Play With Fire (6 page)

It looked like a case of love her, love her dog. Or aimez elle, aimez sa chi en Pleased with herself, Kate said, "Quest-ce que vous voulez? What do you want?"

They brightened a little. Monsieur held up a camera. "Pour prendre un picture dun traineau a chi ens To take a picture of something, but what?

Chien meant dog, but traineau? A train? "Oh." Kate's brow cleared. "A dog sled? You want to take a picture of a dog sled? Like the Iditarod?"

Their faces broke into smiles and they nodded vigorously and Kate was sorry she had to disappoint them. "Je regrette, monsieur, il ny a pas de dog sleds running during, uh--" What was the word? Madame Buss Stowell would be disgusted with her, not that Kate, whose tongue was better suited for Aleut gutturals than French nasals, had ever been one of Madame's star pupils "--le summer. I mean, I'ete." She shook her head from side to side. "Pas de dog sleds de chi en pendant I'ete. No dog sleds during the summer."

Their faces fell. "Pourquoi?"

"No snow in the summer," she said.

After a puzzled moment he got it. "Ah. Pas de neige." "Neige," Kate said, nodding. "No neige during the summer. Not at this altitude, anyway."

"Ah." They thought for a moment, exchanged a phrase or two, and turned back to her. "Eh bien. Y-a-t'il un mais on d'Esquimau ici, peutetre?"

A picture of a little Japanese man, waddling like Charlie Chaplin and shouting, "Bangoon! Ban goon!" in the Prudhoe Bay airport terminal three months before flashed through her mind, and she gave a sudden laugh.

Well, mais on was house. House of Eskimo. "Igloo?" Kate hazarded, and when they nodded again, smiled back, she said, even more apologetically,

"Je regrette, pas de igloos, either. Only Eskimos build igloos, and there aren't any around here. Eskimos, I mean.

Although there aren't any igloos, either." She tugged at the front of her sooty T-shirt, the neckline of which seemed to have gotten a little tighter.

Madame was starting to get a little indignant. "Pas de traineau a chi ens Kate shook her head. "Pas de igloo?" Kate shook her head, and the woman snorted and tossed off a paragraph that Kate had no trouble interpreting as, "Then what the hell are we doing here?"

Monsieur, displaying a touching anxiety to please that confirmed Kate's belief that their relationship was in its infancy, turned back to Kate.

By now she was almost as anxious as he was to find something intrinsically Alaskan for him to photograph. "Aha!" "Yes?" Kate said eagerly. "Quest-ce que c'est?"

"Ici, here, c'est la terre dele soleil de minuit." He beamed at her, and with a sinking heart Kate realized what was coming. "Me photographic, ah, le couchant du soleil de minuit. Ou, um, where le meilleur view he is?"

He looked at her expectantly.

Alaska was the land of the midnight sun all right, but it was the middle of June. Why hadn't she minded her own business and gone outside to wait for Chopper Jim? "Monsieur, sorry, but the sun doesn't set right now, uh, il ne couche pas main tenant He was incredulous. "Le soleil ne couche pas ja maisr

"No, no, not never, the sun will set, just not this month. Or not much, or not enough to take a picture of ... " Her voice trailed away when she looked at them. Monsieur was crushed, Madame piqued, the poodle still assessing the distance between his teeth and Kate's ankle.

"Je regrette mine fois," Kate said, and escaped.

Outside, she collapsed on a bench on the porch and mopped a heated brow.

"That's the last time I try my hand at interpretation," she told Mutt.

Mutt flopped down next to the bench, mouth open, panting. She looked pitiful.

"I couldn't agree more," Kate told her.

It was hot, too hot, so hot even the dust lay unresisting when a car trundled down the road. She squinted around for a thermometer. There was a big white round one with large numbers that told her it was a sizzling seventy-nine degrees Fahrenheit. Funny, it hadn't felt that hot until she saw proof positive, but now the sweat trickled down her back in an unending stream, pooling at the base of her spine. "Give me twenty below anytime," she muttered.

She leaned back, looking in vain for even the wisp of a cloud. The eagle was still roosting in his treetop, and he looked pissed, but that was an eagle's natural expression and so Kate couldn't put it down wholly to the weather. There was a rustle of undergrowth and she turned to see a cow moose browsing in the alder thicket at the edge of the gravel lot.

