Raven Cursed

down the mountain.

“Guarantee.” I looked at my watch. I had missed church. Dang it.

CHAPTER EIGHT You Chasing the Big Doggies?

I drove away, pulling up the GIS maps and Google and Yahoo! and MSR Maps, which offered aerial views that could be overlaid with or exchanged for street maps. I found an unnamed access road that might take me partway down, and hoped the MOC’s vehicles were as good off-road as they were on. And hoped the extra weight of the armor wouldn’t be a hindrance to getting back out. I made it halfway down the gorge, finding a place to execute a tight three-point turn that was more like a ten-point turn, the wheels threatening to slide off the narrow trail and carry me all the way down. I parked facing back up the hill, drank a liter of water, added two more to my pack, and took off, down to the bottom, hoping to end up at the convergence of another creek. It was a harrowing descent, and I worked up a sweat.

The Smoky Mountains are rain forest, creating their own mini-climates at different elevations and disrupting the natural west-to-east trade winds. The temperatures dropped the lower I went, and the air grew progressively more damp. The morning sun disappeared, an afternoon angle needed to warm the west-facing mountain wall. A mist grew around me, wispy and thin in long vertical strips, the mist for which the Smoky Mountains had been named. It stuck to my skin and clothes, cold and clammy. Small rills and runnels formed and merged, splashing down vertical rock faces and cutting into the mountain floor. My sweat chilled and my breath was loud in my ears, my palms growing raw from roots and trees, sliding across bark and rock that decelerated my descent.

Though surely the land had been surveyed, it looked as though no one had been here since the deforestation in the 1920s. I found no human trails, but lots of rabbit sign, deer scat and tracks, and ample bear sign: dead trees clawed for grubs, a honeybee nest high in a tree showing fresh claw marks and bark damage where the bear had climbed. And once I saw what looked like mountain lion sign, old scat, dried and strewn. Beast held me still, a paw on my mind, studying the scat with all her senses. My mouth opened and upper lip pulled back, sucking the scent in through nose and mouth, but my mostly human scenting ability left Beast nearly head- blind. She looked up the mountain, and spotted a tree with vertical claw markings from the ground up to about two feet. Mountain lion? I thought at her.

Finally she thought at me, uncertain, Bobcat. Male.

When? I asked.

Last snow time. Maybe.

Last year. Winter. I stood still, bringing in the scents of the place, smelling rushing water rising on the breeze, deer, bear, rabbit, opossum and raccoon, numerous birds, the dry reek of snake musk, polecat, and skunk. No large cats. I moved on down the mountain, Beast alert and curious. Hunting dead-fish-smell green thing? she asked.

I laughed, the only human sound in the gorge. “Yes.”

Kill and eat it?

“No. Definitely not. It’s hunting the werewolves.”

Beast hissed, deep in my mind. Kill and leave wolves to rot. Killers of winter food. Thieves of meat. Wasters of meat. There were few more horrible insults from Beast than wasters of meat. She said nothing else, but I appreciated her focus. She often saw and smelled things that I missed or ignored because I didn’t know what they meant. Like the scat and the claw marks.

I reached bottom an hour after I left the sheriff, and stopped on the edge on the creek, straddling a downed tree. The movement of water was quiet here, where I sat on the bank in the sun, my feet shuffled beneath last fall’s leaves, but I could hear the roar of water just ahead, where I thought the confluence should be, and from upstream, where it obviously took a drop. Hurricane Ivanna was sweeping slowly up the Mississippi River basin and dumping torrents of water to our west. Projections had it turning east, right for us, with forecasts of four to six inches of rain over two days. Soon this creek would be a raging torrent.

Lunch was protein bars, nuts, three brownies, and two bananas. It left me feeling full but not satisfied. I stored the paper and plastic, and tossed the peels high on the bank, knowing some veggie-loving animal would eat them despite the bitter taste. The pack much lighter, I headed downstream, watching the banks for grindy-sign. The sound of water on stone grew and the air was wetter with mist.

I spotted the three vertical claw marks just before I got to the confluence. They were slashed into solid granite, the fresh cuts still bright in the sun. I placed my fingers into the slash marks, finding the stone dry despite the heavy mist. I had just missed the grindy. “Dang,” I whispered. Below the slash marks were three-toed prints with claw marks deep in the soil.

I pushed on another twenty yards and stopped in the vapor, above the merging of two creeks. It wasn’t a peaceful marriage, more like a shotgun wedding, with noise and complaints roaring. The water formed a violent eddy, the water of the two currents hitting and rising in a foamy wall a foot high. The water churned so hard it flowed upstream for thirty feet in one place, a midsized beaver-gnawed log caught, swirling, and making no headway downstream. Other logs were trapped in rocks, held firm by the push of the water, making a sieve that collected and held everything solid carried by the water. Tires, two-by-fours, a torn mattress, buckets and paint cans, clothing, whole trees with leaves and roots were caught in the maelstrom.

The body of a deer was trapped on the pile farthest upstream, only the haunches and upper rear legs visible, flies buzzing, even in the wet mist. Downstream, the strainers were even worse, the bottom of the gorge filled with logs and human debris.

From my pack, I took a camera and snapped pictures, noting the GPS location. Sam was right. No one in his right mind would navigate the creek, not with the sieves and strainers that clogged the waterway. I had missed the grindy. The only thing I had accomplished all day was to prove to myself that the wolves were responsible for the mauling and killing and that the grindy was on their trail. Which I had presumed from the markings and the attack at the Pigeon River. Disgruntled, I made my way back up the mountain to the SUV for the difficult drive back to a real road. I could have taken the helo, I thought. Beast hissed with displeasure.

I was nodding at the wheel by the time I made it back to Hartford, on the Tennessee side of the mountains, but I couldn’t stop for the day. Not yet. I called Dave and Mike and both were available for an early supper/coffee/beer, as long as I was buying. Leo had given me a company credit card, and I intended to use it.

The afternoon was hot and airless; the air-conditioning and dim lighting of the Bean Trees Café was welcome. Mike ordered appetizers—garlic cheese fries, homemade onion rings, sweet potato fries. Though Beast turned up her nose at cooked meat, we all ordered burgers, loaded. The guys got beer, microbrewery stuff that I really wanted to try, but knew might make me sleepier, even with my Beast-hyped metabolism. I ordered a double espresso so I could make it back to Asheville without falling asleep. I wasn’t a coffee lover, preferring tea, but caffeine was one drug that my skinwalker metabolism did respond to. I was more awake when the food came.

“Most of the creeks between here and Asheville in Buncombe County run east to west across the mountains,” Mike said, his voice carrying even over the busload of noisy tourists. “They’re confined to the French Broad River Basin and empty into the Tennessee River Basin, and then into Mississippi River Basin.”

Meaning that they were attached to the Pigeon River, burbling just outside the café. Got it. He pulled a creased map from his pocket while I wiped my hands on a pile of napkins, swallowing down the last mouthful of Black and Blue Burger. I drank some coffee. And while it was still going down, said, “Okay. So the grindylow can get to most anywhere without ever leaving the water, especially when summer was so wet, and fall looking like it’ll follow the same path. Show me the locations of the grindy-marks the creekers and hikers have seen.”

Mike, wearing a red T-shirt, with a do-rag of the American flag on his head, unfolded the map with the grindy-signs that had been noted by the paddlers, hair-head creekers, and hikers. There were a lot of them. A lot of them. I counted the ones just on the Pigeon and the creeks nearby, and came up with over thirty sites. The grindy was claiming some major territory. I hadn’t seen anything like that in New Orleans. But then, there were no rocks there, and I hadn’t been looking for trees with slash marks. The guys had