Lonesome Animals (29 page)

“When we meet up north I'll collect her.”

Hayes said nothing more. Strawl watched him as he hiked toward the foot of the ridge. He filled his canteens in Harrison Creek and let the dogs drink, then threaded a path through the thickets and low brush beneath until he was out of view.

Strawl traveled two more days, remaining clear of the meadows and bald ridgelines, crossing country quickly and closing on Elijah, now only a mile or two in front of him. From the granite cliffs and basalt knobs he heard automobile tires hum over the paved San Poil highway and, later, axles rattle and gears whine while they fought the rutted logging grades that were their only other option.

The third evening a hound bayed. Strawl guessed the animal resided in Wauconda or Republic, twenty miles from him as the crow flies. The next morning over breakfast, he heard them once more, this time a chorus, on a scent. Dice and his minions were clumsy as three-legged mules, but that would likely make them all the more troublesome, so Strawl saddled and wound through the draws until he had moved within a mile of their soundings. He undid a handkerchief and looped it over a low branch and under piled a pound of Truax's peppered beef. He backtracked Stick to a shaded ridge, where he watched the hounds break brush and come upon the tree and the beef, which they ate greedily until their sneezes and hacks made it impossible for them to swallow. Horses followed, but he'd painted a tree trunk a hundred feet farther with
wolf scent a trapper had once traded him for a walk on a trespassing charge, and the horses raised and threw their riders as if they had been driven into a fence.

Strawl recognized one of Dice's deputies, then Dice himself and the silverspoon, in bandaged feet, who whipped his horse like it had shit on his breakfast. Strawl was tempted to put a bullet between his eyebrows then and there and undo the tension pulling at his own shoulders, but permitted the man another day of light to cuss and night of darkness to suffer through.

Dawn woke Elijah and he rode on, letting Baal pick his way slowly to keep from riding him to pieces. He diverted around Republic, the Ferry County seat, then began the labor of serpentining the broken mountains draining the Kettle River into the Columbia. They watered at a series of clear cirque pools that headed nearly every valley where, thousands of years before, snow had massed into glacial crags that rivaled the stony heights. Their ice and weight had extinguished the vegetation for millenniums and welled the stone floors beneath. The water that remained from the great thaws was a thousand years old and colored green or aqua or nearly purple or jet-black, depending upon the rock and minerals beneath. One pool, over gypsum, appeared the consistency of milk.

Wrinkled granite tables, each several hundred feet square, littered one rise like children's scattered blocks, and he wound through and over them with great care as the pitched rock was sheer and the trails sandy and prone to collapse. Above, a long ridge shadowed his path. At its crest, a mile of meadow spread before Elijah, dotted with delicate white flowers for which he had no name. Yellowing grasses, matted low shrubs, and squat fir punctuated the clearing and lined its edges. The red cedar and stately lodgepole pine were too demanding to endure this high,
and the lack of tall trees left the country looking scalped, and even more so the bald mountain above it.

Even midday was cool this far up and the air thin enough to require more respites for Baal. The pristine sky seemed to turn ten-mile distances to a stone's throw. In other pockets of these mountains, miners had uncovered enough gypsum or iron or gold or copper to make a meager go of their trade, but between the Columbia and the San Poil no one had taken an interest, and, as Elijah hiked the shale, leading Baal when he couldn't sort out a path, he encountered game one rarely did below, elk and a young bull moose standing in Timber Creek trailing water and tulle threads from his ruminating jaws and later a pair of bighorn sheep. Farther, he spied a scattering of caribou resting in a field below a hanging ledge, and, through his rifle's scope, a lynx trailing them—animals he'd only seen in books. Later, when he'd again moved lower, he stopped to study trees scarred with enormous grizzly nails and a sapling splintered by one of its blows.

A weather anomaly left this place warmer and wetter than most inland mountain ranges, and it was as likely to be blanketed by clouds, even in late fall, as snow. Evening, lacy mist collected in the fissures and dips of this strange world. The moon's blue light cast a glowing pallor over the trees, leaving them luminous, as if lit by white fire. That night, a lupine moan broke the quiet and stirred Baal enough that Elijah blanketed his eyes to settle him.

A day later and twenty miles farther north, evening arrived before the sun set, and Baal's breath smoked in the clear and freezing purple night. Elijah was prepared to bed down and collect wood for a fire when he heard a coyote yip, followed by two twitters from a bobwhite. He whistled an answer and when it was acknowledged, he stepped out of the stirrup and led Baal a mile angled beneath the mountain's shadow until he reached a rocky crag. There, he followed a shale slide over the other side. Baal's
hooves clacked the flat rock and the sound rattled the animal. He battled the reins. Elijah settled him, then led on. Soon the smell of meat cooking on a spit beckoned him.

Off the rocks Baal stilled and Elijah rode him through the pines and yellowing tamaracks. The air sighed in the needles and their yellow pollen floated over man and horse. They jumped a pheasant and the pop of wings startled the horse. Elijah watched the bird light in a thicket where another stirred next to it. Soon he heard women's voices, too, and children harassing the female pup Rutherford Hayes had given someone in the spring. It woofed and scared no one. Firelight careened in orange and golden streaks against the darkened trees and pinched shadows.

