P Deutermann - Spider mountain

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.

“What happened?” I asked him.

“Long gun,” he whispered. “Two guys took Carrie.”

“Which way? I asked.

“Down. Hill. Don’t know.”

“Okay-where’s that EPIRB?”

But he shook his head. The effort cost him as he winced with pain. “Save it,” he whispered. “You might need it for the kids.”

“I need it right now to get you to the hospital,” I said. “I’ll find Carrie, but first-”

“No,” he said. “I’m wearing a vest. I’m not bad hit. Bruise from hell, bullet tore a crease. Can’t breathe so good, chest hurts like a mother. But it’s not serious. Go find Carrie. Save the EPIRB.”

“Let me check you out,” I said. “You’re bleeding pretty good.”

“Like being hit by a truck,” he said. “They’ve got Carrie, man. Get on it.”

He closed his eyes and concentrated on getting his breath. I noted no blood in or around his mouth, so he was probably right-the round hadn’t penetrated.

“Okay,” I said. “I’m on it.” Then I saw Carrie’s nine in the snow by the side of his tent. I made sure it was chambered and gave it to him. “In case they come back.”

He nodded. I knew he wasn’t afraid of the men coming back. A couple of those big dogs, though… He’d been holding his little boot popgun. I took it with me.

I found him a canteen, pulled his sleeping bag over him, and stood up. The shepherds backed away from the shelter, as if afraid they were going to be blamed for something. I wondered if the shooter had thought he’d bagged me instead of a stranger. A man and a woman had been causing the Creighs all kinds of trouble, and there was a camp up on that hill above the lake with a man and a woman visible. Drop the man, take the woman. Clear mountain logic.

I backed into the trees with the dogs, got out the monocular, and spent the next fifteen minutes surveying the opposite shore of the lake and the big rock formation at the right-hand end of it, all the while absorbing what had happened to Mose. I felt like a complete shit-heel. Mose had done his level best to say no to us, and I’d shamed him into getting involved. Now he was down, probably with a cardiac tamponade at least. And Carrie was gone, too. I took another sweep with the spyglass. Nothing had changed. Pristine wilderness. No smoke from a campfire, no tracks or trails.

Tracks? If they took Carrie, they might have left tracks.

I circled the camp and found a second faint trail of boot tracks pointing diagonally across the slope leading down toward the lakeshore. I went back to our shelter and found Carrie’s light jacket. I pressed the shepherds’ faces into it and then gave them the find-it command. Off they went. I made sure my rifle was ready to work and followed the dogs down the hillside, being careful to jink and jive a little to make a long-range shot more difficult. The muttskis were hot on the trail, noses down, tails up, and doing their own zigzag search pattern in pursuit of lingering molecules of scent in the frozen grass with those amazing noses.

Down by the lakeshore there was a final barrier of scraggly pines, where the shepherds had a harder time of it. They seemed to be generally headed for that impressive rock formation, so I began to pay attention to that as we closed in on its base at the end of the lake. From here at the water’s edge, there was no sign of the fabled glass hole. I stayed in the tree line to avoid making an easy target, and trusted the dogs to alert me to anybody or thing lying in wait. The sky above the trees was a deep blue, and the water reflected that color. It was now early afternoon and the sun was strong at four thousand feet, even through the canopy of pine trees. I could feel the sunburn coming on.

When we got to within a few hundred yards of the ship-shaped rock formation, the shepherds lost the trail. They circled and circled, returned to me several times, and then flopped down on the ground. I found a clump of boulders and sat down among them, still trying to make it hard for any long-range shooters. The rocks were warm in the sunlight, and the snow and sleet of last night seemed like a dream. But Mose was wounded up there on the hillside, and Carrie was once again in the clutches of the goddamned Creighs.

I studied the sheer cliffs for several minutes. It seemed to be a different kind of rock from a lot of what I’d seen in the Smokies. I wondered if it was basalt, the weathered remains of an ancient lava plug, in which case the whole lake was a crater. I kept looking for a cave or any other feature that might admit humans, but all I could see was sheer blackish rock, with a lone hawk soaring several hundred feet above it, on the prowl for prey.