Here Be Monsters (Tyler Cunningham) (20 page)

Route 30S, 3:37p.m., 9/11/2012

I balanced the box of donuts on the dashboard, made a few cop jokes about myself, took one of the ones with maple cream spread on it, and waited. Hope was doing her best imitation of a grumpy round rock, but she wasn't made of stone, and the smell of the hot dough and oil got to her before long. She groaned and grunted and rotated and adjusted her balled up shape so that her head was now resting on her butt, facing me. I could see her small brown eyes watching my right hand bring the donut up to my mouth for each bite, and after a few times, she swallowed loudly, then sighed delicately. I finished my first donut, and reached into the box for one of the plain ones. I felt it to make sure that it wasn't magma hot, and then broke off half and put it on the edge of her blanket (
and the passenger seat
), as far as was possible from her balled up form.

She was concentrating so intently on the donut that
she didn't have time to react when I reached down and put it on the chair. After the fact, she seemed to want to move, but the donut was already there and my hand was back on the wheel. She watched the donut and sniffed it hard, either in an attempt to draw it closer by vacuum power, or to detect whatever subtle poisons I had clearly loaded the Trojan donut with. A minute later, when I grabbed my next maple cream donut, and with my other hand full of steering wheel, she felt confident enough to stretch her neck out, until she could pick her donut up gently with just the tips of her teeth. She dropped it again in the center of the ball that she had made of herself, and appraised the thing for five long seconds, before inhaling it. When she was done, she looked back towards me and sighed contentedly, but with hunger and desire, not the hatred and fear that her looks had contained before. I tried not to let the gloating reach my eyes or mouth, and handed her the next half donut.

By the time we had reached the turnoff at Rock Island Bay, to head off the big road and onto a series of bumpy little ones, Hope had finished both of her donuts, and was licking the maple cream
off of a piece of one of mine.

We bounced and jounced around a half-assed gate that might stop people from Massachusetts from getting their Priuses back onto the old logging trails, but barely slowed down Ho
pe and me in the nimble Element. We could hear some branches scratching along both sides; I made a mental note to ask Frank about reimbursement, and then made a further note reminding myself that this was fun, and that I didn't care about the scratches.

When we went by a small pond dotted with geese chattering at each other, and sounding for all the world like a cocktail party where everyone had had too much to drink, Hope sat up nice and tall to check out the birds,
and gave a couple of off-duty woofs. We drove away from the road and around Mt. Morris, towards Little Simon Pond, closing in on Cynthia's first set of coordinates minute by minute.

I passed the tiny, almost invisible, side road heading up beside a creek that came down off the back of Mt. Morris, and while I couldn't see a trailer, I could see reasonably fresh tire tracks leading both up and down the steep,
but passable, jeep trail. I recognized the approach and jeep-trail heading uphill from the meth-camp pictures that Cynthia had foolishly shot. I kept driving along the road for a few hundred more yards until I had made a couple of turns along the shore of Little Simon Pond, to a pull-off next to the water, looking out at the single island on this backcountry pond. I grabbed the donuts off the dashboard, and a couple cokes and my un-serious fishing gear, then went around to let Hope jump down and walked her (
via the long lead
) down to the water's edge.

I clipped a
carabineer to her leash and to a belt loop on my shorts and let go of her. I put the donuts in my tackle-box, cracked a coke, and walked out into the water to do a bit of casting into some weeds a ways down the shore from Hope and me, where a tiny creek dumped into the pond by some boulders. Hope turned a few circles and lay down to watch.

Over the next hour, I got a few bites, and hooked a couple of nice bass, which we would enjoy for dinner later; along with a feisty sunfish that swallowed my treble-hook so completely that I injured it removing the hooks; so I decided to give it to Hope to snack on
. Once I'd ripped the hooks out of the poor fish, I chucked it up on shore near Hope. She sniffed at it until it jumped, scaring her mightily; she then scooped it up and gave a quick crunch to kill it, before spending the next 15 minutes eating it and making happy noises behind me while I kept fishing as the sun moved further and further behind me, lengthening my shadow across the water.

