Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 8, No. 6, May 1961

The marshal’s face darkened but he took the correction in his stride. A townsman had a lot of things to learn about the bush. He sucked a deep lungful of air and got resignedly to his feet. “All right, drag me up where we can start the whole mountain land-sliding,” Waring grumbled. “It’s a nice fast way of getting down, at least!”

Cluny grinned quietly and led off in a catlike climb. He figured they’d hit the promontory a few minutes before or after the sun swung behind the mountains in its long, almost horizontal traverse around three quadrants of the horizon. They reached the promontory and sprawled out, the marshal gasping, just as shadow began to wash down the gleaming whiteness between the mountains.

A sudden and startling transformation swept the ice. What had looked serene and smooth and gentle as a lovely woman’s shoulder was abruptly cold blue-grey, upheaved, cracked, splotched and gouged. The incredibly blue lakes on the surface turned a cold zinc grey, like the thundering rivers that squeezed out of the ice at breakup. Pressure ridges crowded up in vicious welts. Crevasses yawned like hideous drunken mouths.

“Kee-ristmas!” Waring shivered. “Looking at that long enough could drive any man berserk!”

“Lot of country here for a man to pick a sensible place to live,” Cluny noted. “Not even the animals live beside a glacier. Only the Grizzlies and the goats. I figure he was berserk when he moved over yonder. Berserk and half-grizzly himself to start with.”

“What’s so different about a grizzly, except its size?” Waring asked.

Clung spat a brown gob of tobacco into space and watched it shredded and separated by the updrafts. “Well, for one thing, the grizzly is the only bear except a polar bear that will attack a man for no reason. And a polar bear has pretty good reason, come to think of it. He wants dinner. But a grizzly don’t want anything, just something to chew on awhile and then to hide.”

“They’ll hide a man’s body?”

“Yessirree, and they won’t forget where it is, marshal. If a pack of wolves gets to nosing around, old Mr. Grizzly will go dig up that body just to move it. He’s just that ornery.”

He unslung his telescopic rifle and aimed on the grey slab of Grizzly Bill’s lake, pulling down until he caught the side of the far glacier in his ’scope. There was a rim to the ice along Grizzly’s shelf, an overlap that made a bridge from the rotten reddish shale that formed the flats out onto the surface. It was one of the few places where the glacier was not up-heaved along the edges, or else sheered off in a rough faced, precipitous wall.

He lowered the gun a fraction more, bringing his sights out onto the glacier, coursing the way a hunter does when he follows a deer bounding through the bush. He steadied with a small breath of satisfaction. His breath made smoke in the air now that shadow had swept over them.

He watched for so long a time that the marshal grew chilled. “What in hell you looking at?” he demanded impatiently.

“Crevasse area,” Cluny said laconically. He handed the marshal the rifle. “Bead on the lake and then draw in just above that ice-bridge from the shelf.”

The marshal beaded and saw nothing but a lot of crevasses that made him think of a Dali painting. The ’scope formed a round picture, laid off in squares and quartered by the cross hairs. The picture was utterly motionless and utterly unchanging, except for the slow thickening of shadowtone. Then something happened in the picture.

The marshal thought he must have flinched and then knew that he had not even quivered. He had a boulder landmark at the edge of the ’scope, and it had not moved an iota. But something had happened, some fast movement, like the clicking of a camera shutter.

He scowled at Tim Cluny. “All right. I’m your sucker. What happened?”

“A crevasse closed,” Cluny said.

The marshal twisted onto his backside, very conscious that a malevolent gravity was seeking to roll him into space. “So, crevasses open and close all the time in August.”

“Only some of ’em,” Cluny said. “Some take their time about it, others open and close in a flash. You can set your watch on some, and others are more skittish than a woman.”

“You think he tossed her down a crevasse?”

“He could have. A ‘breather’ — one that opens and closes — would be the best hiding place he had at hand. If he did it in winter or spring, she’d have covered with drift and you wouldn’t have seen a sign of her from the ’copter. By now, all that draft is melted away. At least from the edge of the crevasse, you could see her.”

“Good lord, there are hundreds of those cracks we’d have to nose out! Not to mention the risk of a stakeout with the ice opening and slamming closed right under you.”

“Oh, I don’t figure we’d have to take much risk,” Cluny drawled.

“You expect me to bring out the ’copter again, with what that costs?”

“Neu-u-u-u-u,” Cluny muttered. “But it might not hurt none to tell Grizzly that we aim to. Truth is, I figure he’ll go bring that corpse right to us.”