Chapter 28: Discovery
She circled the clearing to rejoin Charlie, Snake Eyes, and Shana. "Think I taught that idiot a lesson?" she asked in a whisper as they peered through the screening foliage into the clearing, where the men were milling around in some considerable confusion. The first guy who had spoken was slowly picking himself off the ground, face red; not a good sign, as he also looked angry on top of it.
"You can't teach knuckleheads like that a lesson that sticks unless it involves pain," Shana growled angrily. "They've been warned, they are trespassing, and they need to leave."
"He said there were others. That this isn't all of them. I say we wait and see how many of them are here. And…Shana, is it hunting season? Why would they be coming through here with rifles and guns?"
"They're up to no good. This is spring, you don't hunt in spring because you could hit a mom with babies, or a pregnant doe. There's not much else up here, deer, bears, maybe a mountain lion or two…but it's not hunting season and I can't imagine what they'd be doing here. And the boundaries of our property ARE clearly marked, Snake Eyes and I check the trees every time we come here and spray paint the outer bark with colored stripes to denote the edge of our property and the beginning of the wilderness. If you ask me, these people are poachers. Or worse, they're unregulated militia, the kind of crazy person who buys a gun and joins a club of other gun owners and calls themselves a militia when they don't even know the meaning of the word." Shana was clearly disgusted.
The six in the clearing seemed disinclined to leave it, and settled in, clearly waiting—although they'd stopped talking about digging up the spring and instead waited patiently for the water to bubble up so they could refill their water bottles. About an hour later, they all heard voices, and the six in the clearing stood, looking in anticipation down the way they'd come, and shortly another group of about eight joined them.
"We got us a problem," the first man said to the guy who was heading up the second group. "Was a little Indian squaw here a little bit ago, said we were trespassing. Real hostile little thing too, got angry and twisted my arm when I told her we just stopped for water and were going to move on. I don't think she's still around, probably gone to get couple of braves together. Think we got enough ammo to take them on?"
"If it's Indians we should go, because we would be trespassing, right?" said a nervous, rabbit-faced man toward the back of the second group.
The leader snorted. "Those colored trees we passed awhile back weren't painted by no Indians. They were painted by regular people. Probably some rich guy who uses the place as a summer retreat and doesn't come here much the rest of the time. The Indian's probably from some reservation somewhere, but I guarantee this ain't their property."
"Suppose she tells somebody she saw us here?"
He snorted. "So? She didn't see nothing, just a buncha hikers with guns. Didn't see us kill nothing yet outta season, and they gotta catch you in the act or they gotta see you in the act of killing something. They don't got that, they ain't going to bother us none. I'll tell you somethin', though, if we see her again, let's scare her some and make her think twice 'bout tellin' someone she seen us up here."
"But if we scare her she'll bring more'a her people up here to investigate. We can't hide our stuff from that many people."
"Then we help her meet with an accident. Accidents happen all the time out here, nothing new."
"I don't think this is a good idea," the nervous one said.
The leader snorted. "That's why you ain't the leader, 'cause nothin's a good idea for you. Git movin'."
The Joes waited until the fourteen men had gone on by, heading on out toward wherever it was they were going, before stepping out of the brush. "Well, now we know they're up to no good," Shana said grimly. "Problem is, what are we going to do about it?"
"We know they're up to no good, but we can't prove it. Running around out here with hunting rifles outside of hunting season is suspicious, but nothing that a cop could arrest them for. We can't alert them until we have proof."
"Let's split up," Cam said quickly. "Snake Eyes and Charlie, you two can go back the way they came and see if they left anything, any evidence. My bet is that they're poachers, killing animals out of season for hide or meat or something like that; Shana and I can follow them, see what they're doing and if they're up to no good. You'll know through our bond if there's something going on that you need to know about."
Snake Eyes hands flashed. Why can't we go after the men and you go see what evidence they left?
"They've already seen me. If they see me, and not Shana, they'll think I'm just following them and not think anything of it—they've already stopped thinking of me as a threat. If they see you, they're going to be alarmed—and the way they were talking, they don't have any problems shooting you guys and trying to eliminate anyone who might be a possible witness to what they were doing. I don't want to risk that."
Snake Eyes looked reluctant, but he signed, That makes sense.
