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The next morning, they were all ready to move on, and Sam led them up a narrow trail over a steep pass. Then she asked Maya to lead the group down the valley to a long lake while she brought up the rear, pausing now and then to glance back on the trail. Ever since Ashley mentioned the feeling of being watched, Sam couldn’t rid her mind of that disturbing idea.
The highlight of their hike was the discovery of a lush crop of ripe huckleberries. The time of year was right, so when she first noticed the red-tinged leaves, she checked for the small dark fruits that were mostly hidden near the ground. Taylor was the first to glance back and notice Sam pushing the berries into her mouth.
“Are those edible?” the tall girl asked.
“No.” Plucking another berry, Sam popped it between her lips.
Taylor snorted and then squatted to begin her own search. “Blueberries, guys!”
They all stopped.
“Huckleberries, to be precise,” Sam told them. “Close cousins to blueberries.”
Gabriel trotted toward them. “Save some for me!”
“Look around,” Aidan advised.
After scanning the area for a few seconds, Olivia exclaimed, “They are everywhere!”
“They just grow out here?” Justin asked.
The naiveté of the urban teens never ceased to amaze her, but Sam managed to stifle a sarcastic retort. Instead, she reminded them that all food came from the wild before humans domesticated animals and plants.
“Can we, like, graze, Cap’n?” Gabriel’s lips were already tinged blue with juice.
“Like, why not?” she said. “Set down your packs, crew, and we’ll feast on nature’s bounty. That’s the beauty of being out here. Our schedule is determined only by the sun and the weather, and me, of course. Today we have time to savor each moment. All we have to worry about is getting to camp before dark.”
Taylor inhaled, thrusting out her chest. “These berries even smell purple.”
“Like grape Kool-aid.” Justin sucked in a breath and held it like he was toking on a joint.
“That’s actually the lupines.” Sam waved a hand at the mostly wilted stems of purple flowers that bloomed in bunches along the side of the trail. “They’re past their prime, but still fragrant. And this—she waggled the white furry seed head of a plant between her thumb and forefinger—“this is pasqueflower, which has pretty white flowers earlier in the season. At this stage, it is sometimes affectionately called ‘mouse-on-a-stick.’”
“On a stick? Ugh. Someone call the SPCA.” Ashley shoved another handful of berries into her mouth.
They’d been sitting in the sunshine for nearly an hour among the huckleberries, collecting and eating handfuls, when Sam noticed Nick’s gaze was glued to a spot halfway up the opposite hillside. The boy’s expression was solemn; she couldn’t decipher the emotion underneath. She followed his line of sight, and spotted a dark shape half hidden in the vegetation on the other side of the lake.
Nick’s eyes met hers. She raised a finger to her lips, indicating that this was a secret between them, for now.
It took another ten minutes for anyone else to notice. “Wait a minute!” Ashley abruptly stood up and stared in that direction. “Is that a bear?”
Justin pushed himself to his feet. “What was your first clue?”
Ashley shoved him. “Uh, it looks like a bear, doofus.”
“Don’t call me a doofus.”
“If the blue lips fit—”
Justin pursed his lips at her and made a kissing sound.
Olivia was staring across the valley, her face anxious. “It’s moving!”
“Bears do that a lot.” Nick.
“It won’t come over here, will it?” Olivia wadded the hem of her T-shirt in her hands.
“Not likely; not while we’re here,” Maya reassured her.
Gabriel squinted. “Is it a grizzly?”
“What do you think?” Sam asked. “What’s the difference between a grizzly and a black bear?”
“Grizzlies are brown,” said Justin.
“Some black bears are brown,” Aidan informed him. “Or red. Or even blond.”
Justin frowned. “No shit?” He tossed a chagrined look Sam’s way. “I mean, no gex?”
“Grizzlies have humps,” Nick said. “And they’re usually bigger, and their faces are dished.”
“Dished?”
“They sort of dip in between their foreheads and their noses.” Nick demonstrated by swooping a hand down from his hairline to the tip of his nose.
Taylor turned to Sam. “That right, Cap’n?”
“Nick is correct. Black bears have straighter noses and no humps on their shoulders. So which kind is that?” She handed Taylor her binoculars.
The girl studied the bear for a minute. “Black bear. Yikes! It’s staring right at me.”
