Excerpt from: AS THE WOLF LOVES WINTER
 

Published by: Forge Books, New York

PROLOGUE
 
 
 

    The man in the rust-colored parka had almost reached the crest of the mountain, after a long, wearying climb, when he first suspected he wasn't alone.
    He stopped, thrusting thumbs under pack-straps as he frowned around at the monotonous gray trees.   The blowing snow made them wavering and grainy, like an old film.  Something had moved out there.  But what?  He'd left the last house, the last road miles back.  The only trails up here were deer-trails.  Hunters?  But the season was over, and few hunters came back this far anyway.
    Around the listening figure the hills rose steep as the waves of a frozen sea-storm.  Till now in his march he'd looked up at them.  Now he stood on the ridge line, knowing there was only a little way yet to the summit.  The long crests shouldered forward under snow that hissed steadily down from clouds the color of a worn  spoon.  Valleys fell from sight into shadow.  In the afternoon light no road or building, no human artifice or habitation was visible on the deserted land.
    Finally he decided it must have been a deer.  But cold and fatigue had stiffened his muscles during the pause, and he winced as he forced them into motion again.  The deep unbroken snow dragged at his boots.  Dropping his head, he bulled along through heavier drifts where the woods opened, then into a stand of white pines.  Their resinous smell stung his nose pleasantly.
    Yeah, getting tired . . . he was still in good shape, though.  Not like the other guys at work.  He couldn't think of one who could have kept up to him out here.  He smiled faintly,  planting one foot heavily ahead of the other as the ridgeline lifted toward the clouds.  New snow creaked and popped under his boots.  From time to time he looked up.
    At last he glimpsed a wedge of sky between the stripped boles.  He stopped again, blowing out with relief, and shrugged the pack higher on his shoulders.  Light when he'd left the car, it had gained an astonishing amount of weight as he humped it across miles of  forest and up nearly a thousand feet to this deserted height.
    His eyes searched the trees, the hundreds of stark vertical lines with snow sifting and whirling between them.  No wonder they called it the Wild Area.  The vacant, wind-ringing woods, the mist-wreathed hollows didn't feel empty.  They felt haunted.  He didn't believe in ghosts or spirits.  But it was spooky out here.  Wild, like the forest of fairy tales, or of nightmare.
    The Kinningmahontawany, they called it.
    He shifted the pack again, then bent for the last time to the slope.  Around him the oaks stretched skeletal limbs in impotent entreaty to an indifferent heaven, the colorlessness broken only occasionally on the misty hill-flanks by the bluegreen of pine.  That might have been what I saw, he thought.  An evergreen bough collapsing, giving way at last under its icy and ever-increasing burden.
    A labyrinthine writhe of blown-down trunks and shattered limbs opened above him.  Years before a wind had swept up from the hollow, or a tornado had touched down.  Beneath the fallen trees holes opened like black mouths ringed with jagged bark teeth.  The snow supported his weight at first, then gave way with a sullen treacherous crackle, plunging him thigh-deep, filling his boots and pockets with icy powder.
    When he emerged from the blowdown, soaked with sweat under the parka, the ground levelled out.  It wasn't easy to know when you were at the top.  There was no open vista to look out from.   But as he slogged on the land started to drop.  He stopped, looked around, resting, then backtracked.
    At last he judged he was as near the summit of Colley Hill as he was likely to get without surveyor's instruments.  He didn't have to find the exact apex, but the closer he got to it the more even the repeater's coverage would be.  Coughing white breath like cigarette smoke into the icy wind, he unslung the pack.  Digging a gloved hand into his aching neck, he peered up into dully glowing clouds, murky and turbulent, but at their hearts the same dead gray as the motionless trunks around him.
    Finally he decided on a huge old black cherry.  Like an ancient column, it towered straight-trunked up at the crown of the hill.  Its upper limbs were twisted, lightning-shattered, but it looked like it would be here for years to come.  He knelt to the pack and unzipped it, revealing a coil of insulated wire, a foot-square panel, and a plastic case sealed with epoxy.  He set these aside and pulled out a set of climbing spikes and a lineman's belt.
    Straightening, he peered around once again, still wondering what that movement had been.  Like a ghost slipping through the empty woods, among the winterstripped trees. . . .
    He clamped the spikes onto his boots, shrugged off the parka -- this would be warm work -- and draped it over ice-brittled laurel.  Tucking box and wire inside his sweater, he pulled on heavy leather gloves, looking up.

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    A few minutes later he was sixty feet up, stapled and strapped to the black pillar of the ancient cherry.  Even through the gloves he felt the dead sapless cold of the sleeping wood.  The wind was much worse up here.  Unslowed by underbrush or second growth, it scraped the hilltops like a knife across a cutting board, laying icy steel against his cheeks and ears.
