Cave of Danger

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 2Another hour melted away under the hot rising sun.

Matt climbed to the top of another high ridge. He wiped his wet hands on his Levis, unlimbered his binoculars, and began another long slow sweeping probe of gorges, brush-choked cliffs, great piles of boulders, gullies, broken rock, and crumbled sandstone walls. Nothing.

He sighed and began yet another painful descent. For nearly an hour, he fought his way through masses of scrub pine, stubble brush, and rocks overgrown with vines and choked with old leaves and last year’s cobweb.

He didn’t take time to rest. He started another precarious climb, an exhausting struggle up a sheer face of limestone toward the high lip of the gorge. He climbed higher, and so did the sun. It heated up the rock, and Matt stopped to wipe sweat out of his eyes.

Again he searched with his binoculars. Nothing.

Nothing remotely resembling that V-shaped sign where the crow had flown up. It didn’t seem less than a year ago that he’d seen that crow but ten, maybe fifty, years.

He took off his shirt and stuffed it into his rucksack. Another hour melted away. A vague apprehension crept into his mind—he’d be late for Miss Cleckley’s first-period English class again. But a greater fear drove out any guilt he’d started to feel about another skip and the promise he’d made his mother.

Only another acre or so of unexplored karst lay wild and burning below his probing binoculars. As he stared and felt the fear of defeat, the entire scene seemed to waver and blur like a heat mirage.

He lowered the binoculars and pressed his burning eyes. Then he climbed down from the ridge. He worked his way up a narrow arroyo, climbing and crawling and searching. He climbed again. He searched again with his binoculars.

Nothing.

Go on, he told himself bitterly, go on and finish the karst. Finish the hunt. Get it over with. The sooner the better. You’ll either be a hero or a laughingstock. Either way’s better than not knowing.

Sometime later—he didn’t know how much later—he headed wearily for another lookout point from which to survey the area from a different perspective. But every angle turned up the same result—zero.

So he climbed again. He dug his way up sheer rock walls. He crawled along high and narrow ridges. He fought through tangles of brush and dust, and climbed up and down again.

The sun was high and hot when Matt squirmed over the rim of yet another deep gorge and sprawled out flat on wind-smoothed sandstone. He lay with his eyes half-closed, breathing heavily. The hot stone burned his bare belly, but he didn’t move. He lay there while his running sweat collected under him and cooled off the rock.

He still lay there after he was breathing easily, his face turned to the side and resting on his arm. The only sounds were the slight sigh of wind along the gorge’s walls and the buzzing of mud-dauber wasps building early nests in the rock. Those sounds turned to lazy distant drones and faded clear away into a carefree daydream.

His body jerked. He was suddenly wide awake. Stop stalling, he told himself. A long snooze in the sun is nice except for those classes you promised not to skip, and the cave you’ve bragged about so long that isn’t here.

He propped himself on his elbows and squinted against the sun’s glare. He was lying on the rim of a deep gorge. About a hundred feet separated him from the opposite rim. It was a jagged line of eroded limestone that dropped in a series of broken ledges to the sandy floor of the gorge about two hundred feet below. He raised his binoculars and studied the wilderness of broken ledges and brush-choked cliffs that stretched on through the small remaining area of karst to the wooded fringes of Lake Natacomo. It looked discouragingly like the rest of the karst—and no sign of the V-shape.

He slowly lowered the binoculars and closed his eyes. He felt sick with defeat. He began rubbing the side of his head. He’d started to feel the beginning of a deep, unlocalized pain: an ache, not real pain, but vague promise of something worse.

He rubbed awhile, then rolled over on his left side, and opened his eyes.

He saw it. Or thought he saw it: the V-shape formed by the gnarled branch of a tree angling one way and the arm of corroded rock twisting the other. The twisted, deformed V-shape silhouetted against the blue sky like something in a dream.

He blinked his eyes slowly, three times, and stared.

The V-shape was still there. Just on the other side of the gorge on the rim and over to the left.

He kept staring. His body felt numb, and his breath filled his chest with aching pressure. He stared until his eyes watered and blurred as he tried to believe in what he saw. Slowly, tensely, he got onto his hands and knees, then raised to one knee, never taking his eyes from that crucial sign—like a hunter trying not to scare away the game.

He stood and leaned forward, still staring, feeling a slight trembling in his hands.

