Skull Moon

1

A full moon. Big, bloated, obscene.

Its pallid light filters down on the craggy, shadow-pocketed landscape of the northern Wyoming Territory. Black surreal clouds roll in the sky. A cool wind howls and shrieks, the dark pines bend and sway.

A lone, crooked oak claws at the sky, its stripped limbs creak and moan. From one blasted fork a body hangs, strung by the neck with a coil of frayed rope. The body swings and turns with a gentle tenebrous motion, urged by the night winds.

With a sound like dry lips parting, the eyes open.

2

The Indian was old. His burnished face a map of the rocky, gouged landscape around him. He wore a faded gray army shirt and a tattered campaign hat with the crossed silver arrows of the scouts. On his knotted feet were black moccasins, the soles threadbare. Wrapped around him like a sheet of misery was a stained blanket. He carried an oil lantern that hissed and sputtered, casting grotesque shadows over the rocks and leafless, stunted trees.

He was very old. Even he couldn’t remember just how old. He knew only that in his youth he had fought the beaver trappers in the mountains. And much later, had been with them when the mountain men had their final rendezvous in 1840. And he had been old then, nearly forty years before.

His name was Swift Fox and he was Flathead.

He knew this just as he knew some of his tribe called him Old Fox or Sly Fox behind his back. Just as he knew he’d first fought, then befriended the whites, even serving in their Army in campaigns against the Dakota.

Swift Fox kept walking.

He mounted a rise, the cool November wind blowing dust in his face. He saw the big oak in the distance and made for it. He stepped carefully, a lifetime of navigating such terrain teaching him the value of patience. He’d seen too many men scramble over the rocks and slopes in a rush only to catch their boots in a yawning crevice and snap their ankles. This had never happened to Swift Fox and he planned on keeping it that way. Old men’s bones, he knew, didn’t mend so well.

The temperature was in the mid-forties.

Seasonable for that time of year in the Wyoming Territory. Yet the chill dug into him, laid on his skin like frost, clotted his old, sluggish blood with ice. This more than anything told Swift Fox in no uncertain terms he was an old man.

At the big oak, he stood motionless for some time, watching the hanged man.

The breed, Charles Goodwater, had told him of this. He’d seen the hanged man from a distance as he stalked a deer and had quickly returned to camp to report it. Swift Fox had come, knowing if he didn’t cut the man down no one else would. Not Indian nor white. And in his way of thinking, there was something blasphemous about letting a man hang in the wind until he rotted and dropped to bones.

So he had come.

Holding the oil lamp with a steady fist, Swift Fox studied the hanged man. He was dressed in a long midnight-blue broadcloth coat with black pants, scuffed Texas boots, and a dark flat-crowned hat. He wore a white cotton shirt that was brown now with dried blood.

Swift Fox wetted his lips and set the lamp down. The flickering light threw huge, maddening shadows. The man hung only a foot or so off the ground so Swift Fox only needed to climb up a few feet. He slid a long, curved skinning knife from the sheath at his hip and sawed at the rope. The blade was sharp enough to take off a finger with a single slice, but the rope was stubborn. It took Swift Fox a few seconds to cut through it, the blade winking back moonlight and steel.

The body hit with a thud.

Slowly, patiently, Swift Fox climbed down and sat next to the man. His old bones creaked in protest. The man’s hands were tied behind his back and Swift Fox cut them free. The arms were not stiff as he worked them free and rolled the man over. He hadn’t been dead long.

Swift Fox pushed aside a strand of his white, blowing hair and brought the lantern closer to the man’s face. The hanged man had dark skin like an Indian, yet his features were European. A half-breed maybe or just a white who’d spent his life in the wind and sun.

The wind howling like the spirits of the dead in this lonesome place, Swift Fox checked the man’s pockets. He carried no weapons, no identification. Just inside his coat, Swift Fox felt metal beneath his fingertips. He turned the flap of material out.

A badge.

Swift Fox looked closer.

The hanged man had been a deputy U.S. Marshal.

There would be hell to pay for this, the old man knew. The murder of a federal marshal meant nothing but trouble and a lot of it. Swift Fox looked into the dead man’s face.

And the eyes opened.

3

For the next four days, the many daughters of Swift Fox cared for the hanged man. They wrapped him in buffalo blankets and fed him a hot broth of deer blood. While they did this, the old man kept watch and smoked his pipe. On the morning of the fifth day, the hanged man regained full consciousness.

He looked at the old man’s daughters and then at the old man himself. Then he asked for water in a dry, dead voice. The old man sent his daughters away and let the hanged man drink all he desired from a jug fashioned from the bladder of a buffalo.

“My throat burns,” he finally said, his eyes blue and icy.

“It is not broken, “ Swift Fox said. “By the grace of the fathers, you lived.”

“You speak good English.”

The old man took this as a fact, not a compliment. “I was a cavalry scout.”

“Did you bring me here?”

“Yes.”

The man nodded painfully. He looked around. “Flathead?” he asked.

“Yes. I am called Swift Fox.”

“Joseph Smith Longtree,” the man said. “Where am I exactly?”

“You are in a camp on the north fork of the Shoshone River. Less than a mile from where I found you, Marshal.”

Longtree coughed dryly, nodding. “How far are we from Bad River?”

“Two miles,” the old man told him. “No more, no less.”

Longtree sat up and his head spun. “Damn,” he said. “I have to get down to Bad River. The men I’m hunting…they might still be there.”

“Who are these men?”

Longtree told him.

There were three men, he said. Charles Brickley, Carl Weiss, and Budd Hannion. They ambushed an army wagon in Nebraska that was en route to Fort Kearny, killing all six troopers on board. The wagon had carried army carbines which, it was learned, were sold to Bannock war parties. That was a matter now for the army itself and the Indian Bureau. But the killing of soldiers was a federal offense which made it the business of the U. S. Marshals Office. Longtree had trailed the killers from Dakota Territory to Bad River. And in the foothills of the Absarokas, they had ambushed him. They jumped him, beat him senseless, strung him up.

“But you did not die,” Swift Fox reminded him.

“Thanks to you.” Longtree was able to sit up now without dizziness.

Swift Fox was studying him. His hair was long and dark, carrying a blueblack sheen foreign to whites. “You are a breed?” he asked.

Longtree smiled thinly. “My mother was a Crow, my father a beaver trapper.”

Swift Fox only nodded. “When do you plan on hunting these men?”

Longtree rubbed his neck. “Tomorrow,” he said, then laid back down, shutting his eyes.

4

The wind was blowing when he made it into Bad River.

It wasn’t much of a town. A rutted road of dirt and dried mud meandered between rows of peeled clapboard buildings. What signs hung out front had been weathered unreadable by the elements. There was a livery, a blacksmith shop, and a graying boarded-up structure that might have passed for a hotel. There was no law here, no jailhouse. What Longtree had come to do, he would do alone.

Dust and dirt in his face, the wind mourning amongst the buildings, Longtree hitched the horse Swift Fox had loaned him outside the livery barn. The horse-an old gray-wasn’t too happy about being left in the wind.

“This won’t take long,” Longtree promised him.

He broke open the short-barreled shotgun the old Flathead had given him, fed in two shells, and started down the rotting, frost-heaved boardwalk. His army spurs jangled as he walked. Swift Fox had done some checking and found that the men Longtree was looking for often frequented the Corner Saloon in Bad River.

This is where Longtree went now.

He had his neckerchief pulled up over his nose and mouth so he wouldn’t be breathing grit. The shotgun was held firmly in his fists, his eyes narrowed. His dark clothes were gray now with dust and wind-blown debris. Outside the saloon, he paused. It was a decaying structure, single-story, its boarding warped and peeled, the doorway askew with an old army blanket tacked to the frame.

Longtree went in with a slow and easy pace, the shotgun ready in his hands. It was dim inside, lit only by sputtering lamps. The floor was uneven and covered in layers of pungent sawdust. The stuffy air stank of cheap liquor, smoke, and body odor. Beaten men lounged at the bar. A few more in booths. An obese, toothless bar hag slicked with sweat and grime grinned at Longtree with yellow gums.

“What’ll ya have?” the bartender asked. He was bald and had but one arm, an empty sleeve pinned to his side.

Longtree ignored him, keeping his neckerchief up over his face so the men at the back table wouldn’t recognize him.

They were all there.

Brickley, thin and wizened, hat pulled down near his eyes. Weiss, chubby and short, grinning at his partners. Hannion, a muscled giant, a knife scar running down one cheek.

Longtree went to them.

