***
They had to wait for a half hour or so until the group left the trailhead. From the woods, they watched as two of the Bigfoot hunters strapped a camo-patterned device about the size of a walkie-talkie to a tree facing the clearing. Probably a game camera, Casey thought, as Jack had surmised.
After that, an animated discussion at the map board ensued, with a certain amount of arguing. Casey couldn't hear all of it, but she caught enough to get the basics: they were trying to decided which of the various routes on the trail system was more likely to lead to Bigfoot habitat. Eventually they picked a direction, shouldered their packs, and headed out. Moreland's artificial leg seemed to give her little trouble, even with a pack on her back.
Jack waited a few minutes before standing up and shaking the water and twigs off his coat. He padded into the clearing. Casey followed behind.
She started out trying to avoid the camera, but noticed Jack was making no effort to do so. Of course, we're indistinguishable from normal animals. And a lynx and a bear prowling around at dusk wasn't going to raise eyebrows. Maybe they'd even become an Internet sensation, Casey thought, amused: the bear and the lynx who were "buddies".
Even after so many humans tramping around the wreckage, the bear smell was still strong. Casey thought it seemed like more than one bear by the smell, though she'd have to check with Jack later. She circled the clearing, looking for where they'd gone into the woods. There was bear scent in the edges of the undergrowth, often accompanied by Bigfoot tracks, but no trails leading away that she could find.
Jack headed down the path to the parking lot, nose to the ground. Casey caught some bear scent at the start of the path, but it was completely gone by the time they reached the parked cars.
To Casey's interest, Jack kept walking along the edge of the parking lot, out to the main road. Casey followed, sniffing occasionally. A number of different people had walked along the edge of the road, many of them recently. She couldn't pick out any specific ones.
Jack walked very slowly, nose almost touching the ground. It was almost dark now. About fifteen yards from the parking lot, he stopped, looked around, and shifted.
After a paranoid glance up and down the road-she felt very exposed-Casey shifted too. "Did you find something?"
"I think so. Wish we'd brought a flashlight. My eyes aren't so great anyway, without my glasses. What does that look like to you?"
Casey got down on her hands and knees. Gravel prickled her bare skin painfully. She shifted briefly, to use her much keener lynx night vision, and immediately saw what he was talking about. There were bare human footprints in the wet shoulder, with water pooling in them. Unlike the Bigfoot tracks, which were clear and precise, these were scuffed and hard to make out-accidental, not deliberate.
She went human again, and waited out a brief head rush. Rapid shifts were tiring and a little disorienting. "That's certainly no Bigfoot, unless it's a baby."
"Shifters," Jack said. "I got two different bear scents back at the trailhead. You too?" She nodded. "And no bear scent leaving the clearing. Lots of human, though. It had been walked on, and rained on, so it wasn't the best conditions for it, but I thought I picked up a human scent that was clear enough they probably weren't wearing shoes."
Casey envied his keen nose; she hadn't been able to tell, though perhaps more practice would help. He had, after all, been doing this much longer than she had. "Both shifters, do you think?"
"Yeah, which means at least two shifters, and maybe more, if some of them shifted into animals other than bears. I smelled squirrels, foxes, and a bunch of different birds from the last day or two. Definitely two bear shifters, though. They tore the restrooms apart as bears, and used a cast of a Bigfoot print to cover up the tracks. Then they left on the road."
"But why?" Casey asked. "There are plenty of ordinary bears in these woods. If it was obvious bears had done it, the police would never have been called, and neither would we."
"And if the Park Service got the idea there was a problem bear wrecking government property and threatening the tourists, they might have gone hunting," Jack pointed out. "Or trapped and relocated the local bears. Either way, not something that would be good for resident bear shifters."
"If they wanted to be left alone, not destroying things in the first place would be a better strategy."
"True. Oh, hey." He looked back in the direction of the trailhead parking lot, and shifted.
Casey shifted hastily, unsure what he'd seen. He started back toward the parking lot at a good clip. When she caught up to him at the trailhead, he had shifted human again, standing beside the game camera where he wouldn't trip its sensors.
Casey made sure she was well out of its field of view before shifting. "What are you doing?"
"Sabotaging the camera," Jack said. He opened the top and pulled out an SD card. "If our mystery shifters come back, they might not notice it. We don't want to risk these guys getting pictures of something more sensational than Bigfoot."
Casey opened her mouth to reply, when a weird, screaming cry echoed through the woods.
It rose and fell, then died away, leaving a hush behind. Casey realized her mouth was still open and closed it. She also took an involuntary step closer to Jack.
"What the hell was that?"
It hadn't been close, at least she didn't think so. It had come from deeper in the woods.
