Montana Dreaming Page 20

  Guthrie was past caring about the bear. Past fearing it. He listened, but it was with the detached calm of a distant observer. He remembered an Indian legend about the grizzly. Heard Jessie’s voice relating it to him in the flickering light of one of their campfires.

  Jessie was beautiful in the firelight. She was beautiful in the harsh light of high noon, but in the firelight her beauty became ethereal, otherworldly. He was mesmerized by her, caught up in the heady pleasure of being in her presence and listening to her calm, gentle voice speak the words of another culture, another spirituality, another part of herself. She moved over the earth with the same respect and embraced the same basic doctrines of her Crow and Blackfeet ancestors. She never took more than she could give, and gave everything of herself when she could.

  She told the story of the great bear, and all the pain, cold, thirst and fear slipped away from him as he lay listening. The darkness became filled with starlight, filled with the strengthening glow of the moon, filled with beauty, with peace, with magic, so that when the bear came and stood over him he felt only a kind of awe that he could share this high wild place with such a magnificent presence. If he could do one thing more before he died he wished he could write the magic of this night on paper somehow, so she could read it and understand how it was.

  But perhaps she would know. She had a way of knowing, a way of sensing things, an intuition that surpassed anything he had ever experienced. Perhaps even now she knew what he was feeling. What he was thinking.

  Dying wasn’t so hard, but leaving Jess behind was unimaginably painful. He had promised to be there for her when she needed him, and now he was lying here in about as big a mess as a man could be in. There didn’t seem to be any way out of it. When the bear began knocking aside the great pile of brush that covered him and the dead mare, he said aloud,

  “Hello, Grandfather…”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  SHE FINISHED the tiny pot of coffee and fed the last of the firewood into the fire. It was late, well past midnight. Billy was dozing on his tether, standing hip shot and relaxed in the moonlight, lower lip sagging and twitching as he slept. She pushed to her feet, a vague uneasiness building within her. She stared out across the valley and her soft breaths plumed visibly in the frosty air.

  This thought came to her as if uttered in the silvery silence:

  Guthrie’s in trouble!

  The raven she had seen earlier had foretold it. The raven had shown her the place. It was suddenly as plain to her as the broad face of the moon shining down. He was in trouble and she was sitting here drinking coffee, waiting for a man who would never come.

  The dark thought galvanized her into action. She packed her gear with feverish haste, saddled the startled and disgruntled Billy, sheathed her rifle in the scabbard and smothered the coals of the tiny fire with the remains of the coffee and handfuls of sand and gravel. She wasn’t far from the game trail where she’d found Blue. She’d bring Billy as close as she dared and then go ahead on foot, just as she originally planned.

  She only hoped she wasn’t too late. She had wasted so much time waiting, thinking he’d be right along. She’d squandered precious hours and somehow had to make them up.

  Billy was tired, but he was game. She led him at a brisk uphill climb, turning and twisting with the trail, stumbling now and again over loose rocks and tree roots. In the moonlight everything looked ghostly—the rocks, the trees, the mountain slopes, the sky itself. It was as if they were traveling in a strange dream state, fumbling their way through a nightmare.

  Damn her arm! It had commenced to ache in protest, and the fingers on that hand were tingling and numb, but Guthrie needed her, and she kept climbing toward where she knew he was because she needed him, too, the way she needed food and water and sunshine and the high wild places where the wind blew free.

  She needed him and she loved him.

  Tears stung her eyes as she jerked Billy’s lead rein. Hurry! Hurry! Her lungs gasped for breath and her thigh muscles burned, but her arm was warmer now, the tingling had left her fingers, and she unzipped her parka to keep from getting sweaty. Here! Here at last was the game trail she sought! She turned onto it, and as soon as she did, Billy threw his head back and snorted. He planted his feet in stubborn refusal to go on.

