“What?” she asked assuming that he was pulling her leg.
“Whistle-pigs,” he repeated matter-of-factly. “That’s what my dad called them. I think that most people call them rock-chucks or varmints. Back east they call them; or something like them, wood-chucks.”
“They’re cute” she said as she wrinkled her nose trying to get a better look.
“If you’re real quiet you can hear them whistle or chirp,” he said in a hushed tone so she could listen. Patrick dug around in the side pocket of his pack that he could reach and pulled out some small binoculars. After looking through them for a second, he handed them to Makenzie. She peered through the binoculars at the whistle-pigs for quite some time.
“They like to live up here above timber line. As we get higher, they’ll come out in the hundreds.” He spotted another boulder field that had another clan of them and pointed those out to her as well. “They also make a tasty snack for bear.”
“Ooooooh. Daaaad!” she said as she shoved his shoulder before they stood back up and headed up the long hill.
When they reached the top of the hill to the lake Patrick stopped and pointed to the north-west corner of the lake where two other pack tents were setup. One of the tents had a bright yellow roof on it as theirs did, and the other was entirely a fluorescent orange. Their colors made them standout like a sore thumb against the entirely grey boulder backdrop. He said “I was hoping we could get that spot over there. It’s the nicest one up here, but there’s another good one over on this side of the lake by the outlet.”
“Where do you think the other campers are?” Makenzie asked as she fell in line behind her dad that had started walking over to the secondary site.
“I’m sure that they’re either up at one of the other lakes fishing like we’re planning, or they might be trying to summit Cloud Peak” he replied as he pointed back over to the peak behind the other tents. “Cloud Peak is the highest point in the Big Horns, so a lot people come up here just to see if they can make it to the top.”
They reached the level spot that Patrick had used as a camp site years ago when he was a kid. They shook their packs off as soon as they stopped. It was late afternoon, but they had made better time than Patrick thought they would have. “You know, if we hustle to get camp setup I bet we can still get a little fishing in up at one of the lakes if you want” Patrick offered.
“Why don’t we just go now and setup camp when we get back?” Makenzie asked.
“Darlin’… when it gets dark up here, it gets dark. I don’t know how many camps you have set up in the dark with a flash light hanging out of your mouth, but it’s no fun. If we hustle, we can get everything done in twenty minutes and not have to worry about it if the fishing’s hot up there,” Patrick explained in his father-knows-best voice.
“Okay” she said flatly, but with no sign of the scowl that has been oozing resentment for the last few months.
Patrick clutched his chest and feigned a heart attack as he gave her a hard time “What? No smart-aleck comeback or pouting fit? Just general agreement from the teenage daughter about words of wisdom from her father?”
“Stop” she chuckled as she gave him a light push on the shoulder. “Let’s just get this done so we can go fishing.”
They started setting up the tent as Patrick said “Have I ever told you about Bomber Mountain?”
“Yeah I think so, but I don’t really remember the story behind it. Is that up here?” she asked.
“Yeah. It’s right up above where we’ll be fishing,” Patrick answered. They continued to talk as they went through the motions to setup the small two-man pack tent. “I don’t exactly remember the story either, but I read a book about it when I was a kid. During World War II, a bomber left somewhere west of here and was heading to Nebraska to stop and refuel before heading over to Germany. But it never made it there. It was quite a mystery for a few years until some cowboys seen something glinting from one of the peaks up here one winter, and they made a trek up the mountain the next spring to check it out.”
Patrick thought that it was nice being able to work with Makenzie and not have either of them yelling at each other. Since they had already put up the tent together the night before, they just fell into doing the same tasks that they had done previously while Patrick continued with what he remembered of the story. “I don’t remember how many airmen were on board, but I think it was close to a dozen. They think that most of them didn’t make it through the crash, but the story has it that one of them was found with his bible in his lap leaning against a boulder not too far from one half of the plane.”
“That’s terrible,” Makenzie answered solemnly. “Do they know why it happened?”
“I don’t think that they know for sure, but probably the pilots were off course somewhat in bad weather and ran into the mountain. Half of the plane ended up on the west side of the ridge and the other half ended up on the other,” he concluded the story as they finished pitching the tent and he zipped the rain fly up.
“How’d they get the plane down from here?” Makenzie asked as she gazed around at the rough terrain and remembered the long hike up from the car.
They started getting their fishing gear together and put what they thought they would need in a large fanny pack that Patrick planned to carry up the hill. “It was still there when I was a kid,” Patrick told her.
“What?!” she exclaimed in excited disbelief.
“Yeah. You could tell that time was rough on it and people had taken pieces of it as souvenirs over time, but the big pieces of fuselage were still there,” he told her. Patrick was glad to see that she was genuinely interested in something besides dark music and hanging out at the strip mall.
“Can we go see it Dad?” she asked without hiding the excitement in her voice.
“Sure. I don’t think that we’ll have time today, but I’m sure we can go up there first thing in the morning if you want,” he told her as they started the short hike up to the other small glacier lakes. Although Patrick was somewhat tired and sore from packing the last two days, it felt as if he was as light as a feather without the heavy pack on his back. The pain in his knee was only a dull throb.