    He climbed rapidly, setting the spikes with his toes, then levering himself upward against the massive rough cylinder that narrowed as he rose.  From time to time he came to branches, massive outstretched shoulders, and had to unbuckle the belt and work his way over them.  Some were cracked from ice-load and lightning-storm.  At these moments, with only the strength of his arms holding him from the fall, he couldn't help thinking all he had to do was open his hands . . . and some obscure part of him that only stepped out of the shadows at times like these, urged him to: to let go, fall, and die.  The only way he could keep going was to close his mind against it, as a man looks away from fear, or madness, or unpermitted desire; things that once acknowledged, are half surrendered to.
    Twenty feet from the crown of the tree he paused for a rest.  He tugged at the belt, making sure it was locked, then leaned back and clamped a glove over his face.  As his breath warmed his cheeks, wasp-stinging them back to life, he looked out over an immense and lifeless solitude.
    From up here, high above the summit, hundreds of square miles of hills stretched out like sleeping cats beneath the falling snow.  The bellies of the clouds dragged on the prickly tops of the ridges, the dead-looking branches snagging tufts of white fog like wool and combing it out to lie in opaque drifts in the benches and hollows.  Everything was black, and gray, and white; a world possessed by winter so profoundly it seemed impossible that anything could ever change.
    White, and gray, and black . . . and a furtive stir at the periphery of vision.
    He whipped his head around, peering down through the treetops like a bird of prey.  But his eyes were not a hawk's eyes, and again his focused sight found nothing.  Nothing but the snow, and the slowly vanishing connect-the-dots of his own trail, ending far below.
    Puffing out a stream of frost-smoke, he set his spikes again and hoisted himself to where he could wrap one arm around the narrowed trunk.  The great tree soared upward still.  But this was as high as he could force himself.  Anchoring his weight with a locked elbow, stripping a glove off the other hand with his teeth, he reached inside his sweater.
    Checking the lay of the hills, he set the panel so that it would face south, and pressed its spiked back into the black bark.  He spun the wire out, then swung the box in an arc and let go.  It landed on the next branch up.  He tensed, clinging to the tree.  The box  rocked, then dropped over the branch and hung from its antenna.
    He smiled, as much as his cold-stiffened face would permit.
    He was a radio ham, and the box was an FM relay.  Dotted through the countryside, they let hobbyists communicate outside the crowded and sometimes undependable shortwave bands.  Powered by the sun, it would serve for years before it had to be replaced.
    Huge as it was, the cherry swayed as a gust drove through it.  He quickly fumbled his glove back on, afflicted by a shiver both of cold and anxiety.  He'd raised four daughters on nursery rhymes, and the repetitive verses played themselves back at odd moments.  Rock a bye baby, he thought.  Daddy better get the hell out of this treetop.  If the bough broke, it could be days, maybe weeks, before anybody found him.
    He was setting his spikes for the descent when a throaty rumble came from  below him.
    When he looked down his lips parted in astonishment.  What was a german shepherd doing out here?  It stood at the base of the tree, staring up at him.  He let go with one hand and waved.  "Hey, boy," he called, but his voice sounded weak and tremulous against the enormous empty chant of the wind.
    The dog went silent for a moment after he spoke.  Then the low growl built again, like the sound of a distant battle.
    He felt suddenly apprehensive.  He tightened his grip on the belt, twisting his spurs into the rough bark, then looked down again, studying the animal.
    The first thing he noticed was how long its legs were.  The second, the pinkish-red tongue hanging from a black-rimmed mouth.  Then, one by one, other details.  The brindled coat was the color of woodsmoke and pewter, the shoulders and head outlined in charcoal.  The pointed ears were forward-focused on him.  He was too high to see its eyes.  The big splayed paws rested easily on the snow.  The fluffed-out tail was carried half-lifted as the animal circled the tree, nosing at his pack, then the parka.  It had narrow shoulders and a smallish head, and wasn't as big as he'd first thought.  Not large for a shepherd, certainly not as big as a saint bernard or a rottweiler.
    His eyes darted hopefully around, but he saw no sign of its owner.  Nor could he make out a collar.  It was probably feral.  People thought they were being merciful, abandoning their pets in the country.  They told themselves they'd would make it on their own, but what happened was they starved, or farmers shot them.
     Giving the relay a last glance, he began working his way back down the trunk.  This occupied his attention for some minutes.  Going down was harder than going up.  He was shuddering now.  The wind's icicle teeth gripped his bunched, straining biceps and thighs.  He got to the last branch, twenty feet up, and perched on it to readjust the belt for the final descent.  He glanced curiously down again as he did so.
