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Du Pré kept his mouth shut.

“Carts?” said Father Van Den Heuvel.

“Long time,” said Madelaine. “You guys you aren’t much around, come, help make a baby, we send you off, be a voyageur, a hunter, ’cept for those of you supposed to be ten miles away from the camp make sure nothing get to us and our babies.”

Du Pré nodded.

“So I am mad,” said Madelaine.

Du Pré nodded.

“Du Pré he knows something and he will not tell me. He will not tell me because he does not want, scare this guy. He rather scare me instead. Don’t let me know, maybe use one of my babies as some bait.”

Du Pré shook his head.

“Shit,” said Madelaine. “You lie to me, Du Pré. I cut your damn dick off right then.”

Du Pré looked at the ceiling.

“We must be gentle with each other,” said the priest.

“You shove up your ass, gentle with each other,” said Madelaine. “That damn Du Pré know someone he think maybe do this and he won’t tell me so it don’t scare the guy off. He don’t trust me.”

No shit, thought Du Pré, you take a shotgun to him, be sure that it not come from his direction. No shit I don’t tell you.

“Uh,” said Father Van Den Heuvel. “We could go and get a cup of coffee and maybe talk.” ‘

“Priest,” said Madelaine, “I want shit out of you I squeeze your head. My baby Lourdes we are talking, my baby Simone. You think more people save this damn Du Pré’s sorry ass I think maybe you squeeze your own head. Now, you are nice man, but you are not much help. Why don’t you go, talk to someone, listens. I got no time.”

“Uh,” said Father Van Den Heuvel.

“You go,” said Du Pré. “You go on. She is right.”

“Please,” said the priest. “No more of this.”

“More of what?” said Madelaine. “I bust up some, cheap Kmart plates, bowls, you wipe out all my porcelain, some my great-grandmother’s. Some help.”

“I’ll go,” said Father Van Den Heuvel.

“In some time I be sorry I am mean to you,” said Madelaine, “but now I am not sorry. Go talk, someone else. Go fuck a goddamn goat. Go fuck a goddamn goat in your church, there, I got to talk, this Métis piece of shit.”

Du Pré held his hands up, palms to the sky. He looked at the priest and he shrugged.

“You got to go,” said Du Pré. “Me, I maybe die but you cannot help that either.”

“He give you that Extreme Unction,” said Madelaine.

“I …” said the priest. He was almost gasping.

“It will be all right,” said Du Pré. “People, they the all the time. It is very common thing for them to do.”

“I say I am sorry, I won’t throw nothing more at Du Pré. I not cut his damn nuts off. I am sorry my Jesus. I lose my temper, I come say your fucking Hail Marys and I repent a lot when I fucking well want to repent,” said Madelaine. “But you better go now.”

The big priest crunched away on the bones of Madeline’s porcelain. The door shut gently.

They heard a yelp when he tripped and fell off the porch.

They waited.

The car door slammed. The car started.

“Him,” said Madelaine. “At least he don’t shut his head in it this time.”

Du Pré nodded.

“I find the guy, I am following him,” said Du Pré.

“He in my kitchen, here?” said Madelaine.

“I got to go,” said Du Pré.

“Yah,” said Madelaine. “You better, better not come back he is dead, you hear me?”

Du Pré nodded.

“My babies,” said Madelaine.

Du Pré left.

D
U
P
RÉ WAS SLEEPING
on a high ridge that reached out west from the Wolf Mountains. He’d found a place with several stone peekaboos, piles of flat plates of shale left long ago by other hunters. They could look through the gaps between the stones and not show any movement. From the ridge, Du Pré could see maybe seventy miles north and a hundred west and fifty south. To the east the Wolf Mountains rose, stacked in an east-west line, blue flanks of pine and spruce and fir, the rock above the timberline gray as the sea, some snow on the peaks every month of the year.

A mule deer, curious, had come to look at him. The deer slipped on some shattered yellow mudstones and it leaped in panic and sent down a shower of rock from the ledge it climbed in one bound. Du Pré awoke, his gun in his hand.

There was a flash of green light. A meteor streaked yellow-green across the sky, north to south. The bright trail faded quickly. Du Pré shut his eyes and the dancing spot where the last yellow flash as the meteor evaporated utterly burned a moment behind his eyes.

It was cold. The wind was still. The air was dry.

