Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 8, No. 6, May 1961

Murder Like a Grizzly by Thomas Calvert McClary

“Some men are just about half bear, Marshal,” Cluny said. “And all grizzlies are killers!”

Marshal waring deeply respected his deputy, Tim Cluny, as a “bush man” but he was beginning to suspect the little nut-brown hunter with the child-blue eyes of having conned him into this whole investigation just for company while he surveyed the lands he meant to hunt that fall.

“We’ll just climb up this side the glacier a little piece,” Cluny had suggested casually down on the highway. “We can look right across onto Grizzly Bill’s homestead and maybe figure what he might have done with his old lady.”

The “little piece” of climb had been four thousand feet on this straight-up mountain. Now Cluny wanted to climb another two thousand feet to an overhanging promontory. The marshal had already reconnoitered the whole area by helicopter back in May, when there had been some doubt of Grizzly’s report that his woman had just vanished on him. No suspicious sign or circumstance had turned up, then or since, except that Waring’s all-Alaska inquiry had not located Grizzly Bill’s woman anywheres else.

The case had been carried under nothing more exciting than “Missing Persons,” until Tim Cluny showed up in Anchorage, mid-way of August, with the notion that she’d been murdered.

“What makes you think so?” the marshal had asked, hoping to pin down the seam-faced sourdough in a definite way.

“Well, she ain’t come back to his homestead,” Cluny said.

“Maybe she ran off with some other trapper or miner,” Marshal Waring suggested.

“Now, marshal, who in hell would run off with that piece of bearbait?” Cluny asked logically.

There was no answer to that, even in the lonesome interior of Alaska. Grizzly Bill’s vanished Annie had been bald, toothless, one-eyed, with a wooden leg made of green timber which had twisted and shortened as it seasoned. Further, she had a very short temper and was remarkably expert with a carving knife.

So the marshal had allowed Cluny to entice him out into this glacial wilderness, and now he was more or less in his deputy’s hands until the investigation was completed. And he was damned disgruntled. His legs felt as though they’d been stretched the full four thousand feet of the climb. He was sure that all of the intense heat of the seventeen-hour summer sun was concentrated upon himself alone.

And now that he thought of it, there was nothing to be seen from here that they could not have seen from Grizzly’s mountain, across the glacier. And they could have saved themselves the exhausting, back-breaking effort of an extra climb.

“What in pot,” Waring rasped irritably, “do we gain if we climb on up to that damned promontory? We’ve already surveyed the glacier from the ’copter.”

“Back in May,” Cluny pointed out mildly. He hunkered on the balls of his insulated boots and whittled a nubbin of tobacco from an old fashioned brown-black plug. “That was before the snow bridges and drift snow melted, marshal. Her body could have been in a crevasse right under you and you wouldn’t have seen it.”

The marshal silently conceded that point. He frowned out at the serene white swell of the frozen river that wound up between the mountains, rising up, and up, and up, until it blended with the sky. Although he had been in Alaska eighteen years, the vastness and timelessness of glaciers still filled him with an awe that disturbed his peace of mind and became almost menacing at times.

Cluny said, “Looks real purty and peaceable, don’t it? Soft and purty as a woman. But every second of the day and night, that little old glacier’s chewing up tons and tons of rock. You have to figure a sourdough by the country he lives in, and the animals around him, marshal.”

“All right, so he’s ruthless as a glacier and violent as a grizzly,” Waring snapped. “What do we gain by climbing any more? If he’s guilty and gets worried about what we’re up to, he could pick us off like Dahl sheep with his telescopic rifle.”

Cluny looked at him with mild reproof. “Marshal, don’t you know you can’t shoot across a glacier? The drafts rising off of there would damn near turn a bullet in a circle.”

The marshal’s face darkened but he took the correction in his stride. A townsman had a lot of things to learn about the bush. He sucked a deep lungful of air and got resignedly to his feet. “All right, drag me up where we can start the whole mountain land-sliding,” Waring grumbled. “It’s a nice fast way of getting down, at least!”

Cluny grinned quietly and led off in a catlike climb. He figured they’d hit the promontory a few minutes before or after the sun swung behind the mountains in its long, almost horizontal traverse around three quadrants of the horizon. They reached the promontory and sprawled out, the marshal gasping, just as shadow began to wash down the gleaming whiteness between the mountains.

