“Shut up or I’ll really give you something to cry about,” the almost-man said.
I lay there for a few seconds and fought against the concussion, but my eyes refused to focus. I closed them for a moment and thought I could hear something in the ice as though the plates of frozen water were colliding underneath me, grinding like glaciers. I opened my eyes and watched the snow skim across the surface toward me and could feel the warmth of my face adhering its skin to the lake.
I peeled my face away and looked at the sky, half expecting Virgil to yank me back up to a standing position, but nothing happened.
I stared at the lower part of the clouds that raced overhead and could hear a thumping noise, loud and insistent. The noise was steady, but it wasn’t coming from above-rather, from below. I could feel it in my back, through the expedition pack, as it set up a rhythm. It was a song in counterpoint, one that I’d heard before but was unable to identify.
The noise settled into my heartbeat and the pounding in my head. My legs moved okay, but when I pulled my hand away from my temple, there was blood. The pain was tremendous and once again reminded me of the headaches I’d had only a few months ago, before my eye operation. I stretched my jaw and probed the wound under my hat-more blood. “Well, hell…”
My hat fell off as I rolled onto the pack on my back and sat there looking for Virgil.
There was no one.
As far as I could see, there was no one on the ice of Lake Marion but me.
I immediately felt panic, disconnected the breast strap, and shrugged the pack and rifle from my shoulders. I wrestled myself to my feet, assuming that with Virgil’s weight he had hit a soft spot in the ice and had broken through.
I kneeled, sweeping my arms across in an attempt to find the hole that must’ve been covered by the snow, but there wasn’t anything. I scrambled my way back along my tracks but could see only the dull, opaque sheen of the flat surface with not so much as a crack.
My head was still killing me, but I couldn’t stop jerking it from left to right in an attempt to find him. I took a deep breath and stood, turning three hundred and sixty degrees, but there was nothing except undisturbed lake. I walked in a spiraling circle emanating from where I’d fallen, fully expecting the giant Crow to be somewhere in my field of vision, either approaching or disappearing into the blowing snow, but he wasn’t there and there were no prints.
I stretched my jaw again and blinked my eyes. “Virgil!”
“Virgil. Virgil…”
My voice ricocheted off the cliffs, and I swallowed and stood there for a moment more before noticing that my hat was skimming away on the surface of the lake. Carefully, I trudged across the smooth, hard surface and had just begun to lean over to grab it when a ripping gust carried it out toward the center until it lodged in a small drift a good twenty yards away toward the ridge. I sighed and thought about how I’d lost my last hat and how I damn well wasn’t going to lose this one.
Figuring I’d not have to backtrack if I took the entire load with me, I gripped the strap of the pack and hoisted it, picked up the Sharps and examined it to see if I’d done any damage, but it appeared intact. I put the rifle on my shoulder and looked through the binoculars.
All I could see were the acres of beetle-kill pine that spilled over the ridge and down the valley toward me. I followed the trail to make sure Virgil hadn’t gone ahead and then followed it behind to see if he’d retreated.
I lowered the binoculars and looked around just one more time, forcing his name from my lungs like a bullhorn. “Virgil!?”
Nothing.
I approached my hat and watched as it started to flip up again. I scrambled over and got ahold of the crown and tried to pull it up, but it stuck to the ice, probably from the warmth of my head.
I yanked at it this time, scattering the snow and revealing a freeze-dried, mummified hand.
I blinked hard to clear my head, thinking that it must’ve been a frozen branch, but it was still there when I opened my eyes. I knelt down and used my hat as a fan to scatter the snow that had built up around the thing.
There was a lot of skin left, with a few tendons, and the nails were purpled and black. The wrist was bent, the thumb contracted toward the palm, the forefinger extended and the other three digits slightly curved, almost as if that one finger were pointing up the trail.
I was sure this had to be the hunter that Virgil had mentioned in his story about the dead horse, though it seemed odd that the body of the man had drifted north, away from where the accident had occurred.
There was a ring on the one finger, so I thought I should retrieve it for identification purposes and reached down to carefully remove it, but when I did, the entire hand broke off in mine. Kneeling there holding it, the whole situation felt rather surreal, not to mention macabre, and I was beginning to think that I’d hit my head harder than I thought.
“Jesus…”
To make matters worse, my disturbing the hand had loosened the ring so that it was now sliding back and forth on the bony finger. More carefully this time, I placed the ring between my own thumb and forefinger and slid it off the end. It was silver with coral and turquoise wolves chasing each other around the band, and I couldn’t help but feel that I’d seen it before. There was an inscription on the inside, but the print was far too fine and worn away for me to see what was engraved.
I dropped it in the breast pocket of my jacket and then looked at the hand in my hand.
It seemed somewhat disrespectful to just throw it into a snowbank and walk away; then there was the DNA that might give us the name of the poor, missing hunter in case the ring didn’t narrow the field.
I stuffed the gruesome remains into a different outside pocket and figured since it was my lot in life to be the Bighorn Bone Collector, I might as well gather up all of them.
I tightened my hat onto my head and kicked off north toward the gully of trees that led up the creek that fed Lake Marion, which connected with the ridge. Maybe it was Virgil’s sudden disappearance or maybe it was my growing collection, but I felt very alone and hoped I wasn’t going to eventually add to the assembly.
12
It was a ragged forest decimated by the bark beetles-a standing forest of the dead. They say that if you’re quiet and you listen, you can hear them chewing.
They’re only about an eighth of an inch long, like a grain of rice, which is appropriate since they’re indigenous to China, Mongolia, and Korea. Word is they hitched a ride over on truck pallets, crates, or some such-and so far they’ve eaten more than 1.5 million prime acres of our woodlands. The forest service figures that in a few years the bark beetles will have killed every mature lodgepole pine in Wyoming; by then the epidemic will be under control, because there won’t be anything for the little monsters to eat.
The other thing that will kill them is an extended cold snap of subzero temperatures that lasts more than ten days. Now, I figured that this winter alone we’d already accomplished that many times over, but evidently some of the little buggers were frostproof.
The effects of beetle-kill on water flows, watersheds, timber production, wildlife habitat, recreation sites, transmission lines, and scenic views is already horrific, but the thing that’s got everybody really nervous is that, if given half a chance, there will be a forest fire unlike anything ever seen-Smokey Bear’s worst nightmare, a wildfire that would run from New Mexico to Colorado, through Wyoming, all the way into Montana.
When I saw those standing lifeless brown streaks of dead trees running through my forests, I always thought that I could hear the chewing, too.
But maybe that was just in my mind.
The northern tip of Lake Marion was fed by a healthy amount of water that also filled a couple of kidney- shaped ponds that had no names. The snow was deep in the gullies, but the wind had polished the banks, making the footing pretty good; with recent developments, footing was foremost of my priorities, so I took the shortcut that would help me gain ground on the party ahead. I could still see the ridge trail they followed-it wasn’t as if I was
