Smoky Mountain Mystery 01 - Out on a Limb Page 7

  To Phoebe’s way of thinking Tesla was the perfect man. He was beautiful, brilliant, and geeky. He loved animals and lived off crackers and milk. He could’ve been the world’s first billionaire, but he wouldn’t take the time to sign the paperwork because he didn’t want to be distracted from his work.

  For the similar reasons he’d chosen to be celibate and unmarried. People who didn’t understand him said all kinds of goofy things about him, but his work spoke for itself. Some of the most famous scientists and inventors in history had stolen their best stuff from him, Edison for one. Tesla was the guy who was actually responsible for electricity and radio.

  Nikola was possibly one of the reasons Phoebe had never married. She didn’t dare tell anyone, though. They wouldn’t understand. Sometimes she thought she might be in contact with his spirit because whenever she thought of him for more than a few seconds, it made her dizzy and she could see visions of rainbows shaped like doughnuts and other things that didn’t actually exist as far as she knew.

  Reading the letters of Keats did something similar. She always got the feeling Keats was sitting next to her in bed, reading along with her, and really enjoying himself. Keats was pleasant company, but it seemed like a weird way to live and it wasn’t anything she could talk to anyone about.

  She took a hot bath with a few drops of spikenard in the water. Spikenard was the essential oil that Mary Magdalene poured over Jesus’s head in the incident that set Judas off. Just a couple of drops filled the room with a powerful, complex smell that had a hypnotic, tranquilizing quality. She could only imagine the effect of emptying a whole bottle of it onto someone.

  It was the calming aspect that Phoebe needed, although she naively hoped her trials were behind her. She stayed in the bath for quite a while, adding hot water several times before daring to go back to her bedroom. On the way she searched out a book from her small library.

  She climbed into her tall antique iron bed and got under a quilt covered with a pattern of small red roses. She sat propped up by four pillows and began re-reading Rudolf Steiner’s matter-of-fact explanation of why some people were able to communicate with the dead and others weren’t. And why some people had dreams that would come true the next day.

  It made Phoebe feel slightly less crazy to read Steiner’s calm descriptions of spiritual matters that might seem odd to people who didn’t have experiences like she did. Steiner was no nut. He was a scientist who’d invented a lot of great stuff like reinforced concrete. And he’d written the first books on organic farming and special education for handicapped people. And he’d been a contemporary of Tesla’s. She wondered if they knew each other.

  When she started having trouble following what she was reading, she closed the book and turned off the light, but still she didn’t lay down flat. She sat in the dark, staring, for a long time.

  She prayed hard for Sean, for the blond-haired girl in her dream, for Wanda and Mrs. Willard, for Doc and Jill, for Leon and Henry, her parents, and for the whole world.

  Sometime in the wee hours of the morning she finally drifted off to sleep.

  ***

  While Phoebe slept, Ivy Iverson roused again. She could no longer feel her legs at all. She had to get her weight out of the climbing harness because it was acting like a tourniquet on her lower extremities. And she was cold. She needed to get out of the wind. At this altitude, the temperature could drop thirty degrees or more at night and the dampness made the cold even more penetrating.

  Climbing was out of the question, as was re-rigging her ropes or anything else that required dexterity, or balance, or clear vision. But lowering herself was possible. All she had to do was press down on the Blake’s hitch and it would let her descend in a slow, controlled fashion. She remembered she wouldn’t be able to make it to the ground because she was very high in the tree and her ropes weren’t long enough. She struggled to focus. She had to be careful and not go down too far or she’d run out of rope and fall the remaining eight stories.

  If she could lower herself just enough to reach a limb to sit on, she thought maybe she could survive for a while longer. If she stayed hanging and exposed as she was, she didn’t think she’d make it. She marshaled what strength she had left and pressed carefully on the climbing knot. The gentle downward slide made her dizzy and nauseous. She thought she might be about to faint so she let go of the knot. As soon as she stopped applying pressure to the hitch, her descent arrested.

