3. Erin
ERIN
Four cameras are down when I check the network Thursday morning, and when I hike the west transect I've stopped being surprised and started being furious.
Station two is facedown in the ferns with the casing split.
Station five has been unstrapped and set neatly at the base of the tree, lens shattered, like somebody wanted me to find it in one piece so I'd understand the message.
Station nine is simply gone. Not a fragment, not a strap, not a screw.
Someone unbolted a mount I sank into a red pine with a cordless drill and took the hardware with them.
I sit on a deadfall and eat a granola bar and do the arithmetic. Fourteen hundred dollars a unit. Three units confirmed dead, one abducted. My equipment line for the entire contract was eleven thousand. Amelia is going to have opinions delivered at high speed and moderate volume.
The laptop is worse. I get back to the cabin at four, plug in, and my field database opens to a folder structure that looks correct until it doesn't. Tuesday's transect: empty.
Wednesday's water chemistry: empty. The metadata for the first eight camera stations, including my original GPS marks, is a directory with nothing inside it.
Deleted, cleanly, and then the recycle bin emptied on top of it.
The backup drive is sitting on the table exactly where I left it. I know it's exactly where I left it because it was on top of my field notebook, and now it's beside my notebook, an inch to the left, squared to the table edge like some tidy intruder put it back. I feel the hair go up on my arms.
Nash comes when I call, which is its own kind of infuriating, because he arrives in nineteen minutes from a station that's twenty-six minutes away.
He doesn't say anything for a while. He crouches by station five where I've left it in situ, turns the casing over with two fingers, and looks at the mount holes in the bark like they're going to confess.
"Torx bit," he says. "T-twenty-five. Whoever pulled nine had the right driver and knew the mount before he got here."
"So he'd seen it. Or seen the spec sheet."
"Or both." He straightens. "You file with the sheriff yet?"
"I called Sheriff Louis Reeves this morning.
He was kind about it. He also used the phrase 'kids with four-wheelers,' which, I want to be generous, is not a theory, it's an excuse.
" I shove my hands in my jacket pockets.
"Nash. There are no four-wheeler tracks.
There are no boot prints on the trail because somebody walked the creek bed both directions. That's not kids. That's tradecraft."
He picks up the broken casing and starts back toward the truck, and I match his stride because I'm not going to jog after him like a spaniel.
"Say something," I demand.
"I'm listening."
"You're stonewalling with excellent posture. Who is doing this?"
"I'm not sure."
"Guess. You've lived here your whole life. You know every boat, every dog, every grudge in this county. Give me a name and I'll do the rest."
He stops and sets the casing down with more care than a dead camera deserves. When he faces me his eyes have this flat blue steadiness I'm learning to distrust, because it never means calm. It means the door is shut.
"If I hand you a name and I'm wrong, you'll go and face the wrong person," he says. "If I'm right, you'll go to the right one. Either version ends with you alone in the woods with somebody who already came into your cabin."
"So your plan is that I know less."
"My plan is that you keep the doors locked and stop hiking alone."
"I've worked field sites in three countries…"
"I know." He says it without heat. "You're better in the bush than anyone I've walked out here with. That's not the problem. The problem is you're the only one on your side."
I want to argue. I discover, unhelpfully, that my throat's gone tight, because nobody has said anything close to that to me since the grant collapsed and my entire department discovered urgent business elsewhere.
"Then help me," I say. "Actually help. Not the tow-truck version where you show up and hand me my broken things."
He picks up the casing again and puts it in the truck bed. "I'll pull the state loaner cameras out of storage tomorrow. Six of them. They're older, but they're mine to lend and nobody's got the spec sheet."
It isn't an answer. It's something, and I hate a little how much I want to.
The following Saturday night the reservoir does something it hasn't done in the eleven nights I've been here.
I'm on the porch at half past ten logging bat calls when the first light slides across the water — no navigation lights, just a low working lamp aimed down at the deck.
Then another, four minutes behind, holding the same line.
Then a third. They're running the deep channel beyond the drop-off in single file with matched spacing, no chatter, no fishing lamps, no drifting.
Nobody fishes like that. Nobody recreates like that. That's a convoy.
I'm in the truck before I've finished the thought, down the fire road to the old boat turnout with my binoculars and a notebook and my headlamp off.
From the gravel bar I can make out four hulls now, coming toward the north shoreline where there's no dock, no ramp, no reason.
Something big is riding under a tarp on the second boat.
I get my binos up and start writing hull numbers by feel, and my heart is going like a bird trapped in a garage, and I'm thinking this is it, this is the thing, this is documentable…
A hand closes over my forearm and another comes across my mouth, and I nearly take a swing before I register the size of him and the smell of woodsmoke and pine pitch.
"Down," Nash breathes against my ear. "Now."
He doesn't wait for me to agree. He takes us both off the gravel bar and into the willow scrub, one arm still around me, and we go flat in cold sand behind a root wad with his forearm braced across my back. I can feel his heart. It's slower than mine by half, which seems medically improbable.
Sixty seconds later the shoreline lights up.
Not floodlights, handhelds, four of them, sweeping in a disciplined pattern.
Left, center, right, back. Men come up the bank in a spaced line, moving in a controlled sweep, and every one of them is carrying something slung across his chest that is definitely not a fishing rod.
One stops, his light crawls over the spot where I was kneeling seconds ago and my boot prints are still sitting in the wet sand.
He says something into his collar, photographs the ground, and moves on. Nash's hand stays flat between my shoulder blades until the last light is gone from the bank. When he finally lets me sit up I realize I've been holding his sleeve in a fist.
"Those weren't poachers," I whisper.
"No."
"Nash, that was a perimeter." My voice cracks. "They're not hiding from the law. They're not worried about the law. Somebody is protecting this."
He looks out at the black water where the last hull is disappearing, and he doesn't tell me I'm wrong.