“Go,” Juan said.
“But I thought—”
“Go now,” he said, showing the pistol.
Parker was stunned by the fury of the storm. Snow stung his face and he tried to duck his head beneath his upraised arm to shield it. The wind was so cold it felt hot on his exposed bare skin.
“Help me get this goddamned door open!” Clint yelled. “I can’t get the key to work.” He handed Parker the keys.
“I don’t know which one it is any more than you do,” Parker yelled back.
“Just fucking try it, counselor!” Clint said, jabbing at him with the Colt.
Parker leaned into the door much as Clint had. He wanted to block the wind with his back so he could see the lock and the keys and have room to work. He tried several keys and none of them turned. Only one seemed to fit well. He went back to it. He could barely feel his fingers and feet.
He realized Clint was shouting again.
“Juan! Juan! What the hell are you doing?”
Parker glanced up. Clint was on the steps, his back to him, shouting and waving his arms at the pickup and trailer that vanished into the snow. Faint pink taillights blinked out.
At that moment, Parker pulled up on the iron door handle with his left hand while he turned the key with his right. The ancient lock gave way.
Parker slammed his shoulder into the door and stepped inside the dark house and pushed the door shut behind him and rammed the bolt home.
Clint cursed at him and screamed for Parker to open the door.
Instead, Parker stepped aside with his back against the cold stone interior wall as Clint emptied his Colt .45 at the door, making eight dime-sized holes in the wood that streamed thin beams of white light to the slate-rock floor.
He hugged himself and shivered and condensation clouds from his breath haloed his head.
Parker roamed through Engler’s library, hugging himself in an attempt to keep warm and to keep his blood flowing. There were no lights and the phone had been shut off months before. Muted light filtered through gaps in the thick curtains. Outside, the blizzard howled and threw itself against the old home but couldn’t get in any more than Clint could get in. Snow covered the single window in the library except for one palm-sized opening, and Parker used it to look around outside for Clint or Clint’s body but he couldn’t see either. It had been twenty minutes since he’d locked Clint out.
At one point he thought he heard a cry, but when he stopped pacing and listened all he could hear was the wind thundering against the windows.
He started a fire in the fireplace using old books as kindling and fed it with broken furniture and a few decorative logs he’d found in the great room downstairs. Orange light from the flames danced on the spines of the old books.
He wanted a fire to end all fires that would not only warm him, but also act as his shield against the storm and the coming darkness outside.
After midnight Parker ran out of wood and he kept the fire going with Engler’s books. Mainly the German language volumes. The storm outside seemed to have eased a bit.
As he reached up on the shelves for more fuel, his fingers avoided touching the copies of Mein Kampf. The act of actually touching the books terrified Parker in a way he couldn’t explain.
Then he reasoned that if books were to be burned, Mein Kampf should be one of them. As he tossed the volumes into the flames, a loose square of paper fluttered out of the pages onto the floor.
Parker bent over to retrieve it and flick it into the fire when he realized it was an old photograph. The image in the firelight made him gasp.
Parker ran down the stairs in the dark to the front door and threw back the bolt. The force of the wind opened both the doors inward and he squinted against the snow and tried to see into the black-and-white maelstrom.
“Clint!” he shouted to no effect. “Clint!”
The story is fiction, but the photograph is not.
In 1936, in one of the odder episodes of the modern American West, Wyoming rancher and noted photographer Charles Belden did indeed catch pronghorn antelope fawns on his ranch and deliver them to zoos across the nation in his Ryan monoplane, including a delivery to the German passenger airship LZ 129 Hindenburg in Lakehurst, New Jersey, bound for the Berlin Zoo.
The photograph appears courtesy of the Charles Belden Collection, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming.
I can find no information on the fate of the pronghorn antelope. They would have arrived shortly after the conclusion of Adolf Hitler’s Olympics.
— CJB
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.”