The Dogs of Winter Read Online Free

in the first light of a tropic sunrise.
    “You know what they say about this place,” Peters said. “It’s not just the drop. They say it’s got that old magic, the way the Bay had it, in the old days, before they turned it into a theme park.”
    “Maybe it’s all that Indian land,” Fletcher suggested. It suddenly felt to him as if some offering of peace was about to descend.
    “Maybe so,” Peters said. “Harmon’s married now. You know that?”
    “I hadn’t heard. Who’s the lucky girl?”
    “Don’t know. No one does, as near as I can tell. Last I heard the guy was living in Costa Rica. He calls from Northern California. Tells me he’s married, that he’s gotten himself a chunk of land . . .”
    “That was probably how he got the land,” Fletcher said. “He found himself an heiress.”
    “Half his age no doubt.”
    “With a large trust fund.”
    The men allowed themselves a moment of laughter.
    “I ever tell you about that time in Biarritz? We’re camping on the beach for two days, waiting on a swell. Finally we get it. I get up at dawn, look out. There it is, corduroy to the horizon. The sun is out. The wind is offshore. I hear something and I look up. A Mercedes wagon pulls up and stops. Door swings open. Out steps Drew Harmon. Man’s wearing shades and an ankle-length fur coat. I can see this blonde sitting in the seat behind him. He’s got at least four boards racked to the roof. He pulls one out. Pulls on a wet suit. Walks down. And rips. For about three hours. Never says a word. Just rips. He leaves and the wind turns around, starts blowing on shore. Half an hour later and the place is shit.”
    In fact, Fletcher had heard the Biarritz tale before. But then surfers did love their stories. Big waves and outlaws. Anybody who could grow old and stay in the life. Drew Harmon was all of those things.
    “You remember when I took over the magazine?” Peters asked. “You remember what it looked like then? We changed all of that, Doc. You changed it. All that shit you shot from the water. That was heavy stuff. You set the standard, man. You upped the stakes . . .” The man paused, moved perhaps by his own rhetoric.
    “What I’m trying to tell you,” Peters said finally, “is that I’mpulling for you on this one. Sonny Martin’s nothing new. But R.J. is. He’s the real thing. You get Jones and Harmon, passing the torch in mysto California surf . . .” The man paused once more. “You can tell the newlyweds to go fuck themselves.”
    Fletcher had been off the phone for a full five minutes before it occurred to him that Michael Peters had just made reference to the weddings. He paused at that point in his packing. He looked with some wonder upon the first light. You lost your money. You fucked up your back. In the end, it was hard even to maintain one’s front. In the end, they knew. In the end, they had you. He glanced at his watch. He stuffed the last of his gear into his bags and went with it into the alley where he had parked the old Dodge. As he did so, he was just in time to see a pair of egrets as they swept up from the remains of the Bolsa Chica wetlands where once his great-grandfather had come on horseback from Los Angeles to hunt with his friends. The birds passed almost directly above him, wing to wing, sleek prehistoric shadows before a tarnished silver sky.

2
    T ravis woke early to the sound of distant thunder. Checking his clock, he found it to be 4:00 A.M. He lay awake for some time, his hands clasped behind his head, listening to the waves. He began to think about the meeting of the tribal councils he’d promised to attend upon the coming evening. With the approaching season, tensions were running high on the river.
    The federal government had recently divided the fishing rights on the Klamath. The Yuroks had the first twenty miles of the river, which included its mouth. The Hupas had the rest and believed themselves to have been short-changed. Between the