     The dog was sitting on its haunches now, still looking at him.  A frosting of fresh snow had gathered on its back.  He could see its eyes now.  Flat, curiously expressionless, golden orbs that did not look away but stayed locked on his.
     Suddenly it lifted its muzzle, opening its mouth in a  tremulous, high-pitched wail that echoed and reechoed, first from the trees, then from the bare, far-off flanks of the hills.
     A shiver ran across his shoulders as he heard the answering howls.  He clung to the branch, and made no further move to come down.
     Presently three more forms materialized from the forest.  They came one by one, gliding with an easy lope across snow he'd slogged through laboriously.  From different directions, as if each had been hunting on its own.  As they trotted up each new arrival touched noses with the first, or gave a short whining bark.  They examined the parka, then sniffed and snapped at the pack, pulling it around until the contents lay scattered on the snow.  Then they circled restlessly, looking up at him with the same speculative stare as the first, for quite some time before curling themselves into the snow as if it were a down quilt.  One shifted several times, unable to find a comfortable spot, till settling on a patch of open snow.
     The man clung to the tree, watching them.  His arms were shaking now, muscles cramping.  The wind came through the cableknit sweater as if it was made of lace.  When he lifted his eyes to scan the icescoured woods the snow drove needles into them.  When he lowered them to the animals again their gazes met his, unconcerned, opaque, intent, and unafraid.
     They can't be, he thought.  There aren't any of those left around here.  Not for a hundred, two hundred years.
     He clapped his arms awkwardly against his chest, sitting crouched over on the icy limb.  At the movement heads rose, ears cocked.  He explored his pockets.  A jackknife, nothing to face four wolves with.  A stripping tool.  A pair of needlenosed pliers.
     He poised the pliers like a pub dart and threw them at the first wolf, still sitting below him.  It leapt aside and they missed.  It sniffed at the hole in the snow, then followed its tail around and lay down again in the same expectant position as before.  He threw the stripping tool too, but it went so wide the animal didn't bother to move.  It just sat there, tongue lapping out, looking up at him with what almost seemed to be a grin.

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     During the next hour he passed from shuddering through numbness to a frozen immobility.  Sitting on the limb, buckled to the trunk by the lineman's belt, he didn't need to worry about falling.  But he understood now that unless he could build a fire soon, or at least recover the parka, he would die.
     He thought of his .22 rifle.  At home in the hall closet . . . if he'd brought something to eat, he could toss it to one of the wolves; make them fight over it; maybe get to his parka while they were distracted.  But the only food he'd brought was a Hershey bar, and it lay now below him, nosed but undisturbed by the wolves.  He thought of cutting off a branch, wiring the knife to it to make a spear.  But he couldn't get out to a limb that would break, and when he tried to unbend his fingers from the belt they were frozen to it, like iron clamped to leather.  He might uncrimp them, but then he might not be able to close them again.
     If he went down, the wolves might kill him.  But there was no question about what the cold would do.
     Meanwhile the day dimmed toward darkness, and the snow whispered to him with the tongues of dead leaves.  Soon, it sounded like.  Soon, soon.
     Finally he decided he had no choice but to try.  If he could wound or kill the pack leader, maybe the others would run.
     He pried his fingers apart clumsily.  His hands still bent, but not as individual fingers.  He lobster-clawed the knife open and gripped it in his palm like a Neolithic handaxe.  He shifted his feet around toward the tree, dug the spikes in, and reached round to unsnap the belt.
     The wolves rose, leaving their comfortable positions and trotting forward to gather beneath him.  His heart thudded.  Warmth touched his face again, throbbed in his hands.  He fixed his eyes on the russet nylon of the parka, judging the number of strides to it.  Okay, big bad wolves, he thought with resigned dread.  Here I come, ready or not.
     Instead he heard a crack,  felt a sudden sagging drop.  He whipped around, grabbing for the trunk, but his frozen scrabbling fingers slipped off.  His kicking feet gouged off spinning clods of bark, but gained no purchase.
     The rotten branch gave another rifle-crack and disintegrated into wood-meal and ice, peeling off a long splitting strip of bark as it came apart under his weight.  The woods spun above his head.  The last thing he saw was a gray patchwork of sky.
     The wolves stood in a rough circle around the motionless figure sprawled in the snow.  Then, into the gathering night, rose a haunting, ululating chorus that the gusting wind carried far out over the darkening hills.

