| |
“Rowan,” the tent shook. He sat up, abruptly. “Rowan!”
“I’m up,” he groaned. He threw back the covers and the cold night air hit him. He searched in the darkness for his clothes. “Give me a minute, will ya? I’m up.”
“We’re getting some activity,” Bahati said, urgently. “You’re missing all the excitement.”
Rowan dressed quickly. He gave Lauren a shake. “Activity! Wake up!” he pulled on his jacket and hurried out with his shoes in his hand.
* * *
Lauren wasn’t a morning person. She certainly wasn’t a three-in-the-morning person. The absence of Rowan’s body heat urged her to find her clothes. She squirmed in the sleeping bag as she dressed. When she emerged from the tent, her hair was disheveled. Her mood wasn’t much better.
“What is it?” Lauren grumbled. She joined the team in front of the computer screen.
“We’re hearing tree knocks from two different directions,” Jean-René said.
“Tree knocks?” Lauren stood with her hands on her hips. “You woke me up at three o’frick in the morning for lousy tree knocks?”
“Not just tree knocks,” Jean-René grinned. “Look at this ...” He pointed to the video he’d just pulled up. “We got something on the FLIR. That’s the one we set down by the stream.”
Lauren dropped to one knee. The thermal imaging camera assigned a color for the various temperatures with red being body temperature. Hotter temperatures were darker shades of maroon. The cooler tones were yellow, green and blue. Trees showed as almost white, colder than the ground around them which was a much darker blue-black.
The image was hard to make out. It was just a blob. The colors were in the red tones and moved behind the ice-blue trees. The form was large, lumbering. The creature appeared to be interested in something on the ground, hunched like an enormous squirrel foraging for nuts.. When it stood, it was tall. If Lauren had to wager a hypothesis, she might have estimated seven to eight feet. It disappeared behind another tree.
“Is that a bear?” Bahati asked.
Lauren was shaking her head no, but answered, “I suppose it’s possible, but ...”
“The arms are much longer than a bear,” Rowan finished for her.
“Dang it. The trees are too thick. I can’t get a good view of it,” Lauren said. She leaned back as the form took several long strides. It turned and worked its way back up the mountain. They lost sight of it all together. “Wait, this is playback? How long ago was this filmed?”
“No more than five minutes ago,” Bahati said. “I left to go to the bathroom. Jean-René was making coffee. We didn’t think to check the video until we heard the tree knocks.”
“We need to get up there.” Lauren stood, and turned to look for the equipment. “Wake the rest of the team. We need to get eyes on this thing before we lose it,” she said. She brushed her hair back out of her eyes. “Which direction did you hear the knocks?”
“The first one was coming from the left, up the mountain. The other came from the right, towards the river,” Bahati handed Lauren the handi-cam from one of the kits. “The second one sounded close, but the video came from trap-cam-six.”
“That’s the one uphill,” Jean-René clarified.
“Put on your shoes, Rowan. We gotta move!”
* * *
Lauren conducted the hasty pre-hunt briefing. She gave out assignments. “Rowan, Jean-René, Joshua and I will go down the river to check out what we caught on the FLIR. Bahati, take Pauline and the others and go up the mountain with your thermal cam. Keep your voices down. Move as quietly as you can. Use your radios only if you have something. We’ll circle around and see if we can find whatever that was on the thermal trap-cam. We’ll meet back at base camp before sunrise.”
* * *
Lauren worried about what they’d seen. She had begun to sense the presence of the being she knew as Tsul’Kalu. She didn’t trust her senses, though. This feeling was something she couldn’t explain using any scientific methods she had been taught. She couldn’t sense him at the moment.
The night had gone cold, as it usually did on the mountain. It seemed colder than she would expect. Her breath hung in the air around her as she huffed and puffed her way up the hill. Rowan led them through the dense trees. He blazed a trail straight to the area where the trap cam had caught their quarry.
“There’s the cam,” he whispered.
“That’s where the creature was,” she pointed to the stand of trees ahead of them. “Go stand over there. Let me see if I can determine how tall it was.”
Rowan nodded. “Let me know when I get to the right one.”
Lauren gave him an owl-hoot to signal the right spot. He stood up right and reached his arm up over his head.
Lauren hooted again and the team met in the middle. “It was every bit as tall as the top of that branch,” she said, pointing to one of the high branches on the tree. She pulled up the pictures she’d just taken to give them a better view. “What would that be?’
“That’s got to be at least seven feet,” Joshua said. “Are you sure it wasn’t a bear?”
“No,” Lauren said. “Bears don’t walk on their back legs. They can stand, but they don’t walk.”
“Was it your Tsul’Kalu?” Rowan asked her in sidebar.
“I don’t think so,” Lauren said, trying to find that presence somewhere inside her mind. “But I think there are others of his kind. I do not speak to all of them the way I do Tsul’Kalu.” Lauren noticed a look pass between Jean-René and Rowan. They both seemed perplexed and she suspected they didn’t believe her. She didn’t care.
“Alright, let’s keep moving. Watch where you step. Look for prints.”
* * *
They reached the top of the ridge thirty minutes later. Jean-René scanned the distant valley with the thermal imaging cam. The forests were dark. There was no sign of whatever they’d seen earlier. Rowan radioed the other team to check in. Lauren paced, and sat down on a rock, her shoulder aching. She was exhausted and felt defeated. “Son of a ...”
“No one’s better at not finding the truth than we are,” he shook his head.
“Whatever,” she snapped. She turned towards camp, storming away. “We have to get a new fricking catch phrase.”
“We’re just going to give up?” Jean-René stood fast. It wasn’t like Lauren to call it quits so easily.
Rowan started after her, but stopped. “Jean-René, go on. Take the rest of the team and see what you can find.”
“But ...”
“She’s tired, mentally and physically. I’ll talk to her and we’ll meet you back at camp later. Go on.” He turned and followed her down the hill into the darkness. “Lauren, wait up!”
* * *
“Let’s try some wood knocks,” Jean-René said. “We’re on the peak, we should be able to be heard across the whole valley.”
“I’ll radio the other team,” Joshua said.
Once the other team had been alerted, Jean-René turned the camera on as Joshua picked up a long thick broken branch and cracked it over the side of a fallen tree trunk. The sound, like an echo of thunder, reverberated over the valley. Three more whacks followed, then ... silence.
Everyone seemed to hold their breath as they listened for a response that never came. “Try it again,” Jean-René whispered. Joshua had to find another branch. He’d cracked the first one and it fell apart in his hand. The second gave off a deep, almost musical resonance. Only seconds later, a similar crack echoed from the distant woods. Joshua’s eyes lit up and his good-natured smile glowed in the night vision camera.
“It came from that way.” Jean-René pointed, and they took off down a narrow trail into the valley on the other side of the mountain. Their enthusiasm increased as a distant howl echoed in the woods. Jean-René didn’t hesitate but whooped back in a similar tone.
“Did you hear that?” Bahati’s voice squawked over the radio.
“We’re on it,” Joshua responded.
“We’re headed that way too.”