Alan E. Nourse - The Fourth Horseman Read online

  Pamela Tate found the first one lying on the dusty trail just below the saddle leading up into Nada Lake. It was a tiny, helpless little thing, on its back in the dirt—a golden-sided ground squirrel, seldom seen in these northern Washington State latitudes. It lay very still, with no sign of life whatever.

  Instinctively Pam reached down and touched it, turned it over on its soft tummy. It was a stupid thing to do, she knew that, but she couldn't stop herself, the poor sad creature. Then she saw it wasn't quite dead. Painfully it crept forward in the dust several inches before collapsing, a tiny streak of blood trailing from its mouth. This time when it stopped it didn't move again.

  After a moment Pam nudged it off the trail into the brush with the edge of her boot. Caught by a hawk, she thought, and then dropped for something bigger. Hawks will do that sometimes. She adjusted her pack and started on up the trail toward the saddle, momentarily hating hawks and all their kind. For all her wilderness experience, she had never fully made peace with the cold-eyed law of kill and be killed that prevailed in these rugged mountains. Ground squirrels ate nuts and seeds and hurt nothing at all while hawks tore and rended helpless flesh and blood and bone—and where was the justice to that? There wasn't any justice, no justice at all.

  It was only 7:30 in the morning, but the trail was steep and getting steeper, and the sun was already hot. Pam felt sweat trickling down her shirt and standing out in beads on her forehead. She was a small woman, barely five foot two, with light

  bones and a deceptively delicate, fragile-looking structure. In truth Pam Tate, for all her dainty appearance, was solid muscle. She carried the forty-pound pack on her back like a rucksack, and after four steep uphill miles this morning her step was still springy. She was quick as well as strong, and sure-footed as a mountain goat, in the peak of physical condition. She had to be, to patrol this great complex of high mountain trails through the Enchantment Lakes Wilderness Area day after day on foot, carrying her food and shelter on her back—it built muscles women weren't supposed to have. She had once threatened to throw Frank out of bed—all six feet four and 250 pounds of him. He'd looked at her and grinned, lying there like a lump, challenging her to try. She didn't, of course, he was far too nice in bed—but she knew damned well she could do it anytime she chose.

  In the shade of the saddle she stopped for a minute, pulled off her floppy green Forest Service hat and fanned herself with it. Her hair was red-brown and straight, cut just short of the thin gold earrings in her ears, her face even, almost plain, except for a tipped-up nose and very level, calm gray eyes. Not far now, she thought, to her first rest stop. This particular route up into the seven-thousand-foot Enchantment Basin went in three stages: the climb up a million steep switchbacks from the Icicle River far below, finally reaching Nada Lake; a second climb up a rocky trail leading high above Nada to the Snow Lakes, eight difficult miles in; and the final dismal scramble up the Snow Lake Wall, more goat path than trail, into the fantastic wonderland that lay at the top.

  Some got no farther than Nada, a long, narrow sapphire-blue lake lying deep and cold in a cut between towering forested crags on either side. Nada itself was sublimely beautiful, with a dozen campsites set in forested areas well above the shoreline. Other hikers went on to the Snow Lakes the first day, to stop overnight before assaulting the Wall. The rugged ones made the whole twenty miles to the top in one day. But Pam had other things to do besides hiking. Three camps along Nada were breaking up as she arrived, and she stopped by each one briefly, checking automatically for discarded trash, garbage thrown in the lake, unburied waste, illegal fires. One party of eight teenagers were boisterous but harmless enough; the other two camps were single couples minding their own business and desiring others to mind theirs, typical visitors to the Enchantments who came to these parts for solitude, not company. All (he campers queried her about recent weather conditions "on top'' and she answered them as well as she could: a little rain midaftemoons, morning and evening sun, warm in daytime but chilly to downright cold at night. Fishing? She didn't fish, but she'd seen lots of nice trout caught, mostly with small gray or black flies.

