A Ghost of Caribou, page 1
Dedication
For my parents, who encouraged my love of wildlife and writing
For Jason, fellow adventurer and amazing wildlife photographer
And for all the researchers and activists out there who are working to preserve caribou and their habitats
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Map
Prologue
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Epilogue
Afterword
To Learn More About Mountain Caribou
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Alice Henderson
Copyright
About the Publisher
Map
Prologue
Colville National Forest, Washington
Fourteen months ago
Amelia Fairweather had just entered her tent to sleep when a strange hum sounded from outside. She crouched there in the dark, listening. She had backpacked miles away from any town, any source of man-made noise. The hum grew louder and she pivoted back toward the tent door, kneeling there, alert. Darkness pressed in close around her, so she grabbed her flashlight from the tent pocket.
The peculiar hum grew in intensity. She gripped the flashlight to her chest, wondering if she should peer outside. And then a glaring light erupted over her, illuminating the tent like a glowing yellow beacon. She gasped.
Unzipping the door, she crawled out. She had pitched her tent in a small open meadow with a creek running through it, trees gathered on all sides. The forest glowed around her, lit up in a dazzling white light. Shielding her eyes with her hand, she stared upward, but could see nothing through the blinding brilliance.
The light lowered in the sky. Panic took hold. She shoved the flashlight into her pocket and raced for the cover of the trees.
The hum grew in intensity, the brilliance following her, spotlighting her, as she hit the tree line.
She moved between trunks, leaping over logs, weaving between strewn boulders. The thing kept above the trees, its blazing light following her every move. She had to find better cover. Or get help. But the nearest town was more than twenty miles away. She’d hiked out here on one of her regular backcountry treks, a chance to get away from the bustle of the city and be alone with her thoughts.
At seventy-two, she was in great shape from backpacking. But as she tore through the trees, with no plan other than to get away, panic swept over her. Her feet splashed through a creek and she stumbled over a log on the far bank. She went down hard on one knee, then scrambled to her feet again and kept running.
A sudden deafening blast of noise erupted from the thing, so low in pitch that the sound vibrated through her chest. It blared out two more times, pulsing, like some kind of warning klaxon. She stumbled again, but caught herself. The thing followed relentlessly, a piercing, radiant light that lit up everything around her. There was no way she’d be able to hide from it. And it was so fast that it streaked along above the trees, matching her pace. She had the feeling it could go even faster if it wanted to. Her heart pounded in her chest, and she struggled to still her mind, to think of a plan. What the hell was it? What did it want?
She ran into a dense patch of old-growth forest, with Douglas fir trees that stretched up hundreds of feet into the air. She knew that even at the height of day, only dim sunlight reached the forest floor here. The strange craft soared above the trees, its light struggling to penetrate the canopy.
Now was her chance. She had to break away, get ahead of it. She kept to the dense cover, leaping over logs and mossy rocks. She didn’t dare turn on her flashlight, even though the terrain around her was now harder to make out.
Her heart thudded with relief as the thing veered off in the wrong direction, searching for her. She sped on, her lungs burning in her chest, a stitch developing in her side. She crossed another creek, diving back into another section of old growth. She wove between massive trunks, her panicked brain rejoicing as the thing continued in the wrong direction, its piercing beam lighting up a different section of forest.
In the ensuing darkness, with only the moonlight to guide her, she ran until she thought her lungs would burst, down a steep incline beside a cliff, still surrounded by towering trees. She could barely hear the thrum of the thing now, far off in the distance. She heard one more blast of cacophonous noise from it, and then its light switched off abruptly.
She’d lost it.
She paused, catching her breath, leaning over with her hands on her knees. Terror still buzzed in her mind, clouding her thoughts. She didn’t have her map or her compass, and now she had no idea exactly where she was. Blood thrummed in her ears.
Then the hum returned, growing louder. She jerked her head in its direction. No light splayed from the thing, but it was definitely drawing closer. She stared around in the dark, then spotted a long hollow log on the ground. She raced to it and lay down on her stomach. Then she crawled forward on her elbows, shimmying her way inside the hollow until it swallowed her head, torso, legs, and finally her feet. She flipped over, face just inches from the inside of the log. She waited, breathing in the scent of earth and moss.
The thing flew closer, and she could sense it was directly overhead. It drew lower, lower, and she started to panic in the tight confines of the log. It knew where she was. The light wasn’t on, but somehow it still knew where she was. That long, low booming noise erupted from it and she jumped. She struggled, torn between hiding and scrambling out to flee again. Then it was almost on top of her. There was no doubt it had found her.
She shimmied out of the log and took off across the forest floor. The blinding light switched on, pinpointing her location, mere feet away, and then something bit into her neck, a stinging sensation. She kept running, weaving between tree trunks, but suddenly she felt dizzy and couldn’t keep her balance. She stumbled and fell, struggled to stand up again, and a wave of nausea spread over her.
