CHAPTER 1
One year later in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado
“Who are you?”
I did not say these words aloud to the woman who stood knee-deep in the warm surf that gently washed the beach. I only thought them, but I knew she heard my question. Something of her essence reached out to me though she stood motionless, her long dark hair lifting in the breeze, carrying her sweet fragrance, tinkling water swirling around her feet. I yearned for her to turn and look at me, to show me her face, but I knew she would not. I was aware that I was in a dream, the same dream I had had each of the last three nights that she’d come. I knew and dreaded what would happen next. The woman would fade and the place where she stood would become patternless lines of sea and foam and moving sand and the crackle of dying bubbles.
“What’cha looking for there, boy?”
My eyes fluttered open to the darkness beneath my hat. The image of the woman, the sound of the sea, and even her mystical fragrance lingered like a cloud caught in a mountain forest. Pine-perfumed air started a trickle of recollections of the hike, lunch, the spot of shade that prompted the nap.
My consciousness gathered. The voice …… was it real? No other sounds supported an argument one way or the other. Only the distant cry of a Steller’s jay fractured the silence of the evergreen valley.
My fingers were laced over a topographical map that draped like a blanket on my chest. I pushed the map aside and carefully nudged up the brim of my hat. The muzzle of a double-barreled shotgun hovered like an agitated cobra inches from my face. Squinting past the barrels, I could see a pair of gnarled fingers twitching dangerously on both triggers.
In an explosive flurry that sent my hat rolling, I started to scramble to my feet.
“That’s far enough, boy.” The voice screeched like a hand-cranked siren.
My arms and legs locked. I lay back and swallowed nervously at the sudden dryness in my throat. Whoever was hunkered over the other end of the shotgun knew the advantage of keeping his head below the sun. Blinded, I carefully moved my hand just high enough to diffuse the sun’s brightness and coax features from a frazzled silhouette of white, shoulder-length hair.
The beady eyes of a cantankerous old man, his upper lip curled into a snarl, emerged from the glare. A week’s growth of tobacco-stained stubble forced severity into his scowl. Thin white arms protruded from the short sleeves of a green, open-necked shirt. A pair of bone white legs in black socks and sandals dropped from rumpled, buff-colored shorts.
After a careful assessment of the situation, I figured I could slap the barrel of the shotgun, jerk it from the old man’s hands, and kick his feet out from under him—one quick, disabling move. I was no fighter, no stack of muscle, but I kept my six-foot, 165-pound frame taut enough to handle this skinny old geezer. However, the fall might kill the old bastard, or worse, it might force him to pull the trigger. I’d done enough hunting to know that a blast from the barrel of a twelve-gauge shotgun a few inches from my face wouldn’t leave enough brain matter to satisfy a snacking magpie.
My heart was slamming inside of my chest. I eased up on both elbows. The old man stiffened and took two steps back. I studied the eyes. They were fierce as hell, but they didn’t strike me as the property of a cold-blooded killer. They more likely belonged to the owner of a hidden whiskey still. Nobody had told the old fool Prohibition was over.
“You government?” The old man spat a string of tobacco juice that hung off his chin like a spiderweb. With a deft shrug of his shoulder, he wiped it away and then nodded toward my map. “If you’re government, you best start making tracks. If you’re goddamned IRS, you’re gonna be walking out of here with a butt full of buckshot no matter what you’re up to.”
Certain I’d detected a trace of humor in the old man’s belligerent squawk, I sat up and plucked a couple of pine needles from the sleeve of my flannel shirt. “Not government,” I said. “And I’m sure as hell not IRS.”
“What then? Speak up fast, son. Ya git old like me, your fingers start running out of patience quick.”
“I’m a novelist.”
“Novelist my ass,” the old man grumbled. “Got yourself a name, mister novelist?”
“Adams. Stuart Adams.”
“Never heard of you.”
I couldn’t keep from grinning. There was probably more than me that this old geezer hadn’t heard of. “I’ll have to take that up with my publicist.”
