Vane Pursuit

by Charlotte MacLeod

  “This is hardly the moment for japery, sir.”

  Peter raised his hands as bidden. The roof, he noticed, was low and the blasting had left a good deal of loosened rock overhead as well as underfoot. He stubbed his finger, felt a wiggle, and grabbed the shard before it fell. The guard didn’t notice, he’d stepped on one of the fallen rocks, turned his ankle, and inadvertently looked down. Peter made sure the man’s finger was off the trigger, and threw.

  The rock wasn’t big enough to fell their captor, but it was hard enough to hurt. The man dropped his gun and grabbed for his nose. Cronkite rushed him. Peter rushed the weapon. They tied him up with his own and Peter’s belt, commandeered his bandolier, and gagged him with Cronkite’s necktie, a natty affair of shocking pink with a pattern of little green alligators. Then they headed for the staff car on the double.

  Five more commando types were clustered around the vehicle, happily engaged in slashing the tires with large hunting knives and smashing the windows with rifle butts. Seeing their attention thus engaged, Peter and Cronkite decided not to interrupt them.

  “Any idea where we’re headed, Swope?” Peter panted after they’d slogged at high speed through several miles of wood and bog.

  “Away from there is all I care about,” his companion panted back. “Holy cow, Professor, those guys are a bunch of maniacs!”

  “Your diagnosis seems a reasonable one to me. Did you happen to recognize any of them?”

  “I don’t think I stopped long enough to look. Maybe I would if I dared to sit down and think about them. Only I kind of suspect we hadn’t better just yet. Don’t you think we ought to be coming out someplace pretty soon? I just hope we haven’t been traveling in a circle.”

  “I’m quite sure we haven’t. I’ve been keeping the sunset at our backs as best I could the whole time. At this time of day, that means we ought to be traveling more or less due east, I believe. Does that mean anything to you?”

  “Means we ought to wind up in Boston Harbor if we keep going long enough, I guess.” Cronkite looked down at his formerly dapper light blue slacks and cream and red checked sports jacket. “I’m not exactly dressed for hiking. And I sure wish I’d remembered to bring a sandwich. You know, Professor, I think we must be in that big tract of land that belongs to the Binks estate.”

  “Binks?” exclaimed Peter. “Wasn’t he the old coot who took up cryonetics and had himself quick frozen?”

  “That’s right. He had this thing about wanting to see the new century in. He’s not due for thawing out until December 31, 1999, and they can’t do a thing about settling the estate till they find out whether it worked. The relatives filed an appeal in court, but they didn’t get anywhere. The judge is rooting for Mr. Binks.”

  “Another triumph for modern technology. How big a place is this?”

  “Almost twenty miles square, as I recall. How far do you think we’ve gone?”

  “Four or five, maybe. It hasn’t been easy going, as I don’t have to tell you. Come on, Swope, we’d better push along while there’s still some light left.”

  “Then what happens?”

  “Then we manage as best we can. Here, have some duckweed.”

  Cronkite shied away from the bundle of small-leaved green stuff Peter handed him. “What am I supposed to do with that?”

  “Eat it if you’re hungry. Chickweed is a valuable antiscorbutic.”

  “If you say so. But I wish you hadn’t mentioned hamburger back there.” Cronkite took an experimental nibble. “I suppose we ought to be glad this isn’t the hunting season.”

  “Don’t delude yourself on that point, Swope. After what we’ve seen, those thugs won’t dare not to come after us. More chickweed?”

  “Not just now, thanks. It makes me feel too much like Bugs Bunny. But it did sort of take the edge off,” Cronkite added politely. “Which way now, Professor?”

  “Up, I think. If they happen to think of bloodhounds, this may help to put them off the scent. I hope.”

  They had come upon a wide mat of squirrel briars, pesky vines with stems like wire and thorns like barbs. In the midst of the briar patch grew two oak trees, the tallest they’d seen so far, so big that their branches intertwined. These were something of an oddity. New England woodlands are more likely than not to have been cut over or burned off at one time and another during the past couple of hundred years.

