The Old Man(69)
Sergeant Wright sent out four men as scouts to find tracks and follow them while the other men established a working headquarters in the cabin and began to search for any indication of which direction the pair had taken. In an hour, the two men who had gone up the mountain to search for tracks reported by radio that the snowshoe impressions leading down to the cabin were backward. The subjects had gone up wearing their snowshoes reversed.
Sergeant Wright ordered the two scouts to keep following the backward tracks through the snow, and sent four others down to the village to rent snowmobiles. He told his radio operator to man a communication post in the cabin with two searchers, maintain radio contact with all parties, and keep track of their GPS positions.
While all the other men were occupied, Julian loitered by the side of the pickup truck with the plow on the front. He leaned against the truck and let his bare hand hang above the truck bed, where eight sand bags had been piled. He could see that one of the bags had leaked a thin stream of sand onto the shiny black surface. He casually brushed off some of the sand, but kept some of it in his hand. As he walked away, he put his hand into his pocket and deposited the sand there.
The SUV returned from a sport rental store in town, but only the driver was in it. The other three men came up the hill a hundred yards behind it on three snowmobiles. Wright told two of the men on snowmobiles he wanted them to head up the mountain, following the snowshoe trail, and rendezvous with the two scouts on foot. Wright and Julian would follow on the third snowmobile. As the first two headed upward Julian noticed that they towed short plastic sleds, the sort that were used for towing game home from a hunting trip. Julian didn’t have to strain his imagination to know what those were for.
Within a few minutes the three snowmobiles had reached the spot where the scouts were waiting. At this point the backward snowshoe tracks ended, and ski tracks appeared. The tracks were long and thin, with the marks of ski poles at intervals, the tracks of cross-country skis.
The two scouts climbed on the backs of the two snowmobiles towing sleds. Now their party consisted of Wright and Julian on one snowmobile, and two men on each of the others—six fully armed men on three machines.
The three snowmobiles moved forward, following the ski tracks into the mountains. They were able to go fast over the open stretches, eating up ski tracks in a few minutes that must have taken a half hour to make.
Hank skied through a wooded area. The snow was untouched and drifted. He could see the distance between the tall trees was wide enough so they could maintain good speed. In the fall he had chosen skis that were a size short for both of them. The slightly shorter skis were easier to control and to keep on the path, but they were a bit slower than longer ones would have been on the straight, open inclines.
Hank knew that the backward snowshoe trail would not fool an army rifle team for long, and they would soon pick up the ski trail. He headed into a denser part of the forest, where branches brushed his shoulders as he passed. Top speed for a cross-country skier at his level was probably fifteen miles an hour on flat ground. Through the woods he judged they were traveling about ten.
He had seen that there were tree wells, areas around the bases of big trees where the snow cover was too sparse to ski on, so he stayed away from them. He knew that he and Marcia could go much faster on a downslope, but that the trees at lower altitudes would be closer together. He tried to navigate and keep them at the right level.
They had gone a few miles in silence except for their heavy breathing and the scrape of their skis over the snow, when Hank’s ears began to pick up another sound. At first it was a buzz, like the noise of distant chain saws. Hank tried to tell whether it was somebody cutting wood or something else. As they went on, the noise didn’t fade. Instead it grew louder and deeper. He stopped and let Marcia catch up.
“What is that?” she said.
“It sounds like snowmobiles,” he said. “We can’t outrun snowmobiles, but we can try to go places where they have to slow down.” He pushed off and led them downward into thicker woods, where the lowest branches of some of the trees nearly swept the ground and others intertwined at shoulder level. Hank had driven snowmobiles in Vermont and New Hampshire, and now he looked for places that would slow the vehicles down.
Always he looked for spots where he could set up an obstacle. At one stretch where the spaces between trees had been wide for a time, he found a slope that led down into a narrow space between trees. He stopped, took out his pocketknife, and cut a small slice in the lining of his jacket. He unraveled a length of loose nylon stitching, stretched it from one tree, across the path, around the opposite tree, and then bent a flexible pine branch as far back as he could, and held it there against the tree trunk with a forked stick. He tied the nylon line to the forked stick, so if the line was hit by a snowmobile, the forked stick would be tugged away and the pine branch would whip forward toward the head of a snowmobile driver.
From time to time when he saw the opportunity he would pick up a long, straight pine branch, strip it of twigs, and stab it into the snow between two trees where they had just passed, so it looked like a spear set there to impale a snowmobile. What he hoped it would do was slip under the snowmobile and strip it off its track like a tank trap, or at least jam the track for a few minutes.
Twice he found a rock in the space between two trees, and widened his stance slightly so one ski would pass on each side of it. Then he would shake a bit of snow off the branches above to cover the rock.