“Probably not,” Sam told the group. “Bears have pretty poor eyesight. That bear might be facing you and it might hear us or even smell us, but from that distance it probably can’t tell what we are. And just for your information, crew, we have very few grizzlies in the Cascades. We’d be lucky to see one.”
Olivia shivered. “I hope we’re not that lucky. I saw a TV show about a woman who had her arms eaten off. I don’t want to go on solo tomorrow.”
Day Seven was the first of two overnight periods when the kids were supposed to be spaced out in their individual tents to spend twenty-four hours alone.
“You’ll have your whistles, and Aidan or Maya or I will check in with you to make sure you’re okay.”
“But will you check in with Martini before or after the bear does?” Justin smirked at Olivia.
“Enough,” Sam said. “We have had bears all around us for the last week. No problems, right? What do you think that bear is doing right now?”
They all stared at the bear for a moment, and then turned to stare at her.
“Planning its attack strategy?” Justin suggested.
“Yeesh, you guys! That bear’s eating huckleberries, just like we are. Get a grip.”
They watched as the bear ambled up through the vegetation and shuffled over the crown of the hill.
“Oh, crap.” Maya stood up and held a hand over her eyes to shield them from the sun as she focused on the area to the left of where the bear had disappeared.
Gabriel followed her gaze. “Is that the same hunter?”
A camouflage-wearing man had climbed to the top of a boulder across the way. Sam grabbed her binoculars back from Taylor and pressed them to her eyes. She couldn’t be absolutely sure it was the same guy, but this man was slender and he had a long dark ponytail, just like the previous hunter they’d seen. The rifle and scope slung over his shoulder looked the same.
She tried to reassure the group. “I can’t tell if it’s the same man. If he’s traveling across country, like hunters often do, it’s not so unusual that he might see us again.” Although they had hiked many miles of trail, they actually had stayed in a fairly small area in terms of square miles.
Aidan was glued to his binoculars, suddenly as rigid as a guard dog.
Even with her binoculars, Sam couldn’t see enough detail to be sure, but it seemed as if the hunter was staring right at her. He raised a hand into the air, signaling that he saw them.
Her stomach did a somersault.
The man’s rifle remained dangling from the strap over his shoulder, clearly in safety mode, but just seeing the hunter and weapon again made the hair prickle on the back of her neck. Was he by himself? Did he have comrades hidden in the brush? If she were hiking alone, she’d hike fast and far to lose him. But now she was painfully aware that she was responsible for the safety of eight young people, including four beautiful teen girls. She couldn’t hustle them an extra five miles and hide them all in the bushes.
Her crew kids’ heads were swiveling as if they were following a tennis match: they faced the hunter on the ridge and then anxiously glanced back to the other teens. Nick appeared to be holding his breath. Olivia was chewing her thumbnail.
The hunter lowered his hand and then slipped down off the boulder, vanishing from view.
“It’s okay,” she told everyone. “He’s being responsible. He waved to let us know that he sees us and won’t shoot in this direction.” Please let that be true.
The stranger could be a friendly, conscientious hunter. However, even if that was the case, it seemed likely that he was tracking that bear, and she had no desire to see him kill it. She didn’t want the kids to witness that, either.
“C’mon, Aidan.” She tapped him on the shoulder. He finally lowered his binoculars, but his expression was still tense. “Stand down,” she told him. “He’s gone.”
She shouldered her backpack. “Grazing time is over, crew. Pick up your packs and let’s move on toward camp.”
* * * * *
No gunshots interrupted their evening, so apparently the hunter had either not seen the bear, wasn’t out to kill it, or had hiked in the opposite direction. Sam hoped for all three.
After breakfast the next morning, she prepared the crew kids for their first solo campout, handing them plastic garden spades, packets of food, and coils of parachute cord. “You have your fire starter kits, you can heat up food in your metal bowls. You all know how to make a fire now. There are no bear boxes where you’ll be staying, so follow the same rules we used in the camps where we needed to; don’t leave any food or anything that smells like food out, seal it in your Kevlar bag and hang it up high.”
Gabriel leaned toward Taylor and growled, “Bears.”
“Keeping your food out of the reach of mice and coyotes is every bit as important, Gabriel,” Sam chided him. “One of us will come to check on you during the daylight hours, and we’ll come get you to regroup at noon tomorrow. If you get into trouble, blow your whistle and we’ll come running. None of you will be very far away, but stay close to your tent. Enjoy this time alone.”
