Drone Chase

by Pam Withers

  “So bear spray was allowed.”

  “Yeah, but you should never count on it working,” Cole says seriously. “What you really need is a —”

  “— five-shot capacity, forty-five-seventy high-calibre rifle. Like my granddad’s,” I say in a dark tone, remembering how he felled Hank’s mother even though I was safely up a tree.

  “He’s shot plenty, all right,” Cole allows. “Cougars and stuff, too. My dad has the entire body of a mountain goat mounted on his office wall, your granddad’s work.”

  “Nice,” I say without enthusiasm.

  At the stream, we set up the tent, the guys for once instructing me without giving me a hard time. We lay our sleeping bags and pads in a neat row inside and hang our waterproof food bag high up between two trees, the specified height and distance from each tree trunk. Then we cram energy bars into our mouths and talk about where to hike.

  “Two trails to pick from,” Cole says, pointing. “Up or down, boys?”

  “Down,” I say before he puts it to a vote. My finger indicates the path Min-jun sleepwalked last time. I stash my water bottle and bear spray in holders on my latest belt and check the bulge in my pack that confirms the drone is there.

  “I’ve got the first-aid kit,” Min-jun tells us, “so stick with me if you’re going to get injured.”

  “We need to all three stick tight,” Cole says. “That’s the agreement.”

  “I’ve got bear bells,” I say.

  “You know where most bear bells end up?” Cole asks in a teasing voice.

  “Um, no.”

  “In bear scat.” He and Min-jun laugh, so I join in.

  Eight minutes later — I’m timing it — we pass the barbed-wire fence section that Min-jun paused near last time. Just standing near the fence that night taught us that the property is patrolled — by Yellow Drone. I look overhead and see nothing but a white osprey.

  Cole and Min-jun start singing some pop song.

  “You guys are so out of tune, no grizzly will come near us,” I kid them.

  “Viewpoint, messieurs,” Cole announces awhile later, stepping onto a ledge and sweeping his hand across the horizon.

  The panoramic view is stunning in the midafternoon sunshine. Below is the bay where Dorothy and I landed our canoe and the boulder where we kissed. My heart tugs at my chest muscles to see it. To our right is the cannery property, looking even more derelict from this height, history being swallowed by ancient forest.

  I calculate the distance from where we’re standing to the buildings, and decide Butterfly can make it there and back easily. “Hey, guys,” I say excitedly, setting my pack down on a stump and digging into it. “I have a surprise for you.”

  Cole and Min-jun watch with ready grins as my drone emerges.

  “Figured you might sneak one along,” Min-jun says, sounding pleased. He turns to Cole. “I told you about how he flew a drone into the Logans’ barn and a dog nearly ate it?”

  “You’re going to fly that here?” Cole asks, spreading his arms to take in all the valley and bay. “Easy to lose it, I’d think. And what for?” But I can tell he’s intrigued.

  “To show my friends back in the city. You think this point has a view? Wait till the drone lets us fly over the valley — virtually, of course — and see things close-up.” I grab the remote controller with its mini-tablet in one hand and place the drone down on a flat rock near the edge of the cliff.

  “Huh, the picture doesn’t look too great there, bud.” Cole points to the display on my mini-tablet. “I can hardly tell what you’re looking at with that potato-quality camera.”

  “Bro, that’s just the mini-tablet,” I say with a laugh. “The better image is on my FPV goggles.” I hold them up.

  “What’s FPV?” Cole challenges. “A freaky pervert’s videocam? You use that thing in New York City to peep into high-rise apartments and stuff?”

  “Negative. That would get me arrested fast,” I say. “It stands for first-person view. They let me see where the drone is flying. But we can’t run it anywhere that’s dark, ’cause its sensor isn’t thermal or anything.”

  “Hey, can it send secret messages to girls? Spy on enemies? How much do drones cost, anyway?” Cole asks.

  “All of the above, and anywhere from fifty to fifty thousand bucks,” I say. “But that’s just for the drone. Doesn’t include the cameras, which can cost the same or more. I designed this one myself. It’s extra small. Drone operators aren’t really allowed to fly them in town around people. But out here, as long as I keep it out of trees and away from the water, it —”

  “— is awesome,” Min-jun tells Cole. “Just try out the goggles, dude.”

