Murder on High (18 page)

“Which means that Clough must have been right about the retrievable bolt.”

“I reckon,” said Tracey. He whistled and then tossed out another peanut. The chipmunk scampered over, took the peanut in its mouth, then raced back to the safety of his rock.

“Brazen little beggar,” said Tracey as he took the cup of cappuccino.

“They’re probably used to campers.” Sitting back down, Charlotte took the first bite of her dinner. The sauce wasn’t bad, but what was supposed to be chicken tasted like wedges of damp cardboard.

Tracey peered at her over his cup, his blue eyes dancing. “Leaves something to be desired, does it?” he said in response to her grimace.

“This may be the way I like to cook, but it’s not the way I like to eat.” She looked at him accusingly. “What’s this about making me the decoy?” she teased. “Haven’t you got any girl rangers?”

“Yes,” he said. “But they’re just that—girls. Pamola has a taste for older women.” He grinned. “For that, I can’t say I really blame him. I was pretty sure you’d go for it. Nervous?” he asked.

“A little. Like before a big scene. Actually, the thought of someone dressed up as Pamola doesn’t scare me,” she said. “But the thought of the pistol crossbow does. Where’s your lean-to?” she asked.

“Over there,” he said, nodding at the roof of a lean-to about fifty yards in front of her own. It could just be seen through the trees. “But I’m not going to be there. Pyle will be, but not me.”

“Where the hell are you going to be?” she protested. “You’d better be somewhere close by. You’re supposed to be protecting me.”

His gaze fell on a boulder the size of a small car that was nestled in the underbrush just in front of her lean-to. “In the puckerbrush right behind that rock,” he said. “Armed and ready. Just in case Pamola decides to get notional.”

“If Pamola decides to get notional, as you put it, you’d better damned well be armed and ready,” she said. “And a crack shot, besides.”

“Don’t worry,” he said. “He’ll be dead and done for.”

After Tracey had returned to his lean-to, Charlotte did her washing up, which wasn’t all that easy without a sink, and then unrolled her sleeping bag. The wind had picked up, and she set up her bed at the rear of the lean-to to be as far out of it as possible, and to be as far away as possible from her expected visitor. The noises of the campsite—the banging of the latrine door, the occasional peal of laughter, the clinking of pots and pans—were dying down as the sun descended behind the mountain. The campsite was retiring for the evening. Charlotte thought of Tracey, and wondered if he had already taken up residence in the underbrush behind the rock. After one last visit to the latrine—she didn’t want to have to get up in the middle of the night—she set the alarm on her watch for one
A
.
M
. Despite what Sargent had said about going to sleep as usual, she didn’t want to be caught off guard. Then she took off her boots and climbed into her sleeping bag, fully clothed. It wasn’t the most comfortable bed she had ever slept in, but it wasn’t as bad as she had expected, either. Her inflatable pillow was actually quite comfortable, as long as she avoided the revolver underneath. Most of all, it was warm. Once the sun went down, it had become quite cold, and she was happy to be snuggled into her down-filled bag. For reading material she had brought along
The Maine Woods
. Switching on her lantern, she started reading about Thoreau’s trip up the West Branch to Katahdin, but found her eyelids getting heavy at about the same time that Thoreau found himself in the cauldron of clouds enveloping the summit.

Setting down the book, she turned out her lantern. No sooner had she done so than she heard a rustling in the underbrush behind the lean-to. Was it Tracey, taking his place? But he was supposed to be sleeping behind the rock in front of her lean-to, not to the rear of it. Maybe it was the prankster, paying an early visit. As the rustling came closer, she groped for the revolver, and then lay there, her ears straining. Even closer now. Finally, she decided to get up. Crawling on her knees to the edge of the platform, with the revolver in one hand, she peered around the side wall of the lean-to.

Standing in the underbrush, chomping away as placidly as a cow, was a mother moose, and at her side was a big-eared, long-legged calf, still wearing the woolly coat of the newborn.

It wasn’t the first time she had seen a moose. She had seen several from the Interstate, and one up close: an enormous bull moose standing full square in the middle of a dirt road. Rather then getting out of the way, he had proceeded to trot slowly in front of her car for the best part of half a mile, as if he had wanted to see her safely home. But she had never failed to be astonished at how big they were, and amused by the ungainly appearance created by their oversized heads and long, spindly legs.

