He closed his eyes and waited for death.
The cold sank into his bones, but death did not come.
Something irritated his mind, standing between him and death. A thought of some kind. Now that was interesting! A thought was trying to protect him from death.
His protector.
Somebody had protected him like a spirit all this time!
Then, piece by piece, memories surged up from the well of his consciousness like a movie film of an exploding castle run backward, so that it re-formed itself into a fortress. It glittered and shone with the pure fire of truth.
The Indian opened his eyes. He knew what his spirit was!
He covered his face and wept. He was still weeping as the storm passed on to ravage other mountains and the sun slowly rose over the diminished broken hulk of Mount Colby.
THE SPIRIT
17
Drake had expected to find Jason within minutes after arriving at the glowing pile of embers that had once been Colby Lodge. He dispatched Taylor into the woods after him with instructions to bring him back, spitting and hissing if necessary. “Mr. Jason’s going to need himself a lawyer for this one.” Then to Martha he said, “Why in hell didn’t you tell me about this Indian!”
“I was going to. We were going to. We thought he’d leave—”
“Where is he now!”
She pointed up the mountain. “Jason thinks he went up there after the Bigfoot.”
“To the mine!”
At which point Martha broke down into tears at the transformation of Drake from a Ranger into a very bad-tempered policeman. Drake informed the state police by radio that a fugitive from Canada was missing and presumed dead. “Unless he’s a mole,” Drake snarled. “It’ll save us all the trouble of burying him.” He passed out hot rolls and coffee and arranged to have Martha trucked to the Garrison hospital, where her injuries could be repaired.
After half an hour, Taylor and Wallace came out of the woods, followed by the others. “We lost the trail after about a hundred yards and didn’t find it again. Do you want to start a real search?”
“Damned right,” Drake replied. He called the state police back and told them a man was lost in the area around Colby. Last seen heading north over the slide area, wearing an orange snowmobile suit and carrying a gun and flashlight.
By the end of the following day the countywide alert for Raymond Jason had become a statewide one. Drake spent a fruitless hour circling Mount Colby in a helicopter while several men poked around mine tunnels for some sign of John Moon. They found nothing. “There’s a lot of sinkholes, though,” said Taylor. “He might have been lucky. He might still be in there somewhere.”
They would spend days at the mine, clearing away tunnels, tapping on walls, calling out Moon’s name. Perhaps they would hear rocks tapping in answer. Or perhaps they might find something else down there. But Drake did not think so. John Moon was gone.
At four in the afternoon, he was sitting in his truck, watching the men clear debris away from the mine entrance, when the radio beeped. The hospital had called back about the blood. “Drake, it’s human all right, but we don’t know what type. I’m going to put it down as unclassified.”
Lester Cole might have been a creep, but he was not the type to carve up people on his kitchen table. Whatever he had had in that trailer did not look human to him. Yet blood will tell. Drake had had enough of this business. It was time to consider a little bit of burying in the files. If there were other Bigfoots, leave them be. Leave the whole thing be.
At five o’clock, a car bounced down the Oharaville road. Martha Lucus stepped out, walking carefully to avoid disturbing her taped ribs. Drake was eating cottage cheese from a cup. He rolled down his window.
“Am I under arrest?”
He chewed reflectively looking over her pale, wan face and shabby clothes. They had retrieved some of her luggage from the ruins of the lodge. “There’ll be an inquiry, so I wouldn’t go anywhere for a couple days. But you aren’t under arrest or anything like that.” He opened the door to the truck and let her inside. “You better get into bed or something before you catch pneumonia. Where’s Woodard?”
“I saw him jogging past the motel. He says it calms him down.”
Drake was scraping the last of the cottage cheese from the bottom of his cup. “This Indian might have come out okay if he’d turned himself in. You and Woodard could have backed him up. I don’t know about Jason, though. I don’t know.” He crumpled up the cottage-cheese container and dropped it in the litter bag. “What does he want with these things, anyway?”
She remembered Jason’s tight face, his self-absorption, his congenital unease. “A trophy, I suppose. If anybody can get that female, he can. Have you found any sign of her at all?”
“Nope,” said Drake. “Which doesn’t surprise me in the least. She’s real good at staying hidden. There’s been people who’ve hunted these things for years and never found a sign of one.”
“Not like these. These are smarter.”
Drake let it drop.
“Do you think you’ll find Jason?” she asked after a moment.
“Oh sure, we’ll find Jason.”
“How long do these searches take?”
“For a normal person, about four or five days. For a dead one, just a couple. But for Mr. Jason. Well, now, he could hide in those woods forever. Or he could head on south till he hits California, living off the land like that Indian. And he could walk into a phone booth and call us up and say the hell with it, I’m tired of following this thing. Pick me up. Does that sound like Jason?”
“No,” she replied. “He’ll never give up.”
“That’s what I mean. We’ll find Mr. Jason when he wants us to find him.” He leaned forward to watch the helicopter that still circled Mount Colby. “I wouldn’t spread this around, you know. I’d hate the taxpayers to think we were wasting their money looking for somebody who’s not going to be found.”
All this for an animal that nobody ever heard of. Drake snorted in the truck cab. The whole bunch of them were made for each other.
Raymond Jason leaned over the bank and looked into the mountain stream. A wild animal looked back at him, a forest creature, bearded, with fierce eyes. He sloshed cold water around in his mouth, then spat it out.
He was on a little peninsula of sand jutting into a stream, a good twenty or thirty miles south of Colby, or so he calculated. The female was still on the run. He could not believe her stamina. He expected to find her body under every bush, but so far that had not happened. It was a spotty trail, but he knew where to look—hard ground, spongy grass, surfaces that did not retain prints—and always he found blood. She could not have that much blood left. Even elephants did not have that much blood.
He placed another branch on his fire. It was banked and low so she could not see it. He polished his pistol. He did that a lot when he rested. Just sat on the ground and polished the gun with a carefully cleaned cloth. Minutes before he had shot a bird for dinner. He dropped the empty cartridge on the ground and replaced it with a good one.
Yesterday he had almost been sighted by a helicopter. They were still looking for him. Let them look! He would return with a body or he would not return at all.
Not return?
He stopped polishing. Why did he say that?
Not without a body, that’s what he said. He resumed polishing.
He might have been wrong about her being the last one. She could be leading him to others somewhere. If so, Raymond Jason might find himself in a nasty predicament. They were good at ambushes, as he recalled from the male’s activity at the lake. And the bus. And the crash in Canada. All of them ambushes. They could lure you on . . .