She pitched forward, her face pressing into a bed of pine needles, and darkness swam up into her world.
One
Town of Bellamy Falls, Washington
Current day
Alex Carter approached the coffeehouse, instantly spotting Ben Hathaway waiting just outside. He looked the same as he had when they’d first met at the Snowline Resort in Montana last year, when she’d started her wolverine study there. His tousled sandy-brown hair hung almost to his shoulders now; his tall, athletic frame dressed in a worn blue flannel shirt, faded jeans, and hiking boots.
He turned, eyes falling on her, and grinned. “Alex Carter!” he called.
“Ben Hathaway!”
He held his arms open, and his familiar scent washed over her, a little spicy, like cinnamon, as he drew her close.
He pulled away, grinning. “It’s great to see you.”
“You too.”
He gestured around them, to the small town at the foot of the towering snowy Selkirk Mountains. “How about this place? So great to be out here, away from my desk in D.C.” Ben was a coordinator for the Land Trust for Wildlife Conservation. He oversaw projects all over the country and even the globe, traveling as needed. He hooked his thumb at the coffee shop. “You want something to drink?”
She smiled. “Sounds great.”
He held the door open, and the rush of warm, coffee-scented air embraced her. Local art hung on the walls, and the vibe was welcoming, laid-back, and artistic. People around them read books, sketched, and worked on laptops.
They ordered a mocha and a latte, then took a table by the window.
As they sat down, Alex couldn’t help but grin at the sight of Ben. She’d met him just as everything had fallen apart for her when she lived in Boston, and he’d been a wonderful kindred spirit at a time when she felt like few people understood her call to the wild.
She took a sip of her latte, and they caught up with each other’s lives. Ben told her about a new anti-poaching program he was running at an LTWC preserve in South Africa. Alex related her adventures in the Canadian Arctic studying polar bears. She listened with interest as he described a new six-thousand-acre parcel of land the LTWC might acquire in Alaska, where salmon swam upstream and huge brown bears caught them as the fish leapt up waterfalls.
Alex drank more of her latte. “How much time do you have here?”
He frowned, glancing down at his watch. “Not nearly as much as I’d like. I have to catch a flight back to D.C. tonight. I guess we should get down to business.”
Alex fought the small pang of disappointment that he had to leave so soon. “So what have you got?” When he called her up for this assignment, he’d been vague, asking her only to meet him in the quaint town of Bellamy Falls, Washington, and to bring her backcountry g
He pulled a laptop out of his satchel and powered it up. “Two weeks ago, one of our volunteers was out on the Selkirk Wildlife Sanctuary and downloaded this.” He clicked on a photo and turned the screen so she could see it. The image showed a towering old-growth forest in the background and the furry side of an out-of-focus dark brown animal close to the camera. It was so blurry she couldn’t make out what it was.
“What am I looking at?”
Ben grinned, leaning forward. “This volunteer goes out a few times a year to the various remote cameras we have placed around the sanctuary. She collects the memory cards and replaces the batteries. So she was out there two weeks ago and saw what at first she thought was an elk in the trees. But then it drew closer, and she got a better look at its head. She thinks it was a mountain caribou, but it ran off before she could be sure. When she checked the nearest remote camera, she found this image on the memory card.”
Alex’s mouth fell open. “A mountain caribou? Is she sure?” Alex knew that at one time, the U.S. had been host to herds of mountain caribou, but none were left now in the lower forty-eight.
Different from the barren-ground caribou that roamed the vast expanses of Alaska, the Northwest Territories, and the Yukon, southern mountain caribou were a thing all their own. They were so elusive that people referred to them as the “gray ghosts of the forest.” Instead of traversing the open tundra, they lived in small herds in dense old-growth forests. Their big shovellike feet allowed them to navigate in extremely high-altitude snowy locations during the winter, where they survived off lichen. But due to logging and other factors, eventually their numbers dropped to a single tiny herd surviving in Idaho and Washington, known as the South Selkirk population. As a last-ditch effort to save them, Canada took the final two members of the herd, both females, and moved them north to join that country’s own dwindling mountain caribou population in British Columbia.
Now mountain caribou were extinct in the lower forty-eight. To think that one had wandered down from Canada, into the state of Washington, was huge. After a lot of back-and-forth and numerous lawsuits by conservation organizations, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had finally designated critical habitat for the species. This caribou had a chance. If indeed it was here at all.
Alex looked down at the blurry photo from the remote camera. “The fur does look quite dark brown. Too bad we can’t see if it has any white patches.” Most mountain caribou sported dark brown coats with some white on the sides and a white shoulder and neck patch. They had white bands or socks just above their hooves. And unlike other deer species, both sexes could grow antlers, though they were less common in females. She squinted at the photo. “It’s so out of focus.”
