Primal Threat

by Earl Emerson

  “I guess you did.”

  Moments later a small woman who dressed like a man trotted in, stood close to the local, and ordered the same brand of beer the man was drinking, all without making eye contact with anybody. Her short-cropped hair looked as if she cut it herself without a mirror. When her beer showed up, she gulped a couple of swigs and stared dully at the countertop.

  “To tell you the truth,” said Kasey, “we’re up here looking for some friends. We were supposed to hook up in North Bend, but somehow we got our wires crossed. You wouldn’t happen to know about the mountain biking trails around here, would you?”

  “Did you ask at the bike shop?”

  “We tried there. We tried all the gas stations, too.”

  “Are you talkin’ about an overnight trip?”

  “Yeah, that’s right,” said Chuck, stepping forward eagerly. Scooter wished he hadn’t done that. Both Finnigans were huge, and they were intimidating this geezer, who just might know something. “We’re looking for a group of guys riding mountain bikes up into the hills.”

  “Why you lookin’ for these fellers?”

  “They’re friends of ours,” said Fred.

  “Two hours ago I carried all their camping gear up in them hills. Base of the falls at Panther Creek. ’Course, it’s not really a creek this time of year. Barely enough runoff to keep it going.”

  “Is that where you got the fifty?” Kasey asked.

  “They paid me fifty dollars to take their gear up, and fifty more to haul it all down Sunday morning. So far, it’s about the easiest fifty bucks I ever made.”

  “You got fifty dollars?” asked the local woman.

  “I was going to tell you about it.”

  “When?”

  “I was going to tell you.”

  “I suppose you want another fifty to tell us where they are?” Kasey asked.

  “I was thinking more like a hundred.” He pronounced it hunnerd.

  Scooter looked at the others. After two and a half hours of wandering around this stinking hamlet, it had just become all too easy. But then, Scooter’s entire life had been too easy. He’d had one stroke of unstinting good luck after another.

  They paid the man and watched him draw a map on the back of an envelope, sketching with a leaky pen he’d picked up in a doctor’s office. They gulped down their beers and were on their way out the front door of the tavern when the man hollered after them. “You realize you boys just wasted a hundred bucks.”

  “What do you mean?” Kasey asked, holding his arm in front of Chuck’s burly chest to keep him from rampaging back into the tavern.

  “There was a fire danger alert posted this afternoon. You boys’ll never get past the guard.”

  “How’d you get in?” Chuck Finnigan asked.

  “I went in the main county road before the guard was posted.”

  “How are you going to get their stuff on Sunday?” Fred asked.

  “I ain’t figured that out yet.”

  “So we can’t get into those backwoods?” Scooter asked.

  “Not any way I know of.”

  “Thanks,” said Kasey.

  “Maybe you should give that money back,” said Fred, who was now even more steamed than his brother. Chuck took hold of his thick arm and pulled him out the doorway. “It’s like selling a car you know doesn’t run,” Fred said, once they were on the sidewalk. “That fucker.”

  “How much did it cost you?” Scooter asked. “That’s what I thought. Let it go.”

  “I know these cyclists,” said Kasey. “They’ll get in there somehow. And so will we.”

  “The area they’re heading into is the size of some states,” said Scooter. “There must be dozens of entrances.”

  “I’m not so sure about this,” said Roger Bloomquist. “Maybe we should forget it.”

  “Forget it?” said Scooter. “You get up there in the mountains with us sitting around the campfire telling ghost stories and singing ‘If I Had a Hammer’ and ‘So Happy to Be a Webelo,’ you’ll be glad you came.”

  On the sidewalk in front of the Sure Shot, it was agreed they would retrieve their vehicles and meet on Ballarat, the road that if followed far enough through its various incarnations led north into the foothills. Scooter had to admit that the closer they got to the mountain, the more impressive it looked. Even though he’d lived his whole life in the Seattle area and driven to Snoqualmie Pass dozens of times every winter to snowboard, he’d never been this close to Mount Si except for once as a child, when Vivian and Harry had taken him and his sister hiking up it. He’d gone maybe a mile when he made them all turn back. Even as a nine-year-old, no way was he going to do anything he didn’t want, and he certainly didn’t want to hike for five or six hours. Harry had blown his stack, but Vivian defended Scooter the way she always did, and then a few years later Harry was history like all the others.

