Mother had worried herself into a case of the hives the first two times that Colson had gone hiking with his dad, but she had grown accustomed to seeing them off on their adventures. In fact, there was nothing to be concerned about. In recognition that some creatures of the wild belonged less in a Disney movie than in a horror flick, Dad walked with a 12-gauge shotgun slung over his left shoulder, one loaded with slugs rather than buckshot, intended only for protection from large predators to which a grown man and teenage boy might seem like a Big Mac with a side of fries. The weapon had never been necessary, because clipped to Colson’s utility belt was a small can of pressurized gas, an Attwood signal horn, that produced an ear-splitting noise that tended to scare off even bears and big cats if they were too curious and bold.
They couldn’t get lost because they possessed two compasses and detailed trail maps. They were also equipped with a GPS messenger in the event that one of them might be injured and need to be carried or airlifted out of the wilderness. The cell-phone-size unit had a red emergency button that you needed to press three times in quick succession before your distress call was transmitted to a satellite that then relayed the SOS to the International Emergency Response Coordination Center in Texas. Colson and his dad were safer than they would have been in certain major cities where at least one homicide was committed every day.
Now the trees gave way to a grassy sward along the river, and to the right were the ramshackle buildings of Zipporah. One of the first Fieldings to live in Montana, Ezra Enoch Fielding settled in Zipporah twenty years before it was abandoned. He was some kind of distant relative of Colson’s. He died in a smallpox outbreak, the final blow to a bad-luck town that never became a center of the timber industry or a vital river port, as its founders envisioned.
“Here it is,” Dad said with a sweeping gesture, “a key location in the glorious history of the Fielding family.”
“It for sure won’t be haunted,” Colson said as they approached the backs of the buildings that faced onto the town’s only street. Crickets sang, and clouds of midges erupted from the tall grass around them. “Not even a ghost would want to live here.”
“But people wanted to, back in the day.”
“Why here in the middle of nowhere?” Colson wondered.
“Most places in the West were in the middle of nowhere at one time, until they grew and became somewhere. There was good money in timber, and bigger towns downriver that could buy what a lumber mill produced.”
As they passed between weathered, sagging two-story buildings and came out onto the weedy, unpaved street, Colson said, “It’s more sad than anything, not spooky at all. Even when it was all new, I’d never have come here.”
“Well, son, there wasn’t unemployment insurance in those days. No welfare of any kind except what churches might provide. When you were out of a job, you had to go where the work was—or where you hoped it would be.”
They turned left, toward the stone church at the far end of the street.
Colson said, “So why did Ezra Enoch come here?”
“He made a bit of money as a trapper. The fur trade was big in those days. But that’s a hard life, and he wanted something softer. So he came here and bought this place just ahead on the left.”
The two-story wood building featured a parapet roof and a deep veranda without a railing. At the back of the veranda, on the wall, to the left of the entry door, which stood open, someone had long ago painted a winning poker hand, a royal flush, now so faded that it was almost invisible. To the right of the door was the legend “P. H. Best” crowning an illustration that time had all but obliterated.
Dad said, “P. H. Best was a German beer. The card hand is there to indicate gambling took place inside.”
Suddenly, abandoned Zipporah seemed less sad than interesting. “You mean some guy in our family, this Ezra Enoch dude, he owned a saloon in the Old West?”
“He did indeed, though like most such places in those days, it was less glamorous than you see in movies. Most gunfights weren’t showdowns in the street, but nasty close-up murders by sloppy drunks who were cheating each other at cards.”
Just then, a guy came through the open door of the saloon as if stepping out of the past. He wore boots with tucked-in blue jeans, a dark T-shirt, and a longish denim jacket. Tall, fit, tanned, with an air of authority, he looked as if he ought to be wearing a sheriff’s star on his chest.
“Good morning, gentlemen. I’m with the Montana Historical Preservation Office. If you’ve hiked in to take a tour of our little town, I’m afraid you’ll have to stay out of the buildings, just have a look from the street. We’ll be restoring Zipporah, and we don’t want any more damage done to the buildings than they’ve already endured.”