CHAPTER 14
Ferns
A full day had now passed since the big trout gave itself to him. Nick had seen no sign of the copter. It seemed as if their search for him had moved on.
But it had not stopped. He felt certain of that. The men who wanted him dead were still out there, somewhere ahead of him. He’d moved out of the bear’s den by the river.
“Wliwini, ktsi awasos,” he’d said, raising his hand toward the berry bushes where he did not doubt the bear was waiting to reclaim its resting place. “Thank you, great bear.”
Then he’d found another shelter under the wide-spreading roots of a big, blown-down cedar. He’d eaten, rested, taken more time to think.
Know your enemy. Nick couldn’t remember where he’d first heard that or if it was something he’d read. Was it The Book of Five Rings by Musashi Miyamoto, the greatest of all the Japanese samurai warriors? Or maybe The Art of War by Sun Tzu, the famous fourth-century BC Chinese general? Maybe both. What he knew for sure was that it was true. That kind of knowing meant knowing more if your enemy didn’t know you. It also meant knowing yourself. What you were capable of, what you could do.
Nick smiled as a story he did remember for sure surfaced in his mind. It was called “The Most Dangerous Game” and was the tale of a man named Rainsford who found himself stranded on an island where he was released into the jungle by a Russian general who’d gotten bored with hunting wild animals and now was hunting humans because they were the most dangerous game of all. It had been one of Grampa Elie’s favorite stories.
Nick shook his head.
I’m not going to fool myself, Nick thought. Malay man-catchers, Burmese tiger pits, Ugandan knife traps all sounded like great ideas in that story. But in real life, would those work? Especially when you’re not on an island but have millions of acres ahead of you?
Then he smiled again. Even though those ideas might not be really practical, he could still turn things around by staying a step or two ahead. One of Grampa Elie’s friends who was in the Marines with him in Vietnam was a Cheyenne man named Lance.
“My friend Lance told me,” Grampa Elie said, “the only time the Army ever caught up with his people was when they were not trying to get away from anyone. Those awful massacres of Cheyennes at the Washita and Sand Creek happened because those were peaceful villages, out in plain sight and flying an American flag in front of their chief’s lodge. But when General Custer and all of them went after Cheyennes who were at war, the white soldiers just never caught up with them. That was because those Cheyennes made sure not to be anywhere they were expected to be.”
And that, Nick thought, is where I have to be. Where I’m not expected.
He shouldered his pack. The sun had not yet risen, but there was plenty of light from the moonlit sky. He’d charted a course for himself using the map. By taking note of the elevations and the rivers and streams, he was pretty sure he’d be able to avoid the areas where things could get rough—swamps, or gorges where you’d have to climb down and then up the other side. Places he might get stuck or find himself caught out in the open.
But he was not going to take the easiest routes toward the reserve. Not the most direct routes like the old logging tracks or the snowmobile and hiking trails marked on the map. Those were the places where he’d be expected, where someone might be waiting in ambush.
Nick brushed his palm over the sword ferns that were growing around him in abundance. He’d read wild-plant guides for the region and also learned from some of the Salish elders he had met. There was food all around you if you knew where and when to look. In the spring, sword ferns were good eating. When they were just rising out of the ground, coiled up like fiddleheads. And their tubers down in the moist earth were good to eat.
Ferns had lessons to teach too. Aunt Marge had pointed out some of those lessons to him when he was really young. She’d been working on making an elm bark basket. With a sharp stick she was making patterns on the outside of the basket. Curled patterns like ferns that were uncoiling.
“See this,” she had said. “It’s a story about hunting and tracking.”
Then she’d explained that when a deer is being chased, that deer does not just run straight to get away. It circles and maybe goes up onto a rise so it can look back over its own tracks and see whoever or whatever is after it. Its path is like that of a curving young fern. A good hunter knows that and makes another circle to come up behind the animal that’s being tracked.
What I need to do now, Nick thought, is be both the deer and the hunter.
Ahead of him was one of the hiking trails he’d found on his map. He shifted his walking stick into his left hand and began to run. For the next three hours, before the sunrise filled the sky ahead of him, Nick followed the trail east. He loped along at an easy pace. But when the sun was about to crest the mountains, with birds starting to sing all around him, he stopped.
He turned and ducked under the thick bunches of old-man’s-beard lichen hanging down from the branches of the trees along the trail. He made his way through thick ferns, brushing them aside and taking care not to crush any underfoot. Twenty yards ahead, a huge hemlock tree had fallen halfway up the slope south of the trail. When he reached the tree, he put both hands on it, then vaulted lightly up onto its wide, mossy top.
He paused there. Nick had learned—when he was seven years old—to always look before you leap when you’re out in nature. It happened in New Mexico. His Aunt Marge had grabbed him by the arm and stopped him halfway through stepping over a big rock. He’d almost landed on a western diamondback rattler sunning itself.
There wasn’t much chance of running into a poisonous snake here. He’d be more likely to land on a banana slug or a salamander. But he didn’t want to do that. It wasn’t right for anything to be hurt because of his carelessness. He studied the ground. Nothing there. He dropped down, landing in a crouch and not straightening up.
