was moving him slowly but steadily to dry ground. Perfect.

“Nice,” Kate said in a voice barely above a whisper. It was an understatement. She estimated a good nine hundred pounds of meat dressed. “He’ll fill up somebody’s cache for the winter.” Neither one of the bulls looked twitchy, so they might have yet to go into rut, which meant the meat might even be edible.

She looked at Eberhard and Dieter and for once was not disappointed.

It was impossible to realize the sheer bulk of Alces gigas, genus Alces, family Cervidae, order Artiodactyla without going into the wild, although there was a stuffed, mounted specimen of this ungulate ruminant antler bearer in the Anchorage International Airport, which made a living out of stopping tourists in their tracks. While ambassador to France, Thomas Jefferson had been laughed at when he spoke of the size and weight of the North American moose, and had had one stuffed and shipped to the French court to prove he wasn’t just telling tales.

But this bull was very much alive, living, breathing, the sound of branches snapping between his jaws audible across the still water of the lake. He stood seven feet at the shoulder and measured at least nine feet nose to tail, with great humped shoulders, a long, heavy snout and a broad rack of antlers, seventy, maybe seventy-two inches wide.

He was mature, about six or seven years old from the size and number of his brow tines, four on each side and similar in length and evenly spaced. It was a handsome rack, broadly and evenly palmed, which was just as well since it was destined to grace the wall of the board room at DRG. Kate felt a pang of regret that he was not long for this world and hoped fervently that he had gotten lucky on multiple occasions every year of his adult life and had many offspring scattered between here and Beluga.

“Look at those horns!” Dieter said.

“Quiet,” Kate said.

“Are those horns a record?” Dieter demanded in a lower voice.

“No,” Kate said without expression, but Eberhard gave her a sharp glance. “I’d guess about a seventy-inch spread, maybe a little more. It’s well shaped, though, nice and even.”

“It’ll look good on the wall of the office,” Eberhard said.

Dieter was not to be placated. “What’s the record?”

“A little over eighty inches, tip to tip,” Kate said, “according to Boone and Crockett.”

Dieter crouched over his Merkel, hands clenched on the stock, face flushed with excitement, and worked this into centimeters. He swore. “A third of a meter short of the record.”

One of the bull’s ears twitched. “Quiet, Dieter. You don’t really want to have to chase him through the bush, do you?”

“I wanted a record,” Dieter said stubbornly.

Kate, crouching with her elbows on her knees, rifle held easily in her hands, said with great patience, “I don’t think George puts any guarantees of record kills in his contracts, Dieter. You want this bull or not?”

Dieter flashed her a look of irritation, and looked back at the bull. “I want him,” he said, and raised the Merkel to his shoulder.

“No, not yet!” Kate said urgently, but it was too late. The Merkel boomed in her ear.

Kate, quite forgetting who she was speaking to, said, “You stupid bastard!” and knocked the barrel of the Merkel upward as it boomed a second time.

Dieter leapt to his feet and yelled at her in German, face red with fury. Across the lake, the first bull bolted. As the ringing cleared from Kate’s ears she could hear his frantic crashing through the undergrowth growing steadily more distant.

She got to her feet, ignoring Dieter, intent on the second bull, which was her mistake. He raised the Merkel, butt toward her, and pulled back as if to strike. She caught the movement from the corner of her eye and turned on her heel to face him directly, rifle held horizontally across her chest. As the butt came toward her, she used her rifle like Little John’s quarterstaff, jerking it sharply upward. The swift, abrupt contact of barrel to stock jarred the Merkel out of Dieter’s hands and it flew over his head and fell into the lake.

Eberhard’s rifle was coming around and up. “Don’t,” Kate said. The bolt of the Remington shot home with a heartening sound.

There was a brief, tense silence, broken only by the frenzied splashing sounds Dieter made as he waded into the lake to search for his beloved Merkel. He found it and pulled it up, covered with muck and bracken. He wasn’t happy, and he said so.

Kate didn’t move. All of her attention was focused on the big man opposite her with the big rifle in his hands. Eberhard took a quick look at Dieter. He relaxed visibly, standing down, as it were, and actually bent his head, a warrior’s recognition of his equal. “I won’t underestimate you again,” he said.

“Oh please,” she said, impatiently. “Spare me the Marine’s Hymn.” She looked across the lake.

Dieter hadn’t missed, but it hadn’t been a clean hit, either. The second bull was lying half on the bank, half off it, surrounded by a widening pool of dark red. As she watched, he thrashed feebly, tangling his rack in the alders. She raised the .30-06 to her shoulder, flipping up the sights and bringing the bead to bear on the moose’s head. He thrashed once again, before lying back against the bank, flanks heaving. Kate let out a breath, held it and sighted on the moose’s left eye. Before the shot finished echoing across the lake, the bull was still.

She ejected the spent shell and picked it up. She was as short on diplomacy as she was on patience and only the fact that George Perry was a sometime employer and longtime friend kept her from giving forth with her unvarnished opinion of Dieter, his character, his ancestors and his associates. She pocketed the shell and shouldered the rifle. “Let’s go,” she said and walked around Eberhard in the direction of the dead moose.

