Hunter's Moon Read online

  His fair skin flushed a dull red. “You pick it up.”

  Kate didn’t move. “I’m your guide,” she said flatly, “not the garbage man. Pick it up yourself.” Almost casually, she shifted her rifle so that the muzzle was pointing between his feet.

  There was a strained silence. Dieter glared at Kate, face turning even redder. Either he didn’t like women, didn’t like people of color or didn’t like anybody who didn’t have as much money as he had, or maybe it was all three and nobody told him what to do besides. Take a number, Dieter, she thought.

  Eberhard broke the impasse by leaning over and picking up the wrapper. He stuffed it in his fanny pack and buckled the pack around his waist. “Those moose don’t stay around forever, do they?” he said. “We’d better get going.” He cradled his Weatherby in his arms, and its muzzle came to rest pointed in Kate’s general direction.

  She laughed. He didn’t like it, and neither did Dieter. She managed to control her amusement and jerked her chin in the direction of the lake. “Let’s take it slow and easy, boys. Quiet as you can, okay?”

  They took it slow and easy down to the lake, although the strain of carrying fourteen pounds of Merkel at present arms for three hours was beginning to show in Dieter’s face and shoulders. He called for a rest often. Eberhard continued to manage his Weatherby like he would a toothpick.

  They crouched in a stand of diamond willow, peering through the thicket to the water on the other side.

  “My feet are getting wet,” Dieter said, too loudly.

  “Quiet,” Kate said, without heat. Dieter was wearing hiking boots that laced as high as the ankle and no higher, not a lot of support over rough ground and no protection at all in the swamps that grew the best moose browse. She had no sympathy for him; George sent out a list of equipment to each of his hunting parties, including specific instructions about footwear. It wasn’t her fault if Dieter chose not to follow them, although the hike home, particularly if they got their moose, was not looking like a fun time.

  The lake was half a mile across, a limpid pool with the barest ripples showing in a silver surface that reflected every needle and leaf and branch of the trees that grew at its edge and the blue sky above. The diamond willow stood twelve feet deep in places around the edge, guaranteeing this lake would be first in the chow line for the local moose.

  Since the day before George’s bull had been joined by a second. Kate groaned to herself. Dieter would probably want both.

  The first bull was directly across from them, broad butt planted in the lake, head buried in a thicket of diamond willow. He was on the scrawny side, though, and his rack was a little droopy around the edges, giving him the look of a character who had just wandered out of a Disney cartoon.

  About a hundred yards on their left, the second bull, nice and firm and fat, was planted with all four knees deep in water, a hundred percent of his attention focused on systematically stripping the bark from a stand of alders clustered at the edge of the lake, one branch at a time, making a leisurely journey around the clump, which direction was moving him slowly but steadily to dry ground. Perfect.

  “Nice,” Kate said in a voice barely above a whisper. It was an understatement. She estimated a good nine hundred pounds of meat dressed. “He’ll fill up somebody’s cache for the winter.” Neither one of the bulls looked twitchy, so they might have yet to go into rut, which meant the meat might even be edible.

  She looked at Eberhard and Dieter and for once was not disappointed.

  It was impossible to realize the sheer bulk of Alces gigas, genus Alces, family Cervidae, order Artiodactyla without going into the wild, although there was a stuffed, mounted specimen of this ungulate ruminant antler bearer in the Anchorage International Airport, which made a living out of stopping tourists in their tracks. While ambassador to France, Thomas Jefferson had been laughed at when he spoke of the size and weight of the North American moose, and had had one stuffed and shipped to the French court to prove he wasn’t just telling tales.

  But this bull was very much alive, living, breathing, the sound of branches snapping between his jaws audible across the still water of the lake. He stood seven feet at the shoulder and measured at least nine feet nose to tail, with great humped shoulders, a long, heavy snout and a broad rack of antlers, seventy, maybe seventy-two inches wide.