Hope and I were enjoying the
fading afternoon, together, but each in our own way; I'd say something to her every few minutes; she'd ignore me. When I went back to grab a coke and a donut, I gave her the maple cream one that she'd started back on Route 30S (
she didn't wag or smile, but it was a close call
). Around 5:10p.m., I heard a truck high-center and clang off of a rock down about where the creek-trail to Mt. Morris must have been (
Cynthia's closest marked point on the map
). I forced myself not to turn around, even when I heard the truck slow to swing out around the Element. Hope growled, and stood up to bark a few times, which grated my nerves, but made for perfect 'hide in plain site' cover. The truck kept going to a wide spot further down the pond, and then turned around to return to their hiding place; I heard it clang off the same spot going back up the hill, and fished for another forty minutes before packing it in for the night, reasonably certain that the truck belonged to George's drug-production machinery.

As the sun was dipping behind Mt. Morris, I drove straight through on the road to Simon Pond, so that Hope and I didn't have to double back past the meth-lab (
I hadn't seen any meth, but it was exactly where emails between George and one of his guys had said that it would be, so I wasn't much in doubt, and certainly didn't want to check it out more closely
). We swung around and pointed the Element back into town to pick up my laundry, thanking Gert, and heading back out and mostly northwest, towards Canton and Potsdam. I found a nice spot to pull off into a chunk of State Forest Preserve just north of the Piercefield Flow, where Hope and I could enjoy the sound of running water, and set up camp.

I hung a hammock and threw my bag inside it, cooked both bass in foil with butter and a spice premix that I make once a year in a huge batch from sea salt, cracked-peppercorns, dried/minced garlic, and a bit of brown sugar; Hope loved it!
The night sounds and dark and cool seemed to make her a little uncomfortable. She balanced her diminishing fear of me with her growing fear of the woods at night, and curled up between my feet and the stones of the fire pit as I sat cross-legged. When it was time for bed, she protested being left alone in the nest I'd made in the back of the Element (
I'd taken the rear seats out for this trip
) for so long that I eventually caved in, and joined her, trading a comfy night's sleep for a quiet one. She made a warm pressure behind my knees and at some point in the night was scared by loons on the Flow. She whimpered her way into the opening of my bag and crawled down to sleep by/on/amongst my feet at the closed end. I fell asleep smiling (
no number, this one was actually mine
).

Piercefield Flow, 4:45a.m., 9/12/2012

Sleeping on someone else's pattern and schedule was a new experience for me, and when Hope started tunneling up from the bottom of my sleeping bag, I woke with a start; her faced poked through the opening, right by my face, a second later, and she gave me a casual/ embarrassed/'say nothing' look that let me know that what happens in Piercefield Flow, stays in Piercefield Flow.

We had gotten up a few times during the night, either she or I initiating it, but in each case we'd both head out to pee and walk the perimeter of our camp
to look and listen and smell. There was enough light spread by the dome light of my Element to move around and get some breakfast started for both of us. I cranked up my alky-stove on the tailgate of the Honda so that Hope wouldn't knock it over and burn the Park, put her on a super-long lead to explore a bit, took down my mostly un-used hammock, and was just setting up our food when the water started to steam in the way that it does just before boiling.

I made a big bowl of oatmeal for myself, and enjoyed it with a coke; Hope had a bowl of kibble that I gravified with some leftover hot water, and lapped some cool water from the Flow.
I talked about my plans for the day with Hope, she wasn't listening very hard, but I normally talk things over with a parallel (
and fully non-corporeal
) me, so the occasional eye contact and sigh or burp provided a nice counterpoint to my discourse. With her (
imagined
) guiding questions and responses, I tightened up our schedule a bit, worked through some possible bumps in the road ahead, and improved the plan for how I was going to inform Frank about the positives and the possibles. We were close enough to Tupper Lake still for Hope's sad eyes to make a convincing argument for going back and waiting for Gert to get to the Washboard and make us some donuts. But I used my veto power, and we headed northwest and away from Tupper, stopping at the gas station at Sevey Corners to fill up my gas tank, and load up on some crappy road food for the two of us.