  There were no limbs directly below her, so somehow she was going to have to create enough lateral momentum to swing close enough to grab hold of one. That wasn’t an easy maneuver when she was in good condition, now it might prove impossible. But she had to try, so, like a small child in a swing whose legs were too short to reach the ground, she thrashed as rhythmically as she could and set herself to rocking.

  After long minutes of horrible nausea, she felt something scrape against her left hand and realized she’d touched evergreen needles. She lowered herself a few more inches and continued swinging until she managed to grab some twigs and use that as leverage to get an ankle onto the far side of a branch. Then she twisted and lowered herself until she was sitting astride a large limb with her back to the trunk of the giant hemlock. She scooted until her back was against the tree. Then she used her hands to lift her benumbed legs one at a time until she was sitting supported by the tree trunk with both legs stretched out in front of her.

  For safety, she remained tied into her harness and connected to the climbing rope, so that even if she fell off the limb where she was sitting, she wouldn’t go far. She lashed her legs loosely to the branch she sat on and used a short auxiliary loop to wrap around a small branch that jutted out beside her. She hoped that would keep her from pitching sideways. Then she went to sleep, or passed out. She was in no condition to tell the difference.

  Chapter 17

  What used to be a dream job, getting paid for hunting, had become a burden for Henry. The hours were terrible and there was no fun in it really. Things weren’t done in the old ways anymore. He wasn’t a hunter, he was a professional killer and he didn’t play fair. A six thousand dollar sound-suppressed sniper rifle and another four thousand for state-of-the-art night vision headgear meant his targets hardly had a chance.

  And after a certain point, the pure labor of killing got to be a real drag, literally. You couldn’t just kill and be done with it. You had to get rid of the body. Heaving dead weight through heavy undergrowth on such uneven ground was no easy task.

  He stepped carefully along the deeply rutted dirt path, placing one foot directly in front of the other. Although he was wearing boots with heavy lugged soles, his footfalls made virtually no sound. The Marines had taught him to walk like that. It was the military version of a model’s stalk down the catwalk.

  It was 3 a.m. There was only a sliver of a moon. The weak illumination it provided was almost totally obscured by the heavy cloud cover. He’d had the benefit of several hours of darkness for his eyes to adjust. He was always amazed at how well the human eye could see in the dark when there was no artificial light shining anywhere to spoil things.

  He didn’t need to rely on his own night vision though, because he had some high-tech assistance. An elastic headband held a sophisticated loupe in front of his right eye and provided him with an image so sharp he could make out individual blades of grass on the forest floor. The optical enhancement was so much better than his normal vision. It made him feel like Superman.

  He focused his mind until events from earlier in the day were forgotten. The mysterious backpack, the bears, the crowds in Cades Cove, the cabin on Laurel Ridge, and even running into Phoebe McFarland again. All these things were put aside.

  Henry heard something moving in the woods off to his right and instantly froze, in effect making himself invisible. Anyone looking his way would’ve been deceived by the expertly chosen leaves he’d sewn onto his camouflage ghillie suit. It was the latest in haute couture for stalkers.

 
He consciously forced himself to relax his grip on the rifle. The rustling continued, apparently angling toward the trail he was on, whatever it was would intersect the trail several yards ahead of where he was standing.

  Moments later something stepped out of the woods and onto the trail in front of him. Henry’s hybrid gaze, one mechanical eye and one green eye, met a pair of surprised but shrewd piggy eyes.

  The beast was sparsely covered with coarse black hair and sported an impressive set of curved, razor-sharp tusks, called tushes in the local language. Wild hogs, or tush hogs as they were called, were formidable creatures, pure survival machines. In Smokies dialect critters like this one were called Rooshins because they still bore traces of the original stock brought over from Russia.