“You want somethin’?” Weiss asked, a single gold tooth in his lower jaw.

“I have a warrant for the arrest of you men,” Longtree said. “Murder.”

They looked up at him with wide, hateful eyes.

Longtree flashed his badge and pulled down the neckerchief.

“Oh God,” Weiss stammered. “God in Heaven…you’re dead…” He fell backwards out of his chair as Brickley and Hannion went for their guns. Longtree shot Brickley in the face, his head pulping in a spray of blood and bone. Hannion pulled his gun and took his in the chest, hitting the floor and flopping about, pissing rivers of red.

Longtree broke open the shotgun, emptied the chambers, and fed in two more shells. He stepped over the corpses and towered above Weiss. Weiss was trembling on the floor, his crotch wet where he’d pissed himself, bits of the other two men sticking to him.

“Where’s my horse?” Longtree asked him. “My guns?”

Weiss shuttered, unable to talk.

Longtree kicked him in the face, the boot-spur slicing off the end of his nose and dumping the man in the wreck of Hannion. Weiss screamed, left arm sunk up to the elbow in the bloody crater of Hannion’s chest. Longtree grabbed him by the hair and pulled him to his feet.

“My things,” he said in a deadpan voice. “Now.”

Barely able to walk, Weiss led him out of the saloon and through the screaming wind to the livery stable. A lamp burned in there; a grizzled old man oiled a bridle. He saw the blood on Weiss. Saw Longtree’s badge and fled.

Weiss pointed to Longtree’s horse and saddlebags, his bedroll and weapons lying in the corner. Then he fell to his knees, crying, whimpering, drool running down his chin.

“Don’t kill me, Marshal! Oh, God in Heaven, don’t kill me!” he rambled in a broken, lisping voice. “Please! They made me do it! They made me!”

Longtree kicked him in the face again and the man howled in agony.

Sighing, Longtree turned to his things and went through them. Everything was in order, save the warrants and wanted fliers of the men-they were missing. His gun belts and nickel-plated Colts were untouched. His Winchester rifle had been emptied of cartridges. Nothing else had changed.

Behind him, he heard Weiss make a run for it.

Longtree turned quickly and let him have both barrels. The impact threw Weiss through the doors, his midsection pulverized. He hit the ground a corpse. Only a few ripped strands of meat held him together.

The killing done, Longtree sat down and smoked.

5

Later, after he’d hauled the corpses to the undertaker’s and arranged for their burials using the outlaws’ horses and guns as payment, Longtree hit the trail. He rode up to the camp of the Flathead and gave Swift Fox the horse and gun back, thanked the man.

And then he was gone.

Longtree didn’t like Bad River. It had a stink of death and corruption about it. And if the truth be told, there were few frontier towns that did not. And the reality of this brought a bleak depression on him.

So he rode.

He headed east to Fort Phil Kearny where orders from the U.S. Marshals Office would be awaiting him.

And that night, the air stank of running blood.

6

The switchman was a big fellow.

He went in at nearly three-hundred pounds and though some of it was fat, much of it was hardened lanky muscle accrued from a lifetime of hard work. His name was Abe Runyon and in his fifty years, he’d done it all. He’d driven team and rode shotgun on a stage in the Colorado Territory. He’d been foreman for the Irish gangs that laid track from Kansas City to Denver for the Kansas Pacific Railroad. He’d logged some. Trapped some.

Of all things, he liked railroad work best.

And tonight especially. A storm was hitting southwestern Montana with a vengeance. The sky was choked with snow and already some six inches had fallen, propelled with gale-force intensity by winds screaming down from the Tobacco Root Mountains. Runyon was sitting in a signalman’s shack, playing solitaire before the glow of a lantern. Outside, the wind was screaming, making the little shack tremble.

Runyon cursed under his breath, knowing he’d have to spend the night out here. Knowing he’d been a damn fool to be inspecting track with the clouds boiling and belching in the first place.

There’d be no whiskey tonight.

It would be just him and his cards and the little wood stove that kept him warm.

“Damn,” he said.

He bit off the end of a cigar and lit it with a stick match, spitting out bits of tobacco. Snow was beginning to drift in the corner, forced by the wind through any available crevice. Runyon stuffed a rag in there. It would serve for a time.

Swallowing bitterly at his luck this night, he wiped his hands on his greasy overalls and sat back down to his card game.

And this is when he heard the sound.

Even with the howl of the wind and the rattle of the shack, he heard it: someone out back rifling through the woodpile.

Runyon knew who it was.

Getting up, he grabbed his light Colt double-action. 38 and opened the door. Snow and wind rushed in at him. And despite his size and strength, he was pushed back a few feet. Gritting his teeth and squinting his eyes, he forced himself out, pounding through the drifts that came up to his hips at times. Out back, he caught the thieves in the act.

“All right, goddammit,” Runyon shouted into the onslaught of wind and snow. “Drop them logs!”

The thieves, as it were, were three scrawny-looking Indians dressed in raggedy buffalo coats and well-worn deerhide leggings. They dropped the wood, staring at him with wide, dark eyes. A lean, starving bunch, slat-thin and desperate.

“Please,” one of them said in English. “The cold.”

His English was too good for a redskin and this made the bile rise in Runyon’s throat. He had no use for Blackfeet and Crow savages and especially those that considered themselves civilized enough to use a whiteman’s tongue. Runyon, a well-thumbed catalog of intolerance, hated Indians. Raised in an atmosphere of anti-Indian sentiments, Runyon was born and bred to hate anything just this side of white. They’d never actually given him any personal grief but he knew that a raiding party of Cheyenne had killed both his grandparents in Indian Territory and that his father had watched the bastards scalp the both of them from his hiding place.

“Cold, are you?” Runyon said.

The one who spoke English nodded. The other two just stared. And Runyon knew what they were thinking, knew the hatred they felt and how the sneaky, lying devils would sooner slit his throat as look at him.

“We were caught in the storm,” the injun said. “We need wood for a fire. In the morning we will replace it.”

“Oh, I just bet you will. I just bet you will.”

“Please.” The voice was sincere and had it been a white man, even the lowest murdering drifter, it would’ve touched Runyon.

But these were savages.

And Runyon knew the moment you showed them any mercy, any compassion, was the moment they laughed in your face. And that they’d come back and kill you first chance they got. The heathen red devils didn’t respect compassion; they saw it as a weakness.

“If you’re cold, injun,” Runyon said, leveling the. 38 in his face, “I can warm you up with some lead right fast.”

“Please,” the Indian said and seemed to mean it. Hard-won pride cracked in his voice; it was not easy to beg for a few sticks of wood.

“Get out of here!” Runyon cried. “Get the hell out of here before I kill the lot of you!”

The three of them backed away slowly, not taking their eyes off the white, knowing it was not a good idea to do so. Too many times had members of their tribe been murdered by turning their backs on armed whites.

“We will die,” the one said. “But so will you.” With that, they were gone.

But they weren’t moving fast enough for Runyon’s liking.

Spitting into the wind, he took aim on the stragglers and sighted in on the one who thought himself the equal of white men. He drew a bead on the savage’s back and pulled the trigger. The chamber explosion was barely audible in the shrieking, biting winds. Visibility was down, but Runyon saw one of the savages fall just as a wall of snow obscured him.

“Damn heathens,” Runyon cursed and made his way back.

Sitting by the wood stove and warming his numbed hands, Runyon grinned, knowing he’d freed the world of a few more thieving redskins.

The bastards would freeze.

Runyon smiled.

7

It was much later when the scratching began.

Runyon had been dozing in his chair, a game of solitaire laid out before him, the. 38 still in his fist. He’d been dreaming he was down in Wolf Creek, warm and toasty, having a drink and eating a good meal. Then he opened his eyes. He wasn’t in Wolf Creek. He was out in the goddamn signal shack waiting for morning.

Something that never seemed to come.

Rubbing the sleep from his eyes, he set the Colt down and listened. He’d heard something. Some unknown sound. He knew this much. Runyon wasn’t one to wake without reason. Cocking his head, he listened intently. The wind was still shrieking, the snow still dusting the shack and making it tremble.

But something more now.

A low, almost mournful moaning noise broken up by the winds.

And scratching. Like claws dragged over the warped planks of the shack.

Runyon swallowed, a trickle of sweat ran down his back. It was the injuns. It had to be the injuns. Somehow, they had survived the subzero temperatures and had come back now. Maybe with a raiding party. At the very least with guns, knives, and evil tempers.

What had that injun said?

We will die…but so will you.

Runyon shivered.

