P Deutermann - Spider mountain

Carrie had spent an hour on the phone with Sam King earlier, and it sounded as if her predictions of a Bureau-managed shutdown had been correct. The escape of Grinny and Nathan Creigh had been shunted off to the Bureau’s fugitive program, so there would be the standard manhunt-sometime real soon. The fact that there might be children being exploited had been passed to the federal PROTECT task force, and the SBI had been left to dig through the wreckage of Hayes’s and Mingo’s administrations. In other words, the law enforcement bureaucracy had portioned out all the interesting bits to its various constituencies and settled on a PR strategy, so all was right in the world. Grinny Creigh had been designated a “person of interest,” but that was about it.

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.