“Can’t wait.” Justin’s voice dripped with sarcasm.
Olivia regarded the spade in her hand. “Is this what I think it is?”
“Probably,” Maya told her. “That’s a personal dig-your-own toilet kit.”
Ashley drawled, “Yippee.”
“But what will we do out there?” Gabriel whined.
“Spend your time writing in your journals. You might plan something to share with the group,” Sam suggested. “You should also think about the contracts you’re going to make with your families. Envision where you want to be in five years and plan how you’re going to get there.”
Justin snickered. “Mars, spaceship.”
Sam pushed the remaining supplies back into the bear sack. “Aidan, Maya, please take Justin and Ashley to their solo camps. I’ll stay here with the rest until I see you coming back.”
As soon as she spotted Aidan returning toward the camp, Sam led Olivia to her assigned site in a small copse of alders near a stream that fed into the lake.
The girl seemed fearful. “What if a bear comes into my camp?”
“That probably won’t happen, but if it does, you know what to do.”
“Bang on a pan, yell?”
“That’s right. And if it doesn’t go away, blow your whistle.” Sam didn’t tell her those instructions would most likely work with a black bear, but might not scare off a grizzly. The odds of encountering a griz here were slim.
Sam, Maya, and Aidan left the crew kids in their solo camps for eight hours, then divvied up the task of visiting them all before dark. Sam chose her two favorites, Nick and Ashley.
She found Nick’s camp neatly set up, his tent on a small rise away from the trees. The boy had collected stones to make a fire ring. A few coals smoldered within the small circle when Sam arrived. She found Nick sitting cross-legged in front of a downed tree. The dark rotting wood was covered with ruffles of bright orange fungi, and Nick was sketching the scene.
She studied the drawing in his journal. “That’s really good.”
“You don’t need to check on me.” He didn’t look up.
“We’re checking on everyone, just like we promised.”
Abruptly, he leapt to his feet, tossing his journal to the ground. Yanking up first his shirt and then his sleeves, he showed her his flat abdomen and his forearms. “I’m not cutting.”
“I didn’t expect you to, Nick. You promised me you wouldn’t.”
“Yeah.” His frown was defiant. She had no idea what was going on in the boy’s head. She was glad she didn’t have one of these mercurial teens waiting for her at home. Cats were mysterious enough.
After asking if he had any questions or wanted to talk—no and no—she wished Nick a good night and left for Ashley’s camp.
At first she couldn’t find the girl anywhere close to her tent. She searched the nearby woods. No sign of Ashley. She circled the area. Shit, had the girl taken off? The counselors had warned her of this possibility. Why hadn’t she seen it coming? She was pacing back and forth, working herself into a panic when a small crackling sound caused her to raise her head.
Ashley had shimmied up the trunk of an alder that leaned into two upright trees. She sat on a branch overhead, an amused expression on her face.
Sam took the same route up and perched a few feet away.
The girl had painted muddy stripes across her cheeks that transformed her into a slightly crazed warrior woman, especially in combination with her purple-tipped hair. She grinned at Sam. “Almost got away with it.”
“Yes, you did.”
“Hunger Games,” Ashley said.
Fortunately, Sam understood the reference. The movie heroine had climbed a tree to avoid a group of killers. “Good thing you’re not really on the run, isn’t it?”
Ashley made a scoffing sound and stared off into the distance, where three thin columns of smoke rose into the sky. “Looks like the others are cooking dinner. Guess I’d better get to that.”
They climbed down.
“Are you okay alone?” Sam asked.
“I’ve been alone most of my life.”
Sam had a sudden impulse to hug the teen, but took her leave instead.
After Sam reunited with Aidan and Maya, the three staff members shared stories of what the crew kids were doing in their individual camps.
“Gabe is creating the story line for a new game,” Aidan told them. “I barely escaped hearing about all the subplots for Episode Three. He’ll probably be up to Episode Ten by dawn.”
“What’s it about?” Maya asked.
“You’ll both hear all about it before this is over, I’m sure.”
“I think Olivia’s going to fast or eat her food cold so she won’t have to come out of her tent,” Maya said.
Sam frowned. Would the shy girl be terrified camping alone in the dark?
“We’ve had a lot of others stay inside their tents all night,” Aidan told her.