“Don’t be getting smart with me, boy. In case you haven’t noticed, you’re sitting at the business end of a twelve-gauge shotgun.”
I’d noticed, all right. “Yeah?” I held up my map. Using it and my handheld GPS, I knew exactly where I was. “According to my map, I’m also sitting on public land. Maybe you know something I don’t?”
“That’s a likely possibility. The problem with you damn yuppie types is you put on your little designer hats, you climb into your gas-sucking SUVs, and you think you’re Marlin Perkins. Not one of the lot of you knows how to read a damn map.”
Yuppie type? Slowly, I lifted my sweat-stained Orvis from the soft dirt, brushed dust from its wide brim, and placed it snugly back on my head. “Good for trout fishing,” I said. “Keeps the sun off my neck. And I doubt that a black, ninety-six, oil-dripping Wrangler etched by sagebrush and still covered in the dust of my last four outings exactly qualifies as a yuppie-mobile.”
“I don’t give a rat’s ass what kind of a hat you wear or what kind of a car you drive. The point I’m making here is you’re trespassing. Man’s got a constitutional right to protect his property, so you best start talking or I’m gonna start doing some protecting.”
“All right.” I started to reach for a photocopy of a letter I carried in my shirt pocket.
The old man stiffened and clutched harder at his weapon.
“Look, mister,” I said, my fear giving way to annoyance, “I’m not armed, and I’m sure as hell not here to rob you. If you’ll just lighten up a little, I’ve got a letter that’ll explain what I’m doing.”
“Trespassing, that’s what you’re doing. I’m not interested in the obvious. Do what you was gonna; just keep your damn hands where I can see ’em.”
Still uncertain what the old geezer might do, I carefully lifted the flap on my shirt pocket and pinched out the letter.
He snatched it from my fingers and shook out the folds. “1847?” He squinted his skepticism. “Little old for a letter of introduction.”
“If you’ll just read it, it’ll explain—”
“No,” the old man snapped testily, tossing the letter back in my lap. “You read it. Not taking no chances with the likes of you.”
“All right. It’s dated August 8, 18—”
“I seen that part. Git on with the important stuff.”
Stupid old fart. I cleared my throat and began to read.
Dear Theo,
Since the last time I wrote, things has warmed up some. It ain’t like the East out here in these San Juan mountains. Every night is cold and every day is hot. But there are many interestin things to see and lots of good huntin.
We came upon a most fascinatin find the other day. Apparently there was some elephants that lived in these mountains. We found what appeared to be a tusk and some bones embedded in the rock that must have been as long as a wagon and a team of mules. Neither me or Ned ever seen anything like it. Trevor says he thinks he might have seen a likeness in a newspaper once, but he ain’t too sure. We chipped on it some thinkin maybe we could at least get a piece of it. It broke like rock so we didn’t try no more. Couldn’t haul it out anyway.
Looks like Ned and Trevor is packin out, so I best follow. Don’t know when I’ll get this letter posted.
Your dear brother,
Warren Henry
p.s. Still no gold.
“So, it’s gold you’re after. Isn’t that right?” The old man barked it as if he finally had something on me.
“Nope. I’m interested in the mammoth.”
“Where’d you get that letter?”
“Garage sale. Found it stuck inside a box of old books.”
My girlfriend, Marion Chandler, and I had stopped at the sale at a house in the mountains. I never went to garage sales, but she was looking for an antique lamp and insisted that I pull over. While I waited for her to browse, I spotted the books. The entire box—a dozen or so hardbacks—was marked at five bucks. I didn’t even look at them. I snatched up the box and headed for the lady at the checkout table.
Marion was amused. “You’re buying something?” she asked, a smile of disbelief crinkling the corners of her eyes. “A little impulsive, isn’t it?”
I tossed down my five. “Maybe, but I figure you only live once.”
That night I had a chance to sort through my newly acquired collection. It turned out that the only book I might be interested in was the one that lay on top of the pile—a 1940s account of an expedition into Congo. The rest were old children’s books and an assortment of odds and ends of no value to me. I’d just tossed the last book back into the box and was about to throw the rest into the trash when I noticed a yellowed piece of paper sticking out from one of the books, the envelope containing the letter.