  She was hiking along the trail around Nada toward her usual rest stop when she saw the second ground squirrel. Only sharp eyes could have picked this one up, lying in some bracken at the edge of the trail. It was quite dead, the blood around its nose caked and dusty. Damned busy hawk, she thought as she peered down at it. Too busy. This time she found a stick and pushed the creature deeper into the brush, well away from the trail. Then she pulled a small pad of paper from her blouse pocket and scribbled a note with the date before she went on.

  Her rest stop was at a place just a hundred yards before the trail broke away from the forest around Nada and started up the sharp, rocky trail across an ancient rockslide, climbing up toward the Snows. It was a magic glen of ancient towering cedars, deeply shaded and cool. A tiny stream tumbled down from the heights here to empty into the lake a dozen yards away. Pam dropped her pack to the ground, dipped water with her little tin cup and drank deeply. There was a refreshing downdraft from the cliffs above; flies and mosquitoes seldom came here. She flopped down near the creek with her back to a huge log, munched a bite or two of chocolate and leaned back, relaxing totally.

  She thought of the ground squirrels—Wave to tell Frank—and that turned her thoughts to Frank, as they so often did these days. A sweet guy, Frank, a really sweet, gentle, lovable man. A whole man in every sense of the word—if only he wouldn't push her so hard, right now. They'd met the first week in June when she'd just arrived at the Wenatchee station fora summer's work on the fire crew. Something had happened swiftly between them—first fondness, then affection, then, as natural as eating, love and lovemaking. Within two weeks they were living together in the second-story apartment she had found, spending every nonworking hour together. She had had the strong impression, at first, that Frank was decidedly marriage-shy, and that was fine with her. Yet it was Frank who drove her to grab this wilderness patrol job when it came open, knowing it would take her away three to four days a week by herself, alone to think and not be pressed. Loving and living with a man was one thing, but engagement and marriage now? So soon? She wasn't ready for that.

  Frank had pressed harder, lovingly and inarguably insistent. At least an engagement, he had demanded, and finally she had agreed—but not a formal engagement with notices in the papers and rings and all the ties that bind. Just a pledge between the two of them. Her fingers went to the tiny star-sapphire pendant on a white-gold chain around her neck. Frank's alternative to an engagement ring, and she thought once again, sleepily, what a silly fool she was making of herself. Any woman in her right mind would grab a guy like that and never let go.

  For a few moments she dozed, maybe dreamed a little. Then she was vaguely aware of someone coming up the trail from the direction she had come. A small solitary figure. Just a kid out hiking was her first thought—but then she looked again.

  It was a boy, hardly eight or nine years old, his dirty blond hair matted and snarled down to his shoulders, half hiding his face. He was filthy, his face and arms and legs caked with grime, his clothing little more than rancid brown rags hanging around his skinny chest and waist. He was totally barefoot and carried a thick walking stick with a tattered bandana bag tied at the top. As he came near, Pam caught a wave of rank animal odor so overpowering it made her wince.

  The boy saw the creek and threw himself to the ground, sinking his face in the water. He drank and drank, with frantic grunting sounds. Finally he stood back up, brushed his mouth with his dirty hand, spit into the creek and only then looked straight at Pam.

  His face was vi
le—the most evil, hateful human face she had ever seen. A little boy's face, but corrupted, the eyes mockingly cruel. A face straight out of hell. Then, before she could get her breath, he moved past her, trudging on up the trail toward the rockslide.

  For a moment she sat transfixed, fighting down nausea.

  Then, as the boy disappeared beyond the trees, she jumped to her feet. The kid was barefoot—and going out on those hot, sharp rocks— She let out a shout and charged up the trail after him, reached the bend, stared up the straight rocky trail.

  The trail was empty. It couldn't be, there was no place he could have gone, but no one was in sight. Not a soul. Nothing. She turned back to her pack, rubbing her forehead. She must have dreamed him. She must have gone completely out for a couple of minutes and dreamed him. Sure she'd seen some weird people on the trail, but nobody like that before. Yek! She went to pick up her pack again, and then saw the third dead ground squirrel lying near the creek a few inches from where her leg had been resting.

