Whispers of Old Winds by George Seaton Page A

back down and looked at where Joe was pointing. I saw a vividly white blur, as if a bird were flapping its wings and alighting on the ground. When the flapping stopped, the white blur became the shadow of a man.”
    “A skinwalker?” Michael asked.
    “Maybe. The next thing I knew, I heard another one of my unit say, ‘Oh! Christ!’ I looked to my right, about twenty yards away, and saw two or three of my men hovering over something on the ground. We rushed over there. A staff sergeant named McGill was lying on the ground, his throat cut ear to ear.”
    “Damn.” Michael’s eyes were wide, a concerned look on his face.
    “Yeah. No one had seen or heard anything—except Joe.”
    “But you…. You saw it too,” Michael said.
    “Yeah. I saw something.”
    “Wow. What about the other times? You said there were several?”
    I sipped some more wine, then reached out and drew my fingers through Michael’s hair. “Dear heart, I don’t really want to remember those things. There was nothing good about them.”
    “Okay.” He nodded. “But you believe? Skinwalkers?”
    “Ah,” I sighed. “I believe there are some things that are unknowable, mysteries that we can never untangle.”
    He smiled then and nodded as he picked up his glass and sipped.
    I don’t know why, but I felt that maybe he knew more than I did about such things.
     
     
    I GLANCE out the window, and there’s a figure approaching the door, a fur-lined hood over the head, the head bent down against the sideways-blowing snow. The door opens and I see it’s Digger as he pulls the hood off and slams the door behind him.
    “Whew!” he says, taking off his gloves and vigorously rubbing his hands against each other. “Cold as a witch’s tit.”
    Digger—Dick Snead—is one of my three deputies, who—and I’ve made this conclusion several times—is about as useful as, yes, tits on a boar. But he’s a good-looking kid, with dark blond hair and blue eyes, with a nice ass. He’s got the potential for becoming a good deputy. He’d volunteered for the Army directly out of high school and applied for the deputy job with credentials spanning three years of military police experience. Worked in noncombat duty stations in Germany, Japan, and Virginia. But like I said, after four months on the job here, I’ve concluded he’s a slow starter.
    And we didn’t give him his nickname. He showed up with it at our front door.
    “Got a report of a body up the mountain.” He pulls off his coat, hangs it on a hook next to the door, and steps to the small table where Mary keeps the coffee pot full and hot.
    I lean my shoulder on my office door frame, adore Digger’s ass for a moment as he prepares his coffee, and then ask the pertinent question: “This body alive or dead?”
    “Oh,” he says, turning toward me, cup in his hand. “Hank flagged me down on the road. Said he’d been up near Elk Creek cutting Christmas trees and saw a body lying spread-eagle, facedown in the bowl about a hundred yards from him. He didn’t want to go down there ’cause…. Well, you know how that bowl is when there’s snowpack.”
    I nod. Any urgency I’d felt about heading up the mountain to check this report pales at the mention of that name. Hank is Henry Tall Horse, a Ute Indian who has been up here for probably the last ninety years, though nobody knows for sure how old he is. He’s a sly old man who has probably made the same conclusion about Digger that I have. Hank seems to enjoy toying with him by sending him on wild-goose chases that have just enough credibility to engage Digger’s curiosity. Digger has yet to catch on to Hank’s wiliness.
    And every time I run into Hank, he gives me a wink and says, “Helluva deputy you got, chief.”
    “You gonna check it out?” I ask, glancing at Mary, who is trying to stifle a laugh as she works on the department’s budget for next year, her adding machine clicking away. She, too, knows what Hank is up to.
    “Gotta put