Maya nodded her agreement. “They don’t all have to be brave explorers. They just have to find the strength to endure twenty-four hours by themselves.”
“Justin’s creating a rock pyramid,” Aidan reported. “He promised to knock it down tomorrow.”
Taylor was making lists in her journal of things she planned to do in the future. She seemed to be the only teen with any noticeable ambition.
Sam and her two peer counselors enjoyed a quiet evening by themselves. While Sam and Maya talked and explored the immediate area, Aidan collected some long grasses, then sat with his back against a tree as he braided them and then proceeded to deftly stitch the braids together with more grass, creating a small circular mat.
Sam peered over his shoulder. “Coaster?”
He tilted his head to the side. “Unless I keep going, in which case it could be a placemat. Or even a doormat.”
“Interesting. You should teach the kids how to do that.” It would relieve her of some teaching duty, in addition to giving the kids something else to do in their spare time.
He nodded. “I will.”
The sunset was largely hidden behind the tall mountains surrounding the lake, but the three of them stayed on the shore, watching the stars come out until they got cold and crawled into their tents, Aidan and Maya to read and Sam to write up her notes.
When she got up to pee, Sam was treated to a meteor streaking across the black velvet sky. The August Perseid shower was over, but she was happy that a few stragglers were still rocketing through early September. It would be nice if some of the crew kids were seeing them now.
She sat on a rock by the lake shore for a moment, grateful that no whistles had sounded. If only Chase were beside her. With him unwilling to give up his job and Sam unwilling to join him in Salt Lake, they seemed doomed to slip into each other’s lives like asteroids temporarily caught in a planet’s orbit, then slingshot away, alone in the vastness of space.
Did that mean they didn’t love each other enough? Should one of them be willing to make a major compromise? Her only other long-term relationship had been years ago with self-absorbed newscaster Adam Steele. He had definitely expected all compromises to be hers.
* * * * *
As her crew regrouped the next day, the talk was all about what had happened during their solo campouts. Nick recounted the small animals and birds he’d seen. “I heard a great horned owl, too.”
“Something a lot bigger than that was prowling around my tent,” Ashley said. “A bear.”
Justin and Gabriel rolled their eyes. But Maya, who had brought Ashley back, confirmed the story. “There were bear prints about thirty feet away from Ash’s tent.”
Ashley looked smug. “I threw a rock at it, and I heard it run away.
“Omigod,” Olivia gasped. “I don’t know what I’d do if one came close to my tent.”
Maya’s mouth turned up at the corners. “There were bear prints in your camp, too.”
“For real?” Olivia’s brown eyes were huge. “I went out to pee when a bear was there?”
“Huh,” Justin huffed. “It was probably too afraid to come to my camp. I was ready for it.”
“The point is,” Sam said, “that bear was around but left us all alone. Nobody had to blow a whistle. You should all be proud of yourselves.”
Ashley turned to her. “I saw your light. You guys didn’t really need to come check on me.”
The muscles between Sam’s shoulder blades tightened. “I didn’t, Ash. You saw a light?”
The girl nodded. “Headlamp or flashlight. In the woods, not too far away.”
“Me, too,” Taylor said. “I figured it was one of you.” Her gaze bounced from Aidan to Sam to Maya.
Could it have been that hunter? Or another backpacker? Wandering around after dark in the mountains was not a common activity. She considered how close together the solo camps had been, how Ashley had observed smoke from several of the cooking fires.
“Maybe it was one of your friends here,” Sam suggested, checking their expressions. “Was one of you skulking around in the dark?”
Did Nick look troubled? Was that a flash of guilt she saw on Justin’s face? She simply couldn’t tell. Her entire crew professed their innocence, swearing they’d all stayed in their own camps for the entire time. Sam didn’t know what to think; they all had headlamps and they’d all had plenty of time on their hands during their solo campouts.
She’d been warned about teens hooking up for sex. Had one of the boys been sniffing around Ashley’s and Taylor’s tents?
Their faces revealed nothing.
If one of them was guilty, he or she was hiding it well. She had no evidence against anyone. “Anyway,” she summarized, “you all survived. Now, gear up; we’re moving ten miles today.”
