Mountain Rampage

by Graham, Scott

But what was a dried drop of blood doing way up here? He sighed and crouched over his discovery.

  The blood was splattered around the edges and dried to a sheen. He scraped at it with his fingernail. Aside from the fact that the drop of blood had to have fallen here sometime since the last of the winter snow had melted out of the couloir in May, it was impossible to tell its age.

  He scanned the couloir below. A larger splotch of dried blood coated a rock ten feet farther down the narrow ravine. More dried droplets were sprayed across a scattering of rocks a few feet below that.

  Had a bighorn sheep nicked its leg on a shard of rock while passing through the couloir? No. The amount of blood on the lower rocks was too voluminous to fit that notion. In fact, only one explanation accounted for the amount of blood splattered on the rocks below: something had been shot here in the couloir, sometime since May—despite the fact that all hunting in the park was illegal.

  Chuck climbed down to the dried spray of blood and checked out the ravine farther down. A single thunderstorm anytime since the shooting would have washed away all evidence of the kill. Instead, starting thirty feet below where he now stood, scrapes marked the edges of rocks where an animal had been dragged to the base of the couloir after the creature’s death.

  He centered his cap low over his eyes. What had been dragged off the mountain?

  He climbed down the couloir, following the slide marks of the animal. Whoever had killed the creature had made no attempt to hide the trail—not that the killer had any reason to do so; there was no logical reason for anyone to be here on the steep, remote north side of the mountain.

  From the base of the couloir, the drag trail followed the broad drainage downhill as the steepness of the mountain’s north face lessened. The trail of dark rubbings on rock wended its way around boulders and bypassed low cliffs until, nearing tree level, it headed straight for a narrow opening where the drainage entered the forest.

  As he neared the trees, Chuck spotted a second drag trail descending from the mountain’s northwest ridge. He studied the ridge and saw yet another drag trail leading off the mountainside.

  The two additional trails joined the first just above tree line. In the forest, he followed the conjoined trail over logs and across moss-covered rocks. He eyed the ground as he walked, but the forest duff was too thick to show any telltale boot prints.

  The weather-beaten firs grew close together along both sides of the drainage, their intertwined branches cutting out much of the morning light. The gloom of the shadowed forest and the drag trail of the slaughtered animals—not to mention Nicoleta’s murder hours earlier—filled Chuck with foreboding. He stilled his breathing and crept through the forest in silence, following the trail until the odor of rotting flesh, carried by an upslope breeze, swept through the trees.

  The stench slammed him full in the face. He came to a stop, unexpectedly overcome by a wavering vision of Nicoleta’s body, arms out-flung, neck slashed.

  The breeze picked up, carrying more of the awful smell with it. He bent forward. His knees nearly buckled. He never should have left the students and Clarence and Kirina on their own at the mine. In fact, he never should have come to the mountains with the students this morning in the first place.

  What was to be gained by following the drag trail to its source? He had bigger problems to deal with. He should turn around, return to the mine, and head back to town with the students this very instant.

  But what had happened here on the mountain?

  The breeze let up and the odor subsided.

  Chuck held his breath and descended another thirty feet through the trees to a fen no more than fifty feet across. The small, open area wasn’t wet enough this summer to constitute a true bog, though it was damp enough in non-drought years to preclude the growth of trees. This rainless summer, the fen was a compact meadow of tall grass already turned, weeks early, from early-spring green to late-autumn brown.

  Still holding his breath at the edge of the fen, Chuck spotted several clouds of black flies buzzing above the grass. Beneath each swarm of insects lay a pile of rotting flesh.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Spaced at irregular intervals around the fen were the headless carcasses of half a dozen Rocky Mountain sheep in various stages of decay. All the creatures had been in their prime before they’d been killed. Their broad chests, humped above the grass, gave way to brawny hindquarters of large, muscular rams, not smaller ewes. So powerfully built were the rams’ collapsed forms that they appeared capable, even in death, of leaping without effort from one rocky crag to another.

