Lone Creek

15

Madbird crouched on his heels, his right hand reading the ground-testing its feel, picking up chunks of dirt, crumbling and smelling them. Every half minute or so he'd edge a couple of feet sideways and do it again. I walked along with him, holding the flashlight so he could see.

The shed was the kind of old structure that every good-size ranch had a few of, made of weathered rough-sawn timber and a corrugated metal roof. This one was a sort of frontier post, used for calving in late winter and early spring. Cows going into labor would sometimes seek out the remotest possible places, and the shed was a sanctuary both for them and for the hands out rounding them up, often in blizzards and subzero temperatures. Four walls and a propane heater could make all the difference. But nobody came here this time of year, and the nearest habitations were the hired hands' trailers, a mile and a half away.

It was a perfect place for dirty work.

The walls were a good ten feet high and the barn doors were wide enough to bring in a midsize truck for equipment and feed. Or a D-8 Cat. It would have been tight, but the dirt floor looked freshly turned, as if the blade had scraped and dragged it over-probably to cover the traces of butchering the horses. What was left was a sour-smelling mash of old hay, manure, and hair, along with some dampness and soil-crusted bits that might have been blood and flesh. But blood and flesh were what this place was all about. Calf birthings left a lot of organic residue. The lucky ones made it with relative ease, but many came harder, and sometimes there was no other choice than to pull the infant out with a come-along. If one calf lost its mother and another cow her calf, it was common practice to skin the dead calf and drape the hide over the live one, in the hope that the bereft cow would adopt and nurse the orphan that smelled like her own. This earth was soaked with decades of that necessary carnage. Trying to separate out the new from the old would have called for a sophisticated technical analysis, and all it stood to prove was that some horses had somehow gotten into the mix.

Madbird crunched a last fistful of dirt, then tossed it away and stood. I followed him outside and we checked the perimeter, until he stopped at several hay bales lying on the ground.

"What are you doing here?" he said to the bales. It did seem odd. Hay was brought in to feed, but not in this season, and there was no reason to drag it around the building's rear.

He took the flashlight from me and moved the beam slowly across the ground, then crisscrossing up the shed's wall. The siding was pine of random widths, mostly ten or twelve inches, run vertically. The wood had dried and shrunk away from the rusting nails over the years, but the workmanship, although rough, was neat-the product of some long-gone cowboy carpenters who hadn't cared about pretty, just decent.

Except for one piece that didn't look right. It was bowed out at the top, with a few nails missing along its length and a couple more clumsily bent over.

Madbird crouched again, got hold of its bottom, and wrenched. It started coming loose. I got my hands in between it and the pieces to the sides, and we worked it upward, popping it free. The flashlight showed what had bowed it out up top-a nail head sticking out an inch. That was common when old wood was pried loose, especially with soft stuff like pine. The nail would stay lodged in the cross-timber and the board would split or splinter or just disintegrate around it. If you replaced the board, you usually had to get rid of the nail to keep it from pooching out like this one. Whoever had done this either hadn't noticed it or was in too big a hurry to care.

The gap we'd made was about a foot wide. I stayed back and let Madbird peer in, with the flashlight beside his ear. He spent a good long minute there. Then he motioned me over. As the light beam shifted, I caught a glimpse of his eyes. They brought to my mind the old saying, A good friend and a bad enemy.

"He probably figured a shotgun was his best bet for knocking them down quick, and the sound don't carry so far," Madbird said. "Muffled it some more, piling up them hay bales and shoving the barrel through. That's what blew this shit loose, him swinging it back and forth." He shone the light on some bits of fresh hay strewn on the floor just inside the wall. "But he couldn't of aimed much-just stood here and kept pulling the trigger."

I was jolted by an electric image of the terrified animals rearing, screaming, crashing against their wood prison in a frenzied attempt to escape the unseen thing that was ripping them apart. Coming across the carcasses had been bad, but this was a whole new level of awfulness. We were looking at an ambush-cold-blooded, premeditated murder, without even the mercy of clean shooting.

I shook my head hard and started walking, not to anywhere, just away.