The Boreal Owl Murder (19 page)

So sue me.

“I didn’t know you knew Montgomery,” I said to him.

“My mistake,” Ellis said. “The woman is a disaster.”

“How so?” Luce asked.

Ellis gave her another smile.

Scum.

“Let me count the ways,” he said. “She’s manipulative, insincere, self-serving and a glutton for media attention.”

“That’s her job,” I said. “She’s a lobbyist.”

“That’s the problem,” he replied.

“Can I get you anything else?”

The waitress was back. We ordered a round of coffee.

“Why is that a problem?”

“Because she doesn’t care about the Boreals or the study or anything that’s really at stake, here,” Ellis said. “She’s running S.O.B. because she gets paid to run it. She gets paid to champion the owls. She gets paid to look good on television. Take away her salary, and Ms. Montgomery would be out of here so fast, it’d make your head spin.”

“That’s a pretty cynical assessment,” Luce said.

“It’s the truth. Margaret Montgomery didn’t even live in this state before she was hired on by S.O.B. last year. Andrew told me the owl tours were her idea. He was concerned about bringing people into the owls’ breeding grounds, but she convinced him he needed the exposure to generate more support against the logging initiative. Then, two months ago, she does an about-face, telling him he’s got to forget the tours for this year. Too risky for the owls, she said.”

“Maybe she realized it wasn’t a good idea, after all,” I suggested. “Maybe she’d realized Rahr was right.”

“Or maybe she was feeling the heat from some very generous, well-heeled S.O.B. supporters, who wanted Andrew in control of the study, not her.”

Our coffee arrived. I looked out the big window and wondered if Dr. Phil was one of those very generous, well-heeled S.O.B. supporters. He’d known Rahr a long time, after all, and when it came to personal wealth, I’d witnessed the good doctor’s largesse on repeated occasions over the years. And now, thanks to Montgomery, I also knew that she and Dr. Phil were acquainted with each other. That they were, in fact, business associates. One business associate, I supposed, could certainly have some influence on the other.

Something clicked in my head. I remembered again Rahr’s complaint about sabotage and thinking that Alice’s note-passing might explain it, although his reaction to me seemed a bit over the top for an information leak to one birder. Now, considering what Ellis said, perhaps it wasn’t Alice’s indiscretion at all, but, instead, Montgomery’s insistence that he skip the tours that had fueled his anger and suspicions.

Or was it just too many cooks spoiling the broth?

The Boreal Owl study was Rahr’s baby. It always had been—at least until a year ago, when the circus, as Alice had called it, came to town. Till then, Rahr didn’t have to deal with anyone else when it came to his work with the Boreals. He just did his thing. Even after my short phone call with him, I could definitely see where it would gall him to suddenly have other people telling him how to run his own show.

Of course, he’d had that experience before.

With Ellis.

Luce began laughing at something Ellis said.

“So,” I interrupted. “We should talk about the study. What are you thinking?”

For the next half hour, we talked about the owls. When he finished his pitch, Ellis turned to me.

“Tell me what you think. Shoot.”

Shoot.

Poor word choice, that’s what I wanted to tell him. Especially since I could still almost taste the mud in my mouth from hitting the ground this afternoon to avoid a bullet.

“Shoot” raised a lot of questions.

Like, for instance: was Ellis, by any chance, training for a biathlon earlier today?

But without the skis?

Yet, sitting here now, across from Ellis, I just couldn’t see him taking the shots. Oh, I could imagine it. I knew he was skilled and driven and arrogant enough. But it didn’t fit. He wanted the MOU Boreal study. He wanted it badly. When he’d spoken to Montgomery, he’d practically rubbed her nose in it. It wouldn’t make any sense for him to try to kill the man who could give it to him—namely, me.

I’d promised my MOU colleagues that I’d make a decision about hiring Ellis for the study, and regardless of any lingering suspicions about the nature of his relationship with his former mentor, Ellis was, without a doubt, the man to pick up where Rahr had left off. Since the study was a priority for the board, and letting any more time lapse wouldn’t benefit anyone, especially the owls, I put my reservations aside and decided to give him the job.

