The Moose Jaw

Read The Moose Jaw Online

Authors: Mike Delany

Tags: #Mystery, #Adventure, #Thriller

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THE MOOSE JAW

By Mike Delany

Table of Contents:

The Rainbow Lodge murders

I had returned from England in early June

I spent the night at the Susitna Lodge

Calvin’s Hangar is not, as the name implies, a hangar.

The next week was spent in spurious bouts of shopping, packing and planning.

Hard Case, of course, wasn’t actually his name.

“You know,” he said speculatively, “I flew over an old burn about a half-mile upstream of the landing strip, on the other side of the creek.

As an engineer, the construction of the cabin was to be the high point of my summer.

The following day, Saturday, Haywood suggested we get a start on the repairs to the cache.

We were both wearing our side arms.

The only thing I lacked was running water.

Every other day, more or less, I’d take along the shotgun and pot a ptarmigan or spruce hen for dinner.

Perhaps it was this loneliness that accounted for my occasional feeling that someone else was near.

Then of course, there were the bears.

On the 10th of July, the first wave of Chinook came up the creek.

“Damn it!” he roared. “Must have got the mix wrong.

We’d already said our goodbyes, and he was running late.

The bears came and went with the salmon

The days grew shorter as autumn settled on the Moose Jaw country.

“O.K., Yega,” I said aloud.

As I sat there, that first night in September

The moose surprised me.

He was truly enormous, perhaps six foot-seven or eight

Finally I decided they’d probably raped her

Her voice was soft and cultured

I told her it was Wednesday, Sept. 5th, and I was Gus O’Neill

Morgan didn’t come around again until evening.

I circled the cabin three times

There’s a booby trap you can make

“I think I know how I got in the river.”

The bacon had just begun sizzling in the pan

What could I do? After all, I am a gentleman

“Goose grease?” She looked doubtful,

She talked for an hour.

I had to admire Jason’s taste in fishing buddies.

She laughed a throaty laugh and kissed me on the lips.

“What makes them special?” I asked, sipping my coffee.

She smiled, “I play a fair game of chess,” she said.

I’d located the campsite first.

It was dusk by the time I found my way to Deadman Creek.

I didn’t see the channel coming.

“When the weather clears, I’ll go back up there.

There was no lovemaking that night.

I popped open the lid, took out one of the flies

The screams came from the direction of the lodge. They sliced through the fog and transfixed my soul like a spear of ice. My blood froze in my veins and the hairs bristled on my scalp. My pipe dropped out of my mouth and clattered in the bottom of the canoe. The shrieks grew wilder and more terrible and then abruptly stopped. The fog and the night now vibrated with terror and agony and silence.

I worked the pump on my shotgun and stepped closer.

“No.” She said, “When he comes, I’ll depart alone.”

I filled him in about Morgan as we unloaded.

When we got back to the cabin Morgan was not inside.

“We ate dinner together there last night!”

“She was here,” I insisted.

“And you still believe she was real

“It was all in my mind, wasn’t it?”

When I came to, I was laying on my bed in the cabin

By now I was fully awake and getting very hungry.

Haywood showed up at eight the next morning.

He’d conscripted Hard Case to fly in with him

‘Here we go again,’ I thought. “No evidence?”

He was a good cop. Maybe even a great cop.

I told him she was tall, close to six feet, slender and well sculpted.

“Speak of the devil,” he said.

“Strange, gentlemen, very strange indeed.”

“Bismuth,” he said pensively.

Then, the first week of moose season in 1959, a couple

“Long about the same time, we had another unsolved case.

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