Spider mountain

21

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.

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.

There was a crash in the underbrush and, as I took the monocular away from my eye, I caught just a glimpse of a doe, all pumping, tawny motion with a flashing, oversized white tail, blasting its way up the slope, followed immediately by my two shepherds. I whistled for them, but it was too late-instinct had overcome training, and they disappeared up the slope in hot pursuit. All too aware that my eyes had just deserted me, I unlimbered the rifle and looked around. Something had spooked that deer, and it hadn’t been the dogs. Or at least not my dogs.

A moment later, four of Nathan’s dogs appeared out of the underbrush, noses down, intent on the deer’s trail. They stopped and milled around about a hundred feet in front of me, happily unaware that I had them in my rifle sights, and then set off in the same direction my shepherds had gone. I wasn’t sure that was good news until I heard a voice in the woods in front of me. A scruffy-looking and extremely thin man dressed in black coveralls and a tattered Army jacket appeared out of the woods, holding a single dog on a leash. This dog was following the trail of his buddies, and the man was having a tough time restraining him. The pair stopped in the same place the other dogs had stopped while trying to sort out all the scent. The man encouraged the dog to get on with it, and finally it lurched to the left and followed what had to be by now a virtual parade of scent up the hill. Then a second man appeared, holding a shotgun in one hand and a walking stick in the other.

Unlike the first guy, this one was looking around, so he was quick to spot me sighting down the barrel of my rifle at him. He was almost as tall as Nathan and had an enormous black beard that covered his entire lower face. He pulled up short and called the first man, who turned around and was then nearly yanked off his feet by the big dog, which was still intent on getting that deer. For a moment, we formed a tense tableau, the bearded guy standing in midstride, the dog handler wrestling with his anxious beast, and me ready to perforate the both of them with as many. 308 rounds as I could load before they hit the ground.

“Hey, now,” the dog handler said, finally pulling hard enough on the leash to make the dog behave. It struggled for a few seconds and then caught sight of me. It barked once and started pulling in my direction.

“Where’s the woman?” I asked, aiming my question and the rifle at the dog handler, since he seemed to want to talk. The other guy was leaning on the walking stick and staring at me, but he’d made no move to bring that shotgun up. Yet.

“You lookin’ fer that woman, is that it?” the handler said. The dog was growling now and making it clear that he knew what his new mission was. I thought I saw the bearded man’s hand begin to move, so I swung the rifle over to cover him. He had the shotgun, which made him the far more dangerous adversary here.

“Tell me where you’ve got her, or I’m going to shoot fuzzy-wuzzy and then you, in that order.”

“Well, hey now,” he said again. “Ain’t no need for that. We’ll tell yer, won’t we, Jacky. Take it easy, now, mister, everythin’s gonna be okay.”

The handler looked pointedly over at Jacky, as if for corroboration of what he’d just said, and Jacky, never taking his eyes off me or the rifle, nodded once in slow, deliberate fashion. I almost fell for it. What that nod had really meant was for the handler to turn loose his baby-killer, which he did with a bare twitch of his hand. The dog lunged forward even as Jacky began to swing the scattergun.

I didn’t hesitate. I fired one round at Jacky, which spun him around and sent him rolling down the slope with a howl of pain. I jacked in a reload and shot the dog through-and-through when it was no more than twenty feet away, and then I drew down on the handler, who was still, amazingly, standing there with his mouth wide open and a shocked expression on his face. I worked the bolt and took aim at his face. I was vaguely aware that the bearded one was flopping around down there in the weeds, still yelling, and made a mental note to put eyes on that shotgun. Just in case, I moved to the right, putting a boulder between me and where I’d seen Jacky fall, and then asked the man again where they had put Carrie. The dying dog began to cry miserably.

“Y-yonder,” he croaked, staring almost cross-eyed at the muzzle of my rifle. “In the glass hole.” He pointed behind him in the direction from which they’d come.

“You lead me to her,” I ordered. “Now! Move it!”

I knew I had very little time. Those gunshots would bring Nathan and whatever other hired help he’d brought with him, and they’d probably be a little more competent than this scarecrow trembling in front of me. The problem was that they would probably be coming from the same direction I needed to go.

“Awright-awright, I’ll do her,” the man pleaded. “Anythin’, mister, just don’t shoot me. That there woman’s Nathan’s bizness, none o’ourn. He’s the one shot that other fella, too.”