The old man was skeptical. “What’s a novelist doing looking for a damn mammoth in the middle of the San Juans?”
I stood slowly, brushing a few more pine needles from the seat of my jeans. “I’m looking for a story,” I said, an intentional understatement. I saw no need to explain to the old man that I was looking for the big book. With ten mid-list novels under my belt, self-doubt was growing faster than the gray was spreading from my temples into the thick tousle of my dark brown hair. Marion insisted that the color transformation complemented my denim-blue eyes and gave me the look, she said, of a distinguished writer. Easy for her to say. At twenty-nine, her crow’s-feet didn’t remain after her smile was gone. Nor did she have to contend with a salt-and-pepper beard that, two days neglected, could turn the face of her so-called distinguished writer into something resembling the haggard mug of a destitute drunk. The truth was, Marion and me were marching to the ticks of two very different clocks.
“Story, huh?” The old man relaxed a little. Skepticism faded from his eyes when he clicked the shotgun’s hammers to their safety position. “What do you know about that feller who wrote your letter?” His tone was a little less abrasive, borderline conversational.
“Warren Henry?” I slipped the letter back into my pocket and recalled some of my Internet research. “Not much. I managed to track down a great-great-granddaughter who knew that Warren and a couple of friends had gone west looking for gold. He never came back, and they figured he froze or starved to death. Turned out to be right. I stumbled across the story in a defunct Durango newspaper. Warren Henry’s frozen body had been hauled down from the Silverton area. They’d identified him with this letter that I guess never got mailed.”
The old man stared at me, sizing me up as if I was part of a problem yet to be worked out. A second later, he surprised me by handing me the shotgun.
“Shoot me if you was going to.”
“What?” My eyes flashed between the old man and the shotgun.
“Shoot me if that’s what you come here to do.”
“You’re insane, old man,” I said, braver now that I was armed. “I’m not going to shoot you.”
“That’s good,” the old man said with a tinny cackle. He squeezed out a long fart that sounded like a slowly closing door on rusty hinges. “That old gun isn’t loaded anyway.” He turned and started walking into the trees.
Bewildered, I broke open the shotgun and stared at the circular glare of two empty barrels.
“Get your stuff,” the old man yelled over his shoulder. “Got someone you need to meet.”
Half annoyed, half curious, I put on my backpack and, shotgun in hand, caught up with the old man. With the exception of the water sloshing in the bottle holster of my backpack, we moved in silence under the canopy of an azure sky. The air was warm, filled with the sweet scent of ponderosa. Scolding chipmunks scurried like tiny shadows through the undergrowth. Aspens quaked in the breeze, which carried a raven’s homely message over the valley. A small herd of mule deer, ears pricked in alert, trotted to the far side of a meadow dotted with blue flax, larkspur, yucca, and sporadic clusters of waist-high sagebrush.
Half a mile later, we stood at the opening of a gated stucco wall. I peered through the bars of the iron gate at a footpath that went straight for a hundred feet before disappearing into the trees.
“Where’s it go?” I asked.
The old man fished a large key from a crack in the base of the wall, twisted it in the lock, and then spat his juice before pulling open the creaking gate. “If you’ll go in, I imagine you’ll find out.”
I started through, and then I hesitated. Aside from the fact that he hadn’t shot me with an empty gun, I had no reason to trust the old man. “After you.”
He glared at me. “You think I’m gonna lock you up or what?”
“No, because I don’t intend to give you the chance.”
He mumbled something about Christ in heaven, unloaded his spent wad of tobacco, and stepped through the gate.
