electrified his muscles, drove pure oxygen deep into his lungs, exploded his vision to infinity. Everything grew clear. He sat on the snow. It felt warm and cradling, fit his body like a glove. He looked out over the vast horizon, the great sweeping white plateaus, the raw black peaks and tree-thick ridges under the near-black sky, and sensed the magnificence of it all.
Jesus life is magical. What a great gift. He smiled at the white plateaus, sharp cliffs and endless forests. Thank God for this.
With this God inside him, he could do anything. So what was he afraid for? “Holy shit!”
“Yeah,” Steve chuckled. “Holy shit.”
“How much you say?”
“Thirty grand a kilo, Wall Street or Vegas.”
It always amazed Zack how coke instantly hones your judgment and will power. You can do whatever you decide to.
But does it hurt you? He couldn’t tell. Is it evil, to steal what’s evil? Or is coke even evil? It’s always been good to me. Or maybe coke hurt one person inside him but helped another. Helped the athlete facing endless pain from so many battered places in his body, helped the TV anchor deal with the endless fraud and hustle. But hurt the other side, the one Monica loved, the one she called the real you.
What seemed impossible an hour ago now looked easy. As if you can move the earth with one hand.
True, a century ago lots of folks did coke. It was in every bottle of Coca Cola – how Coke got its name. It’s been the basis of so many medicines that have done so much good – why forbid it?
Funny how so many government prohibitions were not to protect the citizen but rather the powerful interests that could be financially harmed by the item proscribed. Like it’s okay to smoke cigarettes that kill half a million Americans a year – the industry even gets government subsidies. But smoking marijuana, which kills no one, is against federal law. How funny. How tragic.
“Is it better to be poor and honest?” Steve grinned, “or rich and crooked?” He hunched into his black parka against the thickening snowfall. “Is coke even crooked? Anyway,” he chuckled, “if it comes down to a choice, I’ll take rich and crooked any time.”
Zack laughed. And felt a blade drop between his past and now.
“All I’m saying,” Steve added, “is what if there’s a way to do this? Think what we’re doing with our lives. You want to spend thirty more years like this? Or do you want to live?”
“It’s insane. How would we get it out of here?”
Snow began to fall harder, twirling down through the green-black treetops and blotting out the early stars.
FIRELIGHT flickering through the trees ahead made Steve think of ancient hunters returning home out of the cold darkness, generations after generations over thousands, millions of years.
“You boys been gone a while,” Curt said. He stood from the fire and helped them shake snow off their coats. “I was even thinking of looking for you.”
“Beautiful night out there,” Zack said, excited from the coke and trying not to show it.
They unloaded their rifles and slid them into their tents, knelt by the fire. Curt handed them each a cup of coffee and Jack Daniels. “This’ll warm you up.”
“You’re not going to believe what I found,” Zack said.
“Zack killed an elk,” Steve broke in, “but a griz got it.”
Curt glanced at him. “What griz?”
“That’s not all I found,” Zack said.
Steve slapped Zack’s shoulder. “A big griz. Chased Zack, knocked him down … Then he chewed on the elk and Zack got up a tree.”
Curt turned to Zack. “You okay?”
“Fine. Just scared for a while.” Zack looked down at his snow-soaked, still-bloody boots. “But the griz got my elk. Six-pointer.”
“That’s a damn shame.” Curt chewed on a grass stalk. “But at least he’s fed for the winter and won’t bother us now.” He stood and stretched. “I’ll get you boys some more coffee and Jack. Then we’ll have dinner.”
Zack stared at Steve. “That’s not all I found.”
Curt halted. “What else?”
Feeling as if he’d transgressed somehow, Zack told him about the plane.
“Why didn’t you say before?”
“The pilot got away fine,” Steve put in. “Zack followed his tracks part way down toward 191. No emergency.”
“So what was in this plane?”
“Nothing,” Steve said. “Just a couple coffins in the back.”
“Coffins?” Curt half-smiled, as if this might be a joke.
“If there’s bodies in them,” Steve chuckled, “they won’t rot at twenty below … And that pilot was obviously okay, probably on his way to where he came from by now.”
Curt took the grass stalk from his teeth, tossed it. “We’ll have to ride down to the road, call it in.”
“Tonight?” Steve raised his hands, palms up, collecting the fast-falling flakes. “In this?”
“Tomorrow morning.” Curt took off his hat to dump snow from the brim. “If this weather keeps up, we should go down anyway. Getting too deep for the horses.”
“It’s not that bad,” Steve said.
“We agree every year, if there’s too much snow we cut it short.”
“We paid for a full hunt,” Steve said.
Zack glanced at their tracks entering camp. “It’s only knee-deep.”
Curt nodded. “So far.”
“I don’t see any reason to ride out because of that plane,” Steve added. “The pilot’s surely reported it by now. And like I said, those corpses …”
Curt smiled. “Maybe those coffins’re empty.”
“Yeah,” Zack said. “Maybe.”
“If it stops snowing,” Curt said, “I’ll ride down in the morning, call it in. You boys can keep hunting.”
“Too bad there’s no service up here,” Zack said. “Or we could call it in now.”
“Yeah, too bad,” Curt said, “that a little bit of this world’s still natural.”
“When I climbed that ridge,” Zack said, “chasing my elk, I looked out at these mountains and forest …” he halted, not knowing what to say. “It was the most beautiful sight I’d ever
