Chapter Two ~ Lonely Vigil

as told to Bonnie by Knut

“What is that gosh-awful smell?” Hallie managed between coughs.

“A carcass,” I said. It was the first thing I could come up with, although admittedly not terribly pleasant. My brother’s answer was better.

“A bee trap.”

I looked him in the eye. Cap was hard to read, but having spent the better part of two decades with him, I was Cap-literate.

Miss Trask was openly gagging at the stench. It wasn’t pleasant to be sure, but from what little I knew of the middle-aged woman, she was normally imperturbable. Maybe I was immune to the scents of St. Joe.

“Well, which is it?” she asked.

I hesitated a moment this time, gathering my thoughts and trying to figure out what Cap had in mind. “Cap’s usually right about things in the woods. Yes, it’s a bee trap.”

Hallie narrowed her dark eyes at us. She was a smart cookie. And not just because she grew up in the Idaho wilderness with two older, outdoorsy brothers. “We’ve been here most of the day setting up camp. I didn’t see another car nearby. I didn’t hear another car. Not even a motorcycle. So, who set a bee trap?”

This was Cap’s show. I pushed my glasses up my nose, trying to look more like the nerd I actually was. Indoorsy and bookish, unlearned in the nuances of the forest. I do like books but the rest of it is untrue.

Cap moved easily to the edge of the fire circle and peered into the darkness. He didn’t look at anyone when he next spoke, his voice casual, though I could hear a thin trace of tension. I don’t know if anyone else, other than our sister, did. “A fisherman, maybe, while he cleaned his trout. Or another camper.”

“Somebody who’s already pulled out,” I added, with a confident nod in the general direction of our New York visitors. I didn’t make eye contact with Trixie. She didn’t say anything—which was unusual; she was never afraid to speak her mind—but I could feel her Belden blues on me.

My sister pinched her nose and declared, “They’d better change recipes.”

“Or their good neighbor policy,” Brian said. He laughed but it sounded hollow, not like his usual full-throated chuckle. Trixie wasn’t the only Belden who wasn’t quite buying our explanations.

“Why would anybody want to trap a bee?” Di asked. “I thought they were good for making honey and leaving it in trees for bears to eat.”

Though she was clearly attached to Mart, she hadn’t given the impression of being the joker he was. Her innocent comment was genuine and it made me laugh. I must have looked more edgy than I thought because I could visibly see the tension break around the fire circle. “That’s one way to look at it, Di, but when you’re trying to clean fish or cook, yellow jackets can get pretty pesky. Woodsmen get some protection when they hang a fine-meshed wire basket several feet away from where they’re working. They smear stale fish—usually just the heads—with cooking fat and anything else they can find that will turn rancid in the sun. They put the mess in a basket and let nature take its course. Yellow jackets are scavengers. They go for the rotten food and leave the fishermen in peace.”

I withheld my laughter this time as the pretty brunette wrinkled her nose with distaste. She reminded me of my girlfriend Gloria, who was decidedly not the outdoorsy type. Hence, her absence from our gathering.

Cap turned from staring into the darkness, his ponytail swinging behind him. Gosh—or, as my cousins would say, Gleeps!—it sure was getting long. Dad wasn’t going to be too happy about that. “Never mind,” he said. “We’ll take care of it in the morning.”

A few minutes later, the wind shifted and died down. The stench disappeared and we could all breathe freely again. The forest wasn’t silent, though. It rarely was. A great owl swooped low through the clearing, drawing oohs and ahs from all of us, not just the easterners. In the distance, coyotes howled at one another. They sound like they were arguing about something but must have come to some truce because the howling died away. The bear cub resumed its bawling, but only briefly. I imagined its mother giving it a stern cuff across its ears and telling it to go to sleep.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Trixie hunching over toward the fire.

“Are you cold? I can get an extra sweater for you. Our temperature drops pretty low after sundown.”

“No, thanks, Knut,” she answered quickly. “I just thought about home and a—a goose walked over my grave!”

I couldn’t get over the feeling that she was afraid, or at least a little anxious, which wasn’t like my normally fearless cousin at all. And, not to my surprise—probably to no one who knew them—Mart was quick to spring to the rescue of his almost twin, albeit in a somewhat twisted way.

“How appropriate. It has come to my attention that warm-blooded vertebrate animals characterized by oviparous generation and covered by an epidermal growth are prone to gather in companies. Therefore, a web-footed anserine fowl would seek out its kind, namely one Beatrix Belden, aged fourteen, familiarly known as Trixie, the co-president of this otherwise intelligent band of youth called the Bob-Whites of the Glen.”

Seriously. And my family thinks I’m a nerd? But his loquaciousness served its purpose in distracting Trixie from whatever she had been thinking about.

“Heaven—with help from the dictionary—only knows, but I do believe you’re insulting me!”

