The Totem

FOUR

Slaughter flinched from every treetop they scudded over. "Jesus, go down any lower and you'll have us pulling pine needles from our asses."

Hammel gri

"But… Watch it! Look out!"

The helicopter tilted, its rotors nearly colliding with a tree. Slaughter clutched his harness as Hammel worked the controls, and the helicopter tilted on a different angle. Frantic, Hammel fought to gain altitude. Abruptly the helicopter was steady again. Slaughter realized that he'd stopped breathing.

"It's the wind. I didn't count on this much wind," Hammel said.

"Can you get us there, or can't you?"

"If you want to take your chances, I can keep on trying."

"Hey, you didn't talk about taking chances when we were back on the ground."

"Well, that was easy, talking."

As Hammel gri

"Sure. I'd have to be to try this. You're a little nuts yourself."

"Well, you're not far wrong about that."

Slaughter heard a noise behind him. When he turned, he saw that Dunlap had his hand up to his mouth as if he might be sick. Lucas was ashen, staring at the treetops.

"I think everybody in here's crazy," Slaughter said.

They were past the treetops, swooping across a meadow. Slaughter briefly felt relieved. At least there wasn't anything for them to hit, although the wind was tugging at them again, the helicopter twisting. Then the trees loomed before him, and the helicopter struggled to rise above them. Slaughter thought he heard a branch scrape on the landing struts. He closed his eyes and swallowed. When he looked again, the trees were thick a few feet underneath him.

"I don't see a sign of anyone," he shouted to be heard in the roar of the engine and the wind.

"We don't know which way they came," Hammel shouted back. "I'm simply heading straight toward the escarpment. Once we get there, we ought to have a good view of the ridges below us. But we've got another problem. This thing isn't any Honda. Look at how much fuel we're using."

Slaughter did. The gauge was just below the halfway mark. "But we've been gone just a couple of hours."

"Overloaded in a wind that's stronger than I figured. That's the reason I've been flying low. To avoid the wind and save on fuel. With this much weight, if we were higher, the wind would hold us back worse than it is. The chopper would have to work harder. We'd have even less fuel."

Hammel paused between each sentence, drawing breath to shout more.

"Then we can't go back," Slaughter said.

"Right. We'd never make it. I'll keep flying until we're using fumes and I have to set her down. I don't know if we'll manage the escarpment."

"You mean get above it?"

"It's too high for all this weight. I'll have to set down at the base." Hammel paused. "If we have fuel to get that far."

Slaughter's temples throbbed.

The landscape was wild below them, ridges, hollows, rock-falls. Struggling in the wind, the helicopter narrowly missed trees. If we crash now, Slaughter thought, we're finished. Then something flashed ahead of him, and he was pointing. "There. I see them."

Hammel aimed the chopper toward the flash. "No, it's the vehicles they used. I don't see any people."

They swooped toward the surreal image of a parking lot across this distant mountain meadow, Jeeps and vans and trucks all parked absurdly in a pattern of straight lines as if at a supermarket or the K-Mart. Then they were past them.

"Sure. I understand now what they did," Hammel said. "They moved up the long way through that chain of loggers' roads and meadows you see on the map. They must be hiking toward the base of the escarpment. If we keep on a straight line toward the mining town from here, we'll have to see them."

"If the forest doesn't hide them."

"They'll move through as many clearings as they can. That many men. We'll see them, all right. We might wish we hadn't, but we'll see them. Right now, that's the least of our worries."

The helicopter swayed again, and Slaughter gripped his harness, sweating. "Everybody feeling all right back there?"

"Oh, yeah, fantastic." Dunlap groaned.

"Just think about your story."

"What I'm thinking about is straight ahead of me."

Dunlap pointed. The land curved up past wooded ridges, higher, past the cliffs and rockfalls, far beyond to where the snow-capped peaks loomed hazily in the distance. Where two peaks were close together, in the pass between, a cliff glinted in the sunlight. It was massive beyond belief. Slaughter saw that even from this far away. The cliff was like a dam or a huge stone glacier, and on top somewhere the mining town had been established. Slaughter felt a chill pass through him as he saw it getting larger, as he gradually came near it, and he knew what Dunlap meant. He really didn't want to go there.

FIVE

Parsons and his men stumbled through the forest up a gametrail that they'd discovered. Past an open ridge before them, far off, they could see the high cliff they were heading toward. The wind was fierce, but it failed to moderate the force of the sun, and as they sweated, working higher, one man slumped off the trail to lean against a boulder.

"This is wrong. I have to rest."

A few men stopped beside him, scowling with contempt. "When you were riding in the Jeep, you thought this was great."

"That was then. Now I have to rest." The wind shrieked through the trees. "This god-damned wind. What difference does it make how soon we get there?"

"Because everyone agreed to reach the cliff by sundown."

"Why? We can't do anything at night. We'll have to wait till tomorrow morning anyway."

"He's right," another man said. "So what if we spend the night down here? We'll end up sleeping in the woods no matter where we are."

"Because I don't like knowing they might be around me. You guys saw how well that barricade was built. But it didn't do any good. I don't intend to sleep until I know that this is finished."

As a branch snapped in the forest, they pivoted, startled.

"It's the wind," the first man said. "I'm telling you. I have to rest."

"Well, damn it, rest then. But you'll do it by yourself. The others are ahead of us now, and I don't intend to stay behind." The man hitched his knapsack tighter to his shoulders and proceeded along the gametrail. "You must be stupid, hanging back like this."

"Hey, wait for me. I'm coming with you."

They hurried to reach the main group, which was out of sight among the trees. But the first man didn't have the energy to push himself away from the boulder. As another branch snapped in the forest, he looked all around in panic and suddenly did have the energy.

"Hold it. Wait." He stumbled up the gametrail.

At the crest, he saw the main group filing through a wooded hollow, angling up the other slope. He ran to catch them, seeing the men whom he had talked to join the main group. He lurched toward the hollow, then up the other side, and at the top he swung around a lip of rock before he saw the men stopped so closely before him that he almost bumped against them.

"What's the matter?"

"We don't know yet."

The overweight man breathed hard as he glanced toward the group before him. They had left their single-file formation, spreading out to stare ahead. Some were slumped against fir trees, and then the words came drifting back through the wind. "They found something up ahead."

"What is it?"

"I don't know yet."

The men who'd leaned against the fir trees straightened to stare past the heads and shoulders of the men before them.