A sudden and startling transformation swept the ice. What had looked serene and smooth and gentle as a lovely woman’s shoulder was abruptly cold blue-grey, upheaved, cracked, splotched and gouged. The incredibly blue lakes on the surface turned a cold zinc grey, like the thundering rivers that squeezed out of the ice at breakup. Pressure ridges crowded up in vicious welts. Crevasses yawned like hideous drunken mouths.

“Kee-ristmas!” Waring shivered. “Looking at that long enough could drive any man berserk!”

“Lot of country here for a man to pick a sensible place to live,” Cluny noted. “Not even the animals live beside a glacier. Only the Grizzlies and the goats. I figure he was berserk when he moved over yonder. Berserk and half-grizzly himself to start with.”

“What’s so different about a grizzly, except its size?” Waring asked.

Clung spat a brown gob of tobacco into space and watched it shredded and separated by the updrafts. “Well, for one thing, the grizzly is the only bear except a polar bear that will attack a man for no reason. And a polar bear has pretty good reason, come to think of it. He wants dinner. But a grizzly don’t want anything, just something to chew on awhile and then to hide.”

“They’ll hide a man’s body?”

“Yessirree, and they won’t forget where it is, marshal. If a pack of wolves gets to nosing around, old Mr. Grizzly will go dig up that body just to move it. He’s just that ornery.”

He unslung his telescopic rifle and aimed on the grey slab of Grizzly Bill’s lake, pulling down until he caught the side of the far glacier in his ’scope. There was a rim to the ice along Grizzly’s shelf, an overlap that made a bridge from the rotten reddish shale that formed the flats out onto the surface. It was one of the few places where the glacier was not up-heaved along the edges, or else sheered off in a rough faced, precipitous wall.

He lowered the gun a fraction more, bringing his sights out onto the glacier, coursing the way a hunter does when he follows a deer bounding through the bush. He steadied with a small breath of satisfaction. His breath made smoke in the air now that shadow had swept over them.

He watched for so long a time that the marshal grew chilled. “What in hell you looking at?” he demanded impatiently.

“Crevasse area,” Cluny said laconically. He handed the marshal the rifle. “Bead on the lake and then draw in just above that ice-bridge from the shelf.”

The marshal beaded and saw nothing but a lot of crevasses that made him think of a Dali painting. The ’scope formed a round picture, laid off in squares and quartered by the cross hairs. The picture was utterly motionless and utterly unchanging, except for the slow thickening of shadowtone. Then something happened in the picture.

The marshal thought he must have flinched and then knew that he had not even quivered. He had a boulder landmark at the edge of the ’scope, and it had not moved an iota. But something had happened, some fast movement, like the clicking of a camera shutter.

He scowled at Tim Cluny. “All right. I’m your sucker. What happened?”

“A crevasse closed,” Cluny said.

The marshal twisted onto his backside, very conscious that a malevolent gravity was seeking to roll him into space. “So, crevasses open and close all the time in August.”

“Only some of ’em,” Cluny said. “Some take their time about it, others open and close in a flash. You can set your watch on some, and others are more skittish than a woman.”

“You think he tossed her down a crevasse?”

“He could have. A ‘breather’ — one that opens and closes — would be the best hiding place he had at hand. If he did it in winter or spring, she’d have covered with drift and you wouldn’t have seen a sign of her from the ’copter. By now, all that draft is melted away. At least from the edge of the crevasse, you could see her.”

“Good lord, there are hundreds of those cracks we’d have to nose out! Not to mention the risk of a stakeout with the ice opening and slamming closed right under you.”

“Oh, I don’t figure we’d have to take much risk,” Cluny drawled.

“You expect me to bring out the ’copter again, with what that costs?”

“Neu-u-u-u-u,” Cluny muttered. “But it might not hurt none to tell Grizzly that we aim to. Truth is, I figure he’ll go bring that corpse right to us.”

“You getting addled?” Waring exploded. “He was cool as a snow when he reported her disappearance. He’s not going to spook.”

“But that was back in Anchorage,” Cluny pointed out. “Now you’re out in grizzly country, marshal, and grizzlies are the most curious and worrying beast there is. If something’s going on they can’t figure all about, they fret themselves into a lather.”

“Well, what’s going on that would have him worried?”

“We are,” Cluny grunted. “You don’t think he ain’t been glued to his big ’scope all day watching us? There’s no gold on this mountain, and no sheep over here right now. It’s not hunting season anyway, and there’s no power or pipeline or highway going through to survey. You can bet he knows why we’re here and it’s got him sweating.”

Waring said dryly, “He better be — after the sweating you’ve given me!”

