FRANK’S SCREAM REACHED ME AN instant before the tree did. A few feet more and my ATV would be directly under it as it came crashing down. My first impulse was to hit the brakes, but as fast as the ATV was moving, stopping in time wasn’t an option. The only thing left to do was speed up. I accelerated as much as I could. And then I closed my eyes.
The impact sounded like a cannon shot and set the ground shaking behind me. Which meant that I was still alive!
I opened my eyes, hit the brakes, and swung my ATV around to see Frank skid his to a stop just in time to keep from crashing into the oak now blocking his path. We both whipped off our helmets and said at the same time, “Are you okay?!”
We nodded at each other from either side of the fallen tree.
“Whoa, are you guys both all right?” Dan yelled, racing back toward us and pulling to a stop.
“Well, I think we solved one mystery,” I said. “If a tree falls in the woods and someone is there to almost be crushed by it, it definitely makes a sound.”
“I’d laugh if my heart weren’t pounding so fast,” said Frank, climbing off his ATV. “I thought it was going to crush you, for sure.”
“You nearly crashed into it too,” I reminded him. “It could have flattened us both.”
“I’ve spent a lot of time in the woods, but that’s the wildest random act of nature I’ve ever seen.” Dan walked over to look at the split base of the tree, where it looked like a beaver had chewed either end nearly into spikes. “The beavers must’ve left just enough wood there to keep it standing when they stopped. I guess us zooming by like that was all the shaking it needed to tumble over.”
“That’s what it looks like on the surface,” Frank said, reaching down and yanking at something by his feet. “Under the surface, there’s a trip wire.”
“A what?!” Dan gawked.
I examined the nearly pointy stump left sticking out of the ground. When I looked closely, teeth marks weren’t the only marks I saw.
“The beavers chewed only part of the way. Someone used an ax to do the rest.”
Dan looked back and forth between Frank and me. “I—I don’t understand.”
Frank gave the tripwire a twang. “Either you have some super-industrious beavers, or this is sabotage.”
“Sabotage?!” Dan gasped. “But why?”
“Either someone has a really sick idea of a practical joke—” Frank began.
“Or someone knew we were coming and laid a trap to take us out,” I finished.
“Looks like they set it up expecting multiple vehicles, so when the first one came through, it would catch the wire and the force would pull the tree the rest of the way down to fall in the path of the other riders,” said Frank.
“But who would do something like that?” Dan wondered nervously.
“Someone who knew we were on our way to Black Bear Mountain to check on Dr. Kroopnik and didn’t want us to find him,” I speculated.
“This is out of control. You can’t go up there by yourselves,” Dan insisted.
“We wouldn’t have to if you hadn’t bailed on us,” I said.
“No way I’d go up there with you now, even if I didn’t have to get back,” he said. “Bears and mountain lions, I’m cool with. People who set traps to take me out, no thank you. You two aren’t thinking straight if you don’t hop on those ATVs and follow me back to the lodge. You won’t even have cell phone service to call for help if anything else happens.”
The look of determination on Frank’s face said it all. Any doubts I’d had about Aleksei’s fears that Dr. K was in danger vanished with Frank’s discovery of that trip wire. We’d set out to make sure our friend was safe, and that was exactly what we were going to do.
“Not a chance,” I said.
Dan shook his head like we were delusional as he unstrapped our packs from the back of his ATV. “The lodge isn’t going to be liable if you go up there and some killer comes after you.”
“We’ll take our chances,” said Frank.
“Suit yourselves.” Dan gunned his ATV around the fallen tree and headed back the way we’d come.
“Well, that’s not how I envisioned this expedition starting,” Frank said as we watched him vanish into the distance. He pulled a pad and pen from his pack and pinned it to the fallen tree. “To let any other hikers who come along know the ATV trail may not be safe.”
Using the smaller, less used paths, we rode slowly the long way around the beaver pond to avoid any other possible traps and stayed off the main path until we reached the foot trail at the base of the mountain. We stowed the ATVs in the brush beside the trail, grabbed our packs, and stepped into the woods.
“With all these setbacks, I don’t think we’re going to make Dr. K’s research station before the sun starts to set.” Frank sighed. “Is it just me, or did you think Dan was acting squirrelly even before that tree fell?”