  He was mature, about six or seven years old from the size and number of his brow tines, four on each side and similar in length and evenly spaced. It was a handsome rack, broadly and evenly palmed, which was just as well since it was destined to grace the wall of the board room at DRG. Kate felt a pang of regret that he was not long for this world and hoped fervently that he had gotten lucky on multiple occasions every year of his adult life and had many offspring scattered between here and Beluga.

  “Look at those horns!” Dieter said.

  “Quiet,” Kate said.

  “Are those horns a record?” Dieter demanded in a lower voice.

  “No,” Kate said without expression, but Eberhard gave her a sharp glance. “I’d guess about a seventy-inch spread, maybe a little more. It’s well shaped, though, nice and even.”

  “It’ll look good on the wall of the office,” Eberhard said.

  Dieter was not to be placated. “What’s the record?”

  “A little over eighty inches, tip to tip,” Kate said, “according to Boone and Crockett.”

  Dieter crouched over his Merkel, hands clenched on the stock, face flushed with excitement, and worked this into centimeters. He swore. “A third of a meter short of the record.”

  One of the bull’s ears twitched. “Quiet, Dieter. You don’t really want to have to chase him through the bush, do you?”

  “I wanted a record,” Dieter said stubbornly.

  Kate, crouching with her elbows on her knees, rifle held easily in her hands, said with great patience, “I don’t think George puts any guarantees of record kills in his contracts, Dieter. You want this bull or not?”

  Dieter flashed her a look of irritation, and looked back at the bull. “I want him,” he said, and raised the Merkel to his shoulder.

  “No, not yet!” Kate said urgently, but it was too late. The Merkel boomed in her ear.

  Kate, quite forgetting who she was speaking to, said, “You stupid bastard!” and knocked the barrel of the Merkel upward as it boomed a second time.

  Dieter leapt to his feet and yelled at her in German, face red with fury. Across the lake, the first bull bolted. As the ringing cleared from Kate’s ears she could hear his frantic crashing through the undergrowth growing steadily more distant.

  She got to her feet, ignoring Dieter, intent on the second bull, which was her mistake. He raised the Merkel, butt toward her, and pulled back as if to strike. She caught the movement from the corner of her eye and turned on her heel to face him directly, rifle held horizontally across her chest. As the butt came toward her, she used her rifle like Little John’s quarterstaff, jerking it sharply upward. The swift, abrupt contact of barrel to stock jarred the Merkel out of Dieter’s hands and it flew over his head and fell into the lake.

  Eberhard’s rifle was coming around and up. “Don’t,” Kate said. The bolt of the Remington shot home with a heartening sound.

  There was a brief, tense silence, broken only by the frenzied splashing sounds Dieter made as he waded into the lake to search for his beloved Merkel. He found it and pulled it up, covered with muck and bracken. He wasn’t happy, and he said so.

  Kate didn’t move. All of her attention was focused on the big man opposite her with the big rifle in his hands. Eberhard took a quick look at Dieter. He relaxed visibly, standing down, as it were, and actually bent his head, a warrior’s recognition of his equal. “I won’t underestimate you again,” he said.

  “Oh please,” she said, impatiently. “Spare me the Marine’s Hymn.” She looked across the lake.

  Dieter hadn’t missed, but it hadn’t been a clean hit, either. The second bull was lying half on the bank,
half off it, surrounded by a widening pool of dark red. As she watched, he thrashed feebly, tangling his rack in the alders. She raised the .30-06 to her shoulder, flipping up the sights and bringing the bead to bear on the moose’s head. He thrashed once again, before lying back against the bank, flanks heaving. Kate let out a breath, held it and sighted on the moose’s left eye. Before the shot finished echoing across the lake, the bull was still.

  She ejected the spent shell and picked it up. She was as short on diplomacy as she was on patience and only the fact that George Perry was a sometime employer and longtime friend kept her from giving forth with her unvarnished opinion of Dieter, his character, his ancestors and his associates. She pocketed the shell and shouldered the rifle. “Let’s go,” she said and walked around Eberhard in the direction of the dead moose.

  There was a mutter of German behind her. She ignored it, forcing her way through the undergrowth. It caught at her braid and her clothes until she managed to shove head and shoulders through the alders lining the edge of the lake where the moose was.

