Instinctively, Vladdy fell back. As he did so, he raised the metal briefcase and felt a shock through his hand and arm as a bullet smashed into it. On the ground, Vladdy heard a cry and realized that it had come from inside of him. He thrashed and rolled away, and Bob cursed and fired another booming shot into the dirt near Vladdy’s ear.
Vladdy leaped forward and swung the briefcase as wildly as he could, and by pure chance it hit hard into Bob’s kneecaps. Bob grunted and pitched forward, nearly onto Vladdy. In the dark, Vladdy had no idea where Bob’s gun was, but he scrambled to his feet and clubbed at Bob with the briefcase.
Bob said, “Stop!” but all Vladdy could see was the muzzle flash on Eddie’s face a moment before.
“Stop! I’ve got the—” Vladdy smashed the briefcase down as hard as he could and stopped the sentence. Bob lay still.
Breathing hard, Vladdy dropped the briefcase and fell on top of Bob. He tore through Bob’s clothing and found the gun that shot Eddie. Bob moaned, and Vladdy shot him in the eye with it.
With tears streaming down his face, Vladdy buckled Eddie’s and Bob’s belts together and rolled them off the dam. He heard the bodies thump into some rocks and then splash into the reservoir. He threw the pistol as far as he could and it went into the water with a ploop. The briefcase followed.
He found a vinyl bag on the front seat of the Suburban that bulged with $2,000 in cash. It puzzled Vladdy for a moment, but then it made sense. Bob had flashed his lights to see who had taken his briefcase. When he saw two out-of-place guys like Vladdy and Eddie—especially Eddie — Bob made his choice not to pay.
Vladdy drove back through Yellowstone Park in the Suburban, thinking of Eddie, thinking of what he had done. He would buy some new clothes, new shoes, one of those fleece vests. Get a baseball cap, maybe.
He parked on a turnout on the northern shore of Yellowstone Lake and watched the sun come up. Steam rose from hot spots along the bank, and a V of Canada geese made a long, graceful descent onto the surface of the water.
He felt a part of it, now.
A setting from a dream of nature, he thought.
The End of Jim and Ezra
It took great determination for Jim — almost more than he had left inside him — not to throw back the heavy buffalo robes and slice Ezra’s throat open. His sheathed bowie knife was in his bed within easy reach, where it had been each night for the past twenty-eight years. Jim clamped his eyes shut and stroked the leather-wrapped handle with his fingertips. The blade was as sharp and as long as his thigh and he had used it to cut apart hundreds of buffalo, elk, deer, and bears. It had skinned a thousand beaver and he had shaved with it back when he shaved, and it had pierced the insides of three Indian bucks; two Arikara and a Pawnee. But he’d never used it to kill a friend.
Jim felt ashamed and he opened his hand beneath the robes and released the knife handle.
It was freezing inside the cabin, as it had been every morning for six weeks. The cold had made the chinking between the logs contract, crack, and fall out in chunks. The series of gaps let wind blow through the walls and a half-dozen inch-high snowdrifts had formed across the top of his robes, striping them, making them look, as Ezra pointed out each and every morning, as if he were sleeping under a zebra hide. Ice crystals tipped the ends of individual hairs on the outside of the robe as well. Making it as gray as Jim’s beard.
He fought against the urge to grasp the knife again as Ezra’s socked feet thumped the rough wood-plank floor. Jim listened in tortured silence as Ezra rose unsteadily to full height and stretched. Ezra’s bones cracked like ice shifting on a lake, a combination of low-grounded pops and high snapping sounds. Ezra growled from deep in his chest and worked a gob of phlegm up into the back of his throat while he sniffed in the fluid of his nose so it could all mix together into a substantial globule he called his “morning mass” because he was Catholic. Ezra just held it there — sometimes it seemed for a half an hour to Jim — while the man poked and prodded the fire and added lengths of split wood until it took off and started to roar. Waiting for the flames, Ezra breathed raggedly through his nose because his mouth was full. When the fire was intense enough that the metal grate was hot, Ezra spit his morning mass onto the bars of the grate and said, “Lookit that thang burn.”
Sometimes, Jim could hear it pop.
Jim knew Ezra would then say, “Jim, come lookit this thang,” because Ezra said it each and every morning, and had for ninety-two straight days. He said it again.
Ninety-three.
Ezra turned stiffly toward Jim while he pulled a clawed hand down through his matted beard to groom it. He’d once stood six-foot-four before he got that hump in his back and his legs bowed out as wide as his shoulders. He’d worn the union suit so long his leg hairs were growing out through the fabric. White salty blooms framed the crotch. A tobacco stain looked like a permanent teardrop under his left breast. Both elbows of the suit had long since worn away and Ezra’s blue-white joints stuck out the holes.
He cackled and said to Jim, “Lookit you sleeping under that zebra hide! It looks like a damn zebra hide the way it’s all striped like that.”
The cabin, corral, fur shack, and loafing shed had been thrown together on the western side of the Wind River Mountains too high up and too far from anyone or anything else. They’d been caught in early September by snow, and Jim could tell by just looking at the sky that more was coming fast, that it was just the beginning of a mean and heartless winter.
They’d been trapped by their own success, a phrase Ezra had latched onto and repeated two or three times a day.
It had been Jim’s idea, born of frustration and lack of beaver in the lowland creeks and streams, to go higher and farther into the mountains than they’d ever gone before. Farther than any white trappers had gone before. There’d been a sense of urgency because they were being pushed by newcomers. More of them all the time, flowing west and north across the continent like a plague. The newcomers had no idea how rough and raggedy it had once been, and had little appreciation for men like Jim and Ezra, who had scouted the rivers and valleys and found the beaver and fought the Indians. Jim and Ezra were like the elk. Once plains animals, they’d been pressured to seek higher ground.
It wasn’t fair, but Jim had never thought fairness was his due. So many things were working against them. The scarcity of beaver. The discovery back east that silk worked better for top hats than beaver felt. The plummeting price of beaver plews (pelts). And their aged and aching bodies.
Three things bound them together, two being their history and their treasure.
The third thing was the fact they were snowbound nine thousand feet in the mountains.
And all Jim could think of these days was how much he wanted to kill Ezra.
The fur shack outside bulged with skinned beaver plews six feet high by eight feet deep. The plews had been stretched and bound together. Now they were frozen into bales so heavy it took two men to load them. They were worth a fortune.
The cabin was one room, roughly twenty by twenty feet. There were two frame beds crosshatched with rope to provide some give, a table that listed to the right, two chairs, a slab-rock fireplace that wasn’t tight, and no windows except for the four-inch square in the door covered with bear-greased cotton cloth. Every corner of the structure was filled with snarls of traps and chains. They had one pot, one frying pan, and a tin for coffee and hot water.