Forever Dead (32 page)

I felt the goosebumps rise on the back of my neck, and when a twig snapped I whirled around. No one was there. The woods were quiet, but what tales could they tell? Was this where it had happened? Where Diamond had died? Had Paulie witnessed it, and then tried to make her way back to civilization? Or had she followed her master's body back to the other campsite, hitching a ride in the murderer's canoe?

I looked back through the woods and thoughtfully eyed the claw marks on the trees. If this was where Diamond had died then the bear sign might belong to the rogue bear. A disturbing thought, but the loggers could have lied about killing the bear near Diamond's camp or killing it at all. I looked out along the shoreline and figured it'd be a good place to fish. Would they go to all that trouble to guard their illegal fishing for a few measly fish? But there had been no bear to show the wildlife guys, who had taken the loggers at their word, so maybe they hadn't gone to much trouble after all. You'd think they'd want to kill the bear for their own safety. Unless, of course, they wanted it to scare everyone away.

I stared out over the water, wondering if Diamond had seen any of this view in those last agonizing minutes of his life. I shivered as the wind caressed me. It didn't seem right somehow, that a life should have ended alone, here in this beautiful, timeless place, that a man should have died and no trace of his passing remained but the broken collar of a cat. I tried to picture it through Diamond's eyes. What had he been doing? What was so important that he had died for it? Had he really discovered some cougars in an area that hadn't seen them in years or was I just being too fanciful? Yet it all fit my theory: the bear sign, the cedars, the paper with “red welt” and the compass coordinate on it, and now poor Paulie's collar. I pictured the three-legged cat
as she had run back to me and rubbed against my leg on the portage trail. Not for the first time I wondered what had become of her.

I shook myself out of the gloomy mood I was falling into. I studied the cliff and realized there was no way up here without ropes. I'd have to skirt it. I pulled out my small daypack and stuffed it with an emergency blanket, some food, a map, compass, matches, flashlight, and pepper spray, reluctantly foregoing my collection pack. I threw a rope over a branch of one of the cedars and hauled up my pack to keep the bears from tearing it to shreds. I hoisted my daypack onto my back and headed up into the cedars. I skirted the base of the cliff as it ran inland and after ten minutes found a way up.

It was a long narrow cleft in the cliff that angled gently up through the rock. The going got worse as the crack narrowed like a funnel until my shoulders touched both sides and the trail ended abruptly. I looked up and saw blue sky twenty feet above my head. Before I could give myself even a second to think about my fear of heights, I braced my back against one wall, my feet against the other, and began the slow shimmy up. My legs were aching from the effort by the time my head emerged into the dazzling sunshine. I hauled myself out and looked out over the lake as I took a swig of water from my canteen. I hoped I could find a better way down than the route up.

I walked along the edge of the cliff face trying to get my bearings. The sun was almost directly overhead and beat down relentlessly. The sheer drop of the cliff made my stomach queasy and my knees weak, but what I was looking for was unmistakable.

The thin jagged red welt in the face of the cliff cut up through the top and ran back behind me toward the woods. I sat down astride the welt with my back to the
lake and took out my compass. Diamond's compass reading, if he had taken it here from astride the red welt, pointed off to the left. Northwest. I could feel the excitement building in me as I followed the compass reading across the top of the sun-baked cliff, the wind blowing through the trees and a veery singing its waterfall song somewhere off to my right.

When the rock of the cliff gave way to the forest, I stopped and scanned the trees, searching for a blaze, willing it to be there. There were no easy bright orange markers, but then I hadn't really expected Diamond to be so obvious. In the silence I could hear a motorboat in the distance.

I started walking a transect back and forth, looking at every damn tree within a hundred and fifty feet of the rock, and in a path twenty feet on either side of the welt. It took me fifteen minutes before I found the first blaze, a hundred feet from the open cliff and practically invisible to anyone not looking for it, because it was low down, well below eye level. I took a compass reading from the first blaze and almost didn't see the second, Diamond had placed it so far ahead. A very cautious man, but once I reached the second blaze, the rest were easy to follow, coming every twenty feet, which was a good thing because there was no trail and the going was rough. I checked to make sure he'd blazed both sides of the trail before chasing his blazes into the bush. It didn't look as though anyone had used this trail except Diamond the day he had blazed it. Curious. Surely he would have used it often.