Jim chuckled. He was on the ground, leaning back against Trixie’s log seat, his right elbow not quite touching her leg. “If he is, he really got carried away and labeled all of us geese, himself included. That is, unless Mart has recently resigned from the Bob-Whites. As the other co-president, I’d be happy to entertain a motion that his resignation be accepted without further ado.”

His tone was serious but even in the darkness I could see his green eyes twinkling with merriment.

“I second the motion!” Hallie shouted, waving her hand in her excitement. Mart grabbed it and pulled it down.

“You can’t do that, Hallie,” Di scolded. Her voice wasn’t harsh and I knew she and my sister were almost as close as Trixie and Honey, but where Mart was concerned, she wouldn’t listen to any criticism. “Nobody made a first motion for you to second in the first place.”

Hallie had warned me about something she called “Honeyspeak”. Was it contagious?

“I’ll be glad to oblige,” Brian said, his chuckle sounding more sincere this time.

Mart smacked his forehead. “Betrayed first by my own tongue and then by my brother’s.”

Hallie grinned at me. “See? I told you it was fun being a Bob-White!”

“We’re not Bob-Whites,” I pointed out.

“You are now,” Jim said. “All in favor of accepting Hallie, Cap, and Knut as honorary new members of the Bob-Whites of the Glen, say ‘aye’.”

A club. It sounded simplistic, quaint and corny. So why did I feel my heart swelling with warmth when they all shouted, “Aye!” without hesitation?

“Now what do we do?” Cap asked. “Wear feathers in our hair?”

“Be serious,” Trixie begged, although I didn’t think my brother was entirely teasing. I knew he wouldn’t object to sticking feathers in his long hair. “It’s—well, it’s an honor to belong to the Bob-Whites of the Glen. We’re pledged to help each other, or anybody else in need, and we’re semi-secret—we don’t go around bragging about the good deeds we do.”

“Our signal is the bob-white call,” added Honey. “And we use it only when we really need help.”

I shouldn’t have judged Honey as merely the sheltered daughter of a millionaire, and I was pleasantly surprised when I heard the clear, sweet bob, bob-white she demonstrated.

“That’s better than fleep, fleeoweep.”

I felt a trick of something—fear, anticipation … excitement?—race down my spine.

“H-have y-ou heard that scream before tonight?” Trixie asked. And again, I was surprised by the apprehension I heard in her voice.

Cap didn’t speak for a long time. I watched him. And wondered. I’d heard Cap’s stories. Everybody within a couple hundred miles of St. Joe knew the legends. But I, for one, had never been quite sure whether or not my brother was pulling my leg. And right now, it looked to me like he was having an internal debate with himself. Would he tell them the local folklore? Tell them the truth? Or make a joke about it?

Finally, he spoke, but he didn’t answer my internal questions. “A few times.”

“What about you?” Trixie demanded, darting a penetrating gaze at me and then Hallie.

I knew my sister hadn’t. “No,” I admitted. “But Cap told me about it.”

Apparently, he hadn’t told Hallie. “Anybody care to strain a tonsil to let us in on the scary secret?” she asked, in that flat, languorous tone she used when she was trying to play it cool.

“Never mind, Hallie,” Cap said, giving her a stern glance. “He’s gone now.”

“He?” Mart asked alertly. You couldn’t pull anything over on any Belden, east coast or west. “How do you know it’s a he?”

“I don’t,” Cap said. “But it’s over seven feet tall and—”

“Cool it, Cap,” I said, my voice soft but commanding. If he got started on the stories, most of which were just that—stories—he’d never stop. And our guests would be scared out of their hiking boots.

Cap got my drift. He shut it off like a switch, stood, and said in a light tone—that probably only I could detect as artificial, “Who wants to help me serve the watermelon?”

“Allow me!” Mart volunteered. Finally, a Belden behaving in a completely predictable manner.

He and Cap marched off to the stream where we had left the watermelons cooling in the icy water. Hallie ran for a big metal dishpan, which she set on our portable camp table. Mart and Cap returned in no time flat, each with an enormous watermelon cradled in their arms. Cap deftly transferred the weight of his melon to one arm and unsheathed the hunting knife strapped to his belt. He lowered the melon gingerly to the table—miraculously the flimsy thing didn’t collapse—and cut into it.

“Oh, yum!” Di squealed. She jumped up to assist Mart in doling out the dripping, sweet treat.

Trixie sidled up to me, letting the others surge forward for a slice of watermelon. “How tall is a moose?” she asked.

Remembering my brother’s words, I exaggerated a smidge. “Well over seven feet at the shoulder.” Would she assume Cap was talking about a moose? Probably not. But presumably she didn’t know that moose were a little smaller than that, more like four to six feet at the shoulder.

“What kind of sound does he make?”

“He bellows. Have you heard an elephant at a circus? The sound is similar.” Without affirming or denying Cap’s half-told tale, I added, “Don’t worry about it, Trixie. Nobody’s reported an incident so far.”

