It was fourteen degrees with the second cup of coffee growing cold on the counter when Martha Ettinger got the call. No number she knew, a snowbird, she found out, just opening up the summer house in the Madison Valley. He’d been shoveling out his driveway when a truck pulled up, an empty two-stall horse trailer clattering in tow. The driver apologized for his appearance and assured the man it wasn’t his blood, then asked if he could use the landline to call the sheriff. His name was J. C. Toliver and Martha knew him as well as you know anyone you see twice a year who only has one subject. Chuck, that’s what he went by, shoed Martha’s horses; you could go right down the ranch directory for three counties and he could tell you half the horses’ names and bore you with the bloodlines.
His voice was hoarse, the message terse. He told her to get a hasty team up the Johnny Gulch Road to the Specimen Ridge trail access where he’d meet them, that his wife was dying up there and for Chrise sakes hurry, and the line had gone dead.
She’d hit the redial and the snowbird picked up, told her that Toliver had lurched out the door. “Like a zombie,” the man said. “Like on that FX.” Martha asked him to describe Toliver’s condition. Did it smell like he’d been drinking? Was he coherent? Was he driving straight when he drove away?
No, he smelled like a slaughterhouse. To the other questions, yes, and yes.
Martha had taken the man’s name and thanked him. She’d waited a beat as the snowbird cleared his throat. “Ah . . .” A note of hesitancy was in his voice. “You think you could thank me to the tune of a couple thousand bucks? He left gore all over a double diamond Navajo rug.”
“Are you joking?”
“Not funny, is it? I’m one of those people doesn’t know what to say sometimes and it comes out inappropriate. I mean no disrespect. Please call me when you get his wife out. I’d sure like to see a happy ending to this. It’s the kind of thing that can ruin a man’s summer.”
Like most Montanans, Martha owned two Carhartt jackets, an older one for hunting and farmwork, another for town and to wear with the badge. She remembered what the snowbird had said as he ruminated a ruined summer. She zipped into the old jacket. She’d meet Toliver with open arms, and she knew that whatever she was wearing, she might be able to get the smell out of it, but the blood would be another matter.
—
At the trailhead there was no time for introductions, just the sounds of the horses being unloaded, high whinnies, a “Come on, Trudy, settle down, now, the blanket doesn’t bite.” Matter-of-fact voices that didn’t register circumstance, weather, or even fellow man. The masculine undertone that was the soundtrack of Martha’s life.
Well, except for Katie Sparrow, who spoke mostly to Lothar, her Class III search dog, in what was a separate language altogether.
Martha called them over and they gathered around the warm hood of her truck, where she’d pinned down the corners of a topographic quad map. Walter Hess, her undersheriff, raised his eyebrows at one of the paperweights, a loaded clip from Martha’s backup 10-millimeter. Hess was all angles and had a Chicago pallor that nine years in Montana hadn’t changed much. He also had a sense of humor that Martha wouldn’t get if she lived to be a hundred.
“Is that a Glock in your pocket or are you happy to see me?” he said, looking at the clip.
“Walt, that doesn’t even make any sense.”
“It’s a metaphorical reference, Marth. That means—”
“I know what a metaphor is. Here’s the deal.” Her eyes went from Katie Sparrow to Harold Little Feather, her former deputy with whom she had shared more than the job on occasion, and who had recently climbed the rung to Criminal Investigations agent for the state office out of Helena. “Remember those hunters who got lost in a snowstorm and shot their horses so they could crawl inside them? Up in the Bear Paws? Well, that’s what we got here, except one walked out this morning after a night in the carcass, and one couldn’t pull the trigger when the time came and ran off with the other horse.”
She gestured toward Toliver, who was standing by his pickup, changing into a spare set of clothes that Harold had had the foresight to bring when he got the call.
“Some of you know Chuck Toliver,” she said. “It’s his wife, Freida, that we’re looking for.”
“She have a gun?” Walt asked.
