Open Season jp-6 Page 17

  "Yes," her mom said, looking with disapproval at her own mother. "But it doesn't sound like Sheridan."

  Mom turned back to her.

  "Sheridan, you know better than to wait until the last minute to do your homework," her mom admonished as she took the dishes to the kitchen.

  "Well, it's been pretty busy lately," Sheridan said, indicating the move. That would instill a little guilt, Sheridan thought. Her mom knew Sheridan didn't really like the new "vacation home," as Missy called it.

  "Just use your charm to get yourself out of it," Missy said, winking at Sheridan. "Bat your eyes and make up some good story. That's what I would do." Then she smiled.

  Sheridan's mom came back into the dining room.

  "Well?" Sheridan asked her. "Can we go get my books?" Persistence usually paid off.

  "We'll see." Her mom looked at her sternly.

  "Does that mean yes?" Sheridan asked.

  "It means, we'll see," her mom answered. "Now, scoot. You look like you could use a little nap."

  "I'm okay."

  "Are you feeling all right, honey? You're looking a little pale."

  "I'm okay," Sheridan repeated, hopping down from the chair.

  "She's fine," Missy told her mom with a knowing smile.

  Boy, Sheridan thought, is she ever wrong.

  Which meant yes, Sheridan thought, as she huddled with Lucy under a blanket on the sofa to watch Saturday morning cartoons. A second "we'll see" always meant yes.

  Despite what she had told her mom, Sheridan wasn't feeling good. She stared blankly at the television set. She had not eaten much breakfast and her stomach hurt. Last night had been the worst night yet. In the unfamiliar bed it was almost as if that man was in it with her, he seemed so close. She could almost smell his breath. It was as if he were there watching her, waiting for her to say or do something she wasn't supposed to. Then that smile of his would turn into something else, something wicked, and in her imagination she could see him turn on his heel to hurt her family. And there was nothing she could do to stop him.

  She had awful dreams. The dreams awakened her, and she had trouble getting back to sleep. In one dream, the worst, the man was in her room sitting on a chair near the foot of her bed. He was talking to her, telling her that he was her friend, but in his lap there was something round and large and wrapped in paper. Only this time, when she looked at the object, it was not the head of a kitten. It looked like Lucy's head. In the dream he began to unwrap it.

  Another dream had her back in the barn, pinned again to the stall by the man as he breathed in her face and talked to her. He would do things to her mother, he had said. That he'd do things to the baby that was coming, too. You don't really want another brother or sister around here anyway, do you? he asked. / can tell, he said. You would like it if it were only you, wouldn't you? It made her feel bad that in the dream she had nodded her head yes. She hoped she didn't really feel that way. To prove it, she hugged Lucy, but Lucy wriggled free.

  Sheridan had stayed awake after her dad had left her room, and had listened as he made coffee and shuffled around the house, gathering things to take with him. She had come close to telling him about the man and her secret pets when he was in her room. She had come so close. But remnants from her dreams had stopped her at the last second. After her dad had left the house, she stared at the unfamiliar ceiling and made a couple of decisions. When she made them, they felt right to her. So she wouldn't forget them in the morning, she got out of bed and wrote them down on a piece of paper with a crayon. The crumpled paper was in her pajama pocket now.

  First, she would figure out a way to get back to the house so she could make sure the creatures were still there. She would feed them if she could. She prayed they would be all right.

  Second, she would tell her dad everything. Something about the way he had put his hand on her face the night before made her feel that if anyone could protect her and the family, it was her dad.

  Knowing what she planned to do made her feel a little better. Lucy leaned back against her, and they snuggled under the blanket. Lucy laughed at something that happened in the cartoon. Sheridan let her eyes close. Her eyes were burning.

  This was too much for her. All of it. She would have to wait for her dad to come home. Then she would talk. It was time.

