Ice Hunter (21 page)

“It's a beauty,” he said.

“How come you don't wear a uniform?” the tiny girl asked.

“What makes you think I should?”

“Game warden, ain'tcha?”

“How do you know?”

“Your truck.” She pointed with her dripping cone. “I can
read
, you know.”

He laughed. Since joining the DNR he had never owned a car. He lived a simple life that revolved around work and he had saved a lot of money despite what most would think was not a handsome salary. He supposed the money he had saved would come in handy if he and Kira decided to make things permanent, but that was a big if. Was he ready for marriage? The first time hadn't worked out at all, and in the years since he hadn't met anybody he cared enough to try again with.

“We got a bear at my Grampa's camp and he poops all over,” the girl said.

Service loved how candid children were and how easily they segued from topic to topic without the slightest transition. He wondered what kind of a father he would have been. At forty-seven, he probably ought to stop thinking about that.

“A bear, huh?”

The girl gave an exaggerated nod. “And know what?” she said excitedly. “He
bites
Grampa's tires! Tell him, Grandma.”

“You know bears,” the woman said. “Like ill-tempered dogs.”

Service knew that most bears were timid and wary of people. “Where's your camp?” he asked.

“East, near Premo Lake.”

Service sort of knew the area. It was pretty wild. “Have you called us about the bear?”

“My grampa will shoot that
damn
thing!” the girl said. She had ice cream smeared on her chin.

The woman said, “Mind your language, Mary Ruth. Be a proper little girl.”

The little girl pouted. “Grampa says it.”

Service looked at the grandmother. “Is your camp new?”

“We had it built last summer,” she said.

Had it built
. He was not surprised. “There's no point in killing the animal.”

“He's punctured three of my husband's tires. You know how much new tires cost?”

Meaning the state paid for his. “Your camp is probably in the bear's territory. The males can be pretty aggressive and the new camp is a threat, but they seldom attack people. They just want you to go away.” The way I do. “Call Officer Simon del Olmo in Crystal Falls. He'll drive over and trap the bear and move it far away.”

“We've heard they always come back.”

This was one of the myths that conservation officers repeatedly faced in dealing with the public. “Some do, but they're rare. If this one keeps coming back, then we might have to destroy it, but why kill it before we have to?”

“Three tires, for starters,” the woman said. “It's only one bear. They're all over the place up here. Just pests.”

“Where are you from, ma'am?” Service asked.

“Grand Rapids. My husband sold his dry-cleaning business and we retired up here. We love the summers. We bought a little house here in town and built the camp. Wouldn't do to live out there, but eventually we're going to build our dream house there and make the county improve the roads. It's just dirt and mud now.”

Just like Montana. He had been wrong. Even Amasa was being invaded. He wrote del Olmo's telephone number on a notepad and gave the number to the woman. “It's against the law to kill a problem animal without a permit. Talk to Officer del Olmo and he'll help you.”

The woman looked at the paper. “Seems like a lot of useless red tape.”

“It's for the animal's benefit
and
yours.”

It was not that he didn't like people, he tried to convince himself as he drove north. It was just a shame they had to come up here. The more people who came, the more problems there would be, and he and other officers were already strapped. Animals needed space and space was shrinking, a major threat to all the progress they had worked so hard to achieve.

When he reached Covington, Service called del Olmo on his cellular and told him about the woman in Amasa, suggesting he get over to the woman's place before her husband killed the animal.

“They make you some kind of roving three-striper now?” del Olmo asked, half joking.

“Me, a sergeant? No fucking way.”

Service concentrated on the problem in the Tract as he drove toward L'Anse. He needed to sort things out.

Superficially nothing added up, but he could feel something big was under way, and he needed to find a way to tie it all together. No doubt it all fit; the question was how. His gut was rarely wrong, but it had taken him most of his life to learn to trust it. A slow learner in some ways. Maybe in all ways, he thought.