He shouldn’t have shot that one… he should’ve shot them all. He should’ve tracked the bastards through the snow and killed them. Shot them all down and saved himself a hell of a lot of trouble.

But now they were back.

Runyon lit his cigar back up. He wished he’d brought more bullets for the Colt, but, hell, he hadn’t expected any trouble like this. He should have known better. Those savages were always on the look out for a lone white man they could murder and rob.

They were circling the shack now. Moving with quiet footfalls. He could hear them scratching at the shack. But what he heard then made no sense: growling. A low, throaty, bestial growling. No man made sounds like that. Maybe they had brought a dog. He could hear it sniffing, pressing its nose up against the boards, growling low and snorting like a bull.

Runyon aimed the. 38 at the door.

The first one in was a dead man.

The door began to rattle, to shake as someone pulled at it. The boards were shuddering, groaning beneath great force. Nails began popping free. The entire shack was in motion now, swaying back and forth as something out there clawed and tore at it. It wasn’t built for such stress. The roof was collapsing, snow raining down as planks fell all around Runyon.

The lantern went out as it was engulfed in snow.

With something like a scream in his throat, Runyon began kicking at the rear of the shack, knocking boards free. Just as he pulled a few planks clear and squeezed his bulk through, the door was shattered to kindling.

Runyon plowed through the drifts, his ears reverberating with the deafening howls of the thing that could not be a man. Runyon ran through the swirling, blowing snow, tripping, falling, dragging himself forward. Behind him, there was an awful low evil growling and something that might have been teeth gnashing together.

He turned and fired twice at a blurry, dark shape.

A huge shape.

He could smell the beast now. It came on with a stink of decay, a reek of rotting meat and fresh blood.

Runyon screamed now, a high insane screech that broke apart in the wind.

And something answered with a barking wail.

Down in the snow, breath rasping in his lungs, fingers frozen stiffly on the butt of the Colt, Runyon saw a great black form leaping at him. Much too large to be a man. A giant. Runyon fired four more bullets and the gun was knocked from his hand.

But the wetness.

It steamed from his wrist.

In the numbing cold he hadn’t even felt it, but now he saw. The thing had sheared off his hand at the wrist. And as these thoughts reeled in his head with a quiet madness, the black nebulous shape attacked again.

Runyon saw leering red eyes the size of baseballs.

Smelled hot and foul breath like a carcass left to boil in the sun.

And then his belly was slashed open from crotch to throat and he knew only pain and dying.

Runyon was the first. But not the last.

8

By dawn, the storm had abated.

The wind was still cool and crisp, but only a few flakes of snow drifted from the clear, icy sky. In the Union Pacific Railroad yards in Wolf Creek, it was business as usual. Just before nine a flagman discovered the wreck of the signal shack. Searching around out back, he saw a single blood-encrusted hand jutting up from a snowdrift.

Within the hour, the law was there.

“What you make of it, Doc?” Sheriff Lauters asked. He was rubbing his gloved hands together, anxious to get this done with.

Dr. Perry merely shook his head. His hair was white as the snow, his drooping mustache just touched by a few strands of steel gray. He was a thin, slight man with a bad back. As he crouched by the mutilated body of Abe Runyon, you could see this. His face was screwed tight into a perpetual mask of discomfort. “I don’t know, Bill. I just don’t know.”

“Some kind of animal,” the sheriff said. “No man could do this. Maybe a big grizz.”

Perry shook his head, wincing. “No.” Pause. “No grizzly did this. These bite marks aren’t from any bear. None that I’ve ever come across.” He said this with conviction. “I’ve patched together and buried a lot of men in the mountains after they ran afoul of a hungry grizz. No bear did this.”

Lauters looked angry, his pale, bloated face hooking up in a scowl. “Then what for the love of God?” This whole thing smacked of trouble and the sheriff did not like trouble. “Dammit, Doc, I need answers. If there’s something on the prowl killing folks, I gotta know. I gotta know what I’m hunting.”

“Well it’s no bear,” Perry said stiffly, staring at the remains.

Abe Runyon was missing his left leg, right hand, and left arm. They hadn’t been cut as with an ax or saw, but ripped free. His face had been chewed off, his throat torn out. There was blood everywhere, crystallized in the snow. His body cavity had been hollowed out, the internals nowhere to be found. There was no doubt in either man’s mind-Abe Runyon had been devoured, he’d been killed for food.

With Lauters’ help, Perry flipped the frozen, stiffened body over. The flannel shirt Runyon had worn beneath his coveralls was shredded. Perry pushed aside a few ragged flaps of it, exposing Runyon’s back. There were jagged claw marks extending from his left shoulder blade to his buttocks.

“See this?” Perry said.

He took a pencil from his bag and examined the wound. There were four separate claw ruts here, each ripped into the flesh a good two inches at their deepest point. On the back of the neck there were puncture wounds that Perry knew were teeth marks. They were bigger around then the width of the pencil, and just about as deep.

“No bear has a mouth like that,” Perry told the sheriff. “The spacing and arrangement of these teeth are like nothing I’ve ever come across.”

“Shit, Doc,” Lauters spat. “Work with me here. Dogs? Wolves? A cougar? Give me something.”

Perry shrugged. “No wolf did this. No dog. Not a cat. You know how big this… predator must have been? Jesus.” He shook his head, not liking any of it. “Hell, you knew Abe. He wasn’t afraid of man nor beast. If it was wolves, they’d have stripped him clean. And he got off five shots from his. 38, so where are the dead ones?”

“Maybe he missed,” Lauters suggested.

“He was a crack shot and you know it.” Perry stood up stiffly with Lauter’s help. “Well, I’ll tell you, Bill. No bear did that, no way. Those teeth marks are incredible. The punctures are sunk in four, five inches easy.” He looked concerned. “I don’t know of anything in these parts that could do this. And I hope to God I never meet it in the flesh.”

“You saying we got us a new type of animal?”

Perry just shrugged, refused to speculate.

Lauters spat a stream of tobacco juice into the snow and looked up towards the mountains. He had a nasty feeling things were about to go bad in Wolf Creek.

9

When Joseph Longtree rode into the quadrangle of Fort Phil Kearny, the first thing he saw were bodies. Eight bodies laid out on the hardpacked snow and covered with tarps that fluttered and snapped in the wind. They were all cavalry troopers. Either wasted by disease or bullets. Both were quite common in the Wyoming Territory. He brought his horse to a halt before the bodies and followed a trooper to the livery.

Longtree had been to the fort before. But like all forts on the frontier, its command roster was constantly changing. During the height of the Sioux War of ’76, this was especially true. Troopers were dying left and right. And now, two years later, that hadn’t changed.

His horse stabled, Longtree made his way to the larger of the blockhouses, knowing it contained the command element of the fort. It was warm inside. A great stone hearth was filled with blazing logs. A few desks were scattered about, manned by tired-looking officers, their uniforms haggard and worn from a brilliant blue to a drab indigo. They watched him with red-rimmed eyes.

“Can I help you, sir?” a stoop-shouldered lieutenant asked. He had a tic in the corner of his mouth, his amber eyes constantly squinting. A habit formed from long months chasing Sioux war parties through the blazing summer heat and frozen winter wind.

Longtree licked his chapped lips, pulling open his coat and flashing his badge. “Joe Longtree,” he said in a flat voice. “Deputy U.S. Marshal. You have some orders here for me from the Marshals Office in Washington, I believe.”

“One moment, sir,” the lieutenant said, dragging himself away into the commanding officer’s quarters. He came back out with a short, burly captain.

“We’ve been expecting you, Marshal,” the captain said. He held out his hand. “Captain Wickham.”

Longtree shook with a limp grip. “The orders?”

“Don’t have ’em,” the captain apologized. His cheeks were full and ruddy, his hairline receding. Great gray muttonchop whiskers rode his face like pelts. “There’s a man here, though, to see you. A Marshal Tom Rivers. From Washington.”

Longtree’s eyes widened.

Rivers was the Chief U.S. Marshal. He was in charge of all the federal marshals in the Territories. Longtree hadn’t seen him since Rivers had appointed him.

“Tom Rivers?” Longtree asked, his face animated now.

“Yes, sir. He’s come to see you before riding on to Laramie. I’m afraid he’s out right now with Colonel Smith.” Wickham frowned. “One of our patrols was ambushed by a Sioux raiding party last night. We lost eight men. Eight damn men.”

Longtree nodded. “I saw the bodies.”

“Terrible, terrible thing,” Wickham admitted.

“Sure it was Sioux?”

