There was a crisp fall chill in the air. The beginning of dusk had dropped the temperature a quick twenty degrees. The chill, along with the last of the fall colors in the aspen pockets that veined through the dark timber, seemed to heighten his senses. Sounds seemed sharper; his vision extended; even the dry, sharp smell of the sage seemed to have more of a bite. Maybe it was because just prior to darkness the wind usually stopped, and it was the stillness that brought everything out.
He was placing himself right square in the middle of it, using himself as bait. Marybeth wouldn’t approve.
The grass around the murder scene was still flattened by all of the vehicles that had been up there, so it was easy to find. He stopped and killed the engine. Maxine eyed him desperately, her excitement barely contained. “Yup, we’re going to get out,” he told her, “but you’re sticking close to me.”
With that, she began to tremble. Dogs were so easy to please, Joe thought. Pulling on his jacket, he swung out of his pickup and drew his twelvegauge Wingmaster pump shotgun from its scabbard behind the seat, loaded it with double-ought buckshot, and filled a jacket pocket with more shells. He pulled on a pair of thin buckskin gloves, clamped his Stetson on tight, and walked the perimeter of the crime scene. It had been cleaned up, he was glad to note. No cigarette butts or Coke cans in the grass. Maxine worked the area as well, nose to the ground, drinking in the literal cornucopia of smells—wildlife scat, blood, maybe the bear, a dozen Sheriff’s Department people, the ME, the coroner, anything else that clung to the grass.
He turned and faced east, studying the shadowed tree-line above him, wondering what it was that Tuff and his horse had seen that caused the problem. Walking very slowly and stopping often, as if he were hunting elk, he moved up the slope. He had learned that moving too quickly dulled too many senses in the wilderness. If his breathing became labored, all he could hear was himself. By walking a hundred yards and then stopping, he could see more, hear more. As the light filtered out, his eyes adjusted to the darkness. The sky was brilliant and close with swirls of stars. A quarter moon turned the grass and sagebrush dark blue. Maxine stayed on his heels.
For an hour, he moved slowly up the mountain until the first few of the trees were behind him and the forest loomed in front.
It wasn’t so much that Joe could see something in the trees as sense it. It was a hint, a barely perceptible hint, of the pressure he had felt at much greater volume when he found the moose.
Maxine moved up in front of him and set up on point. The hair on her back was raised, and she was sniffing the air.
He reached down and ran his fingers down her neck to calm her, but she was rigid. Her eyes were wild, her ears up and alert. “Stay,” he whispered to her. “Stay, girl.” She was staring into the dark trees the way she would if they were bird hunting and she had found pheasants in the cover. But he could see nothing.
Suddenly, the dog exploded with purpose. She launched herself into the trees ahead—Joe missed when he grabbed for her collar—and she barked with a manic, deep-throated, hound like howl that sounded so loud in the stillness that it even scared him. He had never seen his mild-mannered Labrador act so crazy.
“Maxine!” he yelled. No point in proceeding quietly now. “MAXINE! Get back here! MAXINE!”
He glimpsed her in the shadows, her tail and hind legs illuminated by a dull shaft of moonlight. And then she was gone.
He chased her through the trees listening for her barking. It sounded like she had veered left, then right. She sounded so mean, he thought. And he thought he heard something else. Footfalls? Somebody running? He couldn’t be sure.
He whistled for her, and kept shouting as her barking grew more and more distant. He unholstered his Mag-Lite and bathed the area in front of him with its beam, then sharpened it into focus and shot it up into the trees in the general direction of where she had run. He couldn’t pick up her track.
“Oh, no,” he moaned aloud. In the seven years he had had his dog, she had never run away from him.
He wondered whether she was stupid enough to have taken off after the grizzly bear.
Her barking was now so faint, he could barely hear it. It came from farther to the right in the forest, much deeper into the timber.
While she was still in earshot, he hoped, he fired two blasts from the shotgun into the sky. The flame from the muzzle strobed orange on the tree trunks near him.
Then he waited. Yelled. Whistled. Fired two more blasts and reloaded the shotgun with shells from his pocket. Nothing. It was now completely silent again.
“Shit, Maxine.”
There was no way he could track her in the dark and find her. He couldn’t even be sure she was to the right, the way sounds bounced around in the mountains. Very reluctantly, he began to work his way back the way he had come, stopping periodically hoping to hear her bark. Joe knew that if she managed to emerge from whatever forces had turned her into the hellhound she had become, she would know to return to the pickup. In normal circumstances, he would have given her a day or so before getting worried. But these weren’t normal circumstances. He pictured her mutilated body and it made him shudder.
Joe sat in his pickup with his windows rolled down and his headlights on. Every few minutes, he honked the horn. Maxine would know the sound, recognize it as him. He scanned the slope and timber, hoping des-perately to see her.
It pained him to think that Maxine had possibly charged at something in an effort to save him. Why else would she have become so ferocious, so single-minded? It wasn’t for her own sake, he thought. She wasn’t the kind of dog to embrace a confrontation or want to fight.
“Damn it all,” he said and fought the urge to pound the steering wheel. He kept looking over at the passenger seat, thinking that’s where she should be. He thought that he’d probably spent more hours with Maxine than with Marybeth or the girls. Maxine was a part of him.
He tried not to get maudlin. Leaning on the horn, he let the sound of it express what he felt.
He sat up with a start when something light colored and low to the ground moved just beyond his headlights. Grabbing for the spotlight, he thumbed the switch, the beam bathing the acreage in front of him with white light, seeing something doglike . . . only to discover that it was a damned coyote. The coyote stopped for a moment, eyes reflecting red, then moved down the mountain.