  “Whatever,” Cole agrees, shrugging.

  “After I get it in the air, I’ll hand you the goggles so you can see what the camera is picking up,” I tell him, enjoying the way he’s hovering near me impatiently.

  “Then can I fly the drone?” Min-jun asks.

  “Sure. But later, where there aren’t so many trees.”

  “Okay.”

  They’re both all but leaning into me as I launch the drone and let it drift down the slope. I veer it a little to the right over the barbed-wire fence, inching toward the cannery.

  “Can I put on the goggles now?” Cole asks.

  “Okay,” I say, removing my FPV goggles and passing them over to Cole. I readjust to the display on my remote while cruising the drone over the property immediately below.

  “Whoa.” Cole takes a deep breath. “This is incredible. It’s like I’m flying with the drone. Too cool! There’s a deer down there!”

  I manoeuvre the drone closer to the animal.

  “He’s looking at me! He’s totally running now, and it’s like I’m running with him!”

  Min-jun speaks up. “I get a turn, too, right, Ray? Hey, you’re over the fence. That’s private property. If you lose it over there, we can’t go get it, you know.”

  “I won’t lose it,” I assure him. I buzz over the roofless cottages, the outbuildings, and the bunkhouse, then slow over the warehouse. Aha! I steer Butterfly near a section of collapsed roof, which makes it easy to lower her into the warehouse itself. I hover in a large, near-empty space with piles of garbage in the corners. I hit the record button and spin 360 degrees, saving it all to my memory card.

  “Hey, my view has gone kind of dark. Where is the drone now?” Cole asks.

  “My turn.” Min-jun sounds a little hurt.

  “Yours in a minute, Min-jun,” I assure him, taking back my FPVs from Cole so I can get a clearer view of what Butterfly is seeing.

  Stacks of rusty cans, piles of fish netting, garbage, and broken chairs. Good thing my camera can’t pick up smells. Must be nasty in there. I flit down a long, dark corridor and through an open door into a room with a desk and office chair. Lucky for Butterfly, the room’s features are visible thanks to a skylight that’s really a hole in the ceiling covered in clear plastic sheeting. As in, someone has fixed that up recently? It’s hard to tell on my FPVs, but it seems like there’s a dark wall of deep shelves on one side of the room.

  Movement! I definitely caught something moving out of the corner of Butterfly’s eye. I have my drone do a slow spin to make sure no one’s there. Maybe a rat? I move my spy closer to the shelves and gasp. There’s a row of padlocked cages, seven in all. Four of them contain shadows that could be bears, each moving slightly. It’s too dark to identify anything more.

  I turn back to the plywood desk and note scattered medical equipment: catheters, scalpels, and other instruments sitting beside a vet’s first-aid kit. Behind them, a couple of muzzles hang from hooks on the wall. Finally, two coolers sit on the floor beside the desk. Do they hold food for the bears, or is it where the scum-ass poachers store the bile they pump out of the bears, to keep it cool before it goes to market?

  Well, I’ve gotten my money shots. I’ve saved the views of the cages and medical stuff to my memory card. Time to get Butterfly out of the buildin
g.

  I’m preparing to exit the office for the corridor when two hands grip my head and yank my goggles off. Daylight blinds me for a second.

  “Hey!” I shout at Min-jun. “I said in a minute!”

  But I’m too late. He’s pulled the FPVs onto his face. I look at the mini-tablet on my controller in a panic. I can still manoeuvre Butterfly out of there with only that, of course. It’s just more awkward.

  According to my screen, Butterfly’s camera is still aimed at the desk, turned away from the cages. Min-jun is seeing nothing but the desk chair with a coat slung over it, and maybe a corner of the first-aid kit. Phew! I zip Butterfly through the open doorway and down the long hallway to the warehouse’s open space, then perform lift-up through the collapsed roof and order my spy home. She soars back to us up the slope.

  But Min-jun and Cole are rolling on the ground at my feet, Min-jun tearing at the goggles on his face. Cole’s on top of his friend one minute, then dragging him by the boots away from cliff ’s edge the next.

