Dinosaur Lake (5 page)

Their food came, steaming on the plates.

“What else?” Something more was bothering Justin and Henry waited for the young man to tell him.

Justin hunched his shoulders and leaned in closer so no one else could hear. “This has nothing to do with the lake’s rising temperature or the volcanic activity, but I also found some…tracks…in the mud down by the water.”

“Tracks?” George’s worried face floated across Henry’s inner eyes.

“Huge animal tracks.” Justin rubbed his eyes and shook his head. “The most remarkable thing I’ve ever seen, except for those bones you discovered yesterday. If I didn’t know better I’d swear–” he stopped talking when he caught the look in Henry’s eyes.

“Go on, finish what you were going to say. I’m listening.” Henry started eating his dinner as if nothing was wrong, but pinpricks of unease had begun to needle him.

He was aware the couple at the next table was having a fight of some kind. Distracting.

Justin’s eyebrows lifted and a hesitant grin transformed his face. “If I say anymore you’re going to think I’m crazy.”

“I can’t decide what you are if you don’t tell me what you want to tell me first.”

“All right.” Justin’s hands went up in a surrendering gesture. “Based on what expertise I have, I’d swear those tracks were made by some sort of,” he whispered the word, “
dinosaur
.”

Henry practically choked on his steak. The idea was so ridiculous, he wanted to laugh. And here he’d thought the kid had no sense of humor. Boy was he wrong. “Some joke. You’re kidding, of course?”

“No. Dead serious.”

“A real one?”

“Yes, a real breathing, walking one,” Justin hissed. “A live one.”

Now with more than a hint of irritation, Henry mulled over the notion: what if Justin wasn’t what he’d presented himself to be, but was some kind of nut case? New York had Jaded Henry in that way. Anyone could say they were this or that but it didn’t mean they were. Some people were convincing liars. But the kid’s face was sincere; his eyes clear and bright. If he was a liar, he was damn good at it. And why would he be lying anyway?

“It’s true. The tracks, whatever they are, seemed authentic. I don’t believe it myself. But I saw what I saw.” Justin lifted his cup of coffee with a shaky hand. They were nearly clean now, with just a hint of dirt beneath the nails. Exhausted, the guy looked even younger. About fifteen.

“Did you take a picture of them with your cell phone?”

“I would have if I had one. I dropped my last phone a week ago into some crevice I was climbing over. Lost three phones that way in the last year. I need to get to town and buy another.”

“You’re hard on phones.”

“I think I am.”

“Doesn’t matter. Cell phones don’t work well in the park. Bad reception. Don’t work well in most places around here. But they still take photos.”

“Oh.” Justin was watching him.

Henry was a rational man, and he remembered that someone else had claimed to have seen something unusual in the lake. He nearly mentioned it to the scientist, but it was too preposterous to dwell on, much less repeat.

He recalled George mentioning those strange tracks. Merely coincidences?

“The tracks could be a hoax, Justin. Kids are always playing practical jokes around here. Like that Bigfoot scare up in Washington a couple of months ago. They had tracks, photos and everything. In the end, it turned out to be a prank. All of them do. For the attention and the tabloid money.”

A negative nod. “No, I don’t think this is anything like that. I believe those tracks were made by something alive. Something real. Not any animal I know and not human, either.”

“Where’d you find them?”

“Down past Cleetwood Trail, before the steep walls begin again. The prints were going into the water. It’s easy to see how they could have gone unnoticed. The location is desolate. Hard to get to. I don’t know what made me hike that far off the beaten path.” He shook his head again, wonder and fear warring in his eyes. “Any paleontologist in his right mind would give twenty years of his life to see a real live dinosaur walking around–except me. As much as I adore studying the creatures, I believe there was a reason for their demise, their extinction. They’d be far too destructively anachronistic to coexist with humanity. What most people don’t realize is some dinosaur species were extremely intelligent. Rapacious in their behavior. I’d hate to come face to face with a live one and I’d hate to try to keep one in captivity. A good dinosaur is a dead dinosaur. They’re magnificent monsters, but they don’t belong in iron cages like circus freaks or running loose. Too unpredictable. Too volatile. Too
big
.”

Henry wasn’t sure he agreed with the scientist. It’d be incredible to see a real, living, breathing dinosaur. Just once. A large tranquilizer gun would solve the problem easily.

“Yeah, I remember what happened to King Kong,” Henry threw in for comedic relief, but Justin didn’t crack a smile.

“Eat your food, Justin,” Henry ordered in a calm voice. The kid was a nervous wreck. “Then you can show me those prints. I’ve got to see them for myself. If we hurry we can make it down there before dark.”

