“Look,” Weezy cal ed back, flashing her beam along the sand. “Tire tracks. And recent too.”
Jack saw what she meant. Some of the deeper sand stirred up by the tires was stil dark and damp. The cars or pickups or whatever they were had to
have come through within the hour.
At first the Barrens had been dark and silent, the overhanging pine branches blotting out al but a few rays of moonlight. But neither lasted.
The silence was the first to go.
They were passing the trapper’s spong, and Jack was wondering if he’d reset the traps, when he began to hear a faint, low-pitched thrumming noise
that grew steadily louder as they rode. This graduated to the unmistakable
And then Jack began to catch flashes of bright light through the upper branches. He couldn’t imagine where they could be coming from until he realized
the copters were using their searchlights to light up the ground.
Without warning, Weezy veered to the side and hopped off her bike. She was leaning it against a tree when Jack pul ed up beside her.
“Why’re we stopping?” he said, raising his voice over the racket.
Weezy motioned her brother to get off his bike. “We should walk from here.”
“Bikes are faster,” Eddie said.
“And more easily noticed. We don’t want to be seen.”
Eddie laughed. “Why not?”
“Because then we’l be chased home.”
Jack could make out Eddie’s face in the light through the branches. He looked insulted.
“No way! It’s a free country. We can watch if we want.”
Weezy rol ed her eyes. “They don’t want
“That’s stupidacious. And besides, how do you know?”
Jack thought the answer was pretty obvious, but he let Weezy tel her brother. She stepped closer and got in his face.
“Can you think of any other reason why they’d go to al this trouble at night when it would be so much easier during the day?” When Eddie didn’t answer,
Weezy looked at Jack, then back at Eddie. “So, can we al start walking?”
“Let’s go,” Jack said. “We’re wasting time.”
He took the lead now. With the lights ahead as a beacon, they no longer needed flashlights or Weezy’s keen sense of direction. He kept to the side of
the firebreak until he noticed a deer trail angling toward al the activity. He took it.
This path was much narrower … branches scraped against him as he passed. He was glad he’d worn ful - length jeans instead of cutoffs, but wished
he’d picked out a rugby shirt instead of this T.
As the three of them neared the site, the noise of the copters grew even louder. Ahead and above they looked invisible—black fuselages against a
black sky—with their searchlights seeming to come out of nowhere.
But another sound gradual y joined the mix—the throaty, up-and-down roar of diesel engines.
Construction equipment.
As they closed in on the mound area, Jack lowered to a crouch, then turned and motioned Weezy and Eddie to do the same. When he reached a break
in the trees he came to a sudden stop. Weezy bumped him from behind. He heard her gasp as she saw what he saw.
Just a hundred feet away, the burned-out area of the mound was ablaze with light, il uminating the dozen or so men walking back and forth among the
charred pine trunks. And among those trunks, a backhoe furiously dug up the sand.
He felt Weezy grip both his shoulders and squeeze—hard.
“Our mound!” she said softly, leaning over him, so close he could feel her breath on his ear. “They’re tearing up our mound!”
Not our mound anymore, Jack thought. Pretty soon it wouldn’t even
He watched the backhoe systematical y tearing up the ground, its yel ow arm swinging up and down, ramming its bucket into the mound, pul ing out a
yard of sand, then dumping it to the side before backing up for another go. If a tree had grown too close, the
