The Madman of Black Bear Mountain (5 page)

The Ms and Randall looked perplexed. Max seemed to get it, though—our close call with the bear hadn't frazzled her at all, but when she realized Jim was gone, she started to sweat.

“A bear rampaging through camp might create a heck of a diversion,” I theorized, really hoping I was wrong.

“And the zipper on Jim's tent isn't just open, it's torn,” Frank added, shining his light on the tent flap, which was streaked with red like the floor. “Like there was a struggle.”

Melissa chewed anxiously on her bottom lip. “You don't really think someone meant for the bear to come into camp so they could take Jim, do you?”

“His tent is the farthest from the fire and closest to the woods,” I said, peering into the shadowy forest beyond the tent. “It would have made him the easiest target if someone did.”

“What if they plan to come back and pick us off one by one, like in the movies?” Randall whined.

“But that's crazy!” Mandy cried. “Who would want to do such a thing?!”

The answer hit us all at the same time. The girls gasped, Randall whimpered, and Max's hand reflexively shot down to the handle of the knife she wore on her hip.

“What if the Mad Hermit of Black Bear Mountain is real?” Frank murmured.

“Everyone stay right here,” Max commanded before we had a chance to react to Frank's terrifying suggestion. “I'm going to find your teacher.”

“Don't leave us!” Mandy pleaded, grabbing her arm.

“Everything is going to be fine,” Max tried to reassure us, but from the way she was scanning the woods with her eyes, she was obviously on high alert. “He probably just got scared off by the bear and got himself lost. Stay put and I'll be back with Jim in an hour, by the time the sun is all the way up.”

She turned and stalked back to her camp before anyone had a chance to protest.

“Stupid amateur campers,” I heard her grumble as she left. “I'm supposed to be a scientist, not a babysitter.”

Max rode out of camp a few minutes later, calling over her shoulder, “One hour!”

But two hours later, she was still gone. Three hours later, the awful reality hit us.

We were stranded alone in the wilderness. No adults, no way to call for help, and, quite possibly, a killer on the loose.

W
E'RE ALL GOING TO DIE!”
Randall wailed, burying his face in his hands.

“We're not going to die, Randall,” I said firmly before his hysteria had a chance to spread—I just hoped I sounded more confident about it than I felt. “We just need to stay calm and come up with a plan.”

“Yeah, don't be so dramatic, Randall,” Melissa said, trying to put on a brave face. “Frank and Joe must deal with this kind of thing all the time in their detective work, right, guys?”

Melissa and Mandy looked at us expectantly. Sure, Joe and I have gotten out of some tight spots, but being stranded on a remote mountaintop with a mad cannibal wasn't one of them.

“We don't need detectives,” Randall moaned. “We need an airplane!”

“You're right, and we're going to signal for one,” Joe said. “One of the first things we need to do is build a signal fire that can be seen from the air to alert any passing planes that we're in distress.”

“That's our best bet,” I agreed. “Since Jim's bag has the maps and the GPS, we're not going to be able to hike anywhere for help without getting lost and making it harder for someone to find us.”

I looked up at the dense canopy of trees shading our campsite. “A couple of us are going to have to go on a short scouting mission, though. We need to find a better location to build a fire. That will also give us a chance to scope out the terrain and see if we can spot Max's ranger station to radio for help.”

“No way,” Mandy protested. “We are not splitting up.”

“Yeah, every time someone leaves the camp, they don't come back!” Melissa added.

“Frank's right, guys,” Joe said gently. “Normally, the best thing to do in this kind of situation would be for everyone to stay where they are and wait for rescue, but our camp is too densely wooded to signal for help. And thanks to that bear, we don't have enough food or water to just wait around for three days.”

He kicked one of the empty jugs of water the bear had ransacked along with all our grub.

“But can't we all just go together?” Melissa asked.

