The Seventh Taking: A Mountain Mystery

by BJ Bourg

  I gripped my spear and pointed it toward where I heard the noise. The rattling of rocks moved even closer. When it reached the opening to the cave, it stopped. I could hear heavy breathing. My heart raced.

  “We’ve got to do something, Abe.”

  “Do you have the bow?”

  “No.”

  “Grab some rocks,” I whispered, trying to sound sure of myself. “On three, yell as loud as you can and throw the rocks toward that breathing sound.”

  “Okay,” Charlie said.

  I rested the spear on my knees, where I could easily retrieve it, and then felt around for some rocks. I dragged half a dozen softball-sized rocks next to me, held two of them in my left hand and clutched one in my right hand. I began counting slowly and quietly, “One…two…three!”

  I screamed bloody murder and chunked the rock as hard as I could toward the opening of the cave. I heard a muffled thump as my rock hit something soft. There was a startled animalistic grunt and a violent rustling of loose rocks. It was a bear!

  Charlie screamed like a banshee beside me—scaring me half to death—and I heard another thump as his rock hit the mark. As fast as my hands could move, I launched my other two rocks toward the cave opening, yelling like a man possessed. The grunting wails of a startled animal grew fainter as it rushed off. I whooped and hollered, jumping up and down with confidence.

  “We did it,” Charlie said. “It worked!”

  I couldn’t see Charlie, but I could hear him jumping around, and I imagined he was doing a victory dance in the dark.

  “What about that scream?” I asked, after I had settled down and my heart had slowed to a normal beat. “You sounded like a little girl who walked into a room full of cockroaches.”

  “What happens in the cave stays in the cave,” Charlie said.

  I laughed. “If it takes you getting in touch with your feminine side to scare off bears, knock yourself out. I’ll proudly call you Charlene, my best female friend.”

  “Watch it, pal.”

  Snatching my spear from the ground, I picked my way carefully through the cave until I was standing in the open air. To my surprise, things were brighter than inside the cave. The moon shone off the water and cast an eerie glow along the riverbanks. I was able to make out the light tones of the surrounding rocks against the shadowy background of the trees.

  “Hey, there’s moonlight out here,” I said.

  Charlie joined me. “It’s nice to see you again.”

  “Likewise, my fearless warrior companion.”

  Spears in hand, we scanned the area. Far off in the distance, we could hear the large animal making its escape, snapping twigs as it crashed through the underbrush.

  “That was definitely a bear,” I said.

  “Unless…”

  “Unless what?”

  “You don’t think that could’ve been Leaf Creature, do you?”

  “Nope. Not at all.” The hair on my neck stood up at the thought of being wrong and I changed the subject. “We need to find food, Charlie. If not, we’ll die.”

  “We also need fire to keep animals out of our house. If we’d both been sleeping when that bear came knocking, we could’ve wakened up dead. From now on, until we figure out how to make fire, we need to sleep in shifts.”

  “I believe you’re right. Rock, paper, scissors?”

  Charlie sighed and reentered the cave. “Okay, okay—if you insist. I’ll take first sleep while you keep us safe.”

  I started to protest, then thought better of it. I turned to face the cave. I could hear Charlie moving about inside, but I couldn’t see him or even detect a hint of movement, which made me feel a little better about Leaf Creature—he couldn’t shoot what he couldn’t see. But bears—they could sniff us out in the dark. I shuddered when I thought that a bear had been standing right where I was standing and had been watching us sleep. I knew I’d have to work harder on the fire sticks the next day. Without it, we wouldn’t be able to properly defend ourselves.

  I walked to the opening of the cave and felt around until I found a smooth rock to lean against. I sat down, stretched my legs, and placed my spear in my lap. After a minute, I quickly pulled Jezebel from her sheath and held her in my right hand. I would’ve traded her for a rifle, but the cold steel felt good in my hand and gave me some comfort. I made small talk with myself, sang as many country songs as I could remember, recited every joke I’d ever heard, counted backward from a hundred thousand…

  * * *

  My face was warm. There was an orange glow through my eyelids. I opened my eyes and glanced lazily around. It was daylight. Jezebel was on the ground next to me. My spear was still in my lap. I looked over my shoulder into the cave. Charlie was curled in a fetal position snoring. I grunted.