“Okay. It’ll be good to show them to someone else. Prove they’re actually there, that they weren’t a figment of my imagination. Maybe then I won’t feel like I’ve lost my sanity.”

Justin gulped down his food.

Henry wasn’t as hurried. He was convinced their journey down to the lake would turn out to be a wasted trip. Dinosaur tracks. Yeah, sure.

***

The sun was going down by the time they arrived at the water’s edge. Trees were bathed in lace cloaks of muted reds and oranges, and the murky shadows dancing around them made it seem even later. They’d taken too long over supper and the trip down from the rim to where the tracks were had turned out to be more difficult than Henry had anticipated. Justin had been correct when he’d said it was off the beaten path.

Trudging through the mud, the scientist led Henry down along the bank, past the boat dock at the mouth of Cleetwood Trail and around the bottom of the caldera. They walked and climbed for what Henry felt was at least an hour. The kid had a great sense of direction. When they came to a spot where the caldera’s cliffs were rugged and steep, Justin crouched over and searched the ground in the dimming light, using a flashlight Henry had given him.

“I thought they were here,” he muttered, as he moved on.

Henry followed behind in silence. Better find them soon, he thought, light’s almost gone.

“Here they are,” Justin mouthed just as Henry was getting ready to suggest they give it up and head back. The scientist hunkered down.

Henry came up behind him, bending over to study what Justin was pointing at. They were animal imprints of some kind, true enough. They were approximately eight feet long; narrow at one end and much wider at the other. George had been right about something else–the toes appeared to be webbed claws.

The prints led to the lake and only the impressions made in the soft mud nearest the water were clearly visible.

“See,” Justin exclaimed, “I wasn’t hallucinating. Here are the tracks to prove it.” He seemed to be talking more to himself than Henry.

Henry didn’t know what to say. He was staring at the tracks, but he wasn’t believing them. He craned his neck and glanced around. “They seem to have come from below the cliffs somewhere. There are caves along the caldera’s base beneath the water line. Some of them are quite large and they vein down into the caverns and tunnel under the lake. I’d speculate that whatever made these prints probably came from those same caves.”

The tracks appeared real. They looked like something out of a horror film. So damn big. Henry swallowed hard, his sense of reality blurring. He loved watching old Twilight Zone episodes, but he didn’t like living through one.

“They’re absolutely not bear or cougar tracks.” Henry did some quick calculations in his head: If the size of the body lived up to the feet…then whatever created those tracks was a hell of a lot bigger than any bear.

“Damn,” grumbled Henry, “I should have brought a camera along. They’re expecting more storms tonight. These might not be here tomorrow.” He knew he was behind the times; his cheap cell phone was just a cell phone. It didn’t take pictures. Didn’t work half the time in the park anyway. He took off his hat and raked his fingers through his hair, a nervous habit. “And there’s no way I can run, get the camera and get back here before the light’s gone. No way.”

Justin was still studying the prints. “Well, at least, you’ve see them, too. That’s a relief to know. I thought I was losing it.”

“You’re the expert. Do you think they’re authentic?”

“I don’t know. They look real. It’s just that I’ve never seen any impressions like these in any of the books or excavation sites. If they are dinosaur tracks, they’re tracks of a beast as yet undiscovered in history.”

“Or they could be a clever joke,” Henry offered, hopefully. “You wouldn’t believe how ingenious some hoaxers can be.”

“Well, let’s hope it doesn’t rain tonight. Like you, I wish I could have gotten pictures. I guess I wasn’t thinking, either. When I found these prints I thought I had my camera in my duffel bag, but somehow I must have forgotten to put it in this morning before I left. I was in such a hurry. Perhaps it won’t rain tonight and these will be here tomorrow.” He traced the fading outline of one of the prints. His hair fell forward, covering his face; he slipped the straggly strands behind his ears and rose to his feet.

They stood examining the prints in the flashlight’s circle until it was almost totally dark.

“We’d better get back to the lodge,” Henry finally said. “The path can be treacherous in the dark.”

“Maybe you’re right.” Justin dropped his muddy hands to his side.

Water lapped softly behind them as they painstakingly made their way to the boat dock using Henry’s flashlight.

The cold had crept in with the night and the men shivered in their coats as they picked their way through the rocks lining the path. Henry chose to take the easiest trail up to the rim and straight down to the lodge.

Henry began to doubt what he’d seen. The impressions could have been a trick of the escaping light; or something the lapping water had created. That was possible, wasn’t it?

A full moon, pale and transparent, was riding the horizon above ebony trees. The illumination it gave off was faint. The water of Crater Lake glimmered far below them and they could barely make out the shadows of the trees and the blurry outlines of Wizard Island and Phantom Ship.

