Conard County Watch

by Rachel Lee

  But now with the feeling of having been watched, and Gray Cloud’s readiness to volunteer his nephews as occasional sentries, he wondered what the man had known that he hadn’t shared. Was he expecting some kind of trouble?

  He didn’t like the idea that Gray Cloud wouldn’t share such information, nor did the man seem the kind to mislead them. So no, he’d probably just accepted their sense of being watched as a matter worthy of attention.

  And maybe he’d just believed that Cope could keep an eye on this group. Certainly, he had a skill set for the mountains.

  Tossing the thoughts aside as he ate dinner and listened to the group chat around the small campfire they’d built once again, he realized how much he enjoyed the company of these interns. They were purpose-driven, unlike many of his classroom students who studied history merely because it was part of the general education curriculum. These were good company.

  “I think I’ll be heading out in the morning,” Claudia said. “I want to get some analysis of the samples I took, and a spectrograph would be very handy. I should be back in a day or two.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Renee answered. Then she looked at Denise. “And tomorrow I get to start chipping away at that rock face, right?”

  Denise flashed a grin. “If Cope will help me put up some more strings somehow to mark the grid so that everyone behaves themselves, sure.”

  Cope spoke. “Is there some way to draw the grid on the rock safely? Poking holes in it to hold twine might damage it and that is troubling me. I know we did it earlier, but I’m afraid I might drive a tack right through something important.”

  “At this point,” Denise answered, “we can mark with a carpenter’s pencil. I happen to have several. But your height will be an advantage.”

  He’d busted up his shoulder pretty good in Afghanistan, so it was difficult to reach over his head, but he didn’t say anything about it. He’d deal.

  Something in the deepening night shifted, an almost atmospheric change that put him on high alert. He looked at Renee and tried to see if she felt anything, but apparently not. She was deep in conversation with Denise and Claudia.

  Cope lifted his head and looked around, trying to see beyond the circle of light from the fire. But more importantly, he strained his other senses, seeking a change in the forest sounds or a new odor of some kind. The wind kicked up suddenly, rustling the nearby treetops, causing a branch or two in the deep forest to crack. The flames of the fire danced wildly now and leaned toward the east.

  Well, there went any hope of detecting something from his chair. Rising, he began to circle the edge of the campsite they’d made, peering into the dark shadows, waiting for his eyes to fully adjust.

  Maybe he was losing it. No reason to think he’d been luckier than so many of his fellow veterans. Maybe it had just taken longer to set in, or maybe being up on the side of this damn mountain was waking sleeping tigers in his subconsciousness.

  Gray Cloud had said that Tall and Short—he got a kick out of those names—hadn’t seen signs of trespass out there. They’d check in every so often to keep an eye on the dig. There was absolutely no reason for him to stay on high alert.

  Except for instincts he’d lived with so long he was beginning to think they’d never let go.

  Finally he’d completed his circumnavigation. It hadn’t done much to ease the edginess that plagued him, but that was likely imaginary. He returned to his seat beside Renee and listened with half an ear to the conversation that bubbled up from all the interns. No silence here.

  Eventually Renee leaned toward him and asked quietly, “Everything okay?”

  “Yeah. Actually. Guess I’m having a touch of PTS.”

  “Post-traumatic stress?” Her gaze grew intent. “Do you have much of it?”

  “No, actually. It’s probably the environment here, the mountains. I think I said something about it to you earlier. Anyway, it’ll pass, and I need to push it.”

  She frowned faintly. “Push it why?”

  “So it’ll quit irritating me. You’ve heard of immersion?”

  She nodded slowly. “Jump into the stimulus until the problem passes. Yeah, I’ve heard of it, but don’t ask me to stick my hand in a jar full of furry spiders.”

  Laughter began to find its way up from his gut. “Do they have to be furry?”

  “Oh, yeah.” She tilted her head and looked rueful, but when the laughter escaped him she joined right in. “And no amount of knowing it’s silly makes it possible for me to feel it’s silly. You have more guts than I, Cope.”

  “I don’t know. I’m not dealing with furry spiders.”

  They both laughed again. That’s when they realized that the conversation around the fire had trailed off and that a bunch of interns were staring at them.

  Renee leaped in to save Cope any embarrassing questions. “I was talking about my aversion to furry spiders.”

  “Furry?” Bets shuddered. “I don’t know why, but they seem worse than regular spiders. But it’s weird, I don’t have a problem with daddy longlegs. You know the spider I mean? When I was a kid we had a lot of them running around our front porch and I played with them.”

  “Ewww,” said Denise and Maddie.

  “I know. Weird. They never bothered me at all, though, and they’re perfectly harmless.” She flashed a grin. “When I was a kid, insects didn’t bother me as much. Something happened between then and now.”

  “Adulthood,” Maddie suggested, to a chorus of laughter. A pixieish-looking young woman with tousled dark hair, she had a smile nearly as wide as her face.

  Just as the interns began to gather up the dinner dishes for disposal, Gray Cloud joined them. All of a sudden he was there, like a ghost that had just popped out of nowhere. Renee noted how everyone froze, startled, and she had to admit she was a little startled herself. The man could move like an invisible wraith through these woods.

