Not that I was in danger of blowing myself up like a bullfrog about what I had done. It had been a combination of skill and luck and was probably unrepeatable. I don’t go for this bunk about ‘His arm was strong because his cause was just.’ In my experience the bad guys of this world usually have the strongest arms—look at Hitler, for instance. But Napoleon did say that the moral is to the physical as three is to one, and he was talking out of hard experience. If you can take the other guys by surprise, get them off balance and split them up, then you can get away with an awful lot.
I put away the glasses and looked at the shotgun, then broke it open to see what would have happened to Novak’s belly if I’d pulled the trigger. My blood ran cold when I withdrew the cartridges—these were worse than buckshot. A heavy buckshot load in a 12-gauge carries nine pellets which don’t spread too much at short range, but these cartridges held rifled slugs—one to a cartridge.
Some hunting authorities don’t allow deer-hunting with rifles, especially in the States, so the arms manufacturers came up with this solution for the shotgunner. You take a slug of soft lead nearly three-quarters of an inch in diameter to fit a 12-gauge barrel and grooved to give it spin in the smooth bore. The damn’ thing weighs an ounce and enough powder is packed behind it to give it a muzzle velocity of 1600 feet per second. When a thing like that hits flesh
it blows a hole out the other side big enough to put both your fists into. If I had twitched the trigger down at the marsh Novak’s belly would have been spattered all over the Kinoxi Valley. No wonder he had dropped his rifle.
I looked at the slug cartridge with distaste and hunted through my booty until I found some small buckshot to reload the shotgun. Fired at not too close a range that would discourage a man without killing him, which was what I wanted. No matter what the other guys did, I had no intention of looking at a noose in a rope one dark morning.
I looked out at the empty landscape, then withdrew to head up valley.
For two days I dodged about the North Kinoxi Valley. Howard Matterson must have talked to his boys, putting some stuffing back into them, because they came looking for me again, but never, I noticed, in teams of less than six. I played tag with them for those two days, always edging over to the east when I could. They never caught sight of me, not even once, because while one man can move quietly, six men moving in a bunch make more than six times the racket. And they took care to move in a bunch. Novak must have told them exactly what happened and they were warned about splitting up.
I made half a dozen deadfalls during those two days but only one was sprung. Still, that resulted in a broken arm for someone, who was taken out by helicopter. Once I heard a barrage of shots from a little ravine I had just left and wondered what was happening. If you get a lot of men wandering about the woods armed with guns some fool is going to pull the trigger at the wrong time, but that’s no excuse for the rest of them loosing off. I discovered afterwards that
someone had to be taken out with a gunshot wound—someone had shot at him in error, he had shot back and the rest of the boys had let fly. Too bad for him.
The looted food supply was running out and I had to replenish. It was dangerous to go back to the logging camp—Matterson would have it sealed off tight—so I was heading east to Clare’s cabin. I knew I could stock up there and I hoped to find Clare. I had to get news to Gibbons about what Howard was doing; he wouldn’t look kindly on a manhunt in his territory and he’d move in fast. In any case, I wanted to find out what had happened to Clare.
Twice I made a break to the east, only to find a gang of Matterson’s loggers in the way so that I had to fade back and try to circle them. The third time I was lucky and when I got to the cabin I was very tired but not too tired to approach with extreme caution. I had not had much sleep in the last forty-eight hours, mostly restricting myself to catnapping an hour at a time. That’s when the loner comes off worst: he’s always under pressure while the other guys can take it easy.
It was dusk when I came to the cabin and I lay on the hillside looking down at it for some time. Everything seemed to be quiet and I noted with disappointment that there were no lights in the big cabin, so evidently Clare was absent. Still, it seemed old Waystrand was around because a bright and welcome gleam shone from his place.
I came in to the cabin on a spiral, checking carefully, and was not too stupid to look through the window of Waystrand’s cabin to make sure he was alone. He was sitting before the stove, the air about his head blue with pipesmoke, so I went round to the door and tried to walk in. To my surprise it was locked, something very unusual.
