When Terry nodded, Hutch released him, tugged off his gloves, and threw them down. He stretched one foot into the fire pit to break up the pyramid of kindling, then he stepped in and began stomping the fire out.
“What's going on?”
He turned to see Phil on his hands and knees in the tent, his head pushed through the opening.
“Shhhh,” Hutch said, but Phil was already talking.
“Some kind of First Nation thing? Do you do that when your hunt is successful or when it's not?”
Hutch leaped out of the fire pit and dropped to his knees in front of Phil. In a harsh whisper he said, “Listen, some people are after me, bad people, really bad.They're nearby, so be quiet.We have to go now.”
Phil's soft cheeks rose, pushed up by a big smile. “Yeah, right,” he said. “I suppose you violated some ancient burial ground, and now they want toâ”
As he had done with Terry, he slapped his palm over Phil's mouth. “I'm serious, Phil. These guys shot at me with a machine gun and a rifle. They want to kill me and anyone else they find, I think.”
He did not mention the weapon that had caused the caribou to explode. Phil would not have believed him and would have continued to resist Hutch's plans, not wanting to feel duped if they were revealed as an elaborate joke.
“Now come on.We have to go. Do you have your boots on?”
“No, Iâ”
“Get them on. Now! Grab a jacket.”
He turned to Terry. “Get your jacket,Terry.” He quickly scanned the campsite, the edge of the woods around it, the slope down to the river. “Where's David?” he asked. His level of panic ratcheted up, a feat he had not thought possible.
Terry pointed. “He's still fishing.We found a greatâ”
“We gotta get him.We gotta go.”
Phil had not emerged from the tent. “Phil!” he called.
“My shoes,” Phil answered.
“Now!”
Hutch tried to think. If they could not make it back to the campsite, what would they need? Everything, really, he thought. It was not as though they had brought luxuries.The tents and sleeping bags were required gear in the far north in autumn.The nights could get deathly cold, but lugging them now, while running from killers, seemed more than stupid.
He grabbed his rucksack beside the tent and handed it to Terry. “Put some stuff in here. Only essentials.”
Hutch leaned into the tent. Phil was tying his second boot.
“Hand me the first aid kit,” Hutch said.
Phil did. “This is for real?” he asked.
His expression told Hutch he had started to believe it.
“Very real.” He gripped his friend's knee. “We can do this, Phil. These guys, they're mostly young. They're punks.We can beat them. Right now, we just have to go somewhere they can't find us. Then we'll figure out what to do next. Okay?”
“Yeah,” Phil said, unsure.
“Got your pills?” The last thing they needed was for Phil to stroke out.
Phil rummaged around, pushing aside candy bar wrappers, beer cans, a paperback novel.Then he held up a waterproof plastic cylinder.
“Put them in your jacket,” Hutch instructed. “Let's go.”
Terry was coming out of his and David's tent. Hutch reached for the sack.
“I'll carry it,” Terry said, slinging it over his shoulder. “You got your bow?”
Hutch handed him the first aid kit. “Thanks. Ready? Let's get David.” He looked from one man to the other. “No talking, okay? If you see a yellow Hummer or anyone on foot, hide. Drop straight to the ground if that'll get you out of sight. Then, if you can, signal the rest of us. Quietly.”
“What's this about, Hutch?”Terry asked.
“I don't know, Ter.” He shook his head. “Weird stuff. Definitely. But I do know these guys are killers. They won't hesitate to take you down. And,Ter, I told Phil, some of them are just kids. Don't let that fool you.”
“What do you mean, kids?”
“Kids.Teenagers. One boy looks twelve or thirteen. I think he's in way over his head, doesn't want to be here but is. There's a girl who looks fifteen or so. Another boy seventeen, eighteen.The rest are adults, in their twenties.”
“How many?”
“Six that I saw. Could be more.” He turned to leave, but Terry stopped him.
“And what are they doing?”
“Killing things!” Hutch said in a stage whisper. He was growing frustrated, anxious to put ground between them and Declan's gang. “They shot at me. They gotta be insane or on drugs or hiding something pretty big. Honestly, I hope I never find out. If I do, I hope it's by seeing it on Fox. Know what I'm saying? Now . . .
where is David
?”
