I drove away, pulling up the GIS maps and Google and Yahoo! and MSR Maps, which offered aerial views that could be overlaid with or exchanged for street maps. I found an unnamed access road that might take me partway down, and hoped the MOC’s vehicles were as good off-road as they were on. And hoped the extra weight of the armor wouldn’t be a hindrance to getting back out. I made it halfway down the gorge, finding a place to execute a tight three-point turn that was more like a ten-point turn, the wheels threatening to slide off the narrow trail and carry me all the way down. I parked facing back up the hill, drank a liter of water, added two more to my pack, and took off, down to the bottom, hoping to end up at the convergence of another creek. It was a harrowing descent, and I worked up a sweat.
The Smoky Mountains are rain forest, creating their own mini-climates at different elevations and disrupting the natural west-to-east trade winds. The temperatures dropped the lower I went, and the air grew progressively more damp. The morning sun disappeared, an afternoon angle needed to warm the west-facing mountain wall. A mist grew around me, wispy and thin in long vertical strips, the mist for which the Smoky Mountains had been named. It stuck to my skin and clothes, cold and clammy. Small rills and runnels formed and merged, splashing down vertical rock faces and cutting into the mountain floor. My sweat chilled and my breath was loud in my ears, my palms growing raw from roots and trees, sliding across bark and rock that decelerated my descent.
Though surely the land had been surveyed, it looked as though no one had been here since the deforestation in the 1920s. I found no human trails, but lots of rabbit sign, deer scat and tracks, and ample bear sign: dead trees clawed for grubs, a honeybee nest high in a tree showing fresh claw marks and bark damage where the bear had climbed. And once I saw what looked like mountain lion sign, old scat, dried and strewn. Beast held me still, a paw on my mind, studying the scat with all her senses. My mouth opened and upper lip pulled back, sucking the scent in through nose and mouth, but my mostly human scenting ability left Beast nearly head-blind. She looked up the mountain, and spotted a tree with vertical claw markings from the ground up to about two feet. Mountain lion? I thought at her.
Finally she thought at me, uncertain, Bobcat. Male.
When? I asked.
Last snow time. Maybe.
Last year. Winter. I stood still, bringing in the scents of the place, smelling rushing water rising on the breeze, deer, bear, rabbit, opossum and raccoon, numerous birds, the dry reek of snake musk, polecat, and skunk. No large cats. I moved on down the mountain, Beast alert and curious. Hunting dead-fish-smell green thing? she asked.
I laughed, the only human sound in the gorge. “Yes.”
Kill and eat it?
“No. Definitely not. It’s hunting the werewolves.”
Beast hissed, deep in my mind. Kill and leave wolves to rot. Killers of winter food. Thieves of meat. Wasters of meat. There were few more horrible insults from Beast than wasters of meat. She said nothing else, but I appreciated her focus. She often saw and smelled things that I missed or ignored because I didn’t know what they meant. Like the scat and the claw marks.
I reached bottom an hour after I left the sheriff, and stopped on the edge on the creek, straddling a downed tree. The movement of water was quiet here, where I sat on the bank in the sun, my feet shuffled beneath last fall’s leaves, but I could hear the roar of water just ahead, where I thought the confluence should be, and from upstream, where it obviously took a drop. Hurricane Ivanna was sweeping slowly up the Mississippi River basin and dumping torrents of water to our west. Projections had it turning east, right for us, with forecasts of four to six inches of rain over two days. Soon this creek would be a raging torrent.
Lunch was protein bars, nuts, three brownies, and two bananas. It left me feeling full but not satisfied. I stored the paper and plastic, and tossed the peels high on the bank, knowing some veggie-loving animal would eat them despite the bitter taste. The pack much lighter, I headed downstream, watching the banks for grindy-sign. The sound of water on stone grew and the air was wetter with mist.