Chasing a Blond Moon (46 page)

40

Service was on the 800 as soon as Nantz set the plane down on the grass. The sky was gray and roily, with an erratic light wind sending leaves fluttering in bunches from trees ringing the perimeter of the field. He saw the captain parked and waiting, and radioed Jake Mecosta. “We're on the ground, where are you?”

“On the rim, directly above the target.”

“Where do you want us?”

“These guys are back and forth on the route I told you about. Best you come in from the up-water drop, and make sure you stay on the Reagan side.”

The up-water drop was Laughing Whitefish Falls. Reagan side meant conservative, therefore the right, which meant the east as they would come in. “Copy. We'll call back when we start in.”

Mecosta responded, “Get set and I'll come to you.”

Service acknowledged receipt with two clicks of the mike button.

Nantz helped him load his gear into the back of the captain's truck. “I should head back,” she said.

The captain said, “I could use your help first.”

She smiled and got into the backseat.

McCants and the other officers were waiting in the small gravel parking lot at the trailhead that led to the falls. There was a green porta-john, a picnic table chained to a tree, a barbecue pit, and a sign with a map of the walking trail through the area. All of the officers carried packs and MAG-LITEs. McCants and Moody carried their recently issued rifles, Gary Ebony a shotgun.

The captain exhibited his usual calm. “I'll take keys. This is too public to leave the vehicles. Ms. Nantz and I will move them to the original hide. There's bottled water in back. Help yourselves.” They each took three one-liter bottles of water and put them in their packs.

Nantz looked like she wanted to hug him, but simply looked into his eyes and nodded. They had reached a point in their relationship when words weren't necessary.

She and the captain left in two of the trucks as the group started the almost one-mile hike to the falls. It was a wide, groomed trail through second-growth beech and maple. The leaves of the maples ranged in color from red to orange.

There was a wooden stairway at the top of the falls that went down nearly two hundred feet into the canyon. The falls at the top dropped fifteen or twenty feet straight down onto a limestone and slate slope that sent the water cascading at a forty-five-degree angle. Ahead they could see open sky and canopies of forest, the leaves ranging from lavender to red and pink. The air smelled earthy and fishy. They stood on the top platform and Service laid out the situation for them.

“Pairs?” McCants asked.

“You and Gary, Gut and me. I'll hook up with Jake later. Remember, we're looking for a bear, one of a kind.” He let that thought sink in, took out the wrinkled computer image and passed it around. “It probably looks like this—blond, ninety to one hundred and forty pounds or so, with a mane like a lion.”

“I think I used to date her,” Ebony joked.

“Right tense on all your women,” McCants said, grinning.

Ebony grimaced.

“Focus,” Service said sharply. “These people have killed twice so far.”

“I don't like the so-far shit,” Gutpile Moody said.

“Use it to stay on track,” Service told him.

McCants was studying the photo. “What's with the cage?”

“I don't know that,” he said.

“Lotta unknowns here,” Ebony said.

“The scene looks medieval,” McCants said. “Creeps me out.”

“That was the nineteenth century and a lousy photo,” Service said. “This is now.” He took them through the case again, in more detail, concluding, “I think they're testing the waters. If they can bring this animal in, they can take out what they want.”

“Bring the animal in for what?” Moody asked.

“We'll find out,” Service said, thinking about the picture but not sure what it meant.

None of the officers asked what they would do if this was not the group he was after. They came up empty lots of times and simply regrouped. Failure was part of the job.

Light rain began to fall when they got down to the riverbed. The water was still angling down, moving fast, and there was a light mist from the falls, the river about seventy-five feet across. Service had no idea how wide it was below, but they needed to move down the right wall and he led them across. He stopped on the other side and put on his rain jacket and gloves. The temperature had dropped fast since they left the trailhead, as it always could in the Superior watershed, especially this time of year.

“Cold front coming across the lake,” he told them. “Supposed to hit the area around noon.”

Moody sniffed the air. “I smell snow. She'll be wet and slippery.”

McCants looked at Service and winked, got no response, rolled her eyes, said, “I know . . . focus.”

“Have you seen the grotto?” Gutpile asked.

“No, but Jake's been there with Santinaw. They've been scouting the area for a couple of days.”

“That crazy old Indian's still alive?” Moody asked.

“Candi, you and Gary will set up closest to the grotto, then Gut, and I'll be last so I can maneuver to meet and talk to Jake. Everybody on 800s, earphones. Only Jake and I will talk. Acknowledge with clicks.”

The canyon was more of a gorge and the river wasn't deep, but it moved with force, driven by gravity and slope. The rocks all along the way were slick and they had to be careful of their footing. The sides of the gorge were nearly vertical, in shelves twenty to thirty feet high, stacked on each other. Here and there was some greenstone and exposed strata. Shards of broken stone littered the river, having been snapped off by the cycles of freezing and thawing. At one point, McCants raised her fist and they all squatted. A beaver came swimming up the river toward a two-foot-deep pool, carrying a six-foot-long aspen toward a small dam in the making. The structure wouldn't survive the winter, but failure never deterred beavers. Service thought about how far the animal had to drag the aspen and sympathized.

The rain fell heavily for nearly an hour, then let up, and as the temperature continued to fall, turned to snow. Snow wouldn't raise the river level, which wouldn't impede the movement of things up the river. Service was almost glad to have the snow, knew the ground was too warm to hold it, that it would hit and soon melt.

They got into their hides just before noon. Service met with the group one final time and told them he didn't know how long they would be there, but to get comfortable and be prepared for a long wait. There were no smartass remarks now. They had all done surveillance and stakeouts many times, understood what had to be done, and were getting their minds into the zone where time would pass and they would stay attentive only to the moment. Some people never developed the ability to do this.

