CONTINENTAL DIVIDE
an excerpt

The sun wasn’t close to setting when they had all finished their meal. Like a Norman Rockwell family, they sat around after their plates were clean and chatted, sharing events of their day. Argon had been to town to pick up the hunting licenses. Merrill and Limhi had gone foraging for mushrooms, which had added a rich flavor to tonight’s meal of roasted pheasant and potatoes. Blaze had built a fire in the outdoor fire pit, skewered the bird and put it on a spit made out of twigs. They had all taken turns rotating the bird so the meat cooked evenly and the skin turned a succulent crispy brown. Blaze showed Merrill how to wrap the potatoes in wet leaves and bury them under the ashes so they roasted to a perfect tenderness. Merrill cooked the mushrooms in a pan on the propane stove, added flour and water to the expressed liquid and made a gravy to pour over the meat and potatoes. It was like a mini-Thanksgiving dinner and the remaining pile of gnawed bones attested to the success of the meal.

Argon produced a cigar from his shirt pocket and was about to light it when a huge spider let itself down from the ceiling and landed on Argon’s wiped-clean plate. The color drained from Argon’s face and his mouth gaped wide as if to scream, but no sound came out. His eyes bulged, his breath caught and his whole body stiffened. Merrill thought he might be choking on some last piece of gristle from the ends of the pheasant bones, since Argon had eaten parts of the bird that Merrill had assumed were undigestible. She was about to leap up and give him a good pounding on the back and if that didn’t work, distasteful as it might be, she would have to wrap her arms around him and Heimlich the man. Her brain was several steps ahead of her body and by the time she moved, Blaze had started to laugh and point at the spider.

“Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet and the spider scared the shit out of her.”

So that was the problem…Argon, the man who threatened to kill her children, who punched Blaze or pulled Limhi’s arm almost out of its socket, the hunter who brought down big game animals with one pull of the trigger and sliced them from throat to anus with one swipe of a hunting knife, this tough and dangerous man was afraid of spiders.

Blaze’s laughter infected Limhi and Merrill and they all started giggling. As Merrill reached to remove the plate with the menacing spider, Argon roared and struck her hard across the face. He picked up the plate and threw it at Blaze, then overturned the table so that it landed on Limhi and left a big gash in his forehead. They all went from laughing to screaming in an instant. The spider managed to escape the mayhem and strolled across the floor. Merrill rushed to Limhi and scooped him up in her arms as the spider crawled toward him. She didn’t know if it was a poisonous variety and she tried to stomp on it with her foot, but missed because her balance was askew with Limhi perched on her hip. As she lifted her foot to try again, a shot rang out. Argon aimed at the spider and shot again. A hole opened in the cabin floor and the spider darted through, perhaps wounded, perhaps escaping with its life. For good measure, Argon fired another shot through the hole, then ran out of the cabin. Everyone else froze in stunned silence, not sure what to do next.

Merrill thought Argon might return and kill them all. She understood that they had stepped over some boundary by ridiculing his fear, that he was humiliated by it. She ran to get the rusty rifle in the bedroom to see if it might be useful in defending against his mortal rage. She put Limhi on the bed and told him to stay there. The rifle was frozen shut with decay. She couldn’t get the barrel to open, couldn’t find out if it was loaded, but she could and would pull the trigger even though she decided its only real use would be as a blunt object to aim at Argon’s head if the need arose.

She sneaked out into the next room and peered out the window. An man in a ranger’s uniform was running out of the woods toward the cabin. He had his gun drawn. Argon stood outside and his rifle still cradled in both hands, his body still tense.

“Put the gun down, Argon. What the hell are you shooting at? It’s not hunting season till tomorrow. Christ, I thought we had the escaped convict up here. Or some poachers.”

“There was a wolf,” Argon said. “It came snooping around the fire pit, cause we just roasted some…” he hesitated, since he had indeed poached the pheasant early that morning. “Some rabbit. Hell, Roger, you know I’ve got my two boys up here. One of them’s a scrawny little thing. I can’t have a wolf lurking around. So I fired into the air to scare him off. Didn’t mean to get Fish and Game all riled up. What are you doing up here anyway? Shouldn’t you be getting ready to check in all the hunters tomorrow?”

“We got word of an escaped convict. Local sheriff thought he might head into these parts. You see any strangers, Argon?”

“I’m the strangest guy in these parts,” Argon replied and the two men laughed.

“You won’t get an argument from me about that. Listen, you keep an eye out. The guy we’re looking for is an Indian. He pulled a gun on the lamebrains who were transferring him to the state prison in Billings. He could still have the gun, so be careful if you run into him. He never did anything violent before that we know of, but he might be pretty desperate to avoid the state lockup. Indians get pegged as the boy toys down there.”

“If I see him, I’ll tell him you’re looking for him,” Argon said with a grin.

“And lay off shooting at wolves, will ya? They’re still endangered, you know. You bag one of those and I have to arrest you.”

“I ain’t running a ranch up here. What cause do I have to kill a wolf? I’m just trying to scare the motherfucker.”

“You out on the hunt tomorrow?”

“Crack of dawn.”

“Good luck,” the ranger said. “Save a big one for me.”