Hunter's Moon by Chuck Logan (english novels to read .TXT) 📕

Up ahead somewhere, a deer started, then bounded through HUNTER’S MOON / 231

the undergrowth. Dry branches snapped. Then silence. Harry poised and cupped his hands to his ears.

The footfalls were soft at first. Too steady a rhythm for a deer.

They came from the north, along the snowmobile trail, and he picked up movement in the faint light.

Becky in jeans, his sweatshirt, Emery’s field jacket, a black watch cap, and running shoes. She loped gracefully along the trail, resting her forearms in a cradle formed by a pair of snow-pac boots tied by the laces and slung around her neck. She slowed to a walk at the trail junction. He could make out her hair in a ponytail and see the white puffs of her breath.

Dawn poked through the trees and a lattice of shadow crept across the snow and Becky raised a mittened hand. Her body arched alert.

Listening. Satisfied she was alone, she turned to face the sun and set her shoulders in resignation and plunged up the trail to the point.

Strange way to hide. Running the trail. Follow her? Better wait.

See if anybody was after her.

Two does wandered down the far side of the moraine, fat and idle as cartoon mice. Harry let them pass, then left his perch and followed Becky’s fresh footprints up the ridge.

From the corner of his eye he caught a smudge of red up the slope.

Hunter? He reached the spot where he’d seen the movement and found snowshoe tracks. Becky wasn’t carrying snowshoes. Her tracks were knee-deep in the snow and their shape was different. She’d changed to the boots. He strapped on his Bearpaws and started up the incline.

It was a steep goddamn trail and the sign of wandering hunters fell away as he climbed. Only animal tracks. Rabbit. Deer mostly.

Piles of their black braided shit. Through breaks in the pine and birch he saw the lodge illuminated by the fading yard lights. Headlights on Highway 7 made semaphore flashes between the trees.

The granite shoulders of the ridge increasingly jutted from the snow cover and a cloud of mist rolled in from the lake. Trees floated, twisting from the crannies with tangled roots swept bare by the wind. Troll country.

232 / CHUCK LOGAN

His snowshoes slid on rock and he took them off and tied them to the backpack. The tracks disappeared on a windswept escarpment.

Climbing now, rifle slung across his back, he needed both hands to pull himself up the massive bluff of fissured granite that rose above him in a hood of mist.

A weathered sign tilted on a tree and pointed up the rock face: CAUTION, HAZARDOUS AREA. CHILDREN SHOULD BE KEPT IN HAND.

He cocked his head to a crisp arrhythmic rattle from above. Not rock or wood or metal. The click of bone on bone.

Alert, he scrambled up the rock and sweat ran in his eyes and the snowshoes and rifle lurched on his back. The face broadened out and a dome of furrowed granite spread before him with a foot trail sketched into the rock that led to the promontory. He scaled the last fold of rock and passed through a pygmy pine jungle with a soft moss floor. The layered mist parted. Good. He could see.

The rattle was louder now. He unslung his rifle and approached cautiously and the trees ended and the Big Water did its endless float to the horizon. Far below, Stanley was a pastel watercolor that turned off its night lights one by one.

A tortured birch grew from a tangle of roots in a rock cranny on the apex of the point and the rattle came from a pair of deer antlers tied together and hung over a branch.

Spokes of sunlight thrust through the clouds and raced over the granite-barnacled backbone of the ridge as daylight soaked up the slumbering mist and Harry’s eyes followed the racing edge of dawn.

A visual slap—the evergreen spine of the ridge collapsed into a im-mense concave shadow.

The Stanley open pit. Hidden, except from up here.

His calves trembling from the climb, Harry took off his pack, set his rifle and snowshoes aside, and opened his Thermos. With a cup of coffee, he found a seat on the gnarled roots.

He lit a cigarette and watched the magic slowly seep out of the dawn. Then he took out the binoculars and scanned the terrain below.

HUNTER’S MOON / 233

Something.

He dropped the binoculars and reached for his rifle.

His hand grabbed empty air.

Sheriff Emery stood three feet away holding the rifle, inspecting it. Harry lurched up suddenly and spilled hot coffee on his wrist.

No sound of his approach. Only the sigh of the wind in the pines below and the rattle of the antlers. No Jerry for a chaperone today.

Emery was bareheaded and his dark hair was longer when it wasn’t combed back. He wore the red Mackinaw with the black band striping the sleeves and the hem and his jeans were tucked into the top of worn, greasy leather boots with thick, upturned moccasin toes. A scoped .30-06 hung from his shoulder with a pair of slender snowshoes that gleamed wet yellow.

Emery took a step forward and Harry backed up defensively, then, realizing he had a sheer drop of thin air a foot to his rear, he stood his ground.

Emery’s hand came forward, returning the weapon. “That’s an old gun you got there, Harry Griffin,” he said, friendly enough, as if he’d left the words they’d exchanged at the lodge down below with the load of his life.

Harry squinted around the rock bluff. “Where…?”

“Heard you coming up the trail. Thought you might be a deer.

You, ah, got another smoke?”

Harry held out his pack. Emery selected a cigarette and tore off the filter and lit it from Harry’s lighter. His hands, cupped around the flame, were ruddy olive brown, powerful and thickly veined in the thin sunlight. He nodded at the antlers. “Leave these horns up here. When the wind’s right, can sound like two