Two soft-nosed calves stood next to her on wobbly legs, nuzzling at mama's belly. Kate wondered how anybody could be hungry at this temperature.

The tavern door opened and Monsieur, Madame and Pauvre Petit Chien came out and saw mother and children at the same moment. There was a loud exclamation and a torrent of excited language, not one word in ten of which did Kate catch or need to. Mama moose looked around in mild bemusement, a strip of leaves hanging out of one side of her mouth.

Neither calf, having reached Nirvana, paused in their busy suckling.

"Oooohhh!" Madame cooed, which meant the same thing in any language.

She dropped the poodle and trotted off across the parking lot. The poodle yipped and tore after her.

Mutt's ears went straight up. The dangers of heat exhaustion forgotten, Kate surged to her feet. "Hey! Wait! Don't do that!

DON'T!"

Monsieur gaped at the scene, Madame never turned around and the poodle, yipping hysterically, bounced in the rear on tiny legs, trying frantically to catch up. Kate and Mutt took off in hot pursuit but neither of them had gotten up enough speed to intercept by the time Madame reached the moose and stretched out a hand to pet one of the calves.

Madame stood five feet five inches tall in her two inch heels and at best guess weighed in at 115 pounds wringing wet. Alces alces stands on average five and a half feet high at the shoulder, measures nine feet stem to stern and weighs in anywhere from 800 to 1,400 pounds on the hoof. Bull moose have big racks they use to bang on each other with in rut that can weigh as much as 85 pounds all by themselves; because she lacks this rack the cow is not to be considered less dangerous, especially if she has two newborn calves fastened to the faucets. In Kate's experience, no female of any species was to be trifled with fresh out of the delivery room. "For God's sake, madame, HOLD IT!"

Mama moose watched that human hand reach out for baby, waited until the range was just right and let fly with her left rear hoof. It caught Madame squarely in the solar plexus. She flew backward, in what Kate was pleased to identify (from a different class lo those many years ago), as an arc, or any part of a curve that does not intersect itself.

This arc intersected all right, with the ground, hard. Kate, reaching Madame, stooped and without ceremony grabbed one of her arms and hauled her to her feet. She hooked the arm around her waist and started moving as fast as she could toward the porch. Behind her she heard Mutt give one short, sharp warning bark. Monsieur, recovering from the shock that had kept him immobile with his mouth open, rushed forward and supported Madame on the other side. Together they got back to the porch and safely behind the railing. Kate dumped Madame, who had yet to inhale, on the bench and turned to look. Mama was back at the alder and baby was back at the faucet.

Kate blew out a breath and turned, relief giving way to anger. "Don't you EVER do anything that stupid again! Have you no sense? You're lucky she didn't charge you! She could have knocked you on your ass and tap danced on your breastbone until there wasn't enough left to scrape up with a spoon!"

She came to herself enough to realize that she was yelling, which never got anybody anywhere, and that she was yelling in English, which in this case would get her nowhere faster than that. She took a deep breath and gathered her composure. "Never," she said carefully, "never, never, never pet the moose. Comprenez-moi, madame? Jamais, jamais, jamais pet le moose."

At that moment Madame got her breath back in one enormous

"WHOOOSH!" gulping in air like a bellows, breast heaving.

There was another "WHOOOSH" and for a moment Kate thought it also had come from Madame, but something was off in the direction the sound came from, which was behind her. She heard a high-pitched, terror-stricken yip and turned to see the eagle, launching itself from the top of the scrub spruce, glide down and snatch up the poodle in its talons. "Yip, yip, yip," went the poodle, flap, flap, flap went the eagle's wings, and the last anyone ever saw of Pauvre Petit Chien, except for maybe Mama Eagle's hungry offspring, was him dangling below the great flapping wings as he disappeared over the tops of the trees to the south.

Madame started screaming, first at Kate, then at Monsieur, then at Kate again. It didn't take an advanced degree in French to figure out the content, not when you took the hand gestures in context. Monsieur kept his head bent against the storm and his eyes fixed on the ground; Kate felt sorry for him but Mutt felt sorrier and uttered one deep, brief

"WOOF."

It was remarkable the attention one woof got when it came from a half-husky, half-wolf hybrid with a set of healthy white teeth, most of which were displayed to advantage in a wide, panting grin. Madame stopped screaming in mid-invective, glaring from Mutt to Kate to Monsieur, who was still regarding the ground with fascination. Ten long, slow seconds ticked by. With an angry sob Madame whirled and stumbled to the car.

