“Why didn’t you say before?”
“The pilot got away fine,” Steve put in. “Zack followed his tracks part way down toward 191. No emergency.”
“So what was in this plane?”
“Nothing,” Steve said. “Just a couple coffins in the back.”
“Coffins?” Curt half-smiled, as if this might be a joke.
“If there’s bodies in them,” Steve chuckled, “they won’t rot at twenty below … And that pilot was obviously okay, probably on his way to where he came from by now.”
Curt took the grass stalk from his teeth, tossed it. “We’ll have to ride down to the road, call it in.”
“Tonight?” Steve raised his hands, palms up, collecting the fast-falling flakes. “In this?”
“Tomorrow morning.” Curt took off his hat to dump snow from the brim. “If this weather keeps up, we should go down anyway. Getting too deep for the horses.”
“It’s not that bad,” Steve said.
“We agree every year, if there’s too much snow we cut it short.”
“We paid for a full hunt,” Steve said.
Zack glanced at their tracks entering camp. “It’s only knee-deep.”
Curt nodded. “So far.”
“I don’t see any reason to ride out because of that plane,” Steve added. “The pilot’s surely reported it by now. And like I said, those corpses …”
Curt smiled. “Maybe those coffins’re empty.”
“Yeah,” Zack said. “Maybe.”
“If it stops snowing,” Curt said, “I’ll ride down in the morning, call it in. You boys can keep hunting.”
“Too bad there’s no service up here,” Zack said. “Or we could call it in now.”
“Yeah, too bad,” Curt said, “that a little bit of this world’s still natural.”
“When I climbed that ridge,” Zack said, “chasing my elk, I looked out at these mountains and forest …” he halted, not knowing what to say. “It was the most beautiful sight I’d ever seen.”
“Be nice to keep it that way.” Curt shook more snow off his jacket, clapped his hat against his knee. “Time I get you boys some dinner.”
“What we got, chef?”
“Elk liver’n onions.”
“Elk liver? Where from?”
“I shot him as he was coming right through camp. Must’ve been running from you guys.” Curt pointed a thumb toward the kitchen tent. “There’s liver and heart in that pail, and four quarters hanging from the crossbar behind the tent.”
“We hire you to find us elk,” Steve half-laughed, “and you shoot them instead?”
“What was I going to do? Tie him down till you got here?”
“What you shoot him with?” Zack broke in.
Curt patted his thigh. “Ruger.”
“Anyway there’s plenty more elk out there,” Zack said.
“That’s not the point,” Steve tailed off, as if not sure what the point was. “Anyway, I’m not leaving tomorrow just because of a little snow.”
“If we have to we have to.” Curt grinned. “Unless you want to stay up here without a tent or food or sleeping bags or horses.”
“Hell, Curt, how many seasons you’ve guided us up here? You know we’re not afraid of a little bad weather.”
Curt walked back to the cook tent whacking snow off the low branches, not answering.
Is it true, Zack wondered, that every snowflake is unique? A multi-infinite paradigm, an endlessly varying geometry? How could there be so infinitely many?
Steve turned on him. “What you tell him about the plane for?”
Zack drained his Jack Daniels. “It could be an emergency, maybe that pilot didn’t get to the highway.”
“You said he was fine.”
“I said his tracks looked like he was fine.”
“And now we’ve got Curt wanting to go down? We paid him for the whole trip.”
Zack glanced at the fast-falling snow, blinking as it hit his eyes. “Not his fault if this keeps up. Four years now we’ve hunted with him, he’s always been fair.”
As a football announcer Zack had a bye week every year, when the team didn’t have a game and he could get away for ten days. He and Steve had always hired Curt, who picked them up at Bozeman airport, drove them up here and had camp ready. Any meat they shot was packed on horses down to Curt’s truck and driven to a game butcher in Bozeman. Two weeks later it was shipped, frozen, to Steve in New York and Zack in LA. Elk they had killed high in the wilds of Montana now fed to rich friends in a huge city, on a table set with silver, crystal and fine Bordeaux.
But this year felt different. It wasn’t just the foolishness about the cocaine. Steve seemed tense, less reachable, worried about something Zack couldn’t decode. Steve had made him a fortune when he broke into the NFL, and since then they’d always been close; now Zack found himself almost nervous around him, but didn’t know why.
“TO THE CHEYENNE,” Curt said, “Bear is mother or father, sister or brother. We – what’s your word – we revere Bear. And Bear takes care of us. Even Griz. We tell each other stories.” He jostled the fire with a scrub oak branch and laid it on the flames. “True stories.”
They’d finished the elk liver, onions and pan-fried potatoes and two bags of chocolate chip cookies and had opened another bottle of Jack. Curt brushed new snow off his shoulders and leaned toward Steve and Zack. “Guess how come Bear has no tail.”
“Hell, yes,” Zack said, remembering where he was. “How come?”
“One winter day Bear was fishing in a hole in the ice when Fox came by. Fox asked him if he was having any luck, and Bear said no. So Fox said, ‘Stick your long tail down through that hole in the ice and you’ll surely catch a fish.’ So Bear stuck his tail down through the hole, and Fox went off, saying ‘Don’t pull your tail out till I tell you.’
“Bear sat there a long time, till finally Fox called him to pull his tail out. But now the ice had completely frozen around his tail, and it broke off when he pulled it out …”
“Ouch,” Steve said.
“So that’s how it happened,” Zack laughed.
“That’s how the ancestors tell it,” Curt said. “But speaking of bears, I’ve had a bear lick my ear, a bear eat out of my hand, I’ve had a bear cub sitting in my kitchen sink …”
“What’d you do?”
“Opened the door and let him out. The one who licked my ear was when I was sleeping, out in the woods somewhere, but that woke me up. I yelled at him and he ran off. The one who ate out of my hand – it was a buffalo rib – I called him Boston. For the Boston Bruins, you know … And I think he took that rib from my hand out of kindness, not wanting to hurt my feelings by refusing.”
“In LA,” Zack said, “we don’t have bears.”
“That’s because you killed them all … You even got a grizzly on the California state flag.” For a moment Curt said nothing more, then, “Friend of mine once was chased by a griz, it