In the gathering dark and the swirling snow, she began to imagine voices and distantly wondered if she could still see the trail. She stopped to listen more closely, hoping to hear something new through the wind. A pure singing note rose, high and sustained, then another, in a kind of courtly diction.
Wolves.
Shaman
The Rileys lived on a small piece of land, the remains of a much-bigger property that had been diminished over the generations; but what was left was a lovely place: the two-story clapboard house, built in 1911 in an old grove of cottonwoods, was fed crystalline water by a hillside spring and graced by morning sun in the kitchen and a shelter belt of chokecherry and caragana. On the benches above the creek, the evening sun revealed old tepee rings from when the land had been Indian country. The door-stop at the front entrance was a stone hammer for cracking buffalo bones. Good hard coal from Roundup filled the shed, and on a painted iron flagpole the American flag popped in the west wind until it was in ribbons and had to be replaced. The house had a hidden fireplace vented by a center chimney, in which, during Prohibition, Pat Riley’s grandfather had made whiskey, which he sold from the trunk of his Plymouth at country dances. He was thus able to reverse the contraction of the property, for the time being, which soon resumed under Pat’s father, a small-time grain trader, usually described as “a fine fellow, never made a dime.” The Plymouth remained, with two rusty bullet holes, the shots fired from the inside during a hijacking attempt, and was now embedded in an irrigation dam serving two neighbors, since the Rileys had lost the water rights. The property, Pat’s birthright, was the Rileys’ pride and joy. The point of all their work, however tedious, was to keep them on the place.
Pat was a physical therapist who made the rounds of the small hospitals and rest homes and clinics in southwest Montana. Pat loved his job, feeling that he helped people every day he worked, mostly with postoperative rehabilitation and the debilities of age. He found the residents at the rest homes especially interesting: old cowboys, state politicians, a veteran of the Women’s Army Air Corps, and so on. His wife Juanita’s job at the courthouse was tiresome: reconciling ledgers, posting journal entries for accruals and transfers, tracking grant revenues and expenditures, and filing, filing, filing! So it was that, on the occasion of Pat’s overnight trip for a case in Lewistown, Juanita was ripe for the visit of the shaman. As a point of fact, she fancied him before even knowing he was a shaman. She just figured he was looking for a ranch job, but she never found a chance to tell him there hadn’t been a cow on the place in forty years.
Juanita hardly knew what a shaman was and would have pictured someone on the Discovery Channel, feathered, painted, beaded, perhaps belled — certainly not someone dressed like this or presenting a calling card. His name was Rudy, and he seemed like an Olympian in his tracksuit and Nike shoes. He explained that he was an anthropologist and arid lands botanist, whose work had led him to discover a spiritual being living under a sandstone ledge on the Medicine Bow River, also named Rudy. It had taken seven years for the two Rudys to track each other down and become the united Rudy now standing before Juanita and touching a button of her blouse for emphasis. Juanita felt the heat rise. “I was out in the prairie. It was a hot day. All I could hear was wind and crickets or birds. Then the grass seemed to creak under my feet and I could feel the other Rudy was near and coming to me. The wind stopped as Rudy arrived. It was a lighthearted moment, Juanita. I said, ‘Welcome aboard.’ And that quick, I was unified. I was undivided, united as one, the one and only Rudy. But now there was … something else.” He seemed disturbed by Juanita’s hard, restless gaze. She let him follow her into the house, where she dug her phone out of her yellow, fringed purse hanging on the doorknob. She called her husband. “Pat, I’ve got a shaman here at the house. When are you coming home? You heard me. How on earth should I know? He says he’s a shaman.” She cupped the phone and said to the stranger, “What exactly is a shaman?”
“That’s a long story. I—”
“He says it’s a long story. Okay, sure, see you in a few.”
She hung up. It would not be a few minutes, more like a day, before she saw Pat. But the ruse had an immediate effect on Rudy the shaman: panic.
“Does he mean literally ‘a few minutes’?”
“Maybe five. He has to stop for cigarettes.”
Rudy the shaman burst through the door at a dead run. Juanita watched him windmill down the driveway and out onto the county road, stooping to pick up some kind of pack at the corner. She grabbed the phone again.
“As soon as I told him you were about to arrive, he ran for it.”
“Juanita, listen to me, you need to call the sheriff.”
“And tell him what? I had a shaman at the house?”
“What does that even mean?”
“Pat! I don’t know. I told you that.”
“Well, call anyway and then call me back. Or I’ll call them. No, better you, in case they need a description.”
“Aren’t you just assuming this guy is a criminal?”
“Maybe that’s all a shaman is, for Chrissakes. Just call and then call me back.”
At first, Juanita resisted making the call, then, realizing Pat wouldn’t let it go, she picked up the phone. Sheriff Johnsrud was at a county commissioners’ meeting, but she was put through to Eric Caldwell, his deputy.
“Hi, Juanita.”
“Eric, some strange guy stopped by here. Said he was a — something or other. When I told him Pat was due home, he ran out the door in kind of a panic.”
“That doesn’t sound good.”
“I don’t think it’s a big deal, but Pat insisted I call.”
“Pat has a point. Describe this guy, would you, Juanita? What’d you say he was?”
“I can’t remember, but he was wearing kind of a tracksuit, good-looking guy, maybe thirty-five, odd but with nice manners and one of those big watches tells you how far you walked, wavy brown hair, and talked educated like.”
“Whoa, Juanita, you did get a pretty good look!”
“That’ll do, Eric.”
“Okay, we’ll check it out.”
“Do me a favor, call Pat on his cell or he’ll fret.”
Afterward, Juanita had to piece the story together. Sheriff Johnsrud came back from the commissioners’ meeting and joined Eric in scouring the area between the Riley place on the county road and the edge of town, down by the Catholic church and the ball field. They confronted Rudy just past the Lewis and Clark Memorial. When he went for something in his backpack, Sheriff Johnsrud shot him. Looking at the body, Johnsrud said, “He’s done. Stick a fork in him.” Eric pushed the backpack open with his foot and said there was no gun. Neither spoke until Johnsrud mused that they should go get one, and Eric nodded. “That way,” said the sheriff, “it’s a senseless tragedy.”
Rudy, a low-risk mental patient, had just walked out of the Warm Springs hospital. The backpack contained pebbles, a dead bird, and a book on teaching yourself to dance. There hadn’t been a cloud in the sky for a week in Rudy’s hometown on the Wyoming border. He could have walked there in half a day.
It had been too obvious that Rudy was harmless. The doctors at the Warm Springs hospital made such a huge point of it that the whole town was embarrassed. Dan Sheare at the Ford dealership said it was like they had shot the Easter Bunny, “Town Without Pity,” and so forth. So Sheriff Johnsrud conceded the terrible misfortune and took full responsibility. After all, he had fired the shot. But eventually Johnsrud changed, or everyone thought he had, though some admitted they would’ve changed, too, if such a thing happened to them, or else they concluded they were only imagining the sheriff was any different than he had always been. Eric, however, who had been born right there in town, moved away. Eventually people quit asking where Eric had got off to, just assuming he had landed on his feet somewhere. Probably his sister still heard from him. She lived over where the first post office burned down giving her a great view of the mountains.