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Vida smiles and shakes her head and once more drops to her knees among the dogs, which lavish her with affection. “You and your pack here—who do you search for?”

“Escaped prisoners, people operating meth labs so deep in the mountains they think no one can track them, lost children, people with Alzheimer’s who wander away from home, anyone who needs to be found.”

She says, “Important work.”

He shrugs. “The dogs do the work.”

“You must know the county well, these mountains.”

“I don’t belong anywhere but here. The people have changed some, but the mountains never have.”

“Not yet.” She looks up from the dogs. “You know the Smoking River, where it is?”

“That’s not an official name. It’s a place along the Little Bear River, three hundred yards from end to end, where geothermalvents introduce enough heat into the water to make steam rise from it. About as remote as any place gets. A long time ago, it was a sacred spot to some Native Americans in these parts. Most have no knowledge of it, left it behind with memories of so much else.”

“Two moon,” she says. “Sun spirit.”

“I know them.”

“Them?”

“They use only their Cheyenne names. Sun Spirit is the wife of Two Moon. They’ve chosen a life of hermitage. They live just south of where the river smokes.”

When Vida gets to her feet, the three dogs are seized by a new excitement expressed in whimpers of pleasurable anticipation, as if some purpose that has gripped the woman is one they can endorse.

“How far to this place south of the smoking river?”

“From here, if you have the stamina to stay on the move until nightfall, then start out at first light, you could be there by ten o’clock tomorrow morning, noon at the latest.”

“That’s way beyond the woods I’m familiar with. I’ll hire you to get me there.”

“Get there why?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know.”

“But they will.”

“Two Moon and Sun Spirit?”

“Yeah. Somehow, I’m sure they know something I need to know. Get me to them.”

THREE

THE FUTURE IN THE PAST

65

WHAT THE DEAD CAN PROVIDE

Monger and Rackman each died in the instant the quarrel found its target. Their hearts stopped and their blood pressure dropped at once to zero over zero, so that their wounds produced little blood. Relieving them of their supplies isn’t wet work, but two people are required to shift and roll such large men to wrestle their backpacks from them.

Belden Bead had perished from an accidentally self-inflicted gunshot. Nash Deacon succumbed to mushroom poisoning as if Vida’s life were an Agatha Christie novel. In the first case, she wasn’t to any degree complicit, and the second was an almost genteel homicide. However, the sight of neck and head wounds inflicted by the quarrels attests to an escalation of violence that she regrets but for which she has no remorse—and to which, in the interest of survival, she might have to resort again. At least men like these, by their evil, ensure the absolution of those forced to kill them.

The brothers are carrying a lot of ammunition; Vida and Sam have no use for it. When the ammo is discarded, the backpacks will be bearable. The bottled water, protein bars, and dry dog food are sufficient to support them until they get to Two Moon and Sun Spirit, if the three German shepherds drink spring water where it exists.

“What do we do with the bodies?” Sam asks.