Fear No Evil

Chapter 77

Swan River Valley, Montana

Three mornings later, Sampson and I were up early and wolfing down a hearty breakfast at a lodge overlooking beautiful Holland Lake in the remote Flathead National Forest. Above the thick pine-and-spruce canopy, towering peaks rose, forming the western boundary of the Bob Marshall Wilderness.

I don’t think I’d ever seen Sampson so excited.

“I feel great,” he said as he buttered his toast. “Slept like a log.”

“I did too,” I said and sipped coffee. “All the fresh air.”

“And the eight-hundred-mile drive.”

“Woke up a little stiff from that.”

“You’re going to get stiffer.”

“Yeah, I don’t think I’ve ever ridden a horse for more than an hour before.”

We were done eating by seven. Five minutes later, we were outside with all our gear and calling home one last time.

“Be careful out there,” Bree said.

“Don’t get eaten by a grizzly,” Ali said.

“I’ll try not to,” I said. “I love you all and we’ll talk in six days.”

I was about to shut off my cell phone for the duration of the trip when it rang. Paladin showed up on the ID.

I really didn’t want to, but I answered. “Cross.”

“Steven Vance here, Dr. Cross,” the CEO said, sounding excited. “We found something we believe you are going to be interested in.”

Sampson was making We have to leave motions and I nodded. “Steve, can you tell me this quick? I’m actually in Montana about to go on a trip into the wilderness for the next six days.”

“Love Montana,” Vance said. “Lucky you. I’ll keep it brief. We did find chatter and traffic between southern Wyoming and that same small town in Mexico on the day before the attack. We also picked up a satellite-phone signal from the wilderness beyond that ranch. A satellite phone positioned in central Manitoba answered.”

“Manitoba?”

“Near the town of Herb Lake.”

“Do you know what was said? How long it lasted?”

“Seven minutes, but we have no idea what was said,” Vance said.

“Can you relay this information to Special Agent Mahoney?”

“Of course. Enjoy your trip.”

“What’s up?” Sampson said, sounding defensive when I hung up. “There’s no way we’re pulling out of this now.”

“No way,” I said. “That was Vance. He says the night after the attack, there was a sat-phone call from the wilderness beyond Fell’s Creek Canyon to an obscure town in Manitoba.”

“M is in Manitoba?” John asked incredulously.

“Kind of my reaction,” I said as a white dually pickup pulled up.

Our outfitter and horse packer, Lance Bauer, was a lean, long-legged man in his fifties who chewed Red Man and laughed at just about anything. He climbed out and helped us load our gear in the pickup bed while Pork Chop, his Australian shepherd, bounced all around.

“Nice binocs,” Bauer said, gesturing to the brand-new Leica binoculars hanging on hunting harnesses we both wore.

Sampson said, “We heard there’s a lot to see in there.”

“Well, that’s the truth,” Bauer said.

He drove us up to the Holland Lake trailhead. When we got there, Bauer’s wife, Lucy, and a hired man were loading the last of the pack mules, six in all.

We’d met the Bauers the afternoon before, shortly after we arrived at the lodge to find our gear waiting. Bree had shipped it all out express. After getting our instructions, the Bauers had taken the dry bags away to be weighed, balanced, and packed. We were just making it in as the last trip of the season.

When we got out of the pickup that morning, Lucy Bauer, a tough woman with a magnetic smile, introduced us to our horses for the twenty-nine-mile ride ahead of us.

“John, since you’re the biggest, you’ll be riding Queenie,” Lucy said, patting the quivering flanks of a big chestnut mare. “She’s a doll, a Tennessee Walker, and an absolute dream to ride in the mountains.”

“She’s done this ride before?”

“Fifteen to twenty times a year since she turned three, and that was fifteen years ago,” she said, stroking the horse’s nose. “Queenie could walk most of these trails blindfolded. Couldn’t you, doll?”

Lucy smiled at me and gestured at a stocky, bluish-black horse with a jet-black mane that was smaller than Queenie. “Dr. Cross, you’ll ride Toby. He’s part Morgan horse, which means he’s strong as an ox, has a heart that won’t quit, and can walk forever and a day. He’s twelve and been with us since he turned three.”

“Hey, Toby,” I said, holding out a lump of sugar I’d pilfered from the lodge.

The horse sniffed it and nibbled it off my palm.

“You’ve made a friend forever,” Lucy said.

Her husband walked up holding two scabbards. “Where are your weapons?”

“We’ve got our service pistols,” I said.

“Calibers?”

“Mine’s forty-five,” Sampson said.

“Not good enough,” Bauer said.

“Forty caliber,” I said.

“Definitely not good enough,” he said.

“For what?” I asked.

“Grizzlies,” Bauer said. “You’re about to spend the next six days in some of the densest concentrations of Ursus horribilis in the lower forty-eight states. You need to be prepared, carry bear spray and enough gun. Your service weapons aren’t enough.”

Though I sobered at the thought, Sampson’s smile could not have been bigger. “What’re the chances we’ll see one?”

Bauer shrugged. “They’re all over the place up there, but this time of year it depends on the heat. If we’d been up on Gordon Pass at dawn we’d have had a good chance to see one through binoculars somewhere. But we’ll be crossing it around two.”

“In the heat of the day.”

“Correct,” Bauer said, handing us the scabbards. “We’ll lend you two of our camp guns. I’d appreciate them coming back in one piece.”

“Absolutely,” John said.

Bauer went to his pickup and retrieved an Ithaca ten-gauge pump-action shotgun and a Ruger guide rifle with a low-power telescopic sight on it.

“It’s chambered in three-seventy-five Ruger,” he said, handing the rifle and a box of ammunition to John. “Shoots three-hundred-grain Alaskan bullets.”

“What’s the law on shooting a grizzly?” I asked.

“Gotta be self-defense,” he said, giving me the shotgun. “That means he’s inside thirty yards and coming at you hard and fast. First shot’s buckshot. Next four are slugs.”

“We have to wait until they’re that close?” I said.

He nodded. “We’ll give you bear gas too, which is what you want to use first. But if that doesn’t work and you have to shoot one, preserve the site as if it were one of your crime scenes, because U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will be investigating. To them a grizzly death falls under Napoleonic law.”

“Meaning?”

“You’re presumed guilty of murdering the bear until proven innocent.”