  The slaughtered animals’ fur was intact, legs and torsos lying as they’d been left, uncut by any butchering to make use of their meat.

  Chuck stepped forward and turned a slow circle in the center of the clearing, taking shallow breaths of the fetid air. Rage boiled inside him. The sheep had been slaughtered in some sort of a perverted rampage. Who had killed these magnificent creatures, and why?

  He clamped his nose between his finger and thumb and studied the carcasses. All the rams had suffered the same fate: their heads cut and carried off, their bodies left to rot.

  Chuck considered what he knew about Rocky Mountain bighorn rams. While some remained with their herds of ewes and lambs throughout the year, others, in spring and summer, ran in all-male groups, grazing high above tree level where their keen eyesight and unrivaled sense of smell protected them from predators—save a high-powered bullet fired by a poacher from afar.

  It was easy to surmise what had transpired on Mount Landen over the course of the summer. After the first among them was killed and dragged down the mountainside, the remaining rams had continued to frequent the high alpine tundra of the mountain’s north face. And why wouldn’t they? The slope had proven safe for generations; nothing in their evolutionary makeup warned them away after the death of the first among them, or the second, or third.

  Based on the size of the carcasses, whoever had killed the rams had harvested the most trophy-worthy of the bighorns that roamed Mount Landen. But with just the rams’ heads removed, Chuck knew it wasn’t trophies for fireplace mantels the poacher was after. It was their horns, the bigger the better.

  For many years, Chinese men had believed that ingesting ground-up rhinoceros horn acted as an aphrodisiac, which had led to the decimation of the world’s wild-rhino population by poachers. As powdered rhino horn became increasingly unattainable on the black market, a rumor started up on the internet that the horns of Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep held the same magical sexual powers as rhino horns. The demand wasn’t going anywhere, so somebody came up with a new way to supply it—and here in front of Chuck was the clear result of the latest aphrodisiac craze.

  Also clear, because the carcasses were still here, rotting in the forest, was the fact that no one yet knew what had taken place.

  That, at least, was about to change.

  Chuck retraced his route out of the trees and back up and over the ridge.

  “About time,” said Kirina when he returned to the mine site. “We’ve refilled the excavation units. We’re ready to put the logs back in place.”

  Chuck cast an approving eye at the site of the collapsed cabin—now a flat patch of dirt and rock where the excavation had taken place.

  “Leave no trace,” he said, quoting the ethic of wilderness travel that was equally applicable to archaeological work.

  He helped Kirina, Clarence, and the students return the logs to their original, collapsed positions, studying “before” pictures on Kirina’s tablet computer for accuracy as they worked. When they finished, the site of the collapsed cabin looked as it had at the beginning of the summer—a jumble of protruding logs at the edge of the plateau—as required by Professor Sartore’s contract with the park service.

  The contract required that the floor in the mine tunnel be returned to its original, intact condition as well. In the wake of the floor collapse, however, Chuck decided that part of the contract was null and void.r />
  He pointed at the picks, shovels, boxes of gear, and unused rain shelters stacked beside the collapsed cabin. “Shouldn’t be a problem carrying everything back to the van in one go,” he told the students. “Take a good look around. We won’t be coming back.”

  “Good riddance,” muttered Jeremy.

  “We’re giving it back to the ghosts,” Sheila said to him.

  “To your skinwalkers, you mean,” Jeremy replied.

  “Not skinwalkers. Ghosts,” Sheila asserted. “They haunt the Stanley, down in town, and they’re up here, too.”

  “Your skinwalkers are afraid to leave the rez?”

  Sheila stuck out her tongue at him. “They’re not afraid of anything. They just like to stay close to home.”

  “Let’s get out of here,” Chuck said before Jeremy could direct another dig at Sheila.