Monsieur stirred. Kate touched his arm. "Je regrette, monsieur, je regrette mine fois, but--" He looked up and the words caught in her throat. Monsieur was working hard to look subdued but there was a definite twinkle lurking at the back of his eyes. "Monsieur?" she said uncertainly.

He gave another bow, caught her hand in his, the one covered with red tokens of Pauvre Petit Chien's affection, and raised it to his lips. It was the first time Kate had ever had her hand kissed and after she got over the shock she kind of enjoyed it, which was a good thing, because he kissed it again. "Bonjour, mademoiselle," he said warmly. "Merci mine fois pour un vi site tres agreable." He pressed her hand between both of his and smiled. "Tres, tres agreable."

He released her hand, marched to the car with a stride like William the Conqueror, opened the driver's side door, told Madame to move over to the passenger seat, got in, started the car and drove off, pulling onto the road with a definite flourish. A moment later there was nothing but a thin, ephemeral haze of dust hanging a foot above the ground to show where they had been.

Kate tried to fight it and lost. Her head fell back and she started to laugh, large, loud whoops that echoed off the parking lot and mildly alarmed Mama Moose. Her eyes streamed, her belly hurt, she gasped for breath and off she went again. And that was how Chopper Jim found her when the Bell Jet Ranger settled down in front of the gas pump.

"Phew." "Yeah, I know," Kate said, voice muffled behind the mask.

Chopper Jim, immaculate in dark blue pants with a gold stripe down the outside seams, dark blue tie knotted meticulously over pale blue shirt, tie clipped with a gold seal of the State of Alaska, flat brim of his round-crowned hat adjusted at precisely the right angle, stood with his hands riding his gun belt, pistol grip gleaming in the afternoon sun.

He looked trim and calm and authoritative. He wasn't even sweating.

Kate resented it.

They stood in the little clearing, the acrid scent of the morels losing to the rising stench of fleshy decay.

His calm, level gaze matched his voice. "You clear away some of the mushrooms?"

"Enough to be sure of what I was looking at. Dinah got it all on the tape. Dinah Cookman, Jim Chopin. He's the state trooper assigned to the Park."

He looked past her at the blonde. "How do."

She met his eyes, pale but composed. "Sir."

His smile had too much charm and far too many teeth in it for any woman in her right mind to trust. It was also guaranteed of effect. Kate, who congratulated herself on her own immunity to that smile every chance she got, watched with something between exasperation and amusement as a pink flush began somewhere below Dinah's collar and rose to her cheeks. "Call me Jim," he said in his deep voice.

"Jim," she said obediently, a stunned look in her dazed blue eyes. Kate cleared her throat and Dinah blinked. "Right. Yes. Uh, Bobby says overnight temperatures have dropped below forty every night until last Wednesday."

Jim dropped his gaze back to the body. "Which is why it's only just starting to smell." He produced a pair of white rubber gloves and pulled them on. Walking around to the head of the body, he squatted and reached out to pluck more mushrooms out of the way. "I didn't know mushrooms would grow on flesh."

Behind them Dinah cleared her throat. "Saprobic." Chopper Jim looked at her and she blushed again but retained enough composure to produce from the bottomless pocket of her gray duster a book Kate recognized as Fun with Fungi. "Means mushrooms that live on decayed vegetable or animal matter. A lot of them do."

Chopper Jim gave her an approving smile, and her blush deepened.

"Although these aren't necessarily growing off the er, body."

"Why not?"

"Mushrooms propagate themselves through spores. The spores germinate into threads called mycelia. Some mycologists believe that the mycelia are always present, and that it only takes the requisite conditions to bring the fruiting bodies, that is, the mushrooms, forth."

Jim's warm gaze rested on Dinah's face. "And what are the requisite conditions?" "Well." Dinah paged through the book. "It says here that when the temperature gets up to between forty degrees and sixty degrees Fahrenheit and there has been a lot of rain, but not too much, the strings begin to generate the caps and stems, or the fruiting bodies of the mushroom."

The trooper looked back at the body, a meditative expression on his face.

"These are morels," Dinah volunteered. "They're not exactly predictable, but they do tend to show up the year following a forest fire, if the fire was in the spring or the fall, and if the rain comes along at exactly the right moment and in exactly the right amounts."