Patrick could tell that Makenzie was somewhat disappointed to not be able to go up to the remains of the bomber immediately after he had just gotten her excited about it. So, he told her “There is a little plaque up at Florence Lake that talks about the bomber mission and the people that died. We should be able to see that at least today.”
“Why can’t we go up there today and look at it Dad?” she asked.
They came to the top of a slight ridge and he stepped to the side of the trail so that they could stand next to each other and look ahead for a second. The view was glorious. They were in the glacier bowls of the Big Horn Mountains and there was not a mark that man had made on the country for as far as you could see. To their right was the valley that they had spent the last two days hiking up, and the afternoon sun shown an orange hue on the wilderness below. Patrick was certain that if he had strong enough binoculars you could have seen all the way back to the trailhead from there. Straight ahead of them was a magnificent ridge line that still had quite a bit of snow pack on top of it, even though small waterfalls cascaded down the face of the ridge from the melting snow. From where they were, the trail continued straight ahead for some ways past Gun Boat and Fortress Lakes, then turned left and made a steep climb.
Patrick could tell that Makenzie was just as enamored with the view as he was when she let her breath out, but forgot to breath back in as she stepped up next to him on the trail. Patrick didn’t say a word for a few seconds and let her take in the beauty, but then pointed up the steep hill that the trail took up towards Bomber Mountain. “Florence Lake is right at the top of that hill you can see,” he told her. Patrick then moved his finger to point at the summit of the ridge above the hill and said “The bomber is up above the lake across those boulder fields. I don’t think that we want to try
to navigate those boulders in the dark.” He didn’t even have to use my father-knows-best voice this time, she just started along the trail again.
“Well let’s get some fishing in at least before it gets dark” she said back over her shoulder to him. Even though he couldn’t see her face, he could tell there was a little bit of a smile in her voice.
The climb up to Florence Lake was steep, but both had a little bit of bounce in their step since they didn’t have their heavy packs on any longer and the thought of a fresh trout dinner was on their minds. The sheer beauty of the mountain and the whimsical whistle-pigs that lined the trail made Patrick think that he had stepped onto another planet made up in fairy tales. They didn’t stop at all on the steep climb up to Florence Lake, but Patrick could tell that Makenzie was taking all her surroundings in as well. Her head was on a swivel going back and forth looking at the whistle-pigs ducking and diving behind the boulders, and staring at the huge ridge lines covered in snow to their right and in front of them.
As they topped the steep hill along the trail to Florence Lake, there was a perfect sitting rock just to the right of the trail. They decided to rest on it while they assembled their fishing gear. From that rock they could look back down the trail and steep hill that that they had just climbed, or look down the other side of the hill towards Florence Lake. The lake was another hundred yards down the trail and maybe thirty or forty feet in elevation drop. The trail continued past the lake. They could see another glacier lake up another steep hill called Golden Lake, but the trail was hard to make out from a distance in the midst of the boulders.
Makenzie and her dad decided to both use variations of spinner baits to start out with and began walking down to the lake. Patrick had forgotten just how small Florence Lake was, even for upper glacier lakes. Sheer granite walls surrounded the far half of the lake, so only a portion of the lake was accessible by rock hopping around one side of it. There was no vegetation around the lake either, so trying to sneak up on wily cut-throat trout seemed next to impossible. “The best way I think there is to fish this lake is to get to where you want to be, sit quiet for a little while, and then cast across it. Do you think you can handle that if I go over on this side of the lake?” Patrick asked Makenzie in a tone not much louder than a whisper.
“I think that I could cast across it with a Snoopy pole Dad,” Makenzie said rather offended, but with a quiet voice so the fish weren’t spooked.
“I meant the being quiet part,” Patrick said as he started around the left side of the lake hopping from boulder to boulder while Makenzie started around the other side.
Even though the lake was small, it sure was deep. The water was a deep green against the far side of the lake against the granite walls. Patrick reached the boulder that he wanted to be at where he could cast in a few different angles and most likely make it across the lake near those granite walls and into the deep water.
“A Snoopy pole….” Patrick muttered under his breath. Mackenzie could strike his funny bone or push his buttons sometimes more than anyone else on the planet. He thought that maybe his wife was onto something when she would tell him that Makenzie was just like him.
Patrick cast the spinner bait and allowed it to sail through the air towards the other side of the lake. The line was traveling too fast and he had to pull back on the pole to put some drag on the line so the spinner bait didn’t crash into the granite wall. The tactic was successful in that the spinner didn’t hit the wall, but instead of gliding into the water silently it made a rather large plop and splash when it landed. He glanced over to see if Makenzie was laughing at him, but she hadn’t seemed to notice the splash at the other end of the lake. Patrick hoped that she didn’t think that his rusty fishing skills were the correct way to go about it. It had been a long time since he had been fishing. Even though his skills needed to be polished, all those reasons why he had passed on the fishing trips didn’t seem as important now as they had at the time. The monthly report to the boss; the broken piece of equipment; the upset product engineer from Germany wondering why the schedule had slipped by two days; along with the hundred other regular occurrences that kept him from fishing and these backpacking trips with Makenzie felt insignificant even though they were almost insurmountable at the time.