  Back at Trail Ridge Road, Chuck joined Clarence and Kirina in stacking and strapping the tools and gear bins in the van’s rooftop luggage basket as the students climbed inside and dug into their sack lunches. He checked the time as he turned the van around and headed toward town. Just past noon. Three hours before they were due back at Raven House for their police interviews. Plenty of time for what he had in mind.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Three miles before the East Entrance Station, Chuck turned left onto Fall River Road. Trees pressed close on either side of the dirt road, which followed the Fall River west and upstream away from Estes Park along the north side of Mount Landen, roughly paralleling Trail Ridge Road on the mountain’s south side.

  The students leaned back in their seats in silence, lunches completed and legs outstretched, their eyes following the van’s progress up the valley. Neither Clarence nor Kirina asked where Chuck was taking them; they appeared to be as content as the students to avoid returning to town for as long as possible.

  After a two-mile climb through the forest, the road leveled, broke from the trees, and entered a long, flat meadow where beavers had dammed the river, creating ponds linked like jewels along the valley floor. Trout broke the calm, sun-dappled surface of the pools. A pair of mallards, flushed by the van’s approach, took flight from a small pond beside the road. To the south, the summit of Mount Landen rose half a vertical mile above the valley floor.

  They reentered the trees at the far end of the meadow and neared the three-walled head of the valley. Chuck slowed, peering around each bend until, just before the road began its steep ascent out of the river basin, he spotted a turnout gouged into the side of the mountain. He eased the van to a stop in the middle of the road, hopped out, and crouched, studying the pullout.

  Pressed into the dusty earth at the edge of the roadway between patches of gravel were tire tracks in the shape of lightning bolts. The absence of rain revealed that the vehicle responsible for making the tracks had parked at the turnout numerous times throughout the summer.

  Chuck used his phone to snap pictures of the overlapping tracks. They were thick and deep—made by a vehicle far bigger than an ordinary passenger car.

  He crossed to the dirt embankment cut into the side of the mountain to accommodate the parking spot. Lug-soled boot prints in the soft earth showed that someone had made repeated forays up and down the mountain from the road. He snapped more pictures of the treads.

  He turned the van around, parked at the edge of the pullout to preserve the lightning-bolt-shaped tracks, and rolled open the van’s big side door. “Grab your water bottles,” he told the students. “There’s something I want you to see.”

  He led the students past the boot prints in the soft, roadside soil and up the slope into the forest, Clarence and Kirina in the rear, following the route of whoever had passed this way several times this summer. The person—almost assuredly a male, based on the size of the prints—had made no attempt to hide his passage. Chuck followed the route without difficulty, linking places where grass and weeds had been crushed beneath the hiker’s feet with spots where moss, dry and flaky this rainless summer, had been kicked from fallen logs, and where small rocks had been dislodged from their former resting places.

  The unknown hiker’s path led straight up the mountain, cutting across elk and deer trails as it climbed. Looking up, Chuck caught a glimpse of Mount Landen’s open north slope through a break in the forest.

  He knew what lay ahead, yet even as he followed the route toward the rotting carcasses, he couldn’t help but marvel at his surroundings. He was outdoors, hiking in the woods, on a summer day, far from all the trouble back in town.

  Squirrels scurried up tree trunks ahead of the group. They scrabbled sideways around the trees to keep the trunks between themselves and the students, poking their heads out for brief looks and chattering noisily as the group passed. Gray jays tracked the students, flapping from branch to branch and announcing the group’s progress up the mountain with deep-throated caws. The forest smelled of pine and vanilla. Twigs broke under Chuck’s boots with crisp snaps, releasing small puffs of dust from the forest floor.

  After thirty minutes of uphill progress, the path split in two. A right fork continued up the mountain to the open slope above, while a left fork angled through the stunted trees just below tree line.

  Chuck led the group along the left fork. He stepped aside when they reached the fen a few minutes later, allowing the students to line up at the edge of the small meadow next to him.

  The morning breeze had carried the scent of the rotting carcasses away from the students during their hike, but here, within the tight ring of trees, the reek of the rotting carcasses was overpowering.

