Десмонд Бэгли - Landslide

The cookhouse had a light burning and the door was ajar. I peered through a window and saw there was no one in sight so I slipped through the doorway and closed the door behind me. A big cooking-pot was steaming on the stove and the smell of hash nearly sent me crazy, but I had no time for luxuries — what I wanted was the stock-room.

I found it at the end of the cookhouse; a small room, shelved all round and filled with canned goods. I began to load cans into my pack, taking great care not to knock them together. I used shirts to separate them in the pack and added a small sack of flour on top. I was about to emerge when someone came into the cookhouse and I closed the door again quickly.

There was only one door from the stock-room and that led into the cookhouse — a natural precaution against the healthy appetites of thieving loggers. For the same reason there was no window, so I had to stay in the stock-room until the cookhouse was vacated or I had to take violent action to get out...

I opened the door a crack and saw a man at the stove stirring the pot with a wooden spoon. He tasted, put the spoon back in the pot, and walked to a table to pick up a pack of salt. I saw that he was an elderly man who walked with a limp and knew that violence was out of the question. This man had never done me any harm nor had he set out to hurt me, and I couldn’t see myself taking Howard’s sins out on him.

He stayed in the cookhouse for an eternity — not more than twenty minutes in reality — and I thought he’d never go. He puttered around in a pestiferous way; he washed a couple of dishes, wrung out a dishrag and set it to dry near the stove, headed towards the stock-room as though he were going to get something, changed his mind in mid-limp just as I thought I’d have to hit him after all, and finally tasted the contents of his pot again, shrugged, and left the cookhouse.

I crept out, checked that all was clear outside, and slid from the cookhouse with my booty. Already an idea had occurred to me. I had decided to raise hell, and raise hell I would. The camp was lit by electricity and I had heard the deep throb of a diesel generator coming from the edge of the camp. It was no trick to find it, guided by the noise it made, and the only difficulty I had was in keeping to the shadows.

The generator chugged away in its own hut. For safety’s sake, I explored around before I did anything desperate, and found that the next hut was the saw doctor’s shop. In between the two huts was a thousand-gallon tank of diesel oil which, on inspection of the simple tube gauge, proved to be half full. To top it off, there was a felling axe conveniently to hand in the saw shop which, when swung hard against the oil tank, bit through the thin-gauge sheet metal quite easily.

It made quite a noise and I was glad to hear the splash of the oil as it spurted from the jagged hole. I was able to get in another couple of swings before 1 heard a shout of alarm and by that time I could feel the oil slippery underfoot. I retreated quickly and ignited the paper torch I had prepared and tossed it at the tank, then ran for the darkness.

At first I thought my torch must have gone out, but suddenly there came a great flare and flames shot skyward. I could see the figure of a man hovering uncertainly on the edge of the fire and then I went away, making the best speed I could in spite of my conviction that no one would follow me.

By dawn I was comfortably ensconced in the fork of a tree well into the thick forest of the north of the valley. I had eaten well, if coldly, of corned beef and beans and had had a few hours’ sleep. The food did me a power of good and I felt ready for anything Matterson could throw at me. As I got myself ready for the day’s mayhem I wondered how he would begin.

I soon found out, even before I left that tree. I heard the whirr of slow-moving blades and a helicopter passed overhead not far above treetop level. The downdraught of the rotor blew cold on my face and a few pine needles showered to the ground. The whirlybird departed north but I stayed where I was, and sure enough, it came back a few minutes later but a little to the west.

I dropped out of the tree, brushed myself down, and hoisted the pack. Howard had deduced what I wanted him to deduce and the helicopter reconnaissance was his first move. It was still too early for him to have moved any shock troops into the valley, but it wouldn’t be long before they arrived and I speculated how to spend my time.

I could hear the helicopter bumbling down the valley and thought that pretty soon it would be on its way back on a second sweep, so I positioned myself in a good place to see it. It came back flying up the valley dead centre, and I strained my eyes and figured it contained only two men, the pilot and one passenger. I also figured that, if they saw me, they wouldn’t come down because the pilot would have to stick with his craft and his passenger wouldn’t care to tangle with me alone. That gave me some leeway.

It was a simple enough plan I evolved but it depended on psychology mostly and I wondered if my assessment of Howard’s boys was good enough. The only way to find out was to try it and see. It also depended on some primitive technology and I would have to see if the wiles I had learned in the north would work as well on men as on animals.

I went through the forest for half a mile to a game trail I knew of, and there set about the construction of a deadfall. A snare may have been all right for catching a rabbit but you need something bigger for a deer — or a man. There was another thing, too; a deer has no idea of geometry or mechanics and wouldn’t understand a deadfall even if you took the trouble to explain. All that was necessary was to avoid man scent and the deer would walk right into it. But a man would recognize a deadfall at first sight, so this one had to be very cleverly constructed.

There was a place where the trail skirted a bank about four feet high and on the other side was a six-foot drop. Anyone going along the trail would of necessity have to pass that point. I manhandled a two-foot boulder to the edge of the bank and checked it with small stones so that it teetered on the edge and would need only a slight touch to send it falling. Then I got out the survival kit and set a snare for a man’s foot, using fishing-line run through forked twigs to connect to a single pebble which held the boulder.

The trap took me nearly half an hour to prepare and from time to time I heard the helicopter as it patrolled the other side of the valley. I camouflaged the snare and walked about the deadfall, making sure that it looked innocent to the eye. It was the best I could do, so I walked up the trail about four hundred yards to where it ran through a marshy area. Deliberately I ploughed through the marsh to the dry ground on the other side leaving much evidence of my passage — freshly broken grasses, footprints and gouts of wet mud on the dry land. I went still farther up the trail then struck off to the side and in a wide circle came back to my man-trap.

That was half of the plan. The second half consisted of going down the trail to a clearing through which ran a stream. I dumped my pack by the trail and figured out when the helicopter would be coming over again. I thought it would be coming over that clearing on to the next pass so I sauntered down to the stream and filled my canteen.

I was right, and it came over so unexpectedly it surprised even me. The tall firs muffled the sound until it was roaring overhead. 1 looked up in surprise and saw the white blob of a face looking down at me. Then I ran for cover as though the devil was at my heels. The ‘copter wheeled in the air and made a second pass over the clearing, and then a wider circle and finally it headed down valley going fast. Matterson had found Boyd at last.