Cluny chuckled. He said, “You know what a real grizzly would do if we were wolves and got to nosing around his hideout caches?”

“No, I don’t know!” Waring growled. “I’m no damned grizzly.”

“Well, old Mr. Grizzly would think, ‘I’ll just go in dig me up that piece of meat and hide it somewhere else where them smart aleck wolves can’t find it’ And I figure that’s just about what Grizzly Bill is going to do.”

The marshal tried another cigarette, almost coughed his lungs out, and finally went sourdough and took a chew of Cluny’s plug. He was no cheechako, no greenhorn to Alaska. He could hold his own with Eskimos or miner sourdoughs. But the minds of these bush hunters were devious and mysterious as something from Mars.

He pinned his deputy with a glitter in his eye. “There’s just one thing I want to know right now,” he growled. “What good did it do to climb way up here?”

“Well, one thing, we spotted the breathing crevasses. You can’t see ’em good from his side the glacier. His hill’s too straight above them to pick out fast movement. And we got Grizzly Bill worried about what in hell we are up to. If he knew for sure, like after we’ve seen him, then he’d stop worrying and go into action.”

“You sure go to pains to fret a man!” Waring grunted dryly. “Now if you’re through playing games, lets get down out of here before our blood freezes.”

They started down, which would seem easier than climbing up. It was. It was so easy that a man could step into a hundred yard dive just by the wrong tilt of his body. All the way up, the marshal had pulled himself, and now all the way down, he had to hold himself back. The only part of that day he would ever remember with any kindliness was the hot bath and steak they got back at Tazlina Lodge, about sixty miles down the highway.

They slogged from the highway up to Grizzly Bill’s next morning. They reached the cabin early enough, but there was no sign of Grizzly. No sound of his ax came from the timber, no throb of his outboard from the lake.

The marshal was sore and stiff from yesterday’s climb and in a caustic mood because of it. He cut professional sign on several items around the place. From the front wind break, he could look straight at the promontory they had visited yesterday. A high powered ’scope that stood in the recess was sign enough that Grizzly had probably watched them.

The oil cook stove in the cabin and the half-filled coffee pot were both completely cold. Apparently Grizzly had checked out plenty early. He had jerked blankets out of his bedding and the disarray of tins and jerky on a table was an almost sure indication that he’d made pack. His bear rifle and his .16-gauge shotgun were both gone.

“Saw us and flew the coop!” Waring rasped. “That was a damn fool trick, giving him warning like that climb yesterday!”

“Get yourself a fishing rig and simmer down,” Cluny advised. “He’ll be back.”

He found poles and a pair of oars and led the way to a rowboat by a decrepit wharf. Grizzly Bill had taken the outboard, so he was somewhere down the lake that wound around the hill.

The marshal had damnably good luck from the first drop of his lure. Damnably, because he was in no mood to enjoy it. When he caught himself snared with the fisherman’s spell, he got into an even more foul temper for it.

Waring felt sure that Grizzly had lighted out for some back trail where he might have another cabin, or had hit for the lowlands where he kept his car. He could drive up the Denali highway and hole up for months with some trapper friend if he felt minded to dodge being questioned again by the marshal.

Cluny kept them out fishing until the sun had circled behind the hills and the mosquitoes and “no-see-’ems” were coming in clouds from the dwarfed and scrubby conifers that lined the lake. Lord knew what fed their roots in the rotten shale that passed for dirt at this altitude. The shrubs must have learned to live on minerals.

“Hell, Grizzly will be holed up under Mt. McKinley or over in the Yukon by now!” Waring grumbled as Tim Cluny started pulling into shore.

“He’ll be along soon enough,” Cluny grunted unperturbably. “You got some sweet steelheads there, marshal. Forget Grizzly and enjoy ’em.”

Cluny made himself free with Grizzly Bill’s cookstove. He lighted all of his pressure lamps, sending shafts of blazing light out into the blue-purple dusk that would hang for hours. “Wait ’till he spots the way we’re wasting his gasoline!” he chuckled.

He wasn’t wrong. Within an hour they heard the outboard motor. Shortly, Grizzly Bill filled the doorway, scowling, but restrained by suspicious caution. He was enormous of size, and shaped startlingly like an actual grizzly.

“The law got special privilege to burn up all of a man’s fuel?” he barked.

Cluny said, “Get the bark off your back and fetch your supper from the spring barrel. I know damn well you didn’t catch any fish today.”

“Any day I can’t outfish you—” Grizzly roiled.