“Where’s the hole?” I asked.

“T’other side that there big rock,” he said, glancing sideways toward where Jacky had disappeared. He pointed with a trembling hand in the direction of the formation, which rose over the trees like a big black cloud. “Yonder it is.”

I’d obviously hit Jacky, but I had no way of knowing how badly. The problem was that 1 couldn’t see him anymore, or, for that matter, hear him, and a quick look revealed that he hadn’t turned loose of that shotgun, either. Although even a flesh wound from a. 308 would pack a hell of a punch, he was still out there in the weeds with a shotgun.

“You,” I said. “Go find your buddy. Haul him out here where I can see him.”

“Me?” he squeaked, looking around as if to see if there was anyone else out there. I had a bad feeling that there might be, but if somebody was going snake hunting in close quarters, it wasn’t going to be me.

“Yeah, you. Or how about I shoot you right where you’re standing and then go find him myself? Now do it, and keep those hands where I can see them.”

He kept his hands out in front of him, as if ready to be cuffed. He started moving down the hill toward the lake. I remained in the boulders until he was within a few feet of disappearing into the dense underbrush, and then, perforce, I had to follow him. Behind me I heard the dog expire with an ugly noise.

My tactical situation wasn’t terrific: As soon as that guy figured out that I couldn’t see him, he’d run for it. Or he’d miss Jacky entirely, and then Jacky’d get a shot at me as we walked by wherever he was hiding. If he was hiding-he might have taken off, too. As I entered the thicket, I put my rifle on safe, slung it over my back, and got out Mose’s little pocket gun. The rifle wasn’t of much use in dense underbrush. Jacky’s shotgun, on the other hand, was just about perfect.

I could hear the other guy pushing his way through the branches and brambles in the general direction of the water’s edge. I kept a lookout for any blood trails and cursed my own dogs for taking off. I heard a rustling in the bushes ahead and stopped to crouch behind a tree. As I strained to listen, a shotgun boomed in the underbrush, and I heard the dog handler make a mortal noise. I hit the deck and lay very still. Apparently Jacky hadn’t taken kindly to being fingered, or he’d mistaken the handler for me. I could hear the handler groaning up ahead, and he couldn’t have been that far ahead of me.

The tower of black rock rose above the trees ahead, and I guessed I was maybe a hundred yards from its base. I tried to imagine my previous line of advance and then began to crawl off in a direction at right angles to that line. It was awkward with the rifle slung over my back, but I needed my hands free to push bushes and branches out of my way quietly while I tried to work around Jacky’s position. I was pretty sure he was wounded and maybe even down, but he was obviously not in such bad shape that he couldn’t fire a shotgun, as his ace buddy had just discovered. I got as flat as I could, pushing through grass, gravel, briars, and baby trees. I kept stopping to listen, but all I could detect was the sounds of the dog handler groaning.

Was Jacky moving, too? My cheek brushed up against a softball-sized rock, so I picked it up and pitched it as high as I could over the bushes back in the direction from which I’d come. It made a satisfying thump, but unfortunately it sounded just like a rock had been thrown into the undergrowth. So much for my deception plan. Then I heard something coming from behind me, and the something was making zero effort to hide its approach.

Dogs. Oh, shit, I thought. Nathan’s four-pack had come back and were hot on our trail. No, my trail.

I looked at the little. 25-caliber peashooter and briefly considered using it on myself rather than face the prospect of being torn to pieces by four big beasts.

Except the furry face that finally broke through the bushes was Frack, who was very happy to see me. Frick came through right behind him and took advantage of the fact that I was on the ground to do some serious licking. The problem was that they were making a lot of noise, and if Jacky was near, that shotgun was training around on us. I grabbed a stick and threw it high in the general direction of where I figured the handler was lying, and they took off to retrieve it. They went crashing through the bushes, so I took that opportunity to squirm thirty feet farther to the right under cover of all their noise.

By now I had the rock formation at my back, which meant that Jacky and his erstwhile buddy ought to be between me and my original trail. The dogs were still thrashing around out there, and then they started barking. I winced and waited for the shotgun, but nothing happened. They continued to bark, and they weren’t moving. I decided it was time to close in.