CHAPTER ONE

W. T. Halvorsen
 
 

     The next morning a gaunt old man with gray-stubbled cheeks stood blinking at the sky from a clearing in the woods.  He sniffed the wind, hands shoved deep into the pockets of a red-barred hunting coat.  Only when a white-and-brown hound whined, nuzzling the laces of his boots, did he clear his throat, then turn from the leaden sky to empty his cheek into the snow.
     About time it started warming up some, Halvorsen thought, kneeling stiffly.  Been cold as hell for the last couple weeks.  His hand smoothed the dog's head, and she bored her muzzle into his glove.
     He didn't want to go into town.  He didn't care to have that much to do with people anymore.  You got a bellyful of them, in prison.  A dog was about all the company he really cared to have.  But his battered tin canisters were empty of sugar, and coffee, and beans.  He needed a washer for the pump, it had leaked all  over the floor and froze and yesterday he'd slipped, gone down next to the sink.  Miracle he hadn't busted a rib.
     It was time to go, whether he wanted to or not.
     The bitch pulled away and bounded gracelessly through the snow toward the trees.  "Come on back, Jess," he called sharply.  "Ain't no time to play."
     Pulling his old green cap down, he turned abruptly from the hilltop, the shimmering air above his makeshift chimney.  Back straight, head erect, he started down the road, eyes following the ridgeline as if unwilling to lower themselves to the snow-obliterated track.
     He looked out along the dark rising masses of Town Hill and Groundhog Hill, Gerroy and Lookout Tower and Sullivan and Raymonds Hill.  Below them, out of view though he knew it was there, the Allegheny River slept in black silence beneath white snow.  Halvorsen shivered.  Not a hundred yards gone and he missed home already.  It wasn't much, just a basement.  But it was warm, the stove red-hot with good seasoned birch he'd cut the fall before.
     Forcing reluctance from his mind, he marched stiffly along, keeping to the right-hand side, where it was more or less level and the ruts under the snow weren't as deep.  When he was a boy he'd put his tongue on the train-tracks once, just to see what the bare steel tasted like.  The freezing air tasted like that now.  Behind him the dog hesitated, looking off into the woods.  Then, as he dropped out of sight, she bounded after him, whining anxiously.
     Halvorsen strode along, feeling pain in his bruised side but figuring it would work itself out after a mile or two.  Powder snow a foot and a half deep, crunching at each step like sand between your teeth.  Under it loose gravel and clay was frozen to a bone-jarring hardness.  The road dipped steadily at first, walled in on either side by stands of beech and birch and an occasional white oak, black and ominous against the luminescent shadowless white of the snow.

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     Half an hour later the road turned left for its shallower descent along the  frozen-over creek at the bottom of the run.  He felt warmer now, almost comfortable.  His muscles were limbering up and actually he felt pretty good for as old a son of a bitch as he was getting to be.  His old Maine boots crunched steadily.  The hound whined behind him, but he didn't look back.
     He couldn't help thinking what he thought every time he walked this road, that in  summer there was no lovelier place on earth than Mortlock Hollow.  In the summer it was filled with the chatter of chipmunks and the cries of birds, the vampire whine of mosquitoes and the milling clouds of midges that rose like smoke from the ferny  spots where the water pooled in shadow. Among the branches silver webs shimmered on an intangible wind.  The creek sang beneath leaning pines, and down in the gorge groundhogs scurried from rock to rock.  Life was everywhere, frogs and mud wasps in the puddled ruts of the road, rabbits in the brambles, the heartstopping racket of quail bursting from cover.   As if they understood how little time they had before the chill white silence of winter erased them and the world they inhabited  as if it and they had never existed.
     And now it was here.  The wind gusted between the bare beeches,  sucking the freezing air out of his lungs, numbing his cheeks where they emerged from the turned-up collar.   And shivering suddenly in its chill breath he felt the half-revealed teeth of the ultimate destroyer, enemy of all life, all warmth, all light,  remorseless nemesis of all that existed in Time.
     The road levelled and turned right and Halvorsen paused to rest.  The hound plunged away on the path of a hare.  He waited for her, leaning against the rusty iron of an abandoned pump-jack, panting out clouds of frost-smoke, eyes blinking with cold tears as he looked out at the stark and brittle universe of winter. At hillsides stripped to rock and harsh planes of snow.  Crisscrossed, beneath the naked trees, with furrows and seams like a weathered, ancient face.
     The old man sank back into the past like a stone into the cold dark water of a dammed lake.  Seeing not what was before his eyes, but what was sixty years gone.
     They'd been bumping southward along a rutted track in old Amos McKittrack's  Model T, when the road dropped, the scrub oak fell away, and the boy Billy Halvorsen had gone to stone in his seat.
