Shadow Woman (46 page)

Earl
adjusted the straps on his pack, tightened his belt, and said,
“Jagen!
Hunt!”

It took the dogs fifteen minutes
to reach the place where the prey had spent the night. At first Earl
was not sure, because there was no sign of charred wood or scorching,
but the dogs showed him the pine boughs, and then he knew.

He headed down toward the trail,
and the dogs hurried to beat him there. They galloped off along the
trail, no longer set in motion by his command or the pleasure of
running along a smooth dirt path in the woods with him. They had
picked up the scent, verified it, and found it again. They were eager
now, because at each leap they were closer, the scent was fresher.

Earl worked himself back up to a
jog. He held his head up, staring into the middle distance and
breathing deep, easy breaths. He gauged his speed to keep the dogs in
sight and let them work without inhibition. He had no apprehension
that they might forget their training. When it was time, they would
let him come in and join them in the kill.

Jane
kept Pete moving through the afternoon, running across the open
spaces and walking quickly among the thickets and the stands of
gnarled, stunted trees. In midafternoon the air turned cold. She
found Chaney Glacier and then the fork in the path appeared as though
in answer to a wish.

Jane stopped and turned to Pete.
“This is the last place we can hope to fool them if they’re
on the right trail. Want to do a good job?”

“Of course,” he
said.

She sent him down the slope to
uproot small bushes while she began to dig with her knife. She took
the trail markers down the path that branched off to the right, then
transplanted small shrubs in
the
middle of the trail that went
north. She worked quickly, planting them in random patterns wherever
the ground was bare, men spreading dead leaves and pine needles from
the adjacent grove to cover the fresh dirt at their roots.

When Pete came back, trying to
peer around the thick bushes in his arms to see where to place his
feet, she sent him off again to gamer rocks.

Jane stuck clumps of weeds into
the ground in a second random pattern among the shrubs, then told
Pete, “Don’t just set the rocks into the mix. Bury some
of them enough so they look like they’ve always been here.”

When she was able to step back
along the trail and look at the camouflaged spot without
distinguishing it from the surrounding brush, she and Pete went back
into the forest and collected more leaves and debris to spread among
the bushes.

They stopped to look at their
work. “I should take you home with me to landscape the yard,”
she said.

“If you get me through
this I’ll remodel your whole house.”

“Let’s go. Take the
trail signs.”

They set off below the trail
into the undisturbed woods, then made a turn to angle back and rejoin
the trail a few hundred yards farther north. They moved quickly now
to make up for the time they had spent. Jane found a deer run along
the trail a half mile on and stuck the trail markers into the ground
there.

They moved on faster, and
finally Pete said, “We seem to be going down.”

“That’s right,”
she answered. “This stretch goes almost due north for ten miles
along the Waterton River.”

He gave a tired snort. “Then
it goes straight up, right?”

“Wrong. It flows into
Waterton Lake. The lake is long, like the Finger Lakes in New York.
Ready for even better news?”

“More than ready.”

“It straddles the border.
About two-thirds of it is in Canada.”

“Let’s do some more
running.”

They jogged along the trail,
feeling the lower altitude and hearing it. Somewhere among the big
cedars and hemlocks, a woodpecker rapped on bark. In places they had
to slow their momentum to keep from losing their footing.

They reached the riverbank as
the light was fading. “Are you hungry?” Jane asked.

“Starving.”

“Don’t you want to
stop for dinner?”

“I want to do what you
said this morning, before dawn. I want to use the light, wring every
last bit of distance out of this day. Then I’ll stop and eat a
moose or something.”

She grinned as she moved along
the trail.

“What are you smiling at?
Don’t tell me it’s your turn for a fantasy.”

“Don’t you wish. No,
I was worried about you, but now I’m not. You’re doing
great.”

“I told you a couple of
days ago that I don’t feel like giving up. I like living too
much.”

“That wasn’t a
couple of days ago. It was yesterday.”

