The Spirit

Jason closed his eyes, beating down the rising tide of nausea. Curtis. Where was Curtis? Jason sat up and searched for his rifle. It lay on the ground.

What else? What else?

The pictures! Curtis had photographed the prints!

Jason relaxed somewhat. The camera was at the camp, tucked away in a backpack. First he had to check the helicopter. He wanted to see what had caused the crash.

The rest of Hill was in the little hollow, with the rifle still clutched in one hand. The copter was a broken heap of aluminum plates mixed with the branches. It had literally torn itself up. The radio was dead. Jason picked the walkie-­talkie off the floor. Still no Curtis. Either he had gotten away or he had fallen out. Or his body lay elsewhere.

Jason studied the curled stabilizer. The rear rotor blade was sliced to half its original circumference by the piece of the stabilizer that protruded inward.

At the joint where the stabilizer joined the fuselage, Jason found a bullet hole. It had punctured the base, weakening the cables. Maybe a smaller piece had done the original damage, but Jason knew he was right. That was not an echo he had heard last night. The Indian was a murderer, and a damned fine shot with a .30.30.

At the camp, Jason rewound Curtis’s film in his camera. He tucked the roll into a plastic sandwich bag and placed it in his zippered jacket pocket. While the gray morning melted to a golden brightness, he tramped through the woods, searching for some sign of Curtis.

It was an hour before his eyes chanced on the boot lying at the base of a tree. Curtis was upside down high up in the branches, his weight bending them. Jason wondered if Curtis’s death had been more merciful than Hill’s. He decided it had not.

The beast could still be around. Jason looked over his shoulder frequently as he walked back to the copter and from there to the camp. Had he not done that, he would have missed one final detail. A rock, its moist underside turned up, lay in the loam by Hill’s body. There was blood on one side. The thing could not have sneaked up on the pilot, so it must have thrown this rock to kill him.

Jason drove the Land Rover clear of the trees. The map showed a Canadian Ranger station not far away. He called them on the emergency frequency and told them there had been an accident and three men were dead.

Only after the voice on the other end said help was on its way did Raymond Jason dare to explore the tight, hard face of the Indian and that murderous giant locked in his memory. A hard feeling grew in his guts. He knew that feeling only too well by now. No matter how he analyzed the night’s events, he could not make the pieces fit, and he would not sleep well until he did. He worried at the cipher, he poked, prodded, and clawed at it with every rational method he could devise, but the mystery deepened, and within minutes Jason knew he would never rest until he had tracked both of them down.

Wind rustled the golden grass, splattered with brownish-­red drops of his blood. Raymond Jason sat motionlessly in the Land Rover, his feet dangling outside the door, oblivious to throbbing pain and the constant trickle of blood on his clothes, his single-­track mind fixed on a single project for the first time since he was young. Jason had found something to believe in.

He was flown to a hospital in Calgary and kept under treatment for two weeks. The Canadians were presented with two headless bodies, a helicopter with a hole in it, several expended cartridges, a sheaf of photos, and a baffling, disjointed tale of death and horror recited by Jason into a cassette recorder carried by a policeman who interviewed him while he was under sedation.

On the third week, Jason was released, and a policeman accompanied him to a plane for Kansas City. The policeman was polite but skeptical. “It’s not that we don’t believe your story, Mr. Jason. It’s just that there’s no proof these things exist. Besides, there are almost no reports of this kind of beast—Bigfoot, Yeti, whatever you call it—committing violence.” His face darkened. “We should very much like to find this Indian, if you know what I mean.”

“It was not the Indian,” Jason said emphatically. “I told you that. He wasn’t around when Nicolson was killed.”

The policeman smoothed down his hair and checked his watch.

“And the hole in the copter was a bullet hole, not a branch, like you said. I heard the shot.”

“Quite. You suggested the Indian was hunting the beast and you got in the way.”

Jason touched the turbanlike bandage on his head. He had been warned about dizzy spells. “Yes.”

“We must be especially critical of the incredible, Mr. Jason. We will keep an open file and all that. Do get your rest, and we will keep you informed of developments.” The policeman looked carefully at Jason’s pallid face. “And if I were you, sir, I would forget this business. Your friends are dead. It is over and done with.”