Ancient Shores Part 27

He could, of course, have killed the animal hours ago, but Jack enjoyed tracking. Run it down by inches. Give the beast a fair chance. But it wasn't running anymore. The prints were no longer clean and precise. The front edges were scuffed, and there were marks in the snow indicating uncertainty and, occasionally, that it had stumbled.

He caught glimpses of the animal frequently now. It was getting weaker, approaching exhaustion. He stopped and took off his ski mask and pulled a sandwich out of his utility pouch. Give it time. It didn't really matter at this stage. No need to hurry.

He poured coffee from his thermos.

The woods were full of birds today. Jack loved loved the creatures of the forest. He loved the smell of the woods and the sky wrapped over the trees and the wind moving through the branches and the clean oiled clack of a rifle bolt being slid home to remind you how alone you were. It was easy to lose yourself out here, to forget the concrete and the kids. the creatures of the forest. He loved the smell of the woods and the sky wrapped over the trees and the wind moving through the branches and the clean oiled clack of a rifle bolt being slid home to remind you how alone you were. It was easy to lose yourself out here, to forget the concrete and the kids.

At home in G.o.d's woods. That was how a man was supposed to live.

Sometimes, toward the end of a hunt, he almost came to feel guilty. The prints looked pitiful. He wondered, as he had many times before, about the almost mystical connection between hunter and prey. No anger. No animosity. The buck is resigned, will accept the final round while trying to scramble from its knees, but it will know who he is, and it also will feel the bond, the ineffable connection tracking back to the other side of the ice age.

Jack did not pretend to understand it. Like the buck, he simply accepted it. In his compa.s.sion, he drank slowly. When he was done, he folded the cellophane bag in which his sandwich had been wrapped and pushed it carefully into his pouch. (He had seen people drop trash in the woods from time to time, and nothing enraged Jack like litterers. Last year, about this time, he had come upon one, a guy leaving a trail of beer cans, and he'd left him bleeding by his campfire.) Time to end it.

The moment had come, and Jack would finish it, as he always did, with a single shot.

"I'm coming," he said, his ritualistic response to the final phase. He climbed onto the snowmobile, turned the ignition key, and felt the surge of power through his loins. Startled birds launched themselves into the wind.

He rolled back onto the trail, running behind the prints. Here the animal had paused and slipped into the underbrush. There it had scrambled down a steep slope. He had to go almost a mile out of his way to get to the bottom. Minutes later he followed it across a frozen stream.

It was an eight-point buck, and when he finally came upon it, the creature was trying to hide in thick snow-covered vegetation. But of course it could not conceal its tracks. He unsnapped his rifle and inserted a cartridge. Their eyes locked, a final moment of mutual recognition, and it tried weakly to back away.

Jack raised his weapon, put the animal's heart in his sight, and squeezed the trigger. The shot ricocheted through the woods. Surprise flickered in the buck's eyes. The trees came alive, and a storm of birds fled into the sky. Blood appeared on the buck's breast.

The animal's front legs sagged. It went down, spasmed and relaxed.

He stood enjoying the primal beauty of the scene, waiting for the quivering to stop. When it did, and the deer lay still, he turned back to the snowmobile for the sheet of plastic in which he would wrap the carca.s.s. In that moment something dark pa.s.sed across the sun.

He looked up, expecting to see a cloud. But the sky between the tangle of branches was hard and white. He retrieved his plastic, and the snow crunched under his boots while he spread it out beside the carca.s.s and smoothed it down. The animal had got tangled up in a bush, and he had to break off a few branches to get hold of the front legs.

The temperature began to drop.

He glanced nervously back along the trail to the point at which it curved out of sight, roughly thirty yards away. And ahead almost as far, where it topped a low hill.

A gust of wind shook the trees. Deep in his psyche, far back in the emotional tangles among which the real Jack McGuigan lived, something stirred. Some thing thing that was not part of him. that was not part of him.

And he felt waves of anger.

Crazy.