Waystrand’s voice rumbled, ‘Who’s that?’
‘Boyd.’
I heard his footsteps on the wooden floor as he came to the door. ‘Who did you say?’
‘Bob Boyd. Open up, Matthew.’
The door opened a crack after bolts were drawn and a light shone on me. Then he flung the door wide open. ‘Come in. Come in, quick.’
I stumbled over the threshold and he slammed the door behind me and shot the bolts. I turned to see him replace a shotgun on the rack on the wall. ‘Have they been bothering you, too, Matthew?’
He swung round and I saw his face. He had a shiner—the ripest black eye I’ve ever seen—and his face was cut about. ‘Yeah,’ he said heavily. ‘I’ve been bothered. What the hell’s going on, Boyd?’
I said, ‘Howard Matterson’s gone wild and he’s after my blood. He’s got his boys worked up, too—told them I hammered the daylights out of old Bull.’
‘Did you?’
I stared at him. ‘What would I want to hit an old man for? Right now I want to massacre Howard, but that’s different. Old Bull had a heart-attack—I saw it and McDougall saw it. So did Howard, but he’s lying about it.’
Matthew nodded. ‘I believe you.’
I said, ‘Who gave you the shiner, Matthew?’
He looked down at the floor. ‘I had a fight with my own son,’ he said. His hands curled up into fists. ‘He whipped me—I always thought I could handle him, but he whipped me.’
I said, ‘I’ll take care of Jimmy, Mr Waystrand. He’s second on my list. What happened?’
‘He came up here with Howard three days ago,’ said Matthew. ‘In that ‘copter. Wanted to know if you were around. I told him I hadn’t seen you, and Howard said that if I did I was to let him know. Then Howard said he wanted to search Miss Trinavant’s cabin, and I said he couldn’t do that. He said that maybe you were hiding out in there, so I asked him if he was calling me a liar.’ Matthew shrugged.
‘One thing led to another and my boy hit me—and there was a fight.’
He raised his head. ‘He whipped me, Mr Boyd, but they didn’t get into the cabin. I came right in here and took that shotgun and told them to get the hell off the place.’
I watched him sink dejectedly into the chair before the stove and felt very sorry for him. ‘Did they go without any more trouble?’
He nodded. ‘Not much trouble. I thought at one time I’d have to shoot Jimmy. I’d have pulled the trigger, too, and he knew it.’ He looked up with grief in his eyes. ‘He’s gone real bad. I knew it was happening but I never thought the time would come when I’d be ready to shoot my own son.’
‘I feel sorry about that,’ I said. ‘Did Howard cause any ructions?’
‘No,’ said Matthew with contempt. ‘He just stood back and laughed like a hyena while the fight was going on—but he stopped laughing when I pointed the shotgun at his gut.’
That sounded like Howard. I took off my pack and dumped it on the floor. ‘Seen anything of Cl—Miss Trinavant?’
‘Not seen her for a week,’ he said.
I sighed and sat down. Clare hadn’t been back to her cabin since this whole thing started and I wondered where she was and what she was doing.
Matthew looked at me in concern. ‘You look beat,’ he said. ‘I’ve been going on about my own troubles, but you sure got more.’
I said, ‘I’ve been on the run for six days. These woods are crawling with guys hoping for a chance to beat my brains in. If you want to earn a thousand dollars, Matthew, all you have to do is to turn me in to Howard.’
He grunted. ‘What would I do with a thousand bucks? You hungry?’
I smiled faintly. ‘I couldn’t eat more than three moose—my appetite’s given out on me.’
‘I got a stew that just needs heating up. Won’t be more’n fifteen minutes. Why don’t you get cleaned up.’ He took some keys looped on a string from a box, and tossed them to me. ‘Those will open the big cabin. Go get yourself a bath.’
I tossed the keys in my hand. ‘You wouldn’t let Howard have these.’
‘That’s different,’ he said. ‘He ain’t a friend of Miss Trinavant.’