  “Hello, everyone,” he said. “I brought the map for Claudia to look at.”

  The crew finished tossing trash and food bits into a large garbage bag for transport to the dump tomorrow. Food couldn’t be left lying around because of the animals. This load was locked inside a camper shell.

  While the chores were being finished, Gray Cloud, Claudia and Renee gathered around a plastic folding table. Cope soon joined them.

  “It’s mostly a topographic map,” Gray Cloud said as he spread the roll out and tacked the corners down with some rocks Cope handed him. “You’ll probably see immediately the changes the opening cleft made last year. Even diverted the stream below somewhat.” He traced it with his fingers.

  “Who did this map?” Claudia asked. “Somebody bring a lantern?”

  The ambient light around the campsite was nowhere near good enough to observe details. Renee leaned in, and as the fluorescent camp lantern was planted on the edge of the table by Carlos, she watched the blurry details sharpen. Claudia pulled some reading glasses from her pocket and perched them on the end of her nose.

  “US Geological Survey,” Claudia said, finding the mark at the bottom of the map. “But this isn’t the whole thing.”

  Gray Cloud shook his head. “You don’t need the whole thing, so I only brought the part you’d be interested in.”

  Claudia nodded. Renee felt a surge of amazement when she looked at the topography and absorbed how much had changed. “That cleft made a big dent.”

  “So it did,” Claudia answered. “How old is this map?”

  “Ten years. It was done after the interest in the wolf pack mushroomed. The tribe agreed to allow it because we wanted to have a reference to make sure outsiders weren’t tearing the mountain up.” He drew his finger along the area where they were digging. “That’s you. But the cleft goes a lot farther up.” Again, he traced with his finger. “Maybe another half mile. When you have time, you might want to check it out, but I didn’
t see anything obvious.” He smiled. “Difference between you and me, Renee. I don’t know what to look for unless it jumps out at me.”

  Cope appeared to have a knack for reading terrain maps, as did Claudia. A geologist and a soldier. Of course, Renee thought, putting her chin in her hand to listen.

  “That rock dropped quite a bit when it opened up,” Cope remarked. “That wall appears to be about thirty feet high now, but on the map that entire area slopes down from fifty feet toward the stream. How much fell into the cleft and how much height did we really lose?”

  Gray Cloud smiled. “That’s for you to find out. My guess is there’s about fifteen feet or so of broken rock at the bottom between the two faces. I couldn’t begin to imagine what might be buried down there.”

  “Enough to keep me working until retirement,” Renee said. “More than enough. Big stuff first, though.”

  Gray Cloud nodded. “The kind of fossils people might want to steal.”

  “Some of it is in plain sight,” she agreed. “Fantastic fossils. But hard to remove from the matrix. Nobody’s going to whisk it away overnight.”

  “That’s a relief,” drawled Cope a tad sarcastically. Renee darted a look at him and decided she was going to have to ask him what was going on when they could get a moment alone.

  Gray Cloud left the topographic map with them and disappeared into the night.

  Then, astonishingly, the entire group that had wanted to camp out here to save travel time took a fast decision to head into town for a few hours, maybe stop at the bar or something.

  Renee didn’t object, but she wondered how many of them had any idea how little amusement they were likely to find.

  “Just come back sober,” she warned, not caring if she sounded like a mother hen. “No drinking and driving. DUI will be the end of your work here.”

  A chorus of promises followed them toward the cars. All she could do was wonder what bee had gotten into their bonnets.

  Chapter 5

  “That’s weird,” Cope said when silence filled the woods after the last car drove away. He liked the silence, though. It concealed nothing from his senses. Only the sigh of the wind in the trees and the crackle and pop of the fire at their feet disturbed the night.

  “You mean them wanting to go to town? I know. One of them suggested camping out here.”

  “I guess camping is more boring than they thought.”

  Renee laughed quietly. “Maybe so.” She turned a little in her folding chair. “What did you mean a little while ago that it’s a relief that no one is going to steal a fossil overnight?”

  “I was being sarcastic,” he admitted. Leaning forward, he put some small pieces of wood on the fire. He wanted the heat. Sometimes just making the soles of his boots hot could warm his blood enough to reach the rest of him.

  “Why?” she asked bluntly.

  How much of this did he want to stir up? He really had nothing at all to go on. Nothing, except some instincts born in a war far away. They weren’t at war, so he should ignore them. Maybe. But he couldn’t. “I’m not sure,” he admitted eventually. “Not sure at all. Just a feeling.”

  “A feeling that something bad could happen?”

  He shook his head a little and wondered at what point since leaving the military he’d lost his ability to just shut his mouth. “I don’t know. I can’t shake this feeling of uneasiness. Blame it on my past experience, because there’s sure nothing else to blame it on.”

  Very true, he thought, picking up a long stick to poke at the fire. A shower of sparks rose upward a few feet, then died. Not a damn thing about any of this should be making him feel this way...except for the sense he’d had a few times that they were being watched. Well, it was only some damn fossils. If they were being watched it was by a strangely reticent curiosity seeker. If anyone wanted to know what was going on, all they had to do was ask. Hardly a national secret.

