They walked clear of the lodge, into the bungalow area and beyond that until the sentinel trees enfolded them. The Indian felt at home here, in his element. “Do you know where he is?”
The dog said it did not. It said it while scratching an ear.
“You’re lying to me.”
The dog scratched some more, then grasped the sack in its jaws, anxious to be away.
“What is it? You don’t want me to know where he is?”
The dog tugged the sack over the ground. It looked back once at the Indian. Don’t follow me. Then it was gone.
The Indian was puzzled. Instead of turning right for the valley, where he expected the spirit to be, the dog followed the road which wound past the lodge around the mountain to the north face. There were no rivers there, to the best of the Indian’s knowledge, only higher ground and more mountains. At this height, the vegetation would be skimpy and the water scarce.
A foundation shivered within the Indian’s mind. Again, it was the spirit’s animalness rather than its etherealness that bothered him. The spirit was behaving exactly like a wild animal deliberately hiding from the ski lodge. Animals avoided humans out of fear. But spirits?
The Indian sat on the ground and closed his eyes. He hummed a small tune taught to him by his grandfather. Bits of memory shook loose. The melody of the song threaded clearly from the dark past, and he hummed it in exquisite precision, remembering every silky, colored tone just as the old man had taught him.
A jolt of terror coursed through the Indian’s body. His grandfather was interrupting his song, grasping him by the shoulders and warning him about something. He spoke one word, but the Indian did not want to hear it.
He opened his eyes and listened to the forest. Instinctively his hand went to his medicine bundle. He was being watched.
The luminous dial on his watch told Jason he had been watching the Indian through binoculars for an hour. The lodge infirmary had rewrapped his bandage, but his arm still felt as if hot steel bars had been drilled through the fang marks. He had to prop the heavy binoculars on his good arm.
When he had followed the Indian out tonight, excitement had pumped blood through his body so hard his wound burned. He had kneeled in the bushes, fervently wishing he had a gun, for he was sure the beast would show up again. The last act of this drama was about to begin.
The dog ran off with a sack of food. The seconds ticked into minutes, then the minutes into an hour, and the last act fizzled into anticlimax. Whoever was writing this drama did not know how to end it sensibly. The Indian lay down on the ground and to all appearances fell asleep.
The Indian clearly shared some kind of relationship with the beast. Jason had seen him pack the food in the bag and give it to the dog. Kimberly’s words came back to haunt him. Suppose it really was some poor deformed human, a friend of the Indian’s whom he was caring for, and not the legendary Bigfoot?
No. Not with that face. Not with a face that could only have been dreamed up by a witch doctor at his most concentrated moment of existential terror. Deformed faces were ugly but dulled the senses, the personality behind them, barricaded by their own features. That face was alive.
A pretty picture, Jason thought ruefully. The Indian shadowing the giant and him shadowing the Indian. Was somebody shadowing Jason? Again he felt that peculiar empathy, as though if he looked in the Indian’s face he would see his own features.
Something hissed.
Half fainting, Jason hit the ground and flattened out, binoculars raised like a stubby club. But it was not a rattlesnake—it was Martha Lucas, with her finger to her mouth.
Martha Lucas lived in a bungalow so stuffed with piles of papers, books, and prints that little incidental room was left for such functions as walking and sitting. She knocked a mountain of stuffed file folders to the floor, revealing a chair for Jason. “I don’t usually have guests in here,” she apologized.
As she waited for water to boil on her hot plate, Jason picked up a stapled sheaf of pages. It was entitled “Trickster of the Winnebagos.” Everything in the room was about Indians. Martha Lucas was an organism whose sole purpose was the gulping down of information about Indians. By the look of her kitchenette, she was a vegetarian, too.
She handed him a cup of herb tea, then kicked out a niche for herself from the papers on the bed. “Why are you following Moon?” she asked.
“Why are you?” Jason countered.
“We could always flip a coin to see who goes first. Fair enough?”
“Heads,” said Jason, sending a quarter into the air. It came down tails.
“I think Moon’s on a spirit quest,” she said.
“What’s that?”
She described it as she had to Helder.
Jason nodded, stroking his chin. “It fits. It fits. I always wondered why he carries that bag around. Medicine bundle, you called it.”
“Yes. If I’m right, he’s not going to have much luck.”
“How come?”
“He’s too old. He’s in his twenties, and the vision is a rite of puberty. Besides, you’re supposed to remain isolated during the quest. It’d be interesting to know if he was prepared by a shaman.”
“How long does this quest take?”
“Three or four days at most.”
“Did they ever follow their spirits around? I mean tag along after them?”
“There were all kinds of spirit quests, Mr. Jason. In some tribes it was how you got your name. You always had to go to a sacred place to find them.”
“When I say follow them, I mean for hundreds of miles.”
She thought over an answer while watching him, trying to pierce his face to the brain behind and see where he was leading.
“You would do what your spirit told you to do. Normally, however, you’d be in no shape to walk, unless . . .”
“What?”
“Unless it was a really special spirit. It’s a religious experience, and you know what that can do to some people.” She blew steam from her cup. “And before I go any further, I’d like to ask you some questions.”
“I’ll answer one now. Moon is wanted by the Canadian police in connection with the deaths of three men in British Columbia last summer.”
“Are you a policeman?”
“No. I was with the men when it happened. Moon knocked me out with a rifle butt.”
She played with the handle of her cup. “Did he do it?”
“The circumstances are suspicious. I think he shot down a helicopter in which two of them died. He definitely did not kill the third man.”
“Were you looking for Moon at the Little Harrington that night?”
Jason hesitated only a moment. “Yes. I have been for several months.”
“Are you going to turn him in to the police?”
Jason pressed the teacup to his bandage to see if it soothed the ache. He thought over an answer. He wasn’t ready to tell anybody about the monster. “I suppose I should. But I don’t think he’s all there in the head. I tried to get a rise out of him by mentioning Canada, but he said he didn’t remember. I don’t think he was faking. Then again, he’s got the original poker face.”
She spoke over the teacup, her eyes wide. “Are you frightened of him, Mr. Jason?”
Jason took what he thought was a nut from a clay bowl. He bit into it and felt the shell crumple into tiny husk splinters. They were some kind of goddamned seeds. It was another tiny frustration to add to the considerable mass this business had brought him. The distant roar of amplified applause resounding across the valley reminded him that they were not as alone as they felt. “Yes,” he admitted. “I think he’s capable of killing people.”