a Night Too Dark (2010) (4 page)

“Happens all over the national parks, people thinking they can walk in and just disappear. They’re right, mostly, but what they don’t figure is that we have to go look for them anyway. Clueless assholes.” The last two words were almost a shout and appeared to be directed at the now empty door. He got to his feet. “Show me on the map.”
A map of the Park covered most of one wall of Dan’s office, color-coded for ownership—federal, state, Native corporation, urban, private. The yellow dots signifying land privately owned were barely visible in the sea of green that represented federal parks and wildlife refuges. Smith found the Step road, traced it down to the turnoff, and stopped about half an inch in.
Dan’s sigh was heartfelt. “Great,” he said, “just dandy.” He tapped a red pin. “Eddie saw a grizzly male thereabouts a couple of days ago. Big one, he said, he figures record size, gorgeous golden brown hide.”
“Thought Park rangers weren’t supposed to think about Park bears in terms like ‘record size’ and ‘gorgeous hide,’ ” Kate said.
Dan snorted. “Yeah. Like monks don’t think about sex.” He strapped a .357 to his waist and reached for the .30-06 in the gun rack next to the door. “Let’s go.”
The convoy of trucks rumbled down the hill and pulled up in back of the abandoned pickup an hour and a half later, good time due to the still semifrozen state of the road.
Kate found the registration in the glove compartment. “Dewayne A. Gammons,” she said.
“ ‘Dewayne’?” Mark said.
“ ‘Gammons’?” Luke said.
“What’s the A stand for?” Peter said. “Aloysius?”
The Grosdidiers snickered en masse.
The glove compartment yielded further the vehicle handbook, a square of foil that proved to be a Trojan condom with a three-year-old sell-by date, and a box of cinnamon Tic Tacs with two left. A more extensive search beneath and behind the bucket seats turned up an empty pint of Windsor Canadian, a lug wrench, an oil filter still in its box, an air filter ditto, a book of matches from the Ahtna Lodge, a Suulutaq Mine flyer extolling Global Harvest’s environmentally friendly policy that looked as if it had been used to swab oil from a dipstick, and a single round of ammunition.
The cartridge was maybe an inch long. Kate wasn’t a gun nut, with two weapons to her name, the 12-gauge shotgun in the rack next to the door back home and the .30-06 in the gun rack in the cab of her truck. This was a much smaller cartridge for a much smaller weapon. She handed it to Matt, who flattened his hand and cradled it in his palm. The Grosdidiers crowded around.
“CCI,” Mark said.
“Twenty-two,” Luke said.
“CB Long,” Peter said.
They looked up at Kate and said in a chorus, “Girly gun.”
“Or a kid’s,” Matt said, handing back the round. “Rifle or revolver, not designed for auto or semiauto. Range maybe a mile with a tail wind. Not a lot of oomph, not very loud, used mostly for plinking and taking out your local feral squirrel. Six, six-fifty a box, a hundred rounds per.”
“And, you’ll notice, not fired,” Dan said. “Probably dropped it when he was trying to load the gun so he could shoot himself. Really sucks how that didn’t work out. Can we go find this jackoff now or what?”
He looked at Kate. She wasn’t listening to him, her head cocked, concentrating. “Did you hear that?” she said.
His head whipped around and he looked hard at the dense wall of brush lining the side of the trail. One hand unsnapped his holster, the other half-raised his rifle. “What?”
They all listened then. An eagle called in the distance, a full, piercing cry, answered by a raven’s malicious croak nearer by.
“Nope,” Matt said, “didn’t hear anything.” He didn’t make fun of Dan’s nervousness. None of them did. No Park rat with the most minimal sense of self-preservation would dream of making fun of anyone on the alert for hungry bears in the spring.
“I don’t know,” Kate said, “I thought I heard a shot.” She looked at Mutt, who had those parabolic antennas that passed for her ears up and scanning for intelligent life in the universe. Alert but not alarmed. Of course a gunshot in the Park was like the smell of dope at a Jimmy Buffett concert, familiar and expected. “Probably my imagination.”
She bagged and tagged the bullet, more because she knew what Jim would say if she didn’t than from any real conviction that the
unspent round was evidence of anything other than a strong tendency toward melodrama. Odds were that somewhere between the truck and wherever he was now, Mr. Gammons had rediscovered the will to live. There was a story she remembered reading about people jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge who had survived, every one of whom reported having changed their minds on the way down.