Wickham looked insulted. “Sure? Of course we’re sure. I’ve fought them bastards for ten years, sir.” He quickly regained his composure. “We still have trouble with isolated bands. Most of ’em don’t even know Crazy Horse surrendered. And until they do…well you get the picture, Marshal.”

“When do you expect them back?”

“Before nightfall, sir. I’ve heard you went after the fugitives who robbed that wagon in Nebraska. Murdering thieves. How did you fare, sir?”

Longtree shrugged. “Not as well as I’d hoped.” He scratched his chin. “Had to bury all three of ’em. Would’ve liked ’em alive.”

“It’s what they deserve, sir.” Wickham patted Longtree on the shoulder. “It seems you have some time before the colonel and his party return. You’ve had a long hard ride, sir, might I suggest you take advantage of our hospitality?”

“It would be welcome,” Longtree said, the burden of the past few days laying heavy on him now.

“Lieutenant!” Wickham snapped. “Find a bed for the marshal. He’ll be wanting a hot meal and a bath, I would think.”

The stoop-shouldered lieutenant took off.

“If you’re a mind to, sir, I’d be pleased to join you for a hot drink.”

“Lead the way, Captain,” Longtree said.

10

The interior of the groghouse was dim and dark and smelled of pine sap and liquor. There were tables arranged down the center and knotty benches pushed up to them. Longtree and Wickham each got a mug of hot rum and sat down. There was no one else in the house but them.

Longtree hadn’t been to Kearny for some time, but it hadn’t changed very much. In ’68, it had been abandoned due to pressure from warring Indians. As had Forts C.F. Smith and Reno, all located along the old Bozeman Trail. Only Kearny had been re-opened, back in ’75.

“So tell me of your exploits in Bad River,” Wickham asked in his typically robust manner. He could discuss a woman’s frilly pink underthings and make it sound masculine with that voice.

Longtree sipped his drink. “Not much to tell.”

“They put up a fight, did they?”

Longtree laughed without meaning to do so. “You could say that.” In a low voice, he described the events that had transpired. “If it hadn’t been for that Flathead…well, you get the picture.”

Wickham furrowed his eyebrows. “A strange turn of events, I would say. Very few men survive the noose. I’ve known but one and he spent the remainder of his days with a crooked neck.”

“My throat doesn’t feel the best,” Longtree admitted, meeting the captain’s gaze, “but nothing’s damaged. A week or so, I’ll be fine.”

“Odd, though.”

Longtree had the distinct feeling Wickham didn’t believe him. He loosened the top few buttons of his shirt, revealing a bandage wound around his throat. Carefully, he unwrapped it. There was a bruised, abraded, and raw-looking wound coiled on his neck.

Wickham’s eyes bulged. “My God… how could you survive that? How?”

Longtree wound the bandage back up. “I don’t know. Luck? Fate? The grace of God?” He shrugged. “You tell me.”

Wickham had nothing to offer. He downed his rum. “Well, back to work, Marshal. I’m sure we’ll see each other before you leave. Good day, sir.”

Longtree watched him leave. No doubt he was going back to gossip about the hanged man to his fellow officers. Longtree supposed it had been a bit dramatic showing the wound, but he detested a look of disbelief in another man’s eyes. And after everything he’d been through, he figured he could be excused a bit of drama.

He ordered another rum and waited.

Waited and thought about Tom Rivers.

11

The room wasn’t bad.

There was a bed and blankets and a little firepot in the corner. A few logs blazed in it. A washtub had been filled for him with steaming water. A cake of soap and a couple towels were set out.

“Just like home,” Longtree said, kicking off his boots and clothes.

After his third hot rum, the lieutenant had come for him and brought him to the officer’s mess. He stuffed himself on tender buffalo steaks, sliced potatoes, and cornbread washed down with ale. He hadn’t eaten a meal quite so good in some time.

As he scrubbed a week’s worth of dirt and sweat off, he thought about Tom Rivers. Why would the Chief U.S. Marshal come all the way from Washington to the Wyoming Territory to bring him his assignment? It just didn’t wash. Maybe Rivers was out visiting his marshals-something Longtree had never heard of him doing-and had just decided to serve Longtree’s papers in person.

Could be.

But Wickham had said that Rivers wanted to see him before riding down to Laramie. What was so important that Rivers would wait around to see him in person? There had been no set time for the arrival of Longtree; it could’ve been today or next week or next month, for that matter.

Longtree reclined in the soothing, steaming waters and wondered about these things. Thoughts tumbled through his head in rapid succession.

There was always the possibility that Rivers had come in person to tell him that his appointment as a federal marshal had been revoked. It had happened to others. But it seemed unlikely. Longtree had been with the marshal service since ’70 and in that time, of the dozens and dozens of wanted men he’d hunted down, only a few had eluded him. His record was very impressive. If he was being turned out, then it wouldn’t be a matter of job performance.

The drinking? Was that it?

Also unlikely.

He hadn’t allowed himself to do much drinking recently. And the only time he did was between assignments. And lately, there’d been no time between them: one assignment came right on the heels of the last with no break in-between. It had always been the boredom before, waiting around with nothing to do, no constructive purpose, that set Longtree going on one of his drinking binges or indulgences in other vices.

No, Rivers coming had nothing to do with that.

But just what the reason was, Longtree couldn’t guess.

The next thing he knew, the water was cold and there was someone knocking frantically at the door.

“I’m coming,” the marshal mumbled.

He dragged himself to the door.

12

“Let me guess,” Longtree said. “I’m fired.”

“Of course not, Joe,” Tom Rivers said plopping himself down in a chair by the fire. He warmed his hands. “In fact, we need you more than ever now.”

Longtree, dressed only in a red union suit, pulled his shoulder-length dark hair back and tied it with a thong of leather. He reclined on the bed.

“Tell me of your expedition with Colonel Smith,” he said, changing the subject.

Rivers grinned, smoothing out his mustache. He was a thin man, corded with muscle. His face was lined and pocketed with shadow. His eyes a misty green, like the depths of a pond. He had an easy way about him and there were few who didn’t warm to him almost immediately. It was rumored that years ago when Rivers had been a marshal in Indian Territory, he’d charmed many a white and redskin outlaw into handing over their weapons. He was a natural diplomat. People just seemed to want to do good by him.

“We didn’t see a thing,” Rivers admitted. “Not a damn thing. The only injuns we came across were a beaten, pathetic lot, half-starved.” He shook his head. “I never cared much for the Sioux. You know that. Give me a Shoshone or a Pawnee or a Flathead any day. But to see them reduced to what they are now…well, it’s a sorry sight to see a once proud lot like them begging for a few crusts of bread.”

Longtree rolled a cigarette. “The buffalo are disappearing fast and with them, the Plains Indians. I think we’re about to see the death of an entire people.”

“It pains me some, I must admit,” Rivers said.

Longtree lit his cigarette. “I never loved the Dakotas either.” It was a truth that didn’t require elaboration. Longtree had been a scout in the army and had fought the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Commanche back in the sixties. He developed a hatred for the Sioux Nation not only for their campaigns against whites but for the brutalities and indiscriminate slaughter of other tribes. “But it’s a shame to see this happen. When the buffalo are gone…well, they won’t be far behind.”

“I’m afraid that was the plan, Joe.”

Longtree nodded.

In 1874, he knew, a group of Texas legislators had proposed a bill limiting the slaughter of the buffalo herds. It would’ve imposed restrictions of how many animals hunters could kill each day and limited the range in which they could be taken. It sounded like a good idea. But the army jumped all over it. The sooner the buffalo were gone, they argued, the sooner the backs of the Plains Indians would be broken. It was logical and during the height of the Indian Wars, no one really opposed such thinking. The army had found it almost impossible to pin down and defeat the swift-moving nomadic tribes of the plains-the Blackfeet, Sioux, Cheyenne, etc. But once the buffalo had been decimated, these peoples would no longer be able to feed, clothe, and house themselves. And an army cannot survive without raw materials.

It was sound thinking, if somewhat cruel.

But it worked.

“There must be a few bands out there still, though,” Rivers said. “It’ll probably take a few more years to clean them out.”

Longtree nodded. “Why don’t you tell me now why you’ve come.’’

“I’m just visiting my marshals. It’s something I’ve been planning on doing for awhile, I just haven’t gotten around to it.” Rivers paused, pulled out a clay pipe and filled it. “As for you, Joe, I have a special assignment.”

“Which is?”

“I need you to go up to Wolf Creek in the Montana Territory and look into some killings up there.”

Longtree exhaled a column of smoke. “Wolf Creek. I know of it, near Nevada City. But that’s John Benneman’s territory,” he reminded Rivers. Benneman was the deputy U.S. Marshal operating in southwestern Montana.

