Chasing a Blond Moon(12)

Sometimes he tried to look at her objectively, but such efforts invariably failed and he always reached the same conclusion: The sum of her was bigger than the parts and she was the most beautiful and interesting woman he had ever known. What he loved most was that she was alive, engaged in life, willing to stick her nose wherever curiosity led and to hell with consequences.

“With Jet, you can’t tell,” Service said. His father had always said that there was some deep secret in the trapper’s life and that it had been this that sent him into the backcountry to live alone. “When I took over my old man’s territory, I inherited Ollie Toogood.” Service’s father had been a conservation officer before him, and by chance Service had ended up standing guard over the same area that his father had taken care of for so long.

“He’s nowhere near your territory,” she said. “And?”

“His story checked out. He had a nasty war. Air Force jock. He got the Silver Star, two Distinguished Flying Crosses, a passel of Air Medals, and a Purple Heart. The Silver Star was awarded for his behavior as a prisoner of war. He was an example to others and frustrated the hell out of the North Koreans.”

“Maybe he got tired of serving as a good example,” Nantz said.

“Who knows? He’s a strange old bird, but he knows bears and trapping better than any man I ever met. Maybe he signed off to get a break from people, got set in his ways, and couldn’t find his way back.”

“Like you?” she said.

Service shot her a look. “We’re not talking about me.”

“It will be a pleasure to meet your friend,” she said with her customary optimism.

“It will be something,” Service said, “but I doubt pleasure is the right word.”

Betty Very owned a small farm south of Rockland, on the precipitous banks of the Ontonagon River. Pure copper had been discovered in the craggy hills around 1840, and fifty years later the population was a thousand souls, complete with Michigan’s first and then only telephone system. A fire before the turn of the twentieth century had been a major setback, but the decision by copper mining companies to abandon the area and push west was even bigger, and brought the town’s death knell. Now there were fewer than two hundred people in the village and land was so cheap that one local bought an entire city block just to grow flowers.

Service considered many of the residents to be of the artsy-fartsy persuasion, most of whom spent summers on the Rock and fled at the first burp of winter. Service thought of them as aging hippies who were time-trapped in the sixties. With only two bars in town, the only persistent problem for local law officers were bush dope farms, and even these seemed to be on the decline.

Bearclaw dealt with more problem bears than any other CO in the state and had the scars to prove it. She was forty and lived alone on the old farm with a menagerie of goats, sheep, llamas, dogs, and cats. When she retired she planned to open an animal rehab sanctuary.

There was a small brick house in disrepair and a new pole barn gleaming beside an older wooden one that leaned precariously toward forty-five degrees. One of these winters it would finish falling.

Very came out to greet Service and Nantz. She was in civvies and did not look happy.

“The sooner you get that sonuvabitch out of here, the more likely he is to keep living,” she said loudly enough for it to be heard a hundred yards away. She gestured toward the old barn, making a chopping motion of her hand.

“What’s the deal?” Service asked.

“I was scouting and I ran across him. He was sitting on a blow-down not far from the river.”

“Did he seem disoriented?”

“Nope, just irritated. I could see he was blind and there was nobody around and we were a mile from the road, so I told him I’d help him out, but he didn’t want to come. I wasn’t about to leave him. He wouldn’t say why he was there alone or how he got there, so I dragged him out and he demanded to talk to you.”

“I’ll take care of it,” Service said.

“You know him?”

Service nodded. “He lives in north Iron County. My old man used to take me to see him and now and then I stop by to see how he’s getting on.”

“What’s he do?”

“Used to trap. Mostly he just doesn’t like human company.”

“Is he the one who baits in bears for biologists to study?”

“He baits them in because it pleases him. Doing something for others isn’t part of his modus operandi. Jet is for Jet, period.”

“The smell of him’s enough to make a vulture trombone,” she said, wrinkling her nose.