to be venison. She closed it, straightened up, and gave the small room another sweep with her eyes. An impressive assortment of picks, shovels, ropes, lanterns, and other mining gear lined the cabin's rear wall, suspended on rusty nails. Apart from them, the cabin had no other amenities.
Jules lived a very simple life.
Frustrated, she took the few steps back to the door. No miner and no clues about where he might have gone. She had hoped to get some information out of the old man today, but that wasn't in the cards for her. For all she knew, Jules had gotten eaten himself, taken at night just the way she said he would be. Not much to show for all the time she spent getting up here. Hopefully Ben had tracked down Bill Hicks and learned whether or not Jules had gone missing. If not, they'd be shooting in the dark when they tried to come up with a plan for bagging this monster.
Cora hated not knowing what they were up against. She never took to books the way Ben did, but she liked knowing what she was hunting before she started hunting it. Even regular hunters took the time to learn what they could so they'd know what to expect. Those unlucky wolfers had probably learned a thing or two about wolves before deciding to go out and start collecting bounties. Stupid hunters could end up getting gored by an elk or torn apart by a bear, and those were just regular animals. Folk in her line of work were lucky to end up as a pile of scat after a bad hunt. She'd heard stories of turned hunters, those who went out looking for something and came back as the very thing they were looking for.
Such tales had always chilled her blood a little. Death was easy enough to accept, but she didn't want to lose her soul to some lucky monster and start going about as one of its children. One time, after a priest had given them the unpleasant job of killing a former hunter, she'd made Ben swear to put her to rest should that ever happen. He had gone all teary-eyed when she said it, but he'd made the promise.
Shaking her head, Cora turned to leave, then noticed something. A flat wooden board, like a table without legs, sat in the far corner of the room. From the look of things, Jules didn't seem the type to worry about formalities like a table. Intrigued, she walked over to examine it, then shook her head in amazement.
"Jules, you crazy bastard," she muttered.
It was a trapdoor. Cora gripped the rusty handle with both hands and heaved upward, but the door refused to budge. Determined, she kept pulling at it, her curses almost as loud as the shrieking hinges.
The door suddenly gave way, causing Cora to lose her footing. She fell backward, landing on her back with a loud thud. When her breath returned, it came with a string of profanity. As she got to her feet, she thought of how Ben would be laughing at her expense if he was there. First the crow, now the door. She stretched her back and grimaced, thankful that he was back in town.
Putting the thought aside, Cora returned to the task at hand. The door's hinges had been bent by her efforts, and it stood open at an odd angle. She ignored the damage, peering into the dark hole it had covered. A wooden ladder descended into the inky depths, vanishing after the first two rungs. Frustrated, she looked around the cabin. Jules had a few lanterns hanging from the back wall, but she didn't have any matches. He might have some stashed away somewhere, but finding them would take too long. Instead, she went to each of the cabin's four tiny windows and tore away the hides. Cold afternoon light streamed in. It did little to cheer up the old cabin, but as luck would have it, a beam of sunlight fell across the top of the ladder. She went back over to the hole and looked down.
Pick-marks and scratches in the stone suggested that old Jules had carved this tunnel out himself, or else he'd found it and built his cabin on top of it. Cora guessed it connected to the larger mine she'd seen on her way up here. She couldn't blame him for wanting to work for himself instead of for a big mining company.