Mountains of the Misbegotten Read online

  DEPUTY LUTE BAPCAT TO DEPLOY IMMEDIATELY TO ONTONAGON COUNTY. STOP. DEPUTY FARRELL MACKLEY DEPARTED HIS RESIDENCE IN EARLY MARCH, TELLING HIS SPOUSE HE WOULD RETURN INSIDE OF FOURTEEN DAYS. STOP. PROCEED TO MACKLEY’S RESIDENCE. STOP. FULLY INVESTIGATE DISAPPEARANCE AND PERFORM DEPUTY DUTIES FOR THE COUNTY UNTIL CASE IS CONCLUDED, OR UNTIL SUCH TIME, WHEN NECESSARY, A NEW DEPUTY IS APPOINTED AND REPORTS FOR DUTY. STOP. ALL QUESTIONS TO HARJU IN MARQUETTE. STOP. DAVID JONES. CHIEF DEPUTY, FISH, GAME, FORESTRY, ETC. STATE OF MICHIGAN.

  “You know this Mackley?” the judge asked.

  “Nossir. Must be new. Last year during the strike the deputy over there was a man named Phillips.”

  “You know the sheriff over there?”

  “Just the undersheriff,” Bapcat said, “and only indirectly. Last year during the strike he let us know that his sister and brother-in-law in Chassell were reporting illegal hunting activity. The reports were true. Do you know either man, Your Honor?”

  “Can’t say I do. All I know is by sheer reputation, which can be quite inaccurate up here. What I know for a fact is that Ontonagon is a damned ugly place over in those mountains, and it takes equally hard men to police it. So why mules over a fine Ford?”

  “Rough ground and hills, Your Honor, and I hear there are few roads over in Ontonagon, which I heard ain’t the paragon of modernity that graces us here.”

  The judge burst out laughing. “Paragon of modernity? Let me guess—your Russian partner’s creative words.”

  “Yessir.”

  “He our man whilst you’re man-hunting off to the west?”

  “Yessir, Deputy Zakov is in charge.”

  “And the provenance of said mules?”

  Bapcat didn’t understand the man’s question.

  “Where did the animals come from, Lute?”

  “They belonged to a couple of Swedish fishermen who died this past winter. The mules showed up to our place and have been with us ever since.”

  “Why your place?”

  “Me and Zakov have known the Swedes for some time, and Joe in particular always seemed to favor me, the way dogs will do sometimes.”

  “When did this interspecies marriage take place?”

  “February, Your Honor.”

  “And how is the lovely and winsome Widow Frei?”

  Jaquelle Frei was his lady friend and sometime companion. “Fine.”

  “Marriage in the offing for you two?” the judge asked.

  Bapcat said, “She ain’t mentioned it.”

  “Mark my words, she will,” the judge said. “She will. By the gods that whimsically govern reproduction of our species, ’tis foreordained. Hope you don’t have to shoot some hard case over there in Ontonagon, Lute. They’re a warlike and savage lot of Irish, French, and Finnish lowlife, all of them hating each other’s sheer proximity on earth. Comes down to logic or violence, leave your words holstered, but not your gun, Deputy. Act decisively and do it first.”

  “I’ll remember what you said, sir.”

  Lute Bapcat had no intention of shooting anyone, and truth be known, this assignment was unwelcome. He, Jaquelle, and their ward Jordy were becoming closer all the time, and Lute Bapcat, who had long been sanguine about such things as family, was finding himself drawn to intimacy and companionship, though certainly not nightly. In his mind it was a real family, without legal fetters.

  “Be damn careful over there,” Judge O’Brien repeated as Bapcat closed the door to the jurist’s private domain. “Ontonagon’s the last semicivilized stop for a far piece, and you know the sort of floaters and riffraff that kind of extreme geography seems to pull in.”

  “Yessir, I do.” Fact is, until he had been more or less drafted into being a deputy game warden, he had been a trapper at the tip of the Keweenaw, and assumed he had always been a part of that same riffraff the judge was denouncing. It still struck him as peculiar how a small badge could lift a man from riffraffery to presumed respectability.

