He wasn’t a killer, though he did believe he could kill in self-defense. After all, he hailed from Colorado, the “make my day” state. It was a common joke, but he wondered if even 10 percent of the people who said it could truly kill someone in the heat of the moment. He had even heard of police officers and soldiers who couldn’t pull the trigger.
Wouldn’t self-preservation kick in? He could not imagine enduring an attack without fighting back.
He waited.
He closed his eyes and concentrated on slowing his racing pulse and his too-quick breaths. He was the tree, ageless and unaffected by the events around it. He sat still, hearing not his own exhalations or even the slightest creak from the branches upon which he sat. Not vying for attention against the actions of survival, his injuries now made themselves known. His elbow throbbed, his knee felt swollen, and his forehead radiated waves of pain into his skull.
Still, he sat silent and unmoving. The now-shallow rise and fall of his chest, the bead of perspiration that dripped over his temple and found his jawline—the only movements he allowed.The leaves around him fluttered as a breeze passed.
He wanted to ponder exactly what he had seen, to figure out what was going on. But anything that distracted him meant the difference between life and death.
So he waited.
And they came.
He heard them first, crunching over the ground cover—more quietly than they had moved before, but still not silently enough to call themselves hunters.
Though hunters they were. Hutch did not want to make the mistake of thinking of them in any other way. They were hunters hunting him.
The driver came into view. The weapon he carried was like nothing Hutch had seen before. Hued olive green, it was a metal rectangle, the height and thickness of a hardcover book and three times as long. A handle and trigger assembly jutted from the bottom in the center of its length. It was a mean-looking weapon.
If the hunter continued on a straight path, he would walk within twenty feet of Hutch’s tree.The man’s head rotated like a searchlight, scanning, but he never looked down where Hutch may have left tracks. And he never looked up. If he did, Hutch would loose an arrow into his chest. He thought about doing it anyway, reducing his enemies by one. But depending on where—
There: another hunter. The teenage boy. So young, but appearing much, much older because of the sniper’s rifle he carried. He passed through a ray of sunlight. The metal studding his face glinted. He would pass on the other side of the tree, closer. Hutch wondered how they had come to be so close. Perhaps they spotted some sign of his passage, or they had instinctively patrolled the darkest part of the woods.Maybe it hadn’t been instinct but the correct assumption that he would stick to these areas.
If he shot one of these men, either in self-defense or as a preventive measure, the other would blast him out of the tree before he could draw a second arrow. Unless . . .
Think it through, he told himself.
Unless the surviving hunter witnessed only his fallen partner and not Hutch, not the place from which he struck.
I can do it, he thought. Just take them out, right here, right now.Why not? They were killers.They wanted him dead.Who knew what other crimes they had committed, what other people they had terrorized . . . or what people they would yet terrorize.
Another man came into view.
No, not a man. It was the boy, the one who had retrieved his arrow from the field. He carried a pistol, but it seemed heavy in his hand. He swung it lethargically beside his leg.
“Bad,” the boy whispered. “Bad.
”
The driver snapped his head back. “What?” he said harshly.
“I gotta pee,” the boy said. He tucked his pistol into the back of his jeans.
“Now?” the man named Bad asked.
“Yeah.”
Bad jabbed a finger at him. “Hold it.”
The man passed directly under Hutch. The metal-faced teen shrugged at the boy and followed.
The boy watched them leave, his shoulders slumped.There was no way Hutch would be able to put an arrow in that kid. But if he were forced to shoot one of these people, he did not know how he could avoid going after all three. As soon as one went down, the others would certainly start firing. If his arrows found Bad and the teen, could he convince the boy to run away? Would he run on his own? Remembering Declan, his smirk, the coolness that was really icy cold, the authority he possessed over the others, he believed the boy would not want to return to him empty-handed and unharmed.
The boy walked to a tree and unzipped.
Hutch turned to find the teen and Bad.They were directly behind him, moving off. Gently, he shifted on the tree limb to follow their departure.The branch he had tied slipped out of the knot. It whipped back into place. He nearly fell but reached back and grabbed the trunk. Panicked, he looked down.
