You get a bunch of nimrods like this out in the Bush and you figure you’re going to have people popping off when they shouldn’t.
HE LAY BACK DOWN, to all appearances dismissing the subject from his mind. Rough fingers traced the length of her spine. “Is that what they call a hunter’s moon?” he said.
“I don’t know,” she said, willing to go along with the change of subject. In truth, her thoughts were so fragmented she’d have a hard time coming up with anything to say for herself, and was grateful for the lead he gave her. “It’s a full moon, or almost full. What’s a hunter’s moon?”
“The first full moon after the harvest moon.”
She smiled without opening her eyes. “You sound like the encyclopedia. What’s the harvest moon?”
“I don’t know, but it has something to do with the equinox.”
His fingers flexed, and she sighed her pleasure. “Sounds like it’s tied up with the old hunting and gathering seasons. Or gathering and hunting. Or something. Um, right there, yes. That’s what Old Sam says, did you know?” She turned and crossed her hands on his chest and propped her chin on them, smiling down at Jack.
“When we’re on the tender at the beginning of salmon season and we’re getting ready to pick up the first load. ‘Time to hunt and gather, girl,’ he says, and we go to work.”
“I always knew Old Sam harbored a dangerous partiality for the Pleistocene. I’m surprised he doesn’t wear bearskin and carry a spear.”
“You ever see him when he’s at home?”
Jack laughed.
There was silence. The moon seemed to grow in size and beauty as it rose higher in the sky. “What happened, Jack?”
He sighed, and his hand dropped away. “Pretty much like I told it to George.” He sat up and began adjusting his clothes. “We found the moose, right where George said they were. You remember that little bend in the creek, before it heads up Blueberry Ridge? That stand of mountain ash that marks the turn?”
“Yes.” She began buttoning her shirt. He brushed her hands away and did it for her.
“There were three big bulls, two of them looking pretty ratty and smelling to high heaven and grunting and snorting to beat the band.” He gave a quiet chuckle. “Old Sam is right. There ain’t a damn bit of difference between a drunk chasing girls in a bar and a bull moose in rut.”
“Did you see the cows?”
He shook his head. “We heard some rustles off in the brush but we didn’t see any of them. The way the bulls were behaving, they were there somewhere. Anyway, the biggest bull of the three hadn’t come into rut yet, he was chowing down on the mountain ash like he’d never eaten before in his life, and I figured, as long as we were there, we might as well take the one who was going to give us the best meat. George makes such a point of his hunters eating as much of what they shoot as he can stuff down them.”
“I know, all part of the George Perry Wilderness Adventure Guides, Inc., experience.” She combed her hair back with her fingers. Again he brushed them aside and began braiding her hair himself. He was more acquainted in theory than in practice with French braiding, and the process involved much combing out and starting over. Again, Kate closed her eyes and leaned into it.
“And then there was always the little matter of my freezer and your cache.”
She smiled without opening her eyes. “Thinking with your stomach again, Jack. It’s what I’ve always loved most about you.”
His hands checked a moment, and they were both put forcibly in mind of Jack’s declaration moments before, lending weight to Kate’s light-hearted words.
Jack’s hands resumed braiding. “So, the guides flipped for first shot and I won, and Klemens and Gunther flipped for first shot and Gunther won. We spread out, my group on the left, Demetri’s in the middle, Old Sam’s on the right. The bull was eating his way around the willow, and we were waiting for him to climb up on dry ground when we heard a rifle go off. I looked around and Klemens wasn’t there. Where’s your rubber band?”
“Wherever you threw it, would be my guess. Here.” She fished for one of the backups she carried in her pocket. It was tangled around the little drawstring bag holding the ivory otter she habitually carried as a pocket piece. He was part talisman, part amulet and part good luck charm, and she didn’t feel dressed without him.
“Let me see.” She handed rubber band and otter back. The bag’s strings were knotted tight and Jack’s big hands worked patiently to free them. The little creature, so sturdy of form yet so delicately made, sat back on his thick ivory tail, ivory fur soaked and ruffled with water, black eyes bright with curiosity. “Why do you carry him with you. Kate? He’s a piece of art. He could be damaged, banging against your knife or something.”
She shrugged, and stuffed the otter back in the bag and the bag back in her pocket. “I like having him around.”
Made of ivory taken from an Inupiaq-killed walrus, carved by a Yupik artist, representing an animal into whose body was reborn Aleut souls, the otter in some curious way formed a link to her ancestors, to the people who had come before. The Great Land, the Aleuts called it, alyeska, so as to distinguish the large body of the mainland from the islands of the Aleutian Chain. The otter connected her to them and to all the people who came after and who with them formed part of her ancestry, Aleut hunter and gatherer, British explorer, Russian trapper, New England whaler, miners and soldiers and sailors and airmen and farmers and fishermen from all over the globe. Somehow they were all encompassed in the tiny ivory figure of the otter, one paw raised as if to run or fight, ears cocked for any warning sounds, a study in survival and a tribute to evolution.