“I'm sorry, Melissa. We need everyone else to stay here in case Jim and Max come back,” I said, looking back up at the storm clouds that had started to roll in. “Besides, we already have fire and shelter here, which are the two most critical things you need for wilderness survival. It would be too dangerous for all of us to go stumbling around the woods without knowing what's out there.”

“Or who,” Randall said ominously. “No way am I going out there. Not with some crazy killer on the loose.”

“How heroic of you, Randall,” Mandy sneered.

“Hey, I'd rather be a live chicken than a barbecued hero,” he shot back.

“I'll go,” Melissa volunteered softly.

“That's really brave of you,” I told her. “But Joe and I have the most outdoors training and we work well as a team. It will be the quickest way for us to signal for help and make it back here safely.”

“Just stay alert and light the fire again and we'll be back before you know it,” Joe said, trying to sound cheery as we left the rest of the Geccos and set out on our own.

We made our way uphill through the woods, figuring higher ground would be our best bet. We looked around carefully, moving as silently as we could to stay off the radar of any hungry predators. And I don't mean bears.

If it were just a matter of being lost in the woods, we probably would have called out for Jim and Max as we went,
but the possibility of a Mad Hermit out there waiting to turn us into lunch changed the game.

“There,” Joe whispered, pointing through the trees to what looked like a clearing.

“That'll work,” I said a minute later as we peered out at a large meadow surrounded by trees. “It doesn't give us much of a view to look for the ranger station, but any planes passing over this side of the mountain should be able to see it.”

“It's going to be impossible to stay quiet while we gather wood, so we just have to move as quickly as we can,” Joe said, scanning the tree line to make sure we were still alone.

It really stunk that we weren't getting a chance to actually stop and appreciate the mountainside. I normally would have been totally psyched to be somewhere so beautiful and wild—but in our current situation, stranded, with two people missing and the threat of a killer hiding behind every tree, Black Bear Mountain seemed more like a death trap than a nature preserve.

As I reached down to pick up some firewood, I noticed just how cool the forest floor looked. It was like standing on a carpet of funky green moss with patches of tiny blue flowers and feathery green shrubs polka-dotted with bright red and yellow blossoms. All those plants growing together rang a bell in my mental library.

“Hey, check this out,” I whispered to Joe. “These plants are indigenous to the mountain ranges of eastern Europe
and central Asia! I recognize them from one of the botany books in Jim's classroom.”

Joe looked at me like I was insane.

“It's like a patch of forest from Mongolia or Siberia somehow wound up on top of a mountain in America!” I explained. “It could be scientifically significant. I wonder if this is one of the things Max is studying. It would be fascinating to find out how the plants got here and what kind of effect they have on the native ecosystem.”

“Leave it to my brother to geek out about local flora while we're being stalked by a crazed cannibal,” Joe muttered. “Now let's get this fire started before it starts to rain.”

“Oh right, sorry about that,” I said with an embarrassed glance up at the darkening sky. “I guess I can get a little overexcited about this kind of nature stuff sometimes.”

“I hadn't noticed,” Joe said, rolling his eyes. “I was going to suggest making three separate fires in the shape of a triangle like we learned in survival boot camp, but maybe we should just try to get one big one going first before it rains.”

Luckily, there were a couple of old downed trees right on the edge of the clearing, which made wood gathering easier. We grabbed some live spruce boughs as well, knowing green wood creates lots of smoke, which would make the fire easier to spot from far away. We piled it all up in the middle of the clearing, away from the trees, so we wouldn't accidentally set a forest fire. The first drops of rain started to plop down around us just as we managed to get it lit.

“If you want to work on feeding the fire, I'll use the extra wood to make a big
X
on the ground next to it,” I told Joe. “That way they there'll still be a distress signal for someone to spot after the fire goes out.”

“Sounds like a plan, man. Let's—” Joe stopped midsentence and looked up toward the woods. “Did you hear that?”

I froze in place, scanning the tree line and straining to hear any sign that someone might be out there. Suddenly every shadow and rustling branch seemed threatening, but I couldn't see or hear anything out of the usual.