  “Guys!” I shout. “Stop fighting over my goggles!”

  “What’s wrong with him?” Cole gasps as I retrieve Butterfly from where she lands. “I thought he was going to pull us both over the cliff.”

  “Min-jun?” I say. “Sorry, I got carried away. Your turn. You want to fly it now?” I put Butterfly on the ground beside him, hoping he’s not mad at me.

  That’s when I notice he remains face down on the ground and is jerking from head to boot.

  “You okay, Min-jun?”

  He closes a fist around Butterfly, raises his arm, and smashes my baby down on a rock. His knuckles come up bleeding.

  “Min-jun!” I cry out.

  “What the —?” Cole backs away like he’s freaked, and looks to me with an open mouth.

  I leap forward and press my chest down on Min-jun’s back. At the same time, my right palm closes around his, and as his body bucks, I forcibly remove my drone. Then, like I did before, I wrestle him onto his side, check his breathing, and anchor his thrashing limbs.

  “It’s an epileptic seizure,” I tell Cole.

  But did he break the drone accidentally, or on purpose?

  “Wha-a-t?” Cole says.

  “Stress can set off people with epilepsy,” I say, more to engage Cole and keep him calm than to inform him. “It’ll be over in a few minutes. Then we’ll need to let him rest till he comes to. What’s most important, though, is to act like nothing happened. Don’t mention it. He’ll be very embarrassed.”

  Cole’s still staring at the two of us, his jaw unhinged. “And you know this because …?”

  “I’m a vet’s kid.”

  “Huh. Mussett definitely did not cover this in his camping first-aid course.”

  When Min-jun’s body finally goes still, I wrap my coat around him. He’s not fully aware yet.

  “He could’ve died if you … and he wrecked your drone, didn’t he?” Cole mumbles.

  I grit my teeth and reach for it. “I can fix it, but today’s film is toast.”

  “Oh,” Cole says. “At least it’s just shots of cannery ruins.”

  Cannery ruins with something that freaked out Minjun, I think grimly. What did he see? And will he even remember?

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  IT’S DARK BY the time we’ve hauled Min-jun back to camp and eased him into his sleeping bag. Cole makes me gather wood and start the campfire to show I can do it, and we eat heated-up baked beans in silence, the sound of frogs and crickets accompanying the scrape of our spoons.

  “You wanted to camp here to get drone shots of the cannery, didn’t you? Why? It’s just a heap of rotting wood,” he says.

  “Thought my friends in New York would find it interesting,” I lie again, unwilling to share my poaching-ring suspicions with my moody camping mate.

  “Nothing inside but garbage and graffiti,” he says. “Been there lots of times. It stinks,” he adds, scrunching up his nose and taking a swig of his soda. “Not worth losing your drone for.”

  “Yeah,” I agree, though the image of the shadow-crammed cages in that dark corner and medical tubing on the table makes me want to charge down there right now and free the bears.

  “Is it true you found a half-dead guard dog there and fixed it up in your clinic?”

  “Does everyone in Bella Coola know everything that goes down in Bella Coola five minutes after it happens?”

  “Count on it, New York.”

  “Yes. A Doberman pinscher. Belongs to the Logan brothers.”

  “Logan brothers,” Cole says with distaste. “Stay away from those two.”

  “Why?”

  He shrugs and finishes his drink. “Let’s clean up and check on Min-jun.”

  We scrub our dishes carefully, then pack away the rest of the food in the food bag and rehang it between the two trees. It swings in the air like a punching bag on a clothesline.

  “That’s safe. No bears are going to reach it, no matter how hungry they are,” Cole says with satisfaction. “Promise me you have no food stuff in the tent. Not even toothpaste.”

  “Not even toothpaste,” I pledge. “I have no interest in a bear visit tonight.”

  “For sure,” he says. “’Cause they’re really hungry, aggressive, and unpredictable this time of year, especially with cubs around.”

  Including cubs that are being kidnapped, I think with a shiver. But I’ll put a halt to that, somehow.

  “At least it’s not hunting season yet,” he adds as we douse our campfire and crawl into the tent beside Min-jun.

  Except for poachers, I reflect. Granddad and I agree on their heads needing to be mounted.

