An Angel in Stone

by Peggy Nicholson

  He claimed White Dog was back. Said he’d seen the chief, over by the edge of the trees. Standing there with one hand on his son’s shoulder, just looking at us. Me and Jonesy figured it was nothing but nerves and shadows.

  All the same, Szabo had been wary enough to post a guard inside the mouth of the cave that night. Jones had taken the first watch while the others slept. When a rock rattled down the cliff, then another…“The damn fool grabbed his gun and ran outside, I guess to see what was going on.”

  He was instantly buried, as tons of rock came crashing and rumbling down the cliff face.

  Once the dust had settled, the two survivors stared at each other in horror. They’d always kept a fire burning in the cave, for fear of its smothering darkness. Now the flames showed them a wall of rubble, blocking the entrance. The only exit.

  “Those fucking heathen!” Szabo had written in a staggering hand. “They fixed us but good! When I dig my way out of here…”

  So he’d reached the twin peaks—and now what? If the original map in the watch had shown an X to mark the spot where he’d find the treasure, then Lia had snatched it away too quickly. Cade had missed that crucial detail.

  You could hide a thousand T. rexes up there, he estimated grimly. The mountain massif must be twenty miles or more around its base. Its lower terraces were covered in head-high thickets that would cloak any fossil. Outcrops of pale, crumbling limestone jutted up from the bushes, like a giant child’s tumbled blocks. Higher up reared the weathered cliffs, with their feet buried in slopes of shattered scree.

  All Cade could think to do was start climbing. A well-defined trail wound up the right-hand peak, spiraling gradually around the ragged cone. He followed it cautiously, squeezing between clefts in the rock, edging his way along narrow ledges. Stopping often to listen. The cracker might be somewhere ahead, or he could be days behind.

  Or he’d fallen prey to any number of woes in the jungle.

  And, you, Raine? Cade wondered, as he stopped on a bare ledge, about a thousand feet above the treetops. Are you somewhere out there? Headed this way? His blood quickened with the image.

  He couldn’t imagine she’d turned back. Turned tail. She was coming. So bring it on! Come help me find this thing, then I’ll wrestle you for who gets to take it home. He could hear the blood striding in his ears, an eagle shrieking on the winds above. Somewhere a rock rattled down through the scree. He turned and kept climbing.

  Maybe she’d set the tone for the day, with her conniptions at dawn. The Punan had been skittish all morning. They’d slept late, then dawdled in camp, showing no inclination to leave. Finally Raine had shouldered her pack, and asked White Dog to point the way toward the twin peaks. When he’d done so, she’d set off in that direction.

  Minutes later the men had bustled up the trail, to pass her and take the lead. After that, they’d made good time, padding along in their tireless, splayfooted walk.

  But Raine felt like running. Cade, where are you? He might be days behind her—or days ahead. No way would she ever forgive him, if he beat her to the dino. Still, she’d have felt happier if she’d known he was…Not eaten by a T. rex? she scoffed, recalling her dream.

  If she wanted to worry, she should worry about Szabo. Mr. Smirky could be the grandson of any one of the original dino finders, Raine supposed, kin to Carleton or Jones or even Peckham. But given his blithe way with tossing women out of windows? He’s gotta be a Szabo. He’s got those same carefree genes.

  If that one was someplace up ahead…She reached over her shoulder to fondle her blowpipe—and bumped into the man she followed. “Oof! Sorry.” He caught her arm when she tried to step around him. “What’s up?”

  Ahead on the trail, White Dog and the other hunter teetered frantically on tiptoe, as if they’d come out at the edge of a mile-high cliff. Raine edged up to peer past them—the headman swept out his arm to block her way. With an urgent word, he pointed at the trail.

  Where a red caterpillar, about the length of her little finger, paraded deliberately across their path from right to left.

  “Well, for pity’s sake! Does he jump? We can’t just step over the sucker?”

  No, no, no, no! Absolutely not! White Dog hustled her back a dozen feet to safety, where everyone regrouped and stared uneasily toward the monster.