  Thank God that bear didn’t come back while I was sleeping. It would’ve killed us both in our sleep.

  I clambered to my feet, rubbed the sleep from my eyes, and walked to the riverbank. I longed for a toothbrush. Dropping to my knees, I sucked water into my mouth and swished it around. I spat the water into the sand beside me. I then used my finger to brush my teeth and rinsed my mouth out again. My hair and face felt greasy. I pinched my nose and submerged my whole head under the water. When the icy liquid wrapped its freezing fingers around me, I jerked my head back and gasped.

  “Whew! That was cold.” Wide awake now, I returned to the cave. Before we did anything else, we needed to figure out how to get food and we had to make a fire.

  Charlie was sitting up when I entered the cave. “Where’d you go?”

  “I washed my face in the river.” I collected my fire-making kit and walked to the edge of the cave opening and placed it on the ground.

  “Trying that again?” Charlie asked.

  “I have to.” I placed the tinder near the notch in the bark, set the foot-long in the notch and began sawing away with the bow. The muscles in my arm ached from the night before, and I didn’t know if I’d have the endurance to produce a spark. I must have sawed for ten minutes and still didn’t get so much as a puff of smoke. Sweat was now forming on my forehead. I paused to wipe my face with the short sleeve of my shirt. I glanced over at Charlie. He was sitting cross-legged on a large slab of rock, bent over, staring intently at something on the rock. He would press a finger to the rock, rub it onto his shorts, and then continue scanning the rock.

  “What’re you doing?” I asked.

  “Playing King of the Rock,” Charlie said absently.

  “Doing what?”

  “My rock is being attacked by ants. I’m trying to protect it.”

  “Maybe you could do something productive. Like getting out there and finding some food.”

  “Remember when we used to burn ants with a magnifying glass?” Charlie asked, not a bit fazed by my suggestion.

  “Yep, I do. What about finding some food, there, buddy?”

  Charlie kept smashing the defenseless ants. “I sure wish I had a magnifying glass right now.”

  I grunted and turned back to sawing. I was bent into my work and sawing like a wild man when a thought suddenly occurred to me. It was so profound I dropped the bow. I turned to Charlie. “Charlie, I’ve got it!”

  Startled, he looked up. “You made fire?” He looked at the pile of tinder that still rested on the bark. It was unmarred. “It doesn’t look like you’ve got fire, so what do you got?”

  I dashed into the cave and dragged Charlie’s rucksack into the light.

  “What’re you doing?” Charlie’s curiosity fully aroused, he abandoned his attack on the ants. “Do you think I’ve got food hidden in there? You think I’m holding out on you? What kind of friend do you think I am?”

  I ripped the bag open and dug around until I found the camera. I pressed the release button and twisted the lens off, then tossed the camera back in the bag. Charlie’s eyes widened and his mouth formed a large “O” as he suddenly understood.

  “I get it,” he said.

  “Grab more leaves
and twigs.”

  Charlie snapped into action, and I moved my fire-making kit into the sunlight. I held the lens about a foot over the ground and turned it until it captured the sunlight and shot a beam down on the bark. I adjusted the height of the lens until it focused the sunlight like a thin laser and then I guided the beam over the tinder. Within seconds, the tinder began to smoke and soon after, it burst into flames. With hands that shook, I snatched up nearby twigs and placed them on top of the tinder. The tiny flame licked hungrily at the twigs and grew in intensity. Warm air rose from the flames and caressed my face. I leapt into the air like I’d done when I’d scored my first knockout in the ring.

  “We’ve got fire!”

  Charlie approached at a stumbling run, his arms loaded with twigs and branches. His face lit up and matched the glow from the fire. He dropped the firewood, grabbed me in a bear hug and tried to lift me off the ground. He couldn’t, so he released me and just jumped up and down and screamed, “You did it! You’re the man!”

