Watchers in the Woods

by William W. Johnstone

  “It’s got to be called off, Richard. Using adults as bait is one thing; kids are something else.”

  “I agree with you. But how do we do it? If we were to level with your old classmates, how many would believe us? Any of them? Doubtful. How many would go straight to the press? It would take only one. Besides, a deal has been struck with . . . certain people. The lid stays on and the operation proceeds, Matt. And it goes higher than this office or agency.”

  “And people call us cold-blooded.”

  “Yes. I share your feelings. Matt, how did you come by this knowledge of cannibalism?”

  “I did some snooping.”

  “You’re not telling me the truth.”

  “How long have you been with the Agency, Rich?”

  “Thirty years.”

  “Then that’s how long you’ve been lied to. You should be used to it by now.”

  “Good luck, Matt.”

  “Yeah, thanks.”

  After hanging up, Matt stretched out on the bed and stared at the ceiling for a time. If he knew where the happy campers were going to pitch their tents, he could go back into the wilderness and neutralize the area for several miles around the campsite. But he didn’t know—and wouldn’t until he was with his old classmates. They probably didn’t even know yet. They would probably tell the guide to take them to some breathtakingly beautiful spot and leave it up to him.

  Matt walked back to the office. “Where is the guide who’ll be taking my classmates to the campsite?”

  “Nick Tanner? I think he’s visiting his daughter and family over in Washington. Don’t worry. He’s a good man.”

  “Oh, I’m sure he is. I was just curious, since I might try to wrangle an invitation to go along.”

  “I don’t think you really need a guide, Mr. Jordan,” the man said dryly.

  “Oh?” Matt said with a smile.

  “I saw you leave, and I saw you return. You weren’t ten feet off your entry point. That tells me something about you. Anything you’d like to add?”

  “Such as what?” Matt sat down and accepted the mug of coffee the man offered.

  “Where’d you learn to ride like you do? You’re no newcomer to a saddle.”

  “I’m Colorado-born and -bred.”

  “Bein’ from Denver don’t make you a cowboy. But you ride like one.”

  “I spent a good many years in South America. We ride a lot down there.”

  “What line of work are you in, Mr. Jordan?”

  “Matt. I’m retired.”

  The owner of the lodge smiled.

  “I’m serious. I am retired. I spent twenty-one years with the company, got injured, and pulled the pin. Disability.”

  “You don’t look disabled to me. They must have a good retirement plan.”

  “Oh, they do.”

  “You got half your life ahead of you, Matt. What are you going to do, just wander?”

  “For a year. Then I’ll take odd jobs here and there. You must know this area around here as well as anybody. You told me earlier you were born and reared here.”

  “I know the country. I only left here once for any length of time, from ’41 to late ’45. My mother was a French Canadian, so I spoke the language. I got shot down over France in late ’42 and stayed with the French Underground until Paris was liberated. And if you’re wondering why that didn’t show up when you ran a check on me, I never was formally with the OSS. Wild Bill Donovan asked me to stay on. I’d had enough. He came out here in, oh, ’47, I think it was, right after the CIA was formed. Wanted me to come back. But I was ranching then—I just bought this lodge a few years ago—and I told him I’d had enough excitement to last me for the rest of my life. He laughed and said he didn’t blame me a bit. Told me he wasn’t going to have any formal role with the Agency. And as far as I know, he didn’t.”

  “Not much of one,” Matt said. “You don’t mind if I verify what you just told me, do you, Mr. Watson?”

  “Call me Dan. You go right ahead, Matt. Use the phone here. And then we can sit down and you can ask any questions you like about that bunch of kooks that train in the wilderness and about that strange tribe of people who are rumored to live in the primitive area.”

  “It’s no rumor, Dan. They attacked me. I got lead into one of them.”

  The old man’s face hardened. “Did you kill it, Matt?”

  “No. But it was a righteous hit.”

  “A what kind of hit?”

  “A good body hit.” He had noticed Dan’s face changing and guessed that the old man knew the Unseen were more than just a rumor.

