King had also offered Carrie her job back, but she’d been reluctant to make any decisions about that until she’d exhausted every lead we had or thought we had. She was still convinced that we were the only ones who truly believed there were six little girls out there in the woods somewhere. Personally, I figured they were out there, all right, but not necessarily alive and well. I think she sensed that was how I felt, but she was determined to press on. Having left her behind once and injured twice, I felt obligated to go with her. Besides, underneath all that hard-core internal-affairs armor, she was a sweet, intelligent woman who was valuable in her own right. That was reason enough.
About three miles into Robbins County, Mose pulled over onto a dirt road and stopped. He came back to the Suburban when I pulled in behind him.
“We’ll take this dirt track for about five more miles and then we’ll come to a Forestry Service fire lane. This thing got four-wheel drive?”
I told him it did, and he said okay. “We’ll end up around four thousand feet,” he told us. “The weather’s supposed to be okay today, but there’s a cold front coming in tonight, which might produce a little snow up high. I don’t think it’ll amount to much at this time of year.”
“Where are we actually going?” Carrie asked.
“To a mountain pass. Then we’ll park and hump it the rest of the way up to a small lake with no name. We’ll camp above that tonight, and see what we see the next morning.”
“Do you think the Creighs are out there?” I asked.
“If they went to the glass hole, they could be. Nothing to say they haven’t been here and gone.”
That comment produced a sudden chill in the Suburban. If they’d left, the chances that the kids would be found alive were small and shrinking with every hour.
We reached the ridge overlooking the no-name lake at just before sundown. It hadn’t been a bad climb, other than it had been relentlessly up for two huffing and puffing hours. The scenery was spectacular in all directions, but Mose had been right about a cold front. The northwestern sky was darkening, and the wind had backed around ninety degrees as the front gathered to assault the western mountains.
I’d suggested that we spread out on the hike up to prevent concentrating a target in case the Creighs had left sentinels on their trail. Mose was unhappy with that thought, but agreed. He led the way, then Carrie, and I took up tailend Charlie with the shepherds, who ranged between Mose and me for most of the trek. We kept each other in sight but generally maintained a hundred yards or so of separation. An hour before we reached the campsite, both dogs had gone to investigate something on the edge of the fire lane. The something had turned out to be a pile of dog manure. There were some boot prints in soft ground a few feet away, headed up. This occurred twice more as we made our way up the slopes.
I told Mose but decided to wait to tell Carrie. I took it to mean that someone with dogs had come this way recently. It could have been anybody, because this area was either national park or state game land. I’d asked Mose if there was another way up to this lake, and he said sure-any direction would do. But this was the route you’d take if you’d driven a vehicle as close as you could get. One thing I knew: Grinny wasn’t up here. She couldn’t have climbed that slope in less than a year.
We made camp at the edge of a steep, rocky slope that led down to the lake itself. Mose had us set up two shelters using downed tree limbs and the living ends of pine tree branches, under which we rigged our tents and bags. He situated our camp just inside the tree line and faced the shelters into the woods, toward the east and away from the oval-shaped lake below. We’d packed enough gear and supplies for three days, in and out, with the plan being to spend tomorrow exploring the area around the lake and the so-called glass hole. If it was indeed under water, I wasn’t sure what we’d do.
We didn’t build a real fire for security reasons, using a spirit stove instead to heat our food and water for coffee. Mose warned us to set out warm clothes for the morning, as the temps were going to drop pretty fast once that front arrived. He was right about being careful not to show light, as it would have been visible for miles around. We didn’t know who else was out there, but those dog droppings indicated we were probably not alone. Men with dogs meant Creighs in my book.
I had my Remington 700P and a handgun; Carrie had her trusty nine. Mose carried a pepper-spray canister like the ones the park rangers used, as well as a little. 25-caliber boot gun. I’d brought my pocket monocular. The spotting scope had been too heavy to carry this far in-and up-with all the rest of the gear. We left our cell phones in the vehicles; up here they’d just be excess baggage. Mose showed us one useful electronic item he’d brought along.
“This gizmo here is called an EPIRB, which stands for emergency position indicating radio beacon. If we end up needing rescue, you fire this little jewel and a satellite picks up the signal. A report goes to the U.S. Air Force. They always wait for a second satellite hit, so don’t turn it off once you energize it. Then you’ll have an Air National Guard helo overhead in about two hours. Most of the guides out here carry one.”
As the sun went down, the surface of the lake was bright orange. Carrie asked why we hadn’t gone down to the lakeshore to camp.
“Because to see the glass hole, you apparently have to be above the lake,” Mose said. “Like I said, I’ve never been here before, but my buddy said to camp up here and wait a couple hours past sunrise. The light has to be just right to see it.”
“Well, if this is a submerged feature, what could that kid have meant when she said Grinny would put them in the glass hole? She was gonna drown ’em in the lake?”
“By me,” Mose said. “All I know about the Creighs is to steer clear of ’em. Everybody says they’re bad to the bone, and after what you guys have told me, I believe.”
