Below Zero

“You remembered the trip wire this time,” Nate said. “That’s good, because I armed it with a shotgun.”

Joe shook his head. “Now you tell me.”

“Watch it on the way out, too.”

“I will. Do you have room for this bird?”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“A guy shot it with an arrow.”

Nate’s eyes narrowed. “Is the guy still alive?”

“I arrested him.”

Nate mock spit into dirt beside his boots to show Joe what he thought of that.

JOE FOLLOWED NATE up the trail and through a thick greasy stand of caragana. The mouth of Nate’s cave was obscured from the outside by curtains of military camouflage netting, and Nate pushed it aside so Joe could enter. Because the netting was translucent, the depths of the cave were lit in an otherworldly olive green glow, similar to what one saw through night vision goggles. It took a moment for Joe’s eyes to adjust.

“Here,” Nate said, “let me see that bird.”

Joe was grateful to hand the eagle over.

“You want your sweatshirt back?” Nate asked, pulling a wicked-looking eight-inch knife from a sheath on his belt and slicing through the duct tape.

“Yup.”

“You want the sock back?”

“You can keep it.”

“What would I want your sock for?” Nate asked.

Joe shrugged.

Nate talked to the eagle, telling it she was a pretty bird, a beautiful bird, that everything was going to be just fine now. Slowly, Nate removed the sock from her head and stared into her brilliant yellow eyes. The eagle opened her beak to screech, but Nate said, “None of that, none of that,” and the eagle kept silent.

Joe was amazed, said, “How did you do that?”

Nate didn’t respond. He was running his hands over the eagle, talking to her, acclimating her to his touch, keeping her calm.

“How do you know she’s a she, for that matter?”

“I always know,” Nate said. “I could tell when you were carrying her.”

Joe didn’t pursue it. He watched as Nate slipped the sweatshirt off the eagle, tossing it into a heap near Joe’s feet, and continued running his hands over the bird, smoothing her feathers, pausing to feel the scarred-over entrance and exit wounds. From a bulging pocket in his cargo pants, Nate fished out leather jesses that he tied to her talons and a large tooled leather hood that he slipped over her head. He carried her to a heavy stoop made of branches with the bark still on and tied the jesses to the structure. Like a vintner slipping plastic webbing over wine bottles to keep them from clinking together in the sack, Nate gently fitted a sleeve of tight mesh over her body from her shoulders to her talons.

To Joe, he said, “She’s going to be all right, I think. You did a good job binding her up like that so the broken bones could start to knit. We’ll see in a few weeks if she can fly. This mesh sleeve will keep her from flapping her wings and breaking the bones again. Whether she can fly again will depend on how much other damage there is. I can’t fix severed tendons.”

“And if she can’t fly?”

Nate used his index finger to simulate cutting his throat. “An eagle that can’t fly is a deposed king: humiliated and useless to anybody or anything.”

AS NATE BREWED cowboy coffee in an open pot on a Coleman stove, Joe took in the cave. It was as he remembered. Gasoline-powered generator, satellite Internet, bookshelves filled with battered tomes on falconry, volumes on warfare and world history, newer books on American Indian culture and spirituality. A table and ancient four-poster bed had been left by outlaws. Near the entrance of the cave were stacks of scarred military footlockers containing clothes, equipment, food, explosives. In an alcove near the cave entrance a skinned pronghorn antelope carcass hung from a hook, the backstraps and most of a hind-quarter sliced away. Nate followed Joe’s gaze and waggled his eyebrows.

Joe said, “At least you could have pretended you weren’t poaching.”

Nate said, “My life is an open book. You just don’t want to read it.”

Joe thought, He’s right.

Nate handed Joe a cup of coffee, and Joe told Nate about the text messages. Nate had been there backing up Joe at the Sovereign camp that winter afternoon. As Joe talked, Nate’s expression never changed.

Nate said, “I’ve always wondered about that day. I was pinning down the feds, as you know, but in my peripheral vision I saw maybe a dozen snowmobiles take off into the trees. A couple of them had two or three people on them, and I remember one in particular that had some small people clinging to it.”

Joe paused. “Why didn’t you tell me that before?”

“I never really thought about it,” Nate said, shrugging. “You told me you saw April in the first trailer that burned down. I knew they had kids in that camp besides her, so why would I assume she was one of them on that snowmobile?”

Joe conceded, took a sip.