Full Wolf Moon (Jeremy Logan #5)
Lincoln Child
1
At seven thirty in the evening Palmer stopped for another snack—handmade gorp and an energy bar from the lid pocket of his backpack. He’d sworn hours before that he wouldn’t allow himself a real dinner—hot and steaming from his titanium griddle—until he’d found a decent place to tent for the night.
He looked around slowly as he chewed the energy bar. He’d known it would be a rough slog, and he had believed himself familiar with the surrounding region, but nothing had prepared him for the hike in that day. Guess all the stories were true, he thought a little sourly.
It was the second weekend in July, the sun was just starting to slip behind the horizon to the west, but he could nevertheless make out Desolation Mountain, maybe four miles to the north. It stood there, alone, a mirror of blue-black lake at its base, its green flanks exposed as if taunting him. Four miles—but with this country, it might as well be forty.
“Shit,” he muttered, shoving the wrapper of the energy bar into his pocket and starting off once again.
Desolation Mountain was a trailless peak of 3,250 feet, making it not high enough to be among the “true” forty-six Adirondack tall peaks. Even so, its vertical rise and distance from other summits made it worth notching his belt with. But what made the mountain most attractive to hard-core backpackers, mountain hikers, and students of the Adirondacks was its remoteness. It was situated in the Desolation Lake area, west of the Five Ponds Wilderness—perhaps the wildest, most remote section of the entire six-million-acre park.
Remoteness didn’t bother David Palmer. He liked nothing better than to disappear into the wilderness and go for days without seeing another human being. It was actually getting to the mountain that was proving a real bitch.
At first, it hadn’t been bad at all. He’d left his SUV hidden among the trees at the Baldwin Mountain trailhead, then hiked five miles down a private logging road until at last it petered out. This was followed by miles of virgin, old-growth timber, so tall that it was always dusk beneath and the forest floor was soft and completely free of saplings.
But then he left the Five Ponds Wilderness, the forest fell away behind him, and he began the approach to Desolation Lake. And here was where his fast, easy pace suddenly slowed to a crawl. The country grew ugly, barren, and nearly impossible to traverse. The wilderness between him and the mountain became a labyrinth of outwash bogs, blowdowns, and “kettle holes,” forcing him to watch every step he took. There was no trail, of course, not even a herd path, and with ravines running at crisscrosses to each other he’d had to rely frequently on his Garmin Oregon handheld GPS. More than once he’d slipped on treacherous, barely visible rocks covered with lichen. Thank God he’d decided on wearing his off-trail boots—otherwise he’d have turned an ankle, or worse, long before now.
After another quarter mile, he stopped again. The way ahead was blocked by an overlapping downfall too tight for him to squeeze through with the heavy pack on his back. Cursing under his breath, he shrugged out of the pack, found the widest hole in the downfall, shoved the pack through, then wiggled his way in behind it. The dry ends of branches poked at his limbs and scratched his face.
On the far side of the downfall he put the pack back on, making sure that the compression straps were good and tight. This late in the day a pack began to get heavy, and he wanted to make sure its contents stayed stable.
He spent a moment, shrugging his shoulders this way and that, getting the pack into position. Even though the majority of hikers used internal backpacks these days, Palmer still preferred one with an external frame—in his case, a Kelty Tioga. He tended to travel heavy, and he found externals easier not only to pack, but to carry and balance as well.
The sun had disappeared, and the landscape was growing darker by the minute. The change was actually perceptible to him, as if some god of nature was slowly turning down the dimmer switch. A full moon was rising into the black sky, lending a strange, dappled, almost spectral luminescence to the landscape, but he wasn’t going to rely on the moonlight: it had the tendency to camouflage things, hiding sinkholes and gullies, and he’d learned the hard way not to trust to chance. He reached for the flashlight clipped to his belt, plucked it off, and turned it on.
By now it was past nine. As he started off again, he did a mental calculation and determined his pace had slowed to something like half a mile an hour. Of course, he could keep going until he reached Desolation Lake and camp on the shore. But he wouldn’t get there until at least midnight, and by that time he’d be too whipped for an enjoyable climb the next day. No: there had to be a spot, some spot, in this godforsaken wilderness flat and bare enough for him to pitch his three-season tent and spread out his cookware. A hot meal, a soft sleeping bag, were beginning to seem like unattainable luxuries.
Not for the first time, as he made his way carefully forward, flashlight beam licking this way and that, he wished that he was back in the High Peaks region of the park. True, the trails there were often as wide as superhighways, and you were always tripping over other hikers, but at least you had a regular, goddamn forest around you with clearings and glades, not this alien riot of—
He stopped by a cluster of witch-hobble. He’d been so absorbed in his thoughts, and in his perusal of the treacherous ground ahead of him, that he hadn’t realized there was a strange smell in the air. He sniffed. It was faint, but discernible: sour, a little musky; not skunklike exactly but definitely unpleasant.
Palmer shone his light around, but there was nothing. He shrugged and continued.
The moon was rising higher in the sky, bathing Desolation Mountain in its lambent glow. Three miles left. Hell, maybe he should just try to bushwhack his way to the lake, after all. But then there was the trip back to consider, and he had to—
There it was again: that smell. It was stronger now, and fouler: rank and animal.
Once again he stopped and searched around with his flashlight, feeling a prickle of anxiety this time. Small saplings and a latticework of flattened, fallen tree limbs reflected the beam back at him. The bright circle of light made everything outside it pitch-black.