“Something’s still wrong,” Vinnie said. He had been quiet since we had landed here. “Something is very wrong.”
“How do you mean?”
“Let me ask you something,” he said to Guy. “If you were leading a hunt here, would you leave this place looking like this?”
“No, of course not.”
“Even if you couldn’t stand the men you were with. And it was them that made the mess?”
“I’d still clean up before we left,” Guy said. “And they’d hear about it, believe me.”
“Exactly. That’s the same thing Tom would have done.”
“So what are you saying?” I said.
“They didn’t leave here under normal circumstances,” Vinnie said. “Something happened. Maybe they had to leave in a hurry.”
“Or maybe,” Maskwa spoke up behind us, “they never left at all.”
Vinnie turned around and looked at him.
“Maybe they got lost hunting,” Maskwa said. “The people at the lodge, they didn’t want to deal with it. So they lied.”
“Tom wouldn’t get lost,” Vinnie said.
“Your brother is a long way from home. These are not his woods.”
“If that’s what happened,” Vinnie said, looking beyond the cabin at the thick wall of trees, “then he’s still out there. Tom knows how to survive. He knows how to find plants he can eat, how to make shelter, how to make a fire.”
“But what about their wallets?” I said. “Why would they be in the Suburban?”
“They may have left them here at the cabin,” Vinnie said. “When Gannon came out here, he found them. Maybe Maskwa is right, Alex. Something may have happened. The people at the lodge are just covering it up.”
Maskwa stepped up to Vinnie and grabbed him by the shoulders. “We will look,” he said. “I promise you. We can’t panic, Vinnie. We can’t run around here like chickens.”
“I know.”
“Let’s eat first, okay? Then we’ll look.”
Maskwa sent Guy back to the plane for the big bag and the cooler. Then he sat down on the dock and took out two long salamis and a loaf of bread.
“Grandpere,” Guy said. “How much food did you bring?”
“I had an intuition,” he said. “Something told me we’d be here all day.”
We all sat down on the dock with him and ate. Maskwa passed me one of the cold Molsons from the cooler. The sun came out and shone on the surface of the lake, making it feel a lot warmer than it really was. Under different circumstances, it would have been a hell of a nice day.
I couldn’t stop thinking about that Suburban ditched in the woods. It seemed too far-fetched, that they’d dump it there just to cover themselves. The whole thing was starting to feel wrong, from top to bottom. The real answer was probably something simple. It almost always is.
“You and Vinnie can go out together,” Maskwa said as we finished up. “Alex will come with me.” He looked at his watch. “We should meet back here at 3:00. The days are getting shorter-any later and we won’t have enough daylight to fly back.”
Vinnie and Guy picked the trail that went north from the cabin site. The other trail curled around the rim of the lake before heading west. The pine trees were thick enough to obliterate the sunlight. Maskwa led the way.
“If they’re lost,” I said, “then they could be miles away from here. How are we gonna find them?”
“We won’t,” he said. “But we may find which way they went. A man can’t walk in the woods without leaving some trace behind.”
I followed him deeper and deeper into the woods. The trail seemed to disappear every now and then, but Maskwa didn’t hesitate. He kept moving forward, and inevitably the trail would appear again. “You see all these tracks,” he said.
“What are they?”
“Look at them. You tell me.”
The tracks were about four inches wide, with five distinct toe-prints and little gouges in the dirt where the nails must have dug in. They kept appearing in pairs, with one print right in front of the other.
“Bears?”
“Yes, black bears,” he said. “You see how they walk? Each back foot almost steps into the front track.”
“There’s a lot of tracks here.”
“You can tell how fast they’re going from the spacing. You can even tell if the animal was limping.”
“Are you seeing any human tracks around here?”
“Of course, aren’t you?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m not good at this.”
“You just have to look,” he said. “I mean really look. Come here.” He went to the edge of the trail and crouched down close to the ground. I leaned in close to him.
“Come all the way down here,” he said. It was a position I knew well, of course. Most catchers crouch down behind the plate a few hundred times a day until they’re done playing ball. And then they never crouch again if they can help it.
“See right here?” he said. He brushed away some pine needles. “Here’s a boot print. What does it tell you?”
“Looks like about a size twelve,” I said.
“What else?”
“I’d guess it’s not very recent.”
“Why would you say that?”
“Well, number one, the fact that we don’t see any tracks in the middle of the trail. It’s all bear tracks. That means the bears have been here more recently.”
“Okay, what else?”
“The pine needles,” I said. “It would take some time for the needles to fall and cover the tracks.”
“Couldn’t this man have stepped on top of the pine needles?”
I looked more closely. “If he did, then the pine needles would be pushed into the mud. And some would be bent.”
“Very good,” he said. “It’s all common sense, isn’t it?”
“Yes. So what now?”
“So we go back. It doesn’t look like this trail has been walked on in the last couple of weeks. The men went a different way.”
We retraced our steps to the cabin site. It was just after two o’clock when we got there. Maskwa and I sat on the dock again, and I had another beer.
“This is a beautiful lake,” I said. “It’s too bad we had to see it this way.”
“You must be a good friend,” he said. “You came all the way up here.”
“Vinnie would do the same for me.”
“Do you have a brother, Alex?”
“No, Maskwa, I don’t.”
He nodded and looked out at the lake. “I had two. They’re both gone.”
“What about your son? Guy’s father.”
He threw a small rock into the water.
“Never mind,” I said. “It’s none of my business.”
“He’s gone, too. He killed himself.”
“I’m sorry.”
He shook his head, threw another rock in the water. “He has peace now.”
We kept sitting there on the dock. The sun shifted west, making the shadows longer. Three o’clock came and went. It was almost three-thirty when Vinnie and Guy finally came back.
“What did you find?” Maskwa said.
“Lots of bear tracks,” Guy said.
“A real bear highway,” Vinnie said. Even in the cold air, he was sweating.
“There were boot prints, too,” Guy said. “As far as we could tell, they looked pretty recent. The trail split off, though. And then again. There might be four or five different spurs.”
“And in that one spot-” Vinnie said.
“Yes, a lot of boot prints together. It was hard to say what was going on there.”
“Just a bunch of men standing around?” Maskwa said. “Maybe they were waiting for somebody.”
“I don’t know,” Guy said. “Some of the prints were uneven.” He leaned his leg so that most of his weight was on the inside of his foot. “Like this.”
“We don’t have much light left,” Maskwa said. “I think we should go back. Tomorrow we can bring radios with us, and more food. We’ll search again. We can even fly over the area if we want.”
“I can’t leave,” Vinnie said. “I’d like to spend the night here.”
“There’s no need to do that,” Maskwa said. “We’ll come back tomorrow.”
“You brought plenty of food,” Vinnie said. “If you’d be good enough to leave some with me, I’ll sleep here in the cabin.”