C. J. Box
Dull Knife
When it’s twenty-two degrees below zero on a high mountain lake, the cracking of the ice makes an unearthly howling bellow that chills the blood and makes hearts skip a beat. The crack itself, looking like a jagged bolt of crystal-white lightning, zips across the ice with the flick of a lizard’s tongue. But it is the sound of the crack, the plaintive, anguished moan, that penetrates a man and makes his skin crawl, reminding him that if the earth wanted to swallow him up, well, it could. And no one could stop it.
Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett froze with the sound and looked down at his feet as the crack shot between them. The sound washed over and through him. The crack itself was no danger to him. Ice shifted and buckled all the time. Nevertheless, he sidestepped over the crack before continuing.
The ice fishermen were still a quarter of a mile away across the surface of Dull Knife Reservoir in the Bighorn Mountains. Four fishermen, two sitting on upturned plastic buckets, two standing near their holes in the ice. All bundled up like black snowmen, their shapes rounded and without angles because of the thick winter parkas and insulated coveralls they wore. Snippets of their conversation carried crisply over the distance: a growl, a laugh, a bark. They were obviously watching him approach, and were amused when he froze and altered course.
In January, Joe had little to do besides paperwork, reports, and repairs. All of the hunting seasons were closed, and the streams and lakes were frozen. Except for a few goose hunters who had pits on the southeastern corner of his district, checking the licenses of ice fishermen was the only game in town. Even though it was nearing dusk and he could literally feel the temperature dropping as the sun gave up, defeated, and slipped behind the western mountains, he had decided to park his truck and walk across the ice to check the fishermen out. Well, not really a walk. More like a shuffle.
Joe admired ice fishermen, although he thought they were crazy. To stand around on the surface of a lake, fishing through a hole that had been augured through fourteen inches of ice, took a special breed. To fish when it was twenty-two below took a particular kind of dedication, or madness. Joe often thought that if he caught an ice fisherman without a license, the violator should be sentenced to more ice fishing for punishment.
“Hey, Joe,” one of the fishermen called out. “Fine weather we’re having.” The other three laughed. Joe smiled. He recognized the fisherman to be Hans, a retired Saddlestring cop who now worked part-time as a janitor for Barrett’s Pharmacy. Jack, his partner for hunting and fishing, was a retired schoolteacher. The other two fishermen were their sons.
“How’s fishing?” Joe asked.
Jack opened a cooler and displayed a dozen fat rainbow trout and two dozen silvery cans of beer. “Fishing’s been good,” Jack said. “You can make up for every fish you lost in the summer by fishing in the winter.”
Joe admired the big fish, oohing and aahing. “Since I walked out all of this way…” he started to say.
“You want to check our licenses,” Hans finished for him. All four men started unzipping and unsnapping their coats, digging through layers to find their wallets.
“Do you know anything about that light under the ice over there?” Hans’ son asked as he handed his license to Joe.
“What light?”
Hans pointed across the lake. “We noticed it this morning when we came out,” he said. “It was still dark, and it looked like it was lit up under the ice. It was kind of creepy.”
Joe looked where Hans was pointing, and he could see it. On the far shore, beneath the black wooded bluff of the shoreline, was a faint yellow glow.
“Are you sure it’s not a reflection from somewhere?” Joe asked.
“Where?” Hans asked back.
Joe squinted. “How could there be a light under the ice?”
“That’s what we were wondering,” Jack said. “We were going to walk over there and check it out, but the fish started hitting and, well, you know.”
Joe nodded, handing back all of the licenses, but continued to look across the lake. As it got darker, the glow became more pronounced.
Hans’ son said, “Jesus, it’s getting cold all of a sudden.”
“We’d best head back,” Jack said, reaching down to clear a skin of ice from the top of his fishing hole so he could reel in.
“Let me know what you find over there,” Hans said to Joe. “I’d go with you, but my feet are starting to freeze.”
“That’s because you have old feet,” Hans’ son said, cracking open a beer.
“Not so old I can’t kick your ass with one of ’em,” Hans said.
Jack hooted.
Joe smiled and left.
He shuffled across the lake as the sun set. Hard white stars flickered in the sky, followed by a thin slice of moon that seemed too cold to bloom full. Joe felt icy fingers of cold probing into his collar, and up his sleeves. He knew his feet would freeze, even in his thick Sorel pac boots, the moment he stopped walking.
There was no doubt that there was light under the surface of the lake. It now illuminated the very ice he was walking on, so his feet looked like black silhouettes. It reminded him of being on a hip dance floor once when he was in college. He remembered dancing very badly on it. Another crack on the lake brought a moan that made the hair on the back of his neck stand up. The moan echoed softly back and forth across the lake.
He stopped and stared. Something was sticking up through the surface of ice in the middle of the glow; something thin, spindly, and black. His first thought was that it was a tree branch.
The surface of the ice changed as he walked. There was a rim of broken ice plates, then a slick surface. Ice told stories, Joe knew. Whatever happened could be seen and felt by examining the ice. Something had crashed through here, and the water had recently frozen back over.
It was a frozen human hand, reaching up through the ice, not a branch. As he stood above it, he could see the body below, and the source of the glow beneath the surface: headlights. He felt his heart race as he stared, and a line of sweat broke across his forehead, beneath his wool cap. He could see her face beneath the ice, despite the bolts of thick black hair that slowly whorled around it in the current. Her eyes were open, looking upward, her mouth set in a pout. She wore dark clothing. There was a light band of flesh between the top of her black jeans and the bottom of her coat. Her name was Jessica Lynn Antelope, and she had been a basketball star.
The story the ice told him was this:
The night before, the pickup truck that was now on the bottom of the lake had gone off of the old two-track road that rimmed the bluff. It must have been going fast, he thought, to have launched this far into the lake. The truck had crashed through the ice and had settled on the deep floor of the lake, with its rear end down first so the headlights pointed up. The engine was obviously killed in the water, but the battery held enough of a charge to power the lights a day later.
Jessica Lynn Antelope had been in the pickup, either as the driver or a passenger. She had attempted to swim to the surface toward the hole the truck had made. Whether she’d drowned before she froze to death would be a tossup. Joe wondered if she realized, before she died, that her grasping hand had broken through the rapidly forming new skin of ice into the twenty-below air. As the water froze, it had trapped her arm and held it fast in its grip. Now, her body swayed slowly in the current, her hair sweeping across her face in a fan dance.
He said, “Jesus,” and dug in his parka for his cell phone to call the sheriff.
Joe waited in his pickup on the shore of the lake — engine running, heater blowing full blast — for Sheriff McLanahan and the tow truck to arrive. His toes in his boots burned as they thawed out. He was still annoyed at the tone of the conversation he had had with McLanahan.