  ***

  The first half mile of the canyon was easy going, even as the dark gray walls became sheer and the sky became no more than a ribbon of blue light straight overhead. There were Indian petroglyphs on the rocks, scenes of elk bristling with arrows, painted and feathered men on horseback, figures of warriors holding aloft the scalps and entire heads of other warriors. Near the petroglyphs, Joe found newer and much more stupid graphics written with a felt-tipped marker.

  "Ote Keeley Sucks the Big One," someone had scratched.

  "Kyle Eats Shit," said another.

  "Calvin Is a Needle Dick." Yup, Joe thought, the outfitters had come up here all right.

  The rock walls eventually became so narrow that Joe dismounted and hung the stirrups over the saddle horn so they wouldn't catch on the sides. Lizzie was fidgety, her ears were pinned back, and her eyes were wide with apprehension. He led her, coaxing her to continue and keeping up a singsong, inane monologue to calm her as the walls closed in around them. He stepped from stone to stone in the stream, trying to keep his boots dry. The mare's metal shoes clattered and sometimes slipped on the creek rocks, and the back of Joe's pants were soon soaked as a result.

  He wished he hadn't brought the horse into the canyon and instead had tied her up and continued by himself. The canyon was much narrower than he had anticipated, and the roots, foliage, and thick spiderwebs that covered it made it claustrophobic. The problem he had now was that they had gone too far to turn around. He would have to back her out nearly a quarter of a mile along slippery rocks. The likelihood that she would fall and injure herself--as well as block the canyon--was too great. He had to continue on and hope she would trust him.

  At one point when the walls became so narrow that they were literally touching both sides of her and the brush in the canyon was so thick above them as to block out the light. Lizzie finally balked and jerked back on the halter rope, pulling Joe into the creek. Her eyes were white and wild with panic, and they partially rolled back into her head. Joe tried to stop her as she backed up, and the rope sang through his hands, scorching his gloves. She finally stopped when her shoes skated over the tops of the rocks, and she sat down with an enormous thud and splash. Her breath pistoned out of her flared nostrils. She sat quivering and let Joe approach her. He spoke softly to her saying much the same things he had told Sheridan the night before. After a long ten minutes, she awkwardly scrambled upright. Her breathing had settled to a rhythm. He wedged in beside her and could find no injuries on her except for on her flank, where a small flap of torn hide stuck out like a pink tongue. He was now wet everywhere, and getting cold. The buckskin was wet also, and the canyon smelled strongly of horse.

  "We are over halfway there, Lizzie," he told her, over and over again in a kind of mantra. "We can either keep going or back our way out. Let's keep going. It's not that far now. It'll get better, I promise. It's okay. Things are just real okay. Everything is not as bad as it seems."

  As the walls eventually receded, the creek became shallow and soon Joe was able to mount again and ride upstream along a sandy bank. The sky didn't seem as gray as it had earlier in the morning, and the little bit of sun that filtered through the clouds warmed and dried them.

  When the canyon walls finally opened, the bowl in the mountains was even more lush and untrammeled than Joe had imagined it could be. It was a beautiful, remarkable place. Around the rim of the bowl in all directions were sheer, red rock cliffs, which provided both protection and a windbreak. Thin rivulets of water that looked like old lace streamed down the rock walls from above. Joe imagined that in the spring the waterfalls would have real volume and would fill the bowl with their roar. The old-growth
trees were mossy and tall, the foliage thick. Tall grass carpeted the edge of the creek while spring-fed pools full of clean, cold water dotted the creek bottom.

  Something cracked in the trees and Joe pulled his shotgun out of the scabbard in a single movement. But even before he had racked the pump, he could see that the sound had come from a huge bull elk who had seen him and was now fleeing through the trees, a shadow moving through the thick timber like fan blades whirling in front of a light until it was gone. He lay the shotgun across the pommel of the saddle and nudged the buckskin on.

  Joe knew what a unique place this was. It was like going back in time, like being one of the first to ride into a natural wonder like Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon and not really being able to believe your eyes. Few people in the modern world would ever have the chance to see what he was seeing or experience what he was experiencing. Or so he thought.