“Sorry, dude, I think I'm just on edge,” Joe said after an excruciatingly long minute of silence. “It was probably just a squirrel or something. Let's finish up and get out of here.”

As soon as Joe turned back to the fire, the unmistakable sound of a horse neighing snapped our attention right back to the woods.

“That's got to be Max's horse, right?” I asked hopefully.

The horse burst into the clearing, answering the question for us.

It was Max's horse, all right. Only it seemed to have found a new rider—a hairy ax-wielding man covered in tattered animal skins and war paint!

A
NY HOPE I HAD THAT
Jim and Max were okay vanished as the distance closed between us and the nightmarish figure on Max's horse.

The deranged rider bore down on us in silent fury, ax raised to strike. With all the pelts whipping around, our attacker looked more monster than human, like something a mad scientist had stitched together from pieces of ten different animals! A grimacing bear's head covered the top of the rider's face, a furry beard obscured the bottom, and the skin in between was smeared with black ash and bloodred war paint. Or maybe it was just blood.

The Mad Hermit of Black Bear Mountain apparently
was
real, and it had Max's horse, which meant it probably
had Max too. And if we didn't act fast, the Hardy boys were going to be the hermit's next victims.

“Run!” Frank screamed.

Between the hooves thundering against the ground, the actual thunder ripping through the sky, and my heart trying to beat its way out of my chest, I could barely hear him. That didn't stop me from running, though.

Frank sprinted for the woods with me at his heels as the hoofbeats grew louder behind us and the sky opened up, unleashing a torrential downpour. We plowed blindly into the thick brush at the other end of the clearing, where it would be harder for the horse to follow—which would have been great if the clearing hadn't been right on the edge of a hidden gulch.

One second we were running through the woods and the next we were rolling straight down a humongous hill! I tried to grab hold of something to slow myself down, but the hill was too steep, especially with the rain turning everything around us to mud. I tumbled head over heels after my brother, praying we weren't about to roll right off the side of the mountain.

I heard a thump followed by an “Umph!” when Frank hit the bottom and braced myself for impact.

“Oof!” I grunted as I rolled to a surprisingly gentle stop beside my brother. I opened my eyes, hoping I hadn't broken every bone in my body and was in too much shock to realize it. But nope! We'd landed in a huge bed of lush green ferns!

“Huh,” Frank said, examining one of the leaves. “This looks like
Dennstaedtia punctilobula
.”

“Whatever it's called, it's my new favorite plant,” I said. “I thought we were goners for sure.”

“We still might be,” Frank reminded me, shifting his gaze back up to the top of the hill.

I was so disoriented from our fall, I'd almost forgotten what we'd been running from in the first place! I stared up anxiously, but there was no sign of the Mad Hermit.

“That hill might have saved our lives,” Frank said. “Do you think we lost him?”

“I don't know. It's too steep for him to make it down on horseback, but he knows these woods a lot better than we do,” I said, squinting to see through the downpour. “Let's find some kind of shelter where we can hide until the rain lets up.”

“When in doubt, follow running water downstream,” Frank said, recalling another wilderness survival lesson, pointing to the swelling brook running downhill through the ferns. “I bet that eventually feeds into the rapids we saw from the plane beneath the ranger station.”

Two good things about being pelted by pouring rain were that it made it easier for us to move silently through the woods and a lot harder for someone to track us. It also made for a pretty miserable hike, though, so I was relieved when I saw the opening to a cave at the base of a rocky ledge.

I pointed it out to Frank, and we approached cautiously in case any wild animals had the same idea about waiting out the storm.

“I can't see more than a few feet in,” Frank said as we ducked into the cavern and out of the rain.

“I only have a few matches left,” I told him, reaching into my pocket for the little waterproof survival kit I always carry with me while exploring. “But we should at least be able to scope it out to see if it's safe.”