  “Where were you when they struck?”

  “About eighteen miles due east of here.”

  “Damn! That means they’ve crossed the river. Many of them, Matt?”

  “I’d say a good half dozen, at least. You don’t act surprised.”

  “I got to get me a drink.” He gave Matt his military service number and his social security number. “You call in and run your check on my military background. The reason your boss didn’t catch it first time around was ’cause my records got burned up in that fire at Fifth Army Headquarters in St. Louis some years back. You want a taste of bourbon and water?”

  “That would hit the spot. Thanks.”

  Matt called in and held on while Dan Watson’s military records at the Pentagon were computer accessed. Everything was as the man had said.

  “Let’s sit outside,” Dan suggested, coming back with two very dark drinks in very tall glasses.

  “That’s a taste?” Matt kidded him.

  “You’ll probably want another ’fore I get through telling about those things out yonder.”

  They sat on the rustic front porch of the small lodge on the edge of the Great Primitive Area. Dan was silent for a few moments, and Matt did not push him.

  “My daddy was a rancher and a miner,” Dan began. “We ranched over on the Clearwater, west of here. Daddy used to hunt just east of that river you crossed when you left here: the Red.” He sighed and took a sip of his drink. “Must have been, oh, 1925 or so, I reckon, when Daddy and about fifty other men rode off one morning. I was just a little shaver; but I remember how grim faced they were. All of them. Like they knew they had something awful to do and none of them really wanted to see it done.

  “The story goes, Matt, that way back, a hundred years before Lewis and Clark come in here in 1800 or so, a whole passel of settlers come into the wilderness area east of here—hell, it was all wilderness back then—and they got snowed in. I don’t know where they came from. No one knows. A lot of them died during that winter. The strong ones survived. And multiplied. Nearest town was three hundred miles away. So they just formed their own community. Well, they started inbreeding after a time. They stole Indian women and bred with them. Maybe they were always cannibals, I don’t know. No one does. All that in yonder, Matt,” he waved his hand, “stayed isolated for damn near the next two hundred years. Maybe these people were throwbacks when they came into this country. Maybe they weren’t settlers but people who had lived here since time began. The problem is, Matt, no one knows. Anyhow, up to the time my daddy and the other men rode in to wipe them out, the tribe had pretty much stayed by themselves and left other people alone. They were pretty well concentrated between the Montana line and the Selway River. They must have had a population explosion—that’s what my daddy figured happened—and it was years before he’d talk about that week he was gone with the other men. Hell, I was a grown man before he told me about it.”

  Dan took another sip of his drink. “My daddy and the other men knew they hadn’t wiped them all out. But they also knew they had cut the population down to where they posed no more threat. Daddy said it was the bloodiest week he’d ever experienced. He never hunted after that and didn’t like us kids hunting. And he wouldn’t let us go past the Selway.”

  Dan fell silent.

  “Have you ever personally viewed any of the Unseen?” Matt asked.

  “The w
hat?” Dan turned his head to look at Matt.

  “That’s what they’re being called. The Unseen.”

  “Good name for them. Yes. I’ve seen them. I’ve killed half a dozen. Maybe one every five or six years. But I never went hunting those who stayed across the Selway. I only shot when they strayed too close to my place and were menacing. God damn it!” he suddenly cursed. “For years they stayed low. For years I never heard of any further practice of cannibalism. They lived on game and plants.”

  Matt took a healthy slug of his drink and tried to sort through all Dan had so far told him. “Go on, Dan,” he urged after a few moments.

  “What do you mean?”

  “How many people know of the Unseen?”

  “Hell . . . lots of folks know. But they’re not going to talk to you about them.”

  “Why?”

  “Maybe it’s sort of like why most people who have seen Bigfoot won’t talk.”

  “No, it isn’t, Dan. Bigfoot isn’t a killer. Bigfoot doesn’t, so far as I know, practice cannibalism. Does Nick Tanner know of the Unseen?”

