A Death in Eden--A Sean Stranahan Mystery by Keith McCafferty

Author:Keith McCafferty
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-07-02T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Green Gold

Katie Sparrow lived in a one-hundred-year-lease Forest Service cabin some few miles west of West Yellowstone, alone if you narrowed the definition to human company. She’d been engaged once, to a young man who’d died in an avalanche while skiing, and it was watching the dogs search for him that gave her the idea of becoming a handler, to provide a service that might save lives after losing the love of hers. Sean knew her to have little use for the male of the species after Colin’s death, beyond their basic utility to scratch a biological itch. He had once provided such a service—he never deluded himself into believing it was much more than physical, though she had flirted openly with him for years. Part of their compatibility was his acceptance by the graying-at-the-muzzle shepherd who greeted him with a wet nose on the porch of the cabin. Lothar, Katie’s Type I trailing dog, was her litmus test when it came to men. Nobody got beyond the porch if he raised the hackles on Lothar’s neck.

“How’s old Ephraim?” Sean asked when she answered his knock. “Seen him around much?”

“That old bear,” she said, pronouncing it “bar.” Katie had come from eastern Kentucky and lapsed into the idiom with friends, though she could talk in a flat midwestern accent, sounding like a woman with two masters under her belt, which she had, when assuming her duties as a backcountry park ranger.

“I haven’t seen the likes of that bar since September last. He got through the hunting season, he’ll show up a few weeks from now, when the hyperphagia kicks in. Fatten himself up for winter.”

Ephraim was a two-toned boar black bear with coal black body hair and a head the color of rusted needles on a burned lodgepole pine tree. He regularly visited Katie’s cabin in the fall, and twice, when she’d heard the squawking of her chickens, she’d shot his backside with rubber bullets. Sean remembered his huge haunches shaking as he lumbered away, as well as the blue streak of profanity from Katie’s lips that followed him, for the bear had killed six of her best laying hens.

“I haven’t been here for a while,” Sean said. “You look good, Katie.”

“No, you haven’t.” A pause. “I do? You said I looked like a wren.”

“It’s the way you cock your head to the side.”

“Like when I’m eyeballing some beetle to peck at?” She cocked her head. “But I suppose a wren’s better than a grackle or a magpie. You know what we haven’t done in a while? You and me haven’t got that wolf pack going for a while.”

Sean smiled at the memory, waking Katie in the middle of the night to howl with the Druid Pack on the skirts of Mount Two Top.

“We knew how to get them a-going,” she said. “That why you’re here asking all innocent about Ephraim, want to sing with the doggies? Not that I’d have qualms. Just I took you for the faithful type.

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