High Country

by Nevada Barr

  After garnering that unilluminating fragment of gossip, she’d repaired to the storage garage and found the letter Trish Spencer had written to Dickie referring to having become “a miner” and acquiring the cash to buy him a gym.

  The only possibility these thoughts brought to mind was an impossibility. Still, it gave her direction, and she grabbed at it. With renewed energy she returned to the map. Despite the prognostication of the climber dude, there was not a plethora of low lakes in Yosemite National Park. As near as she could tell there were exactly none. The only lake she could find with anything “low” about it was Lower Merced Pass Lake which at nearly nine thousand feet in elevation was low only in comparison to Upper Merced Pass Lake.

  There was a trail through the pass with a lake to either side. If Anna drove up to Mono Meadows Trailhead and hiked in from there it was twelve miles to Lower Merced with a total elevation gain of two thousand feet. Over rough terrain, elevation gain on a map meant little; one could easily climb three times as much as was recorded, as elevation was gained and lost and gained again over the wrinkles in the world.

  Usually, in December, trails in the high country were impassable but for snowshoers. Winter snows easily reached five to eight feet. Because of the ongoing drought in the Sierra, less than a foot of snow remained in most places. On exposed rock, even that had melted away. Hiking to Lower Merced should be doable. The worst danger would be on ice over the granite shoulders pushing through Yosemite’s thin mantle of soil. Slipping and shattering an elbow or knee was a real possibility.

  Sunrise wasn’t till after six, sunset around five—or so Anna was guessing. Since coming to California she’d seen the sun only twice and then but for an instant. To the people of Mississippi, California was all sunshine and sandy beaches. Her rangers were expecting her to return with at least a tan and possibly one or more body piercings.

  Six to six if she started in the dark and returned in the dark. Twenty-four miles round trip, twelve hours, two miles an hour, half uphill. She could do it. The next day she’d probably be sore—she’d been living at sea level in a state where the highest peak was slightly above her porch roof—but she didn’t report in to the Ahwahnee till three-thirty on the next day. Time enough to ease out of bed gently.

  Twenty-four miles in the cold across rugged country.Beats the hell out of sitting here, Anna thought. Twenty-four miles. Twelve hours. She pushed back from the map and tried to think past her arrogance and enthusiasm. It would be a killer hike. Cold sapped energy as surely as altitude and distance. She needn’t go all the way, just far enough to be sure there was activity in the area. That done, she could simply report, let the rangers do the heavy lifting. Report to whom? Leo? A picture of his sodden face and bleary eyes flashed before her.

  Never mind,she told herself.Burn that bridge when you come to it. Having crammed a dozen granola bars, water, dry socks and, because one never knew, a down sleeping bag into her day pack, she set her battered hiking boots beside the bed, set her alarm for fiveA .M. and went to sleep with what passed these days for great good cheer.

  By the time the sky began to gray with a sun that rose everywhere but where Anna was, she had hiked a ways up the Illilouette Trail. Her rental car was parked at Mono Meadows trailhead. Hiking in the dark wasn’t nearly as hard as one might imagine when on an improved and well-marked trail. Winding white between the trees, the gentle trough worn by feet and paws and hooves, held the snow longer than the surrounding earth. Her flashlight lit the trail up and it unrolled as inviting as the bride’s white satin down a church aisle.

  It wasn’t until she’d hiked in a mile and half that the tracks appeared.

  Winter campers, that hardy breed, were alive and well in the Sierra, but Anna doubted they could account for the traffic this trail had seen. All at once the pristine snow became scuffed and muddied. Before she added her boot prints to the mix she stopped and played her light over the churned-up snow. The flashlight’s beam poked between the surrounding trees to reveal several trails across patches of snow and duff. All convened where Anna stood. A meeting place? A gathering before the trek?

  “Nope,” she said. In the utter silence of fog, darkness and forest, this breach of etiquette annoyed her, and she kept the rest of her thoughts inside her head. These hikers hadn’t wanted the patrol rangers to notice the trail to Lower Merced Pass Lake was getting such heavy use. They’d hiked in cross-country to meet the Illilouette.

