Deadfall (14 page)

Hutch slung his bow over his shoulder. Gripping the back of the tree, he pushed his toes against the front and climbed. It was a skill kids acquired and adults lost, unless you were a hunter looking for a vantage point from which to shoot. He hoisted himself higher and higher until heavy branches stopped him. He swung a leg over a branch and pulled himself up onto it. He turned, pressing his back to the trunk. The branch itself was too uncomfortable for an extended wait and failed to provide a stable firing position.

From a pouch on his utility belt, he withdrew a spare coil of bowstring. He listened for his pursuers. When no sounds reached him, he leaned out to a long, rope-sized branch coming out of an adjacent limb on his left. He bent it down and under his perch, then pulled it up on the other side. He used string to tie it to another limb on his right.The looping branch gave him a thin but solid place to rest his feet, taking some of the weight off his rump and stabilizing his entire body.

Hutch had once hunted in the Rockies with a man named Max. This man was much more serious about the sport than he was at the time. Max, camo'd the way Hutch was now, had set out on an earlymorning hunt. After a leisurely breakfast, Hutch had gone to their appointed meeting place and found no Max. He had searched for an hour before hearing Max call his name. Still he could not spot his hunting partner.

“In the tree . . . not that one.To your left . . . there. See me?”

He had not. Max waved, and only then could Hutch make out the vague shape of a body sitting in a camouflaged tree stand. Hutch believed the setup he had just rigged was even more invisible than that tree stand had been.

Stably seated, he once more got his bow in hand. He removed an arrow from its quiver and nocked it onto the string. As the shaft passed the hand that held the bow, he used a finger to hold it there. He knew from practice that from this position he could draw and release with fair accuracy in three seconds.

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 familiar 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.”