  “Okay!” Cursing her weak and clumsy fingers, she tied him off with a tether rope, giving him enough slack to move about. She loosened his cinch and slipped his bridle off, then draped it over a nearby branch. She slid her rifle out of the scabbard, slung her saddlebags, bedroll and water bottle over her shoulder. “Wait for me here, old friend,” she said, stroking Billy’s shoulder in a brief farewell.

  On her own now, alone, traveling down that narrow trail, brush and tree branches closing in, snagging against her. Stumbling in the darkness as the trees blocked off the moonlight. She could hear her breathing, raspy in the stillness of the night. When she paused to catch her breath and fish the little flashlight out of her saddlebag she could hear her heart pounding in the stillness, and it sounded as loud as an Indian war drum.

  Oh, Lord, had she ever been this afraid?

  A bear in the darkness. A grizzly. A senator with a big gun. And somewhere in the midst of it all, Guthrie was in trouble.

  Jessie took a fresh grip on her rifle and pushed on.

  HE WONDERED if his mother would have loved him better if he’d been born blond like his sister. Bernie had such pretty hair. Flaxen, shiny. His was dark, ordinary hair. Maybe his mother would’ve thought him cuter if he’d been towheaded like his sister; else why had she taken Bernie with her and left him behind?

  He wondered if a mother knew when her child died, if she felt a severing of some deep, primal connection to herself. Would his mother know? Would she awaken in the morning, sit up in her bedroom that overlooked the Pacific Ocean and mourn to her current lover, “Oh, I never should have left that boy, and now he’s dead!”

  “One letter,” he said now to his mother. “One visit. Would that’ve killed you?”

  The bear raised its head and whuffed, a great lung-deep sound of alarm, and rocked back on its haunches. Man moved. Man spoke. The bear hated Man, feared Man, had been hurt by Man before and remembered the hurt. This man bled, but he was alive and moved, made noise, might still cause pain. Man was still too close. In the interest of survival the big grizzly shuffled off, its great bulk casting a shadow in the moonlight, its musky smell permeating the chill air.

  “One letter,” he said as the moonlight flooded over him once again. “One damn letter. Would that’ve killed you?”

  SO DARK! The darkness was thick, suffocating. Jessie stopped. She stood on trembling legs and gripped her rifle with hands that shook. She couldn’t see a thing beyond the narrow beam of the flashlight. How far was she from the kill site? Where was Guthrie? She sensed that both were very close.

  Gradually her breathing slowed and steadied, and the loud drumbeat of her heart faded. Night sounds surrounded her, small noises made big by the stillness. The rustle of a mouse sounded like the footfall of some giant creature and caused her to pan the flashlight quickly in an arc. Calm, Jessie told herself. Be calm. The darkness is nothing to fear.

  Yet she knew that in this darkness lurked the bear that may have killed one of her mares and had definitely wounded her cow dog. In this darkness lurked danger. Morning light would not diminish that danger, but it would reveal it to her and end these gruesome imaginings magnified by the night.

  A murmuring came to her. The wind moving through the trees? No, the sound had more substance than the wind. Deeper. An animal growling? No, softer. Consonants and vowels shaping into words. A voice. A man’s voice speaking in the darkness, faint, so very faint. She craned to hear, but all was quiet now. No sounds, not even the stir of a mouse among the woods duff. She began to think she had imagined it, and then she heard it again, this time clearly.

  “Too late,” the voice said, anguished. “Too late!”

  Ahead of her, and not ve
ry far. She took a cautious step, then another, reaching out with the tiny flashlight to keep from walking into branches, holding the rifle in her right hand.

  “Won’t be any more, no more!”

  The voice was nearer and the words ran together in an almost drunken slur, but the voice was familiar, and her heart jumped with gladness to hear it.

  “Guthrie!” She spoke his name sharply and waited, motionless, for some response.

  “No more. All gone…”

  A few more steps and then she spoke his name again, fear giving a shrillness to her voice. “Guthrie!”

  Silence. She extended the flashlight as if it were a sword and continued forward cautiously. The narrow tunnel of the trail opened out. She saw the glow of moonlight reflecting off the rounded curve of ledge up ahead.

