Free Lonesome Animals by Bruce Holbert Page A

Keller a glow beyond another, lower bluff. Underneath a bull pine he found needles in a hollow softened by the deer that had bedded upon it and hatcheted the lowest pine boughs to construct a pallet and laid out his roll and waited for darkness.

    A hundred feet below and two hundred yards away, Marvin’s grandchildren chased each other, then beat a pan with sticks. The clanks climbed the cliff to him. Marvin’s wife lay fetal on a blanket beneath the makeshift table, catching the last of the failing sun. Marvin joined her with a water bucket. He soaked a cloth and bathed her face carefully, then shushed the children in Salish. They quit their noise and curled like pups around her. Strawl could no more imagine their lives together than he could if studying a pile of ants.
    Strawl swept clear a hollow, then gathered pine straw into a mound. He added sticks from a downed birch and lit them and nursed the fire until it burned warm, but low enough to escape notice. He poured water from his canteen into the frying pan and made bread to go with his jerked beef.
    His adult life, he had watched people turning the same day over and living it again for years at a time, and he thought himself happy it was not his lot. Isolation, Strawl once liked to think, was his penchant, but recently he realized choice had little to do with it. Elijah had made his opinion clear on both farming and Strawl as soon his mother passed and he had a check to cash. Ida, herself, had enjoyed her time alone to his company. And Dot would prefer a book. The grandchildren were hesitant to accept the treats he delivered from town. When he wrestled them, and left an opening to squeeze his nose or box his ears, they used it instead to escape to their mother or father. He was past poor company, it was clear, and the day’s events would go far in maintaining that. Twenty years ago, he mistook such a reputation for respect, but as he tracked or camped alone, he discovered even if it played that way in town, it was something else within his own mind. He bent and scooped a handful of earth from the ground. Nothing was more just than dirt. Returning to it squared them all. Two wives, two flower
bouquets, two preachers, at least in Ida’s case a two-day drunk, all for dirt becoming dirt once more.
    Dawn, Strawl woke bent and aching and remained bleary-eyed through his pot of coffee. In the morning light, he sifted through the papers in the valise once more. He sorted interview notes typed on yellow legal paper from the third murder on, likely because Dice and Higgenbothem in Wenatchee had begun to press the tribe’s investigation. No person had witnessed a single crime, nor did they recall the victims beyond brief description or any argument of any kind preceding the murders.
    The crimes were marked by intricate patterns and the victims by the lack of one, except no struggle. If rancor were at the root, in his man’s chest was a heart that beat pure winter and a mind as patient as a buzzard’s. Most crimes were born in simple want argued into need. To criminals, the law was an argument, stealing persuasion, and killing misplaced zealotry. It made them self-righteous; a part of them desired capture, saw it as a reckoning. Strawl understood them, even agreed occasionally—most acts a man could perpetrate had been unlawful at one time and legal others. A criminal’s birth might be just catastrophic scheduling, the same as a victim’s.
    The BIA hadn’t been completely derelict. Aside from interviewing Marvin, they had spoken with the leaders they could muster from the confederated tribes that resided on the reservation, but many had ceased being Methow, Lakes, Nespelem or Chelan or Palus or Wenatchi. The Nez Perce bore enough physical features that they could be discerned from the other bands and the Bird people kept to themselves, but the others had jumbled into as mixed a soup as the whites disposing them. None knew anything of the