“Chuck says no.”
No one looked at anyone else, to affirm in another’s eyes what they were thinking. With no bullet waiting for a change of heart, Freida Toliver’s chances of having survived the night were almost nothing.
Katie Sparrow had a face a blind person could read, and Martha watched a cloud come over it. No change of expression from Harold, not that she expected it. Words were just white noise to him. Part of him was already up the mountain, his mind working out the trail.
“Any chance she could start a fire?” Katie said.
Martha shook her head. “Not without divine intervention.”
—
They were single file up the trail—Harold on his big paint, then Martha riding Petal, her Appaloosa, followed by Hess on a quarter horse Martha pastured named Big Mike, with Katie Sparrow bringing up the rear on her Rocky Mountain mare. Everyone in a line except for Lothar, who strayed here and there to hike a leg and proclaim his canine supremacy, which ended abruptly where a wolf track crossed the trail. After that, the shepherd kept his nose on the tail of his handler’s horse.
It was a skeleton crew to be generous, which brought two of Martha’s fingertips to the artery in her throat, a tip-off of her worry. But there was nothing to be done about it. The spring storm had dropped a blanket of trouble over the entire county, leaving more than three dozen motorists stranded, this in a place where people didn’t swap out their snow tires until Memorial Day. The priority were two lost bear hunters—in any case that’s what they’d told their wives they were hunting. As that call came in first, the search-and-rescue hasty team had responded, leaving the county closet more or less bare.
Martha called ahead to Harold to let the horses have a blow and crooked a gloved finger for Toliver to pull his mount up alongside.
“Can’t be too much farther, huh, Chuck?”
He didn’t look so bad now, in the change of clothes. He’d washed his face with snow and his blood-caked hair was covered by a hat, so except for his eyes, which had a glazed-over appearance and looked at nothing, and his gloved hands, which ran a tremor and shook the reins, Martha might have been talking to a normal person.
“I dunno,” Toliver said. His red nose held a drop of moisture in suspense.
“I know you told me once, but tell me again just what happened this morning. You followed the trail she laid down when she left you, am I right about that?”
“I tried to, but it had snowed so much they were just pocks. I couldn’t be sure it was the trail we made coming in, or the one she made going out. So I just started walking in circles, hoping I’d cut a fresh track if she was still moving, but I was all wet and cramping up and figured I better get back inside the horse. But by then the danged carcass was up a pretty steep slope and I didn’t have the energy to climb up to it. I just couldn’t get her done. So I told myself I better get on out while I could still walk a little bit.”
He turned in the saddle, looking away. Martha could see his back heave, saw him roughly scrub at his face with the back of his glove. “That woman a’ mine . . .” He shook his head. “She was so softhearted she couldn’t even hunt anymore. Just stalked elk and counted coup. I’m the one had to fill the freezer. I should of known she’d never shoot her horse.”
“We’re going to get her, Chuck,” Martha said. But she was looking at the depressions in the snow that were much shallower now that they’d climbed, the backtrail Toliver had made hiking out already indistinct where the wind had its way.
“Look,” she said, lowering her voice. “You take as much time as you need. We’ll leave when you’re ready.”
“I’m fine.”
She watched Toliver turn his horse without touching the reins. A horse that the man hadn’t set eyes on until two hours past. He was that kind of horseman. Something was off about him, though, and it took her a moment to realize what it was. With the day warming, Toliver had unzipped his jacket to expose the snap-up denim work shirt that Harold had lent him. It was a shirt that Martha had seen Harold wear a hundred times. Her favorite shirt of his, one she’d had occasion to unsnap before things went the way they did.
She chased the thought from her mind.
“Chuck, I want to ride up ahead with Harold. You hang back now with Walt and Katie.”
Toliver touched the brim of his hat in acknowledgment, one in his catalog of country manners that were automatic. Martha rode to catch up with Harold, who was keeping to one side of the nearly blown trail, hanging his head to see past the withers of the horse. He called it reading the white book, deciphering the tracks in the snow.