“See? I’m getting
more out of time now. I feel as though I’ve lived a year since
then.”

Jane said nothing. Exercise was
one of the therapies that doctors prescribed for depression, because
it increased the flow of oxygen and released some chemical into the
blood that fooled the brain into an unfounded sense of well-being.
Whatever had happened to Pete Hatcher, she hoped it would last.

It was deep darkness when they
reached a deserted campground. Jane pulled out her flashlight and
played it around the big clearing until she found the sign.

Pete read it aloud. “Goat
Haunt?”

“Beautiful, isn’t
it?” she said. “We made it. The tip of the lake should be
right up there.”

Pete waited, but she didn’t
move. “Are we going on, or are we going to sleep here?”

She looked around her with the
flashlight. “There’s a lot to be said for official
campgrounds. The rangers generally put them in the best places they
can find, so this is probably the most sheltered spot around here.
It’s a lot colder tonight than last night. There are hearths
for fires, so if we build one, our ashes won’t be a sign of
anything to anybody once they’re cool. People have built fires
here all summer.”

“You don’t sound
sure.”

“I’m not.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know,”
she admitted. “Maybe because I’m so exhausted from
walking and running. Maybe because in order to get through that I had
to get scared.” She swept the area on all sides with her
flashlight again. “I guess it’s just nerves. I guess
we’re not going to accomplish much by tromping on in the dark.
Let’s eat and get some sleep and try to cross the border when
we can see it.”

This time Pete set off to find
soft boughs without her saying anything, while she rummaged in the
packs and unrolled the ponchos and sleeping bags. They ate the rest
of their canned food with some powdered soup Jane heated over the
small fire she had built.

They joined their sleeping bags
and slipped into them after Jane had carefully cleaned the pot and
put all of the cans into the plastic bag.

Jane lay on her back, closed her
eyes, and felt the warm, living mass of Pete’s body beside her,
breathing deeply, then almost immediately falling asleep. In another
few days she would be out of this life forever, lying safely every
night beside Carey in the big bed with the maple tree outside the
window.

The night breeze blew cold, and
she could feel it caressing her face. She tugged the watch cap lower,
pulled the sleeping bag to her chin, and let the wind soothe her to
sleep. Tonight part of her was waiting for the dreams to come, but
sleep was a jumble of images that never seemed to coalesce.

Sometime during the night the
constant mountain wind disappeared and the air turned cold and still.
It was three in the morning when Jane heard the howl.

She opened her eyes and lay
still, then began to take inventory of her surroundings. The fire was
out, and the dew had frozen on the ground. Her cheeks were tingling,
so she rubbed them to get the circulation back. She decided it must
have been a dream and rolled over, pushing her face deeper into the
sleeping bag for warmth. Then she heard it again. It was a high, long
yowl, and then it broke off into a series of yelps. She sat up
quickly and listened.

There were supposed to be a
couple of packs of wolves that had come back into the wild country
above the border in the past few years, but the call hadn’t
sounded like a wolf, exactly. There was no shortage of coyotes
anywhere in the country, but as soon as she had thought of them, she
knew it was wrong. She heard another bark, but this one was closer,
off to the left. It sounded like an answer to the first. She pounded
Pete’s shoulder, then kicked her way out of the sleeping bag.
He sat up quickly and looked around.

Jane tossed his boots into his
chest. “Dogs!” she said. “They’ve tracked us
with dogs!”

She pulled on her hoots,
snatched up their packs, and used her flashlight to find the sign she
had seen when they had reached the campground: “Boulder Pass
Trail.”

Pete had his boots on now, and
he began to roll up the sleeping bags.

“Leave them,” she
said, and handed him his pack.

Jane began to run. She heard
Pete fall into step behind her. When she had passed the sign and
taken a few steps onto the forest trail she turned off the light and
slipped it into her pack. She tried to wake herself and consider the
implications as she ran.