Henry glanced behind him when they’d reached the top and before he turned away thought he saw something. “What’s that rippling on the surface of the lake there past Wizard Island?” He paused, squinting and staring hard at the water, as Justin waited behind him. Yes, something was swimming down there…a series of bumps in the water.

Then it was gone. The water was placid.

“Did you see that?”

“See what?” Justin asked.

“Never mind.” The skin on Henry’s arms and neck was tingling. He experienced that strange feeling of unreality again, as if he were dreaming. A cold breeze fluttered across his face.

He was wide awake.

Had that woman the summer before really seen something in the lake? Something that shouldn’t have been there? Was that the something he’d just seen?

Nah, he chided himself, chuckling uneasily as he and Justin walked down the trail. The ripple in the water was most likely a big fish. Must have been.

That woman in the group yesterday with her ridiculous accusation had spooked him, that was all. Along with George and Justin and the weird tracks. He was tired; and had obviously seen too many Spook Spectaculars as a kid. Under the cloak of night, anything was imaginable.

But he couldn’t explain the great relief he felt when Justin and him strolled through the door of the brightly lit lodge a short while later. The sight and sound of normal, noisy people, the aroma of fresh coffee, and the crackling fire, were comfortingly welcome.

Suddenly he hoped it’d rain again tonight. Hoped it would storm to beat the band so all those tracks would wash away. Then he wouldn’t have to deal with any of it.

***

Outside in the night a mournful call echoed across the water of Crater Lake…and slowly pulsed away into the dark. The water rippled and moved and was eventually calmed as the moon rose high and full over the park among the gathering clouds. The waters stilled. The night silent.

It didn’t only rain that night, it stormed fiercely, as Henry had wished. In the end, discounting his fancies as childish, he convinced himself he hadn’t actually seen anything in the lake. It’d been too far away and too dark.

When he ambled into the kitchen for breakfast, the storm hadn’t abated and the rain was beating heavily outside the windows. He didn’t waste time gazing out at the solid sheet of falling water, but headed for the sink and made a pot of coffee.

It was his day off, but he’d gotten up early to see Ann off to work. She usually put in half-days on Saturdays and he enjoyed having breakfast with her before she left. Because of the bad weather she’d decided not to go into work that morning, but her boss, Zeke, had called and said he really needed her in the office. Another emergency. What was new? So she’d be going in.

Sitting in his pajamas, reading the paper, he was happy he didn’t have to go anywhere and had put the whole weird episode of the night before away as any sane man would have.

He mentioned nothing about the tracks or the sighting to Ann, though he did tell her about his supper meeting with Justin and the lake’s continuing rise in temperature.

“Darn,” his wife griped over her first cup of coffee, her eyes on the wet windows, “Looks like I won’t get those pictures of that dinosaur boneyard this morning, either. I’m beginning to feel as if I’ll never get them. I’m cursed. Zeke thinks I’m making it all up.”

“Don’t fret, hon, you’ll get them. The bones aren’t going anywhere.”

“Yeah, yeah.” The disappointment was strong in the way she cocked her head. “With my luck, we’ll have another massive earthquake and the ground will swallow the whole area up.” She snapped her fingers in the air. “Another missed golden opportunity for fame and fortune.”

She was wearing a soft malt-blue sweater, which made her gray eyes seem blue, and her usual blue jeans, which accented her slim figure. Her short hair was feathered around her face, the gray streaks more prominent as they curved along the front. She looked a lot younger than her age, Henry thought. Prettier than she’d ever looked when she’d worked at that big city paper, her life all hurry-hurry. The country air, the slower pace and the woods agreed with her. Her new life agreed with her, as his agreed with him.

“Laura and Phoebe are coming for dinner tonight,” Ann informed him cheerily as she was leaving.

“What’s new?” he bantered back, with a flicker of a smile, as he looked up from the Everyday section. “Be careful out there, honey. It’s been raining hard and visibility is low with the fog. Take the main highways, none of those back road short cuts, ya hear?”

“Yes, honey.”

***

Ann opened her umbrella and dashed out to her battered jeep Eagle, splashing through mud puddles all the way. With a sigh of relief she slid into her front seat and closed the door on the cold rain.

If you wanted to live in this part of Oregon, you had to have a rugged four-wheel drive. At least eight months out of the year the roads, especially the back ones, were a nightmare. They were covered with three feet of snow or ice, or were mired in mud, and often impassable. And for another two months, during the tail end of fall and the tail end of winter, it rained so much it was like an Asian monsoon. Summer was brief but sweet. The extreme weather was the only thing that Ann wasn’t crazy about.