  “Don’t know what I did wrong…”

  The voice was right in front of her now. She panned the flashlight slowly toward the voice and she saw Guthrie. He was lying on the ground beside an enormous pile of brush, half covered over with it, curled on his side, hatless, knees drawn up. The beam of the flashlight illuminated his face. His eyes were half-open, glassy, and his face was covered with dried blood.

  Hurt. Terribly hurt. Guthrie was hurt.

  She couldn’t speak, couldn’t move for a few horrified moments, and when she did it was to fling aside her rifle and gear. She fell to her knees next to him and frantically began lifting the brush away, feeling for the driest of it and breaking off brittle branch tips. She made a little pile of tinder beside where she knelt, reached in her parka pocket for a match, struck it on her jeans and gently fed the flame beneath the little pile of twigs. The resin in the dried spills sputtered, smoked, caught and flared. She fed bigger pieces onto the tiny pile. The flames climbed, the fearsome darkness was pushed back, golden light danced off the nearby tree trunks.

  She continued to remove the brush from him carefully, piece by piece, until he lay revealed in the strengthening firelight. She knelt beside him again and touched him ever so gently, touched her fingertips to his temple, smoothed bits of twigs from his blood-stiffened hair. “Guthrie,” she breathed, bending over him, feeling as though she were in the midst of some horrific nightmare that she would surely wake from at any moment. His eyes opened at the sound of her voice and he gazed at her in the flickering light.

  “I did it all wrong,” he said, his words running into each other. His breathing was fast, shallow. “All of it. Everything. She left me, and so did you.”

  “That’s not true. I’m here! I’m right here beside you, Guthrie. It’s going to be all right.” She retrieved the bedroll, undid it and laid it carefully over him. Felt briefly for his pulse, which was rapid and weak. Scrambled to the fire and added more fuel. Dragged her rifle and her saddlebags and water bottle back to his side. “It’s all right. You’re going to be okay. You hear me, Guthrie? I’m right here and I’m not leaving you.”

  She fumbled with the buckles, threw back the leather flap, reached inside for the first-aid kit…but what would she do with it? How would she tend wounds she couldn’t see and didn’t begin to understand? What had happened to him? Had he been shot? Had the bear attacked him and then tried to cover him over with all that brush? Such a huge pile of brush! She unzipped the cordura bag and stared blankly, with a rush of growing panic, at the abundance of medical supplies within.

  “Raven came,” he said. “Brought you, just like I asked…”

  “Guthrie, don’t talk. I’m going to get you warm and fix you something hot to drink. Just lie still.”

  There was enough water left in her bottle for a pot of bouillon.

  “You came, and told me the story about the bear walker. And then the bear came and stayed awhile.”

  Jessie froze and stared at him. “Did the bear cover you with brush?” she said.

  He shook his head weakly. “The bear uncovered me. And then we talked.” His eyes watched her, more lucid now, focusing on her, comprehending her presence. “Kestrel’s dead. My fault.”

  She bent lower. “Hush!”

  “I shouldn’t have brought her up there. We were almost to the top. Should’ve left her down here. My fault.”

  Jessie rocked back on her heels. She picked up her flashlight and shined the narrow beam into the depths of the brush pile. Her breath caught in her throat when she saw the bay gloss of horse hide. Kestrel. Hidden beneath a huge brush pile. Hidden, covered over. But how…? Fear curdled her blood and rendered her completely incompetent. The mare had fallen, rolled on him. Crushed him. Kestrel was dead and Guthrie was all broken up inside, and there was nothing she could do! It could be his liver, his spleen, his kidneys, all manner of broken bones and ruptured organs. What could she do! Help was so very far away!

  And how had all this brush come to be here? Had the grizzly done it?

  “It’s all right,” she heard herself say. “All that matters is that you’re alive, and we’re going to keep you that way. You made me a promise, remember? You said you’d always be around when I needed a friend. Well, as it happens, right now I need one real bad, and like it or not you’re it. Besides, we have an argument to finish. I figure that’ll take us the rest of our lives. Years and years.”