“You didn’t have no fishing rig with you,” Cluny laughed. He jabbed his head toward a bottle he’d brought up. “Have a little Jim Beam. That’s fair trade for your damned gasoline.”

Grizzly Bill picked up the bottle but he still growled, “That fuel don’t walk up here by itself! What in hell you need so many lights for?”

“Look,” Cluny grunted. “You’re going to carry on that way, we’ll have the ’copter drop off a drum of blue-gas when it comes out.”

Grizzly broke out of a deep and gurgling drink. He looked hard at Cluny, and then looked at the marshal. “What’s the ’copter coming out here for?” he demanded.

Cluny took the bottle from Grizzly’s bearlike paw. “We’re still searching for your wife, man. The ground was hard when she disappeared. She might have sprained a leg or got hung up crossing the muskeg in the bottoms and been trapped on an island by breakup. She’s lived in the bush enough to survive, so she might still be alive.”

“You crazy?” Grizzly flared. “Don’t you think I’ve looked?”

“Don’t cost you nothing for the state to look some more,” Cluny grunted.

Grizzly slopped too much grease into the pan and it blazed up, singeing his wiry beard. He cursed and then growled, “When’s the ’copter coming out?”

“Next week. Tuesday, weather permitting,” Cluny told him. “You got plenty of gas to last to then.”

Grizzly ate in concentrated silence, snapping probing glances at the marshal and his deputy. Cluny got out a second bottle of Jim Beam and the marshal tried to bait Grizzly into talk of his vanished wife without success.

He said precisely what he’d said last May. She was there in the morning when he went down the lake, and she wasn’t there any more when he got back. She’d worn her heavy parka and taken a hatchet and the 30.06. He’d called and hunted and slogged down trail to the highway and found no sign of her. He’d searched the lake, which was shallow, and there wasn’t a chance she’d fallen in and sank.

“How about the crevasses?” Cluny asked casually.

Grizzly stared at him. “Why would she go out there?”

“Maybe to get a chunk of ice,” Cluny grunted. “That old blue ice is mighty sweet tasting.”

Grizzly chewed at his lips and pawed his jaw. “That woman was so crazy she mighta done anything,” he growled. “But I don’t figure she was crazy enough to go walking on that glacier.”

It was growing daylight when they hit the sack. It was ten next morning before they were having breakfast. They ate hearty, sacked their fish in a nest of lichens, and headed back down the trail.

Grizzly Bill followed them to the edge of the shelf and stood watching. He was scowling and raking his big fingers across his massive neck the last time Cluny looked back. Cluny grinned. Grizzly was plenty worried. Nothing could have been more obvious and it called for no guess work.

“What in hell did you tell him a ’copter was coming out for?” Waring demanded out of earshot. “It isn’t, but you put him on guard! I couldn’t crack a word out of him after that.”

“Shucks, he wouldn’t have talked anyway,” Cluny said. “But now he’ll be worried stiff. You think you can climb that hill again? The other one?”

“Good grief, why a second time?” Waring barked.

“Why, to see what Grizzly does now,” Cluny grunted.

They reached their car, drove back five miles down the highway, and Cluny made camp packs of their sleeping bags. “Trouble with you, marshal, you just don’t know grizzlies,” Cluny said. “I’ve knowed grizzlies to go back where they’d covered something up when they weren’t even hungry, just to see if it was still there.”

“What good’s that going to do us?” the lawman demanded gruffly.

“Well, we’re dealing with a man half grizzly. Anyway, it don’t cost us anything to find out.”

He found a trail where there was no trail, carrying them through a muskeg slough, and then up the steep hill they had climbed two days ago, but this time by a more tortuous route, hidden behind a ridge. He located a ledge where the marshal could not see; a ledge about opposite the promontory and made camp. He’d brought binoculars this time. He set up a little screen of stones and shale on the crest of the ridge and sprawled out comfortably to watch Grizzly Bill’s shelf.

It was clear that their visit had the giant worried. He moved restlessly around the neighborhood of the cabin all the rest of the day. From time to time he’d sweep the promontory and the front trail with his ’scope. A half dozen times, he walked down to the edge of the glacier and stood there staring.

The marshal watched the proceedings sourly. He growled, “He’s not going to risk going out into that crevasse field in this weather. And if he does, what about it? If those crevasses are opening and closing, how are we going to find the right one, except for luck, even if we see him visit it from here?”

“There you go again,” Cluny grunted without offense. “It’s just on account of you don’t know grizzlies, marshal.”