I’d leave the question of how badly Ellis had wanted the study, and what lengths he may have gone to secure it, to Knott.

“It’s all yours,” I told him. “I’ll let the board know.”

Ellis smiled. He seemed to relax. He seemed relieved.

At least one of us was.

I, on the other hand, was nowhere near relieved. I was still thinking about “shoot.”

If not Ellis, who?

Who?

I sounded like an owl. For crying out loud.

And now, I had not one, but two mysteries to consider. One: who killed Rahr? Two: who tried to kill me?

I paid the check, and Luce and I got up to leave. Ellis said he’d take a look at the study sites tomorrow and hoped to start collecting data by Sunday. He asked Luce if she’d like to give him a hand, but she declined.

He didn’t ask me.

I didn’t offer, either.

We left Ellis drinking another cup of coffee and walked out to the car. The air was crisp, but not frigid.

“What do you say we try for the owl?” Luce said. “But not where you went today. One of the other places.”

“I say yes.”

I remembered my license plates.

“Let’s take your car, okay?”

About an hour later, we parked on the side of an old logging road deep in the woods northwest of Two Harbors. It was the first place Mike and I had tried last weekend. Since it was the farthest site from where I’d been shot at, I was relatively confident that it would be a safe spot for owling tonight.

That and the fact that we’d taken Luce’s car.

We got our binos from the back seat, dropped them around our necks and started to hike into the forest.

There was an old trail to follow, so it wasn’t rocket science to find our way in. Last Saturday, I had timed our walk to the Boreal Owl site. All we had to do tonight was walk for the same amount of time: about forty minutes. Of course, Luce’s legs are a lot longer than Mike’s, so we covered more ground faster. After just ten minutes of walking, I could hear some Great Horned Owls calling in the distance.

“They’re quite a ways off,” I told Luce.

“Just as well,” she replied. “I’m sure not interested in walking near any Great Horned Owl nests tonight. They can be just so downright aggressive when they’re protecting their breeding grounds.”

“Yeah, I know,” I said. “My uncle Gus has a scar on the top of his scalp where a Great Horned swooped down on him one night because he was hiking right by a nest. Everyone said it was because of his thick bushy hair—that the owl thought it was a big fat rat being offered for a midnight snack.”

“Ow,” Luce commented.

I’d also heard of neighbors’ outdoor cats permanently disappearing at night. Owls are predators and Great Horned Owls are big, strong birds who will take all kinds of prey, including small pets and other owls. If you hear a Great Horned calling close by, you need to be careful; invading their nesting areas is definitely not a good idea.

Just ask my Uncle Gus.

And Great Horned Owls were way more tolerant of humans than Boreal Owls were.

“Speaking of owls calling, a couple years ago, I went owling with a guy who had just gotten a CD of bird calls,” Luce said as we walked along. “He was convinced that finding Screech Owls would be a snap with the CD.”

I do that, too. You take along a CD player when you bird and play the call of the bird you’re looking for and hope it attracts the bird itself, which then flies in closer to you. You keep playing the CD until the bird either flies into view or you hear it calling back. It works like a charm with some birds. Unfortunately, Boreal Owls don’t respond to the recorded call, so I hadn’t bothered to bring my player and CD with me this weekend.

“We hiked into this enormous county park after dark and he played the CD maybe twice, and we heard the owl call back from pretty far away. He played it some more, and the owl got closer. He played it again, and the owl got closer still. Finally, we figured it had to be just around this bend in the woods, and when we snuck up as quiet as could be, sure enough, we found it.

“But it wasn’t a Screech Owl,” Luce added. “It was another birder with the same CD.”

I laughed and told her about the time I had the same experience but with a Yellow-billed Cuckoo. I was on a MOU trip, and we were looking for a Black-billed Cuckoo. There were about eight of us driving in two cars, and somebody in the first car saw a Black-billed Cuckoo fly by. So, the first car pulled over and was followed by the second car; we all piled out and looked through binos for the bird. While we were watching for it, our group leader suddenly hushed everyone. He said he thought he’d just heard a Yellow-billed Cuckoo, which would be a real find for all of us. We were standing on the side of the road next to a wooded area, so we figured we’d have to walk in and try to find the Yellow-billed. Our leader took out his CD and played the Yellow-billed Cuckoo call and after a couple tries, we got a reply. We zigzagged through the woods, playing the CD and moving toward the answering calls until we saw a guy approaching us and realized he was a birder trying to get a Yellow-billed, too.