Birds and small game were everywhere. A warm air current touched him. The distant rumble of traffic, out on the highway, merged with the pristine silence. He grew disconnected, detached. And he was watching with sudden rage the deer and the snowmobile and a standing figure that could only have been himself.

He felt the treetops, warm and alive, under his hand. They shook. Snow and broken twigs rained down.

Something moved among the branches. The sunlight changed, shifted, coruscated. Someone was here with him. He lifted his weapon and turned to look behind him. The air was getting warmer, and the deer's blood was bright on the snow.

"It's a nightmare," Taylor said. He muted the sound and pushed back in his chair.

Tony Peters ma.s.saged the place over his left eye where his migraines always started.

The television images were from the UN, where a demand for international access to the Roundhouse was about to be presented to the Security Council. "Where," the president said gloomily, "we will have to veto the d.a.m.ned thing."

Peters thought they could ride out the storm, and he knew his role now was to rea.s.sure the president, to prevent precipitate action. "They all know," he said, "that you can't just give away sovereign territory. We couldn't do it if we wanted to. It's private property."

Taylor laughed. "Don't know," he said. "There's plenty of precedent for giving away private property. But it really doesn't matter. It would be wrong wrong."

"It would also be political suicide."

"So you think all that's happening here is that we're being sent a message?"

"No. Of course not. Everybody's scared. But there are still a lot of people who wouldn't want to miss a chance to embarra.s.s us."

"They're doing a h.e.l.l of a good job of it." The president refilled his sherry gla.s.s and offered the bottle.

Peters shook his head.

"Tony, who would have believed there's oil in paradise?" Matt Taylor sighed. "We just don't get a break."

"It shouldn't matter," the aide said. "How much oil can you throw into the world market bringing it through that whatsis one barrel at a time?"

That was a point, and the President seemed happy for that small bit of good news. "But it will matter," he said. "Eventually. If there's a lot of the stuff out there, we'll find a way to get it back. And everybody knows it. But that isn't really the problem, is it?"

"No."

Taylor understood there was more at stake here than economics and elections. Incredibly, a stairway into the sky had opened. He hardly dared consider the implications. He did not want to close it down. The man who did that would not look good a century or two from now. And Matt Taylor, like any president, was determined that history think well of him. He had believed attaining the White House would be enough. But once in the door, he began to envy Washington, Lincoln, the Roosevelts, and Truman. Theirs was a rank he had thought would be denied him because greatness is possible only in crisis. Every administration had its problems, but until the Roundhouse surfaced, his had been relatively mundane: no government to establish, no Union to save, no Hitler to oppose.

Now the crisis was here. In spades. And he had only to choose the right course.

What in h.e.l.l was was the right course? the right course?

"Tony," he said, "I think we've had enough. The Sioux won't cooperate, so we're going to have to find another way to close the operation down. I don't care what it takes, but I am not going to let this country come apart on my watch."

Walhalla, ND, Mar. 27 (AP)-A North Dakota man died this morning when he ran out of the woods off Route 32 south of here, directly into the path of a moving van. The victim was John L. McGuigan of Fort Moxie, who was apparently hunting out of season. His snowmobile was found abandoned about a mile away. It was reported to be in good working order. Police have not explained why he left the snowmobile or why he was running. An investigation is continuing.McGuigan is survived by his wife, Jane, and two children.

"Dr. Deekin, are you absolutely certain about what you saw?"

Ca.s.s looked into the TV cameras. "Yes," he said. "Absolutely."

"Why haven't the people at Johnson's Ridge said anything about this? Is there a cover-up?"

Deekin thought it over. "I don't think so," he said. "I mean, this thing, whatever it was, was invisible invisible. They may not know it exists."

"So what you're saying is that something that cannot be seen came through the port."

"I believe so."

"And is now loose in North Dakota."

"Yes. I would think that is true."

The interviewer turned toward the camera. "So we may have an invisible visitor. We'll be back in a minute to try to determine whether there's a connection between Dr. Deekin's experience, the reports today of a disembodied voice at a remote railroad terminal, and the mysterious death of a hunter near Johnson's Ridge."

25.