I started to follow but stopped. Images suddenly flooded my mind. With my eyes I could see the gate, but in my mind I was looking at a zigzagging stairway ascending into a towering wall of red cliffs. What the hell was it? I turned, already knowing what was behind me. The image of an ocean flashed through my mind. There was a stone pier with three boats, all with masts. They were small with long, pointed bows but not like anything I’d ever seen. They were white with brightly painted images of dolphins on their sides. Their hulls—smooth, not planked—looked as if they were made out of some type of fabric. Beyond the pier, there was a harbor protected from the open ocean by an arcing seawall of rock. Even the air was damp, salty, and filled with the cries of gulls. Stranger still was the woman. She was facing away from me, looking out to the sea, her long dark hair moving with the breeze. She turned and looked straight at me. Suddenly I was lost in the most beautiful eyes I’d ever seen. Impossible.
I shook my head, blinked, and started to rub my eyes but stopped. The mental picture, or whatever the hell it was, suddenly vanished. Pier, boats, harbor, the woman—everything was gone. Trees now stood where, seconds earlier, an ocean had glistened beneath the sun. The air was dry, not a trace of humidity. Baffled, I turned back to the stairs and the red cliff. They were gone. The only thing I saw was that grumpy old man standing just beyond the iron gate, glowering at me through eyes squinted with impatience.
“You coming or not?” the old geezer squawked.
I just stared at him for a few seconds, trying to get my bearings. If he saw shock in my face, he didn’t show it.
I followed him into a courtyard whose centerpiece was a white marble fountain with three urn-bearing cherubim pouring water into a lily pond. The buzz of bees stirred amid sprays of pansies, geraniums, and marigolds. A rainbow of roses threaded through a lattice gazebo and climbed over arbors that covered various points of the flagstone walkways.
I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. The house was a mansion with a dormered, red tile roof and vine-covered walls of stucco. Slightly recessed leaded windows added contrasting shades of sunlight to the superstructure. An eight-foot stucco-and-rock wall, interrupted on at least three occasions by iron gates, surrounded the several acres of yard, gardens, and various outbuildings that made up the estate. I tried to blink it away, but this time the mansion and all its quiet splendor remained.
A Mediterranean villa in the heart of the San Juans?
I followed the old man to a side entrance of the house. We passed through hallways of polished wooden floors, past rooms filled with exquisite statuary, priceless paintings, and ornate vases gracing marble pedestals. One room was a menagerie of big game trophies—lion, grizzly, rhino, leopard, and water buffalo. Another, a billiard room, contained a massive fireplace and one solid glass wall with a stunning vista of the mountains. We walked over Persian carpets and beneath crystal chandeliers, passing enough antique furniture to furnish a Kuwaiti palace. The writer in me wanted to wander off in every direction, linger, study the view, the art, the antiques, and the taxidermy, shoot a game of pool, or maybe even dive into one. But the old man, apparently accustomed to life in a world-class museum, marched past everything that did not relate to his single objective, whatever the hell that may have been. Judging by his attire and frazzled appearance, I figured him for an employee of the estate, janitor maybe.
We traveled the entire length of the house, arriving at the glass doors of an immense solarium. My companion threw open the doors and, with a tilting head gesture, motioned me in. I was beginning to trust him, so I stepped in.
The warm musty air of a rain forest engulfed me like a damp blanket. Condensation on the glass ceiling beaded and dripped with leathery splashes over a room bristling with vegetation: ferns, mosses, banana trees with clusters of green fruit, vines with orchids. A blue and yellow macaw winked from a branch, while a four-foot iguana sunned on a slab of sandstone. A small waterfall tinkled into a brook, snaked through the foliage, and then disappeared through a fissure in the lichen-covered rock.
Impressive as it was, the feature that turned my head, drew me in short, unbelieving steps, had nothing to do with waterfalls, flora, or fauna. I was staring dumbfounded at the fully erected skeleton of a mammoth. The thing was huge, at least twelve feet at the shoulder, with tusks that jutted twenty feet or more from the skull. Its overall length, I figured, would equal that of Warren Henry’s wagon and mule team.
The old man, his eyes beaming with gratification over my openmouthed shock, stood at the door grinning for a long time before he spoke.
“Mr. Adams,” he said finally, “I’d like to introduce you to Manfred.”
J Douglas Bottorff 