Ice Hunter (28 page)

He took his pack and moved quickly along the river, almost at a jog, feeling like a hound with no scent and eager to get on it. He went all the way down to the log slide and up one of the fire lines before he paused. East of the burn he found a small, blurred bootprint with a tiny and unreadable mark on the heel. Farther east, under a maple tree where the ground was protected, he found a patch of damp clay with a pristine track. The mark was shaped like a Coke bottle with exaggerated breasts. He smiled.
Nantz
. She said he would know her mark. He was certain the print in the clay had been carefully placed for him, but why had she come all the way down here?

He soon had a possible answer, a second set of tracks offset twenty yards from hers. Was she shadowing someone? The rain made it difficult to tell what was happening. The second prints were much larger, those of a man. Service found a place where moss had been disturbed on a fallen tree. Only humans stepped on logs that fell across trails. In his mind, he could see Nantz and the other person. All trackers could see like this. It helped make the trail real. Visualization, a big-shot psych once termed it, one word as good as another.

He tried to check his compass but it was still spinning under some sort of iron ore deposit in the area. Obviously Lemich had used a miner's compass, one designed to ignore magnetic disruptions. Nantz's course looked like she was following a consistent heading, more or less east-northeast. A lightbulb came on. It was about the right course to the general area. Was she headed for one of Knipe's leases? Damn.

Instinct and experience told him to make himself invisible; he removed his blue slicker and hurriedly stuffed it in his pack. He felt a pressing need to hurry but restrained himself. A tracker had to control his emotions, keep them as far out of the work as possible. He moved track to track, not jumping ahead, this a cardinal rule. He compromised only by not taking time to mark the tracks with tape; instead, he broke small branches, or set twigs in crooks of trees, Indian pointers. The Shadow Wolves could read sign as easily as most people read books.

Now and then he made a side jaunt to the second set of tracks. There was a steady course there too.

Suddenly Nantz's tracks veered sharply to the left. Why?

The other tracks mirrored hers. Had one of them spotted the other? Maybe. If you were alone in the woods enough, you learned to feel when you weren't alone. You didn't need sound. The knowledge came from something else, something inside and finely tuned. This took many years to develop; most people never caught on. Which made it pretty easy for most COs to walk up on violators.

Nantz's tracks pivoted ninety degrees back to the right for fifty yards, then ninety degrees left and right again on the original course. It was like a Crazy Ivan, a submarine maneuver he had seen in a movie. Smart Nantz. Good going, Nantz. He thought the sign showed that she was the follower, but her maneuver suggested a different scenario.

Cat and mouse was a dangerous game, especially in the woods. Smart could be dumb if you got too confident, but Nantz wasn't the type to back down. You learned to retreat when it was the best option. He had learned this when Grandma Vonnie or the old man was mad at him, and the lesson had been magnified and reinforced in Vietnam and as a CO.

When Nantz's prints got to firmer ground they grew faint. He slowed his pace. Continuing on, he found torn spiderwebs, the breaks too high for an animal unless it was one from a circus, trained to walk on two legs. He had her again.

A dark line of massive northern white cedars loomed ahead, their fresh scent heightened by the rain. It was a huge cluster of towering conifers, their tops so intertwined that light could barely penetrate. He found where Nantz had hunkered down, waited. Had she seen something?

He moved to find the other track and found evidence of some stones being knocked loose, as if the man had turned suddenly. Service stopped to look, reminding himself to let his eyes do the work. You learned to look for what doesn't fit. There. He saw young ferns wilted and drying up. The rest were verdant and upright. He approached them cautiously, careful not to disturb anything.

