The Outlander (11 page)

When he went out hunting, she roused herself and explored the tiny camp,
inspecting everything he owned. She found her own belongings mixed in with his, and so
she
moved these into the tent and piled them together. The saddle of
course had been left down the mountain's slope where she had hung it. She
discovered a frying pan with Office of the National Park Warden burned into its wooden
handle. No tobacco, no pipe. Worn socks so often darned that they were at least half
thread. There were papers, and a notebook in which he had written his thoughts —
nearly all of them, as far as she could make out, concerned the benefits of solitude or
the grandeur of nature. These she struggled to decipher in her habitual way, word by
word, forming the sentences and repeating them to commit them to memory, her mouth
moving like a child's does. A strange picture of this man's life formed in
her mind out of these glimpses.

He was soft of heart: “This evening I watched the thick mass of
white fog as it slowly disappeared, revealing these beautiful green mountains
surrounding the Canyon Station.” He wrote humorously about God: “The Great
Elementary Director has spent almost twenty-eight days amusing himself by way of
creating misery for earthly humans. I for one would almost think he had created a switch
that would alternate from rain to snow.” And it seemed that he had lived lately in
Idaho and Montana, where he made himself a regular at empty ranger stations and
observation towers: “As one climbs the steps leading up to the little cabin, fifty
feet above the ground on four tall cedar poles, the view becomes so impressive the
observer feels as if they were becoming strangely intoxicated by the airy stimulants
evaporating from such a beautiful nature-created scene.”

Here was a man who suffered no loneliness, who spent his days as he
wished, who believed he could so deeply commune with nature that deer would eat from his
hand and allow him
to scratch their heads. It also seemed Moreland
was a chronic thief. The U.S. Forest Rangers had issued a warrant for his arrest after
his incessant pilfering of their cabins. “Four men sleeping upstairs. I got a pair
of good boots, the better part of a bag of oatmeal, lard, not so good rifle, and two
pairs of pants.” In other stations he got maps, binoculars, chewing tobacco,
matches, sleeping bags — anything a woodsman might fancy and everything he needs.
“I borrowed fifteen fire rations — mostly shotgun shells but some pistol
too. Oil of clove for my tooth. What sainted relief came with that.”

On one occasion, rangers had entered a cabin and found his abandoned meal
upon the table, still warm. There were tales of pursuit, well-equipped men on snowshoes,
on horseback, pounding after their quarry in the moonlight, and Moreland far too swift
for them, disappearing into the woods like a djinn. His evasive techniques were out of
boys' adventure books. He removed his shoes and, using long sticks, made tracks so
his pursuers would think he had veered in another direction. He walked in reverse. He
climbed trees. Always faster than the trackers, Moreland was a man chased through his
own home, knowing its every corner and hiding place, accustomed as other men
weren't to the subtler physiology of forests and rivers and snow, all for having
been out in it, alone, without respite.

“I went to the river to cut down some trees, and afterwards I threw
the logs in so the rangers would think I had fashioned a raft. Then I took my boots off
and went straight up the mountain, stepping along a trickle of water no wider than my
foot. In this way, I succeeded in losing them.”

“Got a good handsaw and some coffee at Oakland River R.S. There is a
poster up on the wall about me. They call me
the Ridgerunner, which
is a good name, since they could as easily call me ‘that bastard.' I am a
pain in their necks and they can't wait to get rid of me.”

The widow closed the little notebook and stood thinking among the cedars
and underbrush. She continued to think while stirring the fire back to life, her mouth
dreaming the words over again.
These beautiful green mountains
. By the time the
Ridgerunner returned, holding a limp and garrotted rabbit by its gangly hind legs, she
was in the tent again, peering out at him like a badger in her cave.

“Ho,” he grinned, “you still here?”

He slept during the afternoon, as the rabbit stew cooked, lying on a rain
slicker in the sun with his arms behind his head. And at night, he guarded her.

On the third day, she saw a change in his demeanour. He kept glancing in
her direction — a sly, determined glint there. She suffered a panicked certainty
of what would come next. He would force himself on her. She reminded herself her husband
had often done that, a voracious energy so overtaking him he was blind to her grunts and
struggling, her attempts to rearrange him or push him off, his hard, heavy body laying
down unintended bruises. Looking now at William Moreland, she gauged her chances of
escape or rebuff, and slumped. She sank farther back into the dim of the tent.

