The Spirit

At five o’clock, a car bounced down the Oharaville road. Martha Lucus stepped out, walking carefully to avoid disturbing her taped ribs. Drake was eating cottage cheese from a cup. He rolled down his window.

“Am I under arrest?”

He chewed reflectively looking over her pale, wan face and shabby clothes. They had retrieved some of her luggage from the ruins of the lodge. “There’ll be an inquiry, so I wouldn’t go anywhere for a couple days. But you aren’t under arrest or anything like that.” He opened the door to the truck and let her inside. “You better get into bed or something before you catch pneumonia. Where’s Wood­ard?”

“I saw him jogging past the motel. He says it calms him down.”

Drake was scraping the last of the cottage cheese from the bottom of his cup. “This Indian might have come out okay if he’d turned himself in. You and Wood­ard could have backed him up. I don’t know about Jason, though. I don’t know.” He crumpled up the cottage-­cheese container and dropped it in the litter bag. “What does he want with these things, anyway?”

She remembered Jason’s tight face, his self-­absorption, his congenital unease. “A trophy, I suppose. If anybody can get that female, he can. Have you found any sign of her at all?”

“Nope,” said Drake. “Which doesn’t surprise me in the least. She’s real good at staying hidden. There’s been people who’ve hunted these things for years and never found a sign of one.”

“Not like these. These are smarter.”

Drake let it drop.

“Do you think you’ll find Jason?” she asked after a moment.

“Oh sure, we’ll find Jason.”

“How long do these searches take?”

“For a normal person, about four or five days. For a dead one, just a couple. But for Mr. Jason. Well, now, he could hide in those woods forever. Or he could head on south till he hits California, living off the land like that Indian. And he could walk into a phone booth and call us up and say the hell with it, I’m tired of following this thing. Pick me up. Does that sound like Jason?”

“No,” she replied. “He’ll never give up.”

“That’s what I mean. We’ll find Mr. Jason when he wants us to find him.” He leaned forward to watch the heli­copter that still circled Mount Colby. “I wouldn’t spread this around, you know. I’d hate the taxpayers to think we were wasting their money looking for somebody who’s not going to be found.”

All this for an animal that nobody ever heard of. Drake snorted in the truck cab. The whole bunch of them were made for each other.

Raymond Jason leaned over the bank and looked into the mountain stream. A wild animal looked back at him, a forest creature, bearded, with fierce eyes. He sloshed cold water around in his mouth, then spat it out.

He was on a little peninsula of sand jutting into a stream, a good twenty or thirty miles south of Colby, or so he calculated. The female was still on the run. He could not believe her stamina. He expected to find her body under every bush, but so far that had not happened. It was a spotty trail, but he knew where to look—hard ground, spongy grass, surfaces that did not retain prints—and always he found blood. She could not have that much blood left. Even elephants did not have that much blood.

He placed another branch on his fire. It was banked and low so she could not see it. He polished his pistol. He did that a lot when he rested. Just sat on the ground and polished the gun with a carefully cleaned cloth. Minutes before he had shot a bird for dinner. He dropped the empty cartridge on the ground and replaced it with a good one.

Yesterday he had almost been sighted by a helicopter. They were still looking for him. Let them look! He would return with a body or he would not return at all.

Not return?

He stopped polishing. Why did he say that?

Not without a body, that’s what he said. He resumed polishing.

He might have been wrong about her being the last one. She could be leading him to others somewhere. If so, Raymond Jason might find himself in a nasty predicament. They were good at ambushes, as he recalled from the male’s activity at the lake. And the bus. And the crash in Canada. All of them ambushes. They could lure you on . . .

He should call for help. He should get to a phone and contact the Rangers.

Except what if they took so long the trail got cold?

Forget it.

He didn’t want to face Drake. Fat Drake. The bile churned in Jason’s stomach at the memory of that fat, stolid face. He would like to put a fist through that face. The same held for the others, Martha of the gray eminent face, a mole living in papers, and Wood­ard. Even Kimberly played by the ridiculous rules. Christ! The dregs. Only a carcass of something incredible would shield him from their scoffing, their papers and depositions, their stupid questions. Look what I found! You did not believe in such things until I showed you!