Chasing a Blond Moon(159)

In a pool by his hide he saw four steelhead on a gravel bed. A chrome female flashed in the low light as she finned and shook to clean the area in preparation for putting out her eggs while the three males bumped and chased each other behind her, jockeying for position.

A gray jay came down to the river to drink and looked at him. Gray jays lived in Canada, came down to the U.P. for winters, which in Service’s opinion, put their intelligence in question.

Mecosta made contact just before dark. “All subjects are out of the grotto,” Service heard in his earpiece. “Going back to camp. Takes them about twenty minutes to get to the trail, thirty minutes up to the cabin, load time if they’re bringing more stuff, fifty minutes to be back in the grotto.”

Service radioed, “New arrivals at the cabin?”

“Don’t know. Santinaw is with me.”

This was good. They didn’t need anybody without a radio wandering around until they knew what they were dealing with.

“Santinaw says there’s another entrance to the grotto,” Mecosta said.

“Somebody ought to get inside while they can.”

Another entrance? “Where are you?”

“On top.”

“I’m coming up.”

“No elevator,” Jake said. “Just climb up where you are and Santinaw and I will find you.”

Service looked up at the rocks above, figured it was between one hundred fifty and two hundred feet. While he had light he had visually marked several routes, but in darkness it would not be an easy climb and there was a lot of loose rock and stone to contend with all the way. “I’m climbing,” Service said.

It took an hour to make the climb, with only a few times where he had to backtrack for safer footing. It was steep but he stayed at it, and when he finally crawled over the top he was drenched in sweat. He sat on the edge and took a drink of water.

“You have the grace of a turtle,” Santinaw whispered from the dark. “We could hear you coming for thirty minutes.”

“Three minutes for me,” Jake Mecosta said.

Santinaw chuckled. “Don’t understand how you two could catch anything.”

Service was tired and beginning to chill. “While we’re bullshitting, nobody is in the grotto and nobody is covering their route. We have people down there. Let’s move.”

The entrance was nearly two hundred feet back from the rim, beside some large oaks and between two boulders. Service used his penlight to look into the hole. “This looks like an old copper pit,” he said.

Santinaw said, “From those who came before the people.”

Service didn’t say anything. To every Native American, their own tribe was “the people” and other tribes something less. The old copper pits had been dug out by Indians who lived in the area thirty-five hundred years ago, where they found surface copper, dug around it, building fires to break off the metal. Copper from the Great Lakes had been traded all over the continent. He had never seen such a pit east of the Keeweenaw, but there were patches of copper here and there in the central U.P. and this was not a total surprise.

“Why didn’t you say something about this earlier?” he asked Santinaw.

“If you get to be my age, you’ll understand.”

“Have you ever been down this?”

“I don’t think so,” Santinaw said. “It’s hard to remember.”

“But it goes down to the grotto?”

“It will or it won’t.”

“Goddammit, old man.”

“I’m old, the earth is older. Things move around. Perhaps it went all the way once, maybe it still does.”

Service heard an urgent whisper in his earpiece. “Hey, up there, we have traffic down here.” It was McCants.

Service answered with two clicks. “They’re back,” he told Mecosta.

“I’ll go down with you,” the other officer said.

“No, somebody has to sit their trail, monitor traffic.”

Service toggled his 800. “Give me a count, how many visitors.” He got back five clicks, evenly spaced.

“Five,” he told Mecosta. “Others will come.”

Service radioed the captain. “Bird down?”

“Five straight up.”

Five? What the hell had taken them so long?

Service sat and put his feet in the hole, shone his light down into the darkness, and saw rocks jutting out. “The angle doesn’t look too bad,” he said, hoping it would stay that way.

“The earth moves,” Santinaw reminded him.

The tunnel was a tight squeeze in some places, wider in others. Generally he could make steady progress downward. At one point he took out his compass, but the needle refused to settle. There was iron ore in the rock as well. He climbed down with his face against the wall and did not lift one foot until the other one had purchase. He checked his watch periodically and a minute or so after the forty-minute mark, he saw light below him. Faint, but definitely light. He could feel air coming up the shaft. The light was reflected against a boulder at the base of the hole right under him, maybe five feet down. He carefully lowered himself to the bottom and belly-crawled forward toward the light source. He was moving horizontally now and there was some rubble on the floor, but the sides of the tunnel were smooth; he felt them and guessed it was an old mineshaft. He hoped it was through hard firm bedrock, not soft and porous limestone. At the end of the horizontal shaft there was a large boulder blocking the exit and lights moved and bounced beyond his vision, spilling over the top: flashlights. He undid his pack, took a swig of his water, closed the pack up again. He got to his knees and stood in a crouch. Training: never try to see it all at once from concealment. He would make minor adjustments, try to see what was ahead of him in quadrants, assemble the whole picture in his brain.