  “No,” I said, “it was you. When you started talking about the magnifying glass, it got me thinking. You’re the man.”

  As the fire grew stronger, Charlie and I continued fueling it. We scrambled up and down the mountainside around the cave and deposited armload after armload of branches just inside the cave, where they would be safe from any rain that might come. There were a number of trees that had fallen sometime in the distant past. With swift kicks, I was able to snap off large branches and drag them to the cave. When we thought we had enough firewood to last several days, we sank to the rocks. Exhausted and hungry, we lay there for several minutes trying to catch our breath.

  “I need food,” Charlie said.

  We both did. While we were in no danger of starving to death just then, we needed energy to defend ourselves against any marauding animals and Leaf Creature—if it came to that. I stood. My head swam, and I swayed slightly. I shook my head to clear it, snatched up Charlie’s empty rucksack and pulled it onto my shoulders.

  “Keep the fire going,” I said and walked off.

  “Where you going?”

  I pulled Jezebel from her sheath. “I’m going kill some lunch.”

  “I’m coming.”

  I raised my hand to stop him. “Someone needs to tend the fire to make sure it doesn’t go out. If it goes out and we lose sunlight, we’re screwed.”

  Charlie looked around at the surrounding forest. “What about Leaf Creature?”

  “I’ll take my spear with me, just in case.”

  “I wasn’t talking about you.”

  “You’ve got the other spear and the bow and arrows.” I pointed to the large rocks that guarded the opening to the cave. “If that creep comes here, just stay behind those rocks. You’ll be fine. Stick a long branch in the fire in case a wild animal comes around—you can stick that flame in their face and they’ll leave you alone.”

  “Just hurry back.”

  Rotating my head like it was on a swivel, I searched my surroundings as I walked downriver. When I’d gone about a hundred yards, I came upon a section of forest that was clear of underbrush. I took a right and tromped through the thick leafy blanket that covered the forest floor. I scanned the tree branches overhead. There were plenty of birds flapping around. They would land on a branch momentarily and then fly off to another branch. They never stayed in one place long enough for me to zero in with my knife. Even if I could, I didn’t know if I should try, because if I missed, Jezebel would go sailing off into the air and I might never find her again.

  As I walked, the mountain began to angle downward and I soon found myself at the edge of a large meadow cloaked with knee-high grass. A number of trees grew in spots along the meadow and I thought I saw something hanging from the branches on one of them. I waded through the grass and nearly yelped when I reached the trees and saw dozens of fat green pears. I shrugged the rucksack off my shoulders and began filling it with the fruit.

  I paused to take a huge bite from one of them. The sweet juices flowed smoothly down my throat. When I was done with the first one, I dropped it and reached for another, but movement to my left caught my eye. I turned and froze. A huge mother bear and three cubs were walking directly toward me. They were about fifty yards away. I clutched the rucksack and began backing slowly away from the tree. The mother bear saw me and stopped, then stood on her hind legs. I continued backing away and didn’t stop until I reached the tree line. After determining I wasn’t a threat, the mother bear led her cubs to the tree, stood on her hind legs and pulled pears down for the cubs to eat. One of the cubs took a loping start, jumped onto the tree trunk and scaled effortlessly up it.

  I turned to walk away and another movement caught my eyes at the edge of the meadow. I dropped to my knees and studied the area. There was nothing. Fear paralyzed me. When we had first encountered Leaf Creature, it had been impossible to see it if it didn’t move. It had blended perfectly into the background. Is that Leaf Creature? Is this the way it ends for me?

  The movement happened again, and I sighed in relief. It was a rabbit. I quickly gauged the distance—twenty feet. Without thought, I palmed Jezebel and launched her through the air. One of the blades entered the rabbit just below the neck and killed it instantly. Keeping a wary eye on the four bears, I hurried to the rabbit, retrieved Jezebel, and snatched up the soft furry animal. It was much thicker than any rabbit I’d hunted in Louisiana. It must’ve weighed ten or fifteen pounds. I stuffed it into the rucksack and headed back to camp.

