Hunter's Moon (19 page)

"Those are herbs?" Jack said with a quizzical look. "Look like weeds to me." "You can make tea from fireweed and wormwood. Sourdock paste relieves itching. Horsetail's a diuretic, some say an abortifacient."

"Come on."

She cocked an eyebrow. "You can use devil's club to treat burns. As handy as you are in the kitchen, I ought to plant a patch next to the cabin."

His heart skipped another beat. "I'd rather suffer the burn than have to pick the devil's club to cure it." Inwardly, he rejoiced. She was taking his presence at the cabin as a given. And she wasn't telling him he had to learn to cook. He wanted to ask her to marry him then and there.

Nobly, he restrained himself. One step at a time.

Blissfully unaware of the euphoria her casual words had induced, she turned on the other computer, fumbled her way through the directory and was nearly blasted out of the cabin by the resulting color and sound. "Where's the volume control on this thing?" she yelled. Jack found it and turned it down. "What is it?" he said.

"A commercial, I think," Kate said. "Or part of a promotional campaign. Senta said Gregor was the head of public relations."

"That would explain the boozer's nose," Jack said, nodding.

"Yeah, it does kinda look like it belongs on W.C. Fields's face, doesn't it? Bet we find a bottle stashed in here somewhere."

"Nah. He's carrying it." Jack saw her look and added, "It's a silver flask. I saw him take a nip out of it this morning."

They watched the screen for a few moments as a hearty male voice spouted a string of German while a series of pictures flashed the smiling faces of happy workers all sporting the snazzy DRG logo on a hat or a tie or a shirt pocket.

Jack turned it off. "Pretty picture, when the truth of the matter is that most of their work is probably done in Laos by people making seven cents an hour."

Kate surveyed the room and shrugged. "Looks like the temporary residence of a couple of hardworking family men. It might even be true, or it is when Gregor's at home. Let's move on."

The next cabin, and the last one in line that wasn't falling into the Nakochna, belonged to Senta and Berg. Berg proved to have, besides the usual clothes and toiletries, a secret stash of Hershey bars. "Plain," Jack said peevishly. "Why couldn't it be the ones with almonds?"

"That Berg, so inhospitable toward his friendly neighborhood burglars."

Kate was looking for Senta's purse. In her experience, a woman's purse was second only to a man's mother in filling in the blanks of an individual's character. "Aha."

She found it under the bunk, a darling little mini-backpack affair, probably the latest thing down the runway in Milan. It was made of real leather burnished a deep chestnut, soft and supple to the touch, and had two pockets fastened with a single and probably genuine gold buckle. The outer one was big enough to hold a passport. Kate opened it, and it was her turn to be peevish. "God, I can't believe it." "What?" Jack said, unwrapping a Hershey bar and taking a bite with relish.

"She even looks good in her passport picture. That's against the rule." "The rule?" "The rule that says all passport pictures make people look like toads.

They're usually worse than driver's licenses."

"Let me see." He swallowed and looked. "Yum."

"Watch it, big boy, she'd eat you alive."

He grinned. "I'd slide down kicking and screaming all the way." "And this is the man," Kate told Mutt, who had reappeared to (lop in the doorway and sleep off her midday snack, "who professed his eternal devotion to me on top of a fuel tank in the middle of the Alaskan Bush, beneath a full moon, and not even twenty-four hours ago. See?" she said to Jack. "Mutt thinks you're disgusting, too."

Jack regarded Mutt with a sapient eye. "Mutt is too stuffed to move out of her own way, let alone think anything of the kind. And it was a hunter's moon, as I recall."

Kate sniffed. "Hey, she's thirty-eight, four years older than me."

"So?"

Kate closed the passport and tucked it back into its pocket. "So she's got that kind of a face, you know? The first time I saw her I thought she could be anywhere from thirty to fifty." She meditated. "I wonder why the guys took their passports with them."

Jack produced a wallet like a magician producing a rabbit from a hat.

"Even on a hunt?" Kate said.

"Even on a hunt," Jack said, deadpan. "It's a guy thing."

"Oh. Yeah. Right. Then why didn't Dieter put the letter in his wallet?" "We may never know," Jack said, much struck.