"Could have been a fox, maybe?" But he didn't sound sure.
"Or someone in trouble."
The cry came again, prickling any parts of Casey's body that weren't already prickled with chill-induced goosebumps. It didn't sound like a human cry for help, or like anything she'd ever heard before. It was an ululation, an eerie wah-wah-wah-wah that echoed off the mountains as it died away.
"That way." Jack pointed. He was still holding the SD card from the camera. He threw it as hard as he could into the undergrowth, then shifted.
"Oh good, let's go toward the weird screaming thing." But she shifted and fell into step with him.
Full darkness was upon them now. The park was still and cold and quiet, except for the ululating cry. It repeated at intervals, after pauses of anywhere from ten seconds to a couple of minutes.
They'd left the trail and were going straight overland through a damp and mossy wilderness. Casey hoped it wasn't too hard to find the road again. If nothing else, she supposed they could follow their own scent back to the parking lot.
Whatever it was didn't seem to be moving around. They were able to zero in on its location easily. As they got closer, Jack went slower, and finally stopped at the top of a low hill.
Hidden by ferns and boulders, they looked down at a campsite between the boles of several large pines. An LED lantern sat on the ground between two tents, illuminating the area. The group from the parking lot were scattered around in the light, chewing on granola bars or watching the edge of the campsite where a young man with a blond ponytail was sitting on a fallen cedar trunk. As Casey and Jack watched, he threw his head back and let out the blood-curdling cry they'd heard.
A few feet away, Peri Moreland was filming him. Casey wanted to laugh at the look on Moreland's face, which was clearly telegraphing: How has my life come to this?
"Dude, that is the worst Sasquatch mating call I ever heard," one of the other men said. "Let Brixon try. She's better at it."
Jack gave a soft, huffing grunt, and lumbered off down the hill.
Casey stared after him. She yowled softly, but Jack took no notice of her. Bushes cracked and ferns swished around his bulk.
"Hey, I think I heard something in the woods!" one of the campers said.
"Keep your voice down," someone else snapped. The LED lantern went out, and Casey blinked as her eyes adapted to the darkness. With keen feline night vision, she saw the group of Bigfoot hunters clustered close together. Moreland had her camera pointed at the woods, in the general direction of the rustling commotion Jack was making.
She wished she was clo
se enough to make out their expressions when, instead of a hot-to-trot Bigfoot, an enormous grizzly bear stepped out of the bushes. Jack swung his massive head their way and let out a deep, loud grunt.
After a frozen moment of shock and horror, the group erupted in a panicked explosion of diverse bear-survival strategies. Moreland whipped out pepper spray while keeping her camera pointed at him. One of the women collapsed to the ground and curled into a ball to protect vulnerable areas, while one of the other men took off running, with the other woman yelling after him, "You don't run from bears, Zach, you idiot!" The guy who'd been making the fake Bigfoot call was trying to climb a tree, without a lot of success since most of the trees around the clearing were pines or firs with few low branches.
But one of the male Bigfoot hunters had drawn a gun, and Casey's stomach curdled in fear. She'd forgotten firearms were legal now in national parks. Jack, don't be stupid and get yourself shot. Just back off.
Fortunately, Jack seemed to have had the same thought. He grunted again, and strolled past the edge of their campsite without bothering anything, vanishing into the dark. In a moment he reappeared at Casey's side, having circled around.
She cuffed him with her paw and then shifted to yell at him properly. "What were you thinking?" she demanded in a fierce whisper. "They could have shot you!"
Jack shifted too. In the darkness, she could just make out the white flash of his teeth as he grinned. "I figured it would be a good object lesson in making a target of yourself in the woods at night. There are scarier things than Bigfoot running around out here."
"Sure. You just wanted to play a juvenile prank on them."
"And it was so worth it. You were watching, right?"
"You're going to feel very bad if one of them runs off a cliff in the dark," Casey muttered, and shifted back to her lynx form before she lost feeling in her toes.
Below them, the panicked frenzy slowly died down in the campsite. Someone had turned the lantern back on. People began sheepishly coming down from their trees or picking themselves up off the ground. Casey did a quick head count to make sure everyone was accounted for, and came up one short.
"Where's Zach?" one of the women asked.
"Probably halfway to the trailhead by now," Moreland said.
"Oh God, what if the bear eats him?"
"I'll go find him," the member of the group with the gun announced. He had the sort of overdone upper-body muscles that come from working out for looks more than any other reason, plus a tank top to show them off, in spite of the cold. Casey mentally dubbed him Mr. Macho.
"I think we should stay together," one of the other men said.
Casey gave Jack the most reproving expression that her lynx face could manage, and together they set off quietly into the forest. From the look of things, it would take the campers half an hour to finally decide to send a rescue party.
