“You think they knew we were camped right here?” she asked. I told her my theories, emphasizing the one that had the dogs running loose in the area. It had been a noisy thirty seconds in the camp, but the wind had been up, and if the Creighs were west of us, or across the lake, they might not have heard the ruckus.
“If they have a base camp up here, they might just turn some of the pack loose at night. The dogs would come back to them for food, but in the meantime, they’re bred to attack strangers. They might just have blundered onto us, or smelled the shepherds.”
“We have to assume they know now, though?” Carrie said.
“Be a good bet,” I said. “They’ll be short two dogs, if nothing else.” It was an uncomfortable assumption, but probably a valid one for a change. The sky was clearing, but the wind was still blowing low-flying scud clouds across the mountaintops, which meant that they came right through the camp, like fat ghosts, accompanied by blasts of sleet. Between squalls I could see Mose sitting like the proverbial Indian in his shelter, stick in hand, staring watchfully into the darkness. It was going to be a long damned night.
21
We disposed of the two dead dogs in the morning by throwing their stiff carcasses down the slope. The sky had come out deep blue, and the air temps hovered around forty. There was a light dusting of snow on the slopes leading down to the lake, whose surface was steaming due to the sudden drop in temperature. We had coffee and some rewarmed biscuits, fed my dogs, and waited for the sun to hit the magic angle. We had a clear field of view down the slope to the lake’s shores, so I put the shepherds out in the woods where the cover was thickest, just in case there were more incoming Creigh-dogs out there.
“I think that’s what we’re looking for,” Carrie said, pointing down into the lake. Mose and I stared down the hill but couldn’t see anything except the lake itself, which was about a half-mile-long, almost perfect blue oval surrounded by a gravel margin and dense stands of pine on all sides except ours. A nearly vertical spine of rock stood out over the right-hand end, dropping some two hundred sheer feet into the water and looking like the prow of a ship frozen in stone. Then we saw what she was pointing at: a deeper shade of blue in the water at the base of that rock formation, which extended out to encompass the right-hand quarter of the lake. The water was obviously much deeper there, and if our eyes weren’t deceiving us, the hole in the bottom was in the shape of a giant cone, perhaps four hundred feet across and perfectly round. As the sun rose higher it became better defined until we could see it very well.
“It’s like one of those old Victrola record-player horns, only under water,” Carrie said. “It looks like it goes down under that rock formation.”
I pulled out my monocular and scanned that axe-head-shaped cliff from bottom to top. I don’t know what I was expecting to see, but nothing jumped out at me. There was a tiny level space at the top, and you could imagine one of those Mexican acrobatic divers doing his flying Maya thing from there. The slopes of the surrounding hill framed the rock spine like a house gable all the way up to about the same elevation where we had camped. I couldn’t see any signs of human disturbance, but the dense pines could be concealing a multitude of bad guys.
“I think I’m going to take the shepherds out on a little scouting expedition,” I said. “There might be enough snow on the ground to get an idea of where those dogs came from last night.”
“And what happens if you succeed?” Mose asked.
Good question, I thought. “I’ll back the hell out and regroup,” I said.
“They may come up with a different plan,” he said.
“We can’t just sit here and soak up another night like last night,” I said. “Besides, we’re looking to retrieve some lost kids before they get really lost.”
“Shouldn’t we scout together?” Carrie asked, obviously uncomfortable with the idea of me and the shepherds leaving. I wanted to do this alone. My dogs worked better if they had only one human to protect.
“There’s the glass hole,” I said, pointing down into the lake. “I think that bears watching. I’ll be back in an hour, hour and a half. If I get in trouble I’ll start shooting. I’m going to go back into these woods right here and circle around to the base of that rock formation.”
Mose shrugged and said okay. I knew he didn’t want to mix it up with any Creighs, but Carrie still wasn’t happy. I left her my handgun and took the rifle.
The shepherds and I slipped into the pine forest, moving methodically to get a good stand of trees between us and any watchers who might be down on the lake. The forest was filled with little clumping sounds as the pine branches dumped snow on the ground beneath them. The forest floor was covered in pine needles with a thin, crusty blanket of snow that was disappearing fast. I had hoped to track the dogs that had attacked us last night, but the snowfall hadn’t been substantial enough here in the pines to help. I stopped from time to time just to listen, but all I could hear was the wind through the pines and the shepherds snuffling ahead of me.
When I thought I’d gone far enough into the pines, I turned left and began to make my way toward that rock formation. I didn’t need a compass-as long as I kept the downslope to my left, I had to be working my way around the lake’s rim, albeit a few hundred feet above it. We’d been gone from the camp about thirty minutes when I heard the all too distinctive sound of a large-caliber rifle booming through the trees back to my left. The dogs and I stopped in our tracks and listened to the echoes of the shot reverberating across the nearby ridges. I couldn’t see anything but the trees around me, but the one thing I did know was that it hadn’t come from our camp.
The question was-had it been fired into our camp? I had to go back.
I took my time making the final approach out of the dense pines to the camp itself, not wanting to blunder into an ambush. The shepherds didn’t appear to be wary or alarmed, but all that meant was that there was no one hiding close by. A distant rifleman would pose a different problem. I kept looking for landmarks, although I knew I was retracing my steps, because I could still see them faintly in the rapidly melting snow crust. Finally I moved behind a large pine tree from which I could see most of the camp.
What I couldn’t see was Carrie or Mose. Were they hiding undercover somewhere after that shot?
I sent the dogs down the hill and into the camp, where they ran around in circles. No one appeared. Then Frack started yipping excitedly, his face pointed into one of the tree-branch shelters. I hurried down there, afraid of what I might find. If Frack was that upset, I knew it wasn’t going to be good news, and it wasn’t.
There was a blood trail in the thin film of snow. It came from the edge of the trees toward the lake and ended in the shelter. I got low and scuttled over to the shelter. Mose was inside, curled up on his side with both bloody hands holding his chest. He was still breathing, short and shallow, but his eyes were closed and his face was an unnatural shade of white. It looked like a very bad wound, but it was hard to tell with his bulky jacket.
As I knelt by the side of the shelter, I looked around for Carrie but saw no signs of her. I looked at the snow, which was obliterated by many footprints. Ours? Or theirs? There was no way to tell. Mose groaned and opened his eyes. The shepherds sat five feet away, watching carefully. They knew when something was seriously wrong in the human world.
“What happened?” I asked him.
“Long gun,” he whispered. “Two guys took Carrie.”