Still in the posture of relieving himself, the boy was looking up at him. His eyes were wide, his mouth open in astonishment. Hutch stared back, feeling the weight of his bow in his left hand, feeling the nocked arrow under his index finger. Camouflaged and clinging to a tree high above, he must have appeared gnomelike to the boy.
“What was that?” Bad said, a loud whisper.
The boy looked at his companions. “I stepped on something,” he said.
Hutch rotated his neck enough to see the man shake his head.
“I told you, hold it. Now come on.” He walked on.
The boy’s eyes returned to Hutch. He had regained his composure. His face was unreadable, implacable. He was only now outgrowing childish cuteness, and he wasn’t quite handsome. He would be someday, Hutch thought—if he lived long enough.
The kid zipped up and started to walk away. He stopped, glanced up. Almost imperceptibly, he shook his head. “They won’t stop looking,” he whispered, so faintly Hutch may have misheard. He moved on.
Hutch lifted a foot and put it on the branch. Slowly he stood, turning as he did. He leaned his chest against the tree and peered around it to watch the boy. He extended the bow past the tree and, with the other hand, slipped his fingers onto the string.
The boy caught up with the other two.
Here it comes, Hutch thought. He would shoot Bad first. He seemed the most dangerous. Then the teen. He’d decide what to do about the boy when the time came.
But nothing came. The boy apparently held his tongue. The three fanned out and slowly disappeared from sight, swallowed by shadow and the shattered geometry of a thousand branches.
Hutch waited a long time, thirty minutes or more. He listened for their return. Listened for someone trying to circle around him. He glassed the vicinity three hundred and sixty degrees. He spotted a fox, a coyote, two rabbits, and a squirrel. But no men, no boys.
18
Hutch descended from the tree. On the ground, he cast one last long gaze after his hunters. No sign. He headed in the opposite direction.
He had expected to make a wide circuitous arc through the woods and over the hills to eventually return to camp without these men on his trail. Or to run until the hunters gave up and then make the long trek back to camp. Hiding in the tree and allowing his pursuers to pass had saved many hours and miles. He wound back through the trees, stopping frequently to listen for human sounds—walking, talking, the roar of their vehicle.
When his route required him to cross open areas, he sprinted through them, ready to drop into the tall grass or suddenly tack in another direction. He kept an ear tuned and an eye peeled for the Hummer. Part of his mind listened for the whoosh-crack that preceded the explosions. Of course, it preceded them by nanoseconds; hearing it would not save him, if this time Declan’s aim was right on.
The morning’s hike to the spot where the caribou exploded had taken hours, mostly due to the slow progress of finding prey and then stealthily approaching it. Getting back to camp should take only a fraction of that time, especially if he didn’t need to evade the men in the Hummer. He passed fami
liar landmarks: a marsh of rushes and cattails surrounded by red willow shrubs and swamp birches; a rocky creek running like a liquid spine down the center of a grassy meadow; a steep ravine that forced him a quarter mile out of his way. He found a game trail that he had followed for some time earlier, heading the other direction.Traversing the trail was as much a reprieve to his legs and lungs, after slogging through the untamed wilderness, as a sidewalk would be after pushing through miles of heavy surf.
He was making good time.
Then he heard the Hummer, just a ghost of its engine, maybe near, maybe not. Perhaps to the south or to the north. It was impossible to tell.
Hutch came off the trail and pushed through the woods until they thinned out, eventually becoming a wide open area that sloped steeply toward the Fond du Lac River.
There it was. Across a half-mile span of grass. It was coming up from farther below, closer to the river, as though it had already passed this area once. It moved slowly, like a territorial beast searching for intruders. Hutch stepped back, deeper into the gloom, and crouched. He glassed the vehicle. Declan was harnessed into one of the pedestaled chairs, gazing into the woods on that far side.The girl occupied the other chair in the truck’s bed. She appeared to be reading a magazine. With the tinted windows up, Hutch was blind to occupants in the cab; he knew, however, that they were not blind to him. He did not believe he was visible in the shadows, in the woods, camo’d as he was. His binoculars sported antiglare ruby lenses. Still, these assailants seemed preternaturally sensitive to his whereabouts.