I followed the blazes for several hours, taking compass readings every so often. I began to worry about getting back before dark. Twice I thought I heard an animal in the woods, and once I saw the back end of a moose as it ambled away from me, its huge bulk somehow making no noise as it moved quickly through the forest. It was
nearly 2:30 p.m. by the time the blazes ended abruptly at the edge of a huge rocky outcrop studded with cliffs and boulders that stretched ahead of me for perhaps a hundred yards or more before descending again into the trees. It was a high point of land overlooking a vast wild forest, uncut for as far as the eye could see and dotted with lakes and rivers too numerous to name. No wonder the loggers were drooling over this country.

I looked about me and wondered what to do next when I caught sight of a piece of burlap waving gently in the sickly hot breeze. I stopped and studied it from a safe distance. It was some kind of shelter or blind built between two boulders with the burlap acting as a roof and back wall. What the front looked like, or how big it was, I couldn't tell from where I stood. I could feel the excitement building inside me.

I waited and watched the blind, but after ten minutes, when there was no movement, I cautiously approached, moving quietly and carefully until I reached the flap. Gingerly I pulled it back and peered inside.

I wasn't sure what I expected to see, but it wasn't the fully furnished affair that I found myself staring at. It was still crude, but as blinds go, it was like Buckingham Palace. Diamond certainly had been a man who liked his creature comforts. At the far end was another burlap wall with the telltale peeping flaps of a blind littered throughout it. There was a hunk of foam rubber leaning against the rock, almost obliterated by a mountain of pillows and several blankets. It was positioned right under one of the peepholes. Beside the makeshift sofa was a small crude bookshelf made from slabs of rock holding a dozen whodunits and some papers. There was even a square of carpet on the rough rock floor. I made my way over to the peephole nearest the sofa. It was a square patch of burlap attached only
at the top and loose on three sides. I lifted it up and found myself staring out over a small ledge and then down what looked to be a sheer drop of thirty feet onto a jumble of rocks and caves that wended their way down the cliff into the forest floor below.

The blind was actually a natural crevice between the rocks of a much larger cliff. Diamond had simply run two overlapping pieces of burlap across both ends on a wooden pole and then roofed it with more burlap. There was a pair of new miniature binoculars with Diamond's initials scratched onto the left-hand tube; the hand that did it had jerked on the D so that it looked like a P. I picked up the binoculars and put the cord around my neck out of habit, cautiously pulled back the flaps, and looked out. I looked down through the jumble of rocks, but if Diamond had indeed been watching cougars, they weren't there at the moment. There was nothing to see. Disappointed, I quietly let the flap fall back and turned my attention to the blind itself.

I picked up a
Macleans
magazine that lay on the crude wooden desk to the left of the chair, looked at the date, and sucked in my breath. It was a very recent issue, so recent that I had only just received mine in the mail the day before. I looked at the subscriber, and a chill went through me: Don Allenby. I looked about in alarm and saw a black and red checked coat flung into the corner near the chair, and a small leather satchel hidden in the darkness. I picked up the satchel and opened it. It was full of papers, old magazines, a change purse, and a wallet. I flicked open the wallet and Don Allenby's face stared up at me. I felt a swift flicker of fear.

I stood there like some brainless idiot holding the wallet with his licence in my hands as a million thoughts careered through my head. Don Allenby was out there somewhere. I could hear my heart beat in the calm of
the blind, and the sudden grating of rock against rock sounded like an explosion in the silence. I dropped low and moved quietly toward the lookout flap. The sound had come from somewhere below me. Was he out there waiting for me? If Don was out there somewhere I was a sitting duck and we both knew it.