“Benneman’s on a leave of absence, Joe. He got shot up pretty bad bringing in a couple road agents. He’ll be out of commission for months.” Rivers looked unhappy about this. “Besides, this is a special situation. We need more than a lawman on this. We need someone with investigatory skills.”

“Go on.”

“There’s been five murders in and around Wolf Creek,” Rivers explained. “Vicious, brutal killings. It appears to be the work of an animal. The bodies have been devoured. But…well, you’ll see for yourself.”

“So hire a hunter, Tom. If it’s some marauding grizz that’s your best bet. I’ve been hunting men for too long now to be going after an animal.”

Rivers sighed. “Word has reached us that it may be a human being doing this. Nothing concrete, just rumor.”

Longtree lifted his eyebrows. “What are we talking here?”

“I don’t honestly know what’s going on, Joe. Something strange, that’s all. I want you to go up there and have a look. That’s all. Poke around a bit, see what you find out.”

“This is all pretty sketchy.”

Rivers looked him in the eye. “You’ve done more on less.”

“Maybe. Still, not much there.”

Rivers nodded. “I know. Just take a week or so and nose around. If you think we got an animal, fine. We’ll put a bounty on it and bring in the hunters. If it’s a man…well you know what to do then.”

Longtree still didn’t care for it. “What makes this government business, Tom? Sounds like a local matter to me. Doesn’t seem like our jurisdiction at all.”

Rivers found and held him with those crystal green eyes. “Shit, Joe, you know better than that. I can make just about any goddamn place the province of my marshals if I so choose.”

“Sure, Tom, I know. But humor me.”

“Well, we’ve got an ugly situation there, Joe. First off, Wolf Creek sits at the foot of the Tobacco Root Mountains and I don’t have to tell you what that means-silver. And lots of it. Some people back in Washington, some of whom I work for, don’t like this business at all and you can’t rightly blame them: they own interest in the mines. Secondly, we’ve got a camp of Blackfeet in the hills outside Wolf Creek on reservation land. And they’ve been crying foul to the Indian Agents about how the law has been treating them up there.” Rivers mulled it over. “What we’re afraid of is these murders getting hung on the Blackfeet and the locals taking matters into their own hands. And you know the Blackfeet. You know ’em well as any-they get pushed, they’ll push right back. They won’t tolerate whites raiding into their territory.”

“They’re a proud bunch,” Longtree said, nodding. “They don’t particularly care for whites and you sure as hell can’t blame them.”

“And that’s where you come in, Joe. You’re half-Crow.”

“Crow ain’t Blackfoot, Tom.”

“No, and a pecker’s not a pike, but you’re all we’ve got, my friend. Just go on up there, nose around. See if you can get friendly not only with the townsfolk, but the Blackfeet, too. They might accept you. We need somebody in there who can play both sides of the fence before this gets uglier than it already is.”

Longtree nodded. “Okay, I’ll do it. What they got for law in Wolf Creek?”

Tom Rivers sighed, chewed his lower lip. “Sheriff name of Lauters. He’s a hardcase, Joe. I never heard anything good about him. You might have trouble with him.”

“Oh, I’m sure I will. You always manage to stick me into some spot like this.”

Rivers laughed. “It’s why I keep you around.”

After Rivers left, Longtree sat and thought about it. Usually, he had a man to go after. Something tangible. Not this time.

It would be a challenge.

13

Early the next morning Longtree set out for Wolf Creek.

He took to the trail at a leisurely pace. He was a bit skeptical about any of the killings being done by a man once he learned the details. But if it was an animal, then it was like none he’d ever heard of. Few animals were brave enough to venture into a town. And none that he knew of would kill like that once they did and make a habit of it.

It had all the markings of a damn strange investigation.

14

Nathan Segaris sat in a copse of trees and waited.

He’d been watching the west bluff that separated Carl Hew’s grazing lands from those of the Blackfeet Indian reservation. Hew had about four-hundred head and if things went well, before morning, he’d be down about fifty.

Segaris grinned.

And it wasn’t a pleasant sight: he had no teeth, just mottled gums.

There were several broken sections of fence along the west bluff that Hew and his men hadn’t gotten around to repairing just yet. With a little help, these could be widened up nicely.

Segaris climbed back up on his brown and steered the gelding back down towards Wolf Creek. Tonight would be a good night. The others would meet him on around midnight and, with luck, they’d get those steer off of Hew’s land and into the next valley by morning.

It was a plan.

Segaris grinned and lit a cigar.

It was after sundown by the time he made it back to his little place outside of town. He made himself a meal of corn cakes and what remained of the smoked ham from yesterday. It wasn’t much, but it would suffice. And by this time next week, he’d have some real money for food.

He sat down and re-lit his cigar.

Life was grand, he thought, life was surely grand.

Outside, his horse whinnied.

He sat up. It was too early for the rest of the boys to show. He listened, cocking an ear. He could hear the wind out there, skirting the barn with the wail of widows.

Nothing else.

But Segaris was a careful man. He took his shotgun off the hook above the hearth, broke it open, and fed in two shells. If someone had come to pay a call, they’d best be wary.

The door rattled in its frame like someone had shaken it.

There was a scratching at it now. That and a hoarse, low breathing. Segaris stood up again and took aim, closing the distance to the door with a few light steps.

The door shook violently again and then exploded in with an icy gust of wind that carried a black, godless stink on it. Segaris was thrown to the floor. He came up shooting, not knowing what it was he was shooting at.

Then he saw.

“Sweet Jesus,” he muttered.

His screams echoed into the night.

15

Nobody in Wolf Creek particularly cared for Curly Del Vecchio.

He of the striped coats and trousers, gold watch chain, and immaculately brushed derby hats. He was a conniver and con man, gambler and self-styled ladies’ man who’d spent ten years in prison for his part in a horse-rustling ring. He fancied himself a champion pistol-fighter, but anyone with a real draw would’ve killed him before his hand even slapped leather.

The only thing Curly was really good at was drinking. This night he’d swallowed eight bottles of beer and was halfway through a pint of rum by the time he got to Nathan Segaris’ spread outside town. It was a cool night, a light snow falling, but Curly felt none of these things. He felt very good, very drunk. He was celebrating-prematurely-the theft of fifty head of Carl Hew’s steer.

He knew Nate Segaris and the others wouldn’t be too happy with him getting boozed up and all. But a man had a right to celebrate from time to time.

Especially one that was about to come into a good bit of money. Fifty head of old Hew’s cattle at fifty bucks a crack. That would be a nice chunk of change for the lot of them, being that five of their member were now gone. Five-hundred U.S. Treasury Greenbacks a man. Nothing to sneeze at.

“Rest in peace, boys,” Curly said to himself.

Five of us gone, he thought, five of us left.

Coincidence. That’s all.

Curly gave his old mare a little taste of the spurs-a nick in the sides, nothing more-and she picked up speed a bit, galloping over the hard-packed snow. She brought him over a little rise and there was Nate’s place. It looked inviting. A trail of smoke drifting from the chimney, a lantern glowing in the window.

I surely hope he has a bottle of something warm, Curly thought.

He tethered his horse in the barn and drunkenly made his way up to the front porch, stopping only once to urinate. He was on the top stair before he realized something was wrong.

The door had been ripped asunder, shattered into so much kindling. Only a few jagged sections clung to the hinges, the rest spread out over the floor in a rain of shards and split fragments.

Curly reached down for his old Army. 44.

The metal felt like ice in his trembling hand.

“Nate?” he called in a weak voice.

Getting no answer, he mounted the final two steps and stopped just inside the door. Tables were overturned and broken. Shelves collapsed, their contents strewn everywhere. A bag of flour had been ripped open and another of sugar. There was a dusting of white everywhere. A sudden chill gust kicked up, making the old house creak and sway, churning up dust devils of flour.

There was blood everywhere.

Curly’s stomach turned over.

It was pooled on the floor, sprayed on the walls, beading the old sheet iron cooking stove. The stink of it hung in the air with a ripe, raw insistence. It was in Curly’s nose, on his skin. He could taste it on his tongue.

He didn’t wait to see a body.

He didn’t need to.

He set off at a run, pounding through the snow, falling, slipping, but finally making the barn. He was cold stone sober as he unhitched the mare and climbed on.

The storm was starting again, wind and snow buzzing in the air.

The horse began to whinny, to pace wildly from side to side. It would move off in one direction, snort, and start off in another.

