Around three o’clock Buzzy and I rousted from our lay-about and decided to explore the other side of the lake and try to scout the mystery camper. We hiked up Jumping Rock hill, past the snare field, and over the larger cliffs at the north end.
We watched Pops go lakeside to check the fishing rods—it was then we saw him again, the strange man dressed in black, standing on the rock cliff at the south end of the lake, watching the camp with binoculars. From a distance it was difficult to make out any features—just a dark shape on the granite.
“I swear that’s the man from the other night,” I said, a pitch of fear in my throat.
“Don’t know, but he’s takin a long look at Pops.”
We watched him watch the far shore until Pops went into the trees and the man left the cliff. We crept a half mile through the woods, quiet as Shawnee sneaking up on an enemy camp, tiptoeing around fallen twigs, leaf piles.
At the back side of the cliff we came upon the intruder’s campsite—a smoking fire, a simple sleeping bag under a blue tarp strung between trees, a small daypack against a rock. Buzzy stood.
“Where are you going?”
“Gonna see who it is. You keep lookout. Gimme a bird whistle if he comes.”
“No, I’ll just yell.”
“Don’t be yellin. He’ll know we’re here. Just give a whistle.”
“I can’t whistle.”
“What do you mean you can’t whistle?”
“I mean I can’t whistle.”
“Why not?”
“Never learned how.”
Buzzy looked at me with a pitiful gaze, as if my suburban upbringing left me severely wanting in the ways of boy.
“I’ll give you a woo-woop if I hear him coming back. I’ll make it sound like an owl or something.”
Buzzy seemed dumbfounded by my lack of whistling ability. “I guess that’ll have to do.”
He quietly stepped through the trees to the stalker’s camp. I spun which ways, looking for movement, listening for approaching steps. Buzzy poked through the pack, scouted the camp for clues. He came back and motioned me to follow. We worked quickly through the woods, around the corner of the lake to the start of the flat beach, and sat by the water on a rock.
“Find anything?”
“Nuthin to tell me who it is.”
“What was in the bag?”
“Jus food an some clothes. No fishin rod. Coulda took it with him, though.”
“No, we’d see him on the lake fishing. Maybe he’s a hunter.”
“Maybe he’s huntin that White Stag.”
“He’ll never find it.”
“How do you know? He could be an expert hunter come up jus to kill it.”
“The White Stag is too smart. That’s how he got to be so old. People have been probably trying to kill him for years. He’s not gonna be fooled by a single hunter.”
Buzzy thought about it. “Maybe you’re right about it all.”
“About what?”
“About how some things jus ain’t meant to be killed.”
“Maybe.”
We hiked the trail that ran through the woods back to camp. Halfway there Buzzy pulled me behind a rock.
“What? Is it him?”
He shook his head and shushed me. I stuck my head around the boulder. Three turkey hens and a huge tom turkey were wending down the trail—hens flashing tail and the tom following scent like a bum to whiskey.
“I never got this close to a turkey… hardest animal to hunt. The tom is ruttin, so he ain’t payin attention to nuthin but the girls.” Buzzy peeked around the rock, then took the safety off the crossbow pistol. The hens left the trail, promenading off into the woods. The tom stopped, smelled the air, then turned to follow. Buzzy leapt from behind the rock, knelt, aimed, and squeezed the trigger. The bolt whooshed from the pistol and buried in the shoulder of the turkey. The hens scattered and the tom took to the trees. We ran after him, thrashing through the woods down a long hill. We followed him for a half hour to a clearing in the middle of an unknown valley floor. In a hundred-by-hundred-foot space were rows of what looked like bamboo. The tom took a step out of the woods and into the field. A shotgun blast pierced the quiet of the meadow, and turkey feathers flew into the air, floating like the flotsam of a pillow fight.
We looked for the shooter but saw no one. The feathers were still drifting down as we crept toward the flopping bird. The tom’s head and neck were completely blown off. Buzzy reached over and grabbed its twitching claw and the thin wire caught around its leg. He removed it and followed the wire over to a sapling with a shotgun lashed to it. The wire connected to the trigger through an eye hook screwed into the wooden butt of the gun. “It’s a booby trap,” he breathed.
I faced the plot of bamboo, neatly rowed and well tended. “Why would anyone booby-trap a bamboo farm?”
“Cause that ain’t bamboo,” he said. “Let’s get outta here!” He grabbed the turkey by the feet and carefully walked through the trees, as if navigating a minefield. When we were a safe distance up the slope, we turned and looked over the clearing. “What was all that?” I asked, heart pounding.
“Pot field.”
“You mean marijuana?”
Buzzy nodded.
“How do you know?”
“Seen it before. People grow it up here.”
“What’s with the booby trap? We coulda been killed.”
“That I never seen before. Frickin scary.”
We hiked up the incline back to the lake and followed the trail to camp. The turkey was heavy—about twenty pounds—and Buzzy kept shifting it from hand to hand. Pops was at the lake edge fishing when we walked into camp.
“Whoa-ho! Look what the hunters brought back. That’s an impressive piece of shooting. Wild turkeys are a hard get.”
“We found a pot field that’s booby-trapped. Shotgun blew its head off.”
Pops stopped midcast. “What kind of booby trap?”
We told him.
Pops frowned. “There are folks growing crop out here, but I’ve never heard of anybody booby-trapping; that’s just idiotic. Where’s the field?”
We described the location, then told him about the man spying again from the far cliff.
“He was probably checking to see if I was DEA. The feds have come down here a few times rooting out growers and methamphetamine labs. You boys stay around the lake from now on. No more wandering in the woods. Any man dumb enough to set a booby trap is capable of anything. As long as we don’t go near his field, we’ll be fine.”
Buzzy handed the bloody turkey over to Pops, who felt its weight and smiled. “Heck of a shot, son.”
“He was ruttin, not payin attention.”
“Females have that effect on toms… and on men.” He regarded the fowl. “We are going to be eating fine tonight!”
Pops dressed the bird and stuffed it with several huge king bolete mushrooms, a mass of wild onions, garlic, rosemary, and goatsbeard root. We roasted the turkey on a spit carved from green ash limbs, each of us taking a go at turning. It tasted nothing like Thanksgiving turkey—each bite seemed to melt on my tongue into an explosion of flavors: goose, chicken, steak, and several I couldn’t recognize.
We lay around the fire, gorging on wild tom turkey and watching the sun move behind Harker Mountain.
“Tonight we should see quite a show in the sky. It’s the peak night and astronomers are forecasting a heavy dose of shooting stars; could be one every few seconds.”
“What time does it start?”
“About midnight. Let’s try and get some sleep before then.”
We lingered at the fire, then drifted to our hammocks and eventually found sleep.