They came upon Zach's trail easily, and Zach himself a minute or two later; he hadn't managed to get far. They could still hear the voices of the campers raised in argument. Zach had climbed about fifteen feet up the moss-covered trunk of a tree, and he was now clinging to a branch as if his life depended on it.
Jack and Casey looked at each other, keeping enough of a distance from Zach's tree that he probably wouldn't notice them in the dark. Casey attempted to make clear, with just her eyes and her feline eyebrows, that it was highly unlikely Zach would appreciate help from an enormous grizzly bear in getting down from the tree. Jack shrugged.
And then a sudden scream split the night air.
This was definitely not a Bigfoot call, fake or otherwise; this was a human shrieking for help. Two gunshots sounded in rapid succession, and as Casey whipped around in shock, the smell of bear hit her.
Jack grunted and took off back the way they'd come at a gallop. Casey ran in his wake, stretching out her long lynx legs. More shots rang out ahead of them.
Breaking out of the trees, they found the camp in total chaos, and two bears in the middle of it. The lantern had been knocked over and kicked across the ground, and by its crazily dancing light as it rolled, Casey glimpsed ragged tent canvas fluttering in the wind and Mr. Macho frantically reloading. One bear was down on all fours with blood matting its fur, while another was rearing back and raising its paw to claw a screaming, cowering woman.
Jack plowed into it from the side, dealing it a powerful blow with one of his huge front paws. Both the new bears were black bears, half the size of Jack's massive grizzly, and the blow sent it sprawling. Jack roared in the shaken bear's face and swatted it furiously in the head.
Mr. Macho was taking aim at both of them, not seeming to care which one he hit. Casey dashed in and collided with his shins, bowling him over. He went down hard, and the gun discharged in a random direction, chipping bark from a pine.
Jack used his superior size, backed up with fury and a few more blows, to harry both of the smaller bears out of the clearing. The one that had been shot was limping heavily, and as it tottered into the brush, the other hastened to help prop it up, giving last, defiant snarl over one furry shoulder at the campers.
Jack swatted him or her hard in the rear end, and with that, they were gone into the woods.
As Casey hastened after them, she heard Mr. Macho say, "That was a mama bear and her cubs. We're lucky to be alive."
Yeah, you're luckier than you know. Some of you would be dead right now if we hadn't been in the area. It hadn't looked to Casey like any of them were hurt, though, just scared.
Jack herded the cowering black bears deeper into the woods and down into a small, mossy ravine. Here, he shifted human, and bellowed at them, "Shift! Shift now!"
Every line of their bodies exhibited meekness as the bears did so.
With her enhanced feline night vision, Casey was surprised to see they were both young, no older than eighteen or nineteen. The one who had been shot was male; the other was a young woman. Both had dark blond hair, matted and unbrushed, and dense freckles on their faces and bodies. They were so similar-looking that they had to be siblings.
The young man slumped beside the trickle of water running at the bottom of the moss-covered ravine, clutching his bleeding arm. The woman crouched next to him and looked up at Jack with a hint of belligerence.
"What are you doing!" Jack roared. He wasn't merely shouting; a hint of a bear's deep rumble boosted his natural voice. "If you attack humans, they'll attack you! If you kill a human, they'll hunt us all! Not to mention you'll be a murderer! What were you thinking?"
"We-we're defending our territory," the woman protested. "We got a right!"
"No, you're attacking humans, and that's going to get you shot as a problem bear!"
The young man groaned, holding his arm. His fingers were dark and slick with blood.
"Bobby's hurt. Please let us go. If this is your territory, we're gonna stay out, we're gonna leave-"
"What are you going on about territories for?" Jack demanded. "We're people, not animals!"
Casey was starting to feel sorry for them. They were clearly terrified of him. She shifted and caught Jack's arm. "Jack, let's take them back to the truck. Miss, we can help your friend. We have first-aid supplies there-"
"No!" the woman said, but her defiance collapsed when Bobby slumped on her, passing out. She let out a small sob and clutched at him.
"Please. Just lemme take him home."
"We'll help you," Casey offered. "Jack can carry him. He's big enough. Do you live very far away?"
The woman scowled and put her arms around Bobby. "I can take him. Nobody is allowed in our house."
"Listen, you tried to commit a felony in front of us," Jack said sharply. "We're federal agents as well as shifters, and you're lucky I'm not cuffing you both. Now, before your brother there ends up with hypothermia as well as blood loss, we need to get him somewhere warm. Can you get him to shift back?"
She shook him. "Bobby?"
"I'll take that as a no," Jack sighed. "Casey, after I sh
ift, help her get him on my back."