  The fierce Russian hogs had been imported to a private hunting preserve long ago and had either escaped or been intentionally released into the surrounding wilderness. They were astonishingly aggressive animals. Homicidal marathon pigs. Even ones like this, which were the result of interbreeding with feral domestic hogs, had amazing abilities to fight, climb, and navigate the terrain. They had huge shoulders and tiny hindquarters like a Smokies version of a Tasmanian devil. A man would never be able to outrun one.

  But Henry was a brave man and an experienced professional hunter. Before the wild hog could gore him, it was dead.

  There’d been no loud crack from the rifle, so there was no echo to bounce off the neighboring ridge. The single shot he’d fired made only a popping sound because he was using subsonic ammunition and the rifle was silenced. Considering who he was and especially where he was, it wouldn’t do to make a lot of noise.

  He moved down the trail and knelt to make sure the boar was dead. He couldn’t leave the carcass where it was. He needed to move it well off the trail where it wouldn’t be seen or smelled by hikers.

  He slung his rifle across his back and grabbed a trotter. The terrain was steep and rough. It took twenty minutes to drag the body two dozen yards downhill through the dense brush. It was hard work and he was winded. He paused to rest.

  He heard a commotion up on the trail and turned to see what it was. He could make out nothing but a shadow with his naked eye, but the night loupe revealed a large black bear standing on the edge of the trail, looking at him, slapping its huge paws hard against the ground. He knew better than to run or climb a tree, so he stood his ground and quickly reviewed his options. The bear huffed and snorted and made gruesome clacking noises with its jaws.

  He let go of the pig’s foot. In the same instant, the bear started down the hill bounding in a series of great leaps, hooting like a baboon each time it hit the ground. The sight was terrifying, as it was meant to be.

  He continued to face toward the bear, but moved off to one side, away from the hog’s body, as quickly as he could without appearing to be fleeing. The bear ignored him, snatched up the hog carcass up in its jaws, and ran back up the bank with it. It was unbelievable. It took the bear less than a minute to take the hog back to the same place it’d been shot.

  He marveled at the bear’s strength and at his own luck. Then he made his way back to the trail, taking a wide detour around the bear’s impromptu feast. A hundred yards further along the ridge he came to a tent pitched right in the middle of the trail.

  He mumbled some choice words when he saw it.

  Two backpacks were resting on the ground, leaning against the side of the tent. Light snoring could be heard coming from within. Eejits, he thought. It was local dialect for idiot handed down from the Gaelic.

  He slipped off his night vision headpiece and his ski mask, and stashed them with his rifle behind a tree before approaching the tent. Then he squatted down and said, “Hey in there. You need to wake up.”

  He heard movement and mumbling from inside.

  “It’s Henry Matthews. I’m a park ranger,” he continued. “Sorry, but you can’t camp here, it’s illegal. You need to get up right now and move on down to one of the shelters. It’s not safe for you to stay here. There’s a black bear in the area.”

  Both the bear and the hog could’ve been on their way to the tent when he’d intercepted them. How many times and how many different ways could people be told and still not hear? They were risking their lives whenever they failed to secure their food and their packs well away from their tent. Instead these two had actually baited a trap with themselves.

  Henry waited for the couple to dress, trying not to listen to the grumbling going on inside the tent. Then he spent the next hour escorting them to the closest shelter and showing them how to use the cables to stow their gear up in the air, away from the sleeping area.

  As he continued on his regular patrol, he contemplated events of the night. Bears and hogs weren’t stupid. They didn’t enjoy making life hard for themselves, so if there was a convenient trail, they took it. Seventy-two miles of the Appalachian Trail, known as the AT, ran through the park, following the highest ridgeline in the Smokies. As he walked the trail, his feet straddled the boundary between Tennessee and North Carolina. At night, the narrow rutted track was an interstate for critters through the national park.