“Knutson?”

It was weird hearing my given name. Maybe that’s just the way Miss Trask was. But she didn’t call my cousin Beatrix. Ah, well. I didn’t call her Margery. “Yes, ma’am?”

She smiled but didn’t tell me—again—not to call her ma’am. I couldn’t help it. It was how I had been raised.

“I was wondering how I can recognize this famous Idaho white pine I’ve read about. What makes it different from the white pines in the east? Are there more than those two types?”

I smiled and nodded. “There are actually six or seven types of white pine but only three are native to North America. The eastern, which is what you’d be familiar with. The limber, which is also called the Rocky Mountain white pine, so that should tell you where to find them. And our Idaho, or western, white pine. Its needles are in clusters of five, and the tree grows straight and true, up to two hundred feet, and doesn’t spread as much as other species—which makes it highly-prized for timber.”

Like my cousin, I found spouting off trivia to be something I came by naturally. I could do it without even really thinking about what I was saying. So, even though I was talking to Miss Trask, I was fully aware of Trixie. And I could see that she was deep in thought. I had a bad feeling that she was wondering about my “no incidents” comment rather than my moose or tree expertise.

When the last juicy bite of watermelon had been eaten, Cap collected the rinds and heaped them in the dishpan. “No need to bury them. The porcupines will polish off this treat by morning. I’ll dump them down by the creek, so we won’t have the varmints wandering through camp all night.”

“If you run across that bee trap, take care of it, will you, Cap?” Hallie asked. I could hear the sarcasm in her tone.

Cap looked startled. He must have forgotten about his bee trap excuse. I know he wasn’t surprised by our sister’s smart mouth. He mumbled, “Oh, sure.” He strode away into the dark, carrying the load of rinds.

“Hey, wait for me!” Mart exclaimed, scrambling up to follow Cap. I really hoped he wasn’t going to eat the melon rinds.

“Does Cap read a lot?” Trixie asked out of the blue.

“Depends on what you mean by ‘a lot’.” I grinned at her. “Cap’s English teacher would say he never cracks a book, but she’d be wrong. He hangs around the forestry lookout and memorizes all the government pamphlets.”

“Then he knows all that goes on in the woods?”

There was the Trixie I knew. Bulldogging for answers. I sighed. I didn’t want to share the answers she was looking for, and I wasn’t even sure if she really wanted to hear them.

“Cap knows,” I said, turning away from her when I heard the soft suka, suka, suka. It sounded like it was coming from well downstream. Cap and Mart would be fine. Still, I let out a quiet grunt of satisfaction when they reappeared, swinging the empty dishpan between them and chanting some childish nursery rhyme. That had to be Mart’s doing, rather than Cap’s. I shook my head and chuckled at the odd partnership.

Miss Trask stood up and brushed the bark from her squeaky new blue jeans. I had the feeling that she didn’t own another pair. And probably hadn’t even owned that pair until she learned she would be roughing it in the Idaho wilderness for several days. “Bedtime, my friends,” she announced. “Now, tell me, how do we dispose of the fire?”

“Knut and I will take care of it, Miss Trask,” Cap said quickly, darting a glance my way. “If the rest of you will help us carry water.”

Everyone pitched in and yet Cap waved them off when they approached the fire as if to put it out then and there. “Don’t worry about that. Knut and I will take care of it. Go on to bed, if you want.” As the Bob-Whites and Hallie wandered off to the tents, still chattering away and not looking tired at all, despite the late hour, Cap leaned toward me and muttered, “Before or after two?”

“I’ll take first watch,” I answered, not looking at him but at the others. Especially always curious Trixie. She and the other girls poked their heads out of their respective tents and began acting like … well, girls. Giggling and gossiping. Even Trixie joined in on the sleepover chat. Oddly, it gave me some comfort as I settled down for my sentry shift.

I laid a large, heavy flashlight on the log beside me. It occurred to me that it was no defense against… well, whatever St. Joe had in mind for us tonight. Cap said they were harmless, but I still wasn’t sure if he was pulling my leg or if he honestly believed.

Then why did I agree to this lonely vigil? If I didn’t believe, then what was I standing watch for? And if I did believe Cap, that they were harmless, then what was I guarding against?

I pushed my hands into the pockets of my jacket, wondering if it would get cold enough to want gloves. They were in the tent, and I didn’t want to disturb Brian. I’d just have to suffer. The campfire would help. I grabbed the long limb we were using as a poker and stoked the fire a bit. It didn’t need to be a bonfire, but I didn’t want it to die out, either.

I glanced at my watch. Two hours and thirty-eight minutes until Cap came back to join me. He said he was going to sleep, but I hadn’t heard the zipper on his tent. I didn’t turn around to look but I wondered if he was back there. Watching.