Hunter's Moon Read online

  Samantha drains the collapsible dog dish into which Will has poured half the water bottle that’s ridden all day in his game pocket and is plastered with grouse feathers. He treats his companion to the grouse thighs and himself to a swig of bourbon from his hip flask. He is circumspect about drinking at home, to avoid tempting Maddie. The wreckage she sees every day at the clinic serves as a kind of aversion therapy at least as effective as the A.A. meetings—but he limits himself to one glass of wine at dinner and keeps his whiskey in a locked drawer to which he holds the only key.

  He now has time to worry about her. She must be worried about him. She must have called his cell several times. It’s in the truck’s glove compartment. No point in carrying an expensive iPhone on his person and risking losing or breaking it—out here, far from any cell tower, it’s as useless a means of communication as two tin cans connected by a string. Will she notify the local volunteer rescue squad? What can she tell them? The message he left—Gone hunting with Skryd—might as well have been no message at all.

  The night’s chill descends. Gritting his teeth, he stands and drags a beech log six feet long and as many inches thick and drops one end into the coals. It soon catches; bright, welcome flames lick away the darkness surrounding his campsite. He buttons his jacket collar and scuttles closer to the fire, trying to draw heat into his body so he can sleep. The burning section of log flickers down to embers. He shoves the next eighteen, twenty inches of it into the fire. The bad knee has stiffened, feels like a rusted hinge. If it’s blown, he might not be able to walk out in the morning. He leans against a tree trunk and takes another pull from the hip flask, longer than the first, both to dull the throbbing and make himself drunk enough to sleep.

  “Y’know, Sammy girl, was a time when I could sleep anywhere anytime on anything, kind of like you.” Samantha crawls onto his lap, snuggles up to him as if she’s a puppy instead of a fifty-five-pound dog. “Once, on a patrol, I conked out on the floor of a bombed-out pagoda. Had a hole in the roof an elephant could have flown through, if elephants could fly. Monsoon season, rained all night, three, four inches of water on that floor, and I slept right through it.”

  He rubs under her ears, as much to show affection as to feel her body heat in his hands. Her trust in him moves him, arouses a flashing shame.

  “Sorry for what I did yesterday. We’ve got to stick together and get through this, okay?”

  He lies down on the pine boughs, curling into the fetal position, and falls into a shallow sleep disordered by weird dreams. At some post-midnight hour, he is startled awake by Samantha’s growl. In a state of bristling vigilance, she’s up on all fours, facing out past the fire’s embers.

  Will, his nose and ears tingling from cold, whispers, “What is it, girl?”

  A low rumble in her chest answers him. He stares into the darkness but can make out nothing, not so much as the silhouette of a tree. It’s as if he’s looking at a solid black wall. Then he hears them. One starts off with a long, high-pitched howl, drawing a chorus from the others. They sound like a madhouse glee club, their individual cries merging into a single note, rising until it mimics an air-raid siren’s moan, before it shatters into a series of yelps and demented cackles. The pack is not too far away, maybe a quarter mile. Will knows that wolves do not attack people—one good whiff of human scent and they’ll be gone. But that baying choir bypasses his frontal lobe, penetrating straight through to the paleo brain, where primeval terrors reside. The hairs on his arms and on the back of his neck rise; there is a fluttering in his chest, as if a small bird is trapped in his rib cage—the same sensations he felt when Lonnie Kidman, in a half crouch, waving the AR-15 like a wand, stepped into the hallway, at the other end of which Will waited with a shouldered 12-gauge.

  Will had meant to kill him, but in the instant before he fired, it came to him as a certainty that Kidman sought what in his deranged little mind would be a glorious death in a gunfight. To deny him, to ensure that the little psychopath would suffer a lifetime in prison, Will dropped his aim to Kidman’s knees and pulled the trigger.

  The wolves have ceased their racket. The quiet is disturbing. He imagines they are stalking him. He pictures their yellow eyes, glowing with intent to tear him and Samantha to shreds. They become for him the incarnation of all that is savage, dangerous, and unpredictable in wild nature—and in people. When the lupine sing-along recommences, he wraps one arm around Samantha’s neck, grasping her collar to hold her steady. With his free hand, he grips his shotgun, bracing the stock against the ground. The gun is a side-by-side with two triggers, one behind the other. He yanks the front trigger as hard as he can, and the weapon doubles—that is, fires both barrels at once. The recoil nearly tears it from his hand. The blast echoes, and the wolves instantly stop howling. In a moment, he feels the tension pass from Samantha’s body; she flops onto her belly. The pack has fled.