  He marveled that although he was moving away from a stretch with the highest altitudes in the entire 2,178 mile-long Appalachian Trail, there were no majestic vistas because the path ran through dense forest. Hiking it in the middle of the night like he did, there was even less of a view.

  For all the heart-warming imagery built up around being a park ranger he sometimes felt like he was simply a paid poacher. He roamed the most densely trafficked areas, stealthily murdering hairy critters in an effort to hold back the surging tide of wildflower-eating, trail-plowing pigs that were spoiling things for tourists, hikers, and the indigenous plants and animals that had the right to call this place home. The stinking invaders were strong and clever and had endless appetites.

  The events of this evening made it clear that he’d killed so many hogs on the AT, to protect clueless hikers like the ones he’d just encountered, that the bears had learned to recognize the sound of his suppressed rifle. He’d created Pavlov’s bears. For them, the distinctive muffled crack was now serving as a dinner bell. The bear tonight had gotten to him awfully quick, so they must have started to trail him while he was hunting.

  Henry suspected he’d have nightmares about the huge bear hooting and bouncing downhill toward him. He shivered at the thought.

  Chapter 18

  Fall was crunch time for the bears. They turned into eating machines, desperate to consume as many calories as they could so they’d have a good chance to survive the winter sleep and the first few weeks of spring when there weren’t many edible plants available. The bears’ focus on food meant they were less prone to abandon their eating and run away when they saw people, thus allowing aggressive photographers and other types of idiots to get closer than normal while they were foraging.

  Things were a lot more likely to go wrong when people crowded the bears. Because of this, during the fall, Henry worked as close to 24/7 as he could. So after just a few hours of sleep, he resumed his search for the owner of the backpack. He dropped by his subterranean cubbyhole of an office in the National Park Service Headquarters building at The Sugarlands, an impressive stone structure built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930’s. He called around to all the ranger stations and visitor centers to see if anyone had reported an incident with a bear or the loss of a backpack.

  There were the usual DUIs, car wrecks, heart attacks, and sprained ankles that had to be dealt with, but nothing had been reported that seemed related to the backpack. Each of the people reported missing on trails during the previous week had been found and returned to their vehicles in good enough condition to drive home on their own. Next, he checked the master schedule of events in the park and saw that nearly a dozen flora and fauna surveys were in full swing. He headed for the Twin Creeks Science and Education Center to see if any of the survey participants were missing or had lost a backpack.


  Twin Creeks was the command center for Discover Life in America, DLIA, and its All Taxa Bio-Inventory activities. The building was a striking bit of green architecture built on an open plan, with gigantic wooden beams cut from trees harvested from the building site, a foundation of rounded stones gathered from a creek that ran alongside the building, glass walls, and plenty of skylights.

  He arrived during the morning briefing before the forayers, questers, and blitzers dispersed into the field for the day’s work. Henry politely interrupted the speaker and held up the ominously shredded backpack. “I’m trying to find the owner of this backpack. Do any of you recognize it?”

  Several people came forward for a closer look. Two men were especially intense in their examination. The younger of them said, “I think I know who this belongs to. This purple is pretty distinctive. I think its Ivy’s. Ivy Iverson’s.”

  “What’s your name?” Henry asked.

  “Tim Cardwell.”

  “How do you know Ivy?”

  “She’s my girlfriend,” Tim said, and then he shot an angry look toward the man standing next to him and said, “My ex-girlfriend.”

  “Are you from this area?” Henry asked, noting the man’s orange and white t-shirt.

  “Yeah, I’m a Ph.D. candidate at U.T. in bryophyta.”

  “What’s that?” Henry asked.

  “Mosses and liverworts.”

  “What can you tell me about Ivy?”

  “She’s at U.T., too. In mycology.”

  “Do you know how she might’ve lost her pack?”

  Cardwell shook his head. “I haven’t been in touch with her recently.” He shot the other man another hard look as he said it. “Where’d you find it?”

  “Cades Cove,” Henry said. “Does she go there a lot?”