We drank some coffee, laced with a contribution from my trusty flask, and then got ready to secure for the night. Mose said we weren’t quite done yet. He hung the food bag high in a tree against bears and marauding German shepherds, and then went out into the woods with his camp axe. He returned with three ten-foot-long, two-inch-diameter pine branches and told us we were going to make us some bear sticks. He handed us each a branch.
“I give up,” Carrie said, making an icky face when the pine sap got all over her hands. “What’s a bear stick?”
“We’re going to peel the bark off at both ends and then sharpen one end into a spear point,” he replied. “Then if a bear shows up in the middle of the night, we blind him with our flashlights, use the pepper spray to disorient him, and then jab him with these suckers to make him back out of his problem. Beats a gun every time.”
He showed us how to sharpen one end and cut ridges into the other for hand traction. I’d never made one of these, but it certainly made sense-especially since it would provide a silent defense option. The finished product was about eight feet long and heavy enough to make even a bear feel it. One of my buddies had shot a bear that rousted his camp-and shot him and shot him and shot him, mostly managing to piss him off. Pepper spray works much better: Anyone can outrun a blind and choking bear; outrunning a pain-maddened bear who can still see or smell you is something else again.
Carrie and I shared one shelter; Mose took the other. My mutts bedded down next to our pine-branch hooch. It was full dark when we hit our bags, and we’d been careful to keep our flashlights pointed down. We parked our spears next to the bags, along with our flashlights. Carrie, as usual, went down in about thirty seconds. I envied her ability to do that. My feeble brain always decided to review the day’s happenings and then all of tomorrow’s potential perils before finally switching into sleep mode.
The first dogs didn’t attack until after midnight, right about the time the cold front swept in over the western ridge and came across the lake looking for us. After our long hike up the slopes, both of us were sleeping pretty hard when I heard the first bursts of rain and wind come up the slopes from the lake to stir up the tr
ees. It was a comforting sound, actually, as we were snug in our bags with the shelters’ backs to the wind, but all that changed when I heard a vicious dogfight break out in front of our shelter. I bailed out of my bag with a gun in one hand and my Maglite in the other in time to see Mose stabbing vigorously down at something between the two shepherds with his bear stick.
I threw the gun back into the shelter, grabbed my own stick, and swept the campsite with the light, illuminating two green eyes behind Mose. I just managed to get the stick pointed before the second dog came through the air and knocked me down. Fortunately he ended up impaling himself, so all he could do was lie there and bleed. I threw him off me, left the stick in him, grabbed Carrie’s stick, and moved to help Mose. I caught a brief glance of Carrie’s white face looking out from our shelter, but, heads-up girl that she was, she had my gun in her hand.
Mose no longer needed help. He had the big beast stuck to the ground with his bear stick while my shepherds savaged its face and head. I called them off and stabbed the thing once in the throat, which stopped most of the noise. My dogs circled it for a few seconds, then went over and began to tear up the wounded one. I dispatched that one, too, and then the rain came in like a solid wall and we all jumped back under our shelters.
“Are you okay?” Carrie asked.
“Got knocked down, but I don’t think he bit me,” I said. We used the Maglite to make sure that was true. I wanted to ask Mose if he was okay, but the wind and rain were coming in strong and there was no way we could talk. I finally got his attention, and he gave me a thumbs-up sign through the sheeting rain.
I looked at my watch. It was two thirty in the morning. We’d been asleep since about eight thirty, so whoever had dispatched the dogs had either been watching us and was really patient, or had just turned them loose in the area and told them to go feed. One thing was for sure-we were back in Creigh country.
The initial storm line blew over in about an hour, with more wind than precip. Then we got a brief epilogue of some stinging sleet, a half hour of flurries, and then just cold. I crawled out to retrieve our sticks and tried to listen for any signs of more dogs, but there was just enough wind up to make that impossible. Carrie was awake, too.
“You think they knew we were camped right here?” she asked. I told her my theories, emphasizing the one that had the dogs running loose in the area. It had been a noisy thirty seconds in the camp, but the wind had been up, and if the Creighs were west of us, or across the lake, they might not have heard the ruckus.
“If they have a base camp up here, they might just turn some of the pack loose at night. The dogs would come back to them for food, but in the meantime, they’re bred to attack strangers. They might just have blundered onto us, or smelled the shepherds.”
“We have to assume they know now, though?” Carrie said.
“Be a good bet,” I said. “They’ll be short two dogs, if nothing else.” It was an uncomfortable assumption, but probably a valid one for a change. The sky was clearing, but the wind was still blowing low-flying scud clouds across the mountaintops, which meant that they came right through the camp, like fat ghosts, accompanied by blasts of sleet. Between squalls I could see Mose sitting like the proverbial Indian in his shelter, stick in hand, staring watchfully into the darkness. It was going to be a long damned night.
21
We disposed of the two dead dogs in the morning by throwing their stiff carcasses down the slope. The sky had come out deep blue, and the air temps hovered around forty. There was a light dusting of snow on the slopes leading down to the lake, whose surface was steaming due to the sudden drop in temperature. We had coffee and some rewarmed biscuits, fed my dogs, and waited for the sun to hit the magic angle. We had a clear field of view down the slope to the lake’s shores, so I put the shepherds out in the woods where the cover was thickest, just in case there were more incoming Creigh-dogs out there.
