I was about to crumple when two powerful hands grasped me and sat me on the lee side of the boulder. He took the Sharps from my shoulder and rested it against the granite. “You need to sit, Lawman.”
I was numb; my headache was gone, and I couldn’t feel anything, even the cold. “I don’t think I’m going to make it.” I watched as the brows on the bear headdress furrowed and narrowed as they looked down at me. “Hey Virgil, I don’t mean to sound crazy, but are you sure that that headdress and cloak you’re wearing is dead?”
The big Indian stared at me. And the bear winked.
Subconsciously, I pulled a little away. “Virgil, that damn thing is alive.”
He studied me a few moments more and then began laughing. It was like a seismic event, slow and low at first but then roaring from his mouth. “That is why they sent you, Lawman. I thought it was because you never stop; you never quit. That first time we met in the long road culvert, you fought me to a standstill and no one has ever done that. I thought that was why the Old Ones had sent you, but it is because you make me laugh. No one tickles me the way you do-you say some of the craziest shit.”
The bear winked at me again and then rolled its eyes.
“Virgil, I’m not joking.”
He shook his oversize head at me and then leaned in close. “Did I ever tell you how I killed this bear?” I started to speak, but the headdress raised an eyebrow above his face, placing the upcoming story in a dubious light. “It was a tremendous fight, epic in nature. I was very tired, but I’ll tell you how I defeated him.”
“Virgil, there’s something I have t-to tell you.”
He ignored me and with one swirling movement, the giant Crow heaved himself up from where he crouched and whirled. His cloak flew off, and the wind filled it. The billowing headdress turned of its own accord and towered over Virgil with its claws outstretched, ready to knock my friend senseless with forepaws powerful enough to break a full-grown moose’s neck. It froze there in the incline of Cloud Peak with its ferocious mouth hanging open, bellowing the wind into submission. Even the fog and snow were frightened, and everything stopped almost as if we were in a self-contained snow globe.
Virgil whipped his face back to me and spoke in a hurried whisper, as if the medicine that held the wind-bear might not last long enough. “I was busy and not paying attention when he came on me.” He raised the war lance, and I watched it dance again; this time, the teeth of the coyote skull gnashed, and the elk teeth and deer hooves clacked. The horse tails swished, and the ermines slinked up and down the elongated shaft covered with felt trading cloth and sinew.
The giant bear continued to hover over Virgil as he spoke. “I could not see him, but I could feel him there.”
I fell forward but kept my face up where I could watch the spectacle. “Virgil, you’ve got to let me tell you something.”
“I grasped the lance in two hands and then rolled it back, rotating it.” He swung the broad, obsidian spearhead toward the heavens in the opposite direction as a strange St. Elmo’s fire flickered on its edge, growing and cracking until it sparked like metal in a microwave oven. Virgil then grabbed it firmly and thrust it into the floating bear behind him. The grizzly collapsed onto the point of the spear, and all at once the wind began blowing again and the snow continued to fall.
Plucking the headdress from the end of his war lance, Virgil swung the cloak around and enveloped himself, the bear’s head once again shrouding his own. He laid the lance on the snow between us.
He stared at me, his face only inches from mine. “You must remember how I did this.”
I nodded; it seemed so important to him. “I will… but Virgil, I’m not going to make it-and I need to tell you something.” His face had a patient look, but there was no inquisitiveness there. I lowered my head so that all I could see was the spear in the snow. “The man up there, he’s the one who took your grandson-the one who killed him.” The words spilled from my mouth like broken teeth. “He took Owen’s remains, and he’s got them up there with him.”
I stopped speaking and took a few deep breaths in an attempt to regain my wind, but it didn’t seem to be working. I rolled my weight back onto the rock, slouching to the side enough to elevate my view. I’m not sure how long I leaned there like that before opening my eyes again. When I did, the lance was on the ground but Virgil was gone.
And so was the rifle.
17
I listened to myself breathing and thought about whether or not I was dead-it felt like it.
My breath was ragged, and no matter how fast I thought I was, I couldn’t catch it. When I tried to stand the first time, my kneecaps had sounded like heads of iceberg lettuce being twisted apart, and I’d fallen. This is how it ends with everyone. You fall-you don’t get back up. I wondered if Henry and Joe would find me, or if some unfortunate alpinist would stumble across me. If I was as off the main ascent routes as I thought I was, then it was possible that no one would find me for years. Like the man who disappeared into Lake Marion, I wouldn’t come home and people would say, “Hey, do you remember that sheriff of Absaroka County that up and disappeared?”
Dumb ass. Yep, that’d be me.
I crouched a little lower against the boulder and tried to concentrate, but my head was killing me again, if I wasn’t dead already. Thinking had become more and more difficult since Virgil had left.
I’d never given up on anything in my life when I was alive. I hadn’t always won, I hadn’t always been right, but I’d never given up. Not till now. Now that I was dead.
So, was that my purpose, to lead Virgil to this point? Maybe this was what it was like to be dead, going through the motions until you came to a grinding halt thinking about all the things that you still had to do. It certainly didn’t seem so different from being alive.
Who would they send for me-the same individuals who had saved me before on this mountain and who had haunted Shade throughout his lifetime? Maybe it was like Virgil’s statements about the Inferno, that all horrors are horrors of the mind. We summon up the devils we need to punish us for the things that we’ve done. If that was the case, then why had they sent me for Virgil?
Cady.
I wanted to talk to her about Virgil’s prophecy. I thought about the cell phone and what the chances were that it still had battery power- Slim to None: The Walt Longmire Story.
I moved my hand up the length of the lance and could feel the horsehair wrapping around my hands with the wind, almost as if it was gripping me back. The deer hooves clacked together like chimes and the elk teeth mimicked them. In that small darkness with my eyes closed, I thought specifically of the things that I had to do, and the order in which I had to do them. I had to move, dead or alive. I couldn’t allow Virgil to face Raynaud Shade alone. It was his responsibility, but it was my duty.
You have haunting to do.
I decided to put Virgil’s beliefs to the test. My back felt like it was going to snap, but I hoisted the ascent pack onto my shoulder and used the lance to stand, my knees once again doing the vegetable melody.
I stood there in the blowing snow feeling like some mountain sentry, but it helped to stand, not to fall down, not to concede, not to die-not again. I readjusted the balaclava back over my face, pulled the collar of the jacket up, the Gore-Tex encrusted with iced condensation and frozen mucus from my runny nose.
I growled in my throat, just to give my body a warning, and then turned to let my eyes follow Virgil’s footprints as they angled up. I could see only two steps before they vanished into the low-flying clouds and blowing snow.
Two steps.
“Two steps.”
I smiled at my cracking voice sounding back the words of my mind like the echoes from the rock walls below. I knew they were my words because ghosts’ teeth didn’t chatter-or did they?