  There was nothing to show for Kate’s shot but a missing left eye. The Merkel, on the other hand, had taken half a shoulder with it. Broken bones gleamed whitely through red meat, and Kate caught a whiff of something unpleasant. Dieter’s slug had clipped an intestine. Goody.

  Dieter fought his way through the brush and pounced. The next ten minutes were fully occupied with picture taking, Eberhard producing a small but undoubtedly expensive Leica and shooting a roll of film with Dieter in various poses.

  The camera came to the end of the roll and started rewinding. “Okay.” Kate said, pulling a knife.

  There was a startled exclamation from Dieter and Eberhard almost dropped the camera going for his Weatherby. Kate kept her face straight and extended the knife to Dieter, hilt first. “Time to start skinning.”

  He took the knife automatically. It was a slender eight-inch blade with a wickedly sharp edge. “To take the head off?”

  “Among other things,” Kate murmured, and stood and watched him hack off the head with clumsy enthusiasm. It would have been easier for him if she’d produced the hatchet from her pack, but she didn’t, and he was panting and covered with blood and moose hair by the time the head broke free from the body. He went to lift it up and was surprised by the weight, as well he should be. The rack alone probably weighed fifty pounds.

  Wet to the knees with swamp water, stained to the waist with moose blood, red rage replaced with a pink and gratified pride, Dieter displayed his trophy. Eberhard’s attaboys were as flattering as one of his phlegmatic nature could produce. Kate waited. Dieter finally remembered her presence, and turned to hand her the knife.

  “Not so fast,” she said. “Finish skinning him out.”

  “What?”

  “Finish skinning him out,” she repeated. “You’ll have to haul him from the water first.”

  Dieter gaped at her for a moment, then recovered. “We got what we wanted,” he said, indicating the head.

  “We take the meat, too.”

  He looked baffled. “But—” He looked around at the surrounding brush and brightened. “There are other animals who will eat the meat.” Inspired, he stuck one finger in the air like Christ pointing the One Way. “Wolves! There are wolves in Alaska! They will eat the meat!”

  Kate shook her head. “Not this moose. You shot this moose, you recover the meat, we’ll hang what we can’t pack back to camp and come back for it tomorrow.”

  He was starting to get red again. What the heck, he’d match his shirt. “We’re leaving,” he said shortly.

  “Fine,” she said equably. She turned and surveyed the area. There was a tiny clearing to the left and she squeezed into it, bent a few branches back to let in more light, and sat down with her back to a trunk.

  All this was watched in perplexed silence by the two men. “What are you doing?” Dieter said, finally.

  She smiled at him. “Taking a nap,” she said. “You boys go on, head back to camp.” She leaned her head against the bark and closed her eyes. “You get lost, you remember the signal. Three shots, fired a second apart. I’ll come running.”

  There was silence on the other side of the bushes, followed by some conversation in German, Dieter’s voice rising with wrath, Eberhard’s calmer and less voluble.

  Now, Kate was totally out of line here. State law required that the moose be gutted as soon as possible and all the meat recovered, but it was the guide on the hunt who was responsible for doing this. It was also the guide who would suffer the consequences of the wanton waste law if he or she didn’t, which consequences as George had pointed out included large fines and confiscation of personal property such as private aircraft, not to mention jail time.

  Furthermore, drop-off hunters packed their meat out. Guided hunters did not. Dieter and Eberhard were indubitably guided.

  On the other hand, she’d seen George Perry’s standard contract and the clause that guaranteed a “true Alaskan wilderness experience.” George provided packboards for all his hunters, taking their willingness to pack as understood.

  And Kate was pissed off by the way Dieter and Eberhard were behaving, irritated that they had evidently had wax in their ears when George had instructed them the previous morning on the recovery of game, and was subsequently disinclined to volunteer any advice or help, or to be conciliatory or coaxing in any way.

  All she had to worry about was the Fish and Game showing up unexpectedly. Her luck was the local fish hawk was probably overhead this minute, alert for wrong-doing on his turf.

  Or George would arrive and carve out her liver with a dull knife when he found out what she was up to.

