Moontrap - Don Berry (9 page)

Monday looked up finally. His hands remained tightly
laced on the table in front of him. "That sounds awful much like
a threat."

Thurston shrugged. "Not in the least. I find
threats quite unnecessary. All that is required is a clear
understanding of the situation that exists. I had thought your
eyesight was improving, but I discover there are still areas of
blindness. I sincerely hope, for your sake, that the difficulty is
temporary. Good-by, Monday."

He turned and walked quickly out the door. Monday
heard the rustle as he took up the reins and turned the horse back up
the trail. He listened until the sounds of the horse's hoofs on the
packed trail were no longer audible.

He cradled his head in his hands and stared down at
the scarred table planks, tracing with his eyes the nicks and scrapes
of knives carelessly dropped, the darker stains of spilled coffee and
the blood of rare meat. Suddenly he raised his head at a sound near
the back of the house. In a moment Mary came through the door,
carrying the bucket.

"How long you been back?" he asked.

"I have just come." She went to the
cupboard at the back and got a leaf of paper to dump the berries on.

"You didn't get much," Monday said, looking
at the small pile.

"
Many were not ripe," Mary said. "There
is enough for a pie, if we could get some flour."

Monday put his head back in his hands. There was no
way to tell whether she had heard Thurston's comments or not. It was
one of the many things he would never know.

"Mr. Thurston did not drink his coffee,"
Mary said, taking the full cup from the table.

"He likes sugar in it, " Monday said.

2

He woke feeling dull and depressed in the morning. A
random thought came to him as he struggled up out of the darkness of
sleep, blurred by half-consciousness. They just won't leave me alone,
he thought blearily. Yesterday he had wakened clean and fresh, with
only the consciousness of Mary's body and his own, side by side. This
morning he was back in a world of complexity he had not made. Seemed
as though just as soon as a man got to feeling loose, somebody had to
remind him of the way things really were.

Mary was already up, moving about the fireplace.
Monday turned his head to watch her. With a long scoop she was
dipping up the feathery gray ashes and dumping them into the ash
hopper that stood at the side of the fireplace.

Monday hoisted himself up to his elbows, blinking
with sleepiness, and rubbed the back of his neck. It was always hard
for him to wake when there were things he didn't want to do.

Mary turned briefly to see him rise, then returned to
the slow, gentle pouring of the ashes. Monday watched the pale cloud
of gray that floated up as the stream ran into the hopper.

"
Makin' lye?"

"In a week, maybe," Mary said. "We
have not much soap left. And I could use it to sweeten the sourdough,
if we got some flour."

She could make a pie, if they got some flour. She
could make sourdough, if they got some flour.

"
I'm going to put the field in wheat," he
said. "We'll have plenty of flour in the winter."

But even as he spoke he knew it wasn't certain. There
were only two mills in the country, one at the Methodist Mission
upstream and the other on the island at Oregon City. There was no
credit at either place, and the percentages were always too high.
Worse was the simple fact of being there. At the mission mill they
saved his soul for God, while they cut his purse strings, and at
Oregon City the mill was run by friends of Thurston, which was almost
as bad. He had come to dread both places and always found some excuse
to avoid them.

He swung his feet over the edge of the bed and
reached for his boots. Before he could put the field in wheat he had
to have the wheat. Thank god for Swensen, he wouldn't have to plow.
The endless, wearisome, monotonous trudging back and forth behind the
animals, and them borrowed . . . A man wasn't made for work like
that, the same movement over and over again, endlessly using exactly
the same muscles. It made him ache at night.

He would get the seed wheat from McLoughlin in Oregon
City. If McLoughlin didn't have it, he'd see that it came out of the
Hudson's Bay storehouse in Vancouver. There'd been a hell of a bunch
of people through here in the last ten years, and McLoughlin had seen
that none of them starved. Lost his job for it, too. And the
directors in London had charged his personal account sixty thousand
dollars for the things he'd given to the Americans to keep them alive
those first bad winters.

What the hell was wrong? Seven years here, and he
still had to go on his knees begging for seed wheat. Short of seed,
short of soap, short of flour, short of clothes, even short of powder
and ball. In the mountains it had never seemed so complicated, just
to stay alive. He couldn't recall ever giving it much thought. And
now, already, the eternal damp was beginning to rot the foundations
of the cabin and the beams of the roof, and they would have to be
replaced before winter came again. He sighed, dragging on his
trousers. "Mary, sometimes I think I just wasn't cut out for
farming."

Mary shrugged. "There is much to do," she
said.

"Seems like I take two steps forward and fall
back three. I'm gettin' farther behind all the time."

"
Is bad luck, maybe."

"
A man can take just so long a run of the bad,"
Monday said. "Then he's got to have some good, or he goes
under."

Mary finished scooping the floating ashes and wiped
her forehead with her wrist. Her husband's back was turned, as he
took the linsey-woolsey shirt from the peg on the wall above the bed.
Mary looked at him for a moment and turned back to the coffee pot.
"You will be here today?"

"No," Monday said morosely. "I got to
go into Oregon City. See about the wheat."

After a moment Mary said, "Is maybe better you
stay here a day."

"Why?"

"You are gone a long time. The meat is gone,
now."

Monday closed his eyes. "Meat, too. Christ, we
don't have anything."

"Everything else we can do without. Meat, we
cannot do without meat."

"All right," Monday said. He started taking
off the cloth shirt, his farmer's shirt, and suddenly the depression
began to lift. He reached up for the buckskin hunting shirt, and in
spite of himself began to smile.

"By god, that's not a bad idea, Mary." In
his mind he could already see the branch moving, the faint shadow of
a buff body over the sights of the gun, could feel the waiting
tension. "The wheat can wait a day, can't it?"