“He sure seemed nervous about something, especially the way he kept looking behind him on the way here,” I agreed. “Do you think he could have been in on the trap?”
“Riding past that tree would have been a pretty big risk to take, but he was the first one to go, and it was rigged to fall on whoever was behind him,” Frank said.
“He seemed as shocked by it as we were, though,” I countered.
“Doesn’t mean he wasn’t acting,” said Frank.
I took a second to consider it. “He did seem pretty intent on us not coming up here.”
“To be fair, this expedition does seem a little reckless,” Frank said. “You know, seeing as someone is trying to drop trees on us and all.”
“Whoever it is might still be lying in wait somewhere along the trail, so let’s stay sharp,” I warned.
Like Dan had said, there were trail markers tacked to the trees along the path. The terrain was steep, rugged, and slow going, but I love a good wilderness challenge, and I would have been stoked about every second of it under normal circumstances. Our circumstances definitely weren’t normal, though. Not with Dr. K missing and the possibility of treasure hunters trying to kill us. A hike this difficult requires close attention to every step—especially when it might be booby-trapped—and it didn’t help that we also had to stay on high alert for potential perps lurking in the woods.
Rays of sun poked through the dense canopy of trees, splattering the forest floor with blotches of light. The direction of the beams and quality of the light changed as the day went on until the light started to turn golden.
“It’s closing in on sunset and we still have a few more hours of hiking to go,” Frank said, peering up at the patches of sky visible through the canopy of the pine grove we were in.
I peered ahead at a steep ledge that was going to require some climbing. “That bad boy could be tricky, and we probably don’t want to tackle it in fading light.”
I took a look around the pine grove. The incline wasn’t bad, and there was a little clearing off to the side where we could safely make a fire.
Frank was thinking the same thing. “Let’s camp here for the night and get started again at first light. I don’t like the idea of leaving Max out there alone any longer than we have to, but it won’t do him any good if we get ourselves hurt or lost in the dark.”
“Great minds, bro,” I said, unzipping my bag. “I’m excited to try out our new hammocks. Stealth mode is going to come in extra handy if someone really is out there hunting us. Once we cook dinner and put out the fire, it will be like we vanished.”
Instead of a conventional tent, we’d packed two tree tents, which were basically hammock-tent hybrids. If anybody—or anything—came looking for us on the ground, we’d be safely tucked away above their heads, suspended between two trees all snuggly in our cocoons.
We wouldn’t be the only thing suspended between two trees, either. So would our food. As soon as we were done eating, we wrapped everything up in a “bear” bag and hung it ten feet off the ground and well outside our camp. Black Bear Mountain didn’t get its name by accident, and we’d learned last time how much trouble a hungry bear could cause if it wandered into camp. Black bears were rarely a threat to humans, but they had great sniffers and weren’t above mooching a pack of hot dogs or flapjacks off unsuspecting campers.
There was one more precaution we took, and this one was more for predators of the human variety. We’d walked the perimeter of our campsite before the sun sent, and we’d both been keeping an ear out for any suspicious sounds in the woods. We couldn’t be certain, but if anyone was out there spying on our camp, they’d hidden themselves well.
We stashed the rest of our gear on the ground nearby, camouflaged under some brush, doused the fire with water from a nearby brook, and climbed up into our hammocks. With all the danger we were facing, I expected to have trouble falling asleep, but we’d burned a lot of energy on the hike, and I was out cold the instant I closed my eyes.
When I opened them again, it was to the sound of Frank’s snores. At least that’s what I thought at first. Only these weren’t coming from the tree next to me—they were coming from below. Then it hit me that I’d heard a similar sound on our last trip as well, and it wasn’t snoring. It was grunting. And it was coming from a bear.
Okay, so it’s more than a little unnerving to have a bear rummaging around right under you. Logically, though, I knew it wasn’t really a threat, especially with us up in a tree without any food on us. I took a deep breath, silently gave thanks for our hammocks, and decided to leave the bear alone instead of trying to make a lot of noise and scare it off. Sure, that might work, but it would also call all kinds of attention to ourselves. If there was a human predator out there lurking in the woods, we might as well just start shouting, Come and get us, bad guys! Nope. Better just to let the bear rummage around and be on its merry bear way.
It was when I heard the sound of fabric tearing that I realized what it was rummaging through. The packs with all our gear!