Mountain Rampage (4 page)

Clarence turned his head when Chuck didn't respond. “I
asked you a question, boss.”

Chuck looked past Clarence at the students—the six male members of Team Nugget and six women on Team Paydirt—as they made their way along the trail.

Silver-haired Ernesto Sartore, Chuck's anthropology professor two decades ago at Fort Lewis College in Durango, had called in April from out of the blue to offer Chuck a job running a group of students through Fort Lewis' eight-week field school in historical archaeology at the site of long-abandoned Cordero Mine, high in Rocky Mountain National Park.

“You're the top graduate our School of Anthropology has ever produced,” Sartore told Chuck. “All your published papers, your finds displayed in museums across the country—you're our rock star.”

“I'm not so sure about that,” Chuck demurred, pleased by the unexpected praise from Sartore, with whom he hadn't been in contact for years.

He accepted Sartore's offer when Janelle agreed to bring the girls and spend the summer with him in Estes Park, thanks to her scheduled summer leave from the school receptionist position she'd found upon moving to Durango after their marriage last fall. Chuck called Parker, an old high-school buddy from Durango, and secured the secluded cabin at the back of the Y of the Rockies complex for himself, Janelle, and the girls, and use of Raven House for the students, with Clarence and Kirina providing live-in supervision.

Upon the start of the field school in June, Chuck, for the first time in his life, experienced the satisfaction of coming home to family at the end of each work day, and his insistence on sticking to schedule this morning was born of that contentment. He'd brought the students up into the mountains as planned today despite—or, more accurately, because of—last night's events; he wanted to assure no glitches during the final three days of the
program put his plan to run another field school for Sartore next year at risk—he wanted to spend another contented summer with Janelle and the girls.

“You agree with Parker?” Chuck asked Clarence, changing the subject. “You think the thing with the blood isn't that big a deal?”

Clarence stopped and faced Chuck in the middle of the trail. “Tell you the truth, more than the blood itself, what really confuses me is the anonymous phone call.”

Parker had told Chuck, and Chuck had told Clarence, that a 911 emergency phone bolted to a post in the grass fields at the center of the compound had been used in the middle of the night to alert the police to “something suspicious” next to Raven House. According to Parker, the unknown caller had spoken with a muffled voice, likely through a cloth wrapped around the receiver to avoid leaving fingerprints.

Clarence continued, “Somebody comes across some blood on the ground? That I can buy: a cook or dishwasher from Falcon House gets his hands on some chicken blood from the kitchen and dumps it on the ground—gross out your buddies, trick them into walking through it in the dark, snap a pic and put it online, whatever.”

“Sounds like something you'd do.”

“Sure. But if I did, I wouldn't call the cops about it. And if someone else saw it on the ground and felt the need to report it, why'd they work so hard to hide who they were?”

“Maybe if they were tricked into stepping in the blood,” Chuck theorized, “and they wanted to get the person who did it in trouble without getting in any hot water themselves.”

“The whole thing's strange, you ask me. Those cops, though?” Clarence blew a derisive jet of air through his lips.

“What about them?”

“So serious. They stayed till dawn—for a puddle of blood.”

“It's Estes Park, population what, five thousand? Their whole
careers are spent dealing with jaywalkers, shoplifters, people going thirty in a school zone. This is big stuff for them.”

“Still. Crime scene tape? Spotlights? All the pictures they took? I'm telling you, if this had happened in the South Valley, the cops wouldn't even have shown up.”

“You saw me talking to the guy in charge, Hemphill, the one I heard on the radio thinking he'd found a homicide. He seemed okay to me. Just trying to do his job.”

“That's because you're from a small town, too, bro.”

“He's watched a few too many cop shows on TV, that's all.”

“Maybe,” Clarence said. He shot Chuck a look. “Or maybe he knows something you and I don't.”

F
OUR

The sun was well up and the day quickly warming by the time Chuck gathered the students before him at the mine site.

Cordero Mine sat on a flat triangle of open, rock-strewn ground well above tree line on the east flank of Mount Landen, a mile around the peak from Trail Ridge Road. Ore cart tracks, bent and rusted with age, ran a hundred feet from the mouth of the long-abandoned mine's single underground tunnel to where the mountainside fell away to the east. A dark tongue of dumped tailings extended down the steep slope from the end of the tracks. The site was devoid of structures, save for a collapsed log cabin at the lip of the embankment that had housed miners a century ago.

The field school students stood in a half-circle in front of Chuck, their hardhats tucked beneath their arms. Several of the students cast tired looks at Chuck. Sheila, usually the liveliest of the group, appeared particularly wiped out.

Chuck lifted a consoling hand to the students. “I know you didn't get a lot of sleep last night. But we only have three days to go, and Professor Sartore wants to make sure you get your money's worth.”

Sheila opened her mouth in an exaggerated yawn. “All I want to do is take a nap. I couldn't even make it for my spirit time today.”

Sheila took a few minutes to herself each morning after breakfast, wandering up the slope into the forest behind the dormitories. She was a short, stocky Navajo steeped in spirituality and mysticism. Her cheeks were round and merry, her chestnut eyes generally filled with mirth. All summer, she'd rebelled—good-naturedly—against the field school, claiming her participation was due only to the fact that completing the course was required for her to graduate.

“I'm an anthropology major,” she explained. “I just want to study my
Diné
people. But they say I have to do some field work if I want my degree, so here I am.”

She had predicted the students' presence at the abandoned mine site would stir up ghosts—known on the Navajo reservation as skinwalkers. The male members of Team Nugget had declared their readiness to take on any and all angry spirits that dared haunt them.