There was a mutter of German behind her. She ignored it, forcing her way through the undergrowth. It caught at her braid and her clothes until she managed to shove head and shoulders through the alders lining the edge of the lake where the moose was.

There was nothing to show for Kate’s shot but a missing left eye. The Merkel, on the other hand, had taken half a shoulder with it. Broken bones gleamed whitely through red meat, and Kate caught a whiff of something unpleasant. Dieter’s slug had clipped an intestine. Goody.

Dieter fought his way through the brush and pounced. The next ten minutes were fully occupied with picture taking, Eberhard producing a small but undoubtedly expensive Leica and shooting a roll of film with Dieter in various poses.

The camera came to the end of the roll and started rewinding. “Okay.” Kate said, pulling a knife.

There was a startled exclamation from Dieter and Eberhard almost dropped the camera going for his Weatherby. Kate kept her face straight and extended the knife to Dieter, hilt first. “Time to start skinning.”

He took the knife automatically. It was a slender eight-inch blade with a wickedly sharp edge. “To take the head off?”

“Among other things,” Kate murmured, and stood and watched him hack off the head with clumsy enthusiasm. It would have been easier for him if she’d produced the hatchet from her pack, but she didn’t, and he was panting and covered with blood and moose hair by the time the head broke free from the body. He went to lift it up and was surprised by the weight, as well he should be. The rack alone probably weighed fifty pounds.

Wet to the knees with swamp water, stained to the waist with moose blood, red rage replaced with a pink and gratified pride, Dieter displayed his trophy. Eberhard’s attaboys were as flattering as one of his phlegmatic nature could produce. Kate waited. Dieter finally remembered her presence, and turned to hand her the knife.

“Not so fast,” she said. “Finish skinning him out.”

“What?”

“Finish skinning him out,” she repeated. “You’ll have to haul him from the water first.”

Dieter gaped at her for a moment, then recovered. “We got what we wanted,” he said, indicating the head.

“We take the meat, too.”

He looked baffled. “But—” He looked around at the surrounding brush and brightened. “There are other animals who will eat the meat.” Inspired, he stuck one finger in the air like Christ pointing the One Way. “Wolves! There are wolves in Alaska! They will eat the meat!”

Kate shook her head. “Not this moose. You shot this moose, you recover the meat, we’ll hang what we can’t pack back to camp and come back for it tomorrow.”

He was starting to get red again. What the heck, he’d match his shirt. “We’re leaving,” he said shortly.

“Fine,” she said equably. She turned and surveyed the area. There was a tiny clearing to the left and she squeezed into it, bent a few branches back to let in more light, and sat down with her back to a trunk.

All this was watched in perplexed silence by the two men. “What are you doing?” Dieter said, finally.

She smiled at him. “Taking a nap,” she said. “You boys go on, head back to camp.” She leaned her head against the bark and closed her eyes. “You get lost, you remember the signal. Three shots, fired a second apart. I’ll come running.”

There was silence on the other side of the bushes, followed by some conversation in German, Dieter’s voice rising with wrath, Eberhard’s calmer and less voluble.

Now, Kate was totally out of line here. State law required that the moose be gutted as soon as possible and all the meat recovered, but it was the guide on the hunt who was responsible for doing this. It was also the guide who would suffer the consequences of the wanton waste law if he or she didn’t, which consequences as George had pointed out included large fines and confiscation of personal property such as private aircraft, not to mention jail time.

Furthermore, drop-off hunters packed their meat out. Guided hunters did not. Dieter and Eberhard were indubitably guided.

On the other hand, she’d seen George Perry’s standard contract and the clause that guaranteed a “true Alaskan wilderness experience.” George provided packboards for all his hunters, taking their willingness to pack as understood.

And Kate was pissed off by the way Dieter and Eberhard were behaving, irritated that they had evidently had wax in their ears when George had instructed them the previous morning on the recovery of game, and was subsequently disinclined to volunteer any advice or help, or to be conciliatory or coaxing in any way.

All she had to worry about was the Fish and Game showing up unexpectedly. Her luck was the local fish hawk was probably overhead this minute, alert for wrong-doing on his turf.

Or George would arrive and carve out her liver with a dull knife when he found out what she was up to.

The voices stopped. Kate stayed where she was.

Dieter’s voice said, “You’ll help us.” It wasn’t a request.

She opened her eyes and looked Dieter right in the eye. “The best way to go about it is for one of you to hold the rear legs apart while the other uses the knife to open him up. Start at the anus, one cut straight up the belly to the throat, and let the guts fall out. Don’t nick any of the internal organs—” or any more than you already have, she thought”—or you’ll taint the meat.” She paused. “Of course, you’ll have to haul him to dry ground first. Might have avoided that if you waited until he’d worked his way on shore, which was where he was heading when you shot him.”

“We’re not taking the meat,” Eberhard said, his deep voice quietly menacing.

“Then we’re not going back to camp,” Kate said, just as quietly.

If Dieter’s face had been red before it was purple now. “You can’t talk to me like this! No one talks to me like this!”

“Then you’re about due, aren’t you?” Kate said coolly. She looked up at the sky. “Better get a move on, guys. Sun’s headed down, and we haven’t got much time left to butcher and get back to camp before dark.”