“Can you still see that? I can hardly see it anymore.”
“Plain as the sun,” Harold said.
Martha could have said, “What sun?” But didn’t.
—
He lost the trail a mile farther along. Or rather it was obliterated. Sometime after Toliver had walked away from the carcass of his horse, a herd of elk had wandered across the face of the ridge, churning the snow with their hooves. If the herd had walked single file, as elk typically do in deep snow, it would have been easy enough to see where Toliver’s track strayed from it. But the elk had spread out to nip clumps of fescue peeking through the snow cover, the bulls that had yet to shed their antlers minding their headgear, circling from the main group to walk around trees with low-hanging branches.
“Are we fucked?” Martha said.
“No, I can work it out, but it’s going to take awhile.”
It cost them nearly an hour, the herd easy to follow but the going slow on the steep face of the ridge. Finally Harold found where Toliver’s backtrack emerged from the maze of hoofprints to cross a saddle and head east. From this point the trail zigged down the face of the ridge, Harold twice pointing out places where Toliver had fallen, something he hadn’t mentioned to Martha.
“I’m getting the heebie-jeebies about this,” she said.
When the rest caught up to them, Martha pointed out the depressions in the snow. “You fell here, Chuck? Do you remember that?”
He nodded. Ice beads clung to the hairs in his nostrils. “I think it’s just over the next rise, there’s an elk wallow with a little creek running out of it. It’s in a patch of timber there. Freida called it a witch’s heart.”
Suddenly he called out. “Freida! Can you hear me, Freida!” His voice echoed away.
“That’ll do, Chuck. We don’t want her struggling or doing anything that could get her hurt because she hears us. We’ll backtrack to the carcass and go on from there. Any trace of her trail is left, Harold can follow it or the dog will smell it.” She made her voice casual. “I see you’re still carrying your piece. I thought the bullet you shot your horse with was the last one you had.”
“It was. It’s just, I don’t know, rightly. I just feel naked without that weight on my hip.”
“I’m on the same page with you,” Martha said, patting the grips of her Ruger. And let out a breath, feeling relieved. She knew if they came up that rise and found a dead woman, her husband might well draw his revolver and put a bullet in his brain.
“Why don’t you let me carry it anyway?” she said.
“Sure, if that’s what you want.”
“Yeah, I got plenty of room in the panniers.”
Toliver pulled the handgun and nudged his mount over so he could lift the flap on Martha’s pannier. “That satisfy you, Sheriff? Now if you don’t mind, I want to find my wife.”
They didn’t. At least she hadn’t made her way back to the little hollow. Toliver’s horse was there, his skyward eye opaque and drawing back into the socket, his purpled intestines spilled out, the dark loaf of his liver and pink lungs pulled out. The flanks sagged hollow over the empty abdominal cavity. Bloody snow all around. Martha couldn’t help but think he’d done a neat job of it, cutting through the diaphragm so it all came out in a piece, as he would an elk he’d shot.
“Field dressed to a tee,” Walt commented.
“Old Henry,” Toliver said. “He weren’t the best horse, but he was a trusting animal and I killed him, and he saved me. How do you get your head around something like that?”
“You didn’t have a choice,” Martha said.
They moved upwind and out of sight of the carnage, where they dismounted. Martha edged away with Katie and Harold for a brief council.
“This is your show,” she said. “Katie, does Lothar have enough to go on?”
Katie nodded. “They had extra clothes in the truck. He can isolate her scent, but eyes before nose. If Harold can see tracks, I’ll hold Lothar back.”
Harold nodded. “No sense having paw prints muck up the trail if there’s one to follow. Give me twenty minutes. I can’t find her, Katie and the dog take over. She’s hypothermic. She isn’t going to have made it far.”
Martha looked past them. “Won’t be an easy thing, telling him that we wait behind.”
