Nate said, “If we can’t see them, they can’t see us, right?”
“I wish there was a way to get over the top some other way,” Joe said, trying not to ascribe powers to the Grim Brothers that they didn’t realistically possess.
“There isn’t,” Nate said, nudging his horse on.
JOE HAD RARELY EVER FELT as vulnerable, as much of a target, as he did riding up through the talus. He urged his horse to keep him walking fast, hoping the herky-jerky gait would make him less easy to hit if someone was aiming. There was nothing quiet about his ascent; his horse’s lungs billowed as it climbed, the gelding nickered from time to time to call to Nate’s horse and the packhorse, and the gelding’s steel shoes struck some of the shale rocks with discordant notes and tossed off sparks from time to time. By the time he made it to the summit and the ocean of mountaintops sprawled out before him to the west, his horse was worn out from the forced march and Joe had a slick of sweat between his skin and his clothing.
But no one fired, and nothing more happened.
He pushed the gelding on, over the top, so they’d no longer be in silhouette against the sky if the brothers were somewhere in the timber below them looking back. Nate was soon with him, his own horse breathing hard as well. They tucked away to rest the animals in a stand of aspen.
In the shadows of the trees, Joe’s boot heels thumped the hard ground as he dismounted to let his horse get his breath back. Nate did the same. They stood in silence, holding the reins of their horses, eyeing the dark timber and meadows out in front of them, wondering where the Grim Brothers were.
IT WAS APPROACHING midnight when Joe’s gelding stopped short. He recognized the horse’s familiar signals of fear or agitation: the low rumbling whoof, the whites of his eyes, the ears stiffly cocked forward. Joe’s horse took several steps back, nearly colliding with Nate’s mount.
Nate whispered, “What’s wrong?”
Joe shook his head. “Don’t know. Something’s spooked him.” He managed to get control of his horse after spinning him back around.
When Joe looked up, he could see Nate grimacing, his face illuminated by a splash of starlight.
“Jesus,” Nate said. “Look.”
Joe leaned forward and peered ahead on the trail, willing his eyes to see better in the dark. Something hung across the trail, reminding him of gathered curtains hanging from a rod. He slipped his Maglite out of its holster and adjusted the beam on a moon-shaped human face—eyes open but without the gleam of life, a dried purple tongue hanging out of its mouth like a fat cigar.
Joe twisted the lens of this flashlight to increase the scope of the light. While he did, he forgot to breathe.
Three male bodies, two in black tactical clothing and one in camouflage, hung from ropes tied to a beam that crossed the trail. The bodies were hung by their necks, but it was obvious they hadn’t died from hanging because of the wounds on them. One of the men in black had a hole in his chest, one’s skull was crushed in on the side like a dropped egg, and the third had an arrow shaft sticking out of his throat.
Joe recognized the make of the arrow.
He squelched the light of his flashlight and reached out for the saddle horn to steady himself because he felt suddenly light-headed.
“Oh, God,” he said, fighting nausea.
Nate said, “I think we found the boys from Michigan.”
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 5
29
ONE BY ONE, THE GLASSY SURFACES OF THE ALPINE CIRQUES Joe and Nate rode past mirrored the stars and slice of moon. When a trout rose and nosed the water at the second cirque, Joe found himself unexpectedly heartened as he watched lazy ringlets alter the reflection.
They’d cut down the bodies and stacked them on the side of the trail. Joe rooted through their pockets and found no personal items or identification of any kind. He and Nate covered the bodies with dead logs and sheets of bark to try to prevent predators from feeding on them, and Joe bookmarked the location in his GPS so he could later direct search teams to the exact place to recover and identify the bodies. Dave Farkus had not been among the dead.
It was two in the morning when they rode by the last cirque and Joe clucked and pulled his horse off the trail to parallel the meandering outlet stream.
Nate said, “Is this the creek you followed out of the mountains last time?”
“Yup.”
“What’s the name of it?”
“No Name Creek,” Joe said. “Really.”
“Seems fitting,” Nate said, clucking his horse forward.
“Stay alert,” Joe said to Nate, although he was really talking to himself. “Those brothers could be anywhere.”
DEEP IN THE TIMBER and far down the mountain on its western slope, Joe almost rode by the dark opening where the cabin had been. He didn’t so much see it as feel it—a creeping shiver that rolled from his stomach to his throat that made him rein to a stop and turn to his right in the saddle.
“Here,” he said. He nosed the gelding over, and the horse splashed through the shallow stream and to the other side. As he rode through the opening, the familiarity of it in the starlight made him relive his escape from the cabin. When he reached the clearing where the cabin had been, he rode around it, puzzled. Ghostly columns of pale starlight lit the opening. But there was no sign of the burned cabin, just a tangled pile of deadfall.
Nate asked, “Are you sure this is the right place?”
“It’s got to be,” Joe said. He probed the deadfall with the beam of his flashlight.
Sweeping the pool of light across the dead branches, he noted a small square of orange.
“Ah,” he said with relief, and dismounted. With the flashlight in his mouth shining down, Joe tugged at branches and threw them away from the pile. He kicked away the last tangle to reveal a square foundation of bricks, which was where the woodstove had been.
“The Grim Brothers hid the scene,” he said to Nate. “They carted away whatever was still here and covered the footprint of the cabin in downed timber. No wonder Sheriff Baird and his men never found this.”
“I was starting to wonder myself,” Nate said with a grin. “I was thinking maybe you made it all up.”
“Ha ha,” Joe said sourly.
JOE AND NATE SAT on opposite ends of a downed tree trunk at four in the morning, facing the slash pile that covered up the remains of the cabin, each with his own thoughts. Joe tried to eat some deer jerky he’d brought along, but every time he started to chew he thought of the faces of the three bodies hanging from the cross pole, and he lost his appetite. He could hear Nate slowly crunching gorp from a Ziploc bag on the other end of the log, and their horses munching mountain grass. There was no more reassuring sound, Joe thought, than horses eating grass. Their grum-grum chewing sound was restful.
If only everything else were, he thought.
That’s when he clearly heard a branch snap deep in the timber. The sound came from the north, from somewhere up a wooded slope.
THERE WERE DISTINCTIVE sounds in the mountains, Joe knew. He was never a believer of trees’ falling silently in the forest if there was no one there to hear it, because he didn’t believe it was all about him, or any other human. Nature did what nature did. To philosophize that acts occurred in the wild in the presence of people and for their benefit was to acknowledge that humans were gods. Joe knew that not to be the case, and always thought anyone who bought that line of thought to be arrogant or new to the outdoors. In fact, from his experience, the forest could get downright loud. Trees, especially pines, had wide and shallow root systems. Hard winds knocked them over, where they’d fall with a crash and expose the upturned root pan. Dead branches blew off and fell down. One tree fell into another. Sometimes a bear or cat tried to climb one of the inferior high-altitude trees and the weight of the animal toppled it over. A herd of elk moving through dry and down timber sometimes sounded like a freight train that had jumped the tracks.