How, for instance, had they known to reverse direction and look for him here? Had the boy finally told them about seeing him in the tree, and from that they figured he’d have headed away from them? He had no clue what the boy’s relationship was with the older man, but Declan had seemed belittling and hard to please. And the boy had acted dejected. It was difficult to imagine him subjecting himself to Declan’s wrath for not having alarmed them earlier. Besides, looking down from the tree, he had detected two distinct emotions in the boy’s eyes after the fear and surprise had passed: weariness and defiance. Neither led Hutch to believe his decision to keep quiet would be temporary or a ploy.
How they had come to this area was not as important as the fact that they were here. Camp was not far off. Just over a ridge.The midday sky, even in autumn, was bright, so he didn’t think smoke from a fire would be easily seen. But it could be smelled and possibly honed in on, depending on wind conditions and the tracking abilities of his pursuers. On this last point, he had been optimistic that they were neophytes; now that they had come this close after heading in the wrong direction, he wasn’t so sure.
Half standing, he crept backward, feeling the ground’s stability before putting his weight into each step. When he felt he was sufficiently hidden by foliage, he turned and hurried back to the game trail. He followed the path around the ridge. On his left, he passed a trail of beaten-down grass made yesterday by him, David,Terry, and Phil as they carried their gear from where the helicopter had dropped them off to the campsite. He suddenly recognized the berm over which lay their site. He raced up the hill, through the trees, now seeing campfire smoke undissipated this close to its source.
Terry squatted beside the campfire, attending to a frying pan. Its contents smoked and sizzled. He looked up at Hutch’s approach.
“Hutch!” he yelled. “Look! I caught two grayling.”
Hutch rushed up to him, a finger to his lips. “Shhhh, shhhh.”
“What?” Terry said, standing, reacting to his friend’s panicked expression.
Hutch kicked the grate from over the fire. The frying pan tumbled into the dirt.
“Hey—!”
Hutch grabbed Terry’s arm and pressed the gloved palm of his other hand to his friend’s mouth. “I’ll explain in a minute,” he whispered. “Just keep quiet.We have to get out of here.”
When Terry nodded, Hutch released him, tugged off his gloves, and threw them down. He stretched one foot into the fire pit to break up the pyramid of kindling, then he stepped in and began stomping the fire out.
“What’s going on?”
He turned to see Phil on his hands and knees in the tent, his head pushed through the opening.
“Shhhh,” Hutch said, but Phil was already talking.
“Some kind of First Nation thing? Do you do that when your hunt is successful or when it’s not?”
Hutch leaped out of the fire pit and dropped to his knees in front of Phil. In a harsh whisper he said, “Listen, some people are after me, bad people, really bad.They’re nearby, so be quiet.We have to go now.”
Phil’s soft cheeks rose, pushed up by a big smile. “Yeah, right,” he said. “I suppose you violated some ancient burial ground, and now they want to—”
As he had done with Terry, he slapped his palm over Phil’s mouth. “I’m serious, Phil. These guys shot at me with a machine gun and a rifle. They want to kill me and anyone else they find, I think.”
He did not mention the weapon that had caused the caribou to explode. Phil would not have believed him and would have continued to resist Hutch’s plans, not wanting to feel duped if they were revealed as an elaborate joke.
“Now come on.We have to go. Do you have your boots on?”
“No, I—”
“Get them on. Now! Grab a jacket.”
He turned to Terry. “Get your jacket,Terry.” He quickly scanned the campsite, the edge of the woods around it, the slope down to the river. “Where’s David?” he asked. His level of panic ratcheted up, a feat he had not thought possible.
Terry pointed. “He’s still fishing.We found a great—”
“We gotta get him.We gotta go.”
