The Moose Jaw (28 page)

She looked at me with mild wonder. 

I tried to smile. “Sorry, old habits die hard – take care of your weapon and it will take care of you, and all that.” 

“Army?” She asked.

“Marines,” I told her.

“Did you fight in the Pacific?”

“You could say that,” I told her.  “South-east Asia.”

She nodded and took the shotgun to the bed.  She expertly fingered the slide release and pumped out three shells.”

“Two more,” I cautioned.

She looked puzzled.  “I thought they only held three.”

“The law only allows three. They hold five.  Yours probably has a plug in it.”

She worked the pump twice more, and two more shells plopped out onto the fleece blanket.  It was clear she didn’t know what to do next so I asked her to bring it over to me.  When she had, I unscrewed the spring retention cap and removed it, then I slipped the barrel’s locking ring off the pump tube.

“There,” I said.  “You’ll find some oil and rags in the box on the shelf next to the shells.”

She found them and brought them to me.  By now I was feeling much better.  There is something about a simple chore that confirms a man’s grip on life.  I took the oil from her and dripped a few drops inside the receiver and along the pump tube.  I did the same with the barrel.  She handed me a rag and I used it to rub the oil into the metal.  I spent about three minutes pampering all the gun parts, and then asked her to get the cleaning rod off the shelf.  She did, and I threaded a patch through the loop on its tip, soaked it with oil, and made several passes through the barrel.  Then I replaced the dirty, oily patch with a clean, dry one and ran that through a few times as well. 

Morgan sat quietly on the bed while I cared for my shotgun.  When I was satisfied that it was thoroughly cleaned and oiled, I reassembled it and worked the action a few times, reloaded it with fresh shells from the box, and clicked on the safety.  Then I held it out to her.  She took it to the corner and stood it against the wall. Then she came back and kissed me gently on the forehead.

“Now,” she said, “tell me what happened.”

I filled her in.  There really wasn’t much to tell.  I hadn’t found any sign of Jason, nor had I found the raft or any of their gear.   I had found where the raft had been, and I’d located the lodge, where I’d watched Roy and Larry eat their dinner.  I got caught in a snow storm; I got in water higher than my boots; I’d fallen down a lot; I’d hurt my hand, and I’d almost been eaten by wolves.  A lot of excitement, but the day, to all intents and purposes, had been a bust.

“So what now?”  She asked.

“I’m not sure,” I told her.  “I didn’t get a good look at the inside of the lodge.  I could only see the main room.  It’s still possible they have Jason in one of the rooms in back.”

As I said this I recalled seeing light around one of the doors out back.  There must have been some reason they had lit a back room.

Morgan waited for me to go on.  She knew what I was going to do.  She was just giving me time to figure it out for myself.

“When the weather clears, I’ll go back up there.
  I’ve got to make sure they don’t have him locked up in one of the back rooms.”

She reached out a hand and rested it on my knee.  I looked up.  Her eyes held a great sadness.

“Jason is dead.”  She said it with absolute certainty.

“You can’t know.”  I protested.

“Yes.” She said it simply, quietly. “I do know.” She put her other hand over her heart. “Here.”

We both sat quietly for a few minutes and then she went on, as if we hadn’t paused.

“I was thinking about that night all the time you were gone.  It all came back.  I had thought, before, that I couldn’t remember anything after Jason ran out the door, but I was still awake then.  Today I remembered the rest.  I remember hearing two shots outside, and I remember hearing a cry of pain.  I remember my heart breaking, and then there was only the blackness.”

There was really nothing to say.  She had already let him go.   I realized that, even though she hadn’t remembered the details until today, she had given him up for dead before I’d found her on the bank.  Perhaps that helped explain her conduct since waking in my bed – her easy acceptance of a new man in her life, her need for the comfort of physical contact, and her insistence on the futility of my searching for him.  For her, Jason was dead.  She needed her own life reaffirmed.

