P Deutermann - Spider mountain

“That tells me a lot,” I said. “I mean, how are we going to play this?”

“We’re photojournalists,” she said. “We’re doing a photographic essay on life in the mountains on the edge of the Great Smokies Park. We meet the people, photograph them if they’ll let us, their houses, their farms, their dogs, and then interview them as to what life’s really like up here in what the maps label as game lands.”

“Eventually we’ll stumble onto one of Grinny’s retainers,” I said. “And then we’re going to have some problems.”

“There are more righteous people down there than you might suspect,” she said, pointing down at the lights that were beginning to twinkle through the trees down the valley. “According to our aerial maps, a dirt road parallels this creek all the way to where it empties into a river. There are maybe two dozen cabins, houses, what have you, along that road. They can’t all work for Grinny Creigh.”

I fished around in my pack for a nylon windbreaker; even in late summer, the air temperature dropped like a stone once the sun went down. “It just takes one,” I said. “And they’ll recognize me, especially with these dogs.”

“Then we do what we have to do,” she said. “By the way, was that a flask I saw in your pack?”

I looked at her. “You’re a pushy broad, aren’t you.”

“You gonna share?”

“Aarrgh,” I said. “I hate sharing.”

“I can talk all night, if you’d like. I can even sing.”

“Of course you can. I’ll get the flask.”

The first place we came to the next morning featured an immaculate stone cottage surrounded by gardens and small alpine pastures in which sheep congregated. The people who lived there were both retired from the postal service and were refreshingly friendly. I noticed that the line of power company poles extended up the dirt road as far as their cottage, so these people were living comfortably in the twenty-first century. It turned out in the course of Carrie’s questions that they had never heard of the Creighs or of any particular crime problem in or around Robbins County. They also seemed to have no problem accepting our photojournalist cover story.

The next three homes down were similar situations, retired people who had always wanted to live in the mountains and enjoy the privacy and rustic beauty of the Smokies. The closer we got to the bottom end of the valley, however, the less appealing the home places were. Log cabins and stone cottages gave way to trailers, and gardens to collections of junked cars and trucks. Up the valley the dogs had been friendly if alert; at the lower end they were chained to trees or old cars and inclined to drooling snarls. I kept the two shepherds on the creek side of the road; the last thing we needed was a dog fight.

The first two trailers we passed seemed to have no one home except for some angry dogs. The third one, an especially nasty pile of rusted metal, with loose trash, a hard-packed dirt yard, and a lone, scabrous two-year-old playing in an abandoned tire, was occupied by a man and woman of indeterminate age. Several dogs could be heard barking from behind the trailer, and they didn’t sound very happy, either. There was an electric power pole in the yard, but the meter base was empty. Carrie sighed as if she’d seen all this before.

I held the shepherds over by the creek bank while Carrie unslung her pack and approached the yard to ask if they’d be interested in being “interviewed.” The man, a paunchy, hairy, and paranoid-looking individual wearing blue-jean overalls and a filthy T-shirt told her to get on out here or he’d set them dogs yonder aloose. The woman, a stringy-haired stick figure whose dark-rimmed raccoon eyes indicated an end-stage addiction of some kind, hung back in the doorway of the trailer, a cigarette dangling from her lips and a vacant expression on her face. The child playing in the dirt never looked up during the entire interchange. Carrie waved and backed off to rejoin me on the other side of the dirt road. The man finally saw the shepherds and reached down to pick up an axe handle. He yelled something else at us, but whatever he said was drowned out by the barking dogs behind the trailer. I walked ten feet behind Carrie, and made sure the shepherds stayed between us and the hostiles.

The next two trailers appeared to be abandoned. The final place had beef cattle and a two-story nineteenth-century log house, but there was no one at home except for two small collies, who cowered when they saw the German shepherds. The steers looked well fed and the fences were in good order, so it was a working farm. By late afternoon we’d reached the lower end of the valley, where the stream joined a larger one in a pretty waterfall after crossing under a mostly paved one-lane road. There was a perfect campsite on the point formed by the juncture of the two streams, downhill from the paved road and partially hidden behind a stand of stunted pines. It had obviously been used before, based on the blackened ring of stones in the clearing above the streams.

We set up our tents and a small fire and then went to soak tired feet in the cold stream. Our campsite was on the high, western bank of the stream, and we could see a large tree that had fallen across the water about thirty yards upstream. Its top surface had been flattened and there was a single rope handrail, indicating a crossing point for a local footpath. The sun dropped below the ridges behind us at the top of the valley and darkness settled quickly, followed by the temperature. The dogs curled in as close to the hot rocks around the fire as they could.

We had seen fewer people than I’d expected, but there also had been some chained driveways leading back into the woods and slopes where we had elected not to go. I’d let Carrie call the shots as to where we tried and where we simply passed by. She seemed to have a good sense of which was which. I found myself warming to her-she was practical, carried her share of the load, laughed often, and was easy on the eyes. She maintained that quiet reserve I’d observed in many attractive women, who knew full well that men were likely to make assumptions about their character based on looks rather than competence.

That was fine with me. This was not exactly a romantic excursion in the making, and I was still worried about some of the people we’d seen. I kept thinking about that homing dog Nathan had fired down the meadow. I’d also begun to appreciate the problem law enforcement had in coming to grips with criminal enterprises in the mountains; short of bringing in an occupying army, there was no way even to tell how many people actually lived up here. Based on some of the signs we’d seen, the people who’d built homes here valued their privacy and were more than willing to defend it.

We checked our communications with the DEA base camp over on the lake and then heated some food. Afterward we sat around the fire and talked about our experiences in law enforcement. During the whole time we’d been down there, I realized, we hadn’t heard a single vehicle up on the road above. The woods around us were extremely quiet, with no animal or even bird sounds. There was a dim moon, but the stars blazed above us in the crystalline mountain air.

“You know,” I said quietly, looking around at the clearing, “this would be a bad place to be if someone were to come at us in the night. We’d be trapped with our backs against these two streams.”

“You think those people in that one trailer recognized you, don’t you?”

“It’s possible,” I said. “That guy looked pretty hungover, and he obviously didn’t cotton to strangers. And that woman was in bad shape. I’m thinking maybe we should move our bags over across the stream, just in case.”

“Leave the tent halves?”