Finally, he did stride across the clearing, but instead of entering the
tent, he pulled an upright log to the open flaps and sat quietly with his hands on his
knees, smiling. It was an unusually warm day. From his breast pocket he produced a
little wadge of papers. They were newspaper clippings, and he riffled through them like
playing cards, apparently looking for one in particular. When he found it, he began to
read
in the overly formal manner of a schoolboy. “Fire broke
out at the university library building at Smithburg. It was totally destroyed. The fire
is thought to be the work of incendiaries with a grudge against books.”

He grinned widely at her, waiting.

The widow could not fathom the meaning of this prelude, if indeed it was a
prelude. After a moment, he took out another clipping. “Patrons of Hoglund's
Barber Shop were obliged to rush into the street to stop two well-known church matrons,
Miss Pike and Miss Case, who were administering a severe horsewhipping to the local
mailman. The beating had been going on for some time before it was finally stopped. The
victim, John P. Berry, refuses to lodge a complaint, as he admits to having slandered
the ladies on numerous occasions.”

The widow shuffled a little closer to him and made herself comfortable,
still unsure what he was doing.

“I like that one,” Moreland said. On the next clipping he
stumbled on the word
professes
.

“Dr. Joquish, a well-known citizen of Turo, claims that his soul
recently separated from his body and went up to the heavens where it met and talked with
a goat. He . . .
professes
to remember the circumstances well. This story is
alarming to his family and the faculty of the university where he teaches. But the
doctor is a man of strong mind and he refuses to retract his statement.” Moreland
glanced at his audience, clearly amused. But the confused widow simply gaped at him. He
tried another:

“Victoria Green, of Olander, was bound to the county courthouse for
the sum of $500. She was charged with sending obscene matter through the mails. Miss
Green sent her
neighbour a letter of the filthiest description
because she blamed him for destroying her rose bushes.” Seeing that this had
produced a half-smile on the widow's face, he quickly searched for another story,
pulling at the folded clippings and refiling them until he found the one he wanted. This
sheet was yellowed and badly worn, and he was obliged to hold it delicately before
him.

“Jacob Neuhanssen, lately a farmer out of Durham Falls, was
discovered by a local physician, J. M. Keeler, to be in the process of hanging himself
from a tree in front of his house. Keeler rushed to cut the suicide down, but in
dropping to the ground Neuhanssen broke his leg. As the farmer was now unable to move,
the physician ran to get his wagon to take the unfortunate fellow to his surgery. But in
his haste, Keeler backed the wagon over Neuhanssen, killing him. No charges are to be
laid against the physician.”

The widow burst out laughing. Moreland stuffed the papers back in his
pocket, clearly pleased with his work. He rubbed his hands together heartily and stood
to go.

“More later,” he promised. And with that, he went to lie in
the sun with his hat over his eyes. The widow sat stunned at the flap of the tent, an
open-mouthed smile lingering on her lips. She studied the contours of Moreland's
face in profile. A similar smile lingered there.

THAT NIGHT
, the widow again found him lying next to her.
She remained still, warm under her blankets. He lay with his hands on his belly, the
picture of calm, but after a moment she saw his heart beating hugely under his
shirt.

“William,” she said. At the sound of her voice, he lurched up
and made for the exit.

“Stay,” she said, gripping the back of his shirt so it came
out of his waistband, “stay here. Lie down and sleep. Don't argue.”
She removed a blanket and spread it over him. And so they both lay, fully clothed
against the cold mountain air, neither sleeping, but then, after a time, sleeping
lightly. When she woke, needing to pee, she saw their breath had formed ice on the
inside of the tent. When she touched it, it tinkled like glass and fell away, almost
evaporating as it touched her hand.

In the days to follow he would coax her from the tent to teach her how to
use a rifle. It was something she already knew how to do, but she liked the sound of his
voice. They worked without ammunition, for he could not waste it — even so, they
could both tell how wild her aim was. The calibre of rifle he had was for larger game
and would not do for rabbits, he said. “Unless you want scrappy pieces.” He
also showed her how to lay a proper snare. But the rabbits seemed to know an amateur job
when they saw it and avoided her traps entirely.