I had a hot bath and shaved off a week’s growth of beard and then looked and felt more human. When I got back to Matthew’s cabin he had a steaming plate of stew waiting for me which I got on the outside of at top speed and then asked for more. He smiled and said, ‘Outdoor life agrees with you.’
‘Not this kind of life,’ I said. I reached over to my coat and took from a pocket one of the rifled slug cartridges which I laid on the table. ‘They’re loaded for bear, Matthew.’
He picked up the cartridge and, for the first and last time in my experience, he swore profusely, ‘Good Christ in heaven!’ he said. ‘The goddam sons of bitches—I wouldn’t use one of those on a deer.’ He looked up. ‘Old Bull must have died.’
I hadn’t thought of that and felt a chill. ‘I hope not,’ I said sincerely. ‘I’ve been hoping he recovers. He’s the only man who can get me out of this hole. He can stand up and tell those loggers that I didn’t hammer him—that he had a heart-attack. He can get Howard off my back.’
‘Isn’t it funny,’ said Matthew in a very unfunny and sad voice, ‘I’ve never liked Bull but he and I have a lot in common. Both our boys have gone bad.’
I said nothing to that; there wasn’t much I could say. I finished eating and had some coffee and felt a lot better after this first hot meal I’d had in days. Matthew said,
‘There’s a bed for you all made up. You can sleep well tonight.’ He stood up and took down the shotgun. ‘I’ll have a look around—we don’t want your sleep disturbed.’
I turned in to a soft bed and was asleep almost before my head hit the pillow and I slept right through until daybreak and only woke with the sun shining into my eyes. I got up and dressed then went into the main room. There was no sign of Matthew, but there was coffee steaming on the stove and a frypan already laid out with eggs and bacon near by waiting to be fried.
I had a cup of coffee and began to fry up half a dozen eggs. I had just got them ready when I heard someone running outside. I jumped to the window, one hand grabbing the shotgun, and saw Matthew making good time towards the cabin. He crashed open the door and said breathlessly, ‘A lot of guys…heading for here…not more’n ten minutes…behind me.’
I took my coat, put it on, and hoisted my pack which felt heavy. ‘I put some grub in your pack,’ said Matthew. ‘Sorry it’s all I could do.’
I said quickly, ‘You can do something else. Get into Fort Farrell, get hold of Gibbons and tell him what’s going on up here. And see if you can find out what’s happened to McDougall and Clare. Will you do that?’
‘I’ll be on my way as soon as I can,’ he said. ‘But you’d better get out of here. Those boys were coming fast.’
I stepped out of the cabin and made for the trees, slanting my way up the hill to the place from which I had looked down the previous night. When I got there I unslung the glasses and looked down at the cabin.
There were at least six of them that I could see when I sorted out their comings and goings. They were walking in and out of Matthew’s cabin as though they owned the place and had broken into Clare’s cabin. I presumed they were searching it. I wondered how they had known I was there
and concluded that they must have had a watcher staked out, and it was the lights in Clare’s cabin when I had a bath that had been the tip-off.
I cursed myself for that piece of stupidity but it was too late for recriminations. When a man gets hungry and tired he begins to slip up like that, to make silly little mistakes he wouldn’t make normally. It’s by errors like that that a hunted man is usually nailed down, and I thought I’d better watch it in future.
I bit my lips as I focused the glasses on a man delving into the engine of Matthew’s pick-up truck. He rooted around under the hood and pulled out a handful of spaghetti—most of the electrical wiring, judging by how much of it there was.
Matthew wouldn’t be going to Fort Farrell—or anywhere else—for quite a while.
The weather turned nasty. Clouds lowered overhead and it rained a lot, and then the clouds came right down to ground level and I walked in a mist. It was good and bad. The poor visibility meant that I couldn’t be spotted as easily and the low clouds put that damned helicopter out of action. Twice it had spotted me and put the hounds on my trail, but now it was useless. On the other hand, I was wet all the time and daren’t stop to light a fire and dry out. Living constantly in wet clothes, my skin started to whiten and wrinkle and it chafed where rubbed by folds of my shirt and pants. I also developed a bad cold, and a sneeze at the wrong time could be dangerous.