Phil had not emerged from the tent. “Phil!” he called.
“My shoes,” Phil answered.
“Now!”
Hutch tried to think. If they could not make it back to the campsite, what would they need? Everything, really, he thought. It was not as though they had brought luxuries.The tents and sleeping bags were required gear in the far north in autumn.The nights could get deathly cold, but lugging them now, while running from killers, seemed more than stupid.
He grabbed his rucksack beside the tent and handed it to Terry. “Put some stuff in here. Only essentials.”
Hutch leaned into the tent. Phil was tying his second boot.
“Hand me the first aid kit,” Hutch said.
Phil did. “This is for real?” he asked.
His expression told Hutch he had started to believe it.
“Very real.” He gripped his friend’s knee. “We can do this, Phil. These guys, they’re mostly young. They’re punks.We can beat them. Right now, we just have to go somewhere they can’t find us. Then we’ll figure out what to do next. Okay?”
“Yeah,” Phil said, unsure.
“Got your pills?” The last thing they needed was for Phil to stroke out.
Phil rummaged around, pushing aside candy bar wrappers, beer cans, a paperback novel.Then he held up a waterproof plastic cylinder.
“Put them in your jacket,” Hutch instructed. “Let’s go.”
Terry was coming out of his and David’s tent. Hutch reached for the sack.
“I’ll carry it,” Terry said, slinging it over his shoulder. “You got your bow?”
Hutch handed him the first aid kit. “Thanks. Ready? Let’s get David.” He looked from one man to the other. “No talking, okay? If you see a yellow Hummer or anyone on foot, hide. Drop straight to the ground if that’ll get you out of sight. Then, if you can, signal the rest of us. Quietly.”
“What’s this about, Hutch?”Terry asked.
“I don’t know, Ter.” He shook his head. “Weird stuff. Definitely. But I do know these guys are killers. They won’t hesitate to take you down. And,Ter, I told Phil, some of them are just kids. Don’t let that fool you.”
“What do you mean, kids?”
“Kids.Teenagers. One boy looks twelve or thirteen. I think he’s
in way over his head, doesn’t want to be here but is. There’s a girl who looks fifteen or so. Another boy seventeen, eighteen.The rest are adults, in their twenties.”
“How many?”
“Six that I saw. Could be more.” He turned to leave, but Terry stopped him.
“And what are they doing?”
“Killing things!” Hutch said in a stage whisper. He was growing frustrated, anxious to put ground between them and Declan’s gang. “They shot at me. They gotta be insane or on drugs or hiding something pretty big. Honestly, I hope I never find out. If I do, I hope it’s by seeing it on Fox. Know what I’m saying? Now . . . where is David?”
Terry hesitated only a few seconds longer. Absorbing this information, his face reflected puzzlement, then concern.Then it hardened in a fierce display of resolution. He was a terrible poker player but a good man to have on your side in a pinch.
“About a half mile from here, the river cuts into a deep valley,” he said. “Looked like some nice, deep pools down there, so we checked it out. Good fishing. That’s where I left him.” Without waiting for a response, he brushed past Hutch and charged up the berm.
Hutch patted Phil on the arm.“Keep up,” he said and ran after Terry.
19
Over the berm,Terry cut left,opposite the direction Hutch had taken to hunt that morning. In a single file they followed the terrain as it rose and fell, twisted and turned, sometimes catching a game trail, other times on near-virgin turf. The only evidence of humans were tracks and broken branches from the few times Terry and David had trodden through. When it felt that they had jogged considerably farther than a half mile, Terry turned up an embankment and stopped.
Way below them the Straight River churned through boulders, draped over small falls, and eddied into calm, glistening pools. Under Hutch’s feet, the ground sloped steeply, but not impassibly, to the water. The earth here appeared to be mostly gravel and sand. Hutch wondered if the hill on which he stood had been formed by an esker. Eskers often acted as filters, eliminating clay and soil to eventually deposit the kind of granules they found on this slope.