Jacky was propped up against the base of a tree with his back to me. He was trying to bring the shotgun to bear on the shepherds with just his left arm, and he wasn’t doing too well. I could see a pair of boots sticking out of a clump of hawthorn bushes some ten feet in front of him. The shepherds were very aware of the shotgun and kept darting in and out of the line of fire, continuing to bark at Jacky. I was able to creep right up behind under cover of all that dog racket and grab the shotgun out of his hand before he could pull the trigger. He yelled in pain when I did that, and then pressed his left hand over his right arm, as if trying to hug himself. His left hand was covered in blood.

My snap-shot had managed to hit him in the right hand. It wasn’t anything like the old western movies. That. 308 round had essentially exploded his right hand, to the point where there were jagged bits of bone protruding everywhere his palm used to be. He was distinctly gray around the gills, and there was a baby lake of blood under his legs where he’d been hunched over, holding his right hand under his left armpit. His mouth was open and he was taking short, gasping breaths through all that beard. Keeping an eye on Jacky, I checked out the dog handler, but he was either unconscious or dead. Jacky had managed to put a blast of some large-caliber shot into the man’s chest, and he was probably gone.

I turned back to Jacky, shut down the barking shepherds, and squatted down a few feet away from him, keeping the. 25 pointed in his general direction. His whole face was gray now, and his lips were trembling as he slid deeper into shock. I was amazed that he could have fired the shotgun, given the recoil of a ten-gauge. I broke open the action and found two new shells, so he’d also been able to reload after shooting his own man down. He was glaring at me through a haze of pain. I was very aware that Nathan was out there somewhere, possibly with more of his black hats. They had to have heard all the gunfire.

“Where’s the woman?” I asked.

He just looked at me, his eyes squinting with hate. There was fresh blood trickling down between his fingers as he continued to hold his shattered hand against his body.

I repeated my question. He made no reply. I unlimbered the. 308, opened the bolt to make sure there was still a round in there, and then cycled it closed. I stood up and pointed the rifle at his face. As I pulled the trigger, I twitched the barrel a tiny bit high so that the heavy slug smacked into the tree instead. Even so, he felt the wallop and cried out despite his defiant expression. I jacked in another round and this time lowered the barrel to point at his belly. I asked him again: “Where’s the woman?”

“Go ‘head, do it,” he gasped. “Won’t do you no good, anyhow. She gone.”

“Gone where?” I asked. I lowered the muzzle so that it pointed at his genitals. He watched it as one would watch a snake between his legs.

“In the hole, by now,” he said. “She ain’t a’comin’ out, neither.”

“Did you bastards kill her?” I asked.

An evil sneer crossed his face. “Naw,” he said. “Hole does that. Takes a while. Go look, you want to. You’ll see.”

“Where is it, this hole?”

“Yonder,” he said, pointing with his enormous, frizzy beard toward the rock formation. He coughed, and for the first time I saw blood in his mouth and at the end of his nostrils. It was only then that I saw the hole in his shirtfront and realized I’d hit him twice with the same round. He was a big guy, but he was also mortally wounded, and I think he knew it.

“What’d you do with those children? Are they in the hole, too?”

He got a blank look on his face, then understood. He shook his head. “Wasn’t but one young’un up here,” he said. “Grinny got the rest.”

He closed his eyes and his breathing became more labored, as if the effort to speak had winded him. I lowered the rifle barrel. The shepherds were nosing around the motionless dog handler but keeping their distance. I thought I heard a sound over in the direction of the rock formation, but the dogs weren’t reacting. Still, I knew I had very little time left.

I knelt down again to get closer to his face. “I’m here for Nathan Creigh,” I said. “Where is he?”

He started breathing in even shallower gasps, as if building up enough oxygen to speak again. “Camp’s yonder, by the hole. Nathan tole us to find the third man, after he shot t’other one. He’ll be a’waitin’ fer ye. You that lawman what kilt Rue Creigh?”

I said yes.

“Be damned, then. He said you’d be a’comin’. That Grinny would point the way. He’ll be a’waitin’. You a dead man walkin’.”

“Right now I think you’re a dead man talking,” I replied. I pulled his injured hand out from his armpit just to make damned sure he wasn’t holding a pocket gun. He groaned with pain when I moved his wrecked hand. Then I got up. His hat was lying in the grass. I retrieved that and his shotgun, then called in the dogs. I walked fifty yards toward the rock formation and then gave the dogs the hat as a scent target. No dummies, they promptly headed back to where I’d left the bearded man. I called them back in and sent them in the opposite direction. They cut a trail pretty quickly, and we started down the hill to find Nathan, hopefully before Nathan found us.