  She emptied the remainder of her water bottle into the billy can and put it on the fire to heat, dropping four bouillon cubes into it. She could treat him for shock, keep him warm, get some warm, salty fluids into him. She could bandage the lacerations on his head and face. She had a powerful pain medication in her kit. She had sutures and antibiotics and splints and bandages, but she didn’t have anything that would magically stop internal bleeding.

  She raised her hand to her face, surprised to feel that her cheeks were wet. She hadn’t realized that she was crying. She brushed the tears away and glanced to where he lay.

  He was watching her, but his gaze was losing focus and drifting away. “No more fighting, Jess. No more,” he said, and closed his eyes upon a great weariness.

  THIS WAS UNDOUBTEDLY the worst night the senator had ever spent. Sleep eluded him as he stood watch over the moon-washed landscape and his mind rehashed the day’s events over and over again. “Stupid, stupid, stupid!” He had shot without identifying his target. It was one of the most shameful and dangerous crimes a hunter could commit, and it was the first time he had ever done it. Oh, he could come up with a thousand excuses, but none of them worked. The truth of the matter was, he had screwed up royally and would pay for it for the rest of his life. Every time he picked up a gun, every time he thought about hunting, every time he closed his eyes to sleep, he would see that dead man and he would remember his inexcusable stupidity.

  Once beyond that awful moment he’d had no choice in his actions. He had to protect himself. That man was probably nothing more than a small-time rancher or hired hand. His life was insignificant compared with a senator’s life. A senator could make a difference. He could change the future for the better. He was powerful; he was important. He mattered far more in the scheme of things than some hick-town cowboy.

  Sacrifices were made every day in order to benefit the majority. This was just another such incident. Unfortunate, but most were. The important thing was that he get things back to normal as quickly as possible. That he not dwell on this or let the memory of it ruin his life. Guilt had no place in his life.

  Half-convinced, Smith raised his eyes toward the east in anticipation of the long-awaited dawn. What he saw, instead, caused the blood to rush from his head. He felt faint and dizzy and for a moment he thought he might pass out.

  A light was softly shining on the trees fringing the stone ledge. The light came from below and it flickered like the light of a campfire, and yet there could be no campfire in that place. A man was hidden beneath the brush pile, a man who was dead. There could be no fire, no light, and yet…there was!

  His breath came in shallow gasps. He pushed to his feet, one hand braced against the rough bark of the tree, the other grasping the Weatherby. It was unbelieva
ble! The whole thing was unbelievable! What should he do? What would he see if he walked to the edge and peered over? Would it be as awful as before, or would it be even worse? Could anything possibly be any worse?

  This couldn’t be happening to him. He was a good man. A great politician. People looked up to him, admired him, feared him and emulated him. He might even run for president someday, and here he stood in the tree stand, all clenched up with irrational fear, feeling weak in the bowels and totally out of control.

  The only way to deal with such a paralyzing fear was to confront it.

  He climbed down the tree stand, hand over hand, rifle slung over his shoulder. Crept as before toward the edge of the great rounded dome of rock where the narrow shelf of trail came up and over, and as before he held his rifle at the ready and moved with great caution until he was standing at the very edge, peering over and down. His heartbeat clubbed in his ears. He blinked his eyes and squinted. Yes—yes, there was a fire in the very place he had built the brush pile to cover the man and the horse. It glowed against the tree trunks and upswept branches at the base of the ledge, danced and taunted, threw sparks skyward to join the moon in the broad arc of the heavens.

  A campfire.

  Not only was the man still alive, he was well enough to have built a fire, perhaps even well enough to recover and identify the person who had shot his horse, concealed him beneath a brush pile and left him for dead!

  The senator stood on top of the rock dome, stricken with the enormity of this latest turn of events. Dawn was fast approaching. He had little time now to plot a new course of action, but there seemed to be only one thing he could do to save himself.