  Peter couldn’t understand how two sockdolagers like these had escaped destruction, but he didn’t wait to ponder. Jumping for a low-hanging branch, he swung himself up above the briars and shinned along toward the trunk, Cronkite right behind him. It proved an easy tree to climb, the limbs spaced not too far apart. Peter was grateful for that, he was beginning to feel a mite tuckered out.

  Moving from the first to the second oak was no great feat of acrobatics; they simply shinned out on a convenient limb and stepped across to one that was rubbing against it. Instead of crawling across and dropping off on the other side of the briar patch, though, Peter began climbing straight up.

  “Where are you going, Professor?” Cronkite whispered.

  “I thought we might as well reconnoiter while we still have a little light left. If there’s a shortcut out of here, I’d like to know where it lies.”

  “You and me both.”

  Cronkite swarmed after him, trying not to pant. Peter had chosen this tree for his lookout post because it was the taller of the pair. He’d recognized it as a white oak from the rather evenly rounded lobes on the leaves and the relatively pale color of the bark. He knew that white oaks could grow eighty feet or more, and this one mustn’t be far short of that. Eighty feet was a long way up for a middle-aged man who’d been fleeing a looney tune with a machine gun for the past two hours. He gritted his teeth and kept on climbing.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “Explain yourself, sir!”

  “Great Scott! I do believe I’ve been climbing in my sleep. I beg your pardon, madam. The intrusion was involuntary.”

  One did not, after all, expect to come upon what had looked from below to be an exceptionally large squirrel’s nest, only to find it neatly decked over with birch saplings, carpeted with balsam fir twigs laid in a careful overlapping pattern, and occupied by an elderly lady in a deerskin bikini reading Young’s Night Thoughts.

  “I am Professor Peter Shandy of Balaclava Agricultural College. And this is my young friend Cronkite Swope,” Peter added as his companion hove into view. “We’re fugitives.”

  “Indeed? From what, pray tell?”

  “The answer to that may strain your credulity, madam, yet I assure you that what I have to say is both true and alarming. Our being here may be putting you as well as ourselves in a highly dangerous position.”

  “Then you had better tell me at once.” The woman closed her book, first carefully inserting a tender young oak leaf by way of marker, and laid it aside on the fir twigs. “I am all attention.”

  Peter was no defeatist, but he’d already faced the fact that he and Swope might not get out of this escapade alive. Somebody had to know what was going on at Woeful Ridge. This woman might be crazy as a coot, she might even be a lookout for the survivalists, but she was the only person he could find to tell, so he told. When he’d finished his short but lurid tale, she nodded.

  “Then that’s what they’re up to. I’ve been wondering, and I reproach myself for not having investigated. You must surely realize, however, that a woman in my position is forced to be protective of her privacy. I have no inclination to draw a pack of anthropologists out here to study me. I suggest that you and Mr. Swope sit here and recruit your vigor to whatever extent is possible while I don more suitable raiment. Our route will be somewhat arduous. Please help yourselves to the day lily buds. They’re quite delicious this time of year.”

  Before either of them could reply, she was over their heads and out of sight among the foliage. Peter shrugged and took out his field glasses. Their arboreal hostess, however, had chosen her bosky roost for se
clusion rather than observation. He couldn’t see much except a family of flying squirrels in the tree he and Cronkite had just vacated. The parents were trying to get the kids off to bed and the cheeky little critters were insisting on one more practice glide.

  Under different circumstances he’d have been charmed. As it was, he lowered the glasses in disgust and ate a day lily bud. He himself wouldn’t have said quite delicious, but it tasted better than he’d expected. He and Cronkite had pretty much finished the lot when the woman slid back down the trunk wearing deerskin pants and tunic somewhat haphazardly laced together with thongs. On her feet were moccasins that looked even more handmade than the clothes. Peter wondered if he’d met the ultimate do-it-yourselfer.

  “Now I feel a trifle more presentable. Winifred Binks, gentlemen, at your service. There is a search party composed of six men with what appear to be deer rifles and two rather stupid-looking dogs working their way downhill from Woeful Ridge. They’re about to get stuck in Soggy Bog. I thought you’d probably want to know.”

