Cold River Resurrection

ENES SMITH

COLD RIVER RESURRECTION

A  NOVEL

COLD RIVER RESURRECTION

Enes Smith 2009

This is a work of fiction.  Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.  Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. 

COLD RIVER RESURRECTION.
Copyright 2009 by Enes Smith. All rights reserved.  Printed in the United States of America.  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

Cover design by Road’s End Films

Print version ISBN:  978-0-9778705-1-6

Printed in the United States of America

Enes Smith Productions edition 2009

Kindle edition April 2011

BOOKS BY ENES SMITH

NOVELS

Fatal Flowers

Kindle edition: 
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Dear Departed

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Cold River Rising

Kindle edition: 
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NONFICTION

Live for Almost Free: How to Find Free Housing and Become Debt Free

Kindle edition: 
http://amzn.to/1ijmlSX

AUTHOR’S NOTE

I am a Šiyápu, a white man, and as such, any mistakes I have made regarding Indian tribes, peoples, customs, and culture are mine alone.  This is a work of fiction, from a Šiyápu looking in from the outside, and any relation to persons and events are from the author’s imagination, and not related to real people or events.  

The ideas that catch in a writer’s mind are as eclectic  as the writer’s experience. I am a lifelong reader, bibliophile, cop, teacher, and writer.

Over the course of many months a series of unrelated newspaper articles lodged in this writer’s brain: An article that chronicled the insertion of meth into the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming by drug cartels; an article about a Bigfoot research expedition in Oregon; articles about mid-eastern terrorists attempting to set up a training camp in Oregon; and articles about terrorist organizations engaging in commerce with drug cartels.

While this is a work of fiction, the poison known as meth destroys far too many children in the United States, Mexico, and Indian Country.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

There have been many people who have contributed time and kind
words, without whom Cold River Resurrection would have never happened:

Nancy Spreier, friend, consummate researcher, and constant believer, owed more than I can write
; Annie Hausinger, for the journey of friendship and tireless copyediting; daughter Maddie Smith, beginning writer and one of my first readers; Tom Jones, fellow cop and most talented man I know; Michelle Jones, friend who cares enough to force me to write when I’ve lost the way; Trudy Held, webmaster and insightful reader; and my friend Lieutenant Avex “Stoney” Miller, Ret., of the Warm Springs Tribal Police Department, for his tracking expertise and stories about Indian Country.

For Tony, Melissa, Maddie, and Dani

and

Hunter, Halle, Samantha,
Alan Jay

Justin
, Gwyneth, Austin, and Sean

All my love

C
hapter
1

Cold River Indian Reservation, Oregon

Mt. Jefferson Wilderness Area

July 6

Jennifer Kruger had been lost for hours by the time she discovered the first body.

It was three o’clock in the afternoon, and she was on the eastern slope of Mt. Jefferson, trying to find a way out of the woods. Tall pine
trees closed in on her, blocking the sun. She had been following a game trail, a small track that would disappear and then reappear every few feet.  A low branch blocked her way like a crossing guard’s arm. She shrugged out of her pack and crawled under the branch. Jennifer turned to face back down the tiny path. If she shifted and looked through the trees, she could see the bright flash of sun on Whitewater Glacier.

In front of her a rolling carpet of trees stretched down the slope as far as she could see. She hoped she could find a logging road, but it didn’t look as if any trees had been cut this high up on the mountain. She knew she needed to keep going downhill.

The massive pine trees were so dense she had to constantly look back to the mountain to keep going east, or what she thought was east. It was such rugged country she didn’t wonder why congress had given it to the Indians way back when. She tried to keep the word
lost
from taking over her thoughts. She shifted to a patch of sunlight and sat on the branch in the middle of the path.

See, Jennifer, you can’t be lost, the sun is shining.
She pulled a water bottle from her pack and scooted again so the sun hit her legs. The muted sounds of birds and distant running water gave her a sense of security she clung to, with a little nagging worry that she tried to push away.

Gonna get dark soon, Jenny. 

She pulled a pair of jeans from her pack, raised up, and shrugged out of her hiking shorts. She shook her head at her legs, now a crosshatch of scratches. A bloody gash ran up the back of her right calf; red bumps from mosquito bites covered her legs like angry measles. 

Jennifer had shoulder length light brown hair tied in a ponytail. She was five foot four and athletic without working hard. She w
ore a blue long-sleeved shirt and carried a red backpack. She swung her pack onto her shoulders, adjusted the straps, and took a deep breath. Time to get going. She walked around towering old-growth trees, through bands of shadow and  sunlight. She stopped. The trail angled uphill, to the north, away from the direction she thought she should go. She shrugged and started up the faint trail, and saw what looked like a break in the trees. A clearing. She picked up her pace and hopped over a branch. A clearing might mean logging, and no matter how long ago, there would be a road. 