  They drove through a narrow valley, houses in the trees off to their right, then after a mile or so headed up a short but very steep hill. First in line was Kasey’s Cayenne. Next came Roger in his Land Rover and Ryan in his Jeep. Then Chuck’s Ford truck, outfitted for the backcountry, the body of the truck jacked up so high that Chuck had been lifting Jennifer in and out of the cab all day. His dog Dozer and most of their gear were in the bed.

  Just at the point where the pavement gave way to a steep gravel road, they found their pathway barred by a steel gate, beside the gate a potbellied security guard in glasses, a cap, and a dark green uniform with sweat stains under the armpits and around the belt line. On the hood of his dust-covered vehicle sat a large jug and a cup.

  “There’s no way this is going to work,” Kasey said to Scooter as they slowed.

  “Bet you a hundred bucks.”

  “You’re on.”

  “You boys are going to have to turn around!” The security guard wasn’t much older than they were, midtwenties, full of fake bravado, swaggering over to the passenger’s window Scooter had rolled down. “These woods are closed until further notice. We’re not allowing any parties up in there.”

  “I appreciate that, sir,” Scooter said. “But we’ve got a friend up there.”

  “When he comes on down, I’ll tell him you were looking for him. Or you’re welcome to wait.”

  “You don’t understand. My friend’s Bronco is broken down.” Scooter had deliberately chosen his imaginary vehicle to match the security guard’s. “He and his girlfriend have been waiting for hours. He’s sick.”

  “It’s only three or four miles up the road,” Kasey said, leaning over and smiling at the guard. “We’ve been talking to him all the way from Bellevue. He busted his crankcase on a rock. He’s maybe three miles in. I don’t think he has anything to drink.”

  “We’ve gotta get him out,” said Scooter.

  “He really is sick,” Kasey added.

  Scooter could tell from the guard’s face that whoever had hired him had not prepared him for this contingency. “Here. I can get him on the phone.”

  “I can’t really—”

  “Here,” Scooter said, pushing the buttons on his cell phone. “Jack? Are you there? Jack? Jenny? Where’s Jack? What?” Scooter glanced across at the guard as he spoke. “I’m afraid I’ve got bad news. You’re going to have to walk out…I can’t help it. There’s a guard here who won’t let us in. Well…I’ll let you talk to him.”

  Scooter could hear Jennifer’s voice over the cell phone pleading, explaining that her boyfriend had diabetes and was beginning to lose consciousness—that they had no water and had been stranded for hours and she thought her boyfriend was going to die. If he didn’t let her friends in, the guard was headed for a huge lawsuit. Couldn’t he please let her friends come get them? They would be in and out in ten minutes.

  Wordlessly, the guard handed the phone back to Scooter, then walked over to the steel gate and swung it out of their way. Kasey fired up the Porsche SUV, and the four trucks wended their way up the washboard hill. A minute later Scooter�
��s cell rang. “Did I do good or what?” Jennifer asked.

  “Oscar time, Jenn.” Scooter could hear the two brothers, Fred and Chuck, laughing in the background. Soon all four vehicles were racing along the deserted county road.

  Scooter clapped his phone shut and said, “That was beautiful.”

  “Hang on. They’re right up here.”

  “The cyclists? Already?”

  “There’s a bunch of ’em. I thought there were just going to be two.”

  “Nadine said eight or something like that.”

  “I see five. Hang on. We’ll smother those fuckers in dust.”

  “Yee haw!” Scooter shrieked as they hit a pothole that jarred his teeth. “Look at that cloud. These bastards are going to be brushing grit out of their teeth for weeks.”

  “I hope it’s the right group.”