It is I who travel in the winds,It is I who whisper in the breeze.-Ojibwa poem Excerpt from The Newshour with Jim Lehrer, The Newshour with Jim Lehrer, March 28 March 28. Conversation with Doctor Edward Bannerman, of the Inst.i.tute for Advanced Study, on the subject of the "Dakota port," with Jim Lehrer. Dr. Bannerman is a two-time n.o.bel prize-winning physicist.

Bannerman: It might actually be what physicists call a bridge, which is to say a connection between separate universes. The Horsehead Nebula in the skies of Eden, for example, need not be It might actually be what physicists call a bridge, which is to say a connection between separate universes. The Horsehead Nebula in the skies of Eden, for example, need not be our our Horsehead at all. We don't really know. And, to be quite honest, we may never know the truth of any of this. Incidentally, I should observe that were this to be the case, those people who are hoping to use this technology to travel from San Francisco to New York are going to be disappointed. Horsehead at all. We don't really know. And, to be quite honest, we may never know the truth of any of this. Incidentally, I should observe that were this to be the case, those people who are hoping to use this technology to travel from San Francisco to New York are going to be disappointed.Lehrer: They will not arrive in New York? They will not arrive in New York?Bannerman: Oh, I suspect they would. But it wouldn't be Oh, I suspect they would. But it wouldn't be our our New York. New York.

Jeri Tully was eight years old. Mentally, she was about three, and the experts cautioned her parents against hoping for much improvement. No one knew what had gone wrong with Jeri. There was no history of mental defects on either side of her family and no apparent cause. She had two younger brothers, both of whom were quite normal.

Her father was a border patrolman, her mother a former legal secretary who had given up all hope of a career when she followed her husband to Fort Moxie.

Jeri went to school in Walhalla, which had the only local special-education cla.s.s. She enjoyed school, where she made numerous friends, and where everyone seemed to make a fuss over her. Mornings in the Tully household were underscored by Jeri's enthusiasm to get moving.

Walhalla was thirty-five miles away. The family had an arrangement with the school district, which was spread out over too vast an area to operate buses for the special-ed kids: The Tullys provided their own transportation, and the district absorbed the expenses.

Jeri's mother, June, had actually grown to enjoy the twice-daily round trip. The child loved to ride, and she was never happier than when in the car. The other half of the drive, when June was alone, served as quiet time, when she could just watch the long fields roll by or plug an audio book into the sound system.

Curt Hollis's adventure had taken place on a Thursday. Jeri's father worked the midnight shift the following night, and his wife was waiting for him with French toast, bacon, and coffee when he got home in the morning. While they were eating breakfast, an odd thing happened. For the only time in her life, Jeri wandered away from home. It seemed, later, that she had decided to go to school and, having no concept of distance, or of the day (it was Sat.u.r.day), had decided to walk.

Unseen by anyone except her two-year-old brother, she put on her overshoes and her coat, let herself out through the porch door, walked up to Route 11, and turned right. Her house was on the extreme western edge of town, so she was past the demolished Tastee-Freez and across the interstate overpa.s.s within minutes. The temperature was still in the teens.

Three-quarters of a mile outside Fort Moxie, Route 11 curves sharply south and then almost immediately veers west again. Had the road been free of snow, Jeri would probably have stayed with it and been picked up within a few minutes. But a light snowfall had dusted the two-lane. Jeri wasn't used to paying attention to details, and at the first bend she walked straight off the highway. When, a few minutes later, the snow got deeper, she angled right and got still farther from the road.

Jeri's parents had by then discovered she was missing. A frightened search was just getting under way, but it was limited to within a block or so of her home.

Jim Stuyvesant, the editor and publisher of the Fort Moxie News Fort Moxie News, was on his way to the Roundhouse. The story that an apparition had come through from the other side was going to be denied that morning in a press conference, and Jim planned to be there. He was just west of town when he saw movement out on Josh McKenzie's land to his right. A snow devil was gliding back and forth in a curiously regular fashion. The snow devil was a perfect whirlpool, narrow at the base, wide at the top. Usually these things were blurred around the edges; they possessed an indefiniteness, and they floated erratically across the plain. But this this one looked almost solid, and it moved patiently back and forth along the same course. one looked almost solid, and it moved patiently back and forth along the same course.