What had the stranger been doing in the Tract and why had he been so evasive? He'd had a camera and a hammer. Geologist? Prospector? Had he been looking for diamonds? Had he been upstream at the log slide before he encountered him?

First a fire at the Geezer Hole, then at the log slide.

Neither fire had been an accident.

Connected to the granite formations? At this point there was only conjecture. His. If this all finally came together in a case, he was going to have to go upward for assistance. But not until he knew what he was dealing with.

A mysterious helicopter had been seen by Voydanov north of the log slide, and Voydanov might be a little addled in some ways, but he seemed to know choppers pretty well. Granite up there too. Just one outcrop, a phallic shape. He was surprised Nantz hadn't pointed this out. It fit her mind. Surely she noticed, because Nantz didn't seem to miss much. Granite at the log slide, but not the Geezer Hole. How did these three locations fit together? Did they? The chopper had taken pains to not leave an imprint. In at daylight, flying low, no call sign, no flight plan. Shadowed by a goose? Voydanov was a nice old man and might know choppers, but the conversations with him reminded Service how useless eyewitnesses were on most counts.

The pebbles were a diamond and several garnets. Maybe the dog had found these downstream of the lone outcrop. In the water. The clay and gravel there were brownish red, same as he had seen near the log slide and Geezer Hole. Related geologically? Maybe, but he would have to learn more about this from the professor tomorrow.

Limpy had suggested that the Tract was not all publicly owned, and he was technically wrong; the state did own all the land. But he was also right in that the state had leased a few parcels to citizens. This was a technicality, Hathoot had tried to assure him. Maybe. How did Limpy know this, and why had he put him on this scent? Seton Knipe held two of the leases, the only ones not on the perimeter, and Knipe had moved to the Crystal Falls area about the same time Dow Chemical had gotten into the hush-hush hunt for diamonds. Was this more than a coincidence?

Diamonds in the U.P. He vaguely remembered something about this years ago but had never seen or heard anything more since then. He figured it had fizzled, and if del Olmo was correct it had. But what about Knipe and his office attached to the laboratory? There had been silver and gold in the U.P.'s past, but a real diamond find would create an unwanted, uncontrolled rush. He wondered how Bozian would handle this. Had Dow Chemical briefed the governor? Probably. He was an outspoken supporter of big business and considered environmental impact something between a minor consideration and a pain in the ass. Had Dow's political action committee contributed to Bozian's campaigns? Service felt vaguely irritated.

Knipe's businesses were involved in industries that potentially might use a helicopter for one task or another. Did Knipe own one? Or Wildcat, Inc.? Could they lease one somewhere? If so, there had to be a record. There was always a paper trail of some kind. Knipe, speculating in small land parcels. Why? Was Knipe in the diamond hunt? If so, his parcels in the Tract seemed too far from the granite formations to serve a purpose. If the granite had anything to do with diamonds, which remained a major if. What were the Knipes up to, and did Limpy know Knipe?

If the pebbles were really gems, what was he going to do about them? A stampede could start on no more than a rumor. These sorts of things traveled underground and took on their own lives and power. Yukon, Keweenaw, Black Hills, Sutter's Mill: these had all been stampedes for easy riches, all deeply rooted in the American psyche. In this country you could start with nothing and get everything through smarts and hard work. Or luck. Usually luck played the greater role. You could have a fortune, lose it, get it back, lose it again. No need to lose hope in America. If there were diamonds in the Tract, what would Bozian do? Simon said there had been talk that the Crystal Falls diamond find could be the richest in history. Bigger than South Africa or Siberia? Jesus. Bad news on all fronts, except that the diamond hunters seemed to be gone. What if the real diamonds were not near Crystal Falls, but in the Tract? Or in both locations?

Service cringed and gripped the steering wheel.