  The trail up to the Snow Lakes always seemed longer and harder than it really was, a sharp, climbing trail up across the face of a steep rockslide, then a long switchback climbing still higher, totally without shade and baking hot in the sun, shoulder-high bushes in places filled with mosquitoes and biting black flies. A single tiny creek trickling down the rocks offered a pause for a cold drink, then on up through rock outcroppings until she reached the long, cool forested corridor at the top that led down to the Snows. Lower Snow lay off to the left, shaded and shallow; Upper Snow to the right, a large lake with many bays, and with cliffs rising straight upward a thousand feet to the Enchantment Basin to the north and west.

  She reached the Snows by 10:00 a.m. and found her favorite campsite, on a trail through the rocks on the north side, shielded from the rest of the lake by a high rocky point. There was work to do, so she pitched her tent and stored her pack inside without any loss of time. First she made the mile-long trek down the south side of the lake, past all the campsites, carrying just a small rucksack, pausing to talk to this or that camper, making a mental census of how many had gone up into the basin that morning. A dozen people were around the lake, some pleasant and talkative, some more silent, uncommunicative. Returning by noon, she fired up her little stove, made a cup of tea and munched on salami and cheese for lunch. Then she went back along the trail to the section that needed work. There was a place where a creek meandered down from the mountain to the south, spreading out into a swampy area, now just boggy because of the dry weather but filled with devil's club and wild blackberry all the same, a knee-deep sump in wetter weather. She found where the trail crew had been working with chain saws a week before, dropping five-inch lodgepole pines and bucking them into eight-foot lengths to be used to build a log trail over the swamp. Pam found her own cache of tools stored nearby: a huge machete, a Pulaski with its sharp adz blade on one side and ax on the other, with a file for sharpening it, a hammer and a big bag of six-inch galvanized spikes. She set to work, chopping out roots with the Pulaski, laying short logs for supports, splitting out support stays and driving them into the mud with a heavy rock she found, then setting in the eight-foot lengths of lodgepole and fixing them together with toenailed spikes and anchoring them to the supports with more spikes. It was hot work and slow; by 6:30 p.m. she only had sixteen feet of log trail in place, still not properly secured all the way around, but enough for use. She stored her tools away again and headed back to her camp, ready to quit for the day.

  A headache had come on late in the afternoon, and her right wrist and left ankle were itching inexplicably, a fact that only reached her consciousness when she had scratched at them for half an hour. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to drive off the headache, but it persisted, to her disgust—she never had headaches. Back at camp, secluded from view of the rest of the lake, she stripped naked and plunged into a deep blue pool by the rock, felt the icy water bite her scalp and underarms and breasts and groin. God it was cold! but good, good to get the dirt and sweat off. She used a tiny turkish towel to dry off, then lay naked on the rock to catch the dying sun's warmth, hoping to shake off the headache—but it didn't go away.

  She was dressed in her woollies for the night, starting up her little gas stove to cook macaroni and cheese for dinner when she saw the smoke billowing up from the far side of the lake. Open campfire. The bastards, she thought, they just won't read signs, will they? Since the dip in the lake her chest felt tight and she was coughing repeatedly, as though something in her chest needed to come up but wouldn't. She pulled on her outer clothes, stuck her citation book in her pocket and started off toward the illegal fire, still coughing.

  It was halfway around the lake, an enormous crowd of campers, twenty that she could count and who could guess how many more? Their tents were down on the very lakeshore, and a huge wood fire was blazing on a rock. Half a dozen people stood around the fire, including a large, beefy man with a .38 Special pistol on a belt around his waist. He turned to confront her as she walked into the campfire circle.

  "What are you planning to shoot?" she asked, pointing to the pistol.

  "Rabbits," the man said.

  "There aren't any rabbits this high," Pam said. "And the squirrels, ground squirrels and marmots are all protected."

  "So I'll shoot chipmunks," the man said.

  "That's pretty big game for a man." Pam looked at the blaze. "Quite a fire you've got there."

  "Say, who the hell are you?"

  "Forest Service. Wilderness Patrol," Pam said.

  "So why don't you piss off, lady? We don't need you around here."

  "You've got an illegal fire going here."

  "What do you mean, illegal fire?"

