The trees grew taller as I approached the hidden stream: a mixed grove of white pines, yellow birches, and northern white cedar. The evergreen boughs had blocked the snow, making it easier to read the trail. The brook at the bottom was about ten feet wide at its narrowest point. It was a gurgling little creek, ice-crusted along the edges, with water that looked like flowing ink in the light of my headlamp and smelled, very faintly-because cold dulls the sense of smell-of the rotting pine needles clumped along the streambed.
Lucas had tried hopping his way across from one rock to the next, but the dislodged snow on one of the boulders showed where he’d lost his footing. His feet would be wet now, which increased the likelihood of frostbite. I needed to find him quickly, before his feet froze.
My snowshoes weren’t made for jumping, so I had to untie them and prop them over my shoulder as I waded across. My boots were waterproof, but the iciness of the creek pierced the leather uppers like repeated jabs from a needle.
When I reached the far side, I shined the lamp along the stream, looking for the point where Lucas had continued on, but I found no other tracks. It took me a few seconds to understand what I was seeing-or rather, what I wasn’t seeing-and then I laughed out loud. The boy had used the stream to disguise his passage. He had waded either up- or downstream.
Upstream, I guessed, and I was correct, although not in the way I’d expected. I rediscovered Lucas’s trail, but it was now on the opposite side of the bank. It looped back toward his house, then stopped suddenly halfway up the hill. You might almost have concluded that a passing UFO had teleported him from the ground into space.
I knelt down, and again I started smiling at my own stupidity. I’d been in such a rush, I hadn’t noticed what should have been plainly obvious to even a rookie warden: Lucas had retraced his steps. The boy had walked backward in his own tracks down to the creek.
This kid is really clever, I said to myself. I’d better read Northwest Passage again.
I located the tracks again on the far side of the brook, even farther upstream. As I snowshoed my way up the bank, I came across a spectacular pine that had been blasted apart; the bark was deeply scarred, torn open to the heartwood down the length of the trunk. Lucas’s map, I remembered, included a “Lightning Tree.” I expected this was it.
According to the notebook, the boy’s fort should have been nearby. I decided to remove my snowshoes to make myself more agile, even if it meant that I would flounder in the deep drifts. I tied the laces together and draped the knot across my left shoulder.
My headlamp had a green lens that I could snap over the bulb. The green light had been designed to protect a hunter or fisherman’s night vision, so that if you switched it off suddenly, you wouldn’t be left completely blind. The lens gave an eerie cast to the trail in the snow.
The footprints dived headfirst into a dense mass of deadfall. The boy was leading me through his own private obstacle course. Fallen and half-fallen trees now formed a barrier to my passage. I peered under the first widowmaker and considered dropping down on my hands and knees to follow, but then I thought better of risking my neck by placing it under a heavy, spiked trunk. I would have to go around, I decided, until I regained his trail.
I crept clockwise around the blowdowns, pushing my way through some low evergreens, which gave me a faceful of snow when the boughs sprang back. It was slow going without the snowshoes. Each step had me sinking down to my knees, if not my thighs.
I stopped several times to listen, but the only sound was the wind rustling through the treetops.
Eventually I located Lucas’s path again. The clues to his ordeal showed in the snow. After wriggling through the blowdowns, he’d scrambled on his forearms and knees up out of a hollow beneath a broken tree. I noticed a wet green dot on the snow. It was a drop of blood turned the color of seaweed by the fairy light. The boy had knocked his head or scraped a limb against one of those cruel spikes. So now he was wet and injured, as well as armed.
The wind shifted, and I smelled wood smoke. There was just a hint of bitterness on the air before it drifted away. I moved cautiously upwind, noting that the prints were headed in the same direction, feeling certain that Lucas had lit a campfire. Glancing ahead, I saw a snowy knoll where two huge boulders, bigger than bulldozers, had been dropped by a passing glacier. At the foot of one was a flickering yellow light.
I shut off the headlamp and waited for my pupils to expand. As I drew closer, the boulders gained gigantic proportions. They reminded me of ancient monoliths from the barrow downs of England. At their base, I could make out a boxy shadow wedged in the crack between the glacial erratics. The campfire light leaked out from between the planks, and a spiral of pine-flavored smoke-light gray against the darker gray of the evening-corkscrewed up into the sky.
Lucas was inside.
The question was how to pry him out. He had nowhere to run. The fort was pressed tightly into the vee formed by the leaning rocks. The structure seemed to be about the size of an ice-fishing shack, turned on its side and reinforced with plywood and Typar siding.
Then I remembered the backtracking footprints and the maze of deadfall, and I recalled something Jamie had told me about her son: “Lucas loves puzzles and riddles and secret codes.” On a hunch, I decided to creep around the boulders and have a look at them from behind.
In the nearly pitch-darkness, I almost speared my eye on a sharp branch. Every sound I made seemed amplified to my ears. I worried that my awkward movement through the snow might alert him to my presence.
After a while I came through the birch saplings and the hedge of cedars on the far side of the rise. As I had expected, there was a receding shadow between the boulders: the fort’s secret back door. I moved to one side of the opening and flattened myself against the cold granite.
I lifted my snowshoes gently off my shoulder and pressed them together in my left hand. Then, with all my strength, I hurled them up over the tops of the boulders. I heard the wood frames clatter off something-maybe the rock, maybe the fort-and then a hurried movement that reminded me of a squirrel in an attic.
Faster than I would have dreamed, a rifle emerged from the crack between the two boulders beside me. As soon as I saw it, I grabbed the barrel and gave it a yank, dragging the boy out from the hole. He sprawled forward, landing on his scrawny chest. His glasses fell into the snow and disappeared beneath the surface powder. Half blind, he flipped himself over, waving his arms and kicking out his legs and screaming something unintelligible. It might have been a plea for mercy.
“Relax, Lucas,” I said. “No one’s going to hurt you.”
But he kept screaming.
35
Once I had gotten him to stop howling, I unloaded the. 22 and put the cartridges in my pocket. Then I flicked on my headlamp and helped him dig for his Coke-bottle glasses. He rubbed the lenses with his thumbs before he put them on again. He blinked at me through the wet plastic, blinded by the halogen glow emanating from my forehead.
“Lucas, why did you run off like that?”
“That lady was going to confiscate me.”
Where did he come up with that word? I wondered. “She was just going to take care of you until your mom comes homes.”
“That lady told Tammi that Ma’s in jail.”
I considered my response. “That’s right. She is in jail.”
“What did she do?”
I felt very reluctant to offer him any information. It wasn’t just my usual uneasiness communicating with children; there were legal issues involved. I figured my best bet would be to hand him over to the DHHS woman before I said something that would get me into trouble in Augusta. “She drove a car when she shouldn’t have.”
“How long is she going to be there?”