  Dry crisp snow and half-frozen mud were splendid tracking mediums. A few minutes’ study and she was fairly sure she was seeing not the tracks of nine or ten men, but three men who had come repeatedly at different times. She had little doubt that, should she follow their tracks downhill, they would lead to the road somewhere in the vicinity of Mono Meadows trailhead. Knowing she was on the right track, the pure pleasure of pursuit made her boots light and her heart strong. Had the need for stealth not made her circumspect she would have been singing.

  Outside, moving, tracking, she forgot about time and distance, about the halfhearted promise she’d made herself to go only partway. She walked too far and too fast. Sweat soaked the collar of her shirt and lay damp between her breasts. Forcing herself to take a break, she dried off as best she could and sat down to rest, eat and cool down.

  According to the map, her body and her watch, she’d covered close to eleven miles. Lower Merced Pass Lake was nearby, not more than a mile or two. This was where things got dicey and a person could get herself lost. The lake might or might not be visible from the trail. On a clear day she wouldn’t have given a thought to wandering haphazardly into the woods. Due west was Merced Peak, at 11,728 feet. East-southeast was Buena Vista at 9,700. Orienting one’s self with landmarks of soaring granite was a piece of cake. With clouds clamped down, and the sky oozing between mountains and leaking through trees, there was no place but here, a moveable feast of rock and pine. It wouldn’t do to forget where “here” was at any given moment. In weather this thick even map and compass were no guarantee. The human mind and the wilderness were foxy things. They had the power to bend reality, cause blindness, make madness seem a viable path.

  Food warmed her from within as her sweat-soaked shirt of microfiber dried faster than anything in the natural world had a right to. It was quarter past twelve. She’d been hiking seven hours. Four hours of daylight remained. She knew she should turn back, but she was so close. Shouldering her pack, she returned to the trail, heading uphill.

  Worry over finding the lake had been pointless. At the top of a small boulder-capped knoll, not three hundred yards beyond the copse where she’d picnicked, the veritable pack of boot prints she’d followed half the day took an abrupt right turn off the trail.

  Rather than thunder along this muddy highway, she drifted into the trees and walked parallel to the beaten path. Snow was heavier at this elevation. Drifts were a couple of feet deep, but there were bare patches and, in general, it wasn’t more than six inches. The going was relatively easy. Around her, ponderosa pines, needles looking more black than green in the still air, vanished upward into the gloom. A granite streambed, slab on overlapping slab, black water laced along the edges with silver-white ice, ran in a westerly direction. The duff of needles on the forest floor provided the only real color; that and Anna’s flame-colored fleece pullover. Mild discomfort niggled at the back of her mind for being so out of step with nature’s decor. She ignored it.

  The lake pierced white on white through a fringe of trees.

  Approaching as quietly as crunching snow and heavy boots permitted, she surveyed this hard-won scrap of the park. Undoubtedly a jewel in the summer months, by the feeble light of the dying year it was unprepossessing in the extreme, disappointing even. Not more than ten or fifteen acres, she could see its entirety without bothering to turn her head.

  Scrubby brown grasses, inundated in years with normal precipitation, spiked through crusty snow down to the water’s edge. The lake itself slept under ice and snow. To the west, Lower Me
rced Pass Lake ended in a wall. At first Anna took it to be a berm of snow forty to sixty feet high but quickly realized it was granite shattered and tumbled over so many years the boulders formed a scree wall half as high as the shoulder of the mountain behind it. On the opposite shore from where she stood, trees reached to the water’s edge, a jagged black line between gray ice and ice-gray skies.

  Other than that, there was nothing. Anna didn’t know what, exactly, she’d expected to find, but with the multitude of tracks, the same three or four pairs of boots trekking in and out over a period of time, the careful avoidance of the trailhead, the odd habits of the even odder men in Dixon’s cabin, she’d expected something.

  Damn.Staring into the colorless gloom, trying to get up the energy for the long cold walk down to the valley, she noticed a festooning of odd-shaped snow scraps in the fringe of evergreens across the lake. From ground level to about fifteen feet up, the trees were marred with what looked to be flotsam from a bygone flood. Drawn by the anomaly, she stepped out from the shore, tested the ice. It was rock-hard, a foot thick or more. Emboldened, she crossed. Twenty feet from the far shore she stopped to study the peculiar decorations these pines had acquired just before Christmas.