     Before them had been  desolation to the blue horizon, fold on fold of hills stripped like battlefield dead.  Their slopes were littered with stumps and briars, slashed and gouged with the Shay engines' right-of-way.  The trapper, cursing, had told him how the timber companies had bought politicians, lied and cheated the Indians and smallholders off their land; then whipsawed, toppled, and stripped for tanbark twenty-eight million acres of virgin forest.
     Eyes narrowed, mouth set like a frozen mask, Halvorsen stood staring out.  Then the past gave way again beneath him, and under the snow, under the trees, far beneath the ancient, glacier-planed mountains themselves, he saw the form and structure of the land.
     Once it had been an immense shallow sea.  Over millions of years its buried marshes had turned to petroleum and natural gas,  accumulating in traps and fractures as the land twisted and compressed.  So that now, thousands of feet beneath where he stood, lay the great sands that had supplied the finest oil in the world for a hundred years.  Enough, once, to dazzle the world, and lay the foundations of a thousand fortunes.  Once . . . but now it was almost gone.
     The wind gusted up from the valley, drawing with it an icy curtain of wind-whipped snow, and he shuddered, recalled to himself standing motionless deep in the woods.  Lost in thought, lost in time . . . . useless, daydreaming old bastard . . . but for a moment it had been as if he could see it all, like God himself; all that was past and yet present, all that had happened and was still to come.
     He shivered again, looked blankly around for the hound.  She was investigating some deer-tracks.  He whistled her in and forced himself again into a walk.
     The road came to another switchback and plunged steeply.  This was where Alma  had trouble when she came out to see him.  Damn near straight up and down, broken and gullied by a spring that perked out of the hillside.  He slid his boots along, searching beneath the snow for the treacherous slickness of hidden ice.  He rolled the plug in his cheek and spat bitter juice.  Out of tobacco too, had to remember to stock up  at the store.
     His tongue was exploring a sore spot on his gum when he heard a voice.  He hesitated, looking off between the naked black trees.  It came again, a distant shout, almost a scream.  Hard to tell, but it sounded like whoever was yelling was down in the hollow, below him.
     "C'mere, Jess," he muttered, and the dog followed as he left the road, handing himself from tree to tree down the bank.
     Below that was rocks, and then, a few hundred feet down, the creek.  Halvorsen traversed the rocks carefully.  Big as compact cars, flat-topped juts out of the hillside,  if you slipped you could break a leg easy.  He hesitated,  almost turned back.  Then  heard another scream echo from below.
     The creek came down the run like a ladder.  Its slightly turbid water chattered over mossy rocks, making a rounded coating over the submerged stones, curling clear claws around the ones that broke the surface.  It ran so fast it didn't freeze, except in the coldest winters.
     The old man stopped at the edge, searching for a way across.  There, upstream, a few stones showed shallow under the rushing black water.
     "Come on, Jess," he said again.  "Let's see what's goin' on down here."

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     A few minutes later he crouched in a stand of pines above a lease road, looking down on what seemed to be a murder in progress.
     An ice- and salt-caked Ford pickup was parked square in the middle of the narrow road.   Not far from it two men were beating a third.  One was using his fists; the other, a length of what looked to Halvorsen like wire rope.  He could hear the blows, hear the choked whimpers of the man being beaten.  As he watched, the smaller man collapsed onto the snow.  His face was a bloody mask, but through it Halvorsen caught something else.
     He's a Chink, or a Jap or something, the old man thought.  But the two guys beating him, they're white.
     He squatted amid  the pines, muzzling  the dog with gloved hands.  He didn't like to see two big men on one little one.  He wished he had a rifle.   He'd feel more confident stepping into trouble.  But he couldn't own a gun anymore.  They'd made that clear at the parole hearing.  Anyway, this wasn't his fight.  Whatever it was about, it didn't have anything to do with him.
     One of the white men, tall, with a jutting jaw, started kicking the guy on the snow.
     You shouldn't get involved, Halvorsen told himself.  Just ought to let things alone.  Like you shouldn't have got involved in that strike, in '36.  Or with the trucks dumping that poison.  Last time you stuck your neck out, you lost two years out of your life.
     But he couldn't let them beat a defenseless man to death.  He just plain couldn't do it.  He let go the bitch's muzzle, and her barking pealed startlingly loud in the confined bottom of the hollow.  "Hey," Halvorsen yelled. "Hey!  You men!"
     They snapped around, searching the woods above them.  But just like he figured, they couldn't see him, or tell how many there were.  For the first time he got a clear look at the tall one's face, and squinted.  He'd seen this guy somewhere before.