She could have told Jack this. He would have understood, and even if he hadn’t, he could be trusted neither to laugh nor to scoff. Instead she said, “What did you do when you saw that Klemens was missing?”
He fastened the rubber band around the end of her braid and admired the result. “At first I thought he’d ducked out to take a leak.”
“How long had it been since you’d seen him last?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Gunther and I were watching the moose, waiting. Gunther was excited and I was afraid he’d shoot before he should. You know how I hate to drag a moose out of wherever he’s not supposed to have fallen into.”
“Don’t we all,” Kate said with feeling.
“Klemens was to my right and a little behind. He was supposed to be ready to take the second shot if Gunther missed. I got the impression he wasn’t all that hot to shoot something, that he was glad he’d lost the toss.”
“He tried to give Dieter his moose tag. Said he’d done all the killing he needed to.”
“Yeah? That’d fit, I guess. Poor bastard.” He paused, thinking. “I remember, I was glad he was there, because it was obvious he’d had some experience shooting. You sure as hell can’t say that about the rest of this crew.”
“Excepting Eberhard,” Kate agreed.
“Yeah. Maybe. I haven’t seen him shoot yet. Anyway. The moose heard the shot, too, of course, and naturally he spooked and ran for it. Gunther jumped to his feet and popped off a shot, and then another. Missed, of course, and the moose took off, and up river we could hear brush crashing around like the other two were beating feet, too. You could hear the cows taking off through the brush, then, all right, sounded like a herd of elephants.”
He closed his fist around her braid and gave it a gentle tug. She lay back against him and felt as much as heard his voice rumble up from his chest. “Well, I was sore, all that backstrap and tenderloin getting away like that, and I may have yelled a few things in the heat of the moment.”
Jack was the original slow-talking, slow-walking guy, with a slow smile and an even slower temper, but there had been a few cherished occasions when Kate had experienced Jack “yelling a few things in the heat of the moment,” and she could well imagine what his language had been like that afternoon. An immersion course in Alaskan invective, with some new and better words made up right on the spot, was her guess.
“It was quiet for a few minutes after that,” he said pensively.
I’ll just bet it was, Kate thought.
“Then I heard Old Sam yelling, and he was pissed, too.” Old Sam pissed wasn’t a guess, it was a given. “He was too far away for me to make out what he was saying. I told Gunther we’d better backtrack, but he was all hot to go after the moose. Well, like George always says, these are paying customers, and Kate, I just wasn’t expecting any trouble. You get a bunch of nimrods like this out in the Bush and you figure you’re going to have people popping off when they shouldn’t. That’s why we—Old Sam, Demetri and me, I mean—why we lined up in a row all facing the same direction, no circling around so we could get ourselves in a crossfire or some other nonsense.”
“So you crossed the creek after Gunther.”
“Yeah.” His chest rose and fell with a deep, heavy sigh. “We’re fighting our way through the brush—that was fun—and then we heard three shots. I told Gunther the hunt was off, we were going back now. He didn’t want to, still wanted to hightail it after that damn moose. I had to persuade him.”
“Um.” Kate wondered how. “And then?”
“And then we forded the creek and hiked up the opposite bank. And that was where we ran into Hubert and Gregor and Hendrik and Old Sam and Demetri carrying Fedor in that makeshift stretcher, with Klemens bringing up the rear. It was like a goddamn funeral cortege. Spooky.”
She leaned forward to re-lace her boots. “How long was it, between the time you heard the shot, and when you heard the next three?”
He thought. “Thirty, thirty-five minutes?” He showed her a bare wrist. “You know I never wear a watch in the Bush.”
He got to his feet and stretched out a hand to pull her up next to him. She slid her arms around his neck. “Another of those reasons I love you the mostest.”
His arms tightened. “Kate—”
“Come on,” she said, pulling free. “Let’s go eat. I’m starving, for some reason.” Her grin flashed through the dark.
Mutt, wearing an expression of saintly resignation, waited for them at the foot of the ladder. She examined her two dependents with a critical eye, gave a vigorous sneeze and led the way back to camp, tail held at a tolerant angle as if to say, Well, and what could you expect from humans, who hadn’t the sense to confine affairs of the heart to a window of opportunity lasting a few weeks once every year, the way more sensible mammals did?
Demetri cooked, New York steaks on the charcoal grill and potatoes wrapped in tinfoil and baked in the coals of the fire. A tossed green salad with one of Demetri’s special olive oil and raspberry vinegar dressings rounded out the meal. Everything looked and smelled wonderful. It was a pity, since no one had much of an appetite.