She shook her head. Jack was not approaching the task at hand with what Kate considered an appropriate amount of solemnity. She returned to the backpack. At least women had enough smarts to leave their purses behind when they went out shooting.

The second pocket of Senta's purse was much larger, big enough to hold two wads of. cash one German, one American, a bottle of French perfume, a hair pick, a traveler's size bottle of mousse, another of hair spray and a third of shampoo, a makeup kit, a bottle of nail polish, a fistful of credit cards--all platinum--and a three-month supply of birth control pills. There was a business card case with Senta's name, job title, address and phone, fax and E-mail address printed in elaborately curliqued German lettering, all nouns capitalized, all umlauts dotted, all Fs and Gs serifed within an inch of their lives.

And, lo and behold, there was a picture folder. Most of them were of Senta: Senta in a crisp, tailored business suit either accepting or awarding some kind of plaque, Senta in a graduation gown, Senta in a bathing suit on a beach, blond hair shining gold in the sun and with just the right ratio of lean, hard flank to plump, soft breast.

"Woo woo," Jack said, breathing heavily over Kate's shoulder.

She elbowed him in the gut and flipped the folder. The last picture was of Senta as a girl of about eight, standing next to a boy on the verge of adolescence. Kate studied it. "Isn't that Dieter?"

"Who?"

"The boy next to her. Isn't that Dieter?"

Jack took the folder from her and frowned at it. "I don't know. Is it? They look like siblings, don't they?"

"Senta didn't say anything about it if they are." Kate remembered the look Dieter had given Senta when she had gone off with George. At the time, Kate had put it down to George poaching on Dieter's private preserve. If Dieter and Senta were brother and sister, that look had meant something else entirely. According to Jack, Dieter was a rounder.

Rounders were notoriously straitlaced as regards the amorous activities of the female members of their families, much more so than they were about their own.

"Maybe she's family," Kate said. "Maybe that's why she's not referred to in Dieter's letter." And then she was struck by another thought.

"What are European inheritance laws like, anyway, Jack? Do you know?"

"No idea. Weirder than ours, probably, they've had longer to work on them." He handed the picture folder back, and helped stuff Senta's belongings back into her purse.

They emerged from the cabin to find that the sun had been obscured by the encroaching band of clouds Kate had seen from the runway that morning. "You know what this means," Kate said.

"What?" She jerked her chin at the gray sky. "It means George might really be weathered in in Anchorage and not be back with Demetri's cavalry today."

Jack looked toward the ridge. "It also means our guests will be back soon." He looked down at her. "They're going to notice that their rifles are missing. And probably that their cabins have been searched."

"I don't really give a damn what they notice." Kate stretched, joints popping.

"Me either. I'm just saying it could be an uncomfortable night."

"Well, if last night was any indication--" Kate began in a teasing tone. Mutt's ears went up, and in the next second Jack and Kate heard it, too. They turned as one to look to the northwest and waited.

Nothing. Kate forced herself to relax, forced a lightness she did not feel into her voice. "What do you think for dinner tonight, moose heart or moose liver or moose tongue?" They had plenty of all three left over from the previous hunt.

"How about all three? Damn!"

She had heard it, too, another shot and then another. "Three altogether," she said uneasily. "But not three in a row." "Nobody said they were good shots," Jack said.

Mutt was standing stock-still, nose sniffing the air, as if she could smell out the problem. Kate dropped a hand to her shoulder. "At ease, girl." She looked at Jack. "You think we should go see what's happening?" "There are only two four-wheelers, right?" She nodded, and he shook his head and waved a hand at the sky. "The wind's coming up, Kate." It was true, the wind was beginning to whip at the tops of the trees, to ruffle Mutt's fur, to pull at Kate's braid.

"I think we better stay here," Jack said, "close to shelter. They're probably already on their way back, anyway."

"Why?"

"Because the weather's socking in, because they've bagged something juicy and are ready to call it a day, because Demetri and Old Sam aren't idiots." He looked at her and said more gently, "They aren't, Kate. And there were only three shots."

Kate took a deep breath, held it and let it out slowly. "All right," she said, but she was still uneasy. "You know that gun rack on the west wall of the lodge?"

"Yeah?"