  Who’d paused in his journey to munch on a fallen leaf. One of the hunters groaned.

  Raine blew out a breath. “Okaaay. Could we go around?” She tried to demonstrate a detour—and was instantly reprimanded.

  “No, huh?” She wanted to laugh, she wanted to tear her hair. “But I’m in a hurry here, guys.” Something kept telling her, she needed to move, run, fly toward the mountain. Time was running out. “You’re sure this isn’t just some silly superstition?” she coaxed. “I mean, I’m the first person to toss salt over my shoulder when I spill it. And I try not to stroll under ladders. But when there’s no other way around and it’s an emergency…”

  Their grim faces didn’t relax. That caterpillar was a drop-dead nonnegotiable.

  “Right,” she muttered, clenching her teeth. Half of her ached to elbow White Dog aside. To heck with this voodoo nonsense. She’d go on alone.

  The other half of her was John Ashaway’s daughter. She’d been taught since her first field trip to respect local knowledge. “The people who live here are the experts. You wouldn’t try to tell a New Yorker that it’s okay to jog naked in Central Park after midnight, would you?” she remembered him snorting to an intern on one early trip. “So whatever they tell you, even if it doesn’t seem to make any sense—listen up!”

  “Okay. Then how ’bout a lunch break?” she suggested. People tended to be more flexible on full stomachs than empty.

  They brightened immediately when she unslung her pack to pull out her bag of trail mix, the only provision she’d brought that they found remotely edible. Crouching in the path, they shared that around, along with the ripening jerky. White Dog went to check on the caterpillar—and came back looking grim.

  Raine stifled a moan. “So what’s the plan? Are we going to just sit here till Mr. Wiggles spins his cocoon and changes himself to a cabbage moth?”

  White Dog said something stern but soothing, that sounded like, “Well, of course. If necessary.” And hunkered down again.

  If she didn’t find a way to distract herself, she’d snap! Start screaming and stamping her feet—all over their fuzzy roadblock. Raine pulled out Szabo’s notebook and dived into its last few pages, reading them aloud:

  “‘When I dig my way out of here…’” There was a gap of several lines after that blustering threat. When the writing continued, it was sloppier. Larger, as if Szabo could barely see to write.

  “Morning was about ten years in coming, but when it came, well, Carleton started crying again, and me, I got religion. The natives did their usual half-assed job. There’s a gap at the top of the landslide. You can see a patch of daylight showing. Room enough to squeeze through, if the rest of the pile don’t collapse.”

  Weeping with relief, Carleton had lunged for it, and Szabo had slapped him back to his senses. “If I was trying to bury a man, I wouldn’t just drop some rocks on him and stroll away,” he’d observed.

  “I’d stick around. Make sure nobody crawled out from under. I said if there was one thing we knew about the Punan, they might be lazy, but they were patient as cats at a rat hole. They could be just squatting out there, back in the trees, with their blowguns loaded.”

  He’d told the younger man that they should play possum.

  “Put the fire out so they don’t smell any smoke. Then lie low for a day or two or maybe a week. Let ’em be satisfied we’re dead and done for. We have water, so that’s no problem.”

  The spring that fed the pool outside started deep within the mountain. Instead of drowning the cave, it seemed to have found a way to seep past the fallen boulders.

  “So our only problem is rations, which were getting low before this SNAFU. And
what we’ve got, we’ll need for hiking to the coast, once we get out of here. I’d figured we’d shoot game as we go, but now we’re down to one gun and nineteen bullets.”

  “Oh, boy,” Raine murmured. She could see where this logic was leading.

  “And Carleton’s still limping. Dumbass broke some toes when he was digging. Once we get out of here, he ain’t gonna be able to move fast. And with those heathen sniffing down our trail, moving slow’s as good as dead.”

  So Szabo had helped the boy on his way. “He didn’t suffer none. I did it while he was sleeping.” And then there was only one, to eat those dwindling rations.

  But if he was stunningly short on conscience, he had plenty of nerve. Szabo toughed it out in the damp semidarkness for another three days, with nothing but his journal for company.