  The students recoiled, hands over their mouths and noses. Samuel fled the way they’d come, his arms clasped across his stomach.

  Jeremy spoke through his fingers. “Why’d you bring us here?” he demanded of Chuck. “Is this your idea of some sort of sick joke?”

  Chuck looked at his boots, suddenly ashamed of himself. Why had he brought the students here?

  He should have let them relax in the sun beside the beaver ponds in the valley below before heading back to town for their interviews. But he’d brought them to the scene of the sheep slaughter instead.

  Jeremy was right. What had he been thinking?

  He waved for the students to retreat from the fen. “Let’s back off and regroup.”

  He called ahead for a halt a couple hundred feet from the meadow. The students turned, lined along the path, Samuel having rejoined them along the way.

  Chuck attempted to explain himself. “I spotted the tire tracks in the pullout and the boot prints headed up the mountain. I wanted to make sure where they led.”

  Jeremy’s eyes grew round. “You knew where you were taking us all along?”

  “I had a pretty good idea. And I had my reasons.” Chuck paused, seeking the right words to justify his actions. “What have we just spent the summer doing?” he asked the students.

  They looked at one another. Sheila raised a tentative hand.

  “Historical archaeology,” she said. “Digging up the recent past to learn more about it.”

  “Correct. And with everything we’ve done, if you think about it, perhaps the single most important thing we’ve learned this summer is how far humans will go in the pursuit of one particularly powerful human desire: greed.”

  The students cast uncertain glances at one another.

  Chuck pointed up through the trees at the summit of Mount Landen. “Think about where we’ve been digging, way above tree line. The miners who worked up there in the winter more than a hundred years ago faced blizzards, sub-zero cold, and avalanches, not to mention lightning storms in the summer, along with all the dangers of the mining operation itself—for what?”

  “For gold,” Samuel said. He reprised a bit of his act from the mine tunnel: “The mother lode! All the riches in the world!”

  “Samuel’s exactly right,” Chuck told the group. “A hundred years ago, gold was used for one thing and one thing only: ornamentation. These days, at least, there a
re a few industrial uses for the stuff. But back in the 1800s, gold was all about showing your friends and neighbors how wealthy you were. To do that, people would pay a fortune for the stuff, and miners would risk their lives, day in and day out for years on end, digging it out of the ground.”

  Jeremy pointed past Chuck at the fen. “I don’t see what any of that has to do with what you just showed us.”

  “They’re one and the same,” Chuck explained. “What you saw back there is an example of what people still are willing to do—what they’re willing to risk—a century and a half after the Pikes Peak gold rush, to come up with something others will pay big bucks for.”

  He told the students about the Chinese appetite for aphrodisiacs, the headline-making news of the black market’s shift from rhino to Rocky Mountain sheep horn, and how, as a result, the park’s rams had found themselves in the poacher’s crosshairs.

  “You mean,” Kirina asked when he finished, “somebody killed all those rams back there just for their horns?”

  “Only the rams’ heads are gone,” Chuck affirmed. He looked at the ground in front of him, then up at the students. “Maybe you guys are right. Maybe—especially after what happened last night—I shouldn’t have brought you up here.”

  Samuel said, “No. I totally get it. My dad’s a hunter—a real hunter, not some sleaze-bag poacher. I just want to make sure somebody takes out the rat bastard who did this.”

  Chuck exhaled. “So do I,” he said. “I’ll be reporting this, of course. But in the meantime, one thing we can do is make sure the poacher knows we know what he’s up to. He’s killed six rams on Mount Landen—on our mountain. Let’s make sure he doesn’t kill any more.”

  “What do you have in mind?” Kirina asked.

  Chuck addressed the group. “I want you to walk all the way around the meadow through the trees, kicking over stones, rolling logs, tossing downed branches around—anything we can do to show him we’ve been here.”

  “Good,” Kirina said. She took over, directing the students to spread themselves along the slope and leading them up the mountain through the forest, looping around the meadow.