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negotiated a price," he said without looking up.
    I didn't believe him, but dislike and disbelief are no reasons for pursuing an inquiry past its dead end so I did the obvious thing. "Well, thanks for your time," I said and left, clanking the cowbell he had hung down the back of the door.  
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    I didn't dwell on Sallinon's lack of cooperation. Lots of small town people are resentful of strangers. They make their living from us and they smile at us from their eyes but their mouths remain set and their wishes are not for our well-being; they resent the fact that we have time and money to visit while they're stuck in their rut. I just stored my feelings away and went back over the suspicions Misquadis had brought into my mind.  
    Who could have swept up the campsite where Prudhomme was found? It wasn't him, obviously. Surveyors like him are usually tidy in the bush. They bury their garbage and clean up their campsites when they leave, but they don't sweep around with a big branch. And even if he had, if he was so compulsively house proud that he kept the site tidy all the time, the bear's arrival would have left tracks on top of his work. I knew that Gallagher had investigated and closed the case but it smelled suspicious to me. It smelled like murder disguised as a bear mauling.  
    I thought back to my few meetings with Prudhomme. We had never been close, I'd spent maybe three evenings in his company, back in my married days. My impression was of a quiet man with restless eyes, as if the sights of suburbia weren't enough to hold him. He would have preferred to be off in the wilderness, putting up with the flies and the discomfort for the sake of the peace and the chance of making a big strike that would earn him glory in his company and perhaps get him a vice-president's corner office in Montreal. And now he was dead. The bush he had loved so well had turned on him, as if he was just as ignorant of its ways as the rest of us who live in houses most of the time, instead of in tents away from the city. Except that his bear, if it had really been a bear, had cleaned up after itself.  
    Which left the question of why Misquadis had said nothing about that in his statement. Maybe he was right and Gallagher had been too forceful, putting down what he thought Misquadis had said and pushing it in front of him for a signature. Misquadis was an Indian and a bush Indian at that. As far as he was concerned the whole procedure was meaningless. A white man had been killed and other white men were filling up pieces of paper to make the body disappear. It didn't matter very much what was put on that piece of paper. If nobody had asked him about bear tracks, he wouldn't have volunteered the information. And when the bear horror story grew and the town put a bounty on the animal, he would have kept quiet out of good sense. He wouldn't need more than a day or two in the bush to come back with a bear carcass in his canoe. He'd have his winter's meat, a skin to sell to Sallinon, and a five-hundred-dollar bonus, big money for a trapper. Most of them make less than five grand a year—if he was lucky he might make ten. That was all.  
    I guess I should have gone hotfooting back to Chief Gallagher with my suspicions, but I didn't want to wear out my welcome too early. So I headed for friendly turf, back to the motel.  
    Sam was getting bored with the car so I let him out for a scamper before going into the front office. The same woman was on duty, working away at a painting below the level of the counter. She pushed it out of sight automatically, then recognized me and smiled. It was a nice smile and I was glad I'd opted for talking to her rather than the chief. "Good morning, how's the insurance business?" she asked me.
    I stuck out one hand and did the comme-ci, comme- Ò« a gesture. "Tell me about the art business and I'll sing you the whole sad song," I promised.  
    Surprisingly, she responded.