Fear No Evil

Chapter 91

Even though his Gore-Tex gear was back in the raft stuffed with most of his warm clothes, and John was getting wetter by the moment, he welcomed the rain. He’d been walking for nearly three hours by then, much of it traversing steep hillsides on game trails through loud and crunchy dry grass and brush that was crisscrossed with downed, scorched tree trunks.

But the rain, light and steady for almost an hour now, had deadened the sound of his passing. And he’d decided to climb a little higher to find the bridle path that led north, a clearer way through the patchwork of burned-over land and strips of standing trees, which made the going quieter still.

To Sampson’s left and diagonally downhill, the river was about to turn hard right into the rapids. If John paused, he could hear the light roar of the whitewater coming from around the point of the turn, which was just ahead of him, no more than a few hundred yards away.

He stopped in a large patch of timber, put the .375 Ruger against a big ponderosa pine, and rubbed his stomach and thigh scars a moment before picking up his binoculars. He looked upriver and still saw no sign of the raft.

That rope had to have burned through before the rain began, Sampson thought. But it’s five minutes to three now. I should be seeing the raft, and I’m not.

He turned the binoculars on the opposite side of the river, hoping to spot Alex. The last time he’d seen his oldest friend was two hours before, when Sampson was crossing Black Bear Creek and Alex was climbing the north side of the Slick Creek drainage.

He scanned along the steep hillsides and through the burned-over forests at roughly his same elevation. There was another bridle trail somewhere over there and he hoped Alex had thought to use the easier path as well.

But try as he might, Sampson could not find Cross. After several minutes of searching and another quick glance upriver, he lowered the binoculars and hiked on toward the big rock formation above the river bend.

That cliffy area was farther than it appeared at first because the bridle path followed the contours of the hill deep into draws and around outcroppings. Nearly thirty minutes passed before the trail wound into a denser stand of trees ahead of that large rock formation.

Sampson stopped in dark shadows, waiting for his eyes to adjust. He could hear the swift water but was unable to get more than glimpses of it through the woods that lined the steep slope above the rapids. He picked up the binoculars and peered as far down the trail as he could, looking for the silhouette of a man.

When he was sure there was no one, he took two steps and peered through the binoculars again. He saw where the rock formation began, jutting out over the river forward and to his left another fifty yards. The horse trail went more to his right and north through the trees, disappearing over a gap in the ridgeline maybe seventy yards away.

Sampson picked apart every tree and bush, but he could not place a man on the ridge or the ledge at the top of the rock formation. He was about to take another step when he heard a shriek of laughter come from well behind him and down on the river, somewhere in the long straight before the bend above the rapids.

Then he heard another shriek of fear and joy, followed by children screaming and yelling, “Here we go, Mom! Here we go, Dad! Into the jaws of death!”