Howard’s staffwork had improved. He had me pinned down in a very small area, not more than three square miles, and had cordoned it off tightly. Now he was tightening the noose inexorably. God knows how many men he was using, but there were too many for me to handle. Three times I tried to bust out, using the mist as cover, and three times I failed. The boys weren’t afraid to use their shotguns, either, and it was only by chance that I wasn’t filled full of holes on my last attempt. As it was, I had heard the whistle of buckshot around me, and one slug grazed me in the thigh. I ducked out of there fast and retreated to a hidey-hole where I slapped a Band-Aid on the wound.
The muscle in my leg was a bit stiff but it didn’t slow me down much.
I was wet and cold and miserable, to say nothing of being hungry and tired, and I wondered if I’d come to the end of my tether. It wouldn’t have taken much for me to have lain down and slept right on the spot and let them come and find me. But I knew what would happen if I did. I had no particular ambition to go through life crippled even if Howard let it go at that, so I dragged myself wearily to my feet and set off on the move again, prowling through the mist to find a way out of this contracting circle.
I nearly stumbled over the bear. It growled and reared up, towering a good eight feet, waving its forelegs with those cruel claws and showing its teeth. I retreated to a fair distance and considered it thoughtfully.
There’s more nonsense talked about the grizzly than any other animal, barring the wolf. Grown men will look you straight in the eye and tell you of the hair-raising experiences they’ve had with grizzlies; how a grizzly will charge a man on sight, how they can outrun a horse, tear down a tree and create hell generally with no provocation. The truth is that a grizzly is like any other animal and has more sense than to tangle with a man without good reason. True, they’re apt to be bad-tempered in the spring when they’ve just come out of hibernation, but a lot of people are like that when they’ve just got out of bed.
And they’re hungry in the spring, too. The fat has gone from them and their hide hangs loose and they want to be left alone to eat in peace, just like most of us, I guess. And the females have their young in the spring and are touchy about interference, and quite justifiably so in my opinion. Most of the tall tales about grizzlies have been spun around camp fires to impress a tenderfoot or tourist and even more have been poured out of a bottle of rye whiskey.
Now it was high summer—as high as summer gets in British Columbia—and this grizzly was fat and contented. He dropped back on to four legs and continued to do what he had been doing before I interrupted him—grubbing up a juicy root. He kept a wary eye on me, though, and growled once or twice to show he wasn’t too scared of me.
I stepped back behind a tree so as not to cause him too much alarm while I figured out what to do about him. I could just go away, of course, but I had a better idea than that because the thought had occurred to me that an 800-pound bear could be a powerful ally if I could recruit him. There are not many men who will face a charging grizzly.
The nearest of Matterson’s men were not more than a half-mile from this spot, as I knew to my cost, and were closing in slowly. The natural tendency of the bear would be to move away as they approached. I already knew they made a lot of noise when moving and the bear would soon hear them. The only reason he hadn’t heard me was that I’d developed a trick of ghosting along quietly—it’s one of the things you learn in a situation like I was in; you learn it or you’re dead.
What I had to do was to make the bear ignore his natural inclination. Instead of moving away, he had to move towards the oncoming men, and how in hell could I make him do that? You don’t shoo away a grizzly like you do a cow, and I had to come up with an answer fast.
After a moment’s thought I took some shotgun shells from my pocket and began to dissect them with my hunting knife, throwing away the slugs but keeping the powder charges. In a little while I had a heap of powder grains wrapped up in a glove to keep them dry. I bent down to dig into the carpet of pine needles with the knife; pine needles have a felting effect when they get matted and shed water like the feathers on a duck, and I didn’t have to dig very far to find dry, flammable material.
All the time I kept my eye on brother bear, who was chomping contentedly on his roots while keeping an eye on me. He wasn’t going to bother me if I didn’t bother him—at least that was the theory I had, although I coppered my bet by choosing an easily climbable tree within sprinting distance. From one of the side pockets of the pack I extracted the folded Government geological map of the area and a notebook I kept in there. I tore up the map into small sheets and ripped pages from the book, crumpling them into spills.