  •••

  Trial concluded, he telephoned Zakov from the courthouse to pass on the result.

  The Russian-born Zakov, a former officer in the Russian army, had been in competition with Bapcat as a trapper in the Keweenaw, and they had not gotten along, but over time Bapcat had begun to trust and respect the man, and had him hired on as another deputy state game warden. They lived in a State-owned cabin on top of Bumbletown Hill, about a mile from the mining town of Allouez.

  “I’m leaving for Ontonagon,” Bapcat told his partner.

  “What of the wardens’ survey order?”

  Bapcat sighed. Having come on the job last year, he had been faced with a directive from State Game Warden W. R. Oates to estimate deer numbers by county, section, township, and range, and to estimate wolf kills and mortality from other causes. Same for beavers, partridge, quail, ducks, prairie chickens, squirrels, snowshoe hares, cottontails, bears, and a whole menu of game fish, with trout atop the list. In the report, he was to give his opinion at the conclusion of the numbers: population increasing or decreasing. If the latter, why?

  Because of the bloody mining strike in Copper Country, neither he nor Zakov had had the time for such work. They had submitted the briefest report and conclusions: All species decreasing, both Houghton and Keweenaw Counties. Cause: the greed of man.

  Although they had not been reprimanded, they had promised each other that the 1914 survey would be done in earnest. Now this Ontonagon thing, the latest hitch in their good intentions.

  “Do what you can to start it. I hope I ain’t gonna be gone that long, and we can both work on it when I get back.”

  Zakov grunted, said, “With the weather the way it is this year, you may never get back.”

  Bapcat sighed. The sky was yellow-gray, a winter sky, and here it was June. It had snowed on and off through April and May, and the woods still had snow in shady areas. The problem was that any snowfall this time of year could blink into a blizzard of heavy white stuff, and he was determined to not let weather ever dictate what he did to perform his job for the State.

  Horri Harju, his supervisor in Marquette, had emphasized this during training: “Dealing with weather is part of the job. You go out and do what the State pays you to do. All the weather can do is hint at how you might dress.”

  It had been solid advice during the frigid months of the strike last year.

  Deputy Game Warden Bapcat pushed his collar up before stepping outside, and went to fetch his mules. “Let’s hope this snow’s done while we’re on the train,” he told the animals.

  CHAPTER 2

  Ontonagon

  Wednesday, June 3

  The snow turned into a storm and did not end. Bapcat and his animals got stranded two days in the Baraga depot, only thirty miles south of where they had started off. When they were finally able to board the connecting train, the game warden rode in the livestock car with Joe, the flaming red mule looking quite pleased by his company, and occasionally issuing some sort of short braying bark or choked snort as way of language. Equally pleased seemed the square and muscular black mule named Kukla, which Zakov insisted translated from Russian into English as “doll.” Kukla was as rare as Joe in her singular behaviors. She needed neither rope nor lead, and followed along, apparently reveling in her pack-animal role within the group. Bapcat had ridden Joe all over the backcountry in Keweenaw in all kinds of weather, Kukla happily following behind; the three of them seemed made for each other.

  In some ways, Bapcat thought, being with mules was an improvement over Zakov, who rarely stopped pontificating, or Jaquelle Frei, who was either hurriedly disrobing or jabbering nonstop. “Not sure how long this trip will take, Joe and Kukla. Let’s each try to be patient.”

  Bapcat had packed a month’s worth of supplies, intending to live off the land to the extent possible to augment what fit into Kukla’s heavy-duty 00-gauge canva
s packs. The mules affectionately nuzzled him, and he slipped each a sliver of dried apple.

  Bapcat had several choices in routing, and being largely unfamiliar with train travel, he had picked a way that seemed to involve the fewest changes and least amount of discomfort. His confidence in his own intelligence had long been a problem, and sometimes a source of irritation and embarrassment.

  The Duluth, South Shore & Atlantic delivered them to Baraga, where he and the mules switched to another DSS&A train out of Marquette bound for Ontonagon, from where it would continue onward to the state line at Ironwood and Hurley, Wisconsin, the neighboring state’s equivalent of the pleasure town up in the Keweenaw called Wyoming on maps, and Helltown by those who knew what it actually offered.