  After they passed the cyclists, Scooter added, “It was them. I saw him. Jesus, I think Fred and those guys are going to run them over. It’s dustier than hell back there. I don’t know how they can miss. I think we cut it a little too close.”

  “Did he see you? That’s what matters.”

  “He was too busy spitting dust.”

  A few moments later the walkie-talkie squawked. “Jesus. Can you guys slow down? We can’t see a thing back here. We’re going to go off a cliff or something.”

  It was Roger Bloomquist in the Land Rover. “Just don’t hit any cyclists,” Scooter said. “I don’t want to have to crawl under somebody’s truck to pick a bunch of Lycra out of the undercarriage.” He laughed at his joke.

  5

  “What was wrong with those assholes?” Muldaur asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Stephens. “Maybe they didn’t see us.”

  “They could hardly have missed us,” said Muldaur. “I can’t believe how close they came to killing us. It was like they didn’t care if they did or not.”

  “My guess is they’ve already started drinking,” said Giancarlo.

  “Let’s not get too excited about something that, uh, ended up being rather inconsequential,” said Stephens. Zak had to admire that quality of reasonableness, even though he was as pissed off as Muldaur. Clearly, the yahoos in the trucks had been out to do damage; had the cyclists not ducked off the main road when they did, he was reasonably certain one or more of them would be on their way to the emergency room right now.

  Stephens led them down to the rugged North Fork of the Snoqualmie, which now in late August was just a shadow of its normal self, and then along some overgrown logging roads Weyerhaeuser workmen had once used to haul logs out of the area. Somewhere on the county road to the west they could hear the caravan of vehicles racing back down the road. “Who the hell let them past the gate?” Muldaur asked.

  “I wonder if they even knew we were there,” said Zak.

  “The first car did.” Muldaur turned to him. “I saw the passenger laughing.”

  “They were laughing at us?”

  “One of them was.”

  Eventually they made their way down a slight incline to where the road crossed the Snoqualmie River on a concrete bridge. Because they’d detoured into the woods, they’d bypassed a good part of the county road, as well as what Stephens called the Spur Ten gate, which he assured them would be locked and would effectively bar the Jeeps from following them.

  Once they attained the bridge, they stopped to take in the panorama. Zak could see a quarter mile to the north and a bit more to the south. The water was slow and swirling with eddies and currents and moss-covered rocks exposed by the summer waterline. He could have watched the river all afternoon. The bridge had no railings, and Zak couldn’t help thinking how easy it would be for a car to drive off it. They stared at the hypnotic currents, at the silvers, greens, and lazy blue colors farther downstream. A kingfisher sat on a branch thirty yards away, and Zak spotted a deer standing in the water downriver. The air was cooler here and refreshing.

  “Is there snowmelt at this time of year?” Zak asked.

  “Oh, no, well, you know…that all ended months ago,” said Stephens. “Most of this water’s coming from up in the high lakes. When there’s snowmelt, it’s all sea green and milky from…well, not clear like this.”

  Zak looked up at the close mountains above them in wonderment that they would conquer these slopes in ways that hadn’t been possible when their pioneer ancestors traversed them. Stephens pointed deep into the woods where there were occasional cedar stumps eight or twelve feet across, remnants of the titans that had been logged eighty years back and that dwarfed anything they would see in the tree farms.

  “Can you imagine how dark this forest was at one time?” Giancarlo said. “We’ll never see that kind of majesty again. Not unless nature finds a way to eliminate us. Oh, my God, this is beautiful. This view is worth the trip.”

  “I’ve been here many times,” said Morse, “but it never fails to amaze me.”

  Stephens had located their first night’s camp on a rare flat spot hidden from the road, near an anorexic-looking waterfall that formed a small pool before disappearing over the side of the mountain. It was the terminus of Panther Creek, because from here it ran directly into the North Fork below. They’d been pedaling up the mountain on steep switchbacks, traversing the Z-scar patterns they’d spotted from the valley floor. The roads were impossibly sheer in some places—so sheer that even with twenty-seven speeds, Giancarlo was wishing for lower gears. “Couldn’t ride a lower gear,” said Muldaur. “You wouldn’t be going fast enough to stay upright. You’d fall over.”

