Bear Trapped (Bear Creek Grizzlies #5)

2. Lauren

LAUREN

L auren crouched in the muddy stream, peering into the foliage and undergrowth to check whether anything had disturbed the camera blind she’d set up a week or so ago. She’d spent at least a month studying the forest all around the mostly-abandoned cabin where she was hiding out to find the narrow paths and streams where a Sasquatch was most likely to be. It had to be exactly right to stand the best chance of getting photographic evidence.

She held her breath and checked up and downstream for anything else that might have been moving through the area. As fall turned quickly into winter, there were more bears around than Sasquatches, and she didn’t want to be caught unawares. Even with an airhorn and bear mace and bells to ring to scare them off.

But nothing else lingered in the trees, and the birds still sang and rustled around. She got up and brushed a few leaves off her already dirty pants and clambered up the bank to the small crossroads where several deer tracks and predator paths converged. It was near a source of fresh water, ran eventually into a meadow with good grass, had blackberry brambles along the paths, and provided plenty of concealment as the animals moved through the area. It was the perfect spot to catch a Sasquatch.

It was also one of the very, very few places with any cell phone reception.

Not that she was holding her breath for a phone call. It was the last thing she wanted, since that meant there was bad news. Ginger left groceries out for her at the meeting spot only two days ago, so Lauren didn’t expect to have another message. Still, they’d made a deal that Lauren would check for messages at least every three days. Just in case.

She exhaled in frustration to see that the small snare near the camera was undisturbed, so there wasn’t likely to be anything on the memory card. Unless Sasquatch had gotten good at resetting the fiddly snare.

She checked her phone and breathed easier when no messages awaited. Of course, that didn’t mean she was completely off the hook. After all, it was possible Ginger had been arrested and wasn’t able to send her a message. No one else in the cryptid community around Bear Creek knew where Lauren hid out, since it was safer that way.

Lauren straightened up and headed down the trail toward the meadow. Maybe one of the muddy areas captured footprints as the ground started to freeze. She almost missed having snow to help visualize animals passing through. The Sasquatch’s stride and feet were so distinctive there wasn’t any mistaking them for something else.

She tried to only think about the tasks in front of her: check the rest of the snares and spots where evidence might hide, get fresh water for the cabin, pick some berries if there were any left, and chop some firewood before the sun set. A full day all around. It was easier to ignore being a fugitive when busy and exhausted. Chopping wood and hauling water definitely got the job done.

Lauren set a small solar panel, hooked to a battery pack, out in the meadow before she began her search, since the cabin didn’t get enough sunshine to keep things charged. Then it was back to the methodical search for footprints, tufts of hair, scat, bones or half-eaten meals, or even scratches or broken branches a Sasquatch might use to signal others of its kind.

She’d never imagined being a fugitive at her age, and for something like attempted murder. It wasn’t her fault that the oil company wanted to run a huge pipeline through one of the few habitats where Sasquatch had actually been sighted. It hadn’t been the best idea to go protest a bunch with the rest of her cryptid-seeking friends, or to sneak onto the construction site where they’d been surveying for the pipeline. Lauren only meant to take pictures of all the damage the oil company had already done, then pass it off to local reporters to name and shame the company, maybe get them to stop drilling and exploring. At worst, they planned to pour sugar in the gas tanks of the mining equipment.

It was her own stupid fault for not being a hundred percent clear on what everyone else thought was going on. Because all it took was one guy with a Molotov cocktail, a leaky propane tank, and a bit too much liquid courage, and half the damn yard exploded. Hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage, according to the news and the oil company’s fancy New York lawyers, and at least one security guard permanently disabled.

That would have been bad enough, but since Lauren had stupidly gone back to help Ginger after she twisted her ankle, Lauren was the only one who ended up visible on the security cameras.

It still stung. She was the only one the cops identified as responsible for the mess, even though there had been a dozen other people and the idiot with the Molotov cocktail. She went back to help someone else when the rest of the so-called activists fled and scattered into the woods and back to their cars—leaving her and Ginger behind to limp along to somewhere they could call for help. And yet she was the one with the warrant and skipped bail, hiding out in a rotting cabin with winter coming on and planning to sneak into Canada if Ginger figured out where to get a fake passport. Jumping bail hadn’t been the best idea, but she’d panicked after looking up the jail sentences for the charges on the arrest warrant.

Lauren swallowed a groan and tried to focus on the task at hand. At least she had uninterrupted time to search for Sasquatch. Not that she’d be able to publish her findings without being grabbed by the cops and thrown back in jail. Maybe she needed a pseudonym or activist name. Sunshine Blackberry. Meadow von Grizzly. Mudpuddle Moon.

She froze as something popped loudly in the distance, like a big limb breaking or a tree trunk splitting. Strange. The temperature had not dropped enough for sap to freeze and cause the wood to explode. Maybe something large ran into a tree or fell into a pile of branches. Or maybe it was nothing. She shook herself and checked her phone one more time as the hair on the back of her neck stood up.

There had been occasional boot prints on some of the larger trails, like more hikers started to move through the land adjacent to the national park. She could have reported them for trespassing on private land, but it wasn’t worth risking the attention. Mr. Hanover used to let Lauren and her mom hang out at the cabin whenever they got kicked out of a hotel or lost their trailer to the repo men. Lauren had great memories of the cabin, although she didn’t remember it being quite so shabby or leaky, and pretty good memories of being on the road with her mom. It was only looking back that she realized what a nightmare it must have been in reality.

She finished one more circuit of the meadow and retrieved the solar panels before picking up a few dead branches to haul back to the cabin for firewood. Lauren didn’t know how much longer she could hide out at the cabin before winter came through and froze her out. She’d never survive in deep snow, and it was already a fight to keep enough firewood stocked to cook. She couldn’t imagine having to heat the cabin and melt water and cook and… If Ginger stopped helping her, Lauren wouldn’t have any real food showing up, either. She would starve to death if she didn’t sneak back into town to steal out of dumpsters, running the risk of getting picked up and eventually tossed in jail as a bail jumper.

She clenched her jaw and hiked faster as another loud bang sounded far away. She’d wait another two or three days, then signal Ginger that she needed to find somewhere else to hide. Lauren definitely didn’t want to go to jail, since that was where both of her parents ended up, but it was better than freezing to death—even if she wouldn’t getting out again for a long, long time.