  They pulled into Ontonagon at seven in the morning and Bapcat unloaded his partners, got them some water at the rail yard, and walked beside Joe, looking for the house of the missing deputy, Farrell Mackley. Still snowing here, but no apparent accumulation; this was more cold white dust than snow. The telegram said the man’s wife had expected her husband to be gone two weeks. He was now long overdue, gone since sometime in March. Why had she waited so long to notify Lansing? Of course, Bapcat couldn’t really blame her for not being overly concerned. He knew firsthand how nature or fate could intervene and sometimes confound game wardens’ plans, but even then, if you had good-enough woodscraft skills, you could come through all right.

  An address given to him at the railway station led Bapcat and his crew to an unusual three-story house with a white wrought-iron fence around the yard, and a widow’s walk on top. It looked to Lute Bapcat like an outhouse atop a fancy wedding cake, like the kind Jaquelle had shown him pictures of, in the Hudson’s Bay Company catalog. The huge house was painted pure white with pale blue trimmings, and sat on a small hill north of the rebuilt downtown, looking down on the mouth of the Ontonagon River and out at Lake Superior. New house, no doubt; not twenty years ago the entire town had been razed by fire.

  Joe and Kukla had behaved admirably the whole trip, neither of them the least bit spooked by delays, new sounds, or sights. Bapcat suspected the months of training had paid off. It sometimes felt like there was not much you could count on in this life, but these mules seemed the exception.

  Copper-mining money drove Ontonagon the same as it steered Red Jacket, but there didn’t seem to be as much evidence here. Most of the mines were somewhere back up in the hills around Rockland and Greenland, and who knew where else. Presumed money aside, this pretentious new house was not what Bapcat had expected as the domicile of a fellow game warden. Too big and too fancy. Was it possible this was State-owned, like the log dwelling he and Zakov occupied? He doubted it. Horri Harju was forever complaining about the shortage of state funding for deputies’ operations, including rents.

  The street by the house was paved, as was the main street downtown, and Bapcat wondered momentarily what to do with his companions. There was no livery stable in sight, and he wanted to get on with business, but he couldn’t very well tie the mules to the fence and leave them outside, so he opened the gate and ushered them in to snack through the thin snow on the sweet grassy yard. The practicalities of traveling with mules was only now beginning to come home to him, but he also knew that once they were outside civilization, the going would be a lot easier.

  From the street he had seen a shadowy figure far up in the widow’s walk and felt a lump in his throat, hoping this didn’t ordain what lay ahead. The house had a bell contraption, a sort of handle a visitor pulled outward to activate, and after a time a young woman came to the door. She wore a pressed, clean white smock over a dark blue dress and dainty little black shoes which stood her up an inch or two.

  “Deputy Warden Bapcat to see Mrs. Mackley.”

  “Is she expecting you, sir?”

  “Yes and no,” he said. “She asked the State for help, and here I am. So far as I know, there weren’t no times bandied about.”

  Bapcat was shown into a parlor off the entry hall and asked if he preferred tea or coffee. Tea would be fine, he told the girl, and she left him alone, looking at shelf after shelf of books, wondering how much knowledge lay in those books that might make his life better if he were a better reader, and made time to read. He suspected the books on the shelves weren’t getting used on any regular basis. What good was owning so many books if you didn’t read them?

  The woman who appeared next had light reddish-blonde hair, a long neck, and was dressed in a white dress of silk so fine, he wondered if it might have been spun on her by the silkworms themselves.

  “Sir?” the woman said.

  Her voice was syrupy and raspy at the same time.

  “Deputy Warden Lute Bapcat, ma’am. Are you Mrs. Virginia Mackley?”

  “Yes I am. The State moves slowly in support of its men, I see,” she said pointedly, all the while with a stiff smile on her perfect lips, the color of ripe plums.

  “Ma’am, your telegram was sent ten days ago; I got the word a week ago, and here I am, thanks to the train.”