"Let's empty it out, hide the rifles. And we don't take these off'--she slapped the .357 pistols they had strapped to their waists--"for any reason whatever."

"Why don't we figure out a way to bar both doors while we're at it?" Jack said dryly, but he followed her to the lodge and helped to take the rifles down one at a time. There were half a dozen of them, ranging from a tiny .22 automatic rifle in pristine condition to a Winchester twenty-gauge shotgun with a tarnished barrel and a scarred walnut stock.

"Where do you want to put them?" he said.

"Not where we put theirs," she said.

"Where then?"

In the end, they wrapped the weapons in more of the burlap potato sacks and climbed to the half-loft in the garage to secrete them in the center well of a spool of electric cable. They stacked half a dozen boxes of canning jars on top of the spool to hide the hole and what was poking out of the top of it. For good measure, they took the ladder down and hid it in the bushes on the side of the garage facing away from camp.

"Somebody could always shinny up the cable on that traveling block," Jack said. He caught her eye. "Sorry." "It's not funny," she said severely. "No, it's not," he said. "But for some reason I'm in a good mood anyway. So sue me."

He kissed her, a long, slow, savory kiss as the rising wind rippled through the campsite, setting spirals of golden aspen leaves to dance around them in a whirlwind of delight. There was a shout from the creek, and as they looked Klemens came stumbling up the bank. "Come!" he said. "Come see!" "Hell," Jack said. "You think he knows about the cabins?"

"Or noticed the rifles were gone," Kate murmured. She plastered a false smile on her face and stepped forward. "What is it, Klemens?" "Come see!" he said. His face was red with excitement and for the moment at least he had forgotten his troubles. "Come now! I saw some moose fighting! Come see!"

Kate and Jack followed him to the creek and down the bank. The other side of the creek was thickly crusted with stands of spruce, cottonwood, alder, aspen and diamond willow, a thicket impenetrable even by light, but after five minutes walk it thinned to a small meadow fed by a tiny stream that was the last tributary to join the Nakochna before the Nakochna itself joined the Kichatna.

They heard it before they saw it, and they didn't need to follow his pointing finger to see it. Mutt heard it before any of them, and bounded ahead to watch avidly, quivering with interest.

"I heard noises," Klemens said, lowering his voice and half crouching behind a salmonberry bush. "Look what I found!"

They saw.

Two bull moose were squaring off, stamping and snorting and grunting, tearing the hell out of the trees and bushes lining the edge of the little glade. There were half a dozen cows grazing in the brush; the reason for the fight. They seemed unimpressed, sparing not even a glance for the ruckus being raised on their behalf.

And a ruckus it was, with the two bulls uttering cries that sounded somewhere between a drunken pig and a mad cow. "Old Sam was right," Kate said, "they are like drunks in a bar."

One bull was younger, with a fork on one side of his rack and a spike on the other. He was game, though, and he was almost as big as the other older bull, which was a good thing, because so far as rack size was concerned he was totally outclassed.

"What do you think, seventy inches?" Kate said

"Sixty, maybe," Jack said. "Okay, sixty-five. Not a record, but nice.

I'm glad Dieter isn't here."

Klemens glanced at Jack, and then looked back across the creek.

The rack on the older bull was, in fact, magnificent, broad, evenly balanced brow palms and an equal number of brow tines, four to each side. The older bull was using his rack to advantage, ripping up what seemed to be quite half the trees in sight, yelling and bellyaching all the while, the noise rising in volume as feelings escalated. The object was to intimidate, to throw the opponent off guard, if possible to force a retreat before it came to blows.

The other bull, perhaps too young to know better, refused to back down. The older bull smacked its lips and charged. Seven feet high at the shoulder, nine feet in length and weighing close to a ton each, the clash of flesh and bone and antler when the moose collided was felt all the way across the creek.

"Mein Gott\" Klemens said. He'd forgotten to whisper.

It didn't matter, as the noise of combat was so loud that nothing could be heard over it. The younger bull, either too stupid or too horny to give, met a second charge head on. One of the brow tines of the older bull sliced open his forehead and blood flowed liberally down the young bull's head and neck. He didn't even notice, and tried to gouge his opponent with his single brow tine. The older bull treated this attempt with the disdain it deserved and stepped out of reach.