Stuyvesant stopped to watch.

It was almost hypnotic. A stiff wind rocked the car, enough to blow the snow devil to pieces. But it remained intact.

Stuyvesant never traveled without his video camera, which he had used on several occasions to get footage he'd subsequently sold to Ben at Ten Ben at Ten or to one of the other local TV news shows. (He had, for example, got superb footage of the Thanksgiving Day pileup on I-29 and the blockade of imported beef at the border by angry ranchers last summer.) The snow devil continued to glide back and forth in its slow, unwavering pattern. He turned on the camera, walked a few steps into the field, and started to tape. or to one of the other local TV news shows. (He had, for example, got superb footage of the Thanksgiving Day pileup on I-29 and the blockade of imported beef at the border by angry ranchers last summer.) The snow devil continued to glide back and forth in its slow, unwavering pattern. He turned on the camera, walked a few steps into the field, and started to tape.

He used the zoom lens and got a couple of minutes' worth of pictures before the whirlwind seemed to pause.

It started toward him.

He kept filming.

It approached at a constant pace. There was something odd in its manner, something almost deliberate.

The crosswind ripped at his jacket but didn't seem to have any effect on the snow devil. Stuyvesant's instincts began to sound warnings, and he took a step back toward the car.

It stopped.

Amazing. As if it had responded to him.

He stood, uncertain how to proceed. The whirlwind began to move again, laterally, then retreated a short distance and came forward to its previous position.

He was watching it through the camera lens. The red indicator lamp glowed at the bottom of the picture.

You're waiting for me.

It approached again, and the wind tugged at his collar and his hair.

He took a step forward. And it retreated.

Like everyone else in the Fort Moxie area, Stuyvesant had been deluged with fantastic tales and theories since the Roundhouse had been uncovered. Now, without prompting, he wondered whether a completely unknown type of life form existed on the prairie and was revealing itself to him. The notion forced him to laugh. It also forced him to decide what he really believed.

He started forward.

It withdrew again.

He kept going. The snow got deeper, filled his shoes and froze his ankles.

The snow devil continued to back away. He hoped he was getting the effect on camera.

It whirled and glittered in the sun, maintaining the distance between them. He slowed, and it slowed.

Another car was pulling off the highway. He wondered how he would explain this, and immediately visualized next week's headline in the News: News: "Mad Editor Put Under Guard." "Mad Editor Put Under Guard."

But it was a hunt without a point. The fields went on, all the way to Winnipeg. Far enough, he decided. "Sorry," he said aloud. "This is as far as I go."

And the thing withdrew another sixty or so yards. And collapsed.

When it did, it left something dark lying in the snow.

Jeri Tully.

That was the day Stuyvesant got religion. The story that actually appeared in the Fort Moxie News Fort Moxie News would be a truncated version of the truth. would be a truncated version of the truth.

Unfortunately, there was no ready-made church at hand in Fort Moxie. But the Lord provides, and in this case He provided Kor Yensen. Kor was going to Arizona to move in with his son and daughter-in-law on a trial basis. But he was reluctant to dispose of his oversized house until he saw how things went. The opportunity to rent it to the TV preacher on a short-term basis arrived at precisely the right moment. It never occurred to him that the action would cause a permanent rift with his neighbors, who were mostly Methodists and Lutherans, and who preferred a more sedate form of worship than the hosannahs and oratorical thunder provided by Old-Time Bill.

In order to fulfill its function, Kor's house needed some renovation. The Volunteers tore out three walls to get adequate meeting s.p.a.ce. (They posted bond with Kor, promising to restore everything.) They installed a backdrop of dark-stained paneled walls and crowded bookshelves to maintain Bill's signature atmosphere. They put in an organ and a sound stage and installed state-of-the-art communication equipment. Two days after their arrival, and just in time for the regular Sat.u.r.day night service, the Backcountry Church was ready to go.