I built a fire on that spot, laying down the paper spills, lacing them liberally with gunpowder and covering the lot with dry pine needles. From the fire I led a short trail of gunpowder for easy ignition, and right in the centre I embedded three shotgun shells.
After listening for a moment and hearing nothing, I circled around the bear about one-sixth of a circle, and built another fire in the same way—and yet another on the other side. He reared and growled when he saw me moving about but subsided when he saw I wasn’t coming any closer. Any animal has its ‘safe’ distance carefully measured out and takes action only if it feels its immediate territory infringed on. The action will then depend on the animal: a deer will run for it—a grizzly will attack.
The fires laid, I waited for Matterson’s boys to make the next move, and the bear would give me warning when that was coming since he was between us. I just stood cradling the shotgun in my arms and waited patiently, never taking my eyes off the grizzly.
I didn’t hear a thing—but he did. He stirred and turned his head, waving it from side to side like a cobra about to strike. He made snuffling noises, sniffing the wind, and suddenly he growled softly and turned away from me, looking in the other direction. I thanked the years of experience that had taught me how to keep matches dry by filling a full matchbox with melted candle wax so that the matches were
embedded in a block of paraffin wax. I ripped three matches free from the block and got them ready to strike.
The bear was backing slowly towards me and away from whatever was coming towards him. He looked back at me uneasily, feeling he was trapped, and whenever a grizzly feels like that the best place to be is somewhere else. I stooped and struck the match and dropped it on the powder trail, which fizzed and flashed into fire. Then I ran like hell to the other fire, shooting into the air as I went.
The bear had lumbered into action as I broke cover and was covering the ground fast heading straight towards me, but the bang of the shotgun gave him pause and he skidded to a halt uncertainly. From behind the bear I heard an excited shout. Someone else had also heard the shot.
The bear turned his head uncertainly and started to move again, but just then one of the shotgun shells in the first fire exploded, just as I ignited the second fire. He didn’t like that at all and turned away growling all the time, as I sprinted to the third fire and dropped a match on it.
Bruin didn’t know what the hell to do! There was trouble—man trouble—coming up on one side and loud unnerving noises on the other. There were a couple more shouts from the other side of the bear and that almost decided him, but just then all hell broke loose. Two more shells exploded one after the other and half a second later it sounded as though a war had broken out.
The grizzly’s nerve broke and he turned and bolted in the opposite direction. I added to the fun by stinging his rump with a charge of buckshot and then began to run, following close in his rear. He charged among the trees like a demon out of hell—nearly half a ton of frightful, ravening ferocity. Actually, he was not so much frightful as frightened, but it’s then that the grizzly is at his most dangerous.
I saw three men looking up the slope, aghast at what was coming down on them. I suppose to them it was all teeth
and claws and twice as large as life—and another tale would be told in a bar-room if they lived to tell it. They broke and scattered, but one was a little late and the bear gave him a flick in passing. The man screamed as he was slammed into the ground but luckily for him the bear didn’t stop his rush to maul him.
I went past at a dead run, my boots skidding on the slippery ground. The bear was moving much faster than I could and was out-distancing me fast. From ahead there was another shout and a couple of shots and I spun round a tree to find a guy waving a shotgun at the departing bear. He turned and saw me coming down at him fast and took a sudden snapshot at me. The hammer of his shotgun fell on an empty chamber and by then I was on to him. I took him in the chest with my shoulder and the impact knocked the feet from under him and he went sprawling, aided by a clout behind the ear I gave him as I went on my way. I had learned something from that bear.
I didn’t stop running for fifteen minutes, not until I was sure no one was chasing me. I reckoned they were too busy looking after their casualty—when a bear clouts you in passing there are steel-like claws in his fist. I saw my friend bounding down the hillside and became conscious that the mist was lifting. He slowed up and slowly ambled to a stop, looking behind him. I waved and took another direction because that was one bear I wouldn’t like to meet for the next couple of days.
