Sundown on Top of the World: A Hunter Rayne Highway Mystery (25 page)

Before the conversation came to a halt, Hunter ventured to say, “What would his mother think of our hypothetical situation? I mean, let’s say, suppose her son got away with murder.”

The old man shook his head. Looking straight at Hunter his moustache twitched inscrutably again. “Speaking hypothetically? She wouldn’t like it. She wouldn’t like it at all.”

– – – – – FOURTEEN

Betty shrugged off her pack and dropped it on a rock-strewn mound covered with kinnikinnick , crushing what was left of its tiny, pink, urn-shaped flowers. She sank to her knees beside it. She and Hootie had been walking most of the past two days, stopping when they needed to rest, eat or sleep and came across suitably comfortable spots. They hiked along the shore when they could and when they couldn’t, she tried to keep to anything that looked like a trail without losing track of the river. “What do we do now, Hootie?” she said, surveying the rushing water some forty feet ahead of them.

She had chosen the northeast side of the Yukon River to avoid its confluence with the Fortymile, but at this time of year even the smaller creeks could be difficult to cross. Now they had come up against just such a creek, and Betty considered her options. She couldn’t wade across – the creek was too deep, the current too strong and the water too cold – but she might be able to fashion a raft to pole across at a shallower and calmer stretch. It was inevitable that the current would carry her at least part of the way downstream. With good luck, she would end up on the other side of the creek before it reached the river. With bad luck, she and Hootie would be carried out into the Yukon River and swept back downstream toward Eagle, and very likely, to their deaths from hypothermia and drowning.

Her other option was to make her way as far upstream as she could in the hopes of finding a spot where it was shallow and calm enough to wade across. That was a detour she could ill afford. It could take her hours to find such a spot, and she could end up miles up the creek. She tried to remember if she had ever been close to here with James Monroe, when she lived with him near Fortymile, but he had usually gone out hunting alone while she stayed at the cabin, and she couldn’t recall crossing to this side of the river except in winter when ice turned the river into a solid road.

Either option required her to follow the creek upstream to find a suitable spot. She glanced over at her companion. The day’s hike had been much more than Hootie was used to, and he had found a small depression filled with brown spruce needles to curl up in. Betty smiled sadly. She knew that Hootie would follow her until he could no longer walk and she loved him for it. “We’ll make it, old friend,” she said as she struggled to her feet. Her knees protested, and she massaged them for a moment before straightening up and picking up her pack and her walking stick.

They had been making their way, gently uphill, on a rough moose path for almost an hour. The light had changed. No longer were there bright patches of yellow light on the foliage ahead, so she knew before she could see them overhead that dark clouds that had moved across the sun. The wind had picked up as well, whistling softly through the upper branches of the spruce and setting the aspen leaves trembling.

The creek, when she could see it from the path, was beginning to look less forbidding, and she felt hopeful that it would soon be shallow enough to ford if they could find a spot wide and level enough. Hootie, as always, walked about ten feet in front of her, picking his way over deadfall and past low-hanging spruce boughs. He paused now and then to look back, either to make sure she was following or that he was still heading the way she intended. His steps slowed, and his nose lifted, nostrils wide, as he caught a scent from up ahead. Betty heard him growl, low in his throat, a sound she knew all too well – his bear growl.

She stopped dead in her tracks and listened. This time of year, grizzly sows were out foraging along with the cubs that had been born inside their dens during winter hibernation. It wouldn’t do to surprise a sow with cubs, or a bear feeding on the carcass of an elk or moose calf. From where she stood, she could see clusters of rose hips here and there through the foliage, still clinging to the twigs of last year’s growth. It wouldn’t surprise her if there was a bear foraging for them along the trail ahead. Should she turn back, or continue on?

“Hootie?” she whispered. She would let him decide.

Dan Sorenson felt kind of bad about leaving Hunter to finish the trip himself, but a man does what he has to do. He decided to make an effort to help Hunter by keeping an eye out on his way back home for a native guy with grease under his fingernails on a motorcycle, a guy who might have been in the Yukon the week before. He didn’t hold out much hope, but at least he could say he tried.