Service found a place under an overhang that afforded some protection from the wet snowflakes and got on the 800. “We're here,” he said.

The captain said, “Might get two inches tonight. Our friend says that bird is not yet on the ground. Nantz got off safely.”

Service toggled his transmitter twice, click click. Where the hell was the other aircraft?

He needed to talk to Mecosta, but would let him take the initiative.

The snow intensified around three o'clock, coming down so heavily that it was impossible to see across the river, which was about ten feet from where they were. Leaves were shooting down the river, brightly colored wrinkled rafts. The river level had risen, but not much. A mature bald eagle came soaring down from upriver, got almost to the surface, saw one of them and lifted off, scattering feathers. Service could hear its wings batting the air as it struggled for altitude and safety.

Behind him a mink pussyfooted along the rocks, saw him, and reversed direction. He could smell the animal's musk.

In a pool by his hide he saw four steelhead on a gravel bed. A chrome female flashed in the low light as she finned and shook to clean the area in preparation for putting out her eggs while the three males bumped and chased each other behind her, jockeying for position.

A gray jay came down to the river to drink and looked at him. Gray jays lived in Canada, came down to the U.P. for winters, which in Service's opinion, put their intelligence in question.

Mecosta made contact just before dark. “All subjects are out of the grotto,” Service heard in his earpiece. “Going back to camp. Takes them about twenty minutes to get to the trail, thirty minutes up to the cabin, load time if they're bringing more stuff, fifty minutes to be back in the grotto.”

Service radioed, “New arrivals at the cabin?”

“Don't know. Santinaw is with me.”

This was good. They didn't need anybody without a radio wandering around until they knew what they were dealing with.

“Santinaw says there's another entrance to the grotto,” Mecosta said.

“Somebody ought to get inside while they can.”

Another entrance? “Where are you?”

“On top.”

“I'm coming up.”

“No elevator,” Jake said. “Just climb up where you are and Santinaw and I will find you.”

Service looked up at the rocks above, figured it was between one hundred fifty and two hundred feet. While he had light he had visually marked several routes, but in darkness it would not be an easy climb and there was a lot of loose rock and stone to contend with all the way. “I'm climbing,” Service said.

It took an hour to make the climb, with only a few times where he had to backtrack for safer footing. It was steep but he stayed at it, and when he finally crawled over the top he was drenched in sweat. He sat on the edge and took a drink of water.

“You have the grace of a turtle,” Santinaw whispered from the dark. “We could hear you coming for thirty minutes.”

“Three minutes for me,” Jake Mecosta said.

Santinaw chuckled. “Don't understand how you two could catch anything.”

Service was tired and beginning to chill. “While we're bullshitting, nobody is in the grotto and nobody is covering their route. We have people down there. Let's
move.
”

The entrance was nearly two hundred feet back from the rim, beside some large oaks and between two boulders. Service used his penlight to look into the hole. “This looks like an old copper pit,” he said.

Santinaw said, “From those who came before the people.”

Service didn't say anything. To every Native American, their own tribe was “the people” and other tribes something less. The old copper pits had been dug out by Indians who lived in the area thirty-five hundred years ago, where they found surface copper, dug around it, building fires to break off the metal. Copper from the Great Lakes had been traded all over the continent. He had never seen such a pit east of the Keeweenaw, but there were patches of copper here and there in the central U.P. and this was not a total surprise.

“Why didn't you say something about this earlier?” he asked Santinaw.

“If you get to be my age, you'll understand.”

“Have you ever been down this?”

“I don't think so,” Santinaw said. “It's hard to remember.”

“But it goes down to the grotto?”

“It will or it won't.”

“Goddammit, old man.”

“I'm old, the earth is older. Things move around. Perhaps it went all the way once, maybe it still does.”

Service heard an urgent whisper in his earpiece. “Hey, up there, we have traffic down here.” It was McCants.

Service answered with two clicks. “They're back,” he told Mecosta.

“I'll go down with you,” the other officer said.

“No, somebody has to sit their trail, monitor traffic.”

Service toggled his 800. “Give me a count, how many visitors.” He got back five clicks, evenly spaced.

“Five,” he told Mecosta. “Others will come.”

Service radioed the captain. “Bird down?”

“Five straight up.”

Five? What the hell had taken them so long?

Service sat and put his feet in the hole, shone his light down into the darkness, and saw rocks jutting out. “The angle doesn't look too bad,” he said, hoping it would stay that way.

“The earth moves,” Santinaw reminded him.

The tunnel was a tight squeeze in some places, wider in others. Generally he could make steady progress downward. At one point he took out his compass, but the needle refused to settle. There was iron ore in the rock as well. He climbed down with his face against the wall and did not lift one foot until the other one had purchase. He checked his watch periodically and a minute or so after the forty-minute mark, he saw light below him. Faint, but definitely light. He could feel air coming up the shaft. The light was reflected against a boulder at the base of the hole right under him, maybe five feet down. He carefully lowered himself to the bottom and belly-crawled forward toward the light source. He was moving horizontally now and there was some rubble on the floor, but the sides of the tunnel were smooth; he felt them and guessed it was an old mineshaft. He hoped it was through hard firm bedrock, not soft and porous limestone. At the end of the horizontal shaft there was a large boulder blocking the exit and lights moved and bounced beyond his vision, spilling over the top: flashlights. He undid his pack, took a swig of his water, closed the pack up again. He got to his knees and stood in a crouch. Training: never try to see it all at once from concealment. He would make minor adjustments, try to see what was ahead of him in quadrants, assemble the whole picture in his brain.