I knew two things: I would never understand what went on inside a woman’s head – and I had to continue looking for Jason until I found conclusive evidence that he was dead or alive.  When Roy McCaslin had asked if I’d seen any strangers around lately he had mentioned both man and woman tracks.  Would he have bothered asking about man tracks if he knew Jason was dead?  I doubted it.  That meant it was still possible that Jason was alive.  The bush has its code, as do most societies of men.  It dictated that I keep trying until I knew.  I looked at Morgan, sitting there quietly on the bed.  I realized the sadness in her eyes was not for Jason alone.  Some of it was for me.  She knew I would go back when the weather cleared.  I didn’t have to tell her.

There was no lovemaking that night.
  I was exhausted from my ordeal and the whiskey knocked me out.  When my head slumped forward on my chest Morgan had come and helped me from the rocker to the bed.  She tucked me in, undressed and climbed in beside me, and wrapped me in her arms.  I remember nothing but the sweet sadness of lying there with her arms around me and the delicious smell of her skin in my nostrils as I slipped off into sleep.

I slept the sleep of the dead and did not wake up until the evening of the following day.  It was cold, and I ached all over.  The wind was howling in the stovepipe, and the candle on the table guttered and danced in the drafts coming through the poorly chinked walls.  I tried to sit up, but a spear of pain lanced through my left hand.  I looked at it and saw that Morgan had changed the dressing while I slept.  She brought me a cup of tea and sat on the edge of the bed.  She held it to my lips and I sipped.

“Stay in bed, you still need more rest.  In any event, there’s nothing you can do until morning with this weather.  The snow didn’t stop until midday; now the wind has picked up and it’s bitter cold out.”

“We’ll need more firewood,” I protested.

“I brought in enough to see us through to morning.  Now, go back to sleep.  I’ll join you as soon as I bank the fire.”  She took my empty cup away.

I nestled my head back into the pillow.  I doubted that I could sleep again, but it was pleasant and warm under the covers, listening to the sounds of Morgan moving about the cabin.  I thought I’d just doze a little while I waited for her to slide in beside me.  When I next awoke there was light streaming in through the east window.

The storm had passed in the night and a warm front had moved in behind it.  The new day was clear and bright.  Morgan was already up and busy at the stove when I, reluctantly, opened my eyes.  There were the wonderful smells of coffee and bacon in the cabin, and I realized I was famished.  I was also sore and stiff all over.  Sore from all the falls I had taken, and stiff from lying abed for almost thirty hours.  I threw back the covers and gingerly sat up.  My arms and legs had some lovely patches of blue and purple, and my left hand throbbed with pain.

She saw me sit up and said, “Good morning.  I wondered if you were going to sleep today away as well.”

I looked out the window over the sink.  The sun was well above the treetops.  It was close to ten o’clock.  She brought me a cup of coffee, and I took it with my good hand.

“Thank you.  Smells good.”

She sat next to me on the bed and rubbed my back with one hand.

“You’re pretty banged up.  I haven’t had a look at you since I put you to bed two nights ago.  You’re a study in black and blue.  You still haven’t told me any details of your ordeal.”

I sipped the coffee and shrugged my shoulders.  “Stepped in a few holes and fell down a lot in the dark.  If it hadn’t been for that damned Trilogy I don’t think I would have made it.”

“Trilogy?

“Your pet grizzly.  The one with the two missing toes.”

She studied me for a moment.  “So you’ve named him too.  I know him as “Trident”, the spear of Neptune, because he got me in the water and left me with three marks.  But Trilogy is more fitting.  It suggests he is a story in himself, one of many parts.”

She was lost in thought for a few moments.  I sat quietly and sipped the hot coffee.  At length, she began rubbing my back again.

“Trilogy saved you?” This seemed to intrigue her.

I took another sip of coffee and thought about that.

“Well, I wouldn’t go that far.  But, he helped.  I’d been trying to follow the left bank without crossing the creek; I was already wet enough.  I was having a lot of trouble.  Then I saw his tracks in the snow, going downstream.  I followed them.  He stayed on the gravel bars all the way, no matter which side of the stream they were on.  We must have crossed the creek a dozen times.  I don’t know for sure.  I lost count. 

She looked at me with compassion. “You didn’t have many crossings left in you.”

