He watched the Jetranger hammer away across the plateaus of rock and the huge spread of forest that led out of the wilderness. Then he explored the cave and the shelf in front of it. When he was done he found a rock, sat and stared north at the almost unbelievable view.
In the clinic at Red Lodge a doctor and a nurse began to work on the girl, stripping away the chilled wedding dress, chafing hands and feet, arms, legs and ribcage. Her surface temperature was below frostbite level and her core temperature into the danger zone.
After twenty minutes the doctor caught a faint beat deep inside, a young heart fighting to live. Twice the beat stopped; twice he pumped the ribcage till it came back again. The body core temperature began to rise.
Once she stopped breathing and the doctor forced his own breath into her to make the lungs resume. The temperature in the room was at sauna level and the electric blanket wrapping her lower limbs was at maximum.
After an hour an eyelid trembled and the blue colour began to ebb from the lips. The nurse checked the core temperature: it was above danger level and rising. The heartbeat steadied and strengthened.
In half an hour Whispering Wind opened her large dark eyes and her lips whispered, ‘Ben?’
The doctor offered a short prayer of thanks to old Hippocrates and all the others who had come before him.
‘It’s Luke, but never mind. I thought we might have lost you there, kid.’
On his stone the sheriff watched the Jetranger returning for him. He could see it miles away in the still air and hear the angry snarl of its rotors clawing at the atmosphere. It was so peaceful on the mountain. When Jerry touched down Sheriff Lewis beckoned to the single deputy in the front seat.
‘Break out two blankets and come over here,’ he shouted when the rotor blades had slowed to idling speed. When the deputy joined him he pointed and said, ‘Bring him too.’
The young man wrinkled his nose.
‘Aw, Sheriff . . .’
‘Just do it. He was a man once. He deserves a Christian burial.’
The skeleton of the horse was on its side. Every scrap of skin, flesh, muscle and sinew had long been picked clean. The hair of tail and mane had gone, probably for nesting material. But the teeth, ground down by the tough forage of the plains, were still in the jaw. The bridle was almost dust, but the steel bit glittered between the teeth.
The brown hoofs were intact and on them the four shoes nailed in place long ago by some cavalry farrier.
The skeleton of the man was a few yards away, on his back, as if he had died in his sleep. Of his clothes there was almost nothing left, scraps of rotten buckskin clinging to the ribs. Spreading one blanket, the deputy began to place the bones upon it, every last one. The sheriff returned to those things the rider had once possessed.
Wind and weather over countless seasons had reduced the saddle and girth to a pile of rotten leather, and also the saddlebags. But among the mess gleamed the cases of a handful of brass cartridges. Sheriff Lewis took them.
There was a bowie knife, brown with rust, in the remains of a beaded scabbard which crumbled at the touch. What had once been the sheepskin sheath of a frontier rifle had been torn away by pecking birds, but the firearm lay in the frost, clogged with the rust of years, but still a rifle.
What perplexed him were the two arrows in their quiver, the stave of osage cherry, tapered at both ends and notched to take the string, and the axe. All appeared to be almost new. There was a belt buckle and a length of tough old leather that had survived the elements still attached to it.
The sheriff took them all, wrapped them in the second blanket, gave a last look round to see there was nothing left, and climbed aboard. The deputy was in the back with the other bundle.
For the last time the Jetranger lifted away into the sky, back over the two plateaus and on to the green mass of the National Forest under the morning sun.
Sheriff Lewis looked down at Lake Fork, choked in snow. There would be an expedition to bring back the cadavers but he knew no-one had survived. He stared down at the rock and the trees and wondered about the young man whom he had pursued across this unforgiving land.
From 5,000 feet he could look down to Rock Creek on his right and see that the traffic was flowing again on the interstate, the fallen pine and the wreckage cleared. They passed over Red Lodge and Jerry checked with the deputy who had remained there. He reported the girl was in intensive care but her heart still beat.
Four miles north of Bridger as they followed the highway home, he could see a hundred acres of fire-blackened prairie, and twe
nty miles further he looked down at the tonsured lawns and prize longhorns of the Bar-T Ranch.
The helicopter crossed the Yellowstone and the highway west to Bozeman, dipped and began to lose height. And so they came back to Billings Field.
‘“Man that is born of woman hath but a little time to live.”’
It was late February and bitter cold in the small cemetery at Red Lodge. In the far corner was a fresh-dug grave and above it, on two crossbars, a simple and cheap pine coffin.
The priest was muffled against the chill, the two sextons punched their gloved hands as they waited. One mourner stood at the foot of the grave in snow boots and a quilted coat, but bareheaded. A cape of raven hair flowed about her shoulders.
At the far edge of the graveyard a big man stood under a yew and watched but did not approach. He wore a sheepskin coat against the cold, the insignia of his office pinned to the front.