Zachary's Gold (10 page)

I had no desire whatsoever to prove my manhood against such an adversary. I had barely survived my last attempt at tracking down a resident of that region, and my initial impulse was to return to the safety of the cabin to plan my next step carefully. A superstitious image crossed my mind—a bear-like wraith guarding the dead man's cursed gold.

Common sense told me that I was a well-armed superior being and that the wolverine was only a potential hazard—a doomed one, if I kept my eyes open. It was almost unavoidable that I should confront and destroy him, for we were quite close to the cabin, and there I had a dead body strung up a tree and a mule tethered to a post. I couldn't have chosen better bait to draw him.

I make no pretence of being a master tracker, but with a fresh light snow and relatively open country, I had no trouble following him. As was evidenced by the still-warm droppings on the trap, he was no more than a few minutes ahead of me. I walked with my rifle at the ready—safety off, bullet in the chamber.

The beast's tracks went up an incline in a generally northwest direction to begin with, then he circled back to his left—parallel to the game trail I had originally followed but skirting the ridge a quarter mile away and above it. His trail wandered back and forth as he sniffed and rooted into every windfall and hollow, and the expectation that I was probably gaining on him made my caution even keener.

A sort of bowl-shaped hollow filled with bog and bulrushes presented itself, and my quarry skirted its eastern side, rummaging for any sign of nest or burrow in the high leathery grasses. Even with the fresh snowfall I did not find it easy to discern his spoor through that rough vegetation. An amazing thing it is to me that a creature of such a stocky, bearish build can creep through the forest with only the occasional broken twig and split branch behind him.

I wasn't much worried about losing my way, although I stopped to regain my bearings quite regularly, for I knew that travelling thus, either west or south, I would soon be intercepted by one of the bodies of water that could be followed back to the cabin. Should the animal decide to carry on north, I would follow him only long enough to see him out of my sphere of concern.

As it was, he turned to his left again and headed downhill and to the west. When his route crossed the trapline, he continued his counter-clockwise circuit, back towards the place I had begun to pursue him.

As I passed the third trap I saw the marten that had been held in its jaws when I first passed that way an hour earlier. It had been ripped in two. The wolverine had not stopped to eat it but had only paused before carrying on.

He was tracking other game—more lively and challenging to him. Once again my belly constricted.

I walked only a few more paces before I stopped to consider. I was now travelling a circular route, along with another well-armed killer, and exactly who was pursuing and who being pursued was a matter of arbitrary viewpoint. The main difference between the two of us was that he was in familiar territory and probably feeling in much better health. Viewed thus, the odds were definitely in his favour.

I gave up, turned around, and took two or, at the most, three steps towards home before I heard a sound like a low bark or a harsh cough—a sound that I couldn't locate, unfortunately. Mentally, I had pictured the wolverine behind me at that stage, so I was starting to turn myself when he burst out of a thicket of juniper and willow ahead of me.

I was just able to shift and face the attack before the brute hit me, knocking me backwards so far that it felt as if I had fallen off the roof of a house. Even as I landed with all my wind burst out and my senses stunned, his jaws clamped into the flesh between my shoulder and my neck. The heavy cloth of my jacket might have been thin silk, so easily did those knife-sharp teeth shred it and pin themselves into my muscle and sinew.

The pain was overwhelming—a horrible fire bleeding down my back and up into my face, where I could feel the wiry fur of his cheek pressed against my own.

Two facts loomed clearly enough in those long seconds to take control of my consciousness. First, I recognized that the animal was trying to get a grip on my body with his forepaws. After that, he would either chew out my throat or scrabble my intestines onto the ground with the claws of his hind legs. To stop this, I tried to keep rolling, batting at him with my free left arm, hoping to stop him from gaining any firm purchase.

Secondly, I realized that I still held my rifle. My hand was on the trigger and my grip was firm, amazingly enough, but as we rolled around I had no way of telling for sure where the barrel was pointing. My right arm and the gun were both sandwiched between our bodies. In that death grip there was no chance of working it free to aim it, nor would there be any second shot to fire. One of us would die before then. As pain and fear became unbearable, I knew that I would have to fire and hope for the best, but years of practice and instinct made it very difficult, even at that critical moment, for me to discharge a firearm that seemed to be pointed quite directly at my own head.

Whichever of our heads the bullet contacted, I would gain from the outcome.

I fired and immediately realized that I had lost in my gamble and had shot myself in the belly. New fire burned my flesh, making me squirm and writhe in wild twists. I rolled and crawled and pawed at my chest. It took a long moment to reach the knowledge that I was not only still alive, but free of the carnivore that had sought my life.

The wolverine lay about three feet distant, his back to me. The two yellowish stripes that ran the length of his black body seemed to be pointing at a reddish tuft of fur hanging to one side at the base of the animal's skull, still dripping blood.

I looked down at the powder burns where the muzzle of the Winchester had lain against my chest and considered that I was on the better end of the exchange.

Then, for a time, I was unconscious.

WHEN I AWOKE I SAW
broad spatters of blood on the snow, and a good deal more had soaked my shirt and coat. Not much of this belonged to my erstwhile friend of long tooth and fur. I was badly injured, and on this I blame the irrationality of my next decision—to depart from my roundabout route and head across country, straight south to the cabin.

Soldiers wounded in the war with the South were known to do much the same sort of thing—begin to walk aimlessly and without fear of being lost, until they simply dropped dead in their tracks. It is a physical sickness that infects the mind, a delirium that caused me on that occasion to lose much of my sensation of pain, while robbing me of my intellect. At the best of times I would have had to be very careful in that trackless bush to avoid losing myself forever, but when I left the dead wolverine behind me, I stumbled straight forward—down ravine-side and up again, through bog and bramble with no caution and no reference to guide me except the vague feeling that home was somewhere up ahead.