The “sign of the crow” was still there! It wasn’t a trick. Not a mirage nor something he was dreaming.

Unsteadily he lifted the binoculars for a close-up view of the ledge under the gorge rim that supported the V-shape. It was a long wide ledge with an overhang. Back in beneath the overhand, next to the wall of the gorge, was a deeper, darker shadow: a long charcoal-black s***h of shadow. That just must be a perpendicular opening in solid rock—the one the crow had flown out of.

Matt’s heart pumped in slow heavy surges as he located a loose rock about the size of a baseball and threw it across the gully. The chunk of limestone hit the ledge near the dark stretch of trough, or doline, and shattered. Loud clattering echoes bounced down the gully.

Matt remained tense, bent slightly forward, as he watched and waited and held his breath.

He heard the familiar powerful beating of wings. As on that night so long before, the big crow shot up out of the doline like something out of a gun. Protesting with angry raucous cries, it circled about the gully. It dove and screamed with rage, then settled on a rock near the V-shape and scolded at Matt.

He felt tears stinging his eyelids, but no one could see him, and he didn’t care. Matt had cried a few times before when he was alone; but this was different. You’ve won, he thought, and he laughed. You’ve grabbed the brass ring. You’ve shown them all who the real fast jockey is.

All the year’s accumulated strain broke inside him. He laughed, and more tears came to his eyes, and he laughed louder. He leaned back and let out a long Brushcreeker war-whoop of triumph. He grabbed up his rucksack and swung it around, and laughed and hollered until the crow flew away, cawing its protest and fear.

That crow had been going at top speed when it left the doline. So it must have flown out of a very deep drop, no doubt about that. But how deep? Matt thought impatiently. Just how big a find have I really made? He could hardly wait to discover.

He shouldered his rucksack and started along the rim of the gorge, looking for a relatively fast and easy way to get down without breaking out rope and other climbing gear.

A sudden crackling, a rattling of dry brush and dislodged rocks, startled him. He whirled around, crouching and ready for some threat, he didn’t know what. Maybe a rockslide or an animal made dangerous by hunger and fever. Dogs turned wild and vicious had been seen in the hills.

Dislodged gravel still clattered down a steep path that threaded its way between large piles of boulders. And up there about twenty feet, picking himself out of the dust, was Kurt Moseby.

Matt stared, trying not to show his surprise and apprehension. At this particular place and time, Kurt Moseby was the last person he expected or wanted to see. And what, he thought, is Kurt doing out here skipping morning classes? Well, he has as much right to skip classes as I have.

The fact hit him suddenly then, like a blow in the solar plexus—Kurt was out here skipping classes for the same reason he was. And Kurt certainly looked as if he meant business—cave business.

“Well, hi, hillbilly.” Kurt’s grin shone as big and bright as the sun-gold letter L on his velour turtleneck. It was his same arrogant, sneering grin as always, except for the slight tint of embarrassment from having fallen.

Matt nodded warily and said nothing. He didn’t trust his voice. His throat felt tight, and his chest ached with anxious pressure as he watched the big four-letter athlete casually slapping dust out of his Levis.

He tailed me, Matt thought. He was hiding up there, watching. He saw me throw the rock, saw the crow fly up, heard me whoop and holler. When I started to move, he started to follow. And if he hadn’t slipped and fallen and been forced to show himself, I’d have led him right to the cave drop. Now how much does he know or suspect? Does he know enough about cave hunting to see the significance of that crow’s flight?

Kurt rolled his thick shoulders as he grinned. “Seem a little on the surprised side to see your old schoolmate, hillbilly.”

“It’s a crazy world all right. You never know.”

Kurt kept grinning, but his voice had no humor in it. It was deadly serious, even sinister. “I know you’re not claiming any cave in this country. I know that.”

“I’m going to find that cave all right,” Matt said.

“Maybe. But you won’t ever claim it.”

Matt wanted Kurt to go away from there. He was eager to get across the gorge and take a look at the drop opening he knew was there. But first, of course, he had to lose Kurt. And he also had to find out if Kurt suspected that a cave might be so near. There was no point in trying to hedge because Kurt might hang around for hours. Matt decided to goad Kurt into following him away from the site and then try to lose him.

“So why won’t I claim it?” he asked.