  He was nearly to the grassy rise before he realized exactly where he was.

  Later, when he thought about it, he couldn't really say why he had stopped or how he had found it. It was a feeling he felt on the back of his neck like the lick of a ghost. But when he reined the buckskin and turned in the saddle, he had absolutely no doubt about what was there in front of him.

  He was looking at a killing field.

  It was a treeless slope that started at the edge of a dark timber stand and continued down until it reached the valley floor. What was peculiar about the field, now thick with dried, tall grass, was its lack of life. There were no birds, and nothing scuttled in the grass. It was dead, and Joe wanted to know why.

  The mounds were there. He counted 26 of them. But the holes on the top of the mounds were blocked with new spiderwebs or bits of brush and grass that had blown into them. As Joe walked through the field, from mound to mound, he found the things he had suspected he would. There were spent casings from .22 shells buried in the dirt, as well as shotgun shells. He bent over a dried quarter of elk that was old enough to be skeletal but not old enough that he couldn't see and smell the poison it had been laced with. It was Compound 1080, a deadly substance preferred by those who took the killing of predators very seriously.

  He found several M-44 cartridges wired into the carcass of a rabbit. The devices, long illegal, were designed to automatically fire a stream of cyanide into the mouths of whatever tugged on them. The cyanide, which reacted with saliva, would kill within seconds. The cartridges had been fired.

  In a kind of stunned fog, Joe gathered what evidence he could. He pulled his camera from a saddlebag and took several rolls of film. Many of the shots, he knew, would be of Clyde Lidgard quality. But he found a scattering of tiny bones pressed into the soft earth of one of the mounds, and he filled a plastic bag with them. He gathered a handful of spent .22 brass for another sack, as well as the M-44 cartridges. Then he sat on a downed tree and simply stared at the field. He tried to imagine what it had looked like when it was teeming with the last colony of Miller's weasels on earth.

  It WaS nearly dUSk when Joe cleared the elk camp in a trot and continued down the mountain. The long passage through the canyon had been made almost in a dream, and the buckskin mare seemed to sense that Joe was distracted, so she cooperated. She knew they were going home. Joe's mind was racing, and he was shaky from what he had discovered and from lack of sleep. Several times, he reached back into his saddlebags to confirm that he had in fact gathered the evidence he thought he had gathered. Already, the bowl seemed very far away.

  He thought of the implications, which were huge. Terrible acts had taken place up there. They had happened right under his nose, in his jurisdiction, and on his watch. Of course there was now a conspiracy.

  He doubted that it had started out that way. He guessed that what had happened was a series of incidents and mistakes that had mushroomed into something both big and awful. He didn't know how everything was connected yet, and he wasn't really sure he would be able to find out. But he knew he was now in the thick of it, no matter what. He wondered who out there would surface, once the word got out.

  He thought again of the killing field, which both disgusted and depressed him.

  He was astonished at the thoroughness of the people responsible. First they had started with Miller's weasels and then moved on to killing the outfitters. That progression indicated that perhaps they weren't yet through.

  ***

  Joe loaded Lizzie into the horse trailer and put the saddle and tack in the back of the pickup. He shared the last of his water with his horse then climbed stiffly into the cab of the truck and started the engine.

  When he cleared the timber, the Twelve Sleep Valley opened up below him. In the distance, he could see the early evening lights of Saddlestring like a jewelry box dumped on the prairie. Directly below him was the campground, and the winking yellow lights of hunters' lanterns and propane lamps. Between the two, miles in the distance and hidden in the folds of the foothills, was his house on Bighorn Road.

  God, he was angry. He was furious at his own situation and at the people who had put him there. He was enraged when he thought of the killing field and the purposeful, deliberate way a species had been completely wiped off of the face of the earth. In all of his studies and all of the gossip he had heard over the years, this was the first instance he knew of in which there had been a purposeful and determined effort to wholly terminate a species.

