It was late when Longtree found the body.
He was just making his way down a slope of scrub oak towards the outskirts of Wolf Creek when he saw what might have been an arm covered with a light dusting of snow. Bringing his gelding to an abrupt halt, Longtree dismounted and fought through the snowdrifts to what he'd seen. The wind was blowing with fierce raw-edged gusts that whistled through the hills. His long buffalo coat flapped around him as he bent down and began to dig through the drifts to expose the rest of the corpse.
He got his oil lantern out and lit it.
The corpse wasn't worth revealing.
Especially on this night of black, howling wind and bitter flurries. Longtree judged the man to be in his mid-forties and this was about all he could tell. The body was mutilated, chest and belly gouged open. The flesh clawed and shredded to the point that it and the ripped garments it wore were knotted into each other. Both legs were snapped off below the knees, skin stripped free. The head was twisted around so it was face down in the snow. Both arms had been pulled off. One was missing, the other nearby, mangled and punctured with teeth marks, a Colt pistol frozen in its red fist.
Longtree tried to turn the remains over, but they were frozen into the earth. He poked and prodded gently in the snow with his gloved fingers. There was very little blood around, most of it frozen into sparkling crystals.
Not enough for a slaughter of this magnitude.
Longtree surmised from this that the man had been killed somewhere else and dragged here, gutted and dismembered on the spot.
He looked around for the remains of the cadaver's legs, but they were gone.
He studied the body again in the dancing light.
It was hard to say exactly how the man had died, such was the nature of the carnage. His throat was torn out. Little remained of it but a twisted spiral ladder of vertebrae and hacked ligament. He had been opened up in countless places and could've bled to death from any of a dozen wounds. Longtree figured the attack must've been sudden and vicious. But not too sudden; the man had drawn his gun, precious little good it had done him.
The initial attack must've been savage. Brutal beyond comprehension. The man was dead long before he was dumped here and cannibalized.
Longtree examined the wounds the best he could in the flickering light.
From the teeth and claw marks there was no doubt in his mind: Only an animal could have done this. A huge and powerful beast with iron hooks for claws and jaws like razored bear traps. No man possessed the strength. No insane mind, regardless how fevered, could've summoned up the strength to pull a man literally apart. And the tools that would've been needed to create such injuries would have been complex beyond reason.
The killer in Wolf Creek was an animal.
Type: unknown.
Clenching his teeth and sucking in icy air, Longtree picked up the severed arm. It was much like handling a frozen leg of lamb. Wedging the limb between his knees, he began the grisly task of pulling the fingers free of the gun. He had to know if it had been fired. Rigor mortis and the freezing temperatures had turned the hand into an ice sculpture. The fingers snapped like pretzel rods as he forced them away from the Colt. Two popped off completely and fell in the snow.
It was gruesome work.
But it wouldn't be the first time Longtree had done such things. A man in his line of work spent a lot of time urging the dead to give up their secrets.
The gun had been fired; only three bullets remained in the chambers.
He set the arm and weapon next to the body.
Mounting his horse, he rode into a little arroyo that was protected by a wall of pines. He tethered the black to a tree and gathered up some firewood with his hatchet. The wind was reduced to a gentle breeze in the gully and Longtree got the fire going right away. He would spend the night here. In the morning, he would drag the body into Wolf Creek and begin the job he'd come to do.
He unhitched his saddle from the black and jerked the saddle blanket off, stretching it over some rocks to let it dry; it was damp with the horse's perspiration. Longtree curled up before the blazing fire and chewed some jerky from his grub sack.
He dozed.