He stayed there, unmoving, breathing slowly and listening. A soft chirp came from someplace next to him. He turned his head slightly to his left and saw a tree frog. It chirruped again, its red eyes peering out at him from the crevice in the old tree’s bark that was its home. Nick nodded to it and continued to listen. A ray of sunlight sifted through the branches laden with moss and lichen. As the beam of light touched the trail below him, it was as if a switch had been thrown. The chorus of birds began. Thrushes and warblers and sparrows and other birds he couldn’t name raised their voices, the forest echoing with their songs.
Nick was no stranger to that greeting of the new day. He couldn’t count all the times he’d woken in one woodland or another to hear the dawn chorus of the winged ones. It moved him now as it always did. There were men somewhere ahead who wanted to kill him. But there was still so much in nature to bring a smile to his face, to put sunshine in his heart.
“Wliwini, wli dogo wongan,” he whispered. “Thank you, all my relations.”
It wasn’t just the beauty of their songs that made Nick feel good. It was what that singing meant, singing that went on unbroken minute after minute. If there were other people around, people who didn’t know enough to be still and just listen, that singing would have stopped. A silent forest is a forest where predators are moving about. He could relax.
Nick leaned back against a dry spot on the side of the fallen hemlock. He opened his pack and took out a piece of maple-cured jerky. He tore off a small piece and placed it on the ground.
“I share my food with all you little ones,” he said in a low, soft voice, speaking the way Grampa Elie had taught him to speak in the forest. It showed respect and also did not carry the way more careless human voices did.
He bit off a piece of the jerky. He ate it slowly, washing it down with sips of water from his canteen. He concentrated on how satisfying the water felt as he drank it, how good the jerky tasted as he chewed each bite. How comfortable it was sitting on the soft earth, leaning back on the fallen hemlock, feeling a soft morning breeze on hi
s face, smelling the air, and listening to the birds. He didn’t think about what he had to do next or what might happen later in the day— good or bad. “Sometimes,” Grampa Elie would say, “you just need to be. Not a human doing, but a human being. Then, when it is time to do, you’ll usually do it a whole lot better.”
Nick closed his eyes and slipped into Black Tiger Breathing. In, hold, out again. Twenty times. By the time he was done, the sun was fully up. The forest around him was not silent, but that overwhelming chorus of all birds had ended.
Time to be the hunter, he thought. He took out his map and compass.
CHAPTER 15
They Don’t Know Me
Nick’s plan was simple. Don’t stay on the trails but stay in sight of the trails, whether old logging roads, snowmobile tracks, or hiking paths. Keep circling up to places higher than those ways leading toward the reserve. Never get closer to the trail than fifty yards away. Move quickly when you move. Don’t stomp down heel first like someone unused to forest paths would walk. Roll your foot so that even when you step on a twig it doesn’t make a loud crack. Keep moving that way, just short of a trot. Then stop and wait. Listen and look before starting to move again.
This was not a part of the province where many people went at this time of year. That was clear all through the day after Nick left his shelter under the wide roots of the blown-down cedar. He saw no sign of any humans—either the men hunting him or innocent hikers. But he didn’t allow himself to become careless.
Move, then stop and listen. Move, then stop and listen. There were always sounds to be heard when he did that. Once it was a whole family of raccoons, six babies following their mother, growling and wrestling with each other as they trundled along. Another time it was a deer, and yet another time a solitary wolf that only recognized a human was nearby after it had gone past him. Then, having caught Nick’s scent on the wind, it leapt off the trail to go zigzagging through the forest until it was out of sight. And often, more than a dozen times, what Nick heard when he made one of those silent waits were the sounds of squirrels, making more noise than bears as they rustled along the forest floor.
He’d picked up a piece of red cedar as he’d walked. It was a branch as long as the distance from the fingers of his outstretched hand to his elbow. Heavy and half the thickness of his wrist, it was the perfect size for a rabbit stick. Each time he stopped, he took out his knife and scraped it down the length of the stick, smoothing it and making it better fit his grasp.
Nick had always been unusually good at throwing. The coaches in grade school and middle school had tried to recruit him for Little League Baseball after seeing how far, hard, and accurately he could send a baseball with almost no effort. But Nick had preferred to spend his time on other things—reading, outdoor skills, and martial arts, especially after he started spending summers in New Mexico at The Tracking Project.
The first time he’d been shown how a rabbit stick was used to hunt small game in Australia, Africa, and among North American Native people, he’d fallen in love with it. Soon he could hit targets a hundred feet away with the traditional sidearm throw that sent the stick spinning. And it worked for things other than rabbits. When one of The Tracking Project students had been chased by a mugger in Central Park, she had grabbed a stick off the ground as she ran, turned, threw it, and knocked the guy out!
Nick hefted the rabbit stick. It made him feel as if he was in contact with thousands of generations of people who’d used this ancient way to hunt—or defend themselves. Simple, easy, effective. An old movie came to mind, one that was supposed to be about an actual tracker but had gotten corny real fast. Tommy Lee Jones played the tracker, who was hunting and being hunted by his best former student. In the final scene, the two of them make weapons to fight each other. One of them makes a hunting knife out of flint while the other builds a portable blast furnace to forge a steel weapon. As if they had the time to do that! Thinking of it made Nick smile at how silly it was.