  “Er—thank you,” said Peter. “How did you—er—”

  “I looked, of course. I have a very powerful telescope on my observation platform up above. Feel free to look for yourself if you wish, but I suggest the time might be better employed in moving to a more secluded locale. Shall we?”

  “But where can we go?” Cronkite Swope was too grownup to burst into loud wails, but he might possibly have been wishing he weren’t. “Wouldn’t it be safer for us to stay up here in the tree and—”

  “Hurl coconuts down on their heads?” Miss Binks suggested brightly. “That might be a solution if we had any. Come along, Mr. Swope. Follow me where the woodbine twineth.”

  Peter and Cronkite thought the woman was indulging in an ill-timed flight of poesy, but it turned out she wasn’t. The woodbine, which appeared to be merely picturesque festoons between the oak and an adjoining sugar maple, had, they soon discovered, been adroitly trained to mask a crude but navigable suspension bridge woven from some fiber whose nature they didn’t pause to identify. They’d discovered there was nothing like the baying of a distant bloodhound to put that extra ounce of spring in the step.

  Tired as they were, the two men kept pace with the incredibly agile Miss Binks throughout a Tarzanian journey of perhaps a quarter of a mile, during which they didn’t touch dry ground once. They did plunge into a pond or two and spent a chilly five minutes picking their way along the pebbly bed of a rushing stream, but mostly they kept to the trees. Then all at once they shot feet-first down the hollowed-out trunk of a dead maple tree and found themselves underground.

  “This way.” Miss Binks had dropped to all fours and scuttled along what proved to be a well-dug tunnel some four feet in diameter, shored up with slabs of bark, dry as a bone and clean as a whistle. The tunnel was not very long and it opened out into Bilbo Baggins’s parlor.

  “Snug,” said Peter.

  The room was all that and then some; more round than square, more free form than circular. Along one side of the room a bench of earth that was no doubt Miss Binks’s bed had been built up a foot or so, mattressed with a thick layer of spruce tips, and covered with deerskins. A couple of aged but clean woolen blankets were tidily folded at one end of the bed. Surprisingly, a battery-operated table lamp with a duck stamped on its shade sat at the other end on a kind of headboard that had been made by piling the earth another foot higher and facing it with a couple of rather badly charred boards.

  More boards had been used to shore up the ceiling and build bookshelves in a hollowed-out niche. Miss Binks’s library, Peter noticed, was an interesting mixture of the more serious-minded British poets in tooled leather and the collected works of Euell Gibbons and his ilk in paperback. Another niche was obviously the kitchen. Here were a board working counter, hanging bunches of dried herbs and wild onions, and more shelves. An old galvanized pail filled with water sat under the counter.

  The larder looked to be well stocked, though Peter could only surmise what might be in the containers Miss Binks had cobbled together from birch bark and the baskets she’d woven of dried rushes. Some of the baskets were more recognizable as such than others. Practice still hadn’t made perfect, but Miss Binks was learning. Another niche held a fire pit lined with clay, a few pots and pans, a stack of firewood, and a heap of kindling. All things in good order. Dogberry would have approved.

  “The earth closet is down the back tunnel,” said their hostess. “You’ll find a pan of water and a bunch of soapwort if you want to wash. My establishment doesn’t run to guest towels, but one manages well enough with a handful of dry grass, I find. I’ll just light the fire to dry out your clothes and fix us some food. No doubt you’re both ready for a hot meal by now. And perhaps a little nip to settle your nerves after your ordeal.”

  She went to her pantry and fished out a recycled preserve jar filled with something liquid. “I’ve never been able to make up my mind what it is that I make. Applejack, perhaps, or perry. Or arrack or slivovitz. It all depends on what I can find to put in. There are still some fruit trees on the estate. Sometimes I get apples, sometimes plums or pears. Mostly it’s a peck of this and a peck of that and a bit of whatever else happens to present itself when I’m ready to fire up the still. Anyway, I’ve been drinking my private distillations for quite some time now, in moderation, of course, and the stuff’s never killed me yet.”

  Astonishingly, she took down three unmatched but exquisite crystal goblets. “Professor Shandy? Mr. Swope?”