Shana shouldered her pack. "Okay. Cam and I are going to follow them, you go and find out what they were up to. Stay in touch. The slightest hint of anything wrong, or a feeling that anything is going to go wrong, you let us know, okay?"
They split up.
They didn't even have to try to retrace the backtrail of the men they'd just met. It was all too obvious; these men were clumsy amateurs compared to the militarily-trained Snake Eyes, and about as subtle as an escaped zoo elephant on a city street to Charlie's Native American training.
Half an hour of backtracking, during which Snake Eyes informed him of where the boundaries of the property was, and they got to what was apparently the men's camp. Ten tents, set out in a rough semi-circle around the remains of s campfire, each tent with branches and pine boughs dragged over it in an attempt to hide it from any above searchers. "An amateur attempt," Charlie snorted as they crouched in the brush at the edge of the clearing, peering through to make sure there was no one in the camp before they walked in.
And their purpose for being there was immediately clear. Draped over wooden racks off to one side of the camp were hides and furs, some from animals Charlie didn't really recognize but Snake Eyes certainly did. Deer were readily apparent, and—which made Charlie clench his fist—the spots on the deer fur indicated fawns, baby deer. There were at least eight of them. Larger, brownish-tan hides, obviously from larger deer, does and bucks, most likely, were draped over larger racks; and four deer heads, three does and one buck with an impressive rack of antlers, sat close by.
They are shooting deer out of season. And killing babies.
Snake Eyes nodded, pointed. Those furs there, the tawny ones. Those are mountain lions. There are not many left in the wild, they are a protected species, and we should not be seeing their skins here. His anger was apparent in the harsh, jerky movements of his hands as he signed.
One of the tent flaps opened, and a man came out. So there were fifteen men, too many for the Joes to take on without help; Snake Eyes tensed as the man walked toward the place where he and Charlie hid, but the man walked past their screening culvert and toward a wooden crate sitting on the ground a few feet away from the last tent in the group, then kicked the side of the crate.
There was an answering howl from inside, and Snake Eyes' eyes widened, as did Charlie's. Although they couldn't see inside the crate, what they were hearing was a young animal, and they realized what it had to be as Charlie took in Snake Eyes' furious glare. That sounds like a cub in that crate. They killed the mother, and kept the baby. I wonder what they're going to do with it?
I don't know and I don't care. Let's try and reach the girls. The men they're tracking have to head back here after they're done hunting for the day, so let's have the authorities waiting here for them when they get back. Tell the girls to range out ahead of them, scare away the deer and whatever else they might think of to shoot, while I stay here and watch the camp, you head back to the cabin and call authorities.
Charlie nodded silently and slipped away through the trees as Snake Eyes concentrated on reaching out mentally. Shana?
Despite Snake Eyes saying that Shana needed to work on her stealth, Cam noticed that Shana was pretty good at sneaking through the forest noiselessly. Sure, not as good at it as Charlie and Cam herself, but better than the group of idiots they were following, who were making enough noise for a herd of elephants. They either weren't trying very hard to be quiet, or they didn't see the need; Shana signed to Cam when they passed a tree that had one red stripe and one black stripe spray painted on its bark that that was the end of the property she and Snake Eyes owned and the start of a small public preserve, and no hunting was allowed in the preserve except by the rangers and preserve police, and only when an animal became a nuisance.
They had followed the men deeper into the Sierra Nevada mountains, undetected, and were just starting to worry a little about their men when Shana felt the lightest brush of Snake Eyes' mind against hers. She stopped, reached down deep into herself for that shimmering silver thread, and moments later images flooded her mind. She saw the racks with drying skins draped over them, saw the furs belonging to the mountain lions, heard the whimper as the man who'd been left behind to guard the camp kicked the side of a wooden crate that obviously held at least one frightened baby animal.
When she snapped back to the present, she saw the same anger on Cam's face that she knew was on hers. "I don't mind hunting prey when they are a nuisance or a danger, and I have a bear fur at home. But just killing because they want the fur is…wrong." She swallowed. "Charlie was heading back to the cabin to contact authorities, and on the way back he stumbled over the carcasses of the animals—they were skinned, and only enough meat to feed the hunters was taken, everything else just left to rot." She shook her head at what she perceived as waste; to Native Americans, each animal had a spirit, and thanks was given for each life that an animal 'gave' to a human—and then nothing was wasted. Every scrap was used, hide, fur, hair; bone and marrow, organs, even offal, things that humans couldn't eat was turned into dog food or used as bait to catch fish. To kill an animal only for its fur and leaving everything else to waste was incomprehensible. "Charlie's going to have them meet him at the cabin, then he'll take them up to where Snake Eyes is waiting by the camp, and they will all wait until this lot of idiots gets back there. We're to observe, watch, report."