Every time he came across some brothers on their bikes – he even went so far as to talk to guys on ricers when he happened to find himself parked beside their Hondas or Kawasakis – he would ask them where they’d been and depending on their answer, whether they’d seen a dude like the one Hunter was looking for. “What kind of ride?” they’d ask. “Dunno,” is all he could say. Fat chance he’d find the Lost Mine dude with so little info.

So it surprised him when he seemed to come close. It was in Chilliwack, when he was less than an hour from home. He needed to eat, so he pulled off at the Tim Horton’s just off the highway. There were a couple of guys outside, standing beside their bikes and smoking while they finished off their coffee in paper cups. Sorry almost didn’t ask, figuring it was a lost cause this far from the Yukon, but he did a double take when he saw that one of them had Yukon plates on his big Yamaha. The other guy had a black BMW that reminded him of Darth Vader.

“You just down from up north? I just came from Whitehorse myself,” he said as he slammed the kickstand down and dismounted his Harley beside them. He took off his helmet, then stretched his shoulders as they looked him up and down.

The bigger guy, who had blond hair so obviously wasn’t the dude Hunter wanted to find, was standing beside the Yamaha with Yukon plates – Sorry had to admit that for a ricer it was a sweet looking ride, nicely chromed – and was the one to speak. “I went out for a joyride and forgot to turn around.”

“Done that more than once myself. Nice ride,” said Sorry, eyeing the bike. “You from Whitehorse?”

The guy nodded.

“Not many guys up there have bikes, eh?”

The guy nodded again, dropped his cigarette butt and ground it into the asphalt with his boot heel. “Summer’s too short,” he said.

“Any chance you know a native dude with a scruffy beard who lives up that way and rides a bike? Got a friend who asked me to look out for him, but I’m drawing a blank on the dude’s name.”

The guy shrugged. “What kind of bike?”

“He didn’t say.” Sorry felt like an idiot.

“I knew a native guy up there worked at the local bike shop awhile, moved down here a few years back. He still looks kind of scruffy, like he did when he’d just come out of the bush. I ran into him in downtown Whitehorse recently, said he was on vacation and decided to ride back up north for the hell of it.”

Sorry figured that sounded promising, but he didn’t want to show too much enthusiasm. “Down here? Like, where here? I wonder if that’s him. You know his name?”

“Jimmy something. Never knew his last name.”

“You know where he works?”

“Said he’s still working as a bike mechanic. I think he said Surrey.”

Sorry caught a whiff of Tim Horton’s chili and slapped his back pocket to make sure he still had his wallet. “Thanks, eh?” he said, then as an afterthought, “You said you saw him recently?”

“Week or so, I guess.”

Sorry nodded his thanks and headed for the entrance, already salivating at the thought of the chili. He could call and give that potentially useful piece of information to Hunter once he got home, or he could check out a couple of bike shops in Surrey, since that was his own home turf and he knew some of the guys . If he struck out, well then maybe Hunter could check out the motorcycle shop in Whitehorse. Might be as good a clue as any, he thought.

The girl behind the counter asked him what he wanted and he was about to ask for a double order of the chili when he realized that if all went well, he might be in bed with his lovely wife Mo a few hours later. She hated manly farts. He swallowed hard, then bravely ordered a bowl of soup, a cream cheese bagel, and three glazed donuts.

No way was he going to risk being banished to the couch his first night back.

Betty was debating whether to start making noise to alert the bear to her presence in the hope that it would hightail it in the opposite direction. Tired of carrying the rifle and finding her arthritic fingers cramping up, she had tucked it into her pack several hours earlier. She knew she couldn’t pull it loose without taking off her pack, and it would take more time than she wished to spend to take the makeshift pack off her back and hoist it back on again.