On the other hand, it was spring, the moose were in calf and the bears were up and hungry. There were plenty of ways to die in the Park without shooting yourself. “Okay,” she said, “which way, do you think?”
They surveyed the thick, impenetrable brush with less than enthusiasm, even the Grosdidiers. Bushwhacking was not a fun way to spend an afternoon. “Let’s spread up and down the road,” Kate said, “look for where he went in.”
Luke found crushed fireweed and a bent alder branch about ten feet from the pickup’s front bumper. Mutt took point, nose sensing something the rest of them would never be able to smell. Kate, holding her .30-06 at the ready in front of her, went in next, followed by Dan and the brothers. Smith, with the smug air of one who had done his duty by God and country, had left them to finish his interrupted walk home.
It was a still day, and clear, the sun well into its daily twenty-hour journey around the summer horizon. The spruce were thick here, but they were dying from the spruce bark beetle infestation, too, which meant a lot of them had fallen over, or tried to. It didn’t make the going any easier, and the third time they’d had to get down on their hands and knees to crawl beneath a horizontal trunk there was increasing skepticism displayed concerning Mutt’s trailing abilities.
“Just don’t let her hear you say that,” Kate said.
“Yeah, but who works this hard to off themselves?” Luke said.
“Yeah, what’s wrong with a nice little bullet to the head?” Mark said.
“Yeah, and you realize we’re going to have to pack this fucker out when we find him,” Peter said.
“Maybe he’ll be able to walk,” Matt said, without much conviction.
“Could be worse,” Kate said. “At least it’s too early for mosquitoes.”
But they were all thinking about that gunshot Kate thought she’d heard.
The going was rough and got rougher. They stumbled through patches of ice and snow that the shade from the forest had hidden from the sun. The rest of the time the surface beneath their feet ranged from bare, frozen ground to wet moss. Everyone’s jeans were soaked to the knees, and Matt, who had a particularly fine head of hair, had lost some of it to clawing spruce limbs. More comments were made, most of them profane.
Kate, the smallest of them and therefore the quickest through the underbrush, said, “Jeez, what a bunch of whiners. You’d think you guys had never been hunting in your lives.”
Mutt, who had been appearing and disappearing in front of Kate for the last hour, rematerialized to nip at the cuff of Kate’s jeans. She turned, looked over her shoulder, gave a peremptory bark, leaped over a fallen tree, and vanished again. Kate clambered over the same trunk and was suddenly and blessedly in a large clearing on the south-facing slope of a small hill. She stood there blinking in the bright sunshine, breathing in deep gulps of cool, clean air. She felt as if she had just emerged from a long, underwater swim.
She looked around for Mutt, spotting her at the top of the clearing, fifty feet away. Mutt was dancing impatiently in place, giving out an occasional imperative yip. At her feet was a haphazard pile of dead brush and leaves lumped together over something else, at which Kate was instantly certain no one was going to want to take a closer look.
The five men thrashed their way out of the brush and came to a
stop behind her. “Oh man,” Matt said, spotting Mutt immediately. “I was really hoping . . .”
“Yeah, me, too,” Mark said.
Something caught the edge of Kate’s vision and she looked around, scanning the edge of the clearing. At almost the same moment something large started thrashing through the bush about halfway between them and Mutt.
“Oh fuck,” Dan said, followed by the sound of safeties coming off all around.
Kate was still holding her rifle in front of her but she didn’t raise it to her shoulder or sight down the barrel. Mutt hadn’t charged or put herself between Kate and the noise.
The crashing came nearer, and the bear whose food cache they’d just stumbled on came growling and stumbling into the clearing, bringing the better part of a dense clump of alders with him.
Only it wasn’t a bear. It was Old Sam, and he wasn’t growling, he was swearing, loudly enough to be heard all the way back to the road. He stumbled to a halt, spit out an alder leaf, and glared at them.
“Something chasing you, Old Sam?” Dan said.
“No, there is nothing fucking chasing me!” Old Sam Dementieff, a lean and leathery old fart, near as anyone could figure ninety-five going on forty and cranky with the wisdom of accumulated years, drew himself up and bent a fulminating eye on the ranger. “I was looking for you. Heard you had a search party going. Figured I’d lend a hand.”
Kate looked at the toes of her wet boots with an intensity they did not merit. Matt was inspecting the straps on his pack, Mark was whistling a happy tune, Luke was scratching at a nonexistent mark on the immaculate barrel of his .30-30, and Peter was squinting at the cloudless sky in search of the next incoming front.