  “That settled their hash, Sammy girl,” he says, aware that he sounds more confident than in fact he is. He reloads and lies down again, the gun within easy reach.

  3.

  Dawn breaks silent and cold. No birds sing; no breeze stirs the trees or the leaves on the ground. The sky is a vast arch of lead-colored crepe, rent here and there to allow a little light to pass through. Will’s knee as he stands to rebuild the fire launches rockets of pain down to his ankle, up through his thigh. As he wonders if he’s torn the meniscus, he considers his options. Surely, Maddie has called the search-and-rescue squad by now. Maybe the sensible thing would be to stay put, piling dead leaves and green wood on the fire to create smoke and make it easier for a plane or helicopter to spot him. But what information could Maddie have given? She has no idea where he’d gone, so they’ll have no idea where to look for him. There is also the matter of his pride. He doesn’t want anyone to rescue him; he wants to rescue himself. He will walk out, exhausted as he is. Christ, he can’t be much more than a mile from the road. He hobbles over to a blowdown, saws off a stout forked branch with the pocket saw, cuts the forks down to size and the stick to the correct length. It’s a cartoon of a crutch but more effective than his shotgun.

  He must maintain as straight a westerly course as possible. He remembers that his Ojibwa friend, Johnny Bugg, performs a ritual every morning, facing each of the four cardinal directions to spiritually center himself. Will tries it now, not for any religious purposes but to imprint a compass in his brain. Looking first to where the clouds are reddening, he turns slowly leftward, north to west to south and back again to east. Making one more half circle, he faces in the direction opposite the sunrise, telling himself, West, this way is west, and pushes off on his makeshift crutch.

  To keep track of distance traveled, he counts each time his left foot strikes the ground. That equals a pace—five feet, give or take. The concentration this requires takes his mind off his knee. The pain often makes him dizzy and he has to stop to regain his balance. Or to whistle for Samantha, who, oblivious to their predicament, once again thinks she’s hunting and sprints away on long casts. At last, he spies an opening in the woods not far ahead. It’s got to be the county road.

  It isn’t but rather two broad, dried-up cranberry bogs linked by an isthmus, where an enormous old pine has fallen. Will checks his watch, gazes up to find the blanched eye of the sun, and disappointment at not arriving at the road clots into dismay—in an hour and a half, he’s come just three hundred eighty paces, little better than one-third of a mile, and he has somehow drifted off to the south. The compass in his head, it seems, isn’t much of an improvement over the broken one in his pocket.

  As Will reorients himself, Samantha trots across the first, and widest, bog to the isthmus. She stops suddenly a few yards from the dead pine’s exposed roots. Mortared with packed dirt and rock, they resemble the twisted spokes in a giant wheel. It leans out over the pit where the tree once stood, forming what looks like a cave’s mouth. Samantha stands utterly still. Her tail is not extended, as it would be if she were pointing a bird.
Instead, it’s bent between her legs. Porcupine, he thinks. A porcupine is lurking in the pit. A creature Samantha has learned to fear: a few months ago, she was quilled and nearly blinded in one eye.

  Will crosses the bog and limps up the isthmus to her. Tremors ripple through her flanks; otherwise, she’s as motionless as a painted dog—literally petrified. He’s about to pull her away by the collar when he catches a smell familiar to him, a strong, greasy stench like rancid bacon fat, and in the same moment sees a pair of eyes peering out from the darkness of the cave-like opening. A bear that’s found its den. The dirt scattered around the entrance indicates that it’s been making home improvements before settling in for the winter.