  Chunks varied in size from several feet long and half that wide to tiny shards. Metal and tubing and what looked to be canvas, twisted and torn, was shattered and sprayed into the trees as if a large machine had been pulverized, then blasted toward the southern shore. Mystified, Anna scanned lake, trees and ice. Toward the granite scree wall was a near-perfect triangle several feet high. Perfect geometrical shapes weren’t alien in nature, but they were rare enough to catch her eye and, on an otherwise flat field of ice, worth investigating. She dropped her pack to give her shoulders a rest, walked to the small white pyramid. Brushing the rime of frost away, she exposed a blue metal cone sitting neatly in the middle of the wilderness lake.

  The cone made sense of the other disparate pieces. Kneeling in the snow, she cleaned it off. Thin metal, sky blue in color, rivets running up one side; it was the nose cone of an airplane, not abandoned rusting alone in the middle of nowhere, but intact and unharmed in the idiosyncratic way of disasters. Rocking back on her heels, she looked around with a new perspective. An aircraft—a fixed-wing—had crashed with tremendous force, blasting bits of metal, tubing, Plexiglas, fabric, anything that could be smashed, into the trees. The plane had crashed before the last snow, possibly during the violent storm that preceded the kids’ disappearance. Looking behind her, she tried to figure the angle from which the aircraft had come down, find the main body of the plane or scars that would indicate point of impact. There were none. From the look of things, it had flown straight—or very nearly straight—into the ice-covered lake. The body of the plane broke apart on impact, the pieces blown into the trees with the resultant force. Smashing through the ice, the main fuselage along with the heavy engines would have sunk. Water closed; ice refroze; new snow re-created a virgin lake.

  There would be corpses beneath her.

  Standing, Anna wondered how many. A pilot. Maybe a copilot. Passengers? Why had the plane not been reported missing? California skies were painted with radar from both naval and civil installations. Pilots filed flight plans. In an area as well kept and densely populated as the great state of California, airplanes seldom went missing for long. Were any craft lost over this part of the Sierra, the park would have been notified immediately. With the hue and cry of the search the rangers would have been on hyperalert. This wreck was weeks old. There’d been no word, no hint, not even a rumor of a plane down in the mountains.

  A failure of multiple systems—flight plan, radar tracking, friends and family reporting their loved ones taking to the friendly skies and never coming back—usually meant considerable effort had gone into circumventing the authorities. A pilot taking off from a noncommercial strip, filing no flight plan, flying at night in bad weather beneath the radar, those expecting him or her careful not to report failure to arrive; it had to be a drug plane up from Mexico or Baja, headed into Reno or maybe Salt Lake City.

  This realization like a clarifying lens over her mind’s eye, Anna saw what she’d been missing. A disappointed mind, tired eyes and light that damped rather than brought forth color, her brain had dismissed what it had deemed natural excrescences in the ice along the water’s edge.

  “My God there’sbales of the stuff,” she whispered. Stunned, she trotted toward the nearest. Half frozen in the ice was an eruption of black plastic three feet long and half again that wide and tall, littered with dark green sodden straw. Crouching, she pinched up the frozen hay and sniffed it. AV gas and dope. When the plane struck and ruptured, its cargo, along with much of the fuselage and probably the brains of the pilot, spewed across the ice and into the trees.

  Now that she knew what she was looking at, Anna was astounded she’d not noticed before. Broken, half in ice, wrapped around trees, were fifty or sixty bales of what was undoubtedly prime Colombian or Mexican marijuana. Nearer the shore were places where the ice had been hacked away with axes to free the stuff.

  The entrepreneurs who’d sent and/or purchased the weed would have known it had gone missing. Had they a brain in their head they would have had a pretty good idea where it had gone down. But an educated guess was nowhere near enough to locate something as small as an airplane in the vast rocked and wrinkled acreage of the Sierra. Either the pilot had contacted someone on the way down or the drug plane had been stumbled upon by sheer dumb luck and those who’d struck this mother lode decided getting rich was a higher calling than reporting an accident to the authorities.

