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Dalton stops the SUV and drums his fingers on the wheel as the bear ambles across, taking its sweet time. When it's halfway over, it turns and snarls.
"Yeah, yeah," Dalton mutters.
"Is it safe to be this close?"
He gives me a look like I'm asking if it's safe to be this close to a dog crossing the street. "It's a black, not a brown."
"Okay..."
"Black bear," he says. "Browns are twice the size. Better known as grizzlies."
"There are grizzlies here?"
"About seven thousand of them. They usually stick to the mountains."
"And the town isn't near a mountain?"
"No. It's near two."
Great ... I'm quiet for a moment, in case there's anything pressing he needs to discuss. When he stays silent, I take the chance I've been waiting for.
"You have a case for me," I say.
"What?"
"Something's going on up there. Something that urgently requires a major crimes detective."
"I never said that."
"You said you needed--"
"I admitted that I'm not qualified to investigate serious crimes," he says. "My father is in law enforcement so I grew up with it, but I don't have any formal police training. Definitely no training as an investigator. The town needs more than a thirty-year-old sheriff. I'm making sure it gets everything it needs."
"But there must be a case. A current one. Otherwise, you guys wouldn't have jumped at the chance to bring me in."
He looks at me. "How many detectives you think apply to come up here? I figured, if we were lucky, we might get some old drunk who hasn't been off a desk in twenty years. A young homicide detective with a record that impressed even me? Of course I jumped. Same as we'd jump at someone with medical experience, even if we already have a damn fine doctor. We get too many like your friend, practically useless in a town like ours."
"So you have absolutely no outstanding major cases?"
He shrugs. "Got a guy who went missing a week ago. Took off into the woods."
"I'm a detective, not a bloodhound."
"Well, then, guess you'll have to wait for a real case. In the meantime, there's lots of regular policing to keep you occupied."
I want to call bullshit. Something's going on. But Dalton's not telling me about it. Not yet.
"All right, then," I say. "What are my duties?"
"Take everything a small town cop would do ... and double the workload."
He spends the next half hour giving me just a taste of what I'll be doing in the town--Rockton, as he calls it. That half hour is his limit for conversation, though I suspect we only scratched the surface. After that, it's a silent drive on an empty road. We enter an area where periodic signs mark past fires with dates, and I can still see the damage, twenty years later. I catch a glimpse of what looks like a huge deer at the roadside. Dalton grunts, "Elk," and that's it for the next thirty minutes, until I start seeing brown rodents darting across the road and popping up along the side to watch us pass.
"Are those prairie dogs?" I ask.
"You see prairie?" Before I can answer, he says, "Arctic ground squirrels." I think that's all I'm getting, but after a few more kilometres he says, "Won't see them much longer. They'll hibernate soon, sleep for seven months." Another pause, maybe a kilometre in length, then he says, "Body temperature goes down to near freezing."
"How's that possible?"