* * * * *
At their next camp, she instructed Aidan and Maya to set out the food and pots for dinner and then find something else to do. Aidan perched on a log, a minuscule sewing kit beside him, and set about stitching up a rip in his pants leg. Maya braced her back against a tree and focused on a book in her lap. Sam sat not far away from her, reviewing her guidebook and keeping an eye on her crew.
Gabriel was the first to notice that dinner preparations were not underway. “What’s supposed to happen here?” He spread his hands out to indicate the supplies. “Who’s supposed to do what?”
Sam yawned dramatically. “Staff is tired. It’s the crew’s turn to cook from here on out.”
“Huh.” Taylor’s expression was annoyed, but she walked over to the supply area to survey the dinner ingredients. “It looks like goulash tonight.”
Shaking his head, Justin reached for the largest pot. “I’ll get the water. Lightning, wanna come with me?”
Nick grabbed another pot, and snatched up the water filter, and they turned toward the creek they’d crossed a short time ago.
They argued about who was supposed to do what and girls’ chores versus boys’ chores, but the teens managed to cook dinner with a minimum of scorching and when it was clear that the staff was no longer responsible for doing dishes, either, the crew also cleaned up afterwards. She had to remind them to hang the remaining food from the trees, but overall, Sam imagined that Kyla would be proud of her group.
* * * * *
Sam reported the successful solos to Troy that evening. He congratulated her on how well her expedition was going, but he sounded despondent.
Maya was right, it helped to be away from Bellingham, in the backcountry with a job to do. The tasks Troy was doing every day would remind him of his dead wife and daughter. “How are you, Troy?”
“Day to day,” he responded. “And thank you again, Sam.”
“Please stop thanking me. I’m only a third of the way through this gig.” She could hardly believe she was saying that; it felt like she’d been out here for at least a month. “Have the cops been by? Is there any news?”
She heard Troy slowly inhale and then exhale just as slowly, and guessed he was trying to keep his voice under control. Finally he said, “A Detective Greene from Snohomish County was here yesterday.”
“What did Greene want?”
“She asked about Chris and what we knew about him, and she wanted to know all about the company history and finances, what Kim did at Wilderness Quest and what I’m doing, how long you had worked here.”
“Did she ask how much you were paying me?”
“Yeah, she did. I explained that these were extraordinary circumstances.”
“No kidding.” She felt slightly guilty about the deal she’d made with Troy, but she needed that extra money. And this was an extraordinarily stressful job that she would never have taken under normal conditions. “Do you have a clue what the authorities might be thinking, Troy?”
His laugh was bitter. “They’re checking out me, Chris, you, everyone I ever prosecuted.”
She hadn’t considered that pool of possible suspects: Troy’s job with the Prosecuting Attorney’s Office had no doubt earned him many enemies. “Are there any suspects there?”
“I suppose there’s one or two. Over the years, I received several notes from one guy by the name of Hockney. He got five years for his third DUI; he was upset, to say the least. He lost his job, of course, and his wife and kids left him while he was in lockup.”
“Those sound like self-inflicted wounds.”
“It’s a common story. There’s another one, a Martha Sheldonack, who hates me because the guy we prosecuted didn’t get sent away. It was a case of road rage, and the guy sideswiped their car and killed her husband and daughter. But there was also a deer that ended up entangled in the wreck, and the defense made it sound like Bambi caused the accident instead of the maniac who forced the Sheldonacks off the road.”
Sam was grateful that it wasn’t her job to handle all those sad cases. “Do you think either of those two is so determined to get back at you that they would hurt your family?”
“Seems like a long shot.”
“Do they live in the area?”
“Hockney is in Ferndale and Sheldonack lives in Deming.” He named two towns in Whatcom County, each less than twenty miles from Bellingham.
She was glad she was up in the mountains away from the crazies.
“My best guess, Sam? The cops are grasping at straws, hoping the right one floats by on the stream.”
“That’s the feeling I’m getting, too. Stay strong, Troy.”
“Remember that your break is coming up in a few days; we can talk more then.”
“I’m ready for some time off.” She concluded the phone call.
As she lay in her tent that night, she dreamed fitfully about hazy threats that never quite materialized. In her nightmare, she was hiking with her friends in dense fog when a rifle barrel appeared out of the mist.
She tried to shout a warning, but her voice didn’t work right and Kim and Kyla couldn’t hear her. Sam woke to find the corner of her sleeping bag had flopped over her face as she slept. The word “Kyla!” was still echoing in her head.