“You’ll find a way. Like I said, she won’t have gone far.”
She hadn’t, or at least her horse hadn’t. Fifteen minutes later Martha saw Harold riding back through the timber, Freida Toliver’s saddleless quarter horse shadowing his paint.
“You find her? You find . . . my Freida? You . . . tell me you found her.”
Toliver rushed past Harold to the following horse. “Where is she, Annabel? Where’s our Freida?” Then to Martha: “You tell me she’s all right. You got to tell me she’s all right.” He dropped to his knees, all the cowboy gone out of him, just a man hanging his head, shaking, wavering back and forth in a personal wind. The tears came now, even before the news.
“You couldn’t hear it?” Harold said. “She found her way into a bear den, no more than a quarter mile. I got upwind, that bear, it put up a hell of a ruckus. I’m guessing a sow with her newborns. All of us, we might be able to shoo her out long enough to see if Freida’s alive in there. Human tracks going in. I didn’t see any coming out.”
“Take the horses or leave them?” Martha said.
Harold shook his head. “Ground tie them here. And Katie stays behind with the dog. He gets his hackles up, starts barking, he’ll bring mama griz down on us like a bad wind.”
Only Walter Hess had brought a rifle, his elk gun, a .300 Winchester Magnum. He took the lead as a quarter mile was halved, and halved again.
“That dark spot, that’s the den entrance?” Martha asked.
Harold nodded. “Her tracks went right up to the entrance.”
“A body would have to be desperate . . .” Hess’s voice trailed away.
“You there, bear?” Harold called out.
No sound beyond the muffled plopping of snow as it melted from the laden pine boughs.
“Hey there, bear!”
Suddenly a chopping sound from outside the den in the trees up the slope, the sound of a bear clashing its teeth. Grunting roars reverberated in the confined space of the thicket.
“Cover me,” Harold said.
As Harold and Walt moved forward, Toliver rose to follow them. Martha grabbed his coat. “Let them do their job.”
The bear’s roaring had become continuous. Up the slope from the den, Martha could see a tree whipping as if in a storm, its branches dropping heavy burdens of snow as the bear bristled up against the trunk.
Then there was the crash of Walt’s big Magnum, the muzzle pointed up into the air.
“She’s coming, Harold,” Martha called out.
She could see her now, the bear rushing side to side, glimpses of her grizzled coat, could hear the menace of her popping teeth.
Harold was halfway back out of the den, dragging something heavy, then scooping it up into his arms and running with Walt trailing, all of them in retreat as the bear came bursting out of the pines and charged down the hill.
Another shot from Walt’s rifle, the bullet kicking up the snow ahead of the bear. The bear stopped. She shook her huge head back and forth, then stood, leaning forward, snuffing at the air. She turned to peer at them, her poor eyesight unsure, then at the den behind her.
She dropped to all fours and moved toward the den. A last look around. The threat gone, she ducked her head and was gone from sight.
They didn’t stop moving for another hundred yards.
“This is far enough,” Martha said. “Bear’s not coming.”
Harold sat in the snow with Freida Toliver’s body curled in his lap.
“Is she alive?” Toliver reached tentatively.
Martha felt for the pulse. She was alive.
“Let me.” Toliver clutched the body against his chest.
Let him, Martha told herself. It’s his wife.
Staggering under the weight, Toliver carried her back to the witch’s heart. Martha hurriedly unsaddled her horse and spread the horse blanket on the snow to help insulate the motionless body. She could feel Freida’s heart beating, making a thread of pulse as Harold went about building a fire, beating when Walt pulled the cord on the chainsaw they’d packed to clear a landing space for the helicopter that he’d called on the satellite phone.
Her heart was beating until it didn’t and they all knew it, and nobody would admit it but the man who’d felt her eyelashes flutter against his lips the morning before. He lunged for the revolver in Martha’s pannier, having one last cartridge in his revolver after all.