“Sounds like a plan.”

They gathered up the remains of their lunch and shrugged into their backpacks. With Clive and his GPS leading the way, Nora followed. They waded across the creek and soon came to the junction where Sugarpine flowed in. They followed it upstream. Instead of a single defile, it seemed to Nora the entire creek was lined with rocky cliffs that a wagon would have to squeeze past. As it was, they had to cross the stream multiple times, and her boots ended up getting soaked. They found no meadow and no old woman’s profile, and finally reached a bottleneck beyond which no wagon could have gone.

They returned to Hackberry Creek and hiked up to the next checkpoint on their list—Poker Creek. This one looked much more promising. It went up a mile and then squeezed past a rocky defile like the one described in the journal, with a cliff on one side and the creek on the other.

“I’m getting a good feeling here,” Clive said, quickening his pace.

Nora felt a similar flush of excitement. The stream took a turn and they tramped across it and passed through a screen of dead trees to where the canyon opened up into a long, broad meadow. Steep ravines covered with scree and cliffs of gray basalt surrounded them, framed against a darkening sky.

“This seems a likely place!” said Clive enthusiastically, turning slowly around with his hands raised.

It was a damp meadow of about ten acres, mostly flat, surrounded by tall firs and slopes of broken scree. Both sides of the valley were lined with dark cliffs riddled with holes and cracks. Looming above were masses of dark clouds. Poker Creek gurgled its way through the middle, a deep, narrow gully almost hidden in grass. It was a bleak place.

Clive came over. “Now to find the old woman on one of these cliffs.”

Nora nodded toward the mountains. “Looks like weather coming.”

“Yeah. You’d better take the right side and I’ll take the left.”

Letting her pack slide from her shoulders, Nora walked slowly, scrutinizing the cliffs on her right, squinting, looking at every rock formation from multiple angles. Once in a while she saw something that looked more or less like a face but on further scrutiny just didn’t seem striking enough to qualify as an old woman. At the far end of the valley, where the stream came out from a stand of trees, she met up with Benton.

He shook his head. “Let’s switch sides and go back.”

When they met again at the base of the meadow, they still had seen nothing.

Nora frowned. “Do you think it might have fallen off, like the one in New Hampshire?”

“Anything’s possible. After all, it’s been a hundred and seventy-five years.” The disappointment in his face was plain.

The wind was picking up, flattening the grass.

“I think it’s more likely this isn’t the place,” he continued. “We’d better move on to Dollar Fork.”

She felt a drop of moisture, and then another. Up the canyon, dark shafts of rain rapidly approached.

“Looks like we’re in for it,” said Nora, pulling a waterproof shell out of her pack and putting it on. Clive did likewise.

The storm hit with a blast of cold wind and a torrent of rain that swept over the meadow in sheets and obscured the peaks around them.

“It’s three thirty,” said Nora. “We can do Dollar Fork tomorrow.”

“Sure you don’t want to check it out now?” Clive’s question was almost drowned out by a sudden rumble of thunder.

“I don’t know. Do you?”

“Um…I guess not. I’ve seen what lightning can do up here. Like that big spruce down the trail, trunk split right to the ground.” He tugged the waterproof plastic tighter. “Me for a steaming cup of Maggie’s coffee.”

Another peal of thunder sounded before Nora could reply. Instead, she just nodded her agreement.

By the time they got back to camp, the rain was turning into sleet and the temperature had dropped into the low forties. Nora and Clive took refuge in the dining area, sheltered under tarps strung between trees. They stripped off their dripping rain gear and hung it on branches.

“Come and get some grub before it’s all gone,” said Maggie, hovering over a simmering kettle of stew. “Better warm your butts by the fire. You look like drowned rats.” A Dutch oven smelling of freshly baked bread stood to one side. Salazar, Peel, Wiggett, Adelsky, and Burleson were sitting around the fire circle, sipping coffee.

“Sorry we didn’t wait,” Salazar said.

“I’m not,” said Adelsky. “When Maggie rings the dinner bell, I know to come running.”

Nora and Clive helped themselves to dinner and took their places by the fire.

“Did you find it?” Burleson asked.

Clive shook his head. “Tomorrow. For sure, tomorrow.”

Maggie joined them. “Your young man here pestered me for another story. I was just about to tell them about the legend of the two prospectors. Happened back in 1872. Maybe 1873. Maybe you know it: one of them was blind in one eye, and the other had a hook for a hand.”

She proceeded to tell a hair-raising story about a pair of lifelong friends who found a vein of gold in the mountains, got greedy, and one stormy night—a night like this one—they laid traps for each other, managing to both die in the process. With relish, Maggie added lots of graphic details, especially about the man with the hook. It was amusing to watch Adelsky’s reaction: he was the one who’d asked for a ghost story, but by the time it was over he appeared a little green about the gills.

Later, Nora crawled into her tent, cold and wet, but she had trouble falling asleep. Thoughts of Clive—his stubborn yet appealing ways, his boyish enthusiasm—came unbidden to her mind. She realized she was noticing him more than perhaps she should, and she resolved to keep things strictly professional. In a small, isolated group like this, any sort of relationship could destroy the team’s equilibrium, and with this thought she drifted off to sleep.

She was awakened in the middle of the night—suddenly—by a strange rumbling, like the scurrying of countless giant rats down a mountain slope. She opened the entrance to her tent and glanced around, but it was pitch-black and the sound was already dying away. Nobody else seemed to take any notice.

The sleet pounded down the rest of the night.

15

May 6

WHEN NORA ROSE at dawn, she could see her breath inside the tent. A light sleet was still tap-tapping on the waterproofed nylon.

She dragged herself out into the icy air and put on her clothes. At the fire, Maggie was cooking a breakfast of bacon and eggs and corn bread, her usually cheerful face a damp mask of annoyance. Burleson was sitting on a log, nursing a cup of coffee, speaking in low tones to Jack Peel about the horses. Clive had emerged from his tent in a brand-new paisley shirt, this one purple, orange, and pink.

“Help yourself to coffee,” said Maggie, gesturing toward a pot standing on a rock beside the fire. “You look like you could use it.”

“I heard something strange late last night. A low rumbling, like a herd of tiny elephants coming our way.”

“That was just a rockfall. Tumbling boulders. It’s not uncommon in the spring. Nothing to worry about—unless one lands on your tent, of course.”