Dan eyed the well-worn, well-kept Model 70 Winchester over Old Sam’s shoulder. From years of long and usually alcohol-involved
conversations over the bar at Bernie’s Roadhouse, Dan knew that Old Sam believed absolutely in the hunter’s maxim “Use enough gun.” The Model 70 was known to the cognoscenti as the rifleman’s rifle, and Old Sam’s had a serial number well below 600,000, making it a drool-worthy object of desire to any hunter worthy of the name. His preferred cartridge was the .458 Winchester Magnum, which could put down half a ton of bear and an incoming ICBM with equal efficiency.
It was the half-ton bear, however, that more nearly concerned the chief ranger, steward of everything on two wings and four legs within the twenty-million-acre Park.
Dan looked at Kate. She had her back to him, now absorbed in examining the inside of one of Mutt’s ears. The Grosdidiers had double-checked all the equipment they carried, and had fallen back and regrouped at a safe distance.
Absent a carcass—an ursine one—there wasn’t a thing Dan could say, but he gave Old Sam a hard look anyway, just to keep in practice. Unintimidated, his usual attitude, Old Sam gave him a hard look right back. Kate said, “Let’s see what we got here,” and walked to the pile at the top of the clearing.
They came to a halt in a loose half circle. It wasn’t pretty, but no one humiliated themselves by averting their eyes. “Oh, great,” Dan said, sounding more irritated than horrified.
The Grosdidiers said nothing. It was obvious that no heroic efforts at saving life and limb would be necessary today.
The brilliant spring sun shone down without mercy, illuminating a scattering of moose droppings, an eagle feather, and a jumble of human remains.
The body proved to be in several, well, actually, many pieces. There seemed to be no head. Nothing was left of the torso but a gaping hole, at the back of which the vertebrae, amazingly still attached
to one another, could be individually counted. Both femurs were visible through scraps of torn flesh upon which the blood had dried hard and brown. All of the bones had bite marks, and one of the femurs had been cracked open and the marrow sucked out.
What remained had been scraped together and covered with a loose layer of dead spruce boughs, dry grass and brown leaves, and dirt. There were claw marks all around the pile, as well as bits of clothing, a dark blue flannel cuff, the waistband of what had been a pair of Levi’s.
Kate picked up a pair of white men’s Jockey briefs, an elastic waistband barely attached to a ripped-out crotch.
The men cringed and squeezed their knees together in a single involuntary action.
Kate let her hand drop and bent a thoughtful gaze on one particular, very large set of claw marks that had ripped through a clump of moss campion, leaving four very clear parallel scars in the earth beneath.
“He’ll be napping close by,” Old Sam said. “When he wakes up, he’s going to want seconds.”
“I don’t know,” Dan said, “looks like he pretty much licked the plate clean on the first serving. He’s probably long gone.”
If Old Sam didn’t look at the ranger with outright contempt, he did give a comprehensive snort. The Grosdidier brothers began to cast nervous glances around the clearing.
“Why take the chance?” Kate said. “Let’s move like we got a purpose. Get out the bags while I take some pictures.” She pulled a digital camera from one pocket and took shots of the remains from every direction and several establishing shots to show them in relation to the rest of the clearing. “Okay,” she said, stepping back.
The Grosdidier brothers produced heavy black plastic bags right out of the air, one each, and there was a concerted rush as everyone
leaped to pick up the body part nearest to him and stuff it in the bag. There was no reverence displayed toward the remains and no horror or disgust, either, just a single-minded haste to finish the job and be away from the clearing as soon as humanly possible.
“Okay,” Matt said, scooping up an arm whose hand flopped horrifically from its wrist, “that’s it.” The words were barely out of his mouth before the four brothers had vanished one and all into the undergrowth, black plastic bags slung anyhow over their shoulders.
“Right behind you, buddies,” Dan said to the air, and followed them.
Kate looked at Old Sam.
If it had been anyone else, any other Park rat, he might have looked conscious, ashamed, possibly even repentant, but this was Old Sam. “I would have reported it.”
“You used somebody’s dead body for bear bait?”
“I would have reported it,” he said again.
“Yeah, sure, Uncle,” Kate said, “after you got your bear, and after you’d skinned him out, and after you’d packed out the bladder and the meat and the hide.”
“Come on, girl.”
She looked at him in amazement. It could not possibly be that Old Sam of all Park rats was going to try to justify his behavior, and to someone fifty years his junior at that.
And then he broke out the uncle grin, one part Gabriel to nine parts Beelzebub. “You know I don’t like bear meat.”