Almost as I had stumbled on the bear I came across the man staring into the haze and wondering what all the noise was about. I had no time for evasive action so I tackled him head on, first ramming the muzzle of the gun into his belly. By the time he had recovered from that I had my hunting knife at his throat.
He eased his head back to an unnatural angle trying to get away from the sharp point and a drool of spittle ran
down from one corner of his mouth. I said, ‘Don’t make a noise—you’ll only get hurt.’
He nodded, then stopped as the knife pricked his Adam’s apple. I said gently, ‘Why are you hunting me?’
He gurgled, but didn’t say a thing. I said again, ‘Why are you hunting me? I want an answer. A truthful answer.’
It was forced out of him. ‘You beat up old Bull Matterson. That was a lousy thing to do.’
‘Who said I beat up the old man?’
‘Howard was there—he says so. So does Jimmy Waystrand.’
‘What does Waystrand know about it? He wasn’t there.’
‘He reckons he was and Howard doesn’t say he wasn’t.’
‘They’re both liars,’ I said. ‘The old man had a heart-attack. What does he say about it?’
‘He don’t say nothing. He’s sick—real sick.’ Hatred looked at me out of the man’s eyes.’
‘In hospital? Or at home?’
‘He’s at home, so I heard.’ He managed a grin. ‘Mister, you’ve got it coming to you.’
‘Old Matterson had a heart-attack,’ I said patiently. ‘I didn’t lay a finger on him. Would a little matter of a thousand dollars have anything to do with me being chased all over these woods?’
He looked at me with contempt. ‘That don’t matter,’ he said. ‘We just don’t like strangers beating up old men.’
That was probably true. I doubt if these loggers would set out on a manhunt like this on a purely blood-money basis. They weren’t bad guys, just fools who’d been whipped up into a frenzy by Howard’s lies. The thousand dollars was merely icing on the cake. I said, ‘What’s your name?’
‘Charlie Blunt.’
‘Well, Charlie, I wish we could talk this out over a beer, but I regret it’s impossible. Look, if I was such a bad guy as Howard makes out I could have knocked out your people
like ducks at a shooting-gallery. People have been shooting at me but I haven’t shot back. Does that make sense to you?’
A frown wrinkled his face and I could see he was thinking about it. I said, ‘Take Novak and those other guys—I could have slit their throats quite easily. Come to that, there’s nothing to prevent me from slitting yours right now.’
He tensed and I pricked him with the knife. ‘Take it easy, Charlie; I’m not going to. I wouldn’t hurt a hair of your head. Do you think that makes sense, either?’
He gulped and shook his head hurriedly. ‘Well, think about it,’ I said. ‘Think about it and talk about it to those other guys back there. Tell them I said old Bull had a heart-attack and that Howard Matterson and Jimmy Waystrand have been feeding them a line. Talking about Jimmy, I don’t think much of a guy who’d beat up his own father—do you?’
Blunt’s head made a sideways movement. ‘Well, he did,’ I said. ‘All you have to do to prove I’m telling the truth is to ask Matthew Waystrand. His place isn’t too far from here—not so far that a man couldn’t walk over and get at the truth for once. Talk about that to the other guys, too. Let you and them decide who’s telling the truth in this neck of the woods.’
I eased up on the knife. ‘I’m going to let you go, Charlie. ‘I’m not even going to sap you or tie you up so you won’t set the other guys on my trail again. I’m just going to let you go as you are, and if you want to raise a holler that’s your privilege. But you can tell the other guys this—tell them I’ve had a bellyful of running and not hitting back too hard. Tell them I’m getting into a killing mood. Tell them that the next man I see on my trail is a dead man. I think you’re very lucky, Charlie, that I picked you to take the message—don’t you?’
He lay quiet and didn’t say or do anything. I stood up and looked down at him. I said, ‘The killing starts with you, Charlie, if you try anything.’ I picked up the shotgun and walked away from him without glancing back. I could feel his eyes on my back and it gave me a prickly feeling, not knowing what he was doing. He could be aiming at my back with his gun right at that moment and it took all the will-power I had not to break into a run.