Sevey Corners, 5:58a.m., 9/12/2012

From Sevey Corners we had to drive north on Route 56 for a bit until we got to a wide
spot in the road called Stark.

Stark is most notable for a sign announcing it to be
Stark. It is also known
(by me… now
) for a gravel track that leads away from the road to the north, above and behind the Stark Falls and Crary Falls Reservoirs. This track breaks off into a series of less and less serious/navigable tracks. I kept one eye on the GPS (
for direction of travel only, it didn’t show anything but blank green screen where we were driving
) and one eye on the graveled tire ruts that we were following; they weren't nearly big enough for names or to make it onto Garmin's mapping software, but could eat my muffler for lunch if I wasn’t careful in straddling the biggest ruts.

Hope sat up as tall as she could, and was just barely able to see over the dashboard, loving the view and smells
and bounces. Around one turn we surprised a pair of young deer that showed no reaction to our presence beyond briefly lifting, and then returning, their heads to some sweet clover they were enjoying. Hope assumed, or pretended, that they were big dogs, and did nothing more than wag and give a near-silent woof in their direction. I took about two dozen turns on the way in and was incredibly glad that I'd marked the point where we had left the road with my GPS leaving an electronic trail of breadcrumbs that we could follow back to Route 56. I couldn't have told you with any certainty whether or not we were on public or private land by the time we got to the blocked road, but we hadn't passed a camp or cabin for a while.

We were exploring this area for a few reasons: first, it seemed the perfect spot for George to hide one of his labs, based on isolation and empty space and few attractions for tourists; second, I'd talked to a trio of businesses that each remembered having recent cash dealings that were enough outside of the ordinary to be notable (
a cargo van needing a tow, a huge purchase of propane and supplies every few weeks by the same guys, and weekly blow-out dinners at a tiny locals' only diner
), all within a few miles of where I was driving right now; third, Cynthia had emails mentioning Stark as a place; fourth, it was the closest likely circle on my map to where Hope and I had camped last night. I was exploring my way through a fair amount of gas and dirt-road miles, hoping not to be wasting my time, when I drove around a turn and saw a downed tree blocking the road. I had to force myself not to nudge Hope and point, with an 'I told you so'.

There was a big p
ine down and across the road, with some evidence of recent truck traffic on both sides of the trunk. In my mind's eye, I could see supplies of all sorts being slid from the truck on my side to the truck on the inside of the blockade. I looked for, and found, the marks where a chain had been attached to the tree to pull it down and across the road. My GPS indicated that Whitney Pond was just back through the woods a few hundred yards. I looked over at Hope, who seemed excited to get to work after the bumpy drive, but I wasn't sure that the things that had made her perfect for yesterday's subterfuge wouldn't work against us today. In fact, I was nearly certain that she'd bark and sink us in the spy business (
and I had no desire to get shot again
), so I turned around, took a nearby T-junction turn, and headed down and away from the downed tree, following a track leading south that I hoped would lead to what my paper map called Thirty-Five Pond.

I found a smaller track off the already tiny trail that looked as though it would curve up to the pond I wanted to find. I took it and was rewarded by a pretty little body of water that looked worth returning to for fishing and camping sometime (
despite the fact that I was reasonably sure that I was on the private holding of some massive paper company
).

Hope and I got out to stretch and pee, and sniff around the clearing by the water; it appeared not to have been visited in a year or more, judging
by the grass in the fire pit. I backed the truck most of the way down to the water, tied the extra-long lead to the bumper, and got out my fishing pole.

I had two reasons to do this: first I wanted to spend a bit of time with Hope in this new spot before heading out and leaving her, and second, I wanted to establish some cover if anybody up at the presumed drug-lab had heard/seen
us go by and followed us down. I didn't think it very likely that anyone had noted our passing; but it was a pretty morning, and I had fun fishing while Hope chased frogs and grasshoppers along the shore. I caught a couple of sunnies and a perch for her to gnaw on while I was gone (
I killed them first this time; she seemed to like them as well as the live one yesterday afternoon, and I felt better about it
).