My people come down from Red River in the fall, Du Pré thought, to get that winter meat. Drive them little two-wheeled Red River carts, cottonwood rounds for wheels, not a piece of metal in them, they carry the parfleches, we drive the buffalo into corrals and kill them, dry the meat, the leader of the hunt he makes sure everybody got all their winter meat before he take any. Go on home. Them Sioux, Assiniboine, Blackfeet, sometimes the Crows they try to steal our horses, steal our women, kill the men, drive us away from the buffalo. We don’t go. We got them Hudson’s Bay Company muskets.

Trail is right over there ten miles. No Red River carts, long time. I can still hear them, the night. Screek screek screek, you hear them axles, twenty miles across the prairies. No grease on them, time to time, they catch fire. Métis men, they piss on them, keep them cool. Not so much water here.

Red River.

Benetsee and Madelaine they tell me things, better listen.

That Bart, I go to him, say, I need someone, keep on that Simpson’s trail, keep real close. So that Bart, he look at me, see his chance. If he got someone close, I don’t kill that damn Simpson.

Some reporter, Bart’s newspapers, he is with that crew, big story in the Sunday paper, “Do You Know Where Your Noodles Come From?”

That Hi-Line Killer, him I got to find.

Dream that deer and the deer come.

Dream that killer and he leave me a track.

Sick bastard.

Du Pré slid out of his bedroll and he walked a few feet away and he pissed. The stream steamed in the cold night air.

OK, my Madelaine, I am out, the country, keep him away from you, your babies. Like we used to do. Don’t paint my face, though.

It was four in the morning. The dawn would come in an hour, a first faint rim of pink in the east.

Du Pré rolled up his blankets and sougans in his henskin and he fastened the clips and he tossed it to his shoulder and he walked down to where his old cruiser was parked. He dropped the bedroll into the trunk and he set the bag with his whiskey and tobacco and spare 9mm clips and ammunition and jerky and chocolate on the front seat. He had turned the car around when he had parked it. He drove down the rutted stony trail to the county road, followed that to a small two-lane blacktop. The road was narrow and poorly surfaced. Du Pré sped along at seventy-five, wallowing around the worst potholes.

He got to Raster Creek’s rest area when the light was rising to full day. He parked the cruiser and went into the john and came back out and he walked slowly back to where little Barbara Morissette had lain, her head stuck in her belly and the flies dancing around the blood and wounds.

He took his time.

Some guy, walked back here, maybe yesterday, the afternoon. Du Pré got down on his haunches and he looked at the faint print of a bootsole, a hiking boot with five stars up the center of the sole.

He counted the ant tracks across the earth. Into the faint depression and on toward whatever it was that the ants were working on. A bombardier beetle had scuttled across. Four and one. He looked over at the anthill twenty feet away.

Yah, he thought, maybe twenty-four hours. Less, I think. Yesterday afternoon, late. No dew, no rain. Who are you?

He looked ahead at the line of tracks going straight to where little Barbara had lain. No dog tracks, the guy wasn’t pumping his pooch out. He was going right there. No reason to go right there. No reason …

Du Pré went on. He saw a folded piece of yellow paper, one the size of a deck of cards. Thirty feet ahead.

Du Pré moved slower than he had.

Same tracks. Don’t miss nothing now.

The piece of paper had got stuck against a sagebrush. Little wind did that. Yesterday late afternoon, when the wind always comes up from the west.

Du Pré moved slowly.

When he got to the paper he squatted and he reached out and picked it up gently and he turned it over in his fingers. The paper was crushed and shiny and on one side there was a faint stain, a brown one. Guy folded it, stuck it in his hip pocket between his wallet and his ass. Sat on it. Sweated in it. Tamped it down good.

Du Pré looked up at a hawk that had floated between Du Pré and the rising sun. The shadow had flitted across his face. The hawk was hovering. It plunged and Du Pré heard a squeak, cut off.

Du Pré unfolded the paper. Heavy, yellow stock. Printed with an announcement for a model airplane show. In Fargo, North Dakota. In two days.

Du Pré looked at the other side.

A name. An address. In Renton, Washington.

Du Pré looked at it for a long time.

He refolded the paper and he put it in his pocket and he went on toward little Barbara Morissette’s killing ground.