  “I did not mean to criticize, Deputy. I must confide to being somewhat unbalanced by my husband’s failure to return to the nest.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He considered telling her about the woods and the unexpected ways of nature, but she was a warden’s wife and surely she knew this. “Where exactly did he go?”

  The woman looked like she was trying to concentrate, but threw up her hands. “I have not one sliver of a whit of an idea. He said only the high country. Farrell is one of those men who believes in security. That is to say, the less I knew about his work, the less harassment might occur.”

  “You’ve had some problems over his job?”

  “None, but only because Farrell is a superb planner and thinker. I should tell you, however, that some people around these parts hate your kind. This is surely no secret, but well and loudly established, with criticisms often uttered in public, especially in our town’s public liquories, which I would add far outnumber houses of worship.”

  Bapcat ignored her words: “He say what he might be doing in the high country?”

  She pursed her lips. “Certainly not.”

  “Help me understand the timing of this,” Bapcat said. “What I understand is that sometime in March your husband left out on patrol, intending to return in a fortnight, and now he is a couple of months overdue. Is that about right?”

  “Yes, I believe that’s proximate, if not precise.”

  “Why did you wait so long to notify the State?”

  Her eyebrow arched slightly. “He was in the woods primeval, Deputy. Surely I don’t have to tell you what sort of things can happen out there, especially in the high country.”

  “No, ma’am, I know,” he said, feeling slightly chastised. “He leave any papers or notes that might indicate what his intentions were?”

  “None that I know of.”

  “Does he have a workplace I could see?”

  “There is no office in our home. He did his business elsewhere.”

  “Where might that be?”

  “I have no notion, and must repeat that my husband was very secretive in pursuit of his work.”

  Was secretive, not is secretive. A town this small, and she doesn’t know where he’s working? Not likely. Something with a stench on it here. “What if you needed to get hold of him in a hurry?”

  She heaved a great sigh. “Because that’s not practical, I’d have to work it out and handle whatever it was myself, and that seems perfectly reasonable to me. Why should any woman be accountable to any man? We are not the delicate creatures we are made out to be, though some very much like to entertain that image and live protected in soft cocoons of luxury.”

  The house sure looked to be exactly what she was saying wasn’t so. This dang woman didn’t fit any categories, the same way Jaquelle was in a class all her own.

 
“Would you have something to eat?” the woman asked.

  Unexpected hospitality? “No, ma’am, but thank you just the same.”

  Bapcat found semiformal ceremony and stifling house manners difficult to deal with.

  “You will, of course, remove your creatures from my yard?” she said.

  “The mules? Yes, ma’am. Guess I can’t get too far without them.”

  She accompanied him to the door where another attractive young woman appeared, handed him his Kromer hat, and curtseyed. Bapcat looked at Virginia Mackley and said, “This is one fine house you have. The State own it?”

  “Why in God’s heavenly name would you think that?” the woman countered. “We—and by that, of course, I mean Farrell and I—we have no need of welfare housing from the State.”

  “It’s just that deputy wardens don’t make a lot of money, and most of us have small, State-owned houses assigned to us.”

  “There you are, in your own words. ‘Most of you,’ not all, and though it is none of your business, and I do not wish to be unpleasant, it was my money that purchased this place, and it is my personal capital that keeps it going. I would urge you to not generalize in your work, Deputy. It can lead to some very premature and erroneous conclusions.”

  He wished he had kept his mouth shut. “Your money?”

  “Yes, through my family.”

  “You’re from around here, then?”

  She tensed, and he knew immediately he’d gone too far. “You need to find my husband,” she said, smiling, “not interrogate me. And may I politely suggest that you attend to your soul while you’re at it, and have the time. Our Creator may call us at any moment, and we must be ready. It is, after all, Sunday, our Lord’s Day, and here we are defiling it with our tawdry earthly business.”

  Bapcat thought, she’s got a cold damn attitude for a wife with a missing spouse. “I thought today was Wednesday. Sorry, ma’am, no insults or prying intended. But you know how lawmen are.”

  “The Lord’s Day is every day,” she said. “Apparently I don’t know how lawmen are,” she said, nodding him out and emphatically closing the door in his face.