Twenty heavy canvas military tents, staked and propped by poles cut from the surrounding woods, circled a common area. Eighteen were flapped down for families and privacy—eight for each of the pregnant widows and ten left for the families who volunteered to join them. The remaining two were open-walled to permit public meetings and religious services and meals when the weather required. Each family's tent had a chimneyed Franklin stove for heat, while the public tents contained a pair on each end and another in the middle. In the worst weather, the makeshift village's fifty inhabitants could gather their blankets and dogs and conserve fuel by crowding themselves together in one, as the Canadian tribes had done for centuries. Two other structures finished the circle. Both were metal and windowless and locked. One held food staples that would keep—gunnysacks filled with grain, flour, sugar, salt, canned fruits, baking powder, cornstarch, and some fodder for the animals; the other contained several thousand dollars in medical supplies and a small library instructing a layman how to use them. Together, the contents equaled half the proceeds from the ranch's sale.

At the center of the circle was a twenty-foot-long rock trough constructed for outdoor cooking. Atop the walls were metal grills and
plates and cast-iron spits on which one could turn rabbits or game birds, and at the end was another, larger rod ample to roast half a deer or elk. Under both ends, Raymond's family had constructed brick-reinforced ovens to slow-cook wild vegetables, breads, and stews. Four cows and their calves lolled in a crudely wired square on the east edge of the camp, along with a half dozen sheep and a goat, which accounted for more of the ranch proceeds.

Stacked firewood six feet high formed three quarters of the compound's boundary, yielding only for the livestock. A hundred yards into the woods, Marvin, along with his grandchildren, had cut a root cellar employing rock to support the walls and crossed lodgepoles as rafters.

Marvin had determined Elijah's approach through insects' hush and the fluttering of birds. He tarried at the edge of the light to greet him with a strip of venison and a pipe of kinnikinnick. Elijah and he smoked, then Elijah ate the venison, stringy and coarse with muscle. It was gamier here than down below, where the deer browsed the wheat at night and tasted not unlike beef. Elijah sniffed, disappointed he preferred the other. He let Baal loose to feed on the clumped grasses that managed to grow despite the little light the trees permitted.

“I am finished.”

“I know,” Marvin said.

“Do you think I am a sinner?”

“Did you enjoy those things people would call sin?” Marvin asked him.

“No.”

“It cannot be a sin unless you enjoyed it,” Marvin said.

Elijah nodded and Marvin led him to a tipi outside the camp's boundaries, close to the stream serving the makeshift village, yet far enough to permit him his thoughts. Inside were a lantern and some oil and a copy of his good book.

S
trawl rested a full day under the peak of Copper Mountain, eating the last of his frybread and the remnants of a salami stick. Elijah had not varied his trek, riding as if nobody was interested, or more likely, as if he knew those following and saw no reason to discourage them. The camp before him was impressive—enough so, Strawl determined Elijah could not have managed the project alone. Evening, he watched the pickets exchange, and through his spyglass he made out groups of women laboring at the long pit and silhouetted men walking alone or in pairs across the firelit commons into or past the tents, yellow wraiths where the glow ebbed and ended. Strawl heard stones scrape from the stream bank as another contingent of women and young girls cleaned pots or beat clothes with broom handles soaked in lye.

The encampment appeared comic. Even in this country no one built villages or towns to hide them. They wanted businesses and roads and railroads. They wanted to be found. A man like Rutherford Hayes might hermit himself. Even a family or two who believed in some smoky deity so strange and private that they could only believe in it themselves if no neighbors existed to argue could still be assured seclusion if they risked the most primitive corners of the region. Any group larger, though, necessitated not company—that would be the least of their concerns—but more than would be accessible within walking or riding distance. That meant restocking at stores and liveries, and those don't occur without people, and if reduced to that, what was the point of going off?

As it grew later, Strawl made for the camp. He avoided the pickets with no trouble, even with the horse in tow. At the creek bed were seven women, each heavy with child. They scoured a stack of pans and kettles with river gravel, chattering. He passed without nodding and a quarter mile later arrived at the clearing between canopies. Enormous trees had been pruned ten feet up from the ground, the long phallic trunks appeared sins from the uncharted country in people's minds. Squares of brown tarp were tied fifteen feet high in the trees cinched tight with hemp rope to the sturdiest limbs some places and tethered to the ground with iron stakes in others. The group had scattered leaves and needles atop them to make the place appear nothing unusual. Underneath, the hardpan was swept clean as a floor. In the center, the firepit had high walls and a deep well to mute the light. Inez stirred what smelled like a broth of some kind. A bruise remained beneath her ear. Her grandchildren scrambled toward a tent upon seeing Strawl, and Marvin intercepted him, coming from the darkness.

“You're a party to this?” Strawl asked.

“Yes,” Marvin said.

“I thought you knew nothing of these doings.”

“I lied.”

Strawl smiled. “Well, the truth is overrated.”

He decided to press no further. Marvin loaded a pipe with kinnikinnick and lit it.

“I apologize for hurting Inez,” Strawl said.

Marvin nodded. “No one can help who they are.”

“You included?”

“Yes,” Marvin answered.

“There guns on me?”

Marvin shrugged. “I can't speak for everyone here. If you came to shoot us, some will shoot back.”

“I'm accustomed to those I shoot at shooting back,” Strawl said. He sat on a flat boulder that looked like it was meant for the purpose. The camp had begun buttoning up. Mothers herded children to their canvas abodes, and several pregnant women tottered across the clearing, turning misshapen silhouettes as they left the fire's glow. Strawl watched two tents glow as lanterns inside clicked to life and flickered with their quaking oil feeds.

“Are you looking for a truce?” Strawl asked.

“Yes.”

Strawl stared at the ground.

“You know who I'm here for?”

“He told me.”

“You want this truce extended to him, too, I suppose?”

Marvin nodded.

“You know what he's done and who he's done it to?”