     "Shit.  Somebody up there."
     "Who is it?  You see 'em?"
     "No.  Let's get the hell out of here."  The tall one jerked the driver's door open, and was halfway in when he jumped out again.  "Grab his ass," he yelled to the other.
     They picked up the Asian and threw him into the bed, tossed a tarp over the sagging body, then scrambled into the cab.  The starter snarled and the truck jerked, bounded forward like a startled deer, and disappeared down the hollow, leaving only a  fading growl, gravel-spattered ruts in the snow, and a white cloud that drifted downwind, slowly rising, till it vanished into the silent trees.
     Halvorsen dusted snow off his pants and stood, frowning.  He'd looked for a number as the truck moved off.  Pennsy plates, blue and yellow, but so caked with salt-ice he couldn't make them out.  All he had was an insignia on the door.  It wasn't any he knew: Penelec, the lightning-bolt of Thunder Oil, the two raised fingers of Kendall, or the state logo the game protectors' vehicles carried.  It was a gray pyramid, with letters inside.  Maybe a word, he couldn't tell.
     At last he whistled to the dog, who was sniffing at blood-drops in the snow, a twisted snow-angel where the man had fallen.  Together they swung off again down the hollow, toward the town.

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     The blue flames fluttered with a hollow roar, and the gas heat hit him like a blow in the face, drying his eyeballs so his lids grated when he blinked.  It was so stifling after the crisp winter air he couldn't breathe for a few seconds after the door swung closed.  Taking off his hat, he stood immobile, ignoring the dog's scratching on the outer door.  Then reached up a hand.  His outstretched fingers groped for ragged fur, a gaping muzzle, teeth.  But they fanned through empty space.
     "Lookin' for your bear, Racks?  Ain't there no more."
     "That you, Stan?"
     "No.  It's Lucky."
     Halvorsen blinked again, remembering Stanley Rezk had been dead for years.  Getting old, he thought, angry at himself.  But he didn't recall anything about them getting rid of the bear . . . "It ain't there?"
     "Took it in to Sonny's for repairs.  It was getting kind of moth-eaten.  Don't worry, I'll pick up the tab, it's a good draw for the bar."
     Halvorsen felt annoyed.  What did he care what they did with the damn bear?  He didn't hunt anymore.  He cleared his throat and unbuttoned his coat, stamped snow from his boots, and headed back past mahogany-stained pine booths with new green plastic cushions, the bar, the swinging door to the kitchen.  Four men glanced up from a nook behind the cigarette machine.
     "Racks!  What you doing down out of the hills?"
     "Welcome to Sin City, W.T."
     "Hullo, boys," said Halvorsen, suppressing a smile as he fumbled his hat onto the rack.  Didn't make a damn bit of difference what time of day he ran into them, they were hardly ever sober.  Jack McKee had been a tool dresser for the Gerroy outfit, a gambler, a fighter.  Now he was bald and his hands shook with Parkinson's.  Mase Wilson had jobbed for the White Timber Company, cutting and peeling from when he turned fourteen till the day he lost an arm to one of the big bandsaws.  Fatso DeSantis had played Two Old Cat with Halvorsen through the long dusk after their first day of school, a slim shadow with sneakers flashing beneath the streetlights.  Now he was so heavy the only place that could weigh him was the post office, he had to go to the loading dock and get on the bulk-mail scale.  Charlie Prouper was the oldest man in town, an emaciated ghost who couldn't speak without putting his finger over a silver tube like a second mouth in his throat.  Old men . . . and he was one of them.
     "They say it's been jammed up for two weeks now.  If that don't clear before warm weather sets in, we're gonna see major flooding."
     "What's that, Mase?"
     "Damn Allegheny's froze up solid over at Roulette.  They're talking blasting.  Hey, might be up your alley.  You used to handle the nitro, didn't you?"
     "Ain't touched it for years.  Figure I got out alive back then, I'm ahead of the game."
     A thin girl Halvorsen didn't know came back with shots of White Seal and bottles of Straub's and Black Label.  She started to put one down in front of him, but he said quickly, "Coffee for me, please.  With the cream."  She set a paper cup down instead and he stared at it before he realized it was for his chew.  He spat carefully and folded the top and set it down by his side on the scuffed patterned linoleum.  "So, what else's new?"
     "Nothing."
     "Ain't seen you in a while, Charlie.  Weren't you sick, over in that home?"
     Prouper looked up slowly from his untouched beer.  A low, hoarse, vibrating whisper said, "Had me the pneumonia."