  The headache was pounding behind her eyes. "I mean there's a fire closure in this area," she said irritably. "These woods are tinder-dry, they can go off like dynamite with one little spark. Fires were closed out a month ago; there's a clear notice at every trailhead and dozens more tacked up all over the place, including that tree over there: no fires except camp stoves."

  The man laughed and looked at his companions. "So the girlie is going to make us put out our fire. How about that, guys?"

  Suddenly Pam was tired of all this. She stepped up very close to the big man with the pistol, looking up into his face. For a moment she was wracked with coughing, but fumbled her citation book out of her pocket. "Mister, I don't care what you do with your fire," she said when her voice came back. "What's your name?"

  "Jack B. Nimble. What's yours?"

  "Okay." She glanced at a pack near the fire with a stenciled name and address on it. "That says Robert B. Comstock, 314 Sand Way, Canon City, Colorado. That's good enough for me; let Mr. Comstock carry the load." She was writing in hercita-tion book. "You have an illegal fire, Mr. Comstock or whoever you are. That's point number one. You have at least twenty people in this one camp, where the legal limit is eight to one campsite. That's point number two. You've got a camp directly on the shore of the lake, when the Wilderness Law at the trailhead specifies one hundred feet back at a minimum. That's point number three. Now you can take your three citations and pay the judge a nice fat fine for each one, or you can break up this cozy mess and set up legal camps. Take your choice. I don't care what you do—but I'll be checking."

  She ripped off a copy of the triple citation and shoved it into the man's paw. Then she turned and started back up the trail toward her campsite, coughing and coughing as she went. Behind her there was a flurry of activity; she heard the big man rumble, "For Christ sake, get that fire out and strike those tents. Goddam meddling bastards ..." Pam went on, scratching her wrist and ankle almost raw as she went. They'd probably trim up their camp, at least halfway, she reflected. They usually did. But aside from that, she was appalled at herself. Seldom if ever was she so imperative and abrupt about a violation. The whole idea had always been voluntary compliance, not the force of law. If it hadn't been for this damned headache, she would have handled it far more s
moothly. . . .

  Back at camp she cooked up dinner, then found she had no appetite for it. She just didn't feel good. She really just wanted to get into bed and sleep forever, but the force of habit was strong. First she brought out the small notebook from her pack, pulled out the notes from her breast pocket, propped up her flashlight and made her day's log entry in her small, cramped handwriting. The three dead ground squirrels, the strange dirty boy at Nada Lake, the trail-mending work, the unpleasant crowd she had just encountered around the lake. Finally, inexplicably exhausted and still coughing every few moments, she took a couple of ampicillin caps, her cure-all for everything, crawled into her sleeping bag still dogged by her headache, and dreamed nightmares.

  To her amazement, she didn't wake up until after eight the next morning—more than three hours late, for her. Her head still throbbed and her cough seemed deeper as she crawled out of the tent, stiff and sore. Breakfast was out of the question, the very thought turned her stomach, and she had to get going, there was a lot to do today when she got up to the top. Something nagged at her subliminally as she struck her tent and stuffed her pack—her armpits and groin were aching fiercely. Flu? In August? Good God. That's all I need right now. She took two more ampicillin, struggled into her pack and started around the lake to the beginning of the climb.

  The Comstock party, broken up and moved back from the lake, was just stirring as she went past; three or four of them glared at her. At the far end of the lake she stopped at the feeder creek for water, suddenly unbearably thirsty. From the place where it crossed the creek the trail led back, rising and falling, through a deeply wooded canyon floor, then abruptly started up, and up, and up. Her usual time to the top in the cool of early morning was about an hour, but starting up now after nine, she knew she wouldn't make it that fast. The mist was already off the lake and a hot sun was baking down—Great on those rocks up higher. To top it off, the headache and the coughing slowed her down. Every time her pulse topped a hundred her head started pounding until she tripped or lurched or walked into a tree. Each coughing spell made her stop for a minute to get her wind, so she couldn't set a pace. She pushed doggedly on, finally giving up on pace and stopping to rest for five minutes out of every fifteen as other hikers came up behind her and passed her.