But her husband loved everything about Oregon. Snow or endless rain didn’t disturb him. He was just happy to be living out in the woods. Her mountain man.

When she got to the newspaper, Zeke was busy at his computer. Try as she might, she rarely beat him in.

“Don’t tell me you spent the night here?” She clucked as she shook out her umbrella, laid it in the closet, and hung her coat on a hanger.

“Sure, you know me. I live here. I keep a fold-up cot in the closet. Why go home at all?” The older man retorted gruffly, his sharp gaze meeting hers for a moment. Hidden in his eyes was pleasure at her arrival.

“Oh, by the way, Jeff’s not coming in today. Had to take one of his kids to the dentist, or something. Says he’ll finish his stories at home on his laptop and will email them in first thing tomorrow.”

“So it’s just you and me today, huh, Zeke?” she said, not surprised. Jeff, a young reporter on his way up, as he liked to put it, wasn’t very dependable, kids or no kids. The Klamath Falls Journal for Jeff Spenser was one of those underpaid first steps on his road to the Pulitzer. He’d been with them six months, and Ann didn’t expect him to last another six. Few of the young reporters stayed long because the Journal couldn’t afford to pay good wages. Maybe that was one of the reasons Zeke valued Ann. She actually cared about the newspaper and didn’t want it to go under. Her caring had created a special bond between her and the old editor.

“Not that it matters much lately,” Zeke stated. “If the circulation drops any more, we won’t need him. We won’t need anybody for anything ‘cause there won’t be a paper.”

“Ah, Zeke, this paper’s not going to fold, not if you and I can help it. And if you’d listen to me and do a few more circulars for the stores around here to insert in the Journal, we’d made a bundle. And if we also did a shopper–”

“If I told you once,” he cut her off gently, “I told you a hundred times, Ann Shore, that if I’d wanted to run a printing company, I would have bought one. This is a newspaper. We print the news, remember?”

“A lot of small newspapers produce circulars and shoppers for extra revenue. It would bring in the money we need to stay afloat.” She’d also tried to get him to let her post the newspaper online, but he’d hear nothing about that. No way, he’d said. Newspapers were printed.

“Not us. We’re a newspaper, we print the news. Period.”

Ann gave up. They’d had the same discussion before, many times, but the elderly newspaper man was stubborn; set in his ways.

Zeke grumbled under his breath and thumped the side of his computer with a loud whack. “Darn thing’s acting up again. We never should have thrown away those typewriters.”

“Yeah, we should have stayed in the stone age, too.” Ann tilted her head. But Zeke was right about their computers. He’d bought them used, to save money, and they were forever acting up or breaking down. Zeke and Ann spent as much time lately babying them as they did writing and producing on them.

Ann knew how shaky things were getting for the Journal. It wasn’t only that people these days didn’t seem to read as much, which was what Zeke said, and it wasn’t that they didn’t put out a damn fine product every week, either. According to Zeke, the Journal was the best written little newspaper in the state. No the newspaper’s problems were more insidious than low readership. It was the surrounding towns that were the problem. They were dying. People were packing up and moving away to larger cities searching for those ever elusive better living-wage-with-benefits jobs.

Ann believed the scourge of the time wasn’t just unemployment, though the government wanted everyone to believe the numbers were down when they weren’t because so many people had basically given up ever finding a job and were no longer being counted, but also the prevalence and across the board acceptance of minimum wage no-benefit type jobs. No jobs and lower paying jobs were killing the middle class–if it wasn’t already dead. It was destroying America. There were many people desperate enough to take those awful jobs, but no one could live on minimum wage. Newspapers were a luxury, not a necessity.

Ann knew all that. Her daughter worked one of those awful jobs. No medical coverage. No retirement. No time-on-the-job raises. Let a politician try to live on one of those salaries–fat chance–and maybe they’d finally up the minimum wage.

She sighed inwardly. Government and the decline of the middle class were a few of her soapboxes. She’d done a series of articles on the subject last spring and had learned more about the subject than she’d wanted to.

Where she was distressed about the job situation, Zeke was worried about medical insurance and would rattle on to anyone who’d listen that the government ought to give everyone access to affordable universal health coverage and prescription drugs. “I know friends who spend most of their retirement check on doctors and medications and have to eat macaroni and cheese the rest of the month. And there are so many people without coverage who need it desperately. Kids included. It’s a shame that in the richest country in the world, so many live in poverty because health care costs so much. Ridiculous.” His soapbox topic.