The marshal fumed. He fumed harder when nothing of consequence happened by sundown. One thing he was sure of, Grizzly wouldn’t risk that glacier in the dark!

Grizzly Bill was down at the edge, though, not long after daylight. He scanned the slopes on their side of the glacier half a dozen times. Finally, he went back to his cabin and came out wearing a winter parka. He carried a rope and climber’s pick. He sprawled out by the edge of the ice bridge and scarcely moved to mid-morning.

Suddenly, he straightened, cutting some sign Tim Cluny could not catch from where he was. He jumped his enormous body erect with amazing spryness. A moment later he was hustling across the icebridge with his rope and pick. He passed through some low-pressure ridges, indistinguishable to the marshal, except that he kept appearing and disappearing against the field of gleaming white.

Finally he appeared very clearly and stopped and dropped his rope and hunkered at a particular spot. The marshal’s heart began to beat with the hard rhythm of excitement every law dog feels when a difficult chase shows signs of closing. But Grizzly did nothing after that. He just hunkered there like a man at a fishole in the ice.

Cluny said, “Guess we can go back now, marshal.”

Waring stared at him. “Nothing’s happened!”

“Oh, something will happen by the time we get there,” Cluny grunted, with firm assurance, “Grizzly’s a pretty good man in the bush. He knows that glacier. But nothing this side of hell would get me out there!”

With his leg muscles and back feeling like he’d been wracked, the marshal followed Cluny down to the highway. He was convinced that leaving their vantage point was a big mistake. Grizzly might be up to nothing more suspicious than chopping a chunk of the particularly hard blue ice the sourdoughs rated so highly in this weather. If Grizzly was up to something grimmer, they might lose the evidence they could have gotten with the marshal’s telescopic camera. But Cluny apparently had something in his mind, and this being wilderness bush, it was really his show.

They drove back up the road to the other trail, and made the stiff climb back to Grizzly’s. He wasn’t around the cabin, so he was probably still out on the glacier. Cluny led the way across the ice bridge and through the pressure ridge. They came out onto clear surface two hundred yards below Grizzly just as he hauled something heavy out of the maw of the blue white ice.

What he hauled up was thickly frosted, but it was recognizable enough to be grim. The marshal drew his automatic as Grizzly turned, with the rope across his shoulder, ready to haul something back across the glacier.

The giant froze, watching them solidly as they came toward him. He slacked on the rope and started to shift his weight from one foot to the other, exactly like a bear.

“You boys got me to thinking maybe she did come out here so I come to take a look. She’s kept good enough for decent burying, but her head got kind of bashed when she fell in.”

“We can prove that in the laboratory fast enough,” Waring said grimly.

“You can?” Grizzly asked with surprise. “You mean you can tell how her head got so kind of dented?”

The marshal nodded, but Grizzly’s thoughts didn’t seem to be on his answer. He glanced up at the sun and then his eyes sought some telltale bit of shadow somewhere. Suddenly he gave a snarling laugh and kicked back with right boot, hurtling his wife’s corpse back into the crevasse. His wild laugh rose to a roar of humor.

But he had put down his foot in a coil of the rope and now it caught and jerked him flat. He clawed, but there was nothing to claw into on ice that had slicked with the many melts and refreezings of August. Roaring invective, he was dragged back into the crevasse himself.

The two men ran forward to the rim. The crevasse was not deep and it bellied out into a cavern not far below the surface. Grizzly Bill sprawled down there atop the grim evidence of the murder he had committed. One of his legs had a crooked look, as if broken. His roar had changed to a roar of sheer brute anger.

He was still roaring as the ice under their feet quivered and Cluny shoved the marshal back. The crevasse closed in front of them with a whoosh of disgorged air and a huge shower of ice particles.

Cluny looked at the position of the sun. He said, “I don’t figure it will open up again today. He’ll be froze stiff as a seal carcass by tomorrow. He musta knowed how long that crack stays open.”

The marshal looked at Cluny with grudging respect. “You had him figured to do just this.”

Cluny nodded. “If he had her buried out here. Just like a damned grizzly, marshal. And hell, that wild giant was just about half bear.”

Humor twinkled in the marshal’s eyes. He nodded at their feet. “Thought nothing this side of hell would get you out on a glacier in August, Cluny?”

“No sirree, nothing on earth would, marshal! But I just kind of got took with curiosity to see what one of these breathing cracks looks like.”

“Curious. Like a bear,” Waring grinned, but he said it to himself.