Free Whispers of Old Winds by George Seaton Page B

some gas in the Ski-Doo,” Digger says.
    “That bowl’ll eat the Ski-Doo in a quick minute.”
    “Besides that,” Jim Harris, my number one deputy, says, “if he saw the body a while ago, it ain’t visible now. You see how much snow we got over the past hour?”
    “I’ll go up there with you in a bit, Digger,” I say. “Go get the snowshoes from the storage shed.” I do wish, though, that my number two deputy, Don Hoag, had not started his vacation two days ago. He’d taken his wife and kids to Disney World in Orlando. Not that I don’t think Digger will have my back if anything happens up there, but Don’s got more experience with these mountains. Hell, he’s got a nice ass too.
    “Yessir,” Digger says, setting his coffee cup down and grabbing his coat.
    I sit behind my desk, look at the mess on top of it, and wonder why I thought being the sheriff of a sparsely populated county in Colorado would be one exciting thing after another. The paperwork and supervisory responsibilities make short shrift of whatever excitement I had anticipated when I got the bug up my ass to run for office.
     
     
    S HORTLY AFTER my thirtieth birthday, I decided to run for Sheriff of Pine County, and I won by seventeen votes. My opponent was the incumbent, Howard Slaughter, who’d been sheriff up here for the past twenty-seven years. He’d been a good sheriff, tough as nails and dedicated to an unshakeable philosophy that all things in life are either black or white; gray areas just didn’t exist, except as conspiratorial endeavors by God-hating, limp-wristed, left-wing sonsabitches who were out to destroy the essential fabric of America. I suspect those seventeen winning votes came from that same cadre of evildoers Sheriff Slaughter believed populated the gray areas of life in Pine County.
    Two years before my election, Michael and I had moved up here to make the best of our new life together, away from the fast lane in Denver and the increasing dissatisfaction we both felt with city life in general. I’d met Michael in a Denver bar not a week after I’d returned from two tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, and if you want to call it love at first sight, then go ahead. The senseless passion that initially put us in bed together soon developed into something as precious as life itself. He was only twenty-two, Italian, lithe, bright, and beautiful. I was twenty-six, Irish, and hardened by the things I’d seen and done in that faraway place where hell was a reality for the living as well as a destination for the dead.
    Michael had had the ability to calm the inner demons that followed me home from the war, sometimes with only a smile, but most of the time with his words, his voice a salve as soothing as a springtime morning in these mountains. We married in Taos a year after we’d decided to move in together. We then moved to Pine County a year after that. And in two years, we’d finished rebuilding the dilapidated shack on our seventeen acres of forest and meadow into a three-bedroom log home—a paradise that was our dream destination and is now our everyday reality.
    The county seat of Pine County is Gunderson Junction, a small town named after a Methodist minister who came this way in the 1850s to bestow the Christian message to the red-skinned savages who’d lived here for probably more than a thousand years. The savages had, according to Gunderson, mistakenly believed that Mother Earth and Father Sky were responsible for life’s blessings rather than a Semite who’d died on a cross. It wasn’t a pretty subjugation. But the Manifest Destiny of the white man had prevailed in Colorado as it had everywhere else. And now those few Indians who still live here are much like old Henry Tall Horse, still quietly attuned to their ancestral beliefs and gracious enough to give a wink and a smile to tourist mommies and daddies who point Hank out to their children, saying, “Look there. An Indian. A real, live Indian.”
    It