  “I think I’ll go and wash up first, if you don’t mind.” Cronkite was still essentially a strawberry-milkshake man.

  Peter wasn’t. “Delighted, Miss Binks, if you’ll join me.”

  She poured out two fairly generous belts and handed him one. “I believe I will. I must confess that I don’t generally travel at quite the pace I set tonight, and I find myself feeling a trifle unstrung. Now please do relax and make yourself at home, Professor. I’m not really geared for company, as you can see, but we’ll manage. I hope you like deer meat.”

  “At this point I’d like anything from aardvark to zebra,” he assured her. “I dimly remember having eaten some sort of meal before Swope and I left Balaclava Junction, but it seems to have worn off. How do you hunt your deer?”

  Miss Binks smiled. “Oh, I don’t hunt them. I merely acquire them. Deer get hit by cars, poor things, or wounded by hunters who are too inept, too lazy, or too drunk to track them down. I don’t find many, of course, but then I don’t need many. I sun-dry or smoke the meat and it lasts me for months, mostly in soups and stews. My preference would be to subsist on a purely vegetarian diet, but anybody living this kind of life does need some fat and protein. Luckily I prepared a pot-au-feu this morning so I shouldn’t have to cook tonight. We’ll heat it up as soon as the fire dies down a bit. No use setting a pot on until we have a decent bed of coals. I hope you like pokeweed? It’s quite safe to eat, you know, as long as you pick the sprouts young, which I am always careful to do.”

  “Extremely wise of you,” said Peter. He wondered if there was any pokeweed in Miss Binks’s applejack, or slivovitz as the case might be. “Would it be rude of me to inquire what prompted you to adopt this—er—alternative life-style?”

  “Not at all. I did it because I prefer a life of solitude and contemplation, because I was too flat broke to live any other way unless I went on welfare or found some kind of job, both of which I scorned to do, and because it’s a way of claiming my inheritance. I expect you’ve heard about the bizarre thing that happened to my grandfather, the newspapers were full of it ten years ago. I may as well tell you I am confident my grandfather is dead. In my opinion, the poor old egg was absolutely cracked and that so-called scientist who talked him into the experiment was no more nor less than a murderer. The man’s dead himself now, of course, so I expect you’re thinking I shouldn’t speak so harshly. He was found inside a refrigerator over in Lumpkinton, as you may recall, shot full of bullet holes.”<
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  “I remember our own Chief Ottermole mentioned the case,” said Peter. “I didn’t realize that was the man who froze your grandfather. Chief Olson called it a suicide, didn’t he?”

  Miss Binks sniffed a particularly haughty sniff. “I have always assumed it was Chief Olson’s wife who did the deciding. She’d been a Binks herself, though hardly a close enough relation to justify all the airs she used to put on until Grandfather made such a laughingstock of the family name. I can see why she made her husband hush the case up before the newspapers made the connection, though I did think at the time she was rather overstepping her position. I myself am the only Binks left in the direct line.”

  “Then you—er—had expectations?”

  “Great expectations, Professor. Grandfather himself had led me to believe so, before he got involved with Star Wars-style cryonics. As it stands now, the will can’t be probated until he’s declared legally dead. I found out the expensive way. Court costs today don’t come any cheaper than they used to. I should have remembered my Dickens and Trollope.”

  She shook herself all over, like a dog coming out of the water. “Well, what’s done can’t be helped. I got myself into a mess and have been trying ever since to make my way out. My first thought was to squat in Grandfather’s house, but somebody burned it down before I could move in. Just as well perhaps. I’d have been caught and evicted, or put in jail, and my dear second cousin once removed would have had another scandal to hush up. Anyway, that’s why you find me underground. Or overhead, as the case may be. I’ve often spent warm summer nights in my aerie, though I expect I shan’t be doing that any more once your pursuers discover it. Assuming they do, of course.” She didn’t sound any too hopeful that they wouldn’t, and Peter could offer no encouragement.

  “It’s dollars to doughnuts they will, I’m afraid. We did get mired in a bog for a while not too long before we found your tree. That might put the dogs off the scent, but I expect we left fairly obvious wallowing tracks. I’m sorry, Miss Binks.”