They fished for an hour or so and didn’t get a hit. They both changed spinners a couple of times, Makenzie ended up using salmon eggs, and Patrick tied on a clear bobber and dry fly, but they still didn’t have any luck. Patrick was just about ready to ask Makenzie if she was ready to head back to camp when he felt the earth move under his feet. His arms instinctively shot out from his side to help his balance as he looked down expecting to see the rock that he was standing on sliding into the lake. The rock didn’t look like it had moved and his mind couldn’t comprehend what was happening. Patrick’s body was on full alert. It felt like his heart had jumped up into his throat. It wasn’t until a split second later that he saw Makenzie had her arms out like a tight rope walker as well, and he realized that it must be an earthquake.
“DAD!” Makenzie involuntarily yelled.
Patrick had never been in an earthquake before and wasn’t sure how to react. He continued to hold his arms out for balance as the rock beneath him continued to quake. He could see small stones and rocks start to move, and some of them slid or jumped into the lake at its edges. They weren’t in any danger of anything falling on them, but he wasn’t sure how a boulder field on top of the Rocky Mountains would react to an earthquake.
The whole thing only lasted for several seconds, and it was over as sudden as it started. “It was an earthquake,” Patrick yelled back across the lake to Makenzie. He started to reel in his line in and go over to her when he got a strong bite. The fish hit it hard and started running. Patrick’s rod tip bent almost to the water’s surface as he instinctively set the hook. Patrick wasn’t sure where it was swimming to in a lake this small, but the fish must have been diving down to the very bottom. Patrick looked over to Makenzie to tell her that he had a fish on and saw that she was fighting one too. He couldn’t see her facial features very well from across the lake, but he could see that her fright from the earthquake must have dissipated and she was smiling from ear to ear. Since she seemed okay now that she had a fish on her line, Patrick decided to get his fish on the bank as well before heading over to her.
Both anglers were using extremely light tackle, so even though the fish they were catching were less than a foot long they felt like they we were catching blue marlin in the Gulf of Mexico. They kept fishing since the fish now seemed to be biting on anything that they threw into the lake. Patrick had four and Makenzie had three on stringers when the light began to turn a deep orange from across the top of the ridge to the west. Even though he couldn’t see the sunset from where they were below the ridge, he could tell that they probably didn’t have time to make it back to camp before it became dark. Patrick reluctantly began breaking down his pole and putting the tackle away from the boulder he was standing on. Patrick made hand signals across the lake to Makenzie to do the same and meet him back at the trail.
As Patrick began to hop back from rock to rock over to the trail, his knee reminded him that it was still too tender to stand in one place for several hours then get jolted from jumping and extending. The pain was bad, but it was more of a shooting pain from being stoved up, and he could tell that it was considerably better than yesterday. When he finally made it over to the trail he saw that Makenzie still hadn’t stopped fishing yet. Just as he was going to yell at her, he saw her rod tip bend again as a fish hit and she set the hook. Instead of calling to her, Patrick decided to walk back to the top of the hill and wait on that sitting rock so he could take in some of the sunset from the top of the Big Horns.
As he neared the top of the hill and the rock that they had sat on while coming over to the lake, he could tell something wasn’t right. Although he wasn’t sure what was wrong, that nervous feeling you get in between your shoulder blades a
nd down the back of your neck was in full effect. As he reached the rock and could begin to see over the top of the hill, it dawned on him that the color was wrong. The color of the sunset and the light hitting the rocks was a deep orange. He had seen plenty of orange sunsets in his life, but this deep hue of orange was different and somehow wrong.
Patrick looked back at Makenzie and saw that she was just landing the fish that she had caught, so he turned his focus back to the sunset. His adrenaline was pumping from the paranoid sensation he was having, so instead of sitting on the rock and taking the weight off his injured knee he continued to stand and just leaned against the rock. As his eyes adjusted and he scanned out across the landscape back to their camp, he saw what was causing the change in color and his concern. A thick dark yellow cloud was moving across the earth. It appeared to be a dense fog or cloud that was hugging the ground. The cloud was probably ten-foot-high at the leading edge that was moving east and grew much taller and thicker back to the west. It was so tall that it was blotting out the sun and causing the weird orange color to envelope everything. Patrick had never seen anything like it and his mind raced trying to reason it out and explain what it was.
From a glance back over his shoulder, Patrick could see that Makenzie was breaking down her pole and tackle. He turned his attention back to the cloud and continued to be awestruck. While there was only a slight breeze where he was standing, the mustard-colored cloud seemed to be moving extremely fast and was blanketing the entire landscape now. The cloud appeared to gracefully slide across the mountainous terrain, and he was amazed at the speed of how fast it moved. In a matter of seconds, it had passed from the area where they setup their tent to the ridge past Florence Lake that had taken them nearly an hour to hike. It seemed that it wasn’t able to reach the very peaks of the ridges as it thinned out along the hill Patrick was standing on. From the feeling in the back of his neck and the adrenaline coursing through his veins, he knew that it was wrong; evil somehow.
The Hike (Book 1): Survivors Page 3