“I think that’s what we’re looking for,” Carrie said, pointing down into the lake. Mose and I stared down the hill but couldn’t see anything except the lake itself, which was about a half-mile-long, almost perfect blue oval surrounded by a gravel margin and dense stands of pine on all sides except ours. A nearly vertical spine of rock stood out over the right-hand end, dropping some two hundred sheer feet into the water and looking like the prow of a ship frozen in stone. Then we saw what she was pointing at: a deeper shade of blue in the water at the base of that rock formation, which extended out to encompass the right-hand quarter of the lake. The water was obviously much deeper there, and if our eyes weren’t deceiving us, the hole in the bottom was in the shape of a giant cone, perhaps four hundred feet across and perfectly round. As the sun rose higher it became better defined until we could see it very well.
“It’s like one of those old Victrola record-player horns, only under water,” Carrie said. “It looks like it goes down under that rock formation.”
I pulled out my monocular and scanned that axe-head-shaped cliff from bottom to top. I don’t know what I was expecting to see, but nothing jumped out at me. There was a tiny level space at the top, and you could imagine one of those Mexican acrobatic divers doing his flying Maya thing from there. The slopes of the surrounding hill framed the rock spine like a house gable all the way up to about the same elevation where we had camped. I couldn’t see any signs of human disturbance, but the dense pines could be concealing a multitude of bad guys.
“I think I’m going to take the shepherds out on a little scouting expedition,” I said. “There might be enough snow on the ground to get an idea of where those dogs came from last night.”
“And what happens if you succeed?” Mose asked.
Good question, I thought. “I’ll back the hell out and regroup,” I said.
“They may come up with a different plan,” he said.
“We can’t just sit here and soak up another night like last night,” I said. “Besides, we’re looking to retrieve some lost kids before they get really lost.”
“Shouldn’t we scout together?” Carrie asked, obviously uncomfortable with the idea of me and the shepherds leaving. I wanted to do this alone. My dogs worked better if they had only one human to protect.
“There’s the glass hole,” I said, pointing down into the lake. “I think that bears watching. I’ll be back in an hour, hour and a half. If I get in trouble I’ll start shooting. I’m going to go back into these woods right here and circle around to the base of that rock formation.”
Mose shrugged and said okay. I knew he didn’t want to mix it up with any Creighs, but Carrie still wasn’t happy. I left her my handgun and took the rifle.
The shepherds and I slipped into the pine forest, moving methodically to get a good stand of trees between us and any watchers who might be down on the lake. The forest was filled with little clumping sounds as the pine branches dumped snow on the ground beneath them. The forest floor was covered in pine needles with a thin, crusty blanket of snow that was disappearing fast. I had hoped to track the dogs that had attacked us last night, but the snowfall hadn’t been substantial enough here in the pines to help. I stopped from time to time just to listen, but all I could hear was the wind through the pines and the shepherds snuffling ahead of me.
When I thought I’d gone far enough into the pines, I turned left and began to make my way toward that rock formation. I didn’t need a compass-as long as I kept the downslope to my left, I had to be working my way around the lake’s rim, albeit a few hundred feet above it. We’d been gone from the camp about thirty minutes when I heard the all too distinctive sound of a large-caliber rifle booming through the trees back to my left. The dogs and I stopped in our tracks and listened to the echoes of the shot reverberating across the nearby ridges. I couldn’t see anything but the trees around me, but the one thing I did know was that it hadn’t come from our camp.
The question was-had it been fired into our camp? I had to go back.
I took my time making the final approach out of the
dense pines to the camp itself, not wanting to blunder into an ambush. The shepherds didn’t appear to be wary or alarmed, but all that meant was that there was no one hiding close by. A distant rifleman would pose a different problem. I kept looking for landmarks, although I knew I was retracing my steps, because I could still see them faintly in the rapidly melting snow crust. Finally I moved behind a large pine tree from which I could see most of the camp.
What I couldn’t see was Carrie or Mose. Were they hiding undercover somewhere after that shot?
I sent the dogs down the hill and into the camp, where they ran around in circles. No one appeared. Then Frack started yipping excitedly, his face pointed into one of the tree-branch shelters. I hurried down there, afraid of what I might find. If Frack was that upset, I knew it wasn’t going to be good news, and it wasn’t.
There was a blood trail in the thin film of snow. It came from the edge of the trees toward the lake and ended in the shelter. I got low and scuttled over to the shelter. Mose was inside, curled up on his side with both bloody hands holding his chest. He was still breathing, short and shallow, but his eyes were closed and his face was an unnatural shade of white. It looked like a very bad wound, but it was hard to tell with his bulky jacket.
As I knelt by the side of the shelter, I looked around for Carrie but saw no signs of her. I looked at the snow, which was obliterated by many footprints. Ours? Or theirs? There was no way to tell. Mose groaned and opened his eyes. The shepherds sat five feet away, watching carefully. They knew when something was seriously wrong in the human world.
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