  It was nearly dark, and it was getting colder. An icy wind raced up the mountain from the valley floor. The sky had cleared to the horizons, but it seemed to be regrouping for later. Long, thin faraway clouds paralleled the western horizon looking like multiple red knife wounds slashed across purpling flesh.

  ***

  "We have some beautiful sunsets, don't we, honey?" Sheridan's mom said.

  "Yeah," Sheridan answered blankly. She had other things on her mind.

  In the car, on the way to their house on Bighorn Road, Sheridan's mom had asked her to tell her what was wrong. It was just the two of them, she said, and she was getting a little worried about her big girl. She could tell that something was really bothering her, and she wanted Sheridan to tell her what it was. She said Sheridan's eyes looked very tired.

  "I'm okay, Mom," Sheridan said. Her backpack was on the floor of the car. She had brought it, she said, to put her books in. But now it held a full bread sack of table scraps.

  "Did you hear some of the things your dad and I discussed last night when he got home?"

  Sheridan shook her head no. Her mom seemed relieved. Sheridan was glad it was nearly dark outside, because she knew her mom could read her face. It was as if her mom could tell what she was thinking sometimes. Sheridan felt guilty about not telling her mom about the creatures and the man. Mom was wonderful, and very smart, even though she could be stern. Sometimes she couldn't believe how wonderful her mother was, especially as Sheridan spent more time with Grandmother Missy. Sometimes it seemed like her mom was the adult and Grandmother Missy, Sheridan, and Lucy were the children. But her mom sure could worry, and Sheridan knew how much she would worry if she knew what Sheridan knew. Worrying wasn't a good thing for a woman who was so pregnant. This Sheridan was pretty sure of.

  "I want you to feel you can tell me what's wrong, Sheridan," her mom said. She wasn't letting this go.

  Sheridan had part of her problem solved. When they got to the house, Sheridan would go into her bedroom and fill her backpack with some of her own books from her bookshelves. She doubted her mom would want to look at the books to see if they were from the school library. The hard part, though, would be figuring out a way to get outside alone. She had a little flashlight in her backpack for shining under the garage. She hoped she would see them under there, and she hoped they would be all right.

  "I think I don't like that house we're staying in," Sheridan said. "It seems too fancy. It seems like we're living in somebody else's house."

  "I know you feel that way," mom said. "We are living in someone's house. Wealthy people like your grandmother
do it all the time, but I realize it's new to you. But isn't it nice to have your own big room for a while? And that TV with all of those channels? What about that wonderful fireplace and all of those books on the shelves?"

  "They're all right," Sheridan confessed. "But I still like our old house better."

  "Sometimes change is good," her mom said.

  "Most of the time it's bad," Sheridan echoed darkly.

  Her mom laughed. "You can be so dramatic, sweetie."

  The car slowed and her mom turned the steering wheel. "Well, it's still here," her mom said.

  Sheridan looked through the windshield. The house was very dark. It looked like her father's truck was parked where it usually was on the side of the house. But it wasn't her father's truck.

  "Wacey must have gone with Dad and left his truck here when they took the horses," Mom said.

  "I didn't realize he was going, too." She turned off the motor.

  "Anyway, let's not take all night," Mom continued.

  "Grandmother Missy is making lasagna, and we don't want to miss that."

  Grandmother Missy had come to the conclusion that everyone in the family loved her lasagna. The fact that no one finished their dinner hadn't changed her mind. The truth was that the only person who liked Grandmother Missy's lasagna was Grandmother Missy herself.

  Sheridan was behind her mother while her mom found the keys, opened the front door, and went in. Mom reached to click on the lights, but she stopped before she did so, and Sheridan bumped right into her.

  Her mom didn't move.

  "What? ..."

  Suddenly, her mother was bent over and her face was close to Sheridan's. "Don't turn on the lights, honey. Just be still." Her mom's voice was urgent--and serious. Sheridan had rarely heard that tone, and it scared her.

  "What's wrong?" Sheridan's eyes were wide.

  "I don't know for sure," her mom said. "But I can see some kind of light in the backyard."