Which explained why she had him in the old barn. Betty Very was one of the most polite and considerate officers he had ever met, able to accept people for who and what they were, but she was also a believer in cleanliness and the old man would never meet her standards along those lines.
“I smelt youse comin’,” Trapper Jet rasped when Service stepped past a door hanging from a rusty hinge. The old man was wearing faded, tattered brown Carharts. The stench radiating from him almost made Service retch.
“You got coose with you,” the old man warbled before Service could speak.
Maridly stepped in beside Service. “I’m Nantz,” she said.
“How do,” the trapper said. “Got the curse, have ya? Smelt blood soon as youse gotten outten da truck.”
Nantz stared at him. “You like to shock people, do you?”
“I’m thinkin’ youse ain’t of a kind to shock,” the old man said with a mischievous chuckle.
“You wanted to see me, Jet?” Service asked.
“You, not the coose.”
Nantz stuck out her jaw. “I have a coose, but I am not the coose. Nor am I his coose.”
“Got a mouth on her,” Trapper Jet said.
Nantz parried, “I can’t figure how’d you’d trap anything smarter than a spruce grouse.” A spruce grouse was generally considered the dumbest animal in the forest, a fact attested to by how few remained.
Trapper Jet stared up at her through darkened eyes and grinned. “Coose with fire,” he said, shaking with silent mirth. “I didn’t think it possible.”
“You’d have to double your smarts just to be stupid—” Nantz started.
“Stop!” Service said, raising his hands. “Jet, what the hell are you doing here and what do you want?”
“You could start with givin’ me a lift back to my place.”
“That’s not exactly on our way.”
“You think my being up here is on my way?”
“Why are you here?”
“Got no idea.”
“Why’d you call me?”
“Who else I’m gonna call, eh?”
The trapper obviously wasn’t ready to talk. They loaded him in the truck, rolled the windows down, got a smile of relief from Betty Very, and headed out.
They saw smoke when they were a half-mile from the trapper’s cabin on Mitigwaki Creek, a three-mile-long ribbon of water that connected Mitigwaki and Paint Lakes.
Service spied the smoke and seconds later the old trapper announced, “Somepin’s burnin’.” The something was Trapper Jet’s cabin.
“Dowdy Kitella,” the trapper said with a snarl when they got out of the Yukon.
Service knew Kitella. He was a bear dog outfitter out of Trout Creek with more run-ins with the law than Service cared to count. Kitella was an officer in a national group that promoted bear hunting with hounds, and the sort of man who didn’t care to share. If other guides set up too close to the imaginary lines that defined his hunting territories, he poured gasoline on their baits and sand patches. Guides spread sand on bear trails and smoothed the patches in order to see if animals were coming to their baits. The scent of gasoline and other chemicals pushed bears away. Kitella was known to be ruthless and equally difficult to catch. Most of Kitella’s arrests had come on domestic violence charges, but not once had a spouse or girlfriend pressed charges.
Once Service had read an arrest report where Kitella told the arresting officer that women were like dogs and had to be trained; if you went too easy on them, they’d never do their jobs. That time he’d broken several of a girlfriend’s ribs.
“You think Kitella did this?”
“It’s him,” Trapper Jet said.
“Why?”
“People like him got their own ideas.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“I guess he don’t want me here.”
“You tinker with his baits, maybe?”
“I don’t hunt bruins,” the trapper said. “I entertain ’em. Besides—illegal to have baits out right now, am I right?”
“Maybe you encouraged some animals away from him?”
“Free country. Bears and people both got the right to choose, eh?”
“Maybe you’d better talk to me about this, Jet.”
“No time to yap. Gotta rebuild.”
“Alone?”
“Hell, I built her alone. I can rebuild her.”
“Blind?”
The old man shrugged and grimaced. “Don’t do no good to whine when you gotta eat shit sandwiches. Out here you work or you don’t make it.”
“What were you doing up on the Firesteel?”
The old man opened the door to the truck and got out. “Time I got to work.”