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a neutron bomb blast was really like. This was different. Camp Four was empty,
and Camp Four is never empty. John switched off the truck. No one moved.
Tucker's legs kept on blocking the rearview mirror. Liz waited for an
explanation. It was eerie, well rehearsed but not too interesting, sort of
like the opening of your better Steven Spielberg movies. The whole thing was a
joke, of course. "Rangers must have booted everybody out," she said.
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Jeff Long - Angels of Light
Tucker nimbly hopped out of the bed. "Weird," he pronounced and headed for the
pathway leading into camp.
"Let's see what's up," said John, and he and Liz followed Tucker past the
bulletin board tacked and taped full of scribbled messages. "For sale 1 pr.
unused EBs size 43.
$20. Site 16"; "Wanted, climbing partner. I lead 5.11. Joyce. #3"; "Final
descent.
Selling out, going to Hawaii. All gear at bargain rates. #22"; and a "Joe meet
Henry"
dated 7/15/75, an artifact of the remote past. The pieces of paper flapped
their butterfly wings as John and Liz breezed on without a glance.
In deeper, past the thirty-foot-high Columbia boulder spotted with chalky
handprints like petroglyphs and smudged with shoe rubber, John slowed down and
began to wonder. There were no people in here, either. But neither were there
many tents.
That was odd. A joke was one thing. Pulling up your tent stakes, unjointing
the poles, and packing out all your gear took the practical out of practical
joke. He doubted if even Bullseye could have orchestrated such a mass prank.
There were better things to do with one's time than break camp and then remake
it. Bullseye was eliminated from suspicion when they passed Kresinski's
campsite and saw no tent there, either.
Kresinski would never have played along with Bullseye. It was starting to look
as if people had actually left. More ominous still, the few tents that
remained were in unnerving disarray. The spines of some had relaxed and bowed,
leaving the tent walls limp. Some had collapsed altogether. In their short
absence the camp had been utterly depopulated.
"What's going on?" said Liz.
John lifted and dropped a hand. "New regulations?" he tried. During the reign
of
James Watt as secretary of the interior, the rangers had exercised a heavier
hand.
They'd threatened to muscle the climbers out time and again. Maybe they'd
finally carried through with it.
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"Impossible," Liz said. "Not in three days' time. I'd have known about it
before." She wasn't so sure, though. She was, after all, mistress to the Camp
Four monarchs, first
Matthew, now John. If a resettlement of Camp Four had really been in the
works, it would make a certain kind of sense not to have told her. She'd
always kept her professional life distinct from her love life, even despite
heavy pressure by Kresinski to "help me boys" when ten C4Bs pulled a fire
alarm at the grocery store and went on a cash-free shopping spree up the empty
aisles. Naturally they'd gotten caught. The case was finally dismissed, but
ever after that Kresinski seemed more fascinated by her refusal to "lose" the
park's investigation report than by her magical hair or cloistered heart. When
she finally realized that what Kreski was bent on seducing was really her
loyalty, Liz dumped him. She was still trying to figure out if the last straw
had been the assault on her morals or her pride.
"It's like the end of the world," said John.
"Or the beginning," Liz corrected him. This was how it should be. The forest
empty of
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Jeff Long - Angels of Light chattering, arrogant people. A fresh start on
clean ground. John cut off the trail with the odd caprice of a bird dog
searching for a nest. Liz followed, not entirely cynical. It could be fun
walking with him. He had a true gift for finding the most remarkable stories
imprinted in the earth, reading how many of what species had gone where.
Footprints, broken twigs, depressed moss it was all signatory. Man or animal,
they had a contract with the world, all you had to know was how to read it.
Beyond that, however, John could look at a sign invisible to everyone else and
tell you what its maker had been thinking. Rabbits, snakes, deer, tourists.
They all reduced to the same desires and whims when John read their tracks.
All were in need of the earth.
The emptiness was mystifying. The farther they hurried on, the more
inscrutable the camp's evidence became. It had the feel of those mysteries you
learn about in junior high school: the sudden departure of the Mayans, the
unexplained evacuation of
Mesa Verde, the disappearance of Atlantis. Compressed rectangles clearly
showed in the pine needles where tents had been uprooted. Pulley systems used
to dangle food sacks high off the ground where animals couldn't reach dangled
from tree limbs like emptied nooses.
"John," Tucker called over from a distant site, "your stuff's all gone. And my
tent, my gear, it's all gone." He sounded heartbroken.
"I don't know," John muttered to himself. Liz hung back, waiting for the
verdict. All she had to do was check in at headquarters to get the answer, but
it pleased her to watch John exercising his Apache arts. He was like this on
rock, too, masterful, confident, self-conscious, in his element. Maybe that
was why she hated to watch him climb, because one glance told her he belonged
up there, reading the granite with his fingertips. John paused by a fire pit,
apparently picked at random. Just like a Hollywood injun, he touched one knee
to the dirt and felt the ashes for a trace of heat. Still obedient to the
cliché, he let a palmful of ashes sift through his fingers, then stood up and
declared his findings. "Three days," he said.
Tucker came loping over from the far end of camp, all leg. Naturally he wasn't
out of breath. "It's like a ghost town."
"Whatever happened," said John, "we just missed it. They left the morning
after we split for Reno."
"I don't understand," Tucker let them know. He was a top-of-the-line man,
meaning the loss of his gear was going to cost him more dearly than anyone
else. Where a hundred-fifty-dollar tent might suffice for his neighbors,
Tucker believed in buying only the best. Now his beautiful cantaloupe-color
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dome tent that turned the sunlight into a soft orange glow on the inside was
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