I agreed.  “Don’t think I had any left.  I fell the last time just as I reached the landing strip.  I didn’t think I could ever get up.  The wolves had been following me since I cut my hand and they came in real close while I was down.  That was enough to get me back on my feet, and when I recognized tire tracks in the gravel bar I realized where I was.  Just knowing the cabin was near kept me going.  I forgot about the claymores and tripped the one at the top of the path.  It may have blasted one of the wolves.”

I paused for a little, thinking how close I had come to dying.  Then I put my arm around her and said, “If you hadn’t been here, with the fire going and the stew bubbling, and if you hadn’t been here to get me out of those frozen clothes, I would have died anyway – right there on the floor in front of a cold stove.

She mussed my hair.  “You would have pulled through somehow; it’s not your time yet.” 

***

At noon the sun stood high in the clear blue sky and the day was pleasantly warm.  I didn’t have a thermometer – I made a mental note to add that to the list – but I judged it to be in the sixties.  We took our lunch out on the porch to eat in the sunlight.  Morgan had spent the better part of yesterday experimenting with the cook stove while I slept.  She had roasted two of the geese in the oven; their rendered fat was already in the can on the shelf.  She had boned them out and saved the meat for today’s lunch.  We ate them cold, with a can of green beans and a loaf of bread she had baked this morning.  It was delicious, and I told her so.  She promised to roast the last goose that afternoon so we could have it hot, for dinner.  I teased her about being in a rush to get more goose grease in the can.  A blush colored her cheeks, but she smiled.

Most of the snow had melted by two in the afternoon.  There were still patches where drifts had formed in low places, and a few inches remained under the trees, but the gravel bar was clear.  I walked up the path to the tree line and found the spent claymore.  The PVC pipe had, indeed, blown up when the shell went off.  While I replaced it with a new one I said a silent prayer of thanks that I had decided against the steel pipe models.  I might have been the architect of my own demise.  I looked around for fur or blood near the claymore.  I didn’t find anything, but I hadn’t expected to; the snow had continued to fall after I got back to The Varmitage, and it would have covered any sign the wolf left.  Then I went back down and sat on the porch in the sun.

There was no putting it off.  I had to get back up to the lodge and find out, one way or the other, about Jason.  Haywood would be back in tomorrow, and Morgan would be going out with him.  I assumed the first thing she’d have to do was notify the police of what had happened out here, and file charges against the McCaslins.  It would help if we knew what happened to Jason.  But, aside from that, if he were still their prisoner – a thought that made me shudder – I had to get him out of there.  If they hadn’t already killed him, sooner or later, they would.  They couldn’t afford to let him live to tell his story.

I procrastinated as long as I could.  It was such luxury to just stretch out on the porch in the sun.  I spent the better part of the afternoon there; my head back against the warm logs, the sun healing my bruised body and spirit.  Morgan came out and sat on the top step.  She’d borrowed one of my Levi shirts and the sleeves were rolled up above her elbows.   Her legs and feet were bare.  She had lovely feet – very slender and delicate.  Her legs were lustrous white.  Like most redheads her skin, all over, was very fair.  I’m sure she had to be careful in the sun.

She saw me admiring her legs and gave me a knowing smile.  “You seem to be recovering quickly.”

She was right.  I was.  She held out her hand in my direction, fist closed and upside down.

“A present.”

I leaned forward and held out my right hand.  She dropped a tiny, clear plastic box into my palm.  I recognized it; I had several like it in my fly tying kit.

There were two small flies inside, Deer Hair Caddis, quite expertly tied.

“You’re good!”  I meant it.

She clamped her arms around her bare legs and pulled them up to her chest.

“I promised to make you some special ones.  Take them out of the box.  See if you can tell what makes them special.”  Her eyes held mischief.

I popped open the lid, took out one of the flies
and held it up in the sunlight.  It looked much the same as the ones I tied – number sixteen hook; black thread; the body was built up of gray dubbing and wrapped with grizzly hackle; and the wings and head were of brown deer hair.  As I studied it I detected a flash of color in the wings – a reddish copper glint.  I took my glasses out of my shirt pocket, put them on, and again held the fly up in the light.  Morgan was rocking slowly back-and-forth on the floorboards, watching me intently, an impish smile curling her lips.