Dead Man’s Fancy Read Free Page B

stalling,” she muttered.
    She shuffled off behind the trees. Her face relaxed as she relieved herself. Men on a search, they just unzipped; they could care less she was standing ten feet away. She’d commented on it once to Harold Little Feather, that time when they were hunting elk in the Badger-Two Medicine. He told her that in uniform she was just one of the guys. “It’s respect. That’s the way I’d look at it.” Then he’d shuffled a few feet away and pissed on the campfire coals. Martha shook her head.
Harold
. She kicked pine needle duff over the lance her urine had cut in the snow and went to check on the horses.
    â€œHey girl. It’ll be light in a jiff now,” she said, coming around the trees and then abruptly stopping. Directly in front of her, a little to the left of the two horses, a bulky shape loomed, blacking out a section of forest. For a second Martha thought it was a moose. But of course it couldn’t be a moose; Petal and Big Mike would have gone crazy. Then she heard the nicker and knew the horse that she’d heard earlier had followed its nose into camp. Martha started talking in a low voice and immediately the horse advanced, extending its neck. Martha rubbed her fist under its eye. It was a gelded quarter horse, a bay with a cropped mane and irregular forehead star.
    â€œWhere did you come from?”
    She switched on the low beam of her headlamp and ran it across the saddle. A braided lead rope was neatly coiled and secured to a D-ring ahead of the left fender, indicating the rider probably hadn’t dismounted before separating from the horse.
Thrown?
Martha added a stop to the high line so the quarter horse couldn’t trample into Petal or Big Mike, clipped the lead to the halter and considered the sky. She went back to the shelter and buckled on her duty belt. She thought of waking Walt, but what was the point? He couldn’t go where she was going. And she
was
going, for the moon was showing only because it had found a hole in the clouds. It could snow again at any time, and the tracks the horse had left would be erased.
    In the skiff, the impressions of the horseshoes were sharp sided. Martha backtracked them down to the creek, across and up and then a quarter mile farther to the north, down and across another creek. From there she backtracked the horse steadily upslope, her lungs straining and her legs quaking from the buildup of lactic acid. She had reached an open park some thousand feet or so below the escarpment. Snow was deeper here, the tracks pockmarks without definition. It had still been snowing when the horse reached this point, but had quit shortly after it entered the tree belt. Martha’s smile was grim, for she understood that the window of opportunity to discover why and where the horse had separated from it rider was closing. She was now deciphering the trail of a horse whose tracks had been filling in as soon as they were made, and the higher she climbed, the more snow would have accumulated. She could be left knowing the end of the story without its beginning.
    Martha turned to look at the roll of forest through which she’d been climbing. The camp was marked by smoke that was visible as a ghostlike smudge over the trees. No stars, just the hazy half aureole of moon and the mountain deathly still in the grip of night. She shuddered and placed two fingers to the side of her throat, searching for her pulse. Strong and steady.
    â€œGet a grip, Martha,” she said out loud. “You’re the sheriff of Hyalite County.”
    When she picked up the track, her professional mask was firmly in place. But there was no longer a trail to follow. The tracks had disappeared. She cast upward and found where the horse’s hooves had cut furrows, kicking up dirt. When a horse is at full gallop, there is an interval in its gait when all four hooves are in the air, resulting in gaps in its stride. Martha understood this