  It was the first time I’d killed anything with my throwing knife other than a snake, and I was secretly proud. I’d set out to get lunch and succeeded. I’d taken on the Great Blue Summit Mountains and won. We had fire and we had food. We could survive until the search party found us—unless Leaf Creature found us first.

  CHAPTER 13

  “Hello the camp,” I hollered when the cave came into view, copying a phrase I’d learned from reading Dad’s old Louis L’Amour westerns. Charlie had clearly been busy. He had started another smaller fire inside the cave, where the weather couldn’t get to it. He had stored a large amount of firewood deep inside the cave. He had stacked a number of stones on either side of the larger fire and positioned two long thin slabs of rock across the fire to serve as a grill. “Wow, Charlie, you’ve been busy.”

  Charlie looked up. His face fell. “You didn’t find anything for lunch? I thought you’d bring back a deer or something.”

  I dropped the heavy rucksack to the ground and snatched a pear from inside and tossed it to him. I could’ve sworn he took a bite out of it while it was still in the air.

  “God, this is good. Where’d you find it?” Pear juice dripped down Charlie’s chin, but he didn’t seem to notice.

  “In a meadow down the river and to the right. There must be a dozen pear trees out there. We should be set for a while.” I pulled out the rabbit and held it up like a trophy. “There are also some of these running around.”

  “Whoa! He’s huge,” Charlie said.

  I nodded. “Do you mind cleaning it and cooking it?”

  “Cook it? How? I don’t know how to cook a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, much less a rabbit.”

  “And I do?” I waved him off. “It can’t be that hard. Just skin it, shove a stick up its butt, and suspend it over the fire until the meat’s tender.”

  “Sounds good to me. What about you? What’re you doing?”

  “I want to cross the river and hike about a mile that way”—I pointed directly across from us—“to see if I can come upon a trail. If we find a trail, we find our way out of here.”

  Charlie frowned.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” I said. “I’ll be fine. I’ll stick to the wide open areas where no one can sneak up behind me.”

  “Okay.” Charlie pulled out the punch knife I’d given him and grabbed the rabbit by the tail. “Lunch will be done by the time you get back.”

  I grabbed my spear and shoved a pear in each of the s
ide pockets on my cargo shorts, just in case I got hungry. Taking great care not to slip on the green slime that coated most of the rocks in the river, I picked my way to the other side. The riverbank was elevated and I had to climb a short cliff to reach the forest floor. Although the trees were spread out and there was no dense underbrush, the forest was dark and shadowy. Holding my spear at the ready and scanning my surroundings, I made my way deeper into the woodlands. I tried to avoid making too much noise, but it was hard to walk stealthily in the dried leaves that covered the ground.

  Every now and then, I heard rustling in the leaves and I would freeze. I couldn’t always detect the origin of the sounds, but I caught a glimpse of a number of squirrels scurrying through the dry leaves. I’d never eaten squirrel, but if I got a bead on one, it would end up on the stick. I saw about a dozen deer through the trees, but I couldn’t get close to them. Even if I could, I was afraid Jezebel might not kill them and they would run off with her.

  I paced off what I thought was a mile-and-a-half, but I never came upon anything resembling a trail and the terrain never changed, so I turned and headed back toward camp.

  As I walked, I had an eerie feeling I was being watched. I looked over my shoulder often, trying to penetrate the depths of the shadows, searching for Leaf Creature or anything else that would explain my apprehension—I was praying it was “anything else.” Just to be safe, I quickened my step and was able to make much better time on the return trip. I was relieved when the smell of freshly roasted meat greeted my nostrils and the river’s whitecaps came into view through the trees. I hurried along the last stretch of the forest—glad to be out of the darkness—and slid down the small cliff. I splashed back across the river, and Charlie was pulling the rabbit from the stick when I reached the camp.

  “It smells good, Chef Rickman.”

  Charlie looked up from where he was slicing the meat off the bones. “I couldn’t find any salt in your bag, so I just sweated all over it.”

  I leaned my spear against the cave entrance and took my seat on one of the rocks. I examined the strips of rabbit meat. “It looks like chicken.”