Town in a Wild Moose Chase

A touch of desperation crept into Candy’s voice. “Solomon, you must remember something about it. You must have some idea about what’s been going on in these woods.”

“Sure, I have some ideas,” he said, his voice rising defensively. “I got lots of ideas. But none of them makes much sense. I can’t put two and two together. That’s why I was hoping you could help me. Why else do you think I sent for you?”

“Sent for me? But—?” She stopped, suddenly confused. She looked from Solomon to the moose, which still lingered in the woods just beyond the edge of the camp, and back to the old hermit, giving him a stunned look. “Do you mean to tell me that’s why the moose led me here? You sent it to fetch me?”

“Well, what else do you think?” he asked, growing irritated. “It makes perfect sense, don’t it?” He let out a snort and pulled a pipe from a hidden pocket. He clamped it between dark-stained teeth, lit it with a twig from the fire, and blew out a puff of bluish smoke as he pointed with his head toward the great white creature in the woods.

“ ’Course, I don’t think anyone could send him anywhere he didn’t want to go. I just asked him politely to go fetch you and bring you here, and that’s what he did, all right. Don’t ask me how he did it ’cause I don’t know. But you could say I always did have a way with the forest critters, so maybe he just sensed something and went to find you.”

He paused a moment, thinking. “He’s the one who got me into this, you know. But I’m the one who followed him. He didn’t pull me along on a rope. I could have turned back anytime, but I didn’t, and that was my decision, all right. I just sort of walked right into it.” He stopped to take a deep puff on his pipe and looked at her pensively. “He’s the one who found that body in the woods, you know. That moose led me right to it.”

Candy shifted her gaze to the wild moose, foraging farther away from the camp now. It all sounded unbelievable, but somehow, for some reason, she believed him. “No, I didn’t know that,” she said, and found herself leaning forward a little in her chair. “So there really was a body in the woods?”

He puffed on his pipe and nodded.

“Do you know who it was?”

Solomon shook his head. “Never saw him before. He was pretty well dressed, though. Expensive clothes and boots. Must have cost him a pretty penny, I can tell you that.”

“Do you know how he died?”

The old hermit nodded sagely. “Oh, sure I do. It was that hatchet in his back that done it.”

Twenty-Six

After that, she got a fairly complete version of the story, though it took a while, since Solomon kept digressing into all sorts of subjects. Even though he lived alone, he was not completely unsociable. Candy suspected he was even enjoying talking to a young, attractive woman who was sitting comfortably in his camp, sipping tea, nibbling on biscuits, and giving him her undivided attention.

It appeared there was still some life left in the old coot.

He’d stumbled across the moose’s tracks two days ago while out collecting firewood, he told her, and that had led him to the moose itself, and the body. That’s when he’d been spooked by something in the woods—possibly another person, he said, or possibly something else. He had started running and thought the thing was chasing him, though he couldn’t be sure.

He sounded confused when he tried to describe this part of the story. “I guess I lost my bearings in the woods and got turned around, which is a rare event for me, I can tell you that. I thought I was headed back to my home camp, but somehow I came out in your field. Could’ve been that bump on the head.”

“How did it happen?” she asked him.

He puffed away thoughtfully before he continued. “Don’t know for sure, but I think I might’ve run into a branch or something. Knocked my hat clean off.”

“Were you attacked?”

“I don’t think so,” he said in a hesitating tone. “There for a while I lost track of things.”

“You scared the heck out of me when you stumbled out on the field behind the house,” she told him. “I was running to get the police, but when I looked around, you were gone. Where did you disappear to?”

“First I went to get my hat,” he said, “and then I went back to the body. I didn’t know if he was alive or dead, but I had to check. I didn’t want to leave him out there alone in the woods, especially if he needed help.”

“Weren’t you afraid of that thing that was chasing you, whatever it was?”

“Sure I was, but I was careful. I moved slowly and quietly, just in case it came at me again. But it must have moved on. It had been there, though. I could tell.”

“What do you mean?”

Solomon shook his head. “Well, that’s part of what I don’t understand. You see, when I finally made it back to the body, something had changed. I figured out pretty quick what it was.”

“And what was it?”

He squinted his eyes, as if recalling the scene, and shook his head. “The place had been cleaned up. And all the footprints and tracks were gone. Someone had erased them all.”

Her brow furrowed. “How’d they do that?”

He shrugged. “Tree branch with some leaves left on it, or some other type of brush, sweeping it across the ground. You did that when you were a kid, didn’t you? So you could hide somewhere and sneak around on your friends when you were in the woods?”

“I don’t… well, maybe, yes. So all the tracks were gone?”

“That’s right.”

“But you found the body?”

“Oh yeah, I found it.”

“Was he… still alive?”

Solomon pursed his lips and shook his head quickly. “He was dead when I got there. His face was white as the snow, and the body was turning stiff.”

Candy had read about this lately. She knew a body began to stiffen fairly quickly after death, and rigor mortis began in two to four hours. After a few hours, the entire body would feel stiff, though full rigor took between twelve and twenty-four hours, as far as she could recall.

So if the body had been stiff when Solomon had found it, it had been there for a while.

“Is the body still in the woods?” she asked after a few moments.

“No, I moved it.”

This surprised her. “Why did you move it?”

“It was lying in a gully. Snowmelt was starting to cover it up, and more snow was coming soon. It was about to get buried. I had to do something with it.”

Candy remembered. It had snowed later that day, though not too heavily. But it was reasonable for Solomon to think the body might have been quickly covered by snow.

“How did you move it?”

Solomon nodded with his head toward the sledge, parked next to the rock wall. “It took some maneuvering,” he said. Under his breath, he added, “I had to take that hatchet out of his back.”

Candy was afraid he’d say something like that. “Solomon, you disturbed a murder scene.” She didn’t frame it as an accusation, but simply as a statement of fact.

“Yup, I know all about that,” the old hermit said, “but there was no help for it. It was about to get buried, and then it’d be gone ’til spring, so I had to do something.”

She understood his reasoning—he was just trying to help—but she also knew Chief Durr would be livid when he found out.

He’d also be livid when he found out she was involved in the mystery, and had stumbled across Solomon on her own. She wondered vaguely what had become of Officer Jody. Hadn’t he been assigned to her so he’d be here