P Deutermann - Spider mountain

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 trees. 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.

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.