Alex Scarrow - October skies

‘Oh, come on, you wimp,’ he chided himself.

He wrestled his way out of the bag, fumbled for the torch and then, having found it and snapped it on, fumbled for his glasses.

‘Two minutes and you’ll be back in bed, snug as a bloody bug.’

He squeezed out of his tiny tent and panned the torch around the clearing, Grace’s parting words for the night still playing around with his over-active mind.

Did you know grizzlies can run as fast as a horse? Oh… and the smaller ones can climb trees?

Julian grimaced. ‘Yeah, thanks for that, Grace,’ he hissed, watching the plume of his breath quickly dissipate in the crisp night air.

He stepped lightly across the clearing, navigating his way over the lumps and bumps of long-dead and fallen trees. The beam of his torch flickered like a light sabre through the wispy night mist, picking out the uneven floor of the clearing, carpeted in a thick, spongy layer of moss. He was surprised at how much it undulated and guessed that perhaps some time in the past someone had been logging here, but never got round to finishing the job, leaving an assault course of rotting trunks and branches for him to awkwardly clamber over.

He made his way to the far side of the clearing and came to a halt on the edge, staring uneasily at a tangle of brambles and undergrowth leading up towards a wall of dense foliage — the start of the wood.

He turned to look back at the tents.

Sixty feet… is that far enough away?

He decided it would have to do. There was no way on earth he was actually going to step through the dense web of undergrowth ahead of him and into the woods. No way.

This is good enough.

He unzipped, feeling a sudden gotta-go rush that he couldn’t contain any longer, and, with a long groan of satisfaction, he let rip. His torch picked out the steaming silver arc and he watched with detached interest as the jet of piss stripped away — like a pressure hose cleaning a graffiti-covered wall — the delicate blanket of moss on a rounded log in front of him.

It wasn’t until he’d shaken off and tucked away, and then played his torch more thoroughly across the small arc of exposed dark wood, that his curiosity was piqued enough to take a step forward.

The exposed wood was curiously smooth, not natural. He reached out with his fingers and ran them along the surface. It was old and evenly curved. He rubbed a little further along the exposed arc, moss rolling off effortlessly into little doughy balls under his fingers. By the torchlight he could see the remains of a rusted metal band, dislodged dark brown flakes tumbling from it. He ran his torch down and noticed several unnaturally straight ridges in the mossy surface, converging on a bumpy hub. He rubbed the moss off one of the ridges to find the smooth, weathered form of what quite clearly was wood once turned on a lathe.

A spoke?

He straightened up. ‘That’s a wheel. That’s a wagon wheel.’

Friday

Sierra Nevada Mountains, California

‘See?’ he said, waving at the clearing.

Grace and Rose looked around. Through the morning mist they could see it was about a hundred yards in diameter, and roughly elliptical in shape. The floor of the clearing seemed to be one large, rumpled, emerald-green quilt draped delicately over the messy floor of a child’s bedroom.

‘Whoa… the whole clearing’s…?’

‘One big camp.’

Rose panned her camera round in a slow, steady loop.

Julian stepped towards a rounded hump, knelt down beside it, and rubbed away the covering moss, exposing the spokes of another wheel. ‘Another wagon,’ he said, and surveyed the clearing. ‘There must be several dozen wagons buried here.’

Grace’s eyes narrowed. She pulled off her ranger’s cap and tucked a loose tress of silver hair behind one ear. ‘My God,’ she said, blowing cigarette smoke out of her nostrils. ‘A whole wagon train, up here in our mountains. Sheeesh… been walking these woods for years’ — she turned to Julian — ‘never knew this was here.’

Rose looked at Grace. ‘This is quite a find, isn’t it?’

Grace nodded silently. ‘Hell, could be another Donner Party.’

‘Donner Party?’

‘Party of emigrants that went missing on the way to Oregon in the 1850s. They were too slow making for the pass and got snowed into the mountains. Not too far from here — about a hundred miles further south.’

‘I’ve heard of that,’ said Julian.

She nodded. ‘Helluva grim story. They went missing over the winter, but were found come spring. What was left of them.’

‘I don’t like the sound of that,’ said Rose.

‘Yeah.’ Grace nodded. ‘They resorted to cannibalism. The papers at the time were full of made-up variations of that tale. People scared their kids with the story for generations after.’

They studied the clearing in silence, their eyes making sense of — telling stories with — the contours hidden beneath a century and a half of growth and organic detritus.

‘What we got here,’ uttered Grace, ‘is a heritage site. That means I’ve got to call this in to the National Parks Service.’

Julian bit his lip in thought. ‘Grace, will you excuse me and Rose for a moment?’

‘Change of plan,’ he said quietly to her. ‘Okay, we came out here to basically poke fun at a whole load of gullible straw-chewing rednecks and their stories of abductions and Big Foot sightings and Glowy Things In The Sky.’

Rose nodded. ‘Yeah. I’m guessing we aren’t doing that now?’

Julian grinned. ‘Christ, no. That’s the sort of bottom-shelf schedule-filler I’d love us to leave behind. This’ — he gestured at the clearing around them — ‘is like finding the bloody Titanic.’

‘But we won’t have it to ourselves for long if she’s calling it in, Jules.’

‘I know. Grace is a good ol’ girl and wants to do the right thing. After all, in US terms, this is ancient history. To them it’ll be like finding Stonehenge.’

‘That’s my point, though. This site will be crawling with archaeology students and American history lecturers.’

Julian nodded. ‘But we found it, so surely we deserve the scoop, do we not?’

Rose nodded. ‘That would be nice.’

‘There’ll be a human-interest story here, Rose. A powerfully strong one. And if we can find out who they were and how they ended up here, and if they survived…?’ He looked around at the uneven floor of the clearing. ‘There’ll be all sorts of personal artefacts buried here to give us names. There’s bound to be family these people left behind, descendants today who’ll have a curious family story of their great-great-uncle Bill who travelled west to the promised land and was never heard from again.’ Julian turned to her. ‘I say we drop the stupid bloody project we were doing and instead let’s dig up what we can on this.’

‘Errrm.’ Rose tapped her chin with her finger. ‘Didn’t someone commission this stupid bloody project. You know… money? A paying customer?’

‘Stuff that. RealityUK are a truly shit reality channel paying us a piss-poor commission for this. Not to put too fine a point on it — screw them.’

Rose looked sceptical. ‘But it’s money.’

‘Look, I know money’s tight right now, but I’ll find some other small independents who’ll front some cash for us to work on this. Or better still, I’ll talk to my old contacts at the BBC. I’m still on chatting terms with Sean, and the guys on Panorama. Everyone’s going to want a piece of this.’

He looked across at Grace, who was squatting down and cautiously examining the wheel spokes he’d exposed.

‘We just need a little time,’ he said.

Rose swung the strap of her kit bag off her shoulder and started to unpack her camera. ‘I should grab as much of this on film as I can, you know… whilst it’s still pristine.’