There was an opening, a football field away, through the trees. 

Jennifer stepped off the animal trail and pushed through the brush. She came to a large rock and leaned back, looking at a patch of sky. The contrails of a jet thirty thousand feet above had a dreamy quality about it. She thought about what it would be like to be on that jet, going to Las Vegas, all the bright lights and people. She moved upright and pushed her way through the brush.  Wilderness enveloped her. The last fifty feet to the clearing took her much longer than she had thought it would.  It seemed almost full dark in the trees, but that couldn’t be. She looked at her watch. It was just three thirty. 

Gets dark
early in the mountains, don’t you know, Jennifer. 

And suddenly she knew that she didn’t want to spend the night in the woods alone, and what a fool she had been to leave their camp. She should have made Carl walk out with her, listened to the inevitable arguments, and put up with his company. Carl could be an insufferable prick, but she would gladly welcome the sight of him now. 

She grunted, pushed through a Manzanita bush and lurched against a deadfall. She sat down hard, her breath coming fast, faster than it should. 
Slow down, Jenny, slow down, don’t panic.
She was sitting in a bush in the thick forest. There was no trail, not even an animal track.

Okay, Jennifer, you little copy editor you, if you can spot a misplaced comma from across the room, how hard can it be to find a friggin trail?

She slapped at a branch and then stood at the edge of the clearing. A rock slide long ago had cleared out an area the size of a supermarket parking lot. Small pine trees struggled to grow, some as high as three or four feet, growing around fallen trees and boulders.
Not exactly a pasture, but I’ll take it.
She twisted out of her pack and dug inside for her lighter. With her lighter in hand, she set her pack down and looked around for some dry wood to burn. She realized now how quiet it was. The ubiquitous insect noise was gone. It was too quiet, and that unsettled her.

Birds chirping and twittering and the occasional rustle of small animals in the underbrush had accompanied her all day. She strained to hear.

Nothing.

It was as if she were in a sound booth, suddenly aware of her heart beat.

She pulled a dead branch out from under a log, and the odor hit her then, a heavy, stifling odor, something dead. The odor of something decaying. 

She didn’t want to look. Maybe it was a dead deer, but it was different somehow, coming now on a breeze fanning the clearing. Jennifer  pulled the branch and started to turn.  Her feet slipped out all at once and she fell to a sitting position, still holding onto the branch.

Ohmigod, that’s a shoe.

She held onto the branch as the rotten meat odor blanketed her. She took shallow breaths through her mouth, holding onto the stupid branch.
Get up Jen, get moving.

She had left their tent (and boyfriend Carl) at nine in the morning, determined to walk out of the wilderness, his life, and his crazy schemes, in that order. She had reminded him they weren’t even supposed to
be
on the reservation. When she left camp, the July morning was warming up, and she had hummed to herself for the first hour. Then the trail had just quit and good old Carl had said there was only one trail in and out. After a while the trail just disappeared.

She had followed a twisting succession of game trails since then. Jennifer stopped humming at noon. By one o’clock, she was talking to herself. She thought of building a fire to attract someone, but she knew it wouldn’t work in the dense woods. She thought more than once she would kill Carl for her cell phone. 

Carl. What a loser. I deserve this, she thought. My life must be pathetic. I can’t believe I let him talk me into going on another of his stupid expeditions. This time it was Bigfoot for chrisssakes.  He had actually signed us up for a Bigfoot Expedition. Paid six hundred dollars apiece.  

The idiot huckster Bigfoot leader told us we could be
in the group that finally put the myth to rest, the group that found proof positive that Bigfoot, a large, hairy, bipedal ape existed in the forests of the Pacific Northwest.
Yeah, there was a hairy ape here in the Northwest. Until this morning, I used to date him.
I get back to Portland, I’m going to re-do Carl.  He’s an idiot.

And you let them take your cell phone so it wouldn’t scare Bigfoot!

You’re an idiot, Jen, for going with him here.
Paying those scam artists all that money (teach us how to look for spoor, my ass) and letting them lead us to our overnight listening posts. The leader told us that Carl and I were most likely to see Sasquatch, since he was convinced the big hairy animal actually lived on the Cold River Indian Reservation. The Indians didn’t talk about Bigfoot, he reasoned, ‘cause they wanted to keep him secret. 

Well, no shit Jerry Garcia, the Indians didn’t talk about Bigfoot because the hairy beast just doesn’t exist.