Kate ate enough to keep Demetri from pouting and disposed of the remainder behind a providentially placed cranberry bush, where Mutt discreetly polished the plate almost to its original high gloss, or as glossy as melamine gets. In the meantime, Kate began a covert examination of the party. She didn’t really know why, except that she felt a sense of unease that she could not trace to its source.
The group was uniformly blond and blue-eyed and tall, or tall compared to herself, at any rate. At five feet nothing, Kate had spent most of her life looking up into people’s faces and she had never learned to like it. At first glance there had been a surface similarity to this group, one to the other, and since they would be out of her life in ten days she hadn’t looked beyond it.
Now she took a second look, seeing past her preconceptions with an eye sharpened for detail. They sat quietly this evening, in direct contrast to the chatter and laughter of the night before. Gunther, sitting outside the light cast by the campfire but not far enough to hide the spectacular shiner ornamenting his left eye, picked at his food and avoided looking directly at anyone, disappearing into his cabin as soon as he had finished. He was so very young, his skin pink and smooth from lack of age and experience. She remembered his enthusiasm the previous morning, ready to jump in the plane with George, and upon his airsick return still eager for the chase. He had stamina, at least.
Senta turned up her nose at the steak, ate her potato with a lot of salt, and sat very near George, who ate stolidly from start to finish. George never let anything get in the way of his food.
Senta had a hard and well-polished surface. She was an enthusiastic practitioner of big hair. She’d even worn makeup on the hunt that day, including bright red lipstick that Kate was sure Senta felt made her pout even more irresistible. Human resources was a natural for Senta; it was obvious she was bent on making the best of her own. Dieter probably put her out front as bait when he was recruiting for top-level jobs.
Which either did or did not explain why Dieter glared at Senta from time to time. She ignored him with supreme indifference. Kate wondered if one of Dieter’s toys had had the unmitigated gall to allow itself to be played with by someone else.
Dieter was a bull, all huff and puff and pawing the ground and shaking his horns. John King of RPetCo Oil was just such a man, and a similar bullishness had pushed him to the top of his particular food chain, even if he had had to do some fancy stepping to stay out of jail on a conspiracy to murder charge along the way. Square-headed, square-jawed, Dieter was bluff and blustering and boisterous, but those traits didn’t necessarily preclude intelligence. His most dangerous trait was his arrogance, the inner conviction that his opinion was the only opinion and his way of doing things the only way.
Since Kate enjoyed a certain measure of these qualities herself, they were easy to recognize in Dieter.
She wished she knew more about computers. She also wished she could speak German. She checked behind the bush. Her plate was clean. She picked it up and carried it to the lodge, where Demetri and Old Sam were washing the dinner dishes. “Demetri,” she said in a low voice, “keep your ears open, okay?”
Old Sam gave her a sharp look. Demetri finished rinsing a handful of silverware and picked up a towel. “What for?”
“Anything,” she said. “When these nimrods start talking, listen in. Do they know you speak German?”
“I think George told them so.”
“Hell. Well, pick up what you can.”
Demetri and Old Sam exchanged glances. “Why?”
Her slight smile was a little shamefaced. “I’m not sure, exactly. I’ve got the heebie-jeebies about this bunch.”
“Fedor’s death got you spooked, girl?” For once, Old Sam’s voice wasn’t jeering.
“I don’t know. It won’t hurt us to be careful, though.”
He winked at her. “I’m always careful, girl.”
Popping the top on a can of Diet 7Up, she stood in the doorway for a moment, watching the people around the campfire over the top of the can.
Hubert and Gregor, Demetri’s hunters and the two Kate was least familiar with, sat close together, murmuring in low voices. She was close enough to make out the name of Fedor and something that sounded like Microsoft. Gregor jerked back from Hubert, his expression stunned, and Hubert, seeing Kate standing almost directly behind them, shook his head in warning. They waited until she returned to her seat on the log before making their goodnights and heading for bed. Gregor looked like a veteran of many a convention, who would be much more at home in the hotel bar with a scotch in one hand, alert for any lone female to make the mistake of being in the same city with him. He had a wide wedding band on his left hand that looked loose, all the better for removing when expedient. He had an incipient bay window pushing at the waist of his pants, and the pouched, red-veined eyes of the heavy drinker.
Hubert looked marginally fitter, but his shoulders had the faint stoop of someone who spent most of his days hunched over a computer. His glasses were thicker even than Berg’s. His hair was so thin on top it looked like he’d had a tonsure, which matched the vaguely ascetic cast of his face and the inward look of his eye, as if on one level he were always absorbed in some ongoing internal debate between himself and—who? Or what? Kate had no idea. This evening he was regarding a plant held in one hand. On closer inspection Kate saw that it was the limb of a soapberry bush, half a dozen berries ranging in color from red to yellow depending from stems. Hubert was sketching it in a notebook, high on the corner of one page, the rest of which was filled with cramped writing.