  Morse, who was gasping, said, “Maybe we should have brought ice axes.”

  “Or parachutes.”

  The camping spot at Panther Creek was one of the few places they’d seen where they could pedal off the road—everything else had been hemmed in by sheer rock faces, stands of trees, or drop-offs. Most of the area was closed in by maturing Douglas fir planted after this section of the mountain had been logged off twenty or thirty years before. The clearing was in a small cul-de-sac that had once acted as a dumping area for logging operations, old roots and broken limbs in a giant heap, on top of which sat a red-shafted flicker canting his head back and forth curiously. As soon as he hit the flat part of the road, Morse got off his bike and leaned over to catch his breath, while the other four pedaled around slowly to flush some of the lactic acid from their legs. Morse was definitely going to be their weak link, Zak thought.

  After they located their gear, Zak climbed onto a stump, where he found an expansive view of the valley and the road they’d just climbed. The stump, an ancient cedar, was nine feet across and had stubby trees and brush growing out of it. According to Stephens, they were about a third of the way up the first of several mountains they would scale.

  Except for the barely discernible outlines of the tallest buildings in Bellevue and Seattle thirty miles away and a single puffy white contrail high over Puget Sound, there were no traces of civilization beyond the remains of the logging operations behind them.

  In August the pitiful waterfall was all that remained of Panther Creek, but it would provide fresh water and a cold shower. Morse, who’d overheated badly on the climb, stepped under the waterfall in his cycling clothes, taking off only his shoes. Giancarlo followed, grinning until his dimples showed. “That is really cold.”

  “Feels good,” said Morse. “But it’s giving me a headache.” He peeled his wet and now heavy clothing off and stood nude.

  The original plan had been to explore some of the rolling terrain on the valley floor for a couple of hours before making camp, but after the Jeeps passed them they didn’t want to remain on the valley floor.

  Zak and Muldaur, after ascertaining that their gear had been cached properly, pedaled back to the road and continued climbing, anxious to log more miles. The other three, knowing there would be impromptu climbing contests in the coming days and having had a difficult time already following Zak and Muldaur up the first switchback slopes, seemed content to lollyg
ag back at the waterfall and let the two wear themselves out.

  After climbing for another hour, Zak and Muldaur stopped at a narrow perch on one of the upper road systems. As soon as they quit pedaling, the draft they’d been creating for themselves ceased, and they were both immediately painted in sweat. The afternoon sun stood fairly high in the western sky, and as they walked out to a small landing away from the side of the mountain, a breeze kicked up. They couldn’t see the camping spot below, but they could see just about everything else, including the last half mile of road they’d pedaled up. “I wonder what our elevation is,” Zak said.

  “We passed Lake Hancock twenty-five minutes ago. It’s at twenty-two hundred, and I’m guessing we climbed at least another thousand feet. Probably closer to two.”

  They could see a carpet of low, rolling hills stretching out thirty miles to Lake Washington, which they glimpsed just a sliver of, and then beyond the water Seattle, Puget Sound, and the Olympic Mountains. Seattle sat in a basin between the Olympic and Cascade Ranges, so it was more or less shielded from storms off the Pacific. The basin also subjected the area to periods of air stagnation, one of which they were going through now—the sky over Seattle was brown and purple.

  They were situated on the side of a mountain—or technically a foothill—and the valley floor below looked just as it had several million years ago when the last glaciers moved through and scraped the earth raw, except now it was carpeted in Douglas fir and the large scabby patches that had been clear-cut. They could see the Snoqualmie River at the base of the mountain and several small lakes dotting the landscape, a couple of which they’d passed on their way in but hadn’t actually seen until now.

  Zak noted his heart rate monitor, which had been registering in the high 160s while they were climbing, now registered 52. If his heart hadn’t been working to cool his body, the rate would have been even lower. He was in the best condition he’d been in all year.

  “What’s that?” Muldaur asked.

  “What?”