Kurt’s red, butch-cut hair glistened with drops of sweat. He wiped it with the back of a suede-gloved hand. “You said you’d find a cave and put my old man out of business. Well, I figured all along if anyone could find a new cave all that good, it’d be you. You know this land like your own backyard. And you know caving. You’re not quite as dumb as most hillbillies, either.”

“Thanks, sport,” Matt said. “I didn’t know you cared.”

“I’ve taken your cave hunt real serious like, hillbilly. I figure you know what you’re doing. Now let me tell you—you may find that cave, but you won’t keep it.”

“Be careful, sport. You’ll have to put your money where your mouth is.”

“Yeah, and I like my money,” Kurt said. “So you’re not putting my old man out of business. That’d be like putting me out of business, pal.” He dug his suede desert boots into the gravel and slid down the incline to within a few feet of where Matt stood on the gully’s rim. “I wouldn’t like being put out of business. Wouldn’t like it a little bit. Insecurity, worry about financial future, and working for a living. I tell you, hillbilly, things like that just don’t appeal to big Kurt.”

The intensity of Kurt’s feelings surprised Matt. Matt’s saying he’d find a cave that would put Moseby’s Wonder Caverns out of business had not been entirely an idle boast. But neither had he intended Kurt to take it anywhere nearly so seriously.

“You’ve been keeping tabs on me all these months, tailing me through here?” Matt asked with genuine amazement.

“Just enough to know if and when you found anything,” Kurt said, squinting, shading his eyes, and studying the rim across the gorge. Matt’s stomach jumped as he realized Kurt was studying the area of ledge from which the crow had flown. “Me or Dinny or Spook or one of my gang who loves the great outdoors, we’ve watched your progress. But not all the time and not all the way.” He stepped to the side for a clearer view of the opposite ledge. Matt tried to appear unconcerned.

“We’ve known the trail you took coming in here and the pattern of search you use. So we could pick you up on the trail in each section you were searching without having to follow you all the way in. Like today. I knew the trail you’d take. I knew you only had this last small area to cover. So here I was—waiting.”

“Clever, very clever,” Matt said.

“Been keeping a tighter watch on you these last few weeks though. Figured that after a year, you’d be close to the cave. Or already have it.”

Matt shrugged. “When I have it, sport, you’ll be the first to know. I’ll notify you and your old man personally—after I’ve staked my claim.”

Kurt shook his head. “You never will, not in this county.”

“What’ll you do about it?”

“Anything I have to do.”

“Maybe anything won’t be good enough. You’re not so hot at anything but spending your old man’s money.”

“You’ll find out.”

“Like I found out in gym?” Matt said. “Or on the track field?”

Kurt flushed. Some of his grin faded. “This isn’t a gym or a track meet, hillbilly. We don’t have an audience out here, no rules or judges.”

Matt thought fast. He must move carefully. He was wildly anxious to get over there and see just how much of a cave he’d found—and, of course, not lead Kurt to it. “All right.” He heaved his rucksack onto his shoulders. “You’ve set it straight. You’re going to stay on my back. You hope I’ll either give up looking, or keep looking, and when I find the cave, you’ll step in and take over.”

“That’s not a hope, hillbilly. That’s a fact.”

“You’re a real hard rock.”

“When it comes to being put out of business,” Kurt said, “I’m a real brass boy. I’ll fight buzzsaws.”

“Well, I’ll be finding that cave pretty quick, but you won’t see it,” Matt said.

“You sound mighty sure of yourself.”

“You saw that crow fly up. It made me happy.”

“Like you struck gold, hillbilly.”

“Same thing. Brushcreekers are superstitious about crows. That crow flying up was a good omen. It told me this is my lucky caving day.”

“Mine, hillbilly, mine.”

“No, because I’ll lose you, sport. I’m going to leave you wandering in this wild land like a rat in a maze. I’m going to lose you faster than I did in the track meet.”

Matt didn’t wait for an answer, but turned and walked fast along the lip of the gorge. His heart thudded, and that anxious squeeze tightened his stomach.

If Kurt followed, that would mean he didn’t suspect the real meaning of the crow. Matt would lead him well away from the drop, lose him, then double back. If Kurt doesn’t follow, Matt thought as he kept walking, if he crosses the gorge to look at that ledge and he finds the drop—well, win or lose, he’ll find out what a buzz-saw’s like.