I told Mose but decided to wait to tell Carrie. I took it to mean that someone with dogs had come this way recently. It could have been anybody, because this area was either national park or state game land. I’d asked Mose if there was another way up to this lake, and he said sure-any direction would do. But this was the route you’d take if you’d driven a vehicle as close as you could get. One thing I knew: Grinny wasn’t up here. She couldn’t have climbed that slope in less than a year.
We made camp at the edge of a steep, rocky slope that led down to the lake itself. Mose had us set up two shelters using downed tree limbs and the living ends of pine tree branches, under which we rigged our tents and bags. He situated our camp just inside the tree line and faced the shelters into the woods, toward the east and away from the oval-shaped lake below. We’d packed enough gear and supplies for three days, in and out, with the plan being to spend tomorrow exploring the area around the lake and the so-called glass hole. If it was indeed under water, I wasn’t sure what we’d do.
We didn’t build a real fire for security reasons, using a spirit stove instead to heat our food and water for coffee. Mose warned us to set out warm clothes for the morning, as the temps were going to drop pretty fast once that front arrived. He was right about being careful not to show light, as it would have been visible for miles around. We didn’t know who else was out there, but those dog droppings indicated we were probably not alone. Men with dogs meant Creighs in my book.
I had my Remington 700P and a handgun; Carrie had her trusty nine. Mose carried a pepper-spray canister like the ones the park rangers used, as well as a little. 25-caliber boot gun. I’d brought my pocket monocular. The spotting scope had been too heavy to carry this far in-and up-with all the rest of the gear. We left our cell phones in the vehicles; up here they’d just be excess baggage. Mose showed us one useful electronic item he’d brought along.
“This gizmo here is called an EPIRB, which stands for emergency position indicating radio beacon. If we end up needing rescue, you fire this little jewel and a satellite picks up the signal. A report goes to the U.S. Air Force. They always wait for a second satellite hit, so don’t turn it off once you energize it. Then you’ll have an Air National Guard helo overhead in about two hours. Most of the guides out here carry one.”
As the sun went down, the surface of the lake was bright orange. Carrie asked why we hadn’t gone down to the lakeshore to camp.
“Because to see the glass hole, you apparently have to be above the lake,” Mose said. “Like I said, I’ve never been here before, but my buddy said to camp up here and wait a couple hours past sunrise. The light has to be just right to see it.”
“Well, if this is a submerged feature, what could that kid have meant when she said Grinny would put them in the glass hole? She was gonna drown ’em in the lake?”
“By me,” Mose said. “All I know about the Creighs is to steer clear of ’em. Everybody says they’re bad to the bone, and after what you guys have told me, I believe.”
We drank some coffee, laced with a contribution from my trusty flask, and then got ready to secure for the night. Mose said we weren’t quite done yet. He hung the food bag high in a tree against bears and marauding German shepherds, and then went out into the woods with his camp axe. He returned with three ten-foot-long, two-inch-diameter pine branches and told us we were going to make us some bear sticks. He handed us each a branch.
“I give up,” Carrie said, making an icky face when the pine sap got all over her hands. “What’s a bear stick?”
“We’re going to peel the bark off at both ends and then sharpen one end into a spear point,” he replied. “Then if a bear shows up in the middle of the night, we blind him with our flashlights, use the pepper spray to disorient him, and then jab him with these suckers to make him back out of his problem. Beats a gun every time.”
He showed us how to sharpen one end and cut ridges into the other for hand traction. I’d never made one of these, but it certainly made sense-especially since it would provide a silent defense option. The finished product was about eight feet long and heavy enough to make even a bear feel it. One of my buddies had shot a bear that rousted his camp-and shot him and shot him and shot him, mostly managing to piss him off. Pepper spray works much better: Anyone can outrun a blind and choking bear; outrunning a pain-maddened bear who can still see or smell you is something else again.
Carrie and I shared one shelter; Mose took the other. My mutts bedded down next to our pine-branch hooch. It was full dark when we hit our bags, and we’d been careful to keep our flashlights pointed down. We parked our spears next to the bags, along with our flashlights. Carrie, as usual, went down in about thirty seconds. I envied her ability to do that. My feeble brain always decided to review the day’s happenings and then all of tomorrow’s potential perils before finally switching into sleep mode.
The first dogs didn’t attack until after midnight, right about the time the cold front swept in over the western ridge and came across the lake looking for us. After our long hike up the slopes, both of us were sleeping pretty hard when I heard the first bursts of rain and wind come up the slopes from the lake to stir up the trees. It was a comforting sound, actually, as we were snug in our bags with the shelters’ backs to the wind, but all that changed when I heard a vicious dogfight break out in front of our shelter. I bailed out of my bag with a gun in one hand and my Maglite in the other in time to see Mose stabbing vigorously down at something between the two shepherds with his bear stick.
I threw the gun back into the shelter, grabbed my own stick, and swept the campsite with the light, illuminating two green eyes behind Mose. I just managed to get the stick pointed before the second dog came through the air and knocked me down. Fortunately he ended up impaling himself, so all he could do was lie there and bleed. I threw him off me, left the stick in him, grabbed Carrie’s stick, and moved to help Mose. I caught a brief glance of Carrie’s white face looking out from our shelter, but, heads-up girl that she was, she had my gun in her hand.
Mose no longer needed help. He had the big beast stuck to the ground with his bear stick while my shepherds savaged its face and head. I called them off and stabbed the thing once in the throat, which stopped most of the noise. My dogs circled it for a few seconds, then went over and began to tear up the wounded one. I dispatched that one, too, and then the rain came in like a solid wall and we all jumped back under our shelters.
“Are you okay?” Carrie asked.
“Got knocked down, but I don’t think he bit me,” I said. We used the Maglite to make sure that was true. I wanted to ask Mose if he was okay, but the wind and rain were coming in strong and there was no way we could talk. I finally got his attention, and he gave me a thumbs-up sign through the sheeting rain.
I looked at my watch. It was two thirty in the morning. We’d been asleep since about eight thirty, so whoever had dispatched the dogs had either been watching us and was really patient, or had just turned them loose in the area and told them to go feed. One thing was for sure-we were back in Creigh country.
The initial storm line blew over in about an hour, with more wind than precip. Then we got a brief epilogue of some stinging sleet, a half hour of flurries, and then just cold. I crawled out to retrieve our sticks and tried to listen for any signs of more dogs, but there was just enough wind up to make that impossible. Carrie was awake, too.