The Spirit

The Indian shimmied up the beam and found a weak foothold in the wall. With his aluminum bow he dug away at the rock, forming more weak niches to serve as handholds. Then he clutched at these irregularities like a fly ascending a wall. His fingers poked through the hole, touched squishy mud and grass, and he pulled himself up and out of the earth like a man rising from the dead.

He was in a ghost town, dead center in a main street that petered out to rocky bluffs preceding more woods, everlastingly damned, lonesome woods. It was bitterly cold, although the snowfall had almost stopped and the wind had died. There were other sinkholes pocking the street, closer to Colby’s slopes, all but obscured by tons of rubble.

The Indian crept through the dead town on delicate feet, careful not to force another sinkhole. Not until he was in the woods again, hemmed in by the whispering pines, did he really believe he had escaped.

He prepared himself to die. Better to die on the earth than go mad beneath it. It would be a satisfactory death, if not a noble one. Killing that natliskeliguten was a barren honor, for it had done much murder before he even realized what it was. He had even helped it by sending it food, by keeping it alive.

His spirit. His protector.

He would have to die nameless.

The Indian sat in the snow, feeling the cold. It would be a painless death, something like falling asleep, an endless, dreamless sleep. They would find him frozen, his face expressing no anguish.

He closed his eyes and waited for death.

The cold sank into his bones, but death did not come.

Something irritated his mind, standing between him and death. A thought of some kind. Now that was interesting! A thought was trying to protect him from death.

His protector.

Somebody had protected him like a spirit all this time!

Then, piece by piece, memories surged up from the well of his consciousness like a movie film of an exploding castle run backward, so that it re-­formed itself into a fortress. It glittered and shone with the pure fire of truth.

The Indian opened his eyes. He knew what his spirit was!

He covered his face and wept. He was still weeping as the storm passed on to ravage other mountains and the sun slowly rose over the diminished broken hulk of Mount Colby.

THE SPIRIT

17

Drake had expected to find Jason within minutes after arriving at the glowing pile of embers that had once been Colby Lodge. He dispatched Taylor into the woods after him with instructions to bring him back, spitting and hissing if necessary. “Mr. Jason’s going to need himself a lawyer for this one.” Then to Martha he said, “Why in hell didn’t you tell me about this Indian!”

“I was going to. We were going to. We thought he’d leave—”

“Where is he now!”

She pointed up the mountain. “Jason thinks he went up there after the Bigfoot.”

“To the mine!”

At which point Martha broke down into tears at the transformation of Drake from a Ranger into a very bad-tempered policeman. Drake informed the state police by radio that a fugitive from Canada was missing and presumed dead. “Unless he’s a mole,” Drake snarled. “It’ll save us all the trouble of burying him.” He passed out hot rolls and coffee and arranged to have Martha trucked to the Garrison hospital, where her injuries could be repaired.

After half an hour, Taylor and Wallace came out of the woods, followed by the others. “We lost the trail after about a hundred yards and didn’t find it again. Do you want to start a real search?”

“Damned right,” Drake replied. He called the state police back and told them a man was lost in the area around Colby. Last seen heading north over the slide area, wearing an orange snowmobile suit and carrying a gun and flashlight.

By the end of the following day the countywide alert for Raymond Jason had become a statewide one. Drake spent a fruitless hour circling Mount Colby in a helicopter while several men poked around mine tunnels for some sign of John Moon. They found nothing. “There’s a lot of sinkholes, though,” said Taylor. “He might have been lucky. He might still be in there somewhere.”

They would spend days at the mine, clearing away tunnels, tapping on walls, calling out Moon’s name. Perhaps they would hear rocks tapping in answer. Or perhaps they might find something else down there. But Drake did not think so. John Moon was gone.

At four in the afternoon, he was sitting in his truck, watching the men clear debris away from the mine entrance, when the radio beeped. The hospital had called back about the blood. “Drake, it’s human all right, but we don’t know what type. I’m going to put it down as unclassified.”

Lester Cole might have been a creep, but he was not the type to carve up people on his kitchen table. Whatever he had had in that trailer did not look human to him. Yet blood will tell. Drake had had enough of this business. It was time to consider a little bit of burying in the files. If there were other Bigfoots, leave them be. Leave the whole thing be.