Doug Allyn: Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 134, No. 5. Whole No. 819, November 2009

Roy stared incredulously at his niece, hardly believing the mature explanation that had come out of her. Darlene shrugged at his surprise. “They’ve moved her up two grades already. There’s a full scholarship at the University of Alaska waiting for her next fall. She’ll only be seventeen. Too young to be away from home—”

“Don’t start, Mother,” said Emily.

Roy studied Emily’s pretty young face for a moment, then shook his head in wonder. “I’ll be damned,” he said softly, to himself. Looking over at Edith, he asked, “What about you, little bit? You brilliant too?”

The younger girl shook her head. “Nowheres near. I probably won’t never be nothing. Just a dairy farmer’s wife like Mama.”

“Thanks a heap,” Darlene said drily.

“Is Danny going to this Markinson place then?” asked Roy.

“Not just yet.” Darlene turned away, eyes sad.

“Anchorage is so far away,” Emily told him. “Danny would have to be a boarding student and just come home twice a month. It’s eight thousand dollars a year for room and board. Daddy’s putting a hundred dollars a month away for it. That’s the best he can do. We’ve got nine hundred saved so far.”

Roy and his niece locked eyes in a brief instant of mutual truth. Eighty months to pay for twelve? It was a futile effort and they both knew it. As if reading his mind, Emily said, “When I finish college, I intend to teach English lit. I’ll be able to help a lot.”

“Sure you will,” Roy said, thinking: Help how? Teachers didn’t make no goddamned money. Women working in the post office earned more. He smiled at this sincere, determined niece of his and lightly glided a knuckle over her cheek. “You’re gonna make a right pretty teacher,” he said with a wink.

Opening the box Emily had brought into the room, Roy removed a pair of well-broken-in black kid cowboy boots. Removing the prison-issue brogans, he slipped his feet into the soft leather uppers and felt his sole, arch, and heel mold perfectly, comfortably, to the hard leather bottoms. Working his ankles around a bit, he smiled and said, “That’s more like it.” He handed the prison shoes to Edith. “Throw these out, darlin’.” No one in the room questioned the discarding of the prison shoes — they all knew there were some things not fit for a man to wear.

Also from the box, Roy pulled an old sheepskin-lined caribou leather coat and a pair of butter-colored elk gloves, along with a battered grey Stetson hat that was broken front, back, and top.

“I’ll walk down to the milking shed, see if I can give Rog a hand,” he said. “See y’all later.”

Outside, Roy blinked back tears, thinking about little Danny.

Joe Kell stood next to a big GMC Savana van with its sliding side door open, doing the last of his packing before heading out the next morning onto Ben Axton’s game preserve to look for signs of trespassing. Kell was in Saltcoats now, having driven east from Farley. The van was a four-wheel-drive off-road vehicle with steel-belted ground-gripper snow tires and cranked-up heavy-duty shocks.

Already in the cargo space of the van was a two-seater Arctic Cat snowmobile with several haversacks lashed to it, one of which contained two extra fuel cylinders for the Cat. The others contained a one-person shelter tent, extra-insulated cold-weather sleeping bag, camping gear, cooking utensils, and four one-hundred-count boxes of rifle cartridges. Kell had bought everything except the van and snowmobile with part of the advance money Ben Axton had given him. The van and snowmobile had been loaned to him by Axton.

Prior to leaving, he had only two more things left to do. The first was to work out his surveillance route on the plat map of Axton’s range. The second was to call Doris again. Returning to his motel room, he moved his rifle and binoculars from the table to the bed, and on the table spread open the plat map. Covering the wilderness area between Buckland on the north and Koyuk on the south, Axton’s property was roughly eighty miles wide and forty miles deep. The map was color coded: light green for the domains of moose, dark green for elk, yellow for caribou, light blue for musk oxen, with random brown and gray dots for the nomadic wolf packs of those colors, and — in the far north of the reserve — numerous scatterings of white dots representing the large, elusive, and hated white wolves: hated because unlike their smaller, dingier-colored cousins, they were not averse to surrounding stables, barns, or corrals and attacking anything alive — including young children — to get a meal for the pack.

The way Kell had figured it, Roy Sand would go for the biggest game he could find nearest to Axton’s outer boundary lines. That meant moose and elk. So with a red felt-tip pen, he highlighted all the east-west secondary roads he would follow the next day. That done, he flipped open his cell phone and called Doris.

“Hey, honey, it’s me again,” he said cheerfully when she answered.

“Oh. Why, hello, Joe. What a surprise.”

Kell frowned. What a surprise? She had asked him to call her back.

“Is there something wrong, honey?”

“No, nothing’s wrong, Joe. You just caught me a little off guard, is all. Where are you now?”

“Saltcoats, on the edge of the reserve. I’ll be moving into the wild tomorrow.” He waited a long moment for Doris to carry the conversation forward, but she remained silent. Finally, perplexed, he asked, “Well, have you thought things over, honey?”

“To tell you the truth, Joe, I haven’t had time to give the matter much thought—”

Her usual brittle voice was a little too sweet, he decided. She was putting on an act for someone.

“He’s there with you, ain’t he, Doris?”

“Why, what do you mean?”

“You know damned well what I mean. Henry Edwards. He’s there with you right now, ain’t he?”

“Why, yes, as a matter of fact, I do have company at the moment—”

“Do me a favor, Doris, tell me what time it is there. My watch has stopped.”

“It’s quarter of nine here in Arizona, Joe. But it’s two hours earlier there, isn’t it?”

“Goodbye, Doris,” he said, and snapped the cell phone shut.

For a moment he just stared at his watch, which had not stopped at all. It was seven-thirty there. Doris always kept the clock in their bedroom fifteen minutes fast.

Putting on his coat and Stetson, Kell left the room and walked down the street to a liquor store.

“Bottle of Jack Daniels,” he told the clerk.

The next day, Roy Sand went back into town in Kobuk and located Tootega in a run-down, makeshift Inuit saloon-pool hall.

“I changed my mind,” he said, taking his friend aside. “I’m ready to go after skins. Lots of skins. I need me about twenty-five thousand dollars.”

“For the little kid, right? Little Danny? To go to that school in Anchorage.”

“How do you know about that?”

“Everybody in Kobuk knows about it. The people around here tried to raise some money to help, but everybody’s so poor they couldn’t collect much.”

Touched, Roy swallowed and said, “That was nice. That they tried.” He looked away, momentarily embarrassed. “You think you can round us up some pack horses, rifles, and stuff?”

“Sure. On credit from some of the elders. You prob’ly wanna go after some big game stuff, huh? Elk, moose.”

“No,” Roy shook his head. “Axton will be expecting me to do that. I want to go after smaller skins. Ulva skins.” Ulva was Inuit for wolf.

“They don’t bring no good money, man. Lucky you get a hundred bucks a skin.”

“I mean white wolves, Toot. That trader down in Minto will pay five hundred for white ulva skins. I telephoned him this morning.”