He squelched the light of his flashlight and reached out for the saddle horn to steady himself because he felt suddenly light-headed.
“Oh, God,” he said, fighting nausea.
Nate said, “I think we found the boys from Michigan.”
ONE BY ONE, THE GLASSY SURFACES OF THE ALPINE CIRQUES Joe and Nate rode past mirrored the stars and slice of moon. When a trout rose and nosed the water at the second cirque, Joe found himself unexpectedly heartened as he watched lazy ringlets alter the reflection.
They’d cut down the bodies and stacked them on the side of the trail. Joe rooted through their pockets and found no personal items or identification of any kind. He and Nate covered the bodies with dead logs and sheets of bark to try to prevent predators from feeding on them, and Joe bookmarked the location in his GPS so he could later direct search teams to the exact place to recover and identify the bodies. Dave Farkus had not been among the dead.
It was two in the morning when they rode by the last cirque and Joe clucked and pulled his horse off the trail to parallel the meandering outlet stream.
Nate said, “Is this the creek you followed out of the mountains last time?”
“Yup.”
“What’s the name of it?”
“No Name Creek,” Joe said. “Really.”
“Seems fitting,” Nate said, clucking his horse forward.
“Stay alert,” Joe said to Nate, although he was really talking to himself. “Those brothers could be anywhere.”
DEEP IN THE TIMBER and far down the mountain on its western slope, Joe almost rode by the dark opening where the cabin had been. He didn’t so much see it as feel it—a creeping shiver that rolled from his stomach to his throat that made him rein to a stop and turn to his right in the saddle.
“Here,” he said. He nosed the gelding over, and the horse splashed through the shallow stream and to the other side. As he rode through the opening, the familiarity of it in the starlight made him relive his escape from the cabin. When he reached the clearing where the cabin had been, he rode around it, puzzled. Ghostly columns of pale starlight lit the opening. But there was no sign of the burned cabin, just a tangled pile of deadfall.
Nate asked, “Are you sure this is the right place?”
“It’s got to be,” Joe said. He probed the deadfall with the beam of his flashlight.
Sweeping the pool of light across the dead branches, he noted a small square of orange.
“Ah,” he said with relief, and dismounted. With the flashlight in his mouth shining down, Joe tugged at branches and threw them away from the pile. He kicked away the last tangle to reveal a square foundation of bricks, which was where the woodstove had been.
“The Grim Brothers hid the scene,” he said to Nate. “They carted away whatever was still here and covered the footprint of the cabin in downed timber. No wonder Sheriff Baird and his men never found this.”
“I was starting to wonder myself,” Nate said with a grin. “I was thinking maybe you made it all up.”
“Ha ha,” Joe said sourly.
JOE AND NATE SAT on opposite ends of a downed tree trunk at four in the morning, facing the slash pile that covered up the remains of the cabin, each with his own thoughts. Joe tried to eat some deer jerky he’d brought along, but every time he started to chew he thought of the faces of the three bodies hanging from the cross pole, and he lost his appetite. He could hear Nate slowly crunching gorp from a Ziploc bag on the other end of the log, and their horses munching mountain grass. There was no more reassuring sound, Joe thought, than horses eating grass. Their
If only everything else were, he thought.
That’s when he clearly heard a branch snap deep in the timber. The sound came from the north, from somewhere up a wooded slope.
THERE WERE DISTINCTIVE sounds in the mountains, Joe knew. He was never a believer of trees’ falling silently in the forest if there was no one there to hear it, because he didn’t believe it was all about him, or any other human. Nature did what nature did. To philosophize that acts occurred in the wild in the presence of people and for their benefit was to acknowledge that humans were gods. Joe
But there was a unique sound to a dry branch snapping under the foot of a man. It was a deep and muffled crack, like a silenced gunshot. It was a different sound from that of a twig breaking under the hard cloven hoof of an ungulate—an elk or moose—that produced a sharp snap like a pretzel stick being halved. At the sound, Joe rolled to his right and he sensed Nate roll to his left. Joe had no doubt Nate was on his knees with the .454 Casull drawn by now. For his own part, he had the shotgun ready. He slowly jacked a shell into the chamber to keep the metal-on- metal action as quiet as possible, and when the live shell was loaded into the chamber he fed another double-ought round into the receiver. He held his shotgun at the ready and felt his senses straining to determine if whoever had made the sound was closer, farther, or standing still.
Joe turned to his left to ask Nate if he could hear any more sounds, but Nate was gone. Joe squinted into the darkness, trying to find his friend.
When he couldn’t, Joe settled back on his haunches behind the downed log, his shotgun muzzle pointed vaguely uphill.