  He managed to work one tooth loose from the dinosaur’s jaws. “Might as well take something to show what all the fuss was about,” he noted wryly. “And if the whole dang skull’s worth a million, what’s a fire opal fang worth?”

  He’d cleaned his gun, packed his gear, then waited till half an hour, he estimated, before sundown. Enough light to find his way through the gap, but with darkness soon coming, in case they were waiting for him and he needed to hide. “So if this is the last thing I ever write and only the palm rats are gonna read it, what should I say?” he asked himself. “When they warn you about a bad angel in the stones, then…”

  The rest of the sentence had been scratched out.

  “That’s…” Raine squinted at it, shook her head. Flipped the last few pages and found nothing more. “That’s the last thing he wrote.”

  The Punan wiped the tears from their faces, and gave her brave, satisfied smiles. White Dog grunted and heaved himself to his feet and went to check on their problem and let out a happy yell.

  When they crowded up beside him, there was the caterpillar. Or maybe this was a different but similar caterpillar—trundling left to right across their path.

  Apparently that made all the difference. Though Raine did notice that when each Punan came to the fatal spot, he leaped high over the critter, like a goosed jackrabbit.

  “When in Rome,” she murmured—and did the same.

  Chapter 27

  A few hours before dark, Cade reached the bald summit. Turning in place, he found nothing but a view of infinite treetops, like the tops of clouds seen from a plane. Out at the edges of the rumpled green horizon, thunderheads towered, purple and gold with the setting sun.

  Not a soul in sight anywhere. Not a mark on this desolate world that would prove he lived in an age of men, not dinosaurs. If a pterodactyl had soared past this peak, Cade wouldn’t have been surprised. This feeling grinding in the pit of his stomach was…what? Homesickness?

  Except where was home these days? He’d had plenty of mailing addresses, but nothing like a home, for years and years. Not since his grandfather’s ranch was lost.

  And that’s why you’re here, he reminded himself. To take anything the Ashaways want. Everything they need.

  But he felt no satisfaction, picturing Raine’s defeat. He’d rather see her laughing, the way she’d laughed when he spun her around in the river till they’d toppled, dizzy with wanting. And nothing in the way of their having.

  I want that again. This wasn’t homesickness. He was missing her, dammit. Witch. She-devil. In a world full of willing beauties, how could he have been so feckless—to fall for the woman he’d meant to destroy?

  “This is nothing but empty-stomach blues,” he said aloud. He needed food, a place to camp before dark-fall. Get moving.

  He followed the same route descending till he came to a fork. A faint path led off through a split in the rock, so he took that way down. In the last of the light, winded and footsore, he arrived at the broad bench that connected the two peaks.

  And was he in luck! He found trees tall enough to support his hammock, growing near a pool of clear water.

  “What now?” Raine wondered, when her guides huddled on the trail in front of her. “You’re not stopping for the night, are you?” All afternoon, shivers of dread had been rippling down her spine. Maybe the air pressure was falling, a big storm looming up behind?

  The men crowded around a message stick, planted at a fork in the trail. Muttering and scowling, they turned from the stick’s fronds and notches to the surrounding jungle. Their dark eyes showed rings of wary white. Rising up on the balls of their feet, they touched the parangs hanging at their sides, while the white dog bristled and whined.

  “What is it?” Raine asked in an undertone.

  Holding her gaze, the headman slashed his forefinger savagely across his throat. Then held it up between them.

  “A headhunter? One man?” Echoing “one” with her own raised finger, she grimaced to show she realized this was serious.

  He nodded a vigorous “yes,” then gestured widely at the forest.

  “Beware of one headhunter, somewhere nearby?” But did the stick literally signify a headhunter—a Dayak, since the Punan didn’t take heads? Or had the word generalized to mean “a dangerous man”? Possibly a killer?