     "I was over to see him," said Wilson.  He sounded angry, but that was how he'd always talked.  "Shit,  they had him on the damn breathing machine, they didn't think he was gonna make it.  But damn if he ain't out here again borrowing my money."
     Prouper fumbled for his neck.  "Ever tell you boys about," he said.
     They leaned back, waiting, knowing it took him time to get breath for words.  "When I was with the Marines in France -- 'Fore I got gassed -- the captain kept sending me out to scout the Hun lines --  Every night.  Finally I ast him, Captain -- why do you keep sending me out to scout, why don't you give some of the other boys a chance.  Captain said, -- because you keep coming back."  He took his finger off his neck and looked around at them.
     "And you come back again," Wilson grunted.
     "That's right.  But I tell you one thing.  I ain't going back to that there hospital ever again," whispered Prouper.  He leaned slowly back, nodding to give his words weight, and returned to the somber detached contemplation of his Straub's.
     Halvorsen sat back too, feeling the hot air nipping his ears back to life with sharp kitten-bites.  His coffee came and he counted out change, looking over the menu in pressed-in white plastic letters over the counter.  Might be nice to have something he didn't fix out of a can.  The pork chops and potatoes, maybe . . . .
     Talking about the nitro made him remember the oilfields.  How in the winter, long before sunup, the men would start getting ready for the day's operations.  With guttering torches, rags wrapped on sticks and dipped in the crude, they'd begin thawing out the rod lines to the jacks.  Building fires under the storage tanks,  heating the inflammable crude to the seventy degrees it needed to flow . . . the oil came out of the ground mixed with natural gas but they just let that evaporate, or it howled out of the well pure and colorless and they flared it off.  They built the refineries on the creeks so they could dump whatever they didn't want.  In those days the creeks had floated inches thick with oil-scum.  Sometimes it would catch fire, sending a black cloud up behind the hills, and  everywhere the air reeked sweet with crude petroleum.  It was a smell W. T. Halvorsen had always liked.
     Someone pushed by him toward the restroom and his mind recurred unwillingly to the hot noisy interior of the tavern.  McKee was talking about some kind of insect.  "They're sprayin' for 'em over in the state forest right now.  They had it bad down in the Shenandoah, sucked all the sap right out of the hemlocks.  Say they can kill a hemlock in a couple of years."
     Halvorsen relaxed, the heat making him drowsy, llistening as the conversation wandered.  A school bus accident out by Beaver Fork.  Some farmers had been complaining about dog killings.  Finally Wilson turned to him.  "You gettin' any of them cherry poachers out your way?"
     "The what?"
     "Cherry poachers.  You know how since they done all that clearcutting they had a lot of black cherry grow back.  That and the beech and maple.  Well, it's getting to the size they're cutting it, selling it to Kane Hardwood."
     "Seen the trucks on Route Six."
     "Uh huh.  They sell a lot overseas, a lot goes down to Carolina, make furniture out of it.  Well, now there's guys poaching it.  They'll pull in some night with chainsaws and skidders and next day the people own the land, they'll go out and look and there's nothing left but stumps."
     "I heard somebody got the stained glass out of the church over at Four Holes," said the girl, who had come back without Halvorsen noticing.  "Right out of the church.  They just come out and looked one morning and it was gone."
     A man in uniform came out of the restroom.  "Hey, Pat," said DeSantis.  "You know all these guys, don't you?"
     Pat Nolan was the local police chief.  A big man, blond around a balding crown.  "Hull, Mase, Charlie, Fatso.  Racks, nice to see you in town.  How you getting along out there?"
     "Hello, Pat.  All right."
     "Keeping out of trouble?"
     "Tryin' to."
     "Good . . . Fatso, if I have to pull that Willys of yours over one more time, you're gonna be walking it."
     "Now, Pat, I don't drive her over twenty-five."
     "And you're all over the road like paint.  You want to have a drink, fine, but get somebody else to drive you home.  I'm not kidding, that kind of stuff don't go anymore."
     Halvorsen said, "What's happening, Pat?"
     "Not too much.  I was going out the Derris road and I saw a station wagon stopped.  I went up to it, said, 'Can I help you, ma'am.'  The lady makes these big round eyes and says, 'Turn around and look behind you.'  I think yeah, I heard this one before, so I kind of back up and put my hand on my holster and half turn my head.  And there's the biggest fucking bear I ever seen in my life, right up on top of the embankment.  I'm the trained observer, right?  I saw the station wagon but not the bear.  I thought, Ma, sell the shithouse, I just lost my ass.  He would have had me."
     "What was you doing out Derris?"