He took her on a walk for her strength. Together they wandered the sloped
ground below their camp, the canopy of the trees so thick above that the air was
motionless and the bark sparkled with frost. They sat in a clearing where the mist was
thick and cold. It moved in like cloud, and in fact might have been. A rivulet of icy
water gurgled nearby. He snapped rosehips from a still-blooming bush and ate them. He
told her about his life, some of which she already knew from her spying. He had been
raised in the Idaho woods by a lenient and often absent father. He believed most people
could benefit from solitude. Too much society, he argued, always left one anxious and
depressed. He was thirty-five
years old, or so he figured, but a
life outdoors had aged him considerably. He had been employed once or twice, but the
experiment had always ended in criminal charges. One summer he worked as a flumewalker
for a Montana logging company. Every day he would check the long water trough that ran
downhill past stumps and other logging rubbish, along which logs would be sent banging
and leaping to the river. If there was a jam in the flume, he would clamber up, slam his
hook into the offending log, and pull it free. He was expected to keep the trough clear
of debris and daubed with tar so it didn't leak. He was happy in his work. But he
had also made repeated romantic advances on a girl cook who already had a lover. The
girl never actually rebuffed him, and so a kind of feud developed. Moreland's
rival had friends while he himself had none, so everywhere he went in camp, he was
unwelcome. He took to wearing a pistol. Eventually he was moved to use the pistol to
blow a hole in his rival's bunkhouse door, and that was the end of his job. He
knew when to disappear. He'd spent that winter in an empty and half-ruined company
cabin ten miles north, but no one thought to look for him there.

Later, he worked for another logging company in Idaho, making dynamite
sticks to blow stumps out of the ground, pouring
TNT
into paper sheaths
and attaching the wicks. His fingers were stained black from the powder and they ached
at night. The scent of it had stayed in his nostrils, prickling, and he carried the dust
in his hair and clothes. He was extraordinarily careful around matches and fires. Soon
he was promoted to “powder monkey” and was allowed to blast stumps from the
ground. He learned to drill holes in the massive roots, below the flat, ringed surfaces
as perfect as
tabletops, angling the drill down through the roots
and dropping the already hissing bombs into the dark.

“One fellow wasn't fast enough,” he told the widow.
“The ground jumped up and broke both his legs. But I'm pretty quick on my
feet.”

That job, too, ended when someone, not the Ridgerunner, blew the saw house
up, dynamiting one supporting beam completely away so the building groaned over sideways
and hung there like a poorly made wedding cake. With no work to do, and thus no money,
the men fell to drunken conjecture, and of course the most likely culprit was William
Moreland. Furtive, reclusive, prone to argument, and sporting a pistol, the Ridgerunner
again tested the winds of human opinion and found reasons to vanish.

By mid-winter that year, the Ridgerunner was as close to bankrupt as a
woodsman could be: his boots worn down to flaps, his supplies exhausted, no ammunition
left. Nothing in his possession was dry, nor had it been for weeks. Rot had set into
everything. That was the only reason he got caught, he told the widow — he was
slowed down by misfortune. Two detectives, Horner and Roark, hired at great expense by
the now enraged director of the Forest Service, found his footprints and followed them
to their source. They had been tracking him without success for four weeks, his trail
fading or simply ending without explanation, so the two trackers were almost convinced
the Ridgerunner was not entirely real. And so they were momentarily amazed when they
came over a rise and spotted him there. It was like seeing a real leprechaun. Moreland
was camped down in a hollow, out of sight, huddled by a deliberately modest fire in the
dusk. Had they
not been looking for him, they might have passed
right by, unaware of his presence. Rifles poised, they crept downhill toward him, one
from the north, one from the south, and the Ridgerunner did not hear them coming. Not
until Horner tripped on his own snowshoes and fell face first down the slope, shovelling
up a mound of snow before him that eventually covered his head. Before the Ridgerunner
could move, Roark was behind him with the rifle at his ear.