Hootie growled low in his throat once more, then turned in the direction of the creek and began picking his way around the trees, across deadfall and the low-growing scrub. Betty sensed his caution and followed as quietly as she could, still wondering if it might not be wiser to alert the bear to human presence, but wanting to trust her dog’s instinct to remain silent. A light breeze carried a rotten smell from the bear’s direction. She wasn’t sure if it was a carcass the bear had been feeding on, or a camouflage smell that the bear had picked up, and she didn’t want to find out. From the same direction came a deep snuffling sound and the crack of a breaking branch. It sounded a little too close for comfort.

The creek came into view, and although there was a pretty steep bank that she would have to slide down, the water itself looked reasonably calm and shallow. If they could get across the creek, they would seem like less of a threat to the bear and it would reduce the danger of being charged. Hootie reached the bank, but instead of heading down to the creek, he made an about-face and stood stiff-legged with his ruff raised, his ears pricked in the direction of the moose path behind Betty.

She was only about eight feet from the bank and watching where she placed each foot when she heard Hootie snarl and he bounded past her so fast he was a blur of grey fur. Her adrenalin picked her up and carried her to the bank and down into the creek bed before she had any conscious thought of doing so. She was aware of the sounds of a brawl behind her – Hootie’s deep bark and a bear’s grating bellow accompanied by the violent rustling of undergrowth – and then she heard the sound she dreaded, a high-pitched yelp that told her Hootie had been hit.

Suddenly she was in the water, the cold of it slicing at her skin like a razor, her boots and pant legs suddenly heavy with the weight of it. It reached her knees, and suddenly her thighs; she felt the frigid water assault her crotch, then rise almost to her waist. One foot slipped on a rock and she couldn’t move fast enough to regain her balance. She fell sideways into the icy water and the sudden cold around her arms and chest took her breath away. Gasping, she flailed around trying to get hold of the walking stick she’d dropped in the fall, but it floated out of reach in the current. As she struggled to find purchase with her feet, the current caught her pack and she felt herself being carried backwards down the creek. She had no choice but to shrug out of the heavy pack, heavier still as it began to absorb water. Still it took all of her strength to turn over, and she braced her legs and arms against anything in the creek bed they came in contact with, any rock or submerged and half buried branch or log. The water was deep enough to rush into her open mouth with every gasp, so she spat and coughed and gagged until she could keep her chin above the stream. She was only vaguely aware that her pack was floating steadily downstream; not drowning had become her only priority.

A few times, it seemed to her that the water would win, but she managed to struggle to her feet and take one agonizing step after another, her legs and feet almost numb, until she reached the other shore. Only then did her thoughts turn again to the bear, and to the possibility that her ordeal was just beginning. She crawled up the low bank, barely feeling the rocks under her hands and knees, and tried to conceal herself in some tall scrub under a white spruce about fifteen feet into the woods. She began shivering uncontrollably. The sensation of cold had morphed into pain from her face to her toes, and she could hear nothing but her own rasping breath and the thudding of her heart.

She lay exhausted, abandoning her body to convulsive shivering. As her breathing slowed, a delicious warmth slowly grew from somewhere under her ribcage, gradually displacing cold in her chest and hips, and then crept the length of each arm and each leg. The warmth and silence were so comforting and she felt so safe that there was no room for fear or pain, and alone in the bush a mile or more upstream from the Yukon River, Betty Salmon fell into an exhausted sleep.

“That’s her boat.” Orville was standing at the back of the RCMP patrol boat, pointing at the eastern bank of the Yukon River. An aluminum skiff with patchy red paint on its hull was visible on the beach. “Stop. Turn around. That’s got to be her boat.”

Hunter was relieved to see that the boat Orville referred to seemed to have been deliberately beached, rather than borne ashore by the current. Someone had pulled it away from the river’s edge and turned it over. He hoped Orville was right, and he also hoped that it had been Betty herself who had beached the boat. He didn’t see how she could have gone very far on foot, so if they turned around and followed the shoreline, they might have a good chance of finding her. On the way from Dawson they had been looking for any sign of her boat, scanning the banks on both sides of the river. Now they knew which side to look on, and which stretch of the river to begin searching.