     "Guy was stealing gas.  Property owners get free gas off the wells, you know?  Well, this guy had lines led to two other houses he owned, and was stealing electricity from the company, too.  Then National Fuel offered to meter and reduced it from a criminal to a civil suit."  Nolan looked toward the front of the tavern.  "Nice to see you fellows," he called back.
     Wilson said, "All this goddamned crime.  People don't have no respect for property anymore.  And I'll tell you why, it's because they ain't teaching them when they're little.  When I was a kid nobody ever stole anything.  They never even locked their doors.  Now you see it on the television, why -- "
     "What do you mean, they never stole anything?" Halvorsen said.
     "Just what I said.  When you and me were kids -- "
     Halvorsen said, "Shit, Mase, what the hell are you talking about?  The first guys out here stole all this land from the damn Indians.  Then White and Gerroy and them stole all the timber.  Rockefeller tried to steal all the damn oil.  What's the damn difference?"
     They regarded him with dull astonishment.  "Jesus.  What's got into you?" McKee said.
     "Nothing.  I just don't figure what he was saying was right, sayin' nobody ever used to steal anything in the old days.  The bastards I used to work with, they'd of stole your goddamned ass if it hadn't of been nailed on."  Halvorsen jammed an elbow into DeSantis's flabby side, shoved past Wilson, put his hand on Prouper's shoulder as he stared into his beer.  "Take it easy, boys."
     "Goin' already?"
     "Things to do, people to see."
     "So long, W.T."
     "Stop by before you head home."
     "And you take care of yourself, Charlie," Halvorsen said, grappling his fingers into the older man's shoulder.  It felt slack and bony, and Prouper shook his head without looking up.
     He caught up to the officer as he glanced at the empty space by the door.  "What happened to your bear?"  Nolan asked him.
     "Lucky sent it in to the taxidermist, get it cleaned up.  I have a word with you?"
     "Sure."
     He couldn't help it, something made him feel selfconscious about being seen talking to a cop.  He muttered, "Let's go outside."
     In the street the snow swirled in cyclones down the shovelled sidewalk.  The sky was like gray wrapping paper taped down over the double row of brick and frame two-story and false-front buildings that was Main Street, Raymondsville, Pennsylvania.  Down the block was the little gazebo and the bronze tablets set into rocks, Veterans' Square, and beyond that the black iron arch of the bridge.  Above them the hills peered down like squatting boys examining the skitterings of ants.
     "What you got, Racks?"
     "I was walkin' in to town this morning.  Seven, eight o'clock.  I hear somebody yelling down at the bottom of Mortlock Run.  I went down to look and there was two guys beating up on a little fella.  I made some noise and Jess, she barked and they skedaddled in a white Ford pickup.  Couldn't get no number."
     "What happened to the victim?"
     "They threw him in the bed of the truck.  He didn't look in any too good shape, but I think he was still breathing."
     Nolan had a notebook out, was bent into the doorway of the Salvation Army Thrift Shop as the cold wind shouldered past.  "Describe any of 'em?"
     "The ones doing the beating, two guys about thirty, forty, wearing work clothes.  The tall one had on a Bills hat.  Kind of lean lookin' face, like that Basil Rathbone in the Sherlock Holmes movies.  Jaw out to here.  Big ears.  Kind of bad skin, a red face.  Leather jacket.  Thought I knew him for a second, but I must of been mistaken.  The other guy was heavyset.  No, fat.  A big gut on him.  Had on one of them orange stocking caps, and a mule-colored field jacket.  I didn't get a good look at his face."
     "The victim?"
     "Young.  Maybe twenty.  Thing is, he was some kind of foreigner, looked like to me.  Oriental, or maybe Mexican, but he wasn't negro or white."
     "That's a pretty good description."
     "Uh huh . . . the truck, it had an insignia on it."  He described it as best he could.
     Nolan snapped his notebook shut and tucked it into his overcoat.  "Okay.  I'll file it.  Too late to get anybody out there, get tracks or anything, they'd all be covered up.  But I'll keep an eye open for a truck meeting that description."
     "Maybe the state cops could help.  Bill Sealey -- "
     Nolan moved his head slightly, managing to give an impression of impatience or annoyance, but all he said was "Uh huh.  I'll give Bill a call, see if he knows anything."
     As Nolan headed for his cruiser Halvorsen stood with his hands in his pockets, looking after him.  At the shabby buildings sagging on their foundations, the peeling signs creaking in the wind, the deserted heart of a bereft, forgotten town.  Goddamn it, he thought, turning his head slowly to look up the street, checking his back trail.  But seeing nothing except the bridge, the looming hills, the frozen writhe of the river.
     It was crazy, he knew that, but he still couldn't shake the feeling that something was following him.

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