Terry hesitated only a few seconds longer. Absorbing this information, his face reflected puzzlement, then concern.Then it hardened in a fierce display of resolution. He was a terrible poker player but a good man to have on your side in a pinch.
“About a half mile from here, the river cuts into a deep valley,” he said. “Looked like some nice, deep pools down there, so we checked it out. Good fishing. That's where I left him.” Without waiting for a response, he brushed past Hutch and charged up the berm.
Hutch patted Phil on the arm.“Keep up,” he said and ran after Terry.
Over the berm,Terry cut left,
opposite the direction Hutch had taken to hunt that morning. In a single file they followed the terrain as it rose and fell, twisted and turned, sometimes catching a game trail, other times on near-virgin turf. The only evidence of humans were tracks and broken branches from the few times Terry and David had trodden through. When it felt that they had jogged considerably farther than a half mile, Terry turned up an embankment and stopped.
Way below them the Straight River churned through boulders, draped over small falls, and eddied into calm, glistening pools. Under Hutch's feet, the ground sloped steeply, but not impassibly, to the water. The earth here appeared to be mostly gravel and sand. Hutch wondered if the hill on which he stood had been formed by an esker. Eskers often acted as filters, eliminating clay and soil to eventually deposit the kind of granules they found on this slope.
At the bottom of the gorge and to their left, where the river narrowed and calmed, stood David. He was on the far side of the river, whipping a rod back and forth, making the fly dance along the water. The line looped up, catching the wind and fluttering down again. David's movements were those of a master choreographer; the rod and line seemed somehow poetic, artistic, a painter with his brush, a ballerina perfecting a
grand jeté
. He was turned sideways from them, intently watching for the strike that would land his lunch.
Behind him lay the mirror image of the slope under Hutch's feet. His eyes followed it up to where it plateaued at his own elevation. A glint caught his eye. He looked farther left, and his heart stopped.The Hummer was parked at the top of that opposite slope, parallel to the edge; visible to Hutch were its front grille and right side.
The husky cameraman knelt at the front bumper, filming into the river valley, filming David. Behind him stood the black man the boy had called Bad. He appeared to be dancing in place, gyrating his hips and shaking invisible maracas. Declan was leaning as far sideways in the safari chair as its harness would allow. His head was beyond the side of the bed. The smirk Hutch had witnessed earlier had been replaced by concentration and calculation. He was holding the device he had fiddled with before the explosion that had almost taken out Hutch behind the bush.
“No,” Hutch said under his breath.Then a loud scream: “No!” He waved his arms and yelled again.
Declan spotted him. Now a grin stretched his lips. He returned his attention to the device and to David.
“David!” Hutch yelled and leaped off the edge. His feet hit the gravelly slope. He slipped, landed on his back, started sliding. He gained his feet and continued his graceless jaunt down. Sand and gravel slid out from under his boots in little avalanches. Again he yelled to David, who was oblivious to the danger above him and to Hutch's warnings.
The iPod,
Hutch thought, cursing it.
Running-sliding-tumbling, Hutch continued to yell.
Finally David noticed him. He smiled and waved.
“Run, David, run!”
David tugged an earbud out of his ear. “What?”
“Run!”
At the Hummer, Declan had lost his smile. He was holding the device up and looking between it and David intently.
“Don't!” Hutch yelled. “Don'tâ”
W
hoosh
-
crack
. David exploded.
Water and sand and gravel flew up. Hutch covered his eyes with his arm. He slid farther down the embankment. Pebbles pelted him. Hot air washed over him, carrying the scent of scorched earth and ozone.
The dust and smoke settled, and there was David. He was intact, half in, half out of the river. His legs and most of his torso were on the stony bank, as though he'd lain down to quench his thirst. He was lifting himself with one arm from the river, stunned, bleeding.
“David!” Hutch leaped farther down the slope, almost there. He stopped.
Declan was staring at that device, down at the injured man. He was not finished here.
“Stop, no!” Hutch yelled.