Chuck lowered his hand. “The sooner we meet today's work goal, the sooner we can leave. We're almost there—today and tomorrow here at the mine, Thursday at Raven House finishing up the last of the logbooks, and Friday we are—” he held his hardhat in one hand and drummed it with the other “—outta here.” He looked around the group. “Okay. Team Nugget in the tunnel, Team Paydirt's got the cabin.”

The six young men of Team Nugget groaned in unison.

Acting on a suggestion from Professor Sartore, Chuck had selected the mine tunnel along with the collapsed miners' cabin for excavation during the final four weeks of the eight-week field school, following the students' survey and assessment of the entire mine site. The intrigue of working underground made the mine tunnel the students' preferred work assignment—at first. However, the reality of spending long hours in the cold, dark tunnel soon set in.

“We got the shaft three days last week,” whined Jeremy, Team Nugget's chief complainer. “The girls were only in there for two.”

Jeremy was thin and pale, with bony arms, angular cheekbones, dark brown hair slicked back from a high forehead, and eyes so large they shoved his eyelids out of place in their sockets. His pronounced Adam's apple rode up and down the front of his long neck whenever he spoke.

“You know the schedule,” Chuck said. “Every other day. Paydirt was in there yesterday. You're on for today.”

The mine tunnel, six feet wide by seven feet high, extended two hundred feet into the side of Mount Landen. A floor of heavy planks topped by the ore cart tracks ran the length of the tunnel. At the start of the summer, Chuck had placed pin flags to divide the tunnel floor into four equal sections. The students had dismantled, examined, and reassembled the floorboards and tracks of one flagged section each week for the past three weeks. The last week of the field school called for studying the final, deepest fifty feet of the tunnel.

Yesterday, under Kirina's direction, the members of Team Paydirt had dismantled the iron tracks and floorboard planks to within fifteen feet of the gray granite wall at the end of the tunnel. Team Nugget was to disassemble the last of the tracks and floorboards today, leaving tomorrow to root through the stony debris beneath the floorboards by hand—traditional trowel excavation of the tunnel's rocky base having proved impossible—and Thursday to reassemble the final stretch of floorboards and reattach the tracks.

Kirina addressed the members of her team. “Let's hit it, ladies.”

Along with Chuck's suggestion to hire Clarence for one of the field school's two team-leader positions, Professor Sartore had suggested hiring Kirina, a graduate student from Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, a few hours southwest of Durango. From day one, Kirina had impressed Chuck with her no-nonsense style. He'd learned over the course of the summer that her flat face, receding chin, and small, inset eyes hid a backbone of steel.

At one point, Chuck had overheard Jeremy refer to Kirina as “Hatchet Face,” at another, he'd caught Jeremy referring to her derisively as “one of those square-faced dykes who swing both ways.” If Kirina had heard those or any other derogatory remarks about her over the summer, she hadn't let on. She worked the students hard at the mine site, but always worked
harder herself. Best of all, she did a far better job than Clarence of keeping an eye on the students during their off hours at Raven House, enabling Chuck to relax and enjoy his evenings and weekends with Janelle and the girls.

Kirina was a semester away from completing her Ph.D. in archaeological anthropology at NAU. In her mid-twenties like Clarence, she'd worked a number of digs during her grad-school years, making it easy for Chuck to put her in charge.

Chuck settled his hardhat on his head while Kirina led the members of Team Paydirt across the plateau to the site of the collapsed cabin. The students had numbered and stacked to the side the timbers from the collapsed cabin, and had staked and strung the cabin's cleared floor area using long iron spikes and white nylon cord to form a rectangular grid five units long by four units wide. So far, the students had excavated seventeen of the meter-square units a foot or two deep, to where the rocky soil beneath the cabin gave way to bedrock. The final three units of the twenty-unit grid awaited excavation over the next two days. Thursday, the students would refill the excavated grid and replace the cabin logs where they'd lain after their collapse a century or more ago, returning the cabin site to its original condition as required by Professor Sartore's contract with the National Park Service.

Kirina popped the lid off a plastic equipment bin next to the excavation grid and distributed trowels to Team Paydirt. Chuck walked with Clarence and Team Nugget to the mouth of the tunnel, which extended underground where the triangle-shaped plateau narrowed to a point in a fold in the face of Mount Landen. A rusted iron door in a thick metal frame was bolted into the mountainside, covering the mouth of the tunnel. The bottom half of the heavy door was solid iron, the top half a lattice of inch-wide iron bands welded to form six-inch squares. Hanging from the frame were a heavy chain and
keyed padlock that served to secure the door when the site was unoccupied.

Chuck pulled the door open with a noisy creak and stepped aside, allowing Clarence to lead his team into the tunnel.

The six teammates, close friends from their past three years at Fort Lewis, were among the annual wave of high-school graduates who found their way over the mountains to “the Fort,” as the college was known, from the cities and suburbs lining Colorado's Front Range.

Jeremy's irascibility aside, Chuck liked the members of Team Nugget. Though they wore the air of easy privilege about them like cloaks, all six were willing enough to put in the long hours and physical labor required of the field school despite the fact that only two were anthropology majors. The other four had signed up for the course simply as a way to spend the final summer of their college years together before going their separate ways after their upcoming senior year.

The team members put on their hardhats and clicked on their headlamps as they followed Clarence through the door. Chuck turned on his headlamp and followed. A stream of outside air coursed past him, drawn into the tunnel.

A mining engineer Chuck had hired at the beginning of the summer to assess the security of the mine tunnel had declared it safe from the risk of roof collapse, pointing out that no explosives, which might have damaged the tunnel's structural integrity, had been used in its construction.

“They did it the old-fashioned way,” the fire-hydrant-shaped engineer told Chuck, putting his finger to one of the countless indentations in the wall where miners had chipped away at the granite interior of the mountain, lengthening the tunnel pickaxe blow by pickaxe blow.