She let go of the branch, sat there and stared at the shoe. An ant, not just any ant, but a large black one, crawled out from under the suit pant leg, peered at Jennifer as if to say, “Come on down,” and marched back under the cuff. Jennifer blinked. A man’s dress shoe.
So this is what happens when you get lost, you die under a log.
Something was wrong here, very wrong. The shoe, a man’s dress shoe, was attached to a leg covered with a suit pant. Grey with stripes. Above the suit pant (
don’t look Jenny
) a white shirt with red and yellow stains completed the ensemble. Above that, nothing.

She finally got to her feet, her knees wobbling, and looked at the shoe.
A man’s dress shoe.
She had the thought again, that something was wrong, aside from a body, the dress was wrong. A man wearing a suit, dress shoes, a white shirt.

That’s because he’s not a hiker, Jennifer.

How could that be? A man up here, dead, wearing dress shoes, and not just any dress shoes. That’s a pair of Salvatore Ferragamo oxfords from Nordstrom, eight hundred a pair, no sir, no hiking boots here. But she couldn’t see a pair, and she wasn’t going to look any closer. She had seen only one shoe, and the head, well the head was missing. Must be under the log, you just can’t see it.

But she knew that the head was missing, and it was just too much to deal with right now.

Jennifer backed up, her legs shaking. She placed her feet carefully, turned her head to look around, and walked back toward the trees.  Ten feet, then twenty, the odor lessening somewhat, and she stopped and looked back at the shoe. She could make out the form of the body under the log, but she wasn’t going any closer.  She knew one thing though, Sasquatch, if he did exist, didn’t hunt in downtown Portland. And this poor soul didn’t walk up here in his Ferragamos.

This was no hiker.  So, how did he get here? She looked out over the clearing.  Rocks, scrub trees, crisscrossed by a few old-growth trees on the ground. Toward the middle, fifty feet away, she saw . . . something. Like a –

Like a shoe, a shoe with a foot, Jenny. The missing Salvatore Ferragamo, brown lace-up oxford, ladies and gentlemen, don’t Jenny, ‘cause if you start . . . 

She bit her knuckle to hold back a laugh that once started, she knew would turn into a scream. She stood like that for the longest time, fear giving way to inertia. She knew at some level if she moved the fear would run until her heart burst, but her mind screamed

Run, Jennifer, run as fast as far as you can, just run, Jen, runrunrunrunrun!

The odor came over her again,
a wave of decay, and she tasted death.

Breathe in, breathe out.

She had once edited a book for an NYPD detective, Jerry Biscoani, an energetic, likeable man who didn’t have a nodding acquaintance with grammar or punctuation. His portrayal of crime scenes, however, was graphic and compelling, and the one thing she had never forgotten was his explanation of odor.
“Odor is particulate,” he had written.

The sense of odor is triggered when particulates in the air hit receptors in the nasal passage and are interpreted in the brain. In other words, when you sense a certain odor, you are actually ingesting particulates (solid particles from the object you smell) that cling to the mucous membranes in the nose and give you that sense of odor. When you smell the decay of a dead body, you are actually ingesting particulates of dead flesh into your lungs. Dead flesh clinging to alveoli, the clusters of air sacs in your lungs.

Jennifer had been so grossed out by his description that she had called him up and asked specifically about particulates. “Well, Sis (Jerry had always called her ‘Sis’) it’s like this. I don’t ever make coffee in hotels where they keep the coffee pot in the bathroom, and I use airplanes sparingly.” Gross.

Breathe in, Jenny, breathe out. She fell to her knees and leaned forward on her hands, her pack bunching up behind her neck as the acid came up fast in her throat and she vomited, hot, scalding. She vomited until nothing was left, gagged and spit, trying to get the taste out of her mouth, and then she gagged again, remembering Jerry’s words.
Dead flesh clinging to alveoli.
Jennifer spit and moved her head to look at the shoe.  She turned over and sat, then scooted away from her vomit. Her hands shook as she reached into her pack and removed her water bottle. She rinsed her mouth and spat, and felt a little better. She pushed herself up and stood, cold and shaking, even though the afternoon temperature was over eighty degrees. She felt weak, terrified, alone. She knew she needed a plan, needed to get some control. To get away from the death in the meadow.

“Build a fire, Jenny,” she finally said, her voice sounding strange
and far away. The sound of her voice scared her even more. She turned slowly, afraid of what she might see.
Or who might see me. Someone’s watching me.

And then she had a thought beyond all reason.

Something is watching me.

Get some control, Jenny. Think!

She took a step, and then another. She knew there must be some way to let people know where she was. A fire. Build a fire. Say it. Build a fire, make some smoke.

She whispered, “Build a fire.”

But she wasn’t going to spend the night anywhere close to that body, or any other body, no matter what.  The dense forest was better.  She walked away from the log, retracing her steps to the tree line.  As she reached the trees, she bent over and began to pick up small pieces of wood, getting enough to start a fire.