“So there we were, nine birders standing around looking at each other. I think our trip guide was mortified that he’d led us on a hunt … to another birder.” I put out my hand and touched Luce on the arm. “Stop a minute.”

We both stood still and listened. I focused on the sounds of the night, filtering out the sounds of trees creaking, small animals scampering across dead leaves, an occasional whistle of wind. Although the sense of hearing is especially important for birding at night when you don’t have the benefit of daylight visibility to help locate birds, it’s a necessary talent for every really successful birder. When I was a young birder, my parents always commented on my eyesight. They said I could see birds they couldn’t begin to see and that my skill was a gift and especially suited to birding.

Well, that may be true, but as I got older and became a more experienced birder, I realized that my real gift was my acute hearing. After I memorized all the bird calls in Minnesota—maybe 300 of them—on my CDs, I found I could isolate specific calls from among others. That means when I’m looking for one bird, I can listen for its own call even if the air is filled with the songs of other birds. At the same time, I can pick out the calls of all the other birds singing and name them off. The first time I did that with my dad along on a birding trip, he couldn’t believe it.

“How do you do that?” he asked, stunned, after I listed off about seven birds calling at the same time, their songs layering over each other. I think it was during a warbler weekend, the time in May when all the warblers are migrating back through Minnesota.

“Do what?” I asked him.

“Hear each bird,” he answered. “I can hear them, but I can’t begin to separate their songs. On top of that, you can tell where they are. A minute ago, you said there was a Blue-winged Warbler about a hundred yards up the trail, and sure enough, there it was.”

I shrugged. “I can just do it,” I said. “I know all the songs. And the distance thing, well, that’s just practice. I can tell by the distortion of the sound how far it’s traveled.”

Like I said, experienced birders rely on their hearing to find birds, probably even more than they do on their sight. If I had to break it down, I’d say eighty percent of my birding—actually finding the bird—is by ear.

“What do you hear?” Luce asked me.

“A pair of Great Horned. A Great Gray Owl.”

I was totally still.

“That’s all.”

We started walking again. The night was cold, but it was nothing like it had been just a week before. My breath still frosted when I exhaled, but the cold air didn’t sting the back of my throat every time I inhaled. I was even starting to feel warm underneath my parka as we climbed up and down the trail that wound deeper into the forest.

Finally, after another twenty minutes of hiking, I came to a stop. Luce stood next to me, looking up into the treetops, focusing on branches to see if an owl materialized out of the shadows. Because we were so far from human habitation, there was no light pollution from artificial lights to absorb or scatter the natural light of the moon and stars; the deep patches of snow still on the ground acted almost like mirrors reflecting what natural light there was to further illuminate our surroundings. By now, our eyes were well accustomed to the darkness and given that it was about eleven o’clock at night, we could actually see fairly well, though everything appeared to be in black or varying shades of gray. Through the tops of the bare trees and pines we could see a good portion of the sky and I pointed out the North Star to Luce. It was bright and flanked by other dimmer stars you never see anywhere but out in the wilderness.

“It’s almost like the night sky in the Rincons,” I told Luce. The Rincon Mountains border the Saguaro National Forest east of Tucson in Arizona. Over the years, I’ve birded there a few times, and the desert sky never fails to impress me. Clear and clean with an almost unbounded horizon, I don’t know another place with starrier skies.

Gazing now into the Minnesota night, I almost jumped when I suddenly realized what I was seeing: too much sky. Too much sky for the middle of a thick pine forest.

“I’ll be damned,” I breathed.

“What?” Luce asked, craning her neck to look up in the trees. “What do you see?”

“It’s not what I see, but what I’m not seeing,” I answered her.

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Luce staring at me, her gloved hands on her parka-covered hips. “What in the world are you talking about?”