Chapter #24Where the Wild Things Are, Part 1 by: Seuzz   After your night at Glundandra's old house, you'd bet that your impersonation can pass muster with any of the Stellae, but of course you can't be sure until you submit yourself to inspection. And you don't know when you'll be able to do that, since you've now a character to play, and that character is in the middle of a job. Best then, you decide, to send your crew home. return to diana, await orders, you text Cox. OOR until further notice, inform vulcan. You delete all texts from Fane along with your replies.
Then you turn over the truck motor and head out to Bixby.
* * * * *
It's a circuitous four-hour drive through the mountainous back roads to the little town that is Olympia's nearest neighbor. You get a burger at a café you know, then drive out to the trailhead. There isn't a state or national park here, only old logging and mining tracks that quickly peter out before hitting the really rough country. There's another vehicle at the roadside where you dismount, but it's a camper, so you doubt you'll run into a serious hiking party; and sure enough, within ten minutes of your start you pass a family of four who are having a pleasant picnic next to a tall rock. You nod in a friendly way, and plunge into the trees. After a few hundred yards, you come out into a high glade that looks over Bixby itself, and by a trick of the acoustics the rumble of traffic seems to focus here. But the shoulder of the hill curves sharply back, and once you are around it there is only the occasional grinding passage of jets high overhead to remind you of civilization.
The sun is hot and the insects are loud and the slope turns steep after you've gone half a mile. You wipe your brow and drop your pack long enough to orient yourself on the map. The track of the thing Frank was following had plunged into a ravine, but after half a day hiking up and down without picking it up again, he had grimly concluded that his quarry had gone up and out the other side of that sharply notched valley. Since its trail had been leading steadily higher up country, he'd concluded it was heading toward a tangle of knife-like ridges known locally and colloquially as The Devil's Molars. He'd spat hard in frustration: It would only head there if it was going to climb over them and come down the other side. So now your only real hope of picking up its trail is to hike over to those same ridges and try finding it on this side; in this country, that will take at least a day and a half. You swallow a mouthful of water, swing your pack back onto your shoulders, and resume your climb.
Dirt. Rocks. Dry bramble and brush on the ground. Above, tall trees with spreading limbs and quivering leaves that scatter the sunlight. The acrid, dusty, energizing scent of evergreens. The hills are steep enough you have to mount them in a zig-zag fashion, which steers you farther and farther from your goal. A little after two you find yourself blocked by a steep gully liberally littered with mossy boulders, from the recesses of which sounds the soft gurgle of a running trickle. You pause for nourishment and reconnaissance, taking one of Aparjita's strengthening loaves ("Indian lembas," Joe calls it) and some dry fruit. You also indulge yourself with a mouthful of the dark, almost viscous homemade beer that Steve learned to craft his first summer back from college. You push your hat back and study the slope of the hill. You can't get across the gully without traveling too far back down, so you'll have to chance finding a crossing point farther up. But the slope here is so bad you'll have to lean in and lope up it like a gorilla.
Your calves, knees, and lungs are scorching when you level out an hour later, but the exertion was worth it, for you've reached a shoulder where you can turn your back on that gully (which just got deeper and rockier the higher you climbed) and return the direction you wanted to go in the first place. Instead of resting, you push on, trying to make up time, and trusting to the level ground to let you slowly recover. The trees fall away and you come to a vast, open glade covered in tall, thick, stiff grass. A bumblebee drones past, and as you follow it with your eyes you spot something gray and crooked to your left. You trudge over to investigate, and find broken, weathered timbers propped over a depression in the ground. A rusted metal chain curls nearby. An old well? You look around. Are you so fucking incompetent that you missed a trail leading up here?
You leave it as a profitless mystery and press across the glade. The unfiltered sun soon has you sweating hard beneath your hat. You double-check the map, and grimace to see that your most direct route won't take you back under the canopy but into semi-open country. But the ground continues level, undulating gently, and you rapidly cover several miles after you recover enough to take it at a careful jog.
Your immediate goal is a kind of escarpment, a ridge of high, weather-stained white rock that leads directly to The Devil's Molars (being a trailing tentacle of the same), and it comes into view when the sun is still a few fingers over the horizon. You glance between the sun and your destination, and decide you likely can't reach it before dark, so you scout out possible camp sites. You settle on a kind of grassy hammock between two lobes of hill, one of which shows a berm of exposed rock that's a local high point, good fallback for defense if you need it. You drop your pack from your aching shoulders and take out a trowel-like silver knife. It easily slices through the thick, wiry roots of the grass and into the thin loam beneath, and with it you expertly outline three overlapping triangles; pacing each, you murmur and weave protective imprecations against wildlife. Into one triangle you put your pack; into another, your food stores; inside the third you spread a blanket. For supper you eat trail mix, jerky, and instant potato soup cooked on the portable burner. You wouldn’t waste water on the latter, but the maps shows some small lakes a little higher up where you can refill your canteen.
The Moon is out (and it doesn't disturb you this time) and the Milky Way is a shining haze when you pack everything back up again. A chilly wind begins to blow, but you can't make a fire, not in this thick grass and without any good wood, so you just wrap yourself up tightly and fall into a meditative trance. You are only vaguely aware of the night's struggles, however, and wake briefly many hours later when the cold moon is already beginning to set. You curl up and put yourself back to sleep.
* * * * *
The protective sigils show no sign of siege when you next wake to find the sun already creeping into the low sky. You cuss softly to yourself before realizing it's much earlier than you'd feared; you're on a high hill, so the sun rises early here. Your gear is already packed, so after swapping out t-shirts you stretch and warm up, then take a bite of bread and some coffee for breakfast before hiking your pack back onto your shoulders. You erase and kick over the traces of the sigils, as carefully as if they were a fire.
The air is cool but the sun is strong, a perfect combination for making good progress over easy ground, and almost before you know it you've reached that escarpment. It's steep, though, and covered with boulders, so you skirt it. After a few miles you come to one of those lakes. The water is low, with floating scums of algae, but you filter it and treat it and refill your canteen. About half a mile after that you find a broken place on the escarpment that's like an on-ramp. You study it carefully before mounting, but can only find deer tracks. You come out atop something like a causeway for giants.
Except in the direction you need to go, the ground falls away on all sides, so that you can glimpse even the washed out peaks of a mountain range sixty miles away, and when you've made it over a nearby hump you see The Devil's Molars themselves, looking even more sheer on this side than on the other. You consult the map, and identify the spot where your quarry is likely to have crossed. You're happy to see that this ridge will lead directly to that pass. So you press on carefully and slowly, with eyes down, scanning for any sign of its passage.
You're taking lunch on a high boulder when something in the distance catches your eye. The sun is behind a cloud, so you pull off your sunglasses for a better look; and then you dig out your binoculars. There's something on the grassy hills below, a couple of hundred yards off. Something that is a raw, red color.
You swallow down the last of an apple, shove the core into a pocket, and, grasping your biggest knife, slide heedlessly down a steep, rocky slope so you can jog in for a closer look.
It's a grizzly bear, a big one, and it's been disemboweled from its chin to its asshole, its guts flung far and wide; its face has been gnawed off. You cover your mouth and nose with one hand against the stench.
Where it isn't red with blood it is black with flies, a seething rug of stinging insects. You carefully withdraw before any can light on you. You have the following choice: 1. Continue |
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