legislative session ended a couple of months from now, Fraker would head back to his glossy home life and realize that maintaining the affair was too costly in a number of ways.
Madbird feared that, besides the hurt, it might knock Darcy into a tailspin just when she thought her life was turning the corner. And the situation reeked with the sense of a powerful white man figuring that since he was dealing with Indians, he was untouchable.
Very few things in the world pissed Madbird off like that did.
I knew that he was torn about whether to intervene. He hadn't, yet.
'Okay, it's ready,' Darcy said, stepping back from the pool table. 'One of you guys break.'
'Friday's ladies' night out here,' Madbird said.
'It is? When did that start?'
'New rule. Go ahead.'
She lined up on the cue ball and broke with a crack I could feel in my teeth. The balls seethed around and careened off the rails; when they settled, the six had dropped into a corner pocket and three other solids were easy picks. She tapped in two of those and left the third blocking another corner, with the cue ball buried in a cluster.
Madbird and I managed to sink a couple of stripes, but mostly we duffed around while she continued to clear the table. At the end of the workweek, concentrated effort was very low on our priority list, and this spacious old lodge with its huge stone fireplace and vintage country jukebox was a good place to kick back. Split Rock was the kind of setup that had once been fairly common in the West-a main building that housed a restaurant-bar, and several smaller cabins that served as motel units. Like a lot of the others, it had been hand-built of logs soon after World War II, when tourism by automobile was becoming an industry. It stood facing the landmark for which it was named-a chunk of granite the size of a two-story house, cleft from the top almost to the bottom by a vertical V that looked hewn by a giant ax. Big plate glass windows gave expansive views of the still-pristine surrounding country, the foothills of the Elkhorn Range several miles south of Helena. Often, you could see elk foraging on the mountainsides.
A sudden sound, like a spray of elevator music on acid, made my head jerk. It was the ring of Darcy's cell phone. She dropped her pool cue on the table and flew to dig the phone out of her purse, then pressed it to her ear and walked a few steps away from Madbird and me, talking in a tone too low for us to hear, while her other hand smoothed her hair.
This was the situation that Madbird had tweaked her about. Seth Fraker would drive here to pick her up, but instead of coming inside, he'd call as he was arriving and have her go out to meet him-the modern equivalent of honking the horn. Sure enough, headlights were turning from the highway into the Split Rock parking lot. There was enough daylight left for me to see the vehicle when it got close-Fraker's huge new pickup truck with all the bells and whistles, including smoked windows.
Darcy closed her phone, slipped it back into her purse, and turned to face us. The next couple of seconds were a strange, tense freeze where nothing happened, but it seemed like a lot of things could.
Madbird and Darcy moved in the same instant. He started walking around the table toward the parking lot. She scooped up a chunk of blue cue tip chalk and intercepted him. Her hand moved quick as a snake to smear a touch of it on his forehead. While I stared, she spun around and did the same to me. Just as abruptly, she broke into a brisk skipping dance, circling the pool table and both of us, chanting or singing under her breath.
Then she was gone out the door, leaving him and me standing there, looking like refugees from Ash Wednesday.
'What was that?' I said.
Madbird gazed stonily after her as she hurried across the parking lot and disappeared behind the darkened windows of Seth Fraker's big pickup.
'She threw something at us,' he said. 'Kind of a witchy trick, to get us off her case.'
2
The next afternoon,Saturday, I spent banging around my cabin doing the chores that I let slide during the week. I was forever losing ground; it was like fighting a Hydra that grew back two heads for every one I lopped off. Besides the routine business of cleaning and laundry and such, new problems were endless-plumbing leaks, vehicle repairs, a garage roof caving under one too many snowstorms. Most often, I'd discover further wrinkles once I started trying to fix the original one; I'd end up driving to town for materials two or three times; and so on. By the time I got the situation under control, I'd have lost a couple more weekends, and the list kept on growing.
But that was far outweighed by the payoff. I could never have imagined a greater gift than this property, left to me by my father: twenty acres of conifers in the Big Belt Mountains, an area that was steep, rugged, and thickly wooded, with only a few gravel roads that were dicey at the best of times. Humans were rare.
If I hadn't had this place to come back to during a bad time in my life-the collapse of my marriage and career in California, more or less simultaneously-I wasn't sure I'd have gotten through. Keeping it cobbled together was sort of like living with somebody who drove you nuts, but who you loved and couldn't stand to be without. You did whatever it took to make things work.
I'd been thinking about the incident with Madbird and Darcy yesterday at Split Rock. He hadn't been headed outside to brace Seth Fraker-just to get a look at him, invite him in for a drink, size him up. But I understood Darcy's concern, too. Madbird already didn't like what he knew about Fraker; in all probability, he'd like him even less if they met, and that would be clear. Darcy was well aware of it, and in her view, she had nothing to gain and a lot to lose if it happened.
As for the 'something' she'd thrown at us, paying any attention to it was silly. But I had come to suspect that there were cracks in the rational fabric of the universe, and such a 'something' might just slip through once in a while and rattle cages. In other words, I'd gotten more superstitious instead of more levelheaded. There were a lot of factors involved, including that my nature and lifestyle tended toward the solitary. Then, too, the more I knew about the fairer sex, the more mysterious they became. That wasn't to say I'd bought into Darcy's gesture in any serious way. It just made me a trifle uneasy.
The supply of stove wood that I kept in the cabin was low, so I walked outside through the wet spring snow to stock up. When I got to the woodshed, my half-feral black tomcat-I'd never named him; I just thought of him as the other guy, which was probably how he thought of me-was crouched on a stack of split fir, staring intently toward the tree line, twenty-five or thirty yards away. I glimpsed the shape of an animal just inside there. It was good-sized, with the deep brown color of a mule deer. I hadn't seen any of them for a while, and I was vaguely interested that they were coming back.
But instantly, the real situation clicked into focus. This thing was sitting upright, which deer didn't do. It was built like a Rottweiler, with powerful shoulders, a heavy round head, and bone-crushing jaws.
This wasn't any muley. This was a big cat-the reason the deer hadn't been around lately.
I wasn't entirely surprised. I'd been seeing its tracks for the past couple of weeks, and assumed it was a cougar; this part of Montana had always been their turf. At a guess, he was a young male who'd been driven off by his elders and hadn't yet staked out his own claim. But there were some factors that didn't fit. Cougars usually kept moving around a large area, and they usually stayed well away from humans. I'd only ever glimpsed them in the backcountry, where I'd roamed a lot as a kid. In the past several years, since I'd been living in the cabin fulltime, I'd hardly seen a trace.
But this guy had been hanging around for a while, and he'd been coming within the boundaries of my property. Right now I was looking into his eyes, staring straight back at me. He must have heard me coming out of the cabin, and he hadn't budged an inch. No doubt he was hungry, too. Deer were the main staple of a cougar's diet. He must have been eking out a meager living on small critters.
Shy though cougars traditionally were, attacks on people were becoming more common. Probably they were getting used to us and losing their fear. They'd taken down several joggers around the West, and here in Montana not long ago, a pair of them had stalked a group of schoolchildren on an outing. Courageous teachers had gotten the kids to safety, but the cats hadn't even made any attempt at stealth.
I wasn't too worried, but I admit I suddenly found myself thinking about what I'd do if he came my way. The