“Come on, damn you!” Curly cried, the smell of violent death everywhere. He pulled on the reigns and gave the mare the spurs. “Get up!”

The barn door slammed open in the wind and then shut again. Nate’s horse was whinnying and pulling madly at its tether in there. Something was wrong and both animals knew it.

The lamp in the house flickered and went out.

A cold chill went up Curly’s spine and it had nothing to do with the screaming, bitter wind. And then there was another sound in the distance: a low, horrible howling, an insane baying that rose up and was broke apart by the wind. Curly went cold all over, his hackles raising. That sound…the roar of a freight train echoing through a mineshaft.

The howling sounded out again.

Closer.

With a scream, Curly yanked on the reins and the mare took off down the road, nearly throwing him. It galloped crazily in the wrong direction and Curly couldn’t get it under control. His face went numb from the cold, his eyes watering. Terror rattled in his heart and in his ears-the howling.

Closer.

And closer still.

16

“Big” Bill Lauters dismounted his horse and waited for Dr. Perry to do the same. It took the old man a little longer.

“Damn cold,” Perry said. “My back’s really acting up.”

Lauters rubbed his hands together. “Let’s go,” he said. “Might as well get it over with.”

He went in the house first. He saw pretty much what Curly Del Vecchio had seen the night before. The house was trashed, looking much like a small tornado had whipped through. Furniture was shattered. Dishes and crockery broken into bits that crunched underfoot. Bottles were smashed. Everything seemed to be ripped and splintered. And over it all, flour, sugar…and blood.

“Mary, mother of God,” Perry gasped. “What in the hell happened here?”

Lauters surveyed the scene. He was disgusted, angry, but his features never changed-he always looked pissed-off. “What do you think happened here, Doc?” he said sarcastically.

They both knew what they were facing. They knew it from the moment word reached them that Nate Segaris hadn’t shown up at the Congregational Church that morning. Segaris never missed. He was a thief and a cheat, as everyone knew, but he never missed Sunday services. His mother had given him a strict moral and religious upbringing. And although he had managed to shake off the morality, the religion in his soul clung on tenaciously. Or had.

“What sort of animal does this?” Lauters asked for what seemed the hundredth time. “What sort of creature busts into a man’s house and does a thing like this?”

Perry said nothing. He had no answers. The killings were more than acts of hunger, but violent acts of mutilation and mayhem. And what sort of creature murders people for food like a savage beast and then destroys their lodgings like a crazy man?

Lauters looked at the blood everywhere. “He’s gotta be around here somewhere.”

Together they stepped through the carnage and hesitated before the door to the rear parlor. There were claw marks in the door running a good three feet. Perry examined them. The gouges were dug into the wood at least half an inch.

Perry swallowed dryly. “The strength this thing must have to do that.”

Lauters pushed through the door.

The parlor was wrecked, too. Segaris had kept all the belongings of his late wife in here. Her frilly pillows were gutted, feathers carpeting the floor. Her fine china serving sets pulverized in the corners. Her collection of porcelain dolls were broken into bits. One severed doll head stared at them with blue painted eyes. Her dresses which had been hanging from a brass rod, were shredded into confetti. Even the walls were scathed with claw marks, torn flaps of wallpaper hanging down like Spanish Moss.

“No animal does this, Doc,” Lauters said with authority. “No goddamn beast of the forest comes into a man’s home and wrecks it.”

Perry looked very closely at all he saw, scrutinizing everything with an investigator’s eye. He checked everything. He held a fold of wallpaper in his nimble fingers and examined it as though it were a precious antiquity. He mumbled a few words to himself and extracted a bit of something that was wedged between the wallpaper and baseboard.

“But no man leaves this behind,” he said, holding out what he found.

The sheriff took it, rubbed it between thumb and forefinger. It was a mat of gray coarse fur. “Some dog maybe,” he muttered to himself.

“Think so?”

Lauters scowled. “I don’t know what to think. I’ve got five dead men on my hands and what looks like possibly a sixth…what the hell am I supposed to say? What the hell do you want from me?”

“Easy, Sheriff.”

Lauters dropped the fur and stalked back into the living area. Cursing, with one hand pressed to the small of his back, Perry stooped and picked it up, sticking it in his pocket. Groaning he stood back up.

“Look here, Doc.”

Lauters was squatting down, next to a collapsed end table. There was a shotgun beneath it. It had been snapped nearly in half, the barrels bent into a U. Lauters sniffed them and checked the chambers. “Segaris got off two shots with this before it got him. And what,” he asked pointedly, “walks away from a shotgun blast?”

“Whatever made this track does,” Perry interjected.

Lauters was by his side now. There was a track in the flour, slightly obscured, but definitely the huge spoor of some unknown beast. “What in Christ has a foot like that?” he wondered aloud.

Perry just shook his head. “Not a man. We know that much.”

The print was over three feet in length, maybe eight inches in diameter. Long, almost streamlined, whatever left it had three long toes or claws in front and a shorter, thicker spur at the rear.

“Like the track of a rooster almost,” Lauters said helplessly.

“No bird left this,” Perry was quick to point out.

“Jesus, Doc,” Lauters said wearily. “The print of a giant.”

Perry moaned and stooped down.

“Ought to see someone about that back, Doc,” the sheriff joked out of habit, but there was no humor in his voice.

Perry ignored him. He was digging through the mess. His fingers found an iron loop. “Root cellar.”

With Lauter’s help, he pulled it up and threw it aside. The root cellar was a five-foot hole with walls of earth that had been squared off. Lying on the frozen mud of the floor was what remained of Nate Segaris.

“Shit,” Lauters said quietly.

Segaris was a mess. His guts had been cleaved open, the organs torn free, the body cavity hollow as a drum. His arms were broken in several places. Smashed and bitten. The fingers of his left hand were missing, save for the grisly nub of a thumb. His right leg was hacked off beneath the knee, leaving a knob of white ligament to mourn its passing.

Lauters swore beneath his breath and lowered himself down there. He thanked God it was November. Had it been the warm months…well, he didn’t want to think about the stink and the flies.

“It must’ve killed him and threw him down there,” Perry suggested.

“No shit, Doc.”

The sheriff wasn’t in the mood for Perry’s bullshit speculation. He wasn’t in the mood for anything these days. He searched around and could find no sign of the man’s missing appendages.

Above him, Perry stared down at the ruin of Segaris’ face.

His left eye was gone, as was most of the flesh around it. But his other eye was wide and staring with an accusatory glare. His mouth was frozen in a scream. The top of his head bitten clean open-even from five feet above, Perry could see the teeth marks sunk into the skull. The brains had been scooped out and, it would seem, the gray splatter in the corner was what remained of them.

Lauters looked up at the doc with pleading eyes. “God help us,” he uttered.

“I hope God can help us, Sheriff, I really do,” Perry said stoically. “But if he can’t, then we’d better start thinking about helping ourselves.”

Grumbling, Lauters pulled himself up out of the root cellar, ignoring Perry’s outstretched hand. He stood and brushed himself off.

“It would be interesting to know the turn of events,” Perry mused. “In what order they occurred.”

Lauters glared at him with watery gray eyes. “What possible use would that be? A man’s dead. Murdered. Half-eaten for the love of Christ.”

Perry nodded patiently. He brushed a silky wisp of white hair from his brow. “What I mean, Bill, is that it would help us to understand our killer if we knew a few things.”

“Like what for instance?”

“Well, for starters, I’d like to know if Segaris was killed before or after this place was torn apart. If it was after…well, then we’re talking about an act of hateful, willful destruction here, an act of vengeance. Hardly an animal characteristic.”

Lauters shook his head. “You look too deep into things.”

“And you,” Perry said, “don’t look deep enough.”

Lauters ignored him. “Let’s get back to town. We’ve got to get Spence out here with his wagon to cart this body off.”

“‘His wagon?’” Perry said. “Hate to be the one to tell you, Bill, but Spence is a woman.”

“That’s your opinion.” Lauters sighed and sipped from a pocket flask of whiskey. “Sooner we get that body into the ground, sooner folks’ll stop speculating about it.”

Perry followed him and mounted.

“Yes,” the sheriff said, finishing off his flask and stuffing it in his saddlebag, “I see trouble on the horizon, Doc.”

Perry said nothing. His eyes, however, looked to the mountains for an answer. There was none. Only wind and cold.

17

Later, standing outside his office and listening to the relative calm of a Sunday evening, Lauters kept drinking. He didn’t even feel the cold that swept down from the mountains. In his mind he saw only blood, death, and a forecast of more dying.

Wolf Creek was almost peaceful this night.