What the hell? There was a metal pipe in the ground covered over with uprooted ferns, a clumsy attempt to conceal. The pipe was ten or twelve inches in diameter. Was it an old water well or new one? It was hard to judge unless a pipe was quite old or brand new, and this one was neither. He looked around the immediate area, where the terrain was pancake flat and appeared to be a clearing in the process of being reclaimed by nature. There could've been a cabin at one time, but no ruins were in evidence. In time the forest always took back its own. The larger prints came nowhere near the pipe but angled eastward, drawing away from Nantz and the grove where he had last seen her prints. Maybe the two sets of tracks were coincidental. His mind kept switching between her being the follower and then the followed.

Still, he dogged the larger tracks for about a hundred yards, where the trail began looping back to the south, then eventually turned northwest, the equivalent of a 270-degree turn. The tracks were doubling back on Nantz.

An alarm sounded in his head: He told himself to get back to the cedars and find Nantz
now!

Her prints led into the grove and disappeared. Where had she gone? He looked up into the trees, remembering the way he had guessed that their firebug climbed into the trees to rest, leaving no trace. He stretched to the lowest branch on the nearest trunk. She could jump to this easily enough. Examining it carefully, he found freshly scuffed bark.

He climbed up. The branches were grown together overhead, forming some semblance of a platform. On this she could have moved laterally above the ground like a little monkey. He founded broken branches here and there, little stuff dried out, and the occasional green branch, broken purposefully, all of them pointing west. Now and then he saw where she had scuffed her boots on the bark. He followed the faint sign all the way to the northwest edge of the grove. Now what?

There were some smaller straight-trunked birches below, not too far to reach and not too many branches, which would make for a tricky descent. They were shinnying trees, as smooth and beckoning as white poles. He used the nearest birch to lower himself quietly to the ground and look around.

She had known he would follow her. She had marked her trail this far and wouldn't fail him now, but if something or someone had spooked her into the trees, the next sign would not be easy to find. Nantz was as cool as she was smart. No panic and no quit, qualities rarely found in men or women. He guessed that she had been a star for FEMA.

He made a half circle, moving only a pace or two at a time, studying everything around him, trying to think the way she would think. There was a cluster of nasty-looking slash to the west where ice or wind had battered the forest. Trees died the same as people, and sometimes just as violently. Old age, too. Usually it was a combination of the two.

Think, he told himself. If you chased an animal, it would invariably head for cover. Slash was cover.

He approached the slash, bending low to minimize his profile, poking here and there, looking for anything to tell him where she had gone. There was no blood and he chastised himself for looking for it, but old habits were ingrained.

Where would she leave the next sign for him? Where would he leave it for her?

Deeper, not near the edge, he told himself. He entered the dense slash and looked backward. Most people kept looking ahead, rarely looked back. In war this got you killed. In hunting you missed meat.

He saw it under a log, clear as a
Free Press
headline. Good thinking, Nantz. The track couldn't be seen from the outer edge. You had to crawl into the jumble and look back. Clever move. Big Track had tried to double back on her, but she had caught on. Big Track might still be out there, but Service was getting desperate to find Nantz.

He could resume the follow now. It moved deeper and deeper into the slash. Was she looking for a hidey-hole or just seeking to cover her movements? It was an old Vietnam trick: Stay off the trails, head for the worst shit, every time. Where had she learned this?

She'd left signs but not much. Why? Was she feeling pressured? He was reduced to guesswork.

Then nothing. Nantz was damn good.

“Maridly?” He said in a loud whisper.

“Stay
low
, Grady.”

He heard her voice drifting out of cover, but he couldn't see her. It was like a séance. “
Get . . . your . . . big . . . ass . . . down
,” she hissed anxiously.

He squatted and heard his knees creak. Great shape at forty-seven wasn't the same as thirty. To hell with John Glenn and his stunts. All he had to do was sit on his pampered seventy-year-old ass atop a rocket.

He looked around for a long time and saw a slight movement and a pair of eyes peering out from under a deadfall.

She came out tentatively crawling on all fours until she was close. She threw her arms around him and clung to him tightly.

“What big ass?” he asked.

“Bigger than mine,” she whispered.