Through the binoculars I could make out movement in the shadows of one of the rocks, and I held my breath and watched. Suddenly a small spotted golden animal tumbled into view, followed by two more furballs rolling and tumbling and biting each other as they frolicked, their ringed tails flicking in the sun. I let out my breath slowly and, despite my fear, savoured the sight below me. So I had been right. Diamond had found a family of cougars. He had pulled off the unthinkable — finding an endangered species on the eve of a chainsaw gang moving in to clear-cut. What a coup — not only for this piece of forest, but for Diamond as a researcher. And the find was all the more impressive because the home ranges of these creatures were so large. I held my breath as the long, lithe, golden body of the mother glided into view, her cubs gambolling around her as she blithely ignored them and curled up in the crevice. I sat spellbound, watching them tumble and chase each other, rolling over their mother and playing with her tail. The den must be very close, I thought.

Two of the cubs were locked in each other's arms and were rolling over and over and the third was still playing with the mother's tail: as she flicked it away he'd leap and pounce. The mother was wearing a radio collar with a plastic tag on it, and I focused the binoculars and tried to read what it said, but she was uncooperative until she suddenly looked straight at me and I made out the letters S-i-a-n. The name rang a distant bell, but before I could summon up the memory, I noticed the
complete immobility of the cougars. The family froze, like a family caught in a portrait, all turning to look up straight at me. And then they vanished without a sound.

I had a sudden blinding, unnerving, and overwhelming urge to get the hell out of there. I was halfway to the entrance to the blind when I heard a sharp scraping sound overhead, followed by a rain of pebbles onto the roof of the blind. An ominous rumble grew in intensity even as I dived for shelter toward the cougar side of the blind, not knowing if I had chosen correctly or if I was diving right into the line of the rocks crashing down on the blind. The binoculars swinging from around my neck rapped me hard in the chest. There was a sharp bullet-like sound as a boulder ripped open the roof, and I could feel, more than see, the avalanche coming down. I launched myself at the burlap wall, praying the ledge beyond it was big enough to take me.

I felt the burlap tighten and resist me, and for one dreadful moment I thought it would shoot me back into the line of the boulders, but suddenly it gave way and I was catapulted out onto the ledge. The momentum of my launch caused me to roll right over the edge, the strap of the binoculars catching on a rock and snapping as I scrambled to cling to something solid, clawing with my hands, scrabbling to retain a grip as my fingers slipped and I could feel myself falling.

It was deathly quiet. I lay in the pile of rubble five feet below the ledge, clinging to a stalwart little cedar that had broken my fall. I looked down below me and saw that it wasn't the sheer drop I had thought but a steep series of boulders and rocks that rolled down to the forest floor. My left leg was screaming bloody murder and I moved gingerly, afraid of any broken bones. My baby finger was mashed to a pulp, but there was no pain and I felt a moment of unreality, looking at it as if it belonged to someone else.

The moment was shattered when I heard Don scrambling somewhere up above me. I struggled to my feet, scanning the cliff, but I could see nothing. Footsteps sounded above and to my left, coming closer, causing a cascade of pebbles to fall. In the noise it made I moved quickly, angling away and down to keep out of sight. One of the loose rocks struck me on my baby finger
and I viciously bit off the scream welling up inside me. I stopped when the noise stopped and waited, crouched behind a large boulder. I was just ten feet from the woods, and the silence went on and on. Suddenly the footsteps sounded again, much closer, and as I held my breath I heard rocks being moved. Bent double I bolted for the woods, not daring to look behind me, and when I reached them I kept on running.

When I came to the first blaze I sat down in the hollow of an old cedar and tried to stifle the nausea that threatened to overwhelm me. My mashed finger was bleeding and I wrestled with my shirt, ripping off a hunk and applying a dressing. I struggled to my feet and kept moving, following the blazes back, but it was hard work. I stopped often to listen to the woods, but I heard nothing. Maybe he had decided to ambush me further along the trail, a trail that he presumably knew a lot better than I did. I froze at the thought and then, in total panic, I crawled under a rock outcrop, too afraid to go on. I must have lain there for fifteen minutes before I heard a twig snap somewhere off in the woods and I froze again, waiting, listening, like a wild animal trapped by fear.