The ranch hands had stayed home. The miners had stayed up at the silver camps. Few people ventured out of doors. Maybe it was the frigid temperatures or the blowing snow. But maybe it was something else. Something that killed people for sport as well as food. Maybe this is what kept people behind locked doors.

Lauters took another pull from his silver flask.

Even the old Blackfeet beggars were nowhere to be seen. Come to think of it, he hadn’t seen any injuns around for some time. Since the killings began, it seemed. This stopped the flask at his lips.

Was that worth considering? he wondered.

Could the Indians have something to do with the murders? Maybe. Maybe not. The local Blackfeet tended to steer clear of town for the most part, being that a lot of folks tended to harass them for no good reason. And when a major crime like a murder or robbery came down, they were nowhere to be found. Again, because if a scapegoat was needed, an injun was always a good bet.

Thinking of this, made the sheriff remember the time that Blackfoot was hanged.

He scowled and took another drink.

The Blackfoot’s name was Red Elk. He was being held in connection with the rape and murder of a local white girl, name of Carpenter. The girl had no family. She was new to Wolf Creek. Red Elk had supposedly surprised her one night as she left the dry goods store she worked at, forced himself on her and then cut her throat.

The second night the injun was in jail, the vigilantes came. They wore black hoods with eye and mouth slits. Nine of them pushed their way into the jailhouse.

“We want the injun,” the leader said. “And we plan to have him.”

“You boys better clear out of here,” Lauters had told them.

The vigilantes all carried guns and they were all on the sheriff.

“You don’t understand,” the leader said. “We want that murdering redskin and we’ll kill you if need be to get ’em.”

Lauters had gone for his gun, but the men were already on him. They knocked him senseless with the butts of their rifles and tied him to his chair. When he came to later, it was all done with. His deputy-Alden Bowes-had returned from delivering a prisoner to Virginia City and untied him.

Red Elk was hanged from an oak in the square across the street.

There were a few questions after that, but none Lauters couldn’t answer. The men had worn masks, he couldn’t identify them. They had overpowered him and he had the bruises to show for it. And why had he sent his deputy away to deliver a prisoner to Virginia City with a volatile situation brewing and anti-Indian sentiment running high? He’d thought no one would try such a thing.

The questions were answered to everyone’s satisfaction.

Besides, the man they’d strung up was just an Indian, a Blackfoot. And he’d killed a white. Case closed. The only ones really concerned were the Blackfeet people and they didn’t count.

Everyone else believed Lauters.

They never guessed he was lying about it all.

Knowing this, Lauters drank more. It was a year ago this week that the injun had been lynched and duly swung. In his mind, he could hear the creaking of that limb the noose was strung over.

It made him shiver.

18

The blizzard had been threatening for several days. On around midnight of the day Nate Segaris’ body was discovered and carted away in Wynona Spence’s funeral wagon to be plucked and polished in secret, it hit. It came down out of the Tobacco Root Mountains, urged forward by shrill, squealing winds that forced the mercury well below freezing. Several feet of heavy, blowing snow were dumped over Wolf Creek, the wind sculpting it into four and five foot drifts that looked like frozen waves crashing ashore on some alien beach.

Around four, the storm passed.

The world was white. Drifting, swirling, frozen. In the foothills of the mountains, Curly Del Vecchio waited in an old abandoned mine shaft wondering when death would come. His horse threw him the night before, a short distance away, breaking his leg in the process.

Now it was night again.

He was alone.

Thankful only that he found the old shaft. Thankful there was a firepot in it and a heap of kindling left behind when the miners sought greener pastures. Enough wood to burn for three, maybe four days. Maybe by then, he hoped, someone would find him.

Maybe not.

Curly fed the fire only when he had to. This way the blaze would last for days, he figured. The only other thing he did was look at his leg and the bloody knob of bone that had burst through the skin. If he moved too much, the pain was so intense he lost consciousness.

So he sat and fed the fire.

The rest of the time was spent in a feverish half-sleep in which shadows mulled around him. Shadows with claws and teeth that reached out for him as the moon brooded above, a yellow, dead winking eye.

Curly didn’t even move to relieve himself. He pissed his pants and his crotch steamed with spreading warmth. If he moved his head just a few inches, he could see the mouth of the shaft and the world beyond. A huge drift had insinuated itself there now and he could see only a few feet of the world. He saw parting, rolling clouds and cold stars. And a sliver of moon growing fat by the day like a spider gorging on flies.

Long before dawn, a savage, primal baying rode the screaming winds. Curly wondered again when death would come.

Then, before sunup, with the decayed stink of an old slaughterhouse, it did.

19

It was two days later when Joseph Longtree approached Wolf Creek.

He came from the southeast, across the Madison River on a night of blowing snow and subzero winds. He paused astride his black on a ridge outside town, looking down at the sprawl of houses, buildings, and farms below him. Wolf Creek was a mining town, he knew, its blood running rich from transfusions pumped in from ore veins. There were miners here and ranchers. That and a lot of hatred between the whites and local Blackfeet tribe. Tom Rivers had told him this much.

Not that he needed to be told.

Whites hated most Indians as a rule.

And the Blackfeet, he knew, were a hostile bunch. They’d fought whites and, before them, other Indians. And with a vengeance next to which even the Dakotas often paled. But Longtree knew the Blackfeet weren’t a bad lot. Not really. Just fiercely territorial and unrelentingly proud.

Longtree held no prejudices against them.

In his line of work, he couldn’t afford to. Such things blinded a man’s judgment. And the last thing he ever wanted was to arrest a man and see him brought to trial (and possibly the gallows) simply because of his skin color.

Longtree accepted long ago, that although he might’ve been a lot of things, no one would ever accuse him of not being fair or honest.

20

Joseph Smith Longtree was born in 1836, the son of William “Bearclaw” Smith, a mountain man, and Piney River, a Crow Indian. His father had died fighting Commanches in 1842. Longtree had barely known him. In 1845, a Sioux raiding party attacked Longtree’s village on the Powder River, killing everyone but himself and a few others that had scattered. His mother was among the dead. Longtree was taken away by a local missionary priest to a mission school in Nebraska. After seven years of strict Catholic upbringing and schooling, Longtree left.

He ran away, making his way west.

He fell in with a reformed gunman named Rawlings who was canvassing the Wyoming and Montana Territories in his new profession as a Baptist preacher in search of a congregation. Rawlings still carried a gun; only a fool didn’t in the Territories. During their months together, Rawlings, very impressed with Longtree’s knowledge of the Bible and other matters spiritual, taught him how to shoot. Getting the boy an old. 44 Colt Dragoon, he drilled him every day for hours until Longtree could knock an apple out of a tree from forty feet with one swift, decisive movement.

In southeastern Montana, Rawlings and Longtree went their separate ways. Longtree sought out his Uncle Lone Hawk, who’d been away on the day the Sioux raided their village and hadn’t returned until long after Longtree had been carted away by the missionary. Lone Hawk and his family had a cabin on the Little Powder River and it was here that Longtree spent the next five years.

His mother’s brother was a practical man.

He knew the old ways were dying fast and a new world was beginning for the Indian. He himself lived more like a white man than a red one. He knew a young man needed a trade, a skill with which to eke out a living. But he also believed one should be acquainted with and be proud of one’s ancestral heritage. He found a way in which he could bestow both upon young Joe Longtree-he would train him in the time-honored ways of the Indian, he would school him as a scout.

For the next five years, under Lone Hawk’s tutelage, Longtree learned how to “read sign”: tracking animal and man, learning a wealth of information from such subtle clues as footprints, hoof marks, and bent blades of grass. He learned the fine art of pathfinding. He learned how to doctor wounds with expertise. He learned how to live off the land-what plants and roots could be eaten, which could not, and which could be used as medicines; how to locate and stalk game; how to find water and dozens of other tricks. He learned how to hunt and fight with a knife, a hatchet, the bow and arrow, the lance. He received advanced instruction in shooting and navigation by the sun and stars. He was taught the arts of stealth and concealment.

All in all, everything the Crow had learned in thousands of years of survival were taught Longtree in a few years.

After five years, Longtree left and signed on as an Indian scout to the army. For the next six years he fought with the whites against the Commanche and Cheyenne.

Afterwards, his belly full of blood and death and atrocities committed by Indian and white alike, he drifted to San Francisco. Where, among other things, he made a name for himself (Kid Crow) as a barefisted boxer. Made a good run of it until an Irish hothead named Jimmy Elliot gave him a thrashing he wouldn’t forget this side of the grave. Restless, tired of hitting and being hit, Longtree headed into the Arizona Territory where he turned his skill as a scout to tracking men as a bounty hunter. After six years of that, with a record boasting of tracking thirty men and bringing them all in (dead or alive), he was appointed as a deputy U.S. Marshal in the New Mexico Territory and later, Utah Territory, and finally, a special federal marshal.