  The voices stopped. Kate stayed where she was.

  Dieter’s voice said, “You’ll help us.” It wasn’t a request.

  She opened her eyes and looked Dieter right in the eye. “The best way to go about it is for one of you to hold the rear legs apart while the other uses the knife to open him up. Start at the anus, one cut straight up the belly to the throat, and let the guts fall out. Don’t nick any of the internal organs—” or any more than you already have, she thought”—or you’ll taint the meat.” She paused. “Of course, you’ll have to haul him to dry ground first. Might have avoided that if you waited until he’d worked his way on shore, which was where he was heading when you shot him.”

  “We’re not taking the meat,” Eberhard said, his deep voice quietly menacing.

  “Then we’re not going back to camp,” Kate said, just as quietly.

  If Dieter’s face had been red before it was purple now. “You can’t talk to me like this! No one talks to me like this!”

  “Then you’re about due, aren’t you?” Kate said coolly. She looked up at the sky. “Better get a move on, guys. Sun’s headed down, and we haven’t got much time left to butcher and get back to camp before dark.”

  Five

  Exit, pursued by a bear.

  THEY RETREATED A FEW FEET and Kate heard the murmur of German, Dieter’s voice louder and more insistent, Eberhard’s calmer and less ruffled. There was some movement and Kate opened her eyes to see Dieter shoulder the packboard and Eberhard hand him his rifle. They waded into the brush, the sounds of breaking branches interspersed with muttered curses.

  Well, shit. Kate sighed. Looked like the boys had called her bluff and decided to head back for camp on their own.

  She got up and eeled her way through the trees to the moose’s body, lying where they’d left it, beheaded, half in and half out of the water. The blood was still oozing from the jagged flesh of the neck, the bony spine protruding from the skin and hair of the nape.

  There was a rustle in the brush behind her. It was a small rustle so she didn’t turn around. The smell of blood had had enough time to spread; an aroma that said “Dinner is served!” to every omnivore for miles around. It was a small lake without much flow-through, or in other words not much of a built-in mechanism for self-cleaning, and probably not filled wi
th flesh-eating fish, either. She didn’t have much choice and sighed again. Maybe she should have batted her eyes at the guys, just once. Oh well. No help for it now.

  She had a length of line in her pack; she rigged a noose and tossed it over the branch of a nearby cottonwood. The noose tightened around the moose’s rear left foot, and after much straining and swearing he rolled toward her, coming to rest on his left side, mostly on the bank and out of the water, where at least he wouldn’t foul the lake. She left the line hooked to his foot and took a half-hitch around the trunk of the tree with the free end, and then with one swift stroke of her skinning knife opened the moose up, as Abel would have said, “from asshole to appetite.” The guts spilled out on the ground, the moose between them and the water and a nice, full-bodied stink rising up to perfume the air and entice the clean-up crew.

  There was a squawk above her head and she looked up to see a seagull, no, two, gliding by with a critical eye to assess the possibilities of the situation. There was another rustle in the brush and Kate looked around, expecting to see a fox, or even a wolf.

  Instead a man who looked like one of the lead singers for ZZ Top stepped into the tiny clearing.

  He was thin to the point of emaciation, with hollow, pock-marked cheeks. His jeans were patched at the knee over stork-like legs, and held up by a wide, worn leather belt. His shirt was a plaid flannel so faded the checks were indistinguishable, and his beard was long enough to be tucked into his belt with the shirt. He was close enough for Kate to smell how long it had been since his last bath, and it was too late to take those teeth to the dentist.

  His eyes were dark and watchful. Right then, they were fixed unwaveringly on her.

  Without consciously deciding to Kate reached for her rifle. The stock felt infinitely reassuring as it slid into her hands and she felt marginally safer.

  George had said not to talk to Crazy Emmett, not even to look at him, but he hadn’t envisioned this scenario. “I’m Kate Shugak,” she said, keeping her voice as neutral as possible. “I work for George Perry, the pilot who owns the hunting lodge west of here. You must be Cr—you must be Emmett. Cabin on the lake a mile or so that way?”