Du Pré saw the cheap pair of girl’s underwear cast on the ground where Barbara had lain. He went forward quickly and he picked up the panties and he saw the stains on them. He looked down and there were the spread prints of the bootsoles and the little gouge where a heavy belt buckle had hit to the left of the left foot when the man had dropped his pants to jerk off.

Only this guy, Du Pré thought, is him. Nobody else been back here. Just this guy. He was here, not long ago.

Du Pré walked back quickly to his cruiser. He stuffed the panties into the trash receptacle, down under a bag of cans and cigarette butts. He took out the yellow piece of paper and he stared at it for a long time.

Then he struck a farmer’s match and he burned it and he ground the black ash to smears on the yellow earth.

OK, I come now.

Du Pré looked toward the sun in the east. It was shining red through low haze.

Du Pré got in his cruiser. He rolled a smoke and he had a little whiskey. He was thirsty. He got some big glasses of cold water from a blue-and-white thermal jug. He ate a little jerky.

He drove on east. Fast. He got to a junction and he angled off south a little. He drove like hell. He got to the Interstate and he got on and he slowed down twenty miles an hour.

He stopped and got gas just over the line in North Dakota. He passed the place where the Yellowstone and Missouri Rivers joined.

Used to be a big trading post there.

Take them furs in, get bad whiskey. Trade beads, knives, brass pots and vermilion, needles and thread, flour, tobacco.

Voyageurs, some of them take the boats down to St. Louis, New Orleans. Float down, haul them damn boats back up on a rope over your shoulder. Long damn walk. Takes two years, the trip back.

Du Pré turned off on a secondary highway and he headed toward the Turtle Mountain Reservation.

Been many times, this country, he thought.

See them cousins of mine.

Talk to Bassman.

Du Pré called Bassman’s house from a pay phone at a gas station.

The number was temporarily out of service.

’Nother poor Métis, can’t pay his phone bill.

Du Pré drove on to Bassman’s house. His first wife had got drunk and died in a car wreck five years ago. Bassman had remarried quickly and the kids from the first and second marriages were all playing in the yard, a year or so between their ages. Except that there wasn’t a four-year-old, since Bassman had taken ten months or a year to find that new wife. The kids were running around and laughing and the older ones were watching out for the younger ones. A couple disreputable yellow dogs barked when Du Pré pulled in and he parked.

Bassman came out the front door. He was wearing a tattered red T-shirt, jeans, and moccasins. His hair was braided. This month, he was Indian. Next month, maybe, he cut his hair short and wear a long-sleeved Western shirt, hide the needle tracks on his arms. Bassman had spent ten years in LA, mostly not very good ones.

Du Pré liked him a lot.

“Du Pré,” said Bassman, “you come on in here, now, you eat?”

“Yah,” said Du Pré.

“You look tired. Sleep?”

Du Pré shook his head.

“Ah,” said Bassman, coming down to the cluttered yard. “You need a car got them good North Dakota license plates.”

Du Pré nodded. Moccasin telegraph still worked pretty good.

“I got you a good one,” said Bassman.

They drove over to where it was. Pretty new van, good engine, good tires. Dark blue. Curtain behind the bucket seats.

“Keys in it,” said Bassman, carrying Du Pré’s bedroll. “All gassed, you need anything, Fargo, you call that Le Bon. Toussaint Le Bon. He fiddles some good as you.”

Du Pré nodded. He lifted his bag from the front seat of the cruiser.

He walked to the van and he got in and he tossed his bag on the floor behind.

He rolled down the window.

Bassman handed him a paper bag. It had something small and heavy in it. It rattled a little.

Du Pré looked at Bassman.

Bassman nodded.

D
U
P
RÉ WAS FILTHY
. He hadn’t shaved and he reeked of sweat and cheap wine.

The fairgrounds had a big crowd of people in it, all come to see the model airplane show. The little planes zoomed and snarled and dived and the operators stood in little knots watching the competition.

Du Pré had taken one pass through the parking area and he found the truck he was looking for. A van, long-bed, dusty from the long drive. The rear tires were larger than the ones on the front. They were radials and they were deformed. The van was heavier in the rear than it should be. Du Pré glanced in the rear window. The floor was elevated a foot and a half from the original. Du Pré walked around the driver’s side. There was an extra gas cap and it was mounted high, back of the driver’s door. The other was behind a locking flap.