Sensing her, the moose turned her head and cocked her ears. Charlotte stayed stock-still, having heard that one should beware of a female with a calf. But the moose must have been as used to campers as the chipmunk had been, because she calmly turned back to her dinner, nipping the branch of a sapling with her protruding upper lip and then yanking her head backward and stripping off the leaves. She finished by biting off the tasty bud at the end, and then moved on, leaving a bare branch in place on the tree. When her calf got too far away, she would grunt, and the calf would come running back.

Charlotte was turning around when she noticed a familiar round face watching the moose from behind the boulder in the underbrush. She climbed back into her sleeping bag, reassured that she was in good hands.

The soft beeping of her watch awakened her at one. The wind had picked up, and it now sounded less like a whine or a hum than the plaintive wailing of a chorus of spirits. She was reminded again of Pamola, the evil spirit of the night wind. The walls of the lean-to offered scant protection. The wind rushed through the chinking as if it wasn’t there. The open side of the structure formed a frame for the night scene, in which the ghostly shapes of the birches swayed in the wind like emissaries from the underworld. Somewhere a saw-whet owl let out its peculiar, beeping cry, like the warning beep of a construction vehicle that is backing up. With a shiver, she snuggled back down into her sleeping bag to await Pamola’s arrival. The plank floor now felt as hard as a rock to her stiffening muscles, and she tossed and turned for several minutes before realizing that her foam mat had migrated across the floor of the lean-to. Moving it back into place, however, would require getting out of her sleeping bag, which she wasn’t eager to do. She could tell from the feel of the air on her cheek that it was cold—she would guess the temperature had dropped to somewhere around freezing—and the wind made it feel even colder. No, she definitely did not want to get out of her sleeping bag. But there was also the matter of her bladder, which was pressing uncomfortably against her lower abdomen. What to do? If she got up, would she alarm Tracey unnecessarily? Or, more importantly, would she risk scaring off Pamola? Deciding that there was no point in jeopardizing the whole operation on account of a foam rubber pad and a full bladder, she pulled up the hood of her sleeping bag and waited.

Lulled by the roar of the wind, she found herself transported to that state between waking and sleeping where thoughts seem to float up like bubbles from the unconscious and then pop on the conscious surface of the mind. That’s why she didn’t recognize the sound at first. It was a soft, monotonous, susurrant sound:
shh-shh, shh-shh, shh-shh
, like the pounding of the blood in her ears. It was only when the rhythm grew faster and the volume louder that she realized it was the shaking of a rattle. Reaching for the walkie-talkie next to her sleeping bag, she pushed the button five times in rapid succession. Then she groped for the gun under her pillow. She had just laid her hand on it when he appeared in front of her lean-to.

She had been expecting something on the order of a gorilla costume, something silly and frivolous. The Pamola prankster, they had called him, as if he were playing an innocent game. But he was more like a demon from your worst nightmare. He stood in the center of the open side of her lean-to wearing a gigantic birdlike mask with freakish, staring eyes whose whites gleamed in the moonlight, and a rack of moose antlers that must have been five feet across. His chest was bare and hairless, and painted with a chevron design of black and yellow stripes. Around his neck he wore a collar embroidered with a geometric design that matched the cuffs on his wrists, and a small triangular medicine bag made of beaded leather. His loins were covered with a leather breechcloth, and his shoulders with a long cape made of some rough black fur, maybe bear.

He was all the world’s most frightening gods—Pluto, Osiris, Shiva—rolled into one. He was all the bad things you had ever done, all the bad people you had ever known, all the bad memories tucked away at the back of your mind. Mesmerized by the repetitive shaking of the rattle, she sat up and watched, one hand still on the gun. Then she heard a chilling, high-pitched whine. At first she thought it was the saw-whet again. But then she realized that it had emerged from the throat of the beast: a tremolo of utter despair. His cry was followed by a quick, shrill, shriek of fear, which, she realized only after uttering it, had come from her own throat. And then he was gone.

“Halt!” Tracey shouted. Then he fired two warning shots, and took off into the underbrush after Pamola.