"
Yes, I think so," Mary said.

His movements became quicker, more sure. He yanked
off the stupidly heavy boots and reached under the bed for the
feather-light moccasins. Just getting the boots off, he felt ten
pounds lighter. The moccasins were his own feet, shaped by the
wearing until no other man could feel comfortable in them. He stood
up, shrugging his shoulders, loosening his body for the hunt.

"
You don't want breakfast first?" Mary
said.

"No," Monday said seriously. "I best
get out early. " He was suddenly impatient to be gone and could
not wait.

Mary nodded.

Monday took down the gun from its pegs over the
fireplace and checked the flint. He poured a little powder into the
horn, and took several balls.

"
You take enough?" Mary said, watching.

"
I only need to shoot once."

"
What if you miss?"

Monday scowled at her. "She's got hindsights and
a foresight," he said sharply.

"Just a question that I ask," Mary said
innocently, raising her hands.

"I c'n still shoot a gun," Monday muttered,
not seeing her faint smile. He snapped the hammer sharply several
times and nodded to himself.

Lightly he moved to the door, stepping out into a
flood of early-morning warmth. The sun had just passed the screen of
trees to the east, and was rising quickly, losing the redness of
dawn. He stood at the door for a moment, looking at the world,
letting his eyes sharpen themselves against the wall of foliage that
surrounded his little clearing, feeling the sharp cleanness of the
air.

"Good, I'll get goin', then."

Quickly he saddled the horse, muttering softly to
him, rubbing his muzzle. Mary stood in the doorway watching her
husband's impatience without expression. He mounted and Mary walked
over to the horse.

Monday bent down from the saddle and kissed her
perfunctorily on the forehead. "Got to get movin'," he said
brusquely.

Mary stepped back and he swung the horse around,
setting off up the main trail for Peter's Mountain and the thick
cover of brush where the soft and subtle bodies of the deer were
waiting for him.

She watched him go, then turned and went back into
the dark house. With difficulty she stooped at the cooler beneath the
floor and began to rearrange the paper-wrapped packages. She put all
the fresh packages of meat that Swensen had left near the back, where
Monday would not notice them. Then she got out the half-completed
shirt and took it to the front porch, where she could work in the
warmth of the sun.

3

Once on the trail he lost the tensions across the
back of his shoulders, the feeling of tightness that had slipped into
him with the thoughts of seed wheat and no flour and begging and the
mission and all the rest of it. He began to feel relaxed and easy
again. The horse's hoofs fell softly, like the pad of a cat, and
overhead the branches of fir moved slowly, a creaking, shifting roof
over the endless tunnel that was the trail.

Here in the woods the concerns of civilized life
receded into nothingness again. No worry about Thurston or the farm
or that vicious thought of raising money that always twisted his
guts. And most of all, no question of whether he was doing the right
thing, the thing he was supposed to do. Right and wrong were merely
words again, noises of no distinct meaning. There was only the
powerful consciousness of the world around him. as it existed.
without trying to make up words to fit it. Monday realized it had
been a long time since he had been able to feel the good
world-feeling, the balanced emotionless awareness of himself and the
world, and what was passing between them. He nodded to himself,
watching the brush to either side close in, taking a growing joy in
the simple act of perception.

When he had ridden in this way for half an hour, the
trail narrowed so that it was not easy for the horse to pass without
brushing against the undergrowth at either side. The sense of being
penned was making the animal nervous, and Monday reined up. He
dismounted and rubbed the horse's muzzle gently. "Easy, easy.
Can't worry about it," he whispered. Gradually the skittery
animal calmed, drawing a sort of peace from his master. Monday felt
perfectly neutral and suspended now, almost without volition.

There was good grass growing beneath the ferns. He
unsaddled and picketed the animal there, murmuring reassurances. The
rest of the way he would make on foot. He had been skirting the edge
of a hill, and near the bottom at his left would be a stream, in the
summer probably almost dry, but for now it would give cool clean
water that the deer would prefer to that of the main river. Good
cover, easy water, and good forage. Paradise.

When the horse had begun to browse without tension,
Monday slipped into the brush on the downhill side, working toward
the base of the valley. When he had gone a few hundred yards, he
stopped abruptly, lifting his face to the breeze. He caught a faint,
acrid smell of burning. Involuntarily he wheeled, starting back to
his animal with the instinctive panic fear of fire in the forest.
Then, angry at his own fear, he calmed himself and looked around. The
smoke was so faint that he missed it entirely at first. Then he saw
it, a misty thread some distance up the tiny ravine, swinging toward
him in the breeze. It was almost invisible, appearing and
disappearing like a spider web twisting in the beam of sunlight. Had
he not been directly downwind he never would have caught it at all.

He frowned, puzzled. A smoldering log would surely
give off more smoke than that; and an open fire would cover more
ground. It looked like nothing so much as a small campfire, but who
would be making camp in the hills in the middle of the day? The tame
Indians around Oregon City never hunted, and the others didn't like
to come so close in.

Suddenly he remembered Thurston's talk about the
solitary roaming around out here. Wild Man himself. By god, that's
him, he thought, grinning to himself. l'll just have a look at that
'un.

If it was Wild Alan, Monday thought, then he'd be
like to have Younger Wild Woman some place about. She'd keep y'r
lodge warm,
wagh!
And
while you were still on top of her she'd start eating you up and
spitting out the pieces. It was a serious fault in the Younger Wild
Woman.

He was content as he began working his way down to
the stream, his mind roving over the old, familiar stories. It felt
almost as if he were in the mountains again, tracking, moving along
the almost imperceptible animal trails to see who else was about.