Bitterroot by James Lee Burke

Author:James Lee Burke [Burke, James Lee]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Mystery
ISBN: 0743217535
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2001-06-12T04:00:00+00:00

I GUESS I had misjudged Doc's potential. Or at least Wyatt Dixon had.

The next night he was at home in the small log house Carl Hinkel had given him to use on the back of Hinkel's property. The moon was up and from his window he could see the lines of cottonwoods along the Bitterroot River and the monolithic shapes of the mountains against the sky and the thick stands of timber that grew into the canyons. A star shower burst above the valley and Wyatt Dixon wondered if the tracings of light across the darkness of the heavens were a sign, perhaps an indicator that an enormous historical change was at hand for him and his kind.

Or perhaps he thought nothing at all.

The night was cold, but neither cold nor heat had ever had an appreciable effect on him. He wore only a nylon vest over his skin when he walked down to the river with a cane pole and a can of worms and bobber-fished in an eddy behind a beaver dam. Two nights earlier he had spread the surface of the water with cornmeal, and now, in less than five minutes, he hooked what was at least a twenty-five-inch bull trout. He let the trout swallow the treble hook, down the throat and into the belly, so there would be no chance of its slipping off, then he horsed it onto the bank and picked it up by the tail and swung it like a sock full of wet sand and bashed its brains out on a rock.

As he walked back to his house he saw car lights through a stand of lodgepole pine on the neighbor's property, but the lights disappeared and he gave them no more thought. He slit the belly of his fish under an outside faucet and raked out the guts and threw them to one of Carl's cats, then he scrubbed his hands clean under the faucet and threaded a stick through the trout's gills and mouth and went inside his house.

Just inside the doorway a piece of bronze wire glistened once on the edge of his vision, then looped over his head and tightened around his neck, squeezing tendon and artery, shutting off air to his lungs and blood to his brain.

He lost both his sight and his consciousness as though he were watching a red-black liquid slide down the lens of a camera.

When he awoke his head snapped upward, like that of a man rising from a coffin, and the room, with all its familiar gunracks and deer and elk antlers and assortment of western hats and Indian blankets on the furniture and logs burning in the woodstove, came back into focus, everything in its right place, even the plastic suction device on the kitchen table that he used to clean impurities from the pores of his facial skin.

He realized he was seated in a chair and the wire loop that had razored into his flesh was no longer around

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