The Moose Jaw (24 page)

“Like the little gadget I showed you this morning.  I hook them up to the trip wire you stepped over.  I’ll rig a few to go off if someone comes sneaking around in the willows.  I’ll also leave you with Haywood’s twelve bore.  It holds five shells and makes a lot of noise.  It’s a semi-automatic.  You don’t need to do any pumping to reload; all you have to do is keep pulling the trigger.  If you poke it out the window and squeeze off a couple of shots, no one will stick around to see who’s doing the shooting.”

It wasn’t the best of arrangements, but it was as good as I could hope for.   I spent the rest of that day setting up mini-claymores with individual trip wires in the cover surrounding the cabin.  Since it was possible that they might come back at any time, day or night, I did my best to conceal the trip wires in the undergrowth.  I set one across the path where the overland route came out of the trees, and two more in the willows up and downstream of the cabin.  These would be the most likely avenues of approach if the McCaslins decided to rush us.  They’d want to keep to cover as long as possible before crossing open ground in a frontal assult. 

When I had all three of them in place, I went back to the cabin and stowed my tools and extra material in their appropriate boxes.   Morgan sat on the edge of the bed brushing her hair.  She was humming softly and seemed to be off in her own world, so I didn’t bother her with idle talk.  Then I noticed the empty tin of goose grease setting prominently in the center of the table.  I got the message.  I smiled and took my field jacket off the peg and filled the pockets with goose loads from a box of shells on a shelf near the door.  I picked up my shotgun, went over and kissed her on the forehead and said, “I may be a couple of hours.”

“Pick big, fat ones.”  She said.  Her beautiful lips turned up at the corners and there was a mischievous glint in her green eyes.

There were still a couple of hours of daylight left when I closed the cabin door behind me.  I took my time walking back into the beaver meadow.  On the way in, I crossed the tracks of the giant grizzly again.  Enough was enough.  If I saw him, I’d kill him.  End of story.  No more trilogy.  No more Trilogy!  There, now he had a name.  I paused long enough to take the .44 out of its holster, check the loads, and work the action.  I spun the cylinder, enjoying the well-oiled, metallic click-click-clicking sound.  Then I thumbed down the hammer, slid it back into its holster, and continued on my way. 

There were no geese on the pond when I arrived, so I moved around to the southwest side where the wind would be at my back, and settled into some cover.  They usually flew back to water an hour or so before the sunset, so I just hunkered down and waited.  While I sat there a pair of beavers came out of their lodge, swam across the pond and out the spillway.  They were probably going out to the river to cut willows to haul back in for their winter food stores.  I’d watched them many times before.  They cut four or five good leafy branches and swam them up or down the creek, and brought them up their channel to the pond.  They’d drag them over their dike and then, one by one, dive down and anchor them in the mud at the bottom of the pond.  When winter came, they’d have a good supply of food under the ice, just outside their lodge door.  Pretty good system if you weren’t hung up on variety and could be content with mere survival.

I’d been sitting there in the cover by the pond for a little less than an hour when I heard the far off sound of honking on my right.  A flight of geese appeared in the sky to the south.  They were losing altitude the closer they came, so I knew they were coming in.  There were about a dozen of them.  They made a recon pass over the pond, swung around to the east, and then came dropping toward the water, faces into the wind, wings set.  I let them get close before I moved.

When they were ten feet above the surface of the pond I snapped the shotgun up to my shoulder and dropped the leader.  He folded and plunged into the water with a thunderous splash.   As always, the two behind him peeled off in opposite directions and began flapping hard and rising, trying to get some altitude while swinging around to get the wind behind them.  I had jacked a fresh shell into the chamber as the first goose hit the water.  I swung my barrel and blasted the one on the right.  I pumped in another round as he fell, and shot the third one just as he cleared the dike.  He folded and fell into the marsh just beyond the spillway.  Three for three.  Not bad shooting.  By now the others were all scattered and well out of range.  They honked their protests as they gained altitude and swung into the western sky to regroup.

