Linda Howard - Prey

During the ride Angie had thought several times that if she’d been Chad, she’d have dug in her heels, told Davis to kiss her ass, and gone back to the truck. Now, with that hostility turned on her, she bit her tongue and silently apologized to Chad, because he’d no doubt kept his silence for the same reason she was keeping hers: She needed the money. This was her payback for feeling superior, when she wasn’t at all; she was in the same boat Chad was in, paddling for all she was worth.

“Maybe I’ll take up meditation,” she mused aloud, earning a covert chuckle from Chad that he quickly turned into a cough.

She didn’t know what the big deal was about the camp. Exactly what had Davis been expecting? A lodge, maybe? She had no idea what Chad had told him, how he’d described the accommodations to Davis, but she’d been completely honest with Chad about the camp when she had leased it. It wasn’t the best she’d ever been at, but neither was it the worst. At least they weren’t sleeping on the ground, and she’d done that more times than she cared to remember.

The campsite was in a picturesque spot, on a fairly level section of the mountainside, surrounded by lodgepole pine and tamarack. Below, a crystal clear creek wound its way along the valley floor, bracketed by stands of spruce and black cottonwood. Taller peaks, white-capped with snow, loomed over and around them. Huge boulders and thick tangles of chokeberry bushes dotted the landscape. The presence of the creek and the chokeberry bushes upped their chances of finding bear, which was the reason for being here in the first place. She could have taken them to a place with more luxurious accommodations, but the odds of Davis shooting a bear went down.

There were six wooden platforms, but only three of them were set up with tents. Angie deeply appreciated the platforms; when the rain began, that meant water wouldn’t be running through their tents. The tents were heavy-duty canvas, each with a sort of offset wing in front of the entrance, for extra privacy. She knew for a fact that silhouettes couldn’t be seen through the canvas, which was a big plus for her. The tents weren’t huge, about seven and a half feet by five feet, but that was plenty big enough for a cot and their belongings. They each had an inflatable mattress to go on the cot, and a sleeping bag. The portable toilet took care of calls of nature, and she’d brought enough wet wipes for them to stay reasonably clean and unstinky for a week-longer than that, if need be.

A lot of their food was prepackaged, but a food-prep area had been set up a couple of hundred yards away. There was a camp stove for making coffee, which was as much of a necessity as clothing, in her opinion. There were battery-operated LED lamps in the tents, flashlights, extra batteries. She had Swedish steel for making fires, and if by chance the weather turned bitterly cold, which it wasn’t supposed to do, each tent was stocked with a small oil heater.

Best of all, the rough corral had a section with a roof over the feed troughs, so the horses had a bit of shelter. If the wind got up, she’d cut some pine branches to brace against the corral as a wind break. She believed in taking care of her horses, because their lives could well depend on the animals.

As far as she was concerned, this camp pretty much had everything except television and cell phone service. If Davis was as experienced as he’d said he was, wouldn’t he have known what to expect, or at least had a general idea?

“Which tent is mine?” he demanded, his voice tight.

Without hesitation, Angie pointed to the one on the far left. She’d take the one farthest to the right; she wanted to put as much distance between them as possible. Granted, it wasn’t much, because the tents were separated by only about ten feet, but every little bit counted.

Davis left his horse standing and disappeared into the tent.

She stared after him, her mouth falling open at the absolute boorishness of the man.

“I’m so sorry,” Chad whispered, actually wringing his hands.

She shook herself, and squared her shoulders. “His manners aren’t your fault,” she said, reaching for the reins of the dark bay before he could take it into his head to wander off.

Chad helped her get the horses unsaddled and watered, and the supplies put away in her tent. She wouldn’t have much room to move around, but that didn’t matter; she wouldn’t be in the tent much anyway, and this way everything was at hand, plus no prowling predator could get into their supply and destroy everything, at least not without alerting her. She not only kept her rifle at hand, but she also had a pistol, and she slept with it.

As she’d expected, Chad was moving a little gingerly, but he didn’t complain. Soon enough they had all the chores done, though the work would have gone faster if Davis had stirred himself to help. She noticed Chad kept darting little anxious glances at the tent, and finally he said hesitantly, “Should I… I mean, were you planning to do any hunting today?”

“It’s wasted time if we don’t at least scout around,” she pointed out. “I know where I found bear sign before, and we need to see if there’s any fresh sign.” Taking a bear wasn’t an easy proposition; Montana didn’t allow hunters to put out bait for bears or use scent to pull them in. They had to find the bear, if possible call one in using a bear call, and their hunting time was limited from half an hour before sunrise to half an hour after sunset.

“I’ll, uh, I’ll call Mitchell,” Chad said, squaring his shoulders, and went off to Davis’s tent.

Angie got out her hunter orange vest and put it on, checked her two cans of bear spray to make certain she could get to them without having to move anything out of the way. She loaded her rifle, put an extra box of ammo in one of the vest pockets. She had her binoculars, her bear call, a bottle of water, and while she was waiting for Chad to come back out of Davis’s tent she hastily ate a protein bar, chasing it with water. The biscuit she’d eaten for breakfast had long since worn off and she was starving.

Chad came back out of the tent, his face the dark red that had become so familiar on the ride into the mountains. Sweat glistened on his forehead. “He, um, he said when you found the bear he’d come along. Until then, he isn’t interested.”

Now was a very good time to begin meditating. Angie held her breath for a few seconds, then let it out slowly. Again. There, that was better. Maybe there really was something to this breathing stuff. She didn’t think she had any huge anger issues-other than where Dare Callahan was concerned, then all bets were off-but she supposed she had her moments. Everyone had a breaking point, and she was well past hers where Davis was concerned.

Most of the time she loved her job. Almost all of her clients were perfectly nice people who enjoyed the outdoors, who loved a challenge, who simply liked to hunt. When they weren’t hunting they were telling stories, talking, joking, laughing. They came up here to relax, to have a good time.

This week wasn’t going to be like that. She’d never refunded a fee and walked away in her professional life, and she wouldn’t this time either because she needed the money, but oh, boy, she wanted to. Whether or not she and Dare agreed on a deal they could both live with, she had bills to pay, so she’d stick.

It hit her that this might very well be her last job as a hunting guide-here, anyway. She didn’t have anything else scheduled, and the odds were that come spring she’d be living in a new place, getting accustomed to a new job and new neighbors. Maybe she didn’t have any choice, but damn it, she didn’t want to go out like this, annoyed and stressed to the max.