“It's getting dark,” he said. “We need to get to the river.” If they headed due west they would be above their camp, could move downriver from there, a basic navigational technique for hitting landfall by dead reckoning.

When he stood to look around he felt a sharp pain in his left shoulder. The pain merged with the sound of a rifle report and sent him sprawling.

Nantz crawled on top of him, trying to protect him. He had to push her off.

As the pain intensified he fought to remain calm.

He pushed her away and whispered, “Move it.”

“Where?”

“Back where you were.”

It was a tight squeeze and the pain in his shoulder was like fire, but he managed to get under cover with her.

“Check for blood,” he whispered.

She gently unbuttoned his shirt, moved her hand up his chest, onto his shoulders, and down his sides. She pulled the hand out and showed it to him. Either she had the touch of a spider or he was numb.

“No blood,” she said with relief in her voice. “Where is he?”

Another
mistake. “I don't
know!
” he snapped. He was so focused on finding her that he had committed the cardinal sin of not guarding his six o'clock position. Dumb, he chided himself. He was making too many mistakes in too short a time.

“Do we move?” she asked.

“No, we sit tight,” he said.

She nodded. “How long?”

“At least until dark.”

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I thought I lost him.”

“You did. He followed me.”

She touched his cheek tenderly.

Night took its time in settling in. Clouds hung overhead; a heavy rain continued to fall. There were no stars and the temperature was dropping. They were wet but had good cover, which afforded crude shelter.

“It's time,” he said in the darkness.

“Can you move?”

He grunted. There was more stiffness than pain now. He wondered how much more of a beating he could sustain. Not as much as when he was younger. Then he could will the pain away until it was convenient to deal with it.

“Can you see?” he asked

She tugged on the bill of her hat. “Like a bat.”

Nantz didn't lie. She had night eyes the equal of his.

At the river camp they got into her tent. He rationalized that it was too wet to put his up now.

“What were you doing out there?” he asked.

“I saw a guy with a rifle headed down the east bank and I followed him. He checked out the log-slide burn, right where we found the body, then he headed out. I thought, Weird, and wondered if it was the same guy you talked about seeing. I followed him. When he got to that rocky area he didn't do much, but he disappeared. He was there and then he wasn't. I thought, Uh oh. The mouse had become the cat. I tried to lose him when I got lucky and saw him cutting back on me. I knew it was time for me to get upstairs. I
knew
you'd figure it out. Take off your shirt,” she added.

She helped, using a small flashlight with a red lens to examine him.

“Not a bullet.”

“I think it was a tree branch,” he said. “The bullet must've knocked it down.”

“Jesus, Grady. It's a nasty bruise. Does it feel like something's broken?”

“Right now it's just stiff.”

“
Stiff
can be good,” she said, teasingly.

“Nantz.”

“Okay, okay, I'm just trying to lighten us up. I'm scared shitless and we need to get you to a hospital.”

She dug a small leather pouch out of her pocket, dumping the contents on her sleeping bag. There were more than a dozen small stones. He picked them up. Three were yellowish, clear, and greasy.

“Goddammit,” he said.

“I was sick when I found them. Then I caught a glimpse of the guy while I was in the water. Grady, there are pebbles like this all over in that one spot. That guy tried to
kill
you!”

She was reacting to overlapping realities. He shared the feeling.

“Maybe,” he said. The light had been bad and getting worse. It was also possible he meant to miss, though a reason for this eluded him. “Did you see a rifle?”

“Yes.”

“Scoped?”

“It looked that way. It was one of those black rifles.”

Not enough to identify it, and he cautioned himself against assumptions. “How well did you see the guy?” he asked.

“Real.”

“Describe him.”

“I don't need to.”

“Nantz.”

She reached into her pack, took out her camera, a compact 35 millimeter with a 75- to 150-millimeter lens.

“He's in here,” she said, tapping the body.

“You got pictures?”

“If the rain doesn't get to them.” She poked him playfully and he winced. “Oh God. I'm sorry.”