  He watched Renee in the dancing firelight. She appeared lost in thought, but the flames added mystery to her face, highlighting some features and then others. Until that moment, he had thought of her as an engaging extrovert, but now in some subtle way his impression shifted. He’d bet the woman was more complex than she initially seemed.

  Then he realized she was worried. She hadn’t dismissed the feelings she’d gotten from the shadows in the forest, even though Gray Cloud had assured her his men would keep an eye out.

  “Renee?” He hardly knew what he was going to say.

  She turned her head, the firelight now highlighting only one side of her face. “Don’t dismiss your feeling about this place,” she said slowly. “I’ve been spending a lot of time wondering if this sense I get means Gray Cloud and my cousin are right. What if this mountain is sensate? What if it’s watching us.”

  “Then we’d probably appear like transitory ants,” he said, trying to be light.

  She didn’t smile. “I’m all about science, Cope. Right now I’m not feeling very scientific. Something’s out there. It’s interested in us. Is it human? Probably. But then why the hell doesn’t it just come sit by the fire?”

  Good question, he thought. Exactly the one he’d been asking himself.

  But then he heard Renee draw a sharp breath. He followed her gaze and nearly caught his own breath. A gray wolf with eyes that reflected the dancing firelight stood at the edge of the clearing, motionless, staring. It almost looked like a creature out of myth, so still it might have been a statue.

  No sound. No growl. No bared teeth. Simply a measuring stare that reflected red in the firelight.

  “Beautiful,” he heard Renee whisper.

  He couldn’t have agreed more. Perfection. Almost hallucinatory.

  But then the wolf turned and, as it did, perfection vanished. It was still shedding its winter coat, looking scruffy along its sides as it vanished into the night woods.

  “Wow,” he said.

  “Magnificent,” she answered softly. “It’s been such a struggle to protect them. The tribe and Gray Cloud have been working hard at it, and my cousin Mercy has been doing what she can, but the ranchers want them gone.” She felt a soft smile on her face. “That was magical. I feel blessed.”

  “Me, too.” But that wolf was not what was making him uneasy. If he’d wondered before, he didn’t now. It was almost as if he’d made an appearance to let them know he wasn’t the problem.

  “My hands are getting cold,” she remarked and leaned toward the fire. “I guess I need to dig out my gloves for the evening.” She stuffed her hands into her pockets, pulling out dark knit.

  He’d have offered to warm them for her, but he didn’t think they had that kind of friendship yet. Although he’d have liked to do it for her. “Renee?”

  “Hmm?”

  “I don’t think that wolf would have come this close if someone else were out there. So you can relax.”

  She smiled as she tugged her gloves on. “That’s nice to know. Thanks.”

  But his thoughts had already begun to run back into the rut that had been troubling him since his first sense that they were being watched. “Is there anything at all besides fossils someone could be interested in here?”

  She looked over her shoulder at him. “Still feeling it, huh? I keep expecting some ogre to march out of those trees, and he won’t have gray and white fur.”

  “I told you, yes. But in my case...”

  “Quit blaming it on Afghanistan,” she said. “I can’t blame it on anything. It’s fleeting. It comes and goes. But I’m damned if I can understand why anyone should be interested.”

  “The fossils have to be worth something.”

  “Sure,” she agreed. “But first you have to release them. Right now I’ve got plenty of photos that would uphold the tribe’s claim to them. Try to sell that on the black market.”

  He shook his head, feeling a frown set
tle into the corners of his mouth. “You wouldn’t believe what I’ve seen disappear into the underground trade in antiquities. Don’t say those fossils couldn’t be sold.”

  “Maybe. But for enough to make it worth someone’s while? I haven’t seen anything like that yet. I know we’re only getting started but that egg that so fascinates me? It’s a museum piece, and not the kind of thing that would bring a small fortune. It’s not obvious, if you get my drift. You wouldn’t place it on a shelf in your private underground collection and show to a few good friends. It would be out of context, and without the context...” She shrugged. “It’s of purely academic interest. Especially to me.”

  Then she leaned back, rubbing her hands together, and gave him an almost impish smile. “I hope I’m not being too optimistic here.”

  He laughed. “I get your point. It’s a dinosaur egg. Rare enough, I’m sure. But a long way from a whole skeleton of something identifiable. You’d probably make more money collecting meteorites.”

  “See? I went into the wrong field.”

  He rubbed his chin for a few minutes, erasing the chill. Ever since he’d been grazed by a bullet underneath his chin, the area below his lower lip needed occasional help in staying warm. This night was turning unexpectedly frigid, he thought. “Maybe your team would be better off staying in town, Renee. I’d bet we’re going to fall below freezing tonight.”

  “You might be right.” She flashed another smile. “You will note that I wasn’t the one who suggested camping out here. It’s still early enough in the spring to turn really cold. Of course, it can do that in the summer, too, I hear.”

  “July Fourth snowfall. No joke. Mercy must have mentioned it to you.”

  “Actually no. July Fourth. Really?”