It is to this day miraculous to me that I reached my destination.

So vague was my grasp of reality during that trek that, as I staggered down the creek-side, I eventually encountered, looking only at the rocks and gravel under my boots, I stumbled right past the cabin—thirty feet away—without recognizing the spot. Luckily the mule began to bray loudly enough to catch my attention. I'm not sure whether it was the odour of blood or the scent of the wolverine on me that frightened him so, but I mumbled deep thanks to the poor creature as I tottered past and into the cabin.

Reaching that refuge revived my faculties to some degree—at least long enough for me to use my good arm to throw a few more pieces of wood onto the coals that remained in the heater.

I pulled off my clothes and was about to collapse onto the bed, but a glance at my bloody and unclean shoulder convinced me of one more thing I ought first to do. Returning to the tag end of the bottle of whisky I had befriended the night before, I poured a full cup. Half of that I downed in a couple of graceless gulps. The other half I poured into the open wound at the base of my neck.

I gave voice to my pain loudly and poetically for a few moments, then coiled my body into the blankets on the bed, where I spent the rest of that day and night.

All I remember of those hours is successively being very hot, then freezing cold. Later, in the blackness of the cabin, with only orange needles of half-light escaping from the cracks in the stove, my fever gave me visions of devils and leaping carnivores at the foot of my bed.

Morning found me miserably weak and consumed by thirst, but with my coherence returned, at least. Whatever poison had been spat into my body by the villainous wolverine had worked its way through without killing me, and now all I needed was a day or two to regain my strength.

Virtually all my clothing except my trousers, socks, and boots had been destroyed in the attack—shredded, bloodsoaked, or lost on the path. I was forced to rummage among Dead Ned's effects and to wear what I could of his clothes, wishing at the time that cleanliness was rated a little higher among the priorities of trappers and miners.

He was a shorter man than myself, but thankfully his second pair of underdrawers was a two-piece set—not the combination type that I normally preferred. Undersize combinations would have put a pressure on my shoulders that I could not have endured, but since he was a heavier man than I, his chemise draped over my injury quite loosely. It was short, of course, and my navel was exposed to drafts, but beggars, as they say, must not be choosy.

My entire upper body ached and protested at the slightest movement. My left arm and side were frozen and useless. Already, though, the open flesh had begun to crust over and there were no signs of it becoming septic—none of the angry redness that signals poison working its way into the blood. I considered dousing it with alcohol again, but even the thought of that brought tears to my eyes, and I promised myself to wash it when I had hot water.

Once I had managed to dress, I set about the necessary chores with Spartan dedication and frequent rest stops when I became tired and dizzy.

First I needed water, and I carried two pots full from the creek, placing one on top of the woodstove, along with the remains of the stew. Next I managed to hack one block of spruce into kindling-sized pieces and start a fire. Lastly, I reached deep into my stores of compassion and used the last of my strength to drag an armload of strawy marsh grass to the mule. The poor beast was tethered on stony ground with little to eat.

By the time I went back indoors, the cabin was mostly warm, and I felt quite proud of myself, albeit exhausted.

Half of that day I spent sleeping. When awake, I forced myself to eat a bit, drink water, and cleanse my wound. In the afternoon I sat in the doorway for a while, taking the air and allowing the healing rays of sunshine to work on me, even as they mopped away the remnants of snow. I tried to keep my mind on a positive track—away from the unanswered questions about my current predicament—but the unpleasant truth kept returning to my shadowy thoughts.

There could be no neutral outcome to this affair. If I succeeded in proving Ned's guilt by finding the stolen gold, then I would be a hero in the eyes of the law and a tidy bit richer. If I could not prove my suspicions with concrete evidence, however, I would be viewed as a glory-seeking fool who shot an innocent man before the poor fellow could explain himself. Feeling as miserable as I did, I would readily have admitted the latter, at that stage.

My fever returned with nightfall, and I spent another night fighting with phantoms.

I slept late next day—a good sign for my recovery. Not so pleasant, though, was the arrival of a new malady—a foul bout of diarrhea. I don't know how long the trapper had been working on the pot of stew that I had eaten for two days, but I blamed the stew for my gastric distress. I threw it as far as I could into the bushes, pot and all.

Needless to say, I did not feel terribly energetic that day. Neither could I come up with an obvious next place to carry on my search, so I contented myself with rest and recuperation.

For matters of diet, I boiled a batch of red beans and potatoes into a tasteless muck, which improved greatly when I threw in the crumpled leaves of certain weeds that were hanging upside down in one corner of the room. Whether he was a real woodsman or only a desperado in disguise, I couldn't say, but Ned obviously knew something about edible plants. Not many of God's little green things can hope to make boiled beans and potatoes palatable.

I no longer felt a soul-sickening guilt when I pondered the fact that I had killed the man, but it was still an oppressive thought, for practical as well as emotional reasons. I wished at least that I had been able to interrogate him before I shot him. At times I felt sure that the fellow could not have been the outlaw I had taken him for, but when I thought it through, my original hypothesis was supported by too much evidence, circumstantial though it was. New questions presented themselves as well. This was a prime season for furs, so why, if what I had in my coat pocket was a map of his trapline, was he using only a dozen or so traps? For that matter, several of the ones I had seen were not even set. Why was the map hidden so carefully? Why would an honest man be so secretive and suspicious about his trapline? Undoubtedly, Ned was more than the simple trapper he wished to appear.