I stood up from my improvised blind, pumped the spent hull out of the chamber, and reloaded the gun with three fresh rounds before wading out to collect the first two I’d downed.  I was wearing my hip boots, but I’d had them folded down for easy walking; I now pulled them up and slipped the garter straps through my belt and snapped the snaps.  Then I waded out into the pond.  The first goose was floating along the edge, quite close to where I’d been concealed.  The other was half way out to the middle.  It took only a few minutes to get them both and bring them back to shore. 

With my shotgun in one hand and a pair of warm, wet, slender necks clamped in the other, I walked around the pond, stepped over the dike, and went down into the rushes of the marsh below the spillway.  It took me a few minutes of poking around, but following the down and feathers, I located the third.  All three were prime and plump.  They’d roast up beautifully, and provide enough fat to keep us in skin oil for another month.  A pleasant thought, but first things first.  I stopped there in the marsh long enough to gut and rinse the three geese.  Then I looped a leather thong around their necks, slung them over my shoulder, picked up my shotgun in the other hand and made for the cabin.  The hunter home from the hill… 

It was nearly dark when I topped the last rise and came out of the spruce stand.  The evening was clear and cold and there was no wind.  The temperature had dropped quickly when the sun had gone down behind the distant hills; steam puffed out of me with every breath.  I paused for a moment at the top of the trail to look down at my little cabin by the creek.  A straight column of smoke rose from the chimney into the still evening air.  Golden shafts of light spilled out of the windows onto the hard packed earth at each side of the cabin.  The stars were coming out above the dark spruce trees across the creek, and the creek itself looked like hammered silver in their weak light.  It was a lovely picture.  Even more lovely because I knew Morgan waited for me inside.

She was standing by the table pulling the cork from a bottle of red wine when I came through the door.  She was wearing my favorite outfit – my green and black plaid shirt, and nothing else.  She was even barefoot.  I had dropped the geese outside before entering.  I closed the door behind me, set the shotgun in the corner and began unbuttoning my field jacket.  She set the wine bottle on the table and came over; she helped me out of the sleeves.

“I heard three shots,” she said, and hung my coat on its peg beside the door.

“I left them outside.  I’ll tend to them after we eat.”

“Are they fat?” She asked, smoothing the collar of my wool shirt with one hand, while twisting a finger of the other in my hair.

“Very,” I assured her.  “We’ll get a quart of grease out of each of them. Your skin will positively glow.”

She laughed a throaty laugh and kissed me on the lips.
  “It’s glowing right now.”

Indeed it was.  She’d obviously been grooming herself all the time I’d been away.  Her red hair glistened in the candlelight, and her skin shone like alabaster.  I don’t believe there has ever been a woman more lovely than she was at that moment.  I felt my throat tightening.  She noticed my admiration, and a mischievous smile touched her lips.  She looked at me meaningfully and unbuttoned the top two buttons of the shirt.

“That little green stove puts out a lot of heat.  It’s a bit warm in here, don’t you think?”

It certainly was.  I was getting uncomfortably hot.  She walked to the table and poured wine into two tin cups.  She brought them over and handed one to me and then, with her free hand, she unbuttoned another button.  She was definitely toying with me.  She was obviously in a mood to play.  That was O.K.  I was ready to play.  Shooting and killing and the letting of blood does that to you.  No, really!  It does!  There’s still a lot of the cave in us.

She went over and sat on the edge of the bed.  She kept one foot on the floor and stretched out a long, bare, ivory leg on top of the dark wool blanket.  She ran a hand through her long, red hair; it gleamed in the candlelight.

“Too bad we’ve run out of your goose grease.  It was always so cool and slippery against my skin.”

She was looking directly into my eyes now.  She undid another button.

“Maybe we should just lie down for a while before dinner.”

She unbuttoned the bottom button and the shirtfront fell open.  It wasn’t enough to expose her completely, but it was enough.  I took a gulp of my wine.

“Maybe we should at that,” I heard myself say.

My voice sounded strange, even to my own ears.  She gave another throaty laugh and sipped her wine.  The shirt fell open a little more.  She stretched out full length on the bed.

“I really haven’t had a proper bath today.  Maybe that would help cool me down a little.”