  “Oh, sure.”

  “Damn it!” Matt suddenly lost his temper. “How in the name of God can you people justify allowing tourists to go camping in there knowing they might be killed and eaten?”

  “The guides never took people into those areas where the tribe lived. Well, that’s not true. They did take people in there, but always big bunches of them. The tribe won’t bother big bunches of people. At least, they never have before.”

  Matt sipped his drink. Some key words Dan had spoken remained with him. “You don’t approve of hunting, do you, Dan?”

  The old man slowly turned his head to stare at Matt. “No, sir. I don’t.”

  “Nick Tanner?”

  “He doesn’t like it either. Goddamn hunters is one of the reasons the wolves don’t howl anymore. Entire species have been wiped out just to satisfy a blood lust. Man doesn’t have the right to tinker with the balance of nature. You’ve got to leave the animals’ natural predators alone. The big cats and the bears and the wolves. That’s how herds are maintained. Not by assholes who want to stick a dead animal’s head up on a wall and brag about killing it.”

  “Dan, it may surprise you to learn that I am one hundred percent in agreement with you. But that doesn’t solve the problem of the Unseen, does it?”

  “Sure gets rid of some hunters, though.”

  There was a very definite note of satisfaction in Dan’s voice. “So some of the guides take the hunters into areas known to be populated by the tribe—as you call them—and if they get killed, so what? Is that it?”

  Dan did not acknowledge the question.

  “I hate a goddamn trapper,” Dan said. “That’s the cruelest way for an animal to die. You ever seen an animal with his hind leg or front paw chewed off, Matt? I have. Takes a sorry son-of-a-bitch to trap an animal.”

  “Dan ... I agree with you. I don’t hunt. Haven’t since I was a kid. I don’t trap. I think it’s cruel. I also think it’s cruel to let people unknowingly go into areas where they might be taken alive and butchered for food.”

  “I’m not responsible for that, Matt. Neither is Nick or the other guides who agree with what we’re doing. We’re very careful about where we take decent people.”

  Matt was neither shocked nor surprised by Dan’s feelings. He knew several men who had once been big game hunters and who had finally put up their rifles in disgust, refusing to kill another animal in the name of sport.

  “Dan, the tribe, the Unseen, they must be stopped. You have to understand that. You’ve admitted killing them. You know what they’re doing is wrong.”

  “I killed those who went bad. That’s all this is, Matt—a few bad ones.”

  “God damn it, will you listen to me? How many innocent people have wandered off the nature trails and been seized by these savages? How many transients and hitchhikers have they killed and eaten? Think about it. You people can no longer protect or justify what they’re doing. They’re out of control.”

  “Not the whole tribe. I don’t believe it.”

  “I think you do,” Matt spoke softly. “I think you do. If not, you wouldn’t have told me all this.”

  Dan sat silent for several minutes, thinking and sipping at his drink. He pulled out a battered old pipe and fired it up, filling the air with fragrant smoke. “Maybe I do,” he finally spoke. “Maybe some disease has spread through the tribe. Maybe their time is over. There always was a few bad ones. But there was always some of us around to cull them.”

  “Your father didn’t seem to have had much sympathy for them.”

  “Oh, you’re wrong. He did. But when they moved out of the territory they had always lived in, he knew they had to be stopped. For the good of those that would remain.” He looked at Matt. “Now the government’s gone and stuck their nose into the matter. Four things I hate in this world: hunters, trappers, the IRS, and the goddamn CIA. I don’t hate the individual field agents; you seem like a right nice young man. It’s the idea of the agencies I hate. Matt, how in the hell did the CIA get involved?”

  “It was taken out of the hands of the FBI and turned over—unofficially, of course—to us. Once I locate the main party of the Unseen, I am to call in the backup teams who are waiting.”

  “To kill them?”

  “We’re going to take some alive for study.”

  “Isn’t that just grand?” Dan said sarcastically. “They paying you good money to do this, boy?”

