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so badly that he had disfigured the body out of anger. And what had caused Misquadis to think the scene had been tidied up? None of this sounded right to me.  
    Still doing the same plodding things I would have done as a policeman, I drove back to the center of town where the tiny hospital stood. Like most of the other buildings it was made of white clapboard, square and ordinary. I guessed the builder had used the same plan he had used for the original school, it was the only way he knew how to build anything bigger than a house.  
    Inside it was like any other hospital, only scaled down. There was a comfortable-looking clerk on duty, tapping away on a manual typewriter, and a nurse behind the counter. The nurse was fiftyish and brisk. I went up and introduced myself and asked if Dr. Clarke was in. He wasn't, it seemed. There was a medical convention in Dallas, Texas, she explained helpfully. He would be back on Tuesday. I hung in, even then, explaining who I was and why I was there and pumping her very gently about Prudhomme.  
    Things must have been slack for her because she opened up like a flower, tutting over the poor shape the body had been in when the chopper lowered it into the hospital parking lot. "I thought I'd seen everything after twenty-three years in town," she said with a touch of pride. "I've had men in here with arms and legs gone from mill accidents. Bullet wounds we get by the score, every damn hunting season. I've taken fishhooks out of every portion of the male anatomy." I grinned at that one the way she expected me to, and she smiled and went on, "But this was something. The whole face had gone."  
    I said something sympathetic and she continued more briskly. "It's lucky for Chief Gallagher that Dr. Clarke was here at the time."  
    "Yes, I can see that," I agreed cautiously. "He's the only doctor within seventy-five miles, I guess."
    "Oh, more than that," she said, giving her head a proud little lift that made her starched uniform rustle and let me realize that she was probably in love with her boss but would carry the secret to her grave. "Much more important than that. Dr. Clarke is possibly Canada's foremost authority on animal bites."  
    I looked properly respectful and she filled me in. "Yes, when he came up here first he was a young GP. There was no chance of getting out again to specialize anywhere, the town just couldn't spare him. So he decided to put the isolation to good use. He made a study of animal bites. We get all kinds of them here. Some of the trappers are incredibly careless."  
    She embroidered on this theme for about ten minutes, painting a picture of her employer as a Dr. Schweitzer of the north, toiling with microscope and textbook over the gnawed hides of an ungrateful population and taking his reward in the papers he read occasionally at conventions like the current one in Dallas.  
    Some world expert, I thought. The guy probably knew everything about a bear's dental structure but nothing about bears. He probably spent hours in his office, studying the way animal jaws closed around people, but had seen only a few real bites of any kind. Ah well, some medical fields are less crowded than others.  
    I thanked her and left and went to the greasy spoon in the plaza for a cup of coffee and a homemade donut. I scored the coffee five out of ten for quality, but the donut was great. The place was half full of men, nursing coffees and psyching themselves up for another round of calling at the mine sites, looking for jobs that had all been filled before news of the strike made the general pages of the papers in Toronto. I sat and looked over my notes. The only other witness to talk to was the chopper pilot, but he figured to be working through the day out of the chopper base about thirty miles away at a motel on the highway. No sense driving up there right now. Which left me what? I had an encore on the donut and read through the rest of the file. It seemed that