Klemens was the éminence grise of the group and Kate would have said the steadiest of the lot. He seemed secure in himself, with a latent twinkle in his eye that invited one to enjoy the joke, whatever it was. He also had an erect carriage that smacked of long practice of marching in step. You could always tell an old soldier; they never slumped, and their clothes were usually perfectly ironed, too, even, in Kate’s experience, the clothes of old soldiers in the Alaskan Bush, where irons and the electricity to power them were often hard to come by.
Her father had been such a man. Drunk or sober, his shirts had been ironed, his shoepacs shined. He’d been a soldier, too.
Tall, spare, long of jaw, Klemens had big hands and fingers with knuckles so large Kate wondered how they fit through the trigger guard. They had today. Too bad Klemens hadn’t insisted on staying in camp and doing the fishing he would have preferred. She thought of him by the creek the day before, content to laze in the sun, taking the odd grizzly in stride. After today, that man would never return to this world, and she was sorry for it.
Dieter seemed less than downcast. One might even say, judging from his frequent brays of laughter, that he was positively jubilant. He’d scrubbed off in the creek and arrived at dinner in a fresh set of immaculate khakis, his cuffs unbuttoned so he could roll up his sleeve and display his wound at a moment’s notice, which he did a minimum of four times while Kate was watching. Somehow, without actually saying so in so many words, Dieter managed to convey the impression that he’d received the wound in hand-to-hand combat with his moose, the head of which was propped up against the log to stare out over the campsite with a vacant look in its glassy eyes.
Eberhard, sitting next to Dieter, was as enigmatic as always, calmly eating through his meal and responding when necessary to Dieter’s conversation. Because he didn’t feed into it, Dieter’s good spirits were muted. Kate wondered if it was deliberate. She would guess so, and wondered why Eberhard wasn’t running the company.
But then, maybe he was. It wouldn’t be the first time someone pulled the strings on a figurehead. And if Kate had ever seen someone who could pull strings, Eberhard was it. Eberhard was a big man, as tall as Jack, slow without being clumsy, certain without being arrogant. The scars, one on each cheek, had healed cleanly, unlike the scar on Kate’s throat, but they formed deep creases that would never go away. If he ever smiled, they would be even deeper. His eyes were so light a blue they were almost colorless, and he had a habit of staring that could indicate either myopia or a need to intimidate. Either way, it was unnerving. He was a hard man to figure. He was a man to watch.
Berg alone went back for seconds. Kate noticed the others avoided sitting next to him. It didn’t seem to bother him. During the after-dinner coffee his glasses steamed up, until he looked like a character from a Little Orphan Annie cartoon. He ate well, concentrating on what was on his plate and how fast he could get it down. He hadn’t worked hard enough during the day to justify that much of an appetite, so he was probably just greedy. Greed would explain his size; Kate figured he weighed in at 275, if not 300: a big barrel of a man. She wondered what quality control involved when you were working on computers. Berg looked as if he’d be more at home swinging an ax.
Dieter laughed again. Kate was watching Hendrik at the time and saw a look of pure hatred pass swiftly across his face. She didn’t blame him. Young Hendrik had spent the meal in shocked silence, white of face, staring of eye, his plate of food untouched in his lap. He moved like a dancer, and he had hands down the nicest buns of the bunch. Kate admired them as he leaned against a tree, staring out at the wilderness. She remembered Hendrik and Fedor sitting closely together the last two nights, the conspiratorial whisperings, the intimate laughter, and wondered.
George and Senta had their backs to the log and their feet stretched out to the fire. Kate took her can of pop and went to sit down next to Senta. “Nice evening,” Kate said, looking up at the stars.
Hendrik heard her and stirred from his misery to say loudly, “I bet Fedor would have thought so.” His face started to crumple, and he fought to bring himself back under control. “If that Nazi hadn’t shot him he might have had a chance to see it!”
Dieter barked a command in German.
“I called him a Gottverdammt Nazi!” Hendrik said loudly. “He learned his shooting in the Wehrmacht in World War Two, the miserable son of a bitch. He was the one of ail of us who should have known what he was doing in the verdammt Wald!”
There was a crackle of twigs where Klemens had been sitting in the dark at the edge of the circle. “You’re right, Hendrik,” he said, his voice strained. “I should have. But I didn’t.”
There followed a strained silence. With dignity, Klemens walked to the trestle table that did duty as serving line, ammo dump and garbage collector and picked up a plate. He loaded it with cold steak and potatoes, one item at a time, with everyone watching his every move.
He took his plate to his cabin. No one tried to stop him.