  Will doesn’t have time to be scared. Dropping the crutch, he snatches Samantha’s collar and tugs her as he backs off. She resists, surprisingly strong for her size. Possibly she’s too terrified to move—she’s a sweet-natured bird dog, not some bear-hunting redbone or bluetick hound. But then, with a quick, twisting movement, she breaks his grip, yanking him off his feet, and bolts into the woods. This comes in reaction to the bear’s emergence from its den. It makes neither menacing sounds nor aggressive moves—merely stands with a stupid look on its face, which is as black as a tire and almost as wide. Or so it appears to Will, down on his butt, cradling his 20-gauge. What happens next happens in less than ten seconds, but there is a time dilation, as in a dream, that stretches those seconds into long minutes. The bear heaves itself onto its hind legs, its fur rippling like charred grass in a breeze. It’s no more than five yards away, roughly the distance at which he shot Lonnie Kidman. And for a microsecond, Kidman’s image superimposes itself in the space between Will and the bear. He raises the shotgun as the animal regards him, its barrel-top head cocked aside, its bewildered expression replaced by one of wary curiosity, such as a man might bestow on a stranger at his door. And Will, recalling his mother-in-law’s stories about the bear spirit’s healing powers, experiences something he never has before—a sense of communion with the wild beast towering over him. He lowers the gun and says in a subdued tone, “Hey, bear. Don’t mean you any harm. Hey, bear…” It grunts, drops back to four legs, and the last he sees of it is its broad rump as it crawls back into the den.

  Will retrieves his crutch and heads in the direction of Samantha’s flight, whistling and calling to her. Within a short time, a curious feeling takes possession of him, one for which he has no words. The woods that the wolf howls had imbued with intentional threat have shed their menace. He’s still lost in them, yet he doesn’t feel lost. He can’t describe the feeling any better than that.

  He stumbles on, more worried about Samantha’s safety than his own. He spots fresh paw prints in the soft loam, follows them for a while, loses them in drifts of fallen leaves, then, quite by chance, crosses them again. They no longer zigzag but run straight, leading Will through some hemlocks, down into a culvert, the crossing of which tests his tolerance for pain, and, to his astonishment, out onto the county road.

  His relief at finding it at last is alloyed with anxiety. Where the hell is Samantha? Her prints lead south over what appear to be recent tire tracks, the treads’ imprint sharp and distinct. She was chasing a car or truck. He follows her trail, which ends fifty yards farther on. There are boot prints in the beige dirt, a woman’s or boy’s from the size of them. The tire tracks continue southward. Someone has picked her up. Will fervently hopes that whoever has found her won’t steal her but will call his home number, etched with her name into the brass plate on her collar.

  Right then he notices a dust cloud rising about a quarter of a mile down the ruler-straight road. A pickup truck emerges from the dust, its horn blaring. He recognizes the old brown-and-cream Dodge and, standing in the middle of the road, waves his crutch, like some disabled hitchhiker hailing a ride.

  The Dodge swerves to the side and stops and Skryd rolls down the window.

  “Well, son of a bitch, we were getting ready to call the sheriff and the bloodhounds.”

  Maddie sits in the passenger seat; Samantha is chained in the back.

  “Been driving up and down for the last hour, honking, calling for you, for the dog. She must’ve heard us, because she popped outta the trees and started to give chase.” Skryd gestures at the crutch. “What’d you do? Shoot yourself?”

  Will doesn’t answer. Skryd gets out, opens the passenger door like a chauffeur, and helps him inside. Maddie, arms folded across her abdomen, slides over to the middle of the seat, grudgingly, as if she’s not sure she wants to make room for him. Down vest, flannel shirt, hiking boots, fanny pack—she’s dressed for the boondocks.

  “Glad to see you,” she says in a voice that could freeze meat.

  “Not half as glad as I am to see you.”

  “So if you didn’t shoot yourself, what did you do?”

  He tells her, then asks how they knew where to look for him.

  “Oh, that’s quite the saga. You’re aware that Mr. Skrydlowski and I hardly know each other? That I was completely in the dark about where to find him? Or how to get in touch with him? And you leave that message, like I’m supposed to know?”

  “Okay, I should’ve—”

  “Woulda. Coulda. Shoulda,” she interrupts bitterly. “When you didn’t show up by nightfall, I called the Magnusons. Where the hell do I find this Skryd guy? Jim didn’t have a number for him but knew where he lived, and he and Helen drove me out to his place. And there he was with his daughter but no you—”

  “Roseanne,” Skryd interjects. He puts the pickup in gear and heads up the road to the junction with the jeep trail.