  “Enough.”

  “And you think I’m going to tell you where to find them?”

  “You don’t have to cooperate, Dan. I’ll find them or they’ll find me. But you think about this: my old classmates are bringing some of their children with them. You said the tribe had crossed the river, so it doesn’t make any difference where the guide takes them in, the Unseen will find them. You want the blood of those people on your hands?”

  The old man didn’t reply. Just smoked his pipe and looked out into the not-too-distant wilderness.

  “Dan, you know it’s got to be political.”

  “Sure it is. Me and Nick have seen it coming for some time.” He laid his pipe aside. “I don’t have any compassion for the bad ones, Matt. Don’t get me wrong . . . they’re throwbacks.” He cut his eyes at Matt and Matt knew that this was one old man with considerable steel in his backbone, one old man who would kill without hesitation if he felt he was being crowded. “But the tribe functions in the wilderness to give the animals a fighting chance. Who takes their place when they’re gone?”

  “You’re the damnedest ex-rancher I’ve ever heard of, Dan. You’re actually defending nature’s predators. I just read a couple of weeks ago about some plan to reintroduce wolves to Yellowstone National Park, and the stockmen were screaming about it.”

  “Their losses could be kept very, very low if they work at it. I ran cattle for the first twenty years of my life, working on my daddy’s ranch, and for thirty-five years after I came home from France and took over the running of the place. A man don’t just move cattle out on the range and leave them, not unless he’s a damned fool. You got to work them. You got to move them around and night-herd them. Look after them like children. You rest when you’re dead, if you’re a rancher. Ranching is hard work, boy. You ever seen a big wolf running, Matt? Beautiful. They’re God’s creatures, and they have a right to their place on this earth. Man, now, he hollers about all the great and wonderful things that we humans have done, all the progress. Progress? Poisoning the earth and fouling the air is progress? Streams filled with dead fish due to chemicals is progress? Rivers filled with garbage is progress? Destroying forever hundreds, maybe thousands of species of wildlife and plants so a bunch of goddamn people who never grew up can come ripping and snorting through on their fancy all terrain vehicles or motorcycles is progress? Aw, hell, I’m an old man who talks too much, Matt. I’m just tired of seeing animals get the short end of the stick, that’s all. Their l
ife is hard enough. What gives us the right to make it even tougher?”

  “I agree with everything you’ve said, Dan. You should see what they’re doing to the rainforests in South America. It would make you puke. But for now, I have to keep pulling you back to the immediate problem.”

  “You think those friends of yours would settle for nature trails, Matt? Keep them out of harm’s way.”

  “What did they tell you when they called, Dan?”

  “That would be a Mrs. Lavelle.”

  “Nancy. Right.”

  “She said they wanted to go deep into the wilderness area and camp for two weeks. She said they didn’t want to see or hear another human being during that time.”

  “That’s your answer, then.”

  “You going to be with them, Matt?”

  “Yes.”

  “I guess your boss told you that they couldn’t be told nothing about this?”

  “That is correct.”

  “Well, Nick can take them where they won’t see another human being, that’s a fact. It’s what else they might see that worries me.”

  6

  Matt spent a week deep in the Primitive Area. Dan had shown him on a map where Nick planned to take the campers and Matt rode through it once, picking out good defensible campsites. Norm would be the only one who might spot what Matt was doing with his choices of sites. Norm was a highly decorated Vietnam vet who had served two tours. He would understand defense positions. The other men wouldn’t know a defensive position from an aardvark.

  The sites set in his mind, Matt rode back toward the area where Jimmy had been camped. He had not picked up any sign of the Unseen, nor had he sensed being watched. God, but this country was big and wild and rugged. Matt spotted elk and deer, mountain goat, and several black bears. Late one afternoon he heard the scream of a mountain lion and that night the howling of wolves.

  “You’re right, Dan,” he muttered to his dying fire. “The country belongs to the animals. It’s rightfully theirs.” He went to sleep under a blanket of stars.