“I blew it,” she said for the tenth time. “I’m really sorry. I just plain blew it.” She was standing outside the ranger’s cabin an hour later with Tracey, Haverty, and Sargent. The others had all gone back to bed.

“No, you didn’t,” Tracey said. “You did exactly what you were supposed to do. You were supposed to be a camper who was frightened by Pamola, and that’s exactly what you were. You played your role perfectly.”

“We’re the ones who blew it,” Haverty said. He shook his head. “We had the people; we had the moonlight. I just don’t understand how he got past us. It was as if he just vaporized. The guy must be one hell of a hunter: he didn’t make a sound going through the woods.”

“He was probably wearing moccasins,” said Charlotte.

“Even so,” Haverty said. “We’ll look for his trail in the morning. At least we know for sure now that he headed off in the direction of the Saddle Trail. We’ve got a ranger here who’s an expert tracker. Maybe he’ll be able to figure out where he went from here.”

“Maybe he really is Pamola,” said Tracey, “and he just flew away to his cave up on the mountain.” He looked up at the Knife Edge, where the moon rested on the edge of the black silhouette of the headwall like a juggler’s ball on an outstretched arm.

“The old ranger who used to live here told me that Pamola lived in a hole just below Pamola Peak,” said Haverty. “He said he would come out on moonlit nights to roll the moon across the Knife Edge. See how it seems to be hung up there?” He nodded at the headwall.

They looked up at the moon, which did indeed seem to be stuck on one of the peaks on the Knife Edge.

“He used to say that the moon needed help getting over South Peak,” Haverty continued, “and that’s where Pamola would come in.” He shook his head at the memory. “He had a lot of stories about Pamola. And if you spend enough time here, you start believing some of ’em.”

Haverty talked for a few minutes more about the old ranger’s Pamola stories, and then excused himself to go to bed.

After yet another apology, Charlotte too said good night, and headed off in the direction of her lean-to. Though she carried a flashlight, she didn’t need it. The glowing disc that Pamola was pushing over the hump of South Peak shed light enough for her to see.

Back at lean-to number nine, she slid her foam mat back into place, climbed into her sleeping bag, and fell immediately to sleep.

10

The birds woke her at five
A.M.
They sang with the abandon of birds in early spring, joyous and exultant. Charlotte recognized some of them from their songs—the Swainson’s thrush, the white-throated sparrow, the chickadee, the winter wren—but there were others whose songs were unfamiliar. The bass note in this symphony was sounded by the thumping of the latrine door. The campsite was coming awake. She opened her eyes to the sight of the tips of the spruces and the new leaves on the birches bathed in the golden glow of first light. It was absolutely lovely, utterly still and clear. She couldn’t remember the last time she had been up this early. She breathed in the fresh air, and took note of the cloud of condensation as she exhaled. It was cold, but she felt as snug as a baby in a bunting in her warm sleeping bag. And despite the interruptions of the night before, she felt rested and relaxed.

After her own trip to the latrine, she went down to the pond to fetch some water. Then she lit her little stove, and set the water to boil for her breakfast. Once the water had come to a boil, she stirred in the contents of a packet of blueberry pancake mix. Then she set her skillet on the stove, and within a few minutes she was dining on a delicious blueberry pancake breakfast. She had always maintained that her idea of roughing it was to go from a four-star hotel to a three-star. But to her surprise, she was finding that she actually
liked
camping out. Of course, it had only been one night. She hadn’t even had to cope yet with the fact that there were no bathing facilities. But she was ready for more. In fact, she was falling in love with the mountain. Though this visit would be cut short—Pamola wasn’t likely to come back for another night of being shot at—she vowed to return. After breakfast, she fetched some more water and washed up her dishes. Afterward, she went around to the back of the lean-to to dump out her gray water, as the ranger had instructed. She was just turning back when she spotted an odd shape in the underbrush. Leaning over, she pushed the branches aside to get a better look.

It was a rattle: Pamola’s rattle—a round, smooth, cocoa-colored gourd with a shellacked surface. A peeled stick had been stuck into the gourd for a handle, and lashed to it with leather strips. Etched into its hard, shiny surface, like a petroglyph on the wall of a cave dwelling, was a primitive line drawing of a small, short-legged animal.