He nodded. “It obviously passed quickly in front of the camera, and too close.”
She leaned back in her chair. “So you think there’s a mountain caribou on the preserve?”
He exhaled, that charming smile returning. “There just might be.”
“And you want me to find out for sure?”
“You got it.”
Alex stared down at the picture again.
“There’s an old ranch house on the preserve,” he continued. “It belonged to the previous owner of the land. It’s nothing like the grandeur of the Snowline, but it’s got heat and running water. Indoor plumbing.”
“I think you mean the spookiness of the Snowline.” She laughed, thinking of where she’d been stationed in Montana, how the wind howled through the broken windows, and how the stories of the horrors that had transpired in the place before it became a wildlife sanctuary were local lore.
Ben laughed, too. “This place has no ghosts.” He paused, taking a sip of his mocha. “At least I don’t think it does. And there’s another plus, too.”
“What’s that?”
He leaned forward. “Later this week, Kathleen Macklay is going to be out in this area.”
Alex broke into a smile. “You’re kidding.” Kathleen had been the police dispatcher in the town of Bitterroot, Montana. She’d met the woman during her first job with the LTWC. Alex and Kathleen had instantly hit it off, and she’d looked forward to seeing her again.
He nodded. “Yep. She comes out here every summer to be a fire lookout. She’s actually the person who tipped us off that this piece of land here was for sale. Her lookout lies in the adjacent national forest.” He sipped his mocha. “So are you intrigued?”
“I am.”
“Then let’s go out to the preserve. I can show you the house, and we can walk around the place, give you a sense of it.”
“When do we leave?”
“Whenever you’re ready.”
They finished their coffee, then headed out. Ben had rented a Toyota Prius and offered to drive. Alex left her own rental car, a four-wheel-drive Jeep, on the street. They took the main road out of the charming turn-of-the-last-century town, passing art galleries, a general store, a movie theater with a 1930s marquee, and two saloons. The whole area had a bohemian feel to it, with a new age crystal shop, a public art studio, a small community theater, and two live-music venues.
Outside town, Ben turned off onto a smaller road, paved but full of potholes. Ten miles in, he veered onto a dirt road. At the intersection stood a collection of metal U.S. Postal Service boxes.
“This is where your mail will come once you forward it. I’ll give you the key.”
He took the dirt road up a steep series of inclines into the mountains. Alex rolled down the window, smelling sun-warmed pine on the wind, comfortable with Ben. He looked over at her and smiled, clearly enjoying the wild spaces around them as well.
He turned off onto a final road and bumped along its rutted dirt surface to a small two-story house made of clapboard.
“It was built in 1936,” Ben told her, parking in front. “A family moved out here to raise horses.” Alex glanced around, seeing the decaying remains of old fence posts and corrals. The fencing wire had been removed at some point.
They stepped out of the car and Ben fished a set of keys from his pocket. They climbed three stairs to the front door and he unlocked it. The door opened to a comfortable living room with a couch, a coffee table, and a bookshelf full of volumes.
He took her on a tour through the place, which held two bedrooms, an old-fashioned kitchen with a gas range, and a bathroom with 1930s-style fixtures.
“There’s no cell signal up here, but the house has two landlines—one in the kitchen and one upstairs in the main bedroom.” He wrote down the number for her. “It even has satellite internet. It’s slow, but it works.”
They returned to the living room, and Alex examined the books on the shelf more closely. She was delighted to find volumes on painting and bird identification, and books on tracks and scat. She pulled down a guide to wildflowers and turned to him. “This is a treat. I’m getting spoiled lately. I’m used to sleeping in a tiny backcountry tent. My last few gigs have had hot water and everything.”
Ben laughed. “Glad you like it. C’mon. I’ll show you the rest of the preserve.”
They grabbed their daypacks out of Ben’s car and set off on a trail that crossed a glorious wildflower-strewn meadow. Alex thrilled to the sight of yellow glacier lily, brilliant orange Columbia lily, scarlet paintbrush, and the delicate purple petals of alpine lewisia. They hiked up steep terrain and over a saddle in the nearest mountain. Snowfields covered talus slopes. Curious hoary marmots, their golden coats shining in the sunlight, emerged from rock piles to watch them. She even heard the telltale “Eep!” of an American pika, a small vocal relative of the rabbit that lived in high-elevation sites. Above them, a golden eagle wheeled in the sky, crying out.
She already knew she was going to love this gig.
They passed a sapphire-blue glacial lake. A family of mergansers paddled on its surface, diving down and emerging back up, buoyant as corks.
Alex and Ben wound along the shore of the lake, climbing higher again toward another saddle. Her legs burned from moving over the steep terrain. She was used to being out on the flat ice of Hudson Bay.