Another explosion. Water geysered up. False rain sprayed up, downâalong with bits of rock and sand and what else Hutch didn't want to know. Squinting through mist, steam, smoke, he saw the river rushing to fill the void the explosion had left.The swirling waters were opaque with mud and a rich scarlet.The boulder on which David had lain was scorched and cracked. Hutch glared up at Declan. In his heart, white-hot hate wrestled with shock and loss.
A camera had grown the body of a man and was kneeling, watching.
Hutch's stomach rolled.This was beyond murder, beyond depravity. It felt as wrong as ritual human sacrifice.
He recognized a pattern to Declan's movements, to the way he fiddled with the device, to his facial expressions. He was still not finished here.
Hutch was next.
He reached behind him to unsling his bow. As he did, he glanced up to see Terry frantically rummaging through the rucksack. Phil was not visible, but his cries of anguish and bewilderment poured down from over the edge. Hutch swung back to face Declan, plucking an arrow from the bow's quiver. He nocked it, knowing the Hummer was too far, the angle too impossible for an arrow to hit its mark. Still, he would not die without at least trying to stop his killer. If he was to join David, he wanted his last vision to be of an arrow sailing at the man who sent him there.
He took a bead on Declan's head as the man's eyes snapped from him to whatever he held. He plucked the bowstring. The arrow sailed straight toward Declan. Then it dropped, thunking into the slope. It kicked up a puff of dust and loosened a trickle of gravel. The mancamera twisted to catch the arrow's pathetic landing. After a moment, it turned its attention back to Hutch.
Declan had paused to watch. Now he smiled and returned to his work.
A shot rang out, then another and another. The window of the Hummer's rear passenger door shattered. Briefly, the startled face of the girl appeared in the opening before dropping out of sight.
Declan's head snapped up. Hutch followed his gaze to the top of his own slopeâto Terry, who held a pistol in two hands. He was screaming and pulling the trigger as fast as he could.
At the Hummer, Declan pounded his palm on the roof. Bad ran around to the driver's side. The man-camera suddenly morphed into a man with a camera at the end of his arm. He disappeared through the passenger door.
Two bullets plunked into the vehicle's metal, both on the side of the bed. Declan was rocking back and forth in the chair, secured by the harness, yelling, “Go, go, go!” In a flash, the Hummer was gone.
Shots continued to ring out.
Hutch wondered if the fleeing Hummer was still in Terry's sight. He looked up. The gun fired.
Terry, in his rage and enthusiasm, stepped off the edge. The gun went off and flew out of his hands. He tumbled and tumbled. Finally his hands flailed out, slowing his descent. On his back, head downslope, arms out in a posture of crucifixion, Terry slid, pushing sand and gravel ahead of him. A deep groove trailed behind. When he stopped, he didn't move. He appeared dead.
“Terry!” Hutch called. He slung his bow. He dug and crawled up the unstable slope to his friend.
Terry opened his eyes. “David,” he said, slow, sad.
“I know,” Hutch said, then added, “You saved my life.”
Terry smiled weakly. He shrugged and slid a foot before Hutch stopped him. “Least I could do,”Terry said.
Hutch stood. He pulled the other man up by his jacket and kept holding him until his feet found a way to maneuver on earth that was as unearthlike as quicksand.Together they trudged up the slope.The climb required more steps than the distance seemed to call for because of the slope's insistence on bringing them down one step for every two they took. Hutch broke off from the two-man team they had formed to retrieve the pistol. He rotated it in his hands. It was a Colt 911 semiautomatic. The slide had locked in the open position, meaning it had spent every round.
When he and Terry reached the top, they collapsed in exhaustion. Down the short embankment on the other side, Phil sobbed.They were great racking cries no man should ever hear, let alone produce. Hutch felt that Phil was expressing grief for all of them. Hutch himself was numb. He ached for David and knew that a time would come when he would express it as thoroughly as Phil. But that time was not now.
He sat up, and Terry joined him. Hutch handed him the gun. “Where did you get that?”
“Snuck it in.”
“You brought it into the country?” He knew he had. Except for Terry's clandestine diversion to the tobacco store in La Ronge, when the rest of them thought he'd hit the bathroom, the four had been together since leaving Denver. “You know how serious Canada takes its gun laws?”