Cam nodded. "Let's walk out ahead of them. If we scare all the game out from the trail in front of them, they won't have anything to hunt and they'll turn and go back to the camp all that much faster."
That sounded like an excellent idea to Shana, and she and Cam ranged out ahead of the poachers, staying in sight of each other and communicating silently by hand signals. Maybe it was their imagination, or maybe it was just that they had served together and were so alike that each knew what the other was doing before they did it, but it seemed to both of them that they could hear each others' thoughts, knew exactly how to coordinate. But it was impossible, their bond was only with their men, wasn't it? Shana wondered as she flung a stick at a rabbit, sending it skittering into the bushes.
Behind her, she could hear the men start grumbling. First, just a few comments about the lack of game, usually punctuated by, "These woods are full of deer and stuff. We'll find something soon." But as the day wore on and there was no sign of anything (Cam was even burying deer droppings, and apparently the poachers were not so woods-wise as to recognize the signs of human digging.)
By mid-afternoon there was a lot of grumbling, and the optimism of the late morning was gone. Now the nervous, rabbit-faced one was openly (and loudly) complaining that the 'Indian spirit' they'd run into that morning had cursed them, making them unlucky in finding game. Although the others scoffed at his mutterings as 'old wives tales' and 'superstitious nonsense', even they started looking out on both sides of the trail, and it was through sheer bad luck that the leader's glance to the right side of the trail happened to be at the very moment that Shana crossed it. Her distinctive red hair was too easy to spot, and he leaped forward, moving with a speed she didn't know he had in that bulky frame of his. "Weelll, looky what we got here," he drawled.
Shana blinked, made her eyes look huge, then burst into tears. "Oh thank goodness someone found me, I was afraid I was going to spend the whole night up here!"
He bought it, hook, line and sinker. "Why, are you lost, honey?" and if she hadn't already known he was up to no good, she might just have been taken in by his apparent show of concern. "Came out hiking here all by yourself?"
A woman alone wouldn't be a threat. And if they knew about Cam, there was a chance that they might use those hunting rifles on the two women. Shana shrank into herself, hung her head, and did her absolute best to imitate Courtney's 'dumb blonde supermodel' façade. A whining, clinging female might disgust them enough to consider dumping her body in a ravine somewhere; but silly wouldn't raise suspicion, and if she could convince them she was an empty-headed silly female chances were good she could convince them she was no threat. Just enough to get them to let their guard down around her, and then she could slip away. She cursed herself for getting caught; she was slipping, she was a trained Army Master Sergeant, for pity's sake, she knew better! What was wrong with her? "I came up here because I wanted a good look at the whole mountain, and I thought the top would be good for pictures. It looked so easy, I wasn't expecting it to be so hard. It didn't look that hard from down there." She pointed down the mountain.
"Well, don't worry, you won't be up here all alone. We got you." His tone was outright patronizing, and made Shana grit her teeth, but she had to pull this off. Not that she couldn't put him on the ground, grab his gun, and run before the others even knew what was happening, but she didn't want to chance anything. She was just glad she'd tucked her dog tags into her shirt so they wouldn't see it, and they weren't perceptive enough to see the bead chain around the back of her neck.
"Are you park rangers?" she said, widening her eyes as she pointed at the hunting rifle on his back. "That's an awfully big gun." Internally she winced at the stupidity of the comment.
The men looked at each other. "Uh, yeah. We're plainclothes park rangers. We carry these because there are mountain lions and bears out there and we need to be able to protect ourselves while we're out looking for pretty little ladies like you."
Sure you do, but Shana didn't say that. "Can you tell me how to get back to town?"
"Even better, we'll show you. We're about done for the day here anyway." The leader took her arm and started to steer her back down the mountain, ostensibly toward the campsite below. Shana went along, allowed herself to be led, but a quick glance out the corner of her eye showed Cam following along. Follow my lead, she wanted to say, but didn't dare…and wasn't really necessary anyway, Cam appeared perfectly willing to just follow and watch.