  “Szabo?” she wondered aloud. Kincade had mixed easily and amiably with the islanders, she’d noticed. It was doubtful he’d have frightened or threatened anyone he encountered. But Szabo, on the other hand, spreading joy and good times wherever he went…

  “And who left us this message?” But just because she’d seen nobody, didn’t mean the woods were deserted. The Punan let you see them if and only if they chose.

  Meanwhile, her friends were arguing. One hunter wanted to turn back the way they’d come. The second had drawn his parang and was jabbing it toward the right-hand fork—proposing they go hunt the headhunter? But that would mean a turn to the southwest, back toward the butterfly lake, when they’d been walking eastward for the past two days.

  White Dog gestured to the other fork that continued east, but clearly his heart wasn’t in it.

  Raine knelt in the middle of the eastward path—raked up dirt to make a crude, double-coned symbol. She tapped herself on the chest, then walked two fingers toward the peaks. “I’ve got to go there.” She tapped herself on the chest again, pointed down the eastern fork, gave White Dog a look of pleading and inquiry. “If I keep following this trail, will it take me there?”

  His troubled expression said, yes, but…

  Meanwhile the hunter who’d wanted to go home, had changed his mind. He’d joined the tough guy, and now both stood a few feet down the southwest fork, shuffling from foot to foot, urging Raine and White Dog to join them.

  Raine paced five feet to the east, then turned around. The Punan decided issues by reaching a consensus. It wasn’t a matter of majority rule as in the West, one side outvoting the other. Here everybody must agree, even if it took days to convert and convince the other side. “But, guys, I haven’t got days. So I hate to be rude, but you’re either with me, or I’m outa here.”

  White Dog made a mournful face, and drifted a few steps backward toward his friends. “Ren-Bungan?” he pleaded, beckoning her to follow.

  “I can’t. I wish I could, but I can’t. Oh, please don’t be sad.” Unslinging her pack, she pulled out the gift she’d meant to give him for farewell. A bright red, multipurpose Swiss army knife. “You’re the guy who saved my life. I won’t forget you.” She showed him how its blades opened and closed, the miniature tweezers slipped out and slipped in. “Lord knows what you’ll do with the bottle opener, but you’ll think of something.” His tears dried to a dazzling smile. She touched the knife to her heart, to her lips, then put it in his broad, brown palm. “Take care of yourself, okay?”

  Raine turned and walked east, a bit tearful herself—then glanced back for one last wave goodbye.

  Not a leaf waved, not a twig stirred. The Punan had faded into the forest.

  Something woke Cade just before dawn. He lay listening, but if it had been a sound that aroused him, it didn’t come again. He wriggled i
nto his worn and sweaty clothes, checked his boots for surprises, pulled them on and slipped out of the hammock. He walked down to the pool. Stood, gazing up at the peaks, dark against a brightening sky.

  “And if I don’t find the dino today?” he wondered aloud. To have come all this way for nothing? Talk about a snipe hunt!

  Something stirred at the edge of his vision, and he swung toward the left-hand peak. This side of it had sheared off in a ragged cliff. A pile of scree sloped from near the top of the cliff into the pool, marking the site of some long-ago rockslide. At the top of this heap of rubble, a cloud of smoke swirled and billowed. He squinted, staring.

  The smoke sucked inward, eddied…blew outward and dispersed. “Bees!” he realized. Flying out at dawn. There must be an entrance to a cave up there, a big cave, to hold such a swarm.

  Cade rubbed the bristles on his jaw and considered. Fossils were most often found where the land was breached by erosion or by digging. You needed to look below the skin of the Earth, search a cross section of sediments, the layered millennia. A cavern, cutting down through the mountain strata would give you that. He grimaced. He wasn’t fond of tight places.

  Maybe he’d explore the left-hand peak first.

  By noon, a tropic sun hammered down on the sparsely shaded peaks. The pale limestone bounced back the heat in shimmering waves, a white glare to stab the eyes and stun the brain. Cade’s explorations of the outer slopes had proved a fruitless endeavor; he was thinking more kindly now about cool, damp, shady spaces, no matter how claustrophobic. He fished his flashlight from his pack, which he’d hidden at his camp near the pond, then he started up the scree.