All of her ruses and misleading
trails had meant nothing. A man would have been fooled and walked on
past the shrubs and plants and rocks she and Pete had carefully
placed to cover the path. A dog would not even pause, just plunge on
through them, following the scent. The spot had probably served the
dogs as a beacon, because the sweat from the hard work must have been
all over the rocks and shrubs they had moved. She had a sudden vision
of herself moving trail signs along the way. All the effort and all
the delay would have been worth it if only dogs could read.

“Couldn’t it be
somebody else?” The low, raspy whisper from behind reminded her
that she had to keep him from being confused.

“No,” she said.
“Dogs aren’t allowed in the park.” She heard a bark
and tried to gauge the distance. It sounded as though the dog was far
behind them, but when she tried to decipher what that meant, she
found that she couldn’t. The dog had a deep-register voice, but
that didn’t mean it was loud; there was no way to know if the
dog was even facing in their direction when he barked.

She ran harder, ducking and
weaving to avoid low branches but making no attempt to keep her
footprints off the trail. She searched her mind for strategies she
could use to fool the hunter. The only one that offered any hope was
to outrun him.

She and Pete had traveled half
of one night and a full day, from before sunrise until late evening.
They had wasted only enough time to try to disguise their trail and
eat and pee. That thought made her feel worse. That was how dogs
marked their territories. The occasional smell of human urine in the
bushes along the trail had probably been overwhelming to a dog.

Running was the only answer. If
she and Pete had traveled quickly for thirty-six hours, then this
hunter and his dogs had traveled faster. In order to be anywhere near
the campsite at Goat Haunt by now, they must have kept going through
the cold and darkness for five or six hours while she and Pete had
eaten and slept. The hunter must be an intimidating physical
specimen, but she and Pete were warm and rested now, and ready to
run. He would be worn out and hungry.

She ran on as quickly as she
dared in the darkness. The trail wound upward through the trees
against the path of a small creek she could hear to her left.
Sometimes she could see a brief glimpse of moonlight on water.

She ran until the sun began to
throw her shadow on the trail ahead of her, then she walked for a few
minutes, listening to the harsh huffing sound of her breathing.
Pete’s breath was louder and deeper, and she could tell by his
heavy footsteps that he was tired enough to stumble now and then. She
pulled the pack off her back and onto her belly, found the map, and
studied it.

“If we stay on Boulder
Pass Trail, we’ll reach a fork in the path, then go west to
Kintla Lake or swing south to Bowman Lake.”

Pete looked over her shoulder at
the map. “They both look like a long way.”

“Maybe twenty-five miles.
Neither one leads to what I would call civilization, but I would be
very glad to see a few park rangers with guns about now.”

She studied the map more
closely. There was a thin, jagged line like a crack in a teacup that
crossed Boulder Pass Trail and zigzagged north to the border. “There
is a closer way, if we wanted to take a big chance. See this line?”

“What is it? Another
path?”

“No such luck. It’s
the border between Glacier County and Flathead County.” Her
finger followed it northward. “In Canada it separates the
Kootenay District and the Lethbridge District.”

“What are we looking at an
imaginary line for?”

“Because it’s not
straight and regular and even. See the Canadian border? It’s
the forty-ninth parallel, because some politicians drew a neat line
on a map in a comfortable building thousands of miles from here. But
this line is all sawteeth and wiggles. That means it wasn’t
done that way. Surveyors actually went there. Somebody walked that
line. Even if it was a hundred years ago, somebody was up there.”

“Sure. It was probably one
of those old-time mountain men that looked like Bigfoot and smelled
the same, and his faithful Indian guide.”

Jane shrugged. “They’ve
got nothing on us.”

“What do you mean?”

She answered the question she
wanted to. “We’ve done pretty well so far. We just had
food and a little sleep. The guy behind us didn’t.”

“How can you know that?”

“He was still up and
chasing at three a.m. He was trying to make time and kill us in our
sleep. If we want to outrun him, then the rougher the country, the
better.”

“I’m not so sure.”