He had all sorts of puzzle pieces but no clue if they all fit the same puzzle. So many things could be linked intellectually and instinctively, but without evidence you had nothing but something to worry about. Jerry Allerdyce had worked for Ralph Scaffidi and Jerry had been murdered. Jerry had continued to see Scaffidi's niece even after banishment. Jerry had taken his chain saw to do some logging, and now they had Jerry in a bag. The saw was still missing. A chain saw had been used at the log-slide fire, where Jerry's body had been found. He felt certain he could assume Jerry had been working there for somebody, then killed. Why? His womanizing had created a lot of hard feelings over the years. But Jerry was also a skilled logger, a good choice to help somebody put a protective line around a small fire. Finding out who Jerry Allerdyce had worked with in the Mosquito was crucial. Did Limpy know something more? Maybe.

He would need to find answers before a situation developed that couldn't be controlled. Once you had a full-blown crisis, your only option was damage control, which meant damage was inevitable, no matter what you did. The trick was to stop events from becoming a crisis.

Driving toward L'Anse, Service turned west on M-28, bypassing the downtown area. He passed under the outstretched arms of the golden statue of Father Baraga, standing on a bluff above the highway. So many people up here on welfare, but the Catholics built golden statues. When he reached Pelkie Road, he headed north to the village of Pelkie, where he stopped at a gas station next to a restaurant called Finn's Fins. The sign out front said
homecooked whitefish
. They were probably illegal, but he had other things to think about, and this wasn't his turf. As a CO, your first lesson was that you couldn't do everything. A professional learned to pick and choose. Sometimes you had no choice but handle what came up, but there were other times when you had to ignore some things and stay focused. It was a tough balancing act, one he still struggled with.

Gus told him that Knipe was an old name in Pelkie, a town founded by French Canadian fur trappers and loggers. The gas station had one ancient pump under a sagging wooden roof. There was a handmade sign in the window:
sprinkle donuts: yah. bait: yah, pretty alive last may. ammo: shoot, yah
! Yooper humor with one-stop shopping. He filled the truck's tank with gas and went inside to pay. It was a hot day and getting hotter. If this weather stayed and there was no rain, the fire threat would escalate rapidly. Some summers it was terrible. Other summers the temperature might climb to seventy degrees only twice between Memorial Day and Labor Day. He could remember three times when there was snow on July Fourth. But this summer had the earmarks of a hot one.

Bozian's policies had cut hell out of the state's forest fire-fighting resources, chopping the state staff twenty to thirty percent. Now the governor bragged to reporters about how he'd downsized deadweight bureaucrats.

A man in greasy white coveralls was behind a glass counter that hadn't been cleaned in a long time. There were half a dozen yellowing pike heads on the wall and a five-year-old calendar with a painting of a bull moose.

“Any granite around here?” Service asked.

The man looked past him at the truck and its emblem.

“I don't know from rocks.” The man had not shaved in several days and had black grime under his fingernails.

“Nice pike,” Service said. “Spear?”

“Yah,” the man said.

A woman in her late twenties came out of a back office. She wore faded denim coverall shorts and no shirt. She was in danger of spilling out of her bib.

“Are you a rock hound?” she asked. She had short black hair streaked with blond highlights and a tattoo of a purple rose on her left shoulder.

“He's a fish cop,” the older man said.

A warning to her? It often was. Yoopers could smell a CO out of uniform. To a Yooper, a CO's job was regulating outsiders, not locals.

“Hey,” the woman said, adding, “Far out!” She had a square face and thick, full lips. “Are you new? We haven't seen you around here before.”

“I'm passing through,” he said. “Somebody asked me about granite formations over this way and I said I'd look around.”

She smiled. “There's granite hereabouts, for sure,” she said. “Limestone Mountain and Sherman Hill. You take Papin Road west to the mountain and Pelkie Road north to Mantila Road and turn west to get to the hill. It'll be on your right.”

“Thanks,” he said. “Were these places ever mined for iron or copper?”

She asked sarcastically, “You one of those ice hunters?”

The question was so unexpected that Service stammered in his response.

“Ice hunters?”

“Diamonds,” she said.

“Diamonds?” he asked, his heart racing.

“Exactly,” she said. “There aren't any.”

He was puzzled. “Why did you ask me about diamonds?”