  “Mr. Skrydlowski—Bruce, my new best friend forever—hadn’t seen you all day,” Maddie resumes. “I was frantic. I phoned our local search-and-rescue guys, and they said there was nothing they could do at night. Nothing they could do in daylight, for that matter. Because you could have been anywhere inside of a zillion square miles. They said I should call the state police. They have helicopters. They also charge for that service. Thousands, Will. Thousands.”

  She falls silent. Will remembers an old word. “Dungeon.” No, “dudgeon.” “High dudgeon.” That’s what Maddie is in. They are bouncing up the jeep trail now, the Dodge’s worn shocks slamming them against each other.

  “Woke up this morning and remembered the map,” Skryd says, picking up the “saga,” as Maddie had termed it. “Remembered I’d left it on the table but it was gone. Roseanne said she didn’t see it or put it away. So I figured that you must’ve let yourself in and helped yourself to it and went on out. Seemed like a real-long long shot, but I called your wife, and here we are.” He pauses, runs fingers nervously through his wiry hair. “So how come you did that? Came out and took the map and told your wife that we were gone hunting together?”

  “I came out to…” Will hesitates, unsure how to explain his cockeyed plan to pretend to run into Skryd. “I was going to apologize.”

  “What for?”

  “For what I said. When we were cutting firewood this July.”

  Skryd muses for a few moments. “I remember you said my thinking was flawed.”

  “That and more.”

  “Well, I guess my thinking wasn’t flawed this time around.”

  They arrive at the clearing and Will’s truck, a sight as welcoming as lighted windows in a dark woods. Will climbs out, wincing.

  “Thanks, Bruce,” he says. “You’re not what I said you were, and I’m sorry for saying it.”

  “Forget what that was.”

  Maddie takes the wheel and, with Samantha nestled in the back seat, follows Skryd out to the county road. Will watches the trees pass by and struggles to think of a word for the feeling that came over him after his adventure with the bear. A sense that he was not separated from his surroundings, or from himself. Oneness. That will have to do. Oneness.

  “Since I’m in apologizing mode, I’ll apologize to you, too,” he says.

  “No ‘I’m sorry’s, please,” she replies. “I
want you to promise you won’t do this to me again. You’re sixty-four years old.”

  “Any chance you stole some OxyContin from the clinic?”

  “Hell, no. I’ve got Advil in there.” She points to her fanny pack, on the seat between them. He swallows two with a long pull from the water bottle, realizing that he has a raging thirst.

  “Okay. Promise.”

  She doesn’t say anything for a full thirty seconds as they cruise along the Lake Superior shore. With its teal-green nearshore shallows shading to the royal blue of the deep water, the lake is as lovely as a tropical sea.

  “Know what Helen said to me last night?” Maddie says finally.

  “Not a clue.”

  “Coldest cold comfort I’ve ever got. Subzero.”

  “What, Maddie?”

  “She said, ‘Nobody knows the woods better than Will Treadwell, so he couldn’t have gotten lost; he must have had a heart attack.’”

  Will laughs a deep, sputtering laugh. He laughs long and hard.

  “There’s something I haven’t heard from you in a while,” Maddie says.

  THE GUEST

  Lisa Williams bought the century-old Victorian on Schoolcraft Street and converted it to a bed-and-breakfast two and a half years after her husband, Bill Erickson, died in a hunting accident. At least, that’s what she’d been told. An accident. The house was the largest in Vieux Desert and at one time would have been considered stately, if not quite a mansion: a corner turret, a commodious porch dripping gingerbread, and five bedrooms. A detached cottage and an expansive yard with a gazebo were thrown into the bargain. And a bargain it was, the asking price so low that Lisa suspected the realtor was hiding something—fatal flaws in the wiring, the plumbing, the roof. Lisa, a neophyte in real-estate transactions, feared she might be taken advantage of and overcompensated for her inexperience by pretending to be a wily buyer. As she toured the interior with the agent, Jake D’Agostino, she tapped the walls, flushed toilets, turned faucets on and off, cast an appraising eye at the ceilings, the molding, the light fixtures, without the vaguest idea what she was looking for.