Zeke, preoccupied with his story, had returned to his computer. Since his wife Ethel’s death the winter before he’d become more of a workaholic than ever as he fought to hang on to the failing newspaper. He worked harder than most men Ann thought, and he was way past retirement age. “Can’t live on social security anyway,” he’d complain. “Only a mouse could. A skinny mouse.” Another soapbox theme.

The newspaper and his wife had been Zeke’s life; now it was only the paper. They’d had two children, Sherry and Tony. Sherry died when a child and Tony lived in Los Angeles with his wife and son, Jimmy, and was a senior reporter on the Los Angeles Tribune. Zeke liked to show Tony’s latest articles to Ann for her opinion. Three years ago Tony won a Pulitzer for a story about street gangs. Zeke was proud of his son, though he didn’t see much of him, and missed him terribly. But he’d be the last one to whine to Tony about his being too far away. Zeke believed everyone had to live their own lives. Children weren’t put on the earth to keep their parents company forever.

How sad it must be, Ann thought, to have a child and grandchild one hardly ever saw. Zeke was a lonely man.

For a while the two worked in comfortable silence, except for the clicking sounds of Zeke’s keyboard. Ann was formatting the weekly ads and bemoaning the fact one of their best client’s had canceled his weekly half-page. Things were bad enough without that. Ads were their main revenue.

“Oh, I almost forgot,” Zeke announced a bit later as if it’d just popped into his head. “I got a mighty queer call already this morning, Ann.”

He ran an age-spotted hand through his white hair, chuckling, and twisted around to look at her through his thick-lensed glasses. “Mighty queer.” His eyes, magnified, were a sharp piercing blue. She noticed his slacks were a little threadbare and his button-down tan sweater over a white shirt was frayed at the cuffs.

“Queerer than usual?” Ann asked. The newspaper received odd calls every week; some on the level, some not.

Zeke liked the ones where people spotted criminals they’d seen on America’s Most Wanted. He often alerted the police to check them out.

Ann was partial to the ones where little blue aliens visited or had abducted the callers.

Zeke sometimes ran the stranger stories if he could, tongue-in-cheek, as a joke, as if they were real news. Their readers loved them. It was a small town, people knew each other and most had a sense of humor.

At her desk in the back, Ann sipped a cup of coffee, and done with the ads, cleared her work area off a little; the rain a lulling presence beyond the cozy room. She liked things neat and usually ended up straightening up Zeke’s and Jeff’s messes as well.

She was working on a last minute article about the recent earthquakes for the next edition. All she had left to do was check her facts, a little polish, and it’d be ready to go. Outside, the rain reminded her of the story she truly wanted, but had to wait to get.

In the meantime Zeke continued his story. “Ya, this guy’s tale was a doozy. And right in your backyard, Ann. He runs one of those tour boats out from Wizard Island and claims there’s a creature, a water leviathan of some kind, in the lake. Can you imagine? We now have our own Loch Ness monster in Crater Lake. Ha! An American Loch Ness monster!”

Ann’s hands froze over the keyboard. Her mind went to those bones Henry had spoken of up on the crater’s rim. Could there be some connection? Henry believed the bones had once been prehistoric dinosaurs, but they’d lived millions of years ago. Dead now. Just bones now. The weird thing was, this call might be something they’d expect to get later, once the fossil bed was public knowledge, but not now. No one else knew about the bones. Or did they?

Henry had also said the paleontologist from John Day suspected the lava rivers under the lake were flowing again, which was why the lake’s temperature was rising. The terrain beneath the volcanic lake was rearranging, shifting and regurgitating ancient rock and dirt. What other repercussions were those changes bringing? What else was the volcano regurgitating?

Certainly not monsters.

Nah. Of course the call was a crank, or an old man’s flight of fancy.

“Did the caller sound drunk?” she asked. “Or just mentally unbalanced?”

“No. I’ve known the guy for years. He keeps his boat in one of those boat houses on Wizard Island and docks it for the tourists at Cleetwood Cove. He always was a little eccentric, and as independent as all get-out. But as far as I know, he’s neither a boozer nor a nut. You know the type?”

Oh, Ann knew the type. They spent their lives doing what they pleased and worked when they wanted. Self-employed and obstinate, they were drifters and dreamers. Oregon was full of them. The park was full of them.

She got up, moseyed over and stood looking down over her boss’s shoulder as he worked. “Well, what else did he say?”

“Not much. He sounded embarrassed to be calling. I had to pull most of the story out of him, like a bad tooth, after the initial confession. He sounded scared and claimed the creature butted his boat, as it was getting dark, the evening before. Rammed it hard enough to rattle him and the vessel. And you know how big those tour boats are.”