  The references of the ex–party boys to a gold rush were apt. Evidently the squatters in Dixon’s tent had been mining this vein for some time, maybe since a few days after the crash. That accounted for greenhorns suddenly willing to hike past blisters and sore muscles, carrying double-bladed axes and backpacks reeking of fuel.

  The squatters had not fortuitously stumbled upon it while on a Boy Scout campout. Anna doubted any of the four had spent a night outdoors in their lives. Therefore someone had told them, someone who’d seen it, knew the pilot was dead, the dope accessible. Someone in the park.

  A detail she hadn’t paid much attention to first time around flashed into her mind. About the time of Trish Spencer’s disappearance the fire ax in the dorm had been taken from its place at the end of the hall.

  The better to hack dope of out the ice with, my dear.

  Had Trish stumbled onto the plane? No. Not Trish. Patrick Waters. Anna remembered where the punky trail crewman had last been seen: on the trail she’d just traipsed. Trail crew was re-habbing in a burned area six miles below the lake where the Illilouette had subsequently washed out. Who better to discover the crash, perhaps hiking on his day off?

  So Patrick takes a sample to sell to Trish, his local connection. Trish worms the truth out of him and teams up with buddies Caitlin and Dix to become “miners” and strike it rich, buy brother Dickie his dream job.

  When the local market was saturated, they must have gotten greedy, looked farther afield. Had Trish with her petty low-level drug dealing thought she could play with the big boys? Taken her wares to the nearest city and shot her mouth off? It wouldn’t take long for the really big boys to decide to take over the excavation, cut out the middleman. Or in this case, woman.

  A reverberating crack came on a high pitched singing sound. Anna staggered, her train of thought derailed.

  Till she saw the blood she thought the ice had begun to give way.

  CHAPTER

  11

  Another crack split the silence. White powder plumed at Anna’s feet. Shots fired: she was a target, iridescent in the red pullover. Her mind snapped back to the unease she’d felt trundling this rag of color onto the ice. The tiny watchwoman in the back of her mind had been screaming of this possibility. In her preoccupation, Anna had ignored her.

  Instinct overrode further thought. The snow had spewed toward the s
outh and the wall of boulders. Guessing the shooter was at the lake’s north end, Anna bolted for the eastern shore and the cover of trees. Gravity had gone mad. She fell. Rose. Fell again.

  Shots rang out, two, three, fifty—Anna’s mind wasn’t on counting. Twice more she stumbled but managed to keep her feet. Reaching the line of trees, she dove, belly down, across the icy snow and duff.

  “Safe!”a memory of Mr. White, her fifth-grade teacher, shouted as she slid into home on a base hit.

  Crawling lizard-fashion, elbows and knees bent, she scuttled deeper into the trees. Like all of Yosemite National Park, the shores of Lower Merced Pass Lake were littered with granite boulders. Anna didn’t stop till she was snuggled up to the base of a big friendly rock.

  Two more shots smashed into the stillness. If they landed anywhere near her, she didn’t hear them hit. Either the shooter had bad aim or was using a pistol. Regardless of the reason why, Anna was alive and grateful for it. With this new lease on life came wracking pain. Every nerve in her left leg fired till the cacophony coalesced into a bone-breaking ache that nearly paralyzed her from toes to hip. She ignored it. Pain, shock and their attendant stupidity would have to wait. Crouching small behind her rock, she skinned out of the alarmingly red pullover. Beneath, she wore a gray turtleneck. The turtleneck was next. Then she pulled the red fleece on first and stretched the turtleneck over it. Feeling somewhat less visible, she answered the clamoring of pain from her ankle. Her sock blossomed with an oddly beautiful bloom of crimson. A bullet, probably a ricochet or even a shard of ice, given she’d walked away from the scene—albeit with less grace than was wanted—had struck just above the cuff of her boot, shredding her sock and tearing away a chunk of flesh. No spurting, but plenty of blood. Nothing to bind it with and no time. The cold would help stanch the bleeding.