  I dream that night of UAVs flying over our tent, buzzing like a formation of Amazon delivery drones. Yet somehow their approach feels sinister. They hover a few feet from the tent, then open their claws to release their loads, one after another. Not packages, but grenades. A mad general is at the controls, yahooing each time he drops one. “That’ll teach you to date my daughter!” he cackles. Then the UAVs lift up and away and disappear into the silent night.

  Cole shakes me awake. It’s still dark.

  “Shhh,” he whispers. “Grizzlies in our campsite.”

  Grizzlies? As in plural? My left ear buzzing, I rocket out of my sleeping bag and feel around for my can of bear spray. Cole’s hand closes over my wrist. “Shhh.”

  Min-jun’s awake now, and Cole warns him in whispers, leaving him wide-eyed. Only Cole’s headlamp is on, just enough to reveal panic on all our faces. We’re on our knees, still as statues, facing the zipped-up tent door like condemned prisoners awaiting execution. Min-jun has an open penknife in his hand. Cole and I poise trigger fingers above spray cans.

  At the sound of grunts outside, adrenalin crackles through my system like neon lighting. I shuffle forward and unzip our tent an inch. I put my eye to the hole, then choke on fear and slide back on my knees.

  Cole moves to the peephole. When he sits back on his butt, his face is drained of colour.

  The grunts get louder, along with slurping and thumping as they fight over the food. A foul smell drifts right through the tent walls and makes me lift my T-shirt to my face to breathe through it. Did they wrestle our bear bag down after all? Tear it open and invite all their friends over? Will we be dessert?

  Min-jun takes his turn looking and scrambles backward. Please don’t have another seizure now, I think.

  We sit motionless for the better part of an hour, hardly daring to take sips from our water bottles. As dawn creeps through the tent sides, I expect a giant clawed paw to tear into the thin nylon at any moment, and a stampede of bears to trample us, close jaws on us, feast on us.

  “Leave ’em alone an’ they’ll usually leave you alone,” Granddad likes to say. “They prefer berries and salmon to people.”

  Salmon. That’s the smell. They’ve pulled fish from the stream beside us and are having a banquet. But why not do it on the stream bank instead of beside our tent?

  G
runts and snuffling fill our ears. Then we feel the earth shake as they move away. We allow for a good twenty minutes of silence, not counting the reassuring morning bird sounds, before we peek and confirm the coast is clear.

  “I say we move on out of here now that there’s enough light,” Cole suggests. “I’m okay with calling off hiking today. Min-jun?”

  “Definitely. This campsite’s not safe, and I’m really tired, anyway.”

  Cole and I exchange glances, but don’t bring up the seizure incident. Nor am I about to say anything about my broken drone. It’s fixable. But is Min-jun’s condition? Either he lied to me about how frequent his seizures are, or they’re increasing.

  We crawl slowly out of the tent, one by one, like cartoon characters waiting for bad guys to spring on us. Almost tiptoeing around the stinky mess of salmon heads and bones, under the gaze of ravens wanting the leftovers, we pee in the stream. There isn’t a single salmon visible in its waters or on its bank, which is several long strides from our tent.

  After voting not to take the time to cook up our instant oatmeal, we lower the intact bear bag, push our sleeping bags into their stuff sacks, pack up the tent faster than ace army recruits, then double-check that the campfire is cold. As we start up the trail to the parking lot, nervously eyeing the shadowy forest around us, we sing loudly and badly, me jingling my bear bells like it’s Christmas at Madison Square Garden. Only when the Chevy’s doors have slammed shut and Cole has turned over the ignition do we breathe freely.

  “Why did they drag the salmon into the campground?” Min-jun asks what each of us has been turning over in our minds. “Did you guys leave anything around that attracted them?”

  “Negative,” I say for both Cole and me.

  “I didn’t know there were any salmon in that stream,” Cole says in a puzzled voice, “never mind this early in the year.”

  “It’s like someone dumped a pile of salmon next to us in the middle of the night while we were sleeping, to bring the bears around,” I say.

  Cole laughs shakily. “Good one.”

  “But there were no boot prints except ours. I checked,” Min-jun says.