the better to feel what lay beneath our feet. Treads could mean the difference between stepping on a branch and bending it, or breaking it entirely. For now we also wore orange vests, and baseball caps with reflective strips. We didn’t want some overenthusiastic hunter to mistake us for deer, or raise the suspicions of a warden if we encountered one. Thirty minutes in we heard gunshots to the south, but otherwise we might have been entirely alone in the woods.
The going was relatively easy for the first couple of hours, but then the terrain began to change. There were more ridges to climb, and I could feel the strain in the backs of my legs. Shortly after midday we startled an adolescent buck from a copse of alder, his antlers little more than extended buds, and later there was a flash of brown and white to our left as a doe moved quickly through the trees. She spotted us, seemed to pause in confusion, and changed direction, cutting away from us until we lost sight of her. We noticed the trace of bigger bucks, and there were places where the stink of deer urine was strong enough to make one gag, but those were the only large animals we saw.
After three hours, we stopped and made coffee. Despite the cold, I was sweating under my jacket, and I was grateful for the rest. Louis dropped beside me.
‘How you doing, city boy?’ I said.
‘Yeah, like you Grizzly Adams,’ he replied. ‘How much farther?’
‘Two hours, I reckon, if we keep making this kind of progress.’
‘Damn.’ He pointed at the sky. There were clouds gathering. ‘Doesn’t look good.’
‘No, it doesn’t.’
Jackie finished brewing the coffee and served it up. He gave his cup to Liat, and drank his own by pouring it from the pot into a small thermos. He separated himself from the rest of us, and stood on a small ridge looking back in the direction from which we had come. I followed him up there. He didn’t look happy.
‘You okay?’ I asked.
‘Rattled, that’s all,’ he said.
‘By what we’re doing?’
‘And where we’re going.’
‘In and out, Jackie. We’re not planning on settling there.’
‘I guess.’ He swished the coffee around in his mouth, and spat. ‘And there’s the doe we saw.’
‘What about it?’
‘Something spooked it, and it wasn’t us.’
I stared out at the forest. This wasn’t first growth, and so the foliage was still thick.
‘Could have been a hunter,’ I said. ‘Even a bobcat or a lynx.’
‘Like I said, maybe I’m just rattled.’
‘We could hold back, see if anyone comes,’ I said, ‘but there’s rain on the way, and whatever hope we have of finding that plane depends on good light. And we don’t want to be stuck out here for a night.’
Jackie shivered. ‘I hear that. Come dark, I want to be in a bar with a drink in my hand, and that fort far behind me.’
We returned to the others. Liat approached me. I couldn’t have mistaken the questioning look on her face, but she still mouthed the words, just to be sure: What is it?
‘Jackie was concerned that something might have spooked the doe we saw earlier,’ I answered, loud enough for Angel and Louis to hear. ‘Something, or someone, following behind us.’
She extended her hand. Another question: What do we do?
‘It could be nothing, so we keep going. If there is someone following, we’ll find out who it is soon enough.’
Jackie poured the rest of the coffee into his thermos, packed away his little Primus stove, and we moved off, but there was a palpable change in our mood. I found myself checking behind me as we walked, and Jackie and I would pause on the higher ridges, seeking movement on the lower ground.
But we saw no one, and at last we came to the fort.
49
My first thought was that Fort Mordant was less the thing itself than the memory of it made manifest. The forest had done its best to blur and disguise its lines as though to discourage closer examination: its walls were covered in poison ivy, like waterfalls of green tumbling over precipices, and hemlock and common juniper had taken advantage of storm damage to mature trees by using them as nurseries. Cairns of stones, perhaps remnants of the original clearance of the land for the fort’s construction, had become shadowed by moss, lending them the aspect of funeral markers. Somewhere nearby must have been the actual graves of the fort’s original occupants, but I suspected