And now after all the killing he’d done, all the men he’d tracked, all the convicts and murderers he’d brought in, Longtree was going after something a little different.

A killer that acted like a man.

But sported the hungers of an animal.

21

It was late when Longtree found the body.

He was just making his way down a slope of scrub oak towards the outskirts of Wolf Creek when he saw what might have been an arm covered with a light dusting of snow. Bringing his gelding to an abrupt halt, Longtree dismounted and fought through the snowdrifts to what he’d seen. The wind was blowing with fierce raw-edged gusts that whistled through the hills. His long buffalo coat flapped around him as he bent down and began to dig through the drifts to expose the rest of the corpse.

He got his oil lantern out and lit it.

The corpse wasn’t worth revealing.

Especially on this night of black, howling wind and bitter flurries. Longtree judged the man to be in his mid-forties and this was about all he could tell. The body was mutilated, chest and belly gouged open. The flesh clawed and shredded to the point that it and the ripped garments it wore were knotted into each other. Both legs were snapped off below the knees, skin stripped free. The head was twisted around so it was face down in the snow. Both arms had been pulled off. One was missing, the other nearby, mangled and punctured with teeth marks, a Colt pistol frozen in its red fist.

Longtree tried to turn the remains over, but they were frozen into the earth. He poked and prodded gently in the snow with his gloved fingers. There was very little blood around, most of it frozen into sparkling crystals.

Not enough for a slaughter of this magnitude.

Longtree surmised from this that the man had been killed somewhere else and dragged here, gutted and dismembered on the spot.

He looked around for the remains of the cadaver’s legs, but they were gone.

He studied the body again in the dancing light.

It was hard to say exactly how the man had died, such was the nature of the carnage. His throat was torn out. Little remained of it but a twisted spiral ladder of vertebrae and hacked ligament. He had been opened up in countless places and could’ve bled to death from any of a dozen wounds. Longtree figured the attack must’ve been sudden and vicious. But not too sudden; the man had drawn his gun, precious little good it had done him.

The initial attack must’ve been savage. Brutal beyond comprehension. The man was dead long before he was dumped here and cannibalized.

Longtree examined the wounds the best he could in the flickering light.

From the teeth and claw marks there was no doubt in his mind: Only an animal could have done this. A huge and powerful beast with iron hooks for claws and jaws like razored bear traps. No man possessed the strength. No insane mind, regardless how fevered, could’ve summoned up the strength to pull a man literally apart. And the tools that would’ve been needed to create such injuries would have been complex beyond reason.

The killer in Wolf Creek was an animal.

Type: unknown.

Clenching his teeth and sucking in icy air, Longtree picked up the severed arm. It was much like handling a frozen leg of lamb. Wedging the limb between his knees, he began the grisly task of pulling the fingers free of the gun. He had to know if it had been fired. Rigor mortis and the freezing temperatures had turned the hand into an ice sculpture. The fingers snapped like pretzel rods as he forced them away from the Colt. Two popped off completely and fell in the snow.

It was gruesome work.

But it wouldn’t be the first time Longtree had done such things. A man in his line of work spent a lot of time urging the dead to give up their secrets.

The gun had been fired; only three bullets remained in the chambers.

He set the arm and weapon next to the body.

Mounting his horse, he rode into a little arroyo that was protected by a wall of pines. He tethered the black to a tree and gathered up some firewood with his hatchet. The wind was reduced to a gentle breeze in the gully and Longtree got the fire going right away. He would spend the night here. In the morning, he would drag the body into Wolf Creek and begin the job he’d come to do.

He unhitched his saddle from the black and jerked the saddle blanket off, stretching it over some rocks to let it dry; it was damp with the horse’s perspiration. Longtree curled up before the blazing fire and chewed some jerky from his grub sack.

He dozed.

22

He didn’t sleep long.

Sometime after midnight he heard horses coming up the trail that cut down the slope below him and led in the direction of Wolf Creek. He heard at least a half dozen of them come within three-hundred yards of his position, the riders dismounting. They must’ve seen the smoke from his fire.

He pulled himself free from his bedroll and swigged from his canteen.

In silence, he waited.

He heard them coming, stumbling through the snow to the pines that sheltered his arroyo. They were a noisy lot. Had to be whites. They stomped forward, chatting and arguing.

Longtree strapped on his nickel-plated Colt. 45 Peacemakers and drew his Winchester from the saddle boot. Then he waited. They were coming down now. Longtree positioned himself away from the glow of the fire, leaning against a shelf of rocks, hidden in shadow.

They came down together, six men in heavy woolen coats. They sported shotguns and pistols and one even had an ancient Hawken rifle. They plowed down, packed together. Very unprofessional. It would’ve been easy killing the lot of them.

“You got business here?” Longtree called from the darkness.

They looked startled, hearing a voice echoing, but unable to pinpoint it. They scanned their guns in every which direction. Longtree smiled.

“Identify yourselves or I’ll start shooting,” he called out.

The men looked around, bumping into each other.

“Bill Lauters,” a big man said. “Sheriff, Wolf Creek.” He tapped a badge pinned to his coat.

Longtree sighed. He knew who Lauters was.

He stepped out of the shadows and moved noiselessly to them. He was almost on top of them before they saw him and then their guns were on him.

“Who the hell are you?” one of them said.

“Easy, Dewey,” Lauters said.

“Longtree, deputy U.S. Marshal,” he said in an even tone, showing his own badge. “You were wired about—”

“Yeah, yeah, I got it all right. I know who you are and why you’re here.” Lauters said this as if the idea were beneath contempt. “You can just ride right back out again far as I’m concerned. We don’t need no damn federal help.”

“Regardless, Sheriff, you’re going to get it.”

“Where the hell’s Benneman?” the one called Dewey asked. “He’s the federal marshal in these parts.”

“John Benneman got shot up,” Longtree explained. “He’ll be out of action a while.”

Lauters spit a stream of tobacco juice in the snow. “And we’re really lucky, boys, cause we got us a special U.S. Marshal here,” he said sarcastically. “I guess we can just hang up our guns now.”

Longtree smiled thinly. “I’m not taking over your investigation, Sheriff. I’m just here to help.”

“My ass you are,” one of them muttered.

“Nothing but trouble,” another said.

Lauters nodded. “We don’t need your help.”

“Don’t you?”

“Ride out,” Lauters said. “Ride the hell out of here.”

“Never happen,” Longtree assured him.

The guns weren’t lowered; they were raised now, if anything.

“I’m here to help. Nothing more.” Longtree fished out a cigar and lit it with an ember from the fire. “Course,” he said, “if you boys would rather stand around and argue like a bunch of schoolboys while more people are killed, that’s your own affair.”

“Who the hell you think you’re talking to here?” Lauters snapped, taking a step forward.

Longtree stood up, pushing aside his coat and resting his hand on the butt of a Colt. They all saw this and he wanted them to. “I think I’m talking to a man with a strong like of himself.”

Lauters’ face went slack and then tight in the blink of an eye. “Listen, you sonofabitch!” he barked. “I don’t need your goddamn help! I’m the law in this town! Not you, not the U.S. Marshals Office! If you’re coming into my town, then you do what I say when I say to do it! Understand?”

Longtree remained impassive. “All I understand, Sheriff, is that you’ve got five dead men on your hands and if you keep this up, you’ll have more.” Longtree let that sink in. “Maybe if we work together, we can stop these killings.”

There was no arguing with that.

“You just keep out of my way, Longtree. I don’t need your damn help.”

Longtree nodded. “That’s fine, Sheriff. That’s just fine. I’ll do my own investigation. But I sure would appreciate your help.”

Lauters gave him an evil stare. “Forget it. We don’t need outsiders making any more of a mess of this.”

“Sheriff,” the one called Dewey said calmly. “We got six murders, here, for the love of God. If he can help—”

“Shut up, Dewey.” Lauters turned his back on all of them and started up out of the gully.

“Who’s the sixth?” Longtree asked.

“Nate Segaris,” one of the men replied. “Got killed right in his house.”

“Ripped to shreds,” another said.

Longtree took a drag off his cigar. “Before you boys head back,” he said, “you ought to know there’s a seventh.”

Everyone stared at him.

And in the distance, a low mournful howling rose up and died away.