He stopped and slowly crouched down. Had he heard something? The forest here on this ridge above the trail was thick, but maybe not thick enough for someone looking down from the air. Nick slid under the low, thick branches of a hemlock. Now he could hear the sound of a helicopter’s thudding blades. He fought the urge to look up as the copter swept overhead … and kept going. He hadn’t been seen.
Nick waited until he was certain it was gone. Then he took out the map. The trees were too closely grown here for a helicopter to touch down. But the map showed an area five miles farther ahead where several of the trails came together. A small settlement had once been there. A logging town. There’d be places there where it could land. And it was between Nick and the reserve.
That was it. Nick felt he knew what Dead Eyes had in mind. They’d be waiting there for him to show up, since all the trails led that way. They’d be hiding, and he would be easy prey, worn out from running, tired, hungry, and desperate. That’s how they thought he’d be, how most people would be in his situation.
But they don’t know me, Nick thought. They don’t know me.
CHAPTER 16
The Copter
It was almost dark when Nick reached the place where the trails came together at the ghost town. But he’d followed none of those trails. He’d gone around. He’d made a mile-wide circle so that he first caught sight of the deserted logging town from a hill to the east, not the west. What told him he’d been right in being so careful was down there. The Apache helicopter. It sat on the far eastern end of the abandoned settlement on a wide area behind what might once have been a one-room school. Though grass was growing up between cracks in the paved yard, the concrete breaking down to sand, it was a clear enough surface for a makeshift landing pad.
No one seemed to be guarding it. But Nick stayed where he was, a quarter of a mile away on a wooded hill looking down on the ghost town. The trees and brush were thick there, and he could watch through the green screen of leaves and branches without being seen. He watched and waited until he saw the glow of light through the windows of one of the buildings.
City people, he thought. They have to have light, even when they don’t need it. Even on a night when the moon is so bright it casts a shadow.
That light in the building was a good sign. It meant the men trying to catch him were not real trackers, people comfortable with being in a forest. They needed light to feel secure. It also meant they weren’t worried about anything being a threat to them. But real hunters realize no one is ever fully in control of nature. You always have to be alert.
How dangerous could one skinny kid be? they were probably thinking.
Nick smiled, a thin, tight smile that didn’t show his teeth. Dangerous enough, he thought. He tapped the rabbit stick in the palm of his left hand.
The full moon was now four hands high in the southern sky. Nick made his way down the hill, paused, and listened. Then, staying in the shadows, he moved on to the helicopter. The pilot’s side was open. No door. The moon over his shoulder shone into the cockpit. He climbed in and sat in the pilot’s seat. Nick had read about helicopters and how to fly them.
He recognized the three main controls. Foot pedals to control the rotor blades and rotate the copter. A collective lever on his left side to angle the rotor blades. Pull it back to go up, and push it forward to go down. Then there was the cyclic, the big joystick between his legs. You could use it to make the machine go forward or backward, left or right.
But knowing all that was far different from actually flying a whirlybird. No way was he going to even try.
He took his knife out of its sheath. I could cut some of the wires and cables, he thought. Then he shook his head. Better to not let them know I was here.
He put his knife away. He knew a better way to disable a helicopter.
When started to get up from the pilot’s seat, he saw something behind the passenger seat. Two things. The first was under a blanket with just an edge of it visible. It was leather with beadwork. Nick mo
ved the blanket, uncovering the briefcase he’d seen in the murdered man’s stateroom.
You’re coming with me, he thought. Nick pulled out the briefcase, tucking the blanket back so that it looked as if nothing had been disturbed.
Then he slid out the second thing he’d seen. The rifle that had been placed under the back seat.
It was a .308, just like the one Grampa Elie owned. It was fully loaded and almost certainly the gun that Blondie had used when he was shooting at the bear near the river.
Now’s the time, Nick thought, when in a movie I’d be going all Rambo. Charge the building and mow everyone down.
He shook his head. It wasn’t that he didn’t know how to use the gun. Killing people, even men wanting to take his life? That just wasn’t him. But there was something else he could do. He’d learned how to take apart a rifle just like this to clean it. Maybe he couldn’t do it blindfolded—like his grandfather—but what he could do would not take that long. He took out the magazine, cleared the breech, popped out the take-down pins with his fingers, and pulled the charging handle back. The bolt came out. With the tip of his knife, he pulled out the retaining pin, and the firing pin dropped free.
No firing pin, no shoot.
Nick dropped the firing pin into his shirt pocket, reassembled the rifle, and placed it back where it had been. He slid out of the helicopter and stood listening for a time without moving. Nothing.
And now it’s time to ground this bird, he thought.
He reached up and unscrewed the cap on the top of the Apache’s fuel tank below the main rotor. A discarded fast-food coffee cup had been tossed onto the ground. He scooped it full of sand and dumped the sand into the fuel tank. He did that once, twice, three times before placing the cup back where it had been on the ground. He picked up the fuel cap and screwed it on tight.
Found Page 5