She didn’t have to ask twice.  I stepped quickly to the boiler and put an inch of hot water in the basin, cooled it with a splash from the spigot, snatched up a washcloth, and hurried to the bedside.  She had put me in a playful mood.

“Don’t worry lady,” I said, affecting a rescuer’s tone.  “Everything’s under control.  The first thing we have to do is get you out of those wet clothes.”

She walked into it. “My clothes aren’t wet,” she said.

   I threw half the basin on her.  She gasped.  Her mouth and eyes flew open in surprise.  I maintained my official posture.

“As I was saying, we must get you out of those wet clothes – AT ONCE!”

With that I took a grip on the lapels of my, now wet, plaid shirt and, with a single downward jerk, peeled it from her shoulders and down the length of her back.  She was giggling uncontrollably, and couldn’t very well resist.

I said, “You’re obviously hysterical madam.  I hope I won’t have to slap you silly.”

Her giggling became helpless laughter; she was, literally, in tears.  I undertook to comfort her.

I awoke at first light.  Morgan’s warm, naked form curled contentedly around mine.  The wine bottle stood, still open and unfinished, on the table.  We’d burned the stew, and the geese were still outside the door, waiting to be dressed.  We’d never left the bed.  Somehow, I felt no sense of guilt at the wasted food, or the dereliction of duty.  We had accomplished something.  We’d managed a night of delightful and inventive sex without a drop of goose grease.  She certainly was a wildcat; she’d clawed me with her three long fingernails while in the throes of an orgasm.  I was sure she’d drawn blood; I could feel the scratches, hot and stinging down my back.  I guess I’d been initiated into the club.

She sensed I was awake and turned to snuggle inside my arms.  Her lips settled against my chest.  She was purring, or murmuring something.  I couldn’t tell.  I didn’t care.  Slowly, I realized she was kissing, or licking, one of my nipples.  My God!  After last night, I doubted I could rise to the occasion.  Her tongue was hot and wet.  Yes, perhaps I could.  I was already a quart low on seminal fluid, but  I resolved to begin eating more eggs and oysters.

It was more than an hour after sunrise when I finally rolled out from under the blankets and ventured outside into the cold morning air to perform my ablutions in the icy waters of the creek.  It had been one hell of a night.  It had been one hell of a morning.  I had never felt so drained, yet so alive.  I was happy.  That’s the only word for it.  Happy.  Before I had gotten out of bed Morgan had taken my face between both her hands and looked very deeply, and seriously, into my eyes.

“I’m not a slut.  I want you to know that.  You must think I’m sex crazed or something, the way I’ve been acting.  But I’m not that way.  I’ve needed you to hold me and love me, not just screw me.  After what happened at that awful place, I needed physical proof that people still feel for one another – that they’re kind and gentle to one another, and that sex isn’t some brutal and ugly thing; it’s beautiful when people do it to become closer, or because they are in love.”

I think she was trying to tell me that she loved me.  No wonder I was happy.

Happiness notwithstanding, I had some serious work to do this morning.  The first thing on the agenda was to dress the geese.  Thank heaven I’d taken the time to gut them before I came down from the beaver pond.  That was the only blessing.  The morning was cold, and there was the usual September frost, heavy and thick on the ground; the geese were stiff as boards.  There was no point in trying to pluck them, so I just skinned them.  I took my time, in order to save as much fat as I could.  After all, that was the primary reason they had died.  It would be a pity to loose any.

It took me three quarters of an hour to skin and rinse all three.  I hung them from a willow to let them cure a little in the cool air and the breeze.  Then I gathered up all their left over parts, and took them down and tossed them in the creek.  Again, it was all natural and biodegradable, so I felt no guilt.  After I’d dealt with that, I went around and checked the trips on the claymores.  By ten o’clock I was done. 

I went back into the cabin and found Morgan sitting quietly in the rocker, reading one of my fly-tying books.  The fire was hissing gently in the stove, and the smell of fresh brewed coffee filled the interior.  I poured a cup and stood by the fire to thaw out.

She looked up from the book.  “Do you tie your own?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Where do you keep your material?”