Pine Sight (First Draft) – Part Two

“The hills are alive with the sound of eyes”

It’s been a couple of weeks since the last edition of “Pine Sight,” huh? And for good reason; in that time, I was exploring a bog and getting stuck in a ditch. You know, as one does from time to time. One day, you’re the middle of the road, other days, you’re the ditch. And other days still you’re a bug on a baseball bat in what may or may not become a mixed metaphor for life. You know what they say, though. Once in a lifetime.

Either way, whether you are bug or ball or bat or b ditch, your road has led you, sometimes for better and often for worse, to my blog. So why don’t you stop, rest, chat a while, and read the middle section of a story that aims to be a reasonable length (compared to some people) and will hopefully end with part three, where all the scary stuff is packed into one final segment. Because this is, you know, still supposed to be a scary story. I am disappointed to report that nothing scary happens yet unless you count weird interactions with bizarro people from the public, which to me, are always scary.

This is also your once and future reminder that this story is lightly inspired by Search and Rescue Woods, and if you haven’t read that, give it a go, because maybe that’ll scratch your horror itch in the meantime.

And, this is your twice and past reminder that you can find part one here.

“Pine Sight,” By Andy Sima (2023)

Where we last left off….

“How’d you like to go for a little ATV ride? Help you cool off?” the radio chattered. I could hear my boss rubbing his beard stubble through the receiver, lopsided grin preparing to spell out my next several hours. I frowned. There had to be a catch.

“First aid?” I asked. Stupid question. I knew that wasn’t it. They wouldn’t call me for it, anyway.

“Nope. Better. Dead critter duty,” he said. “We just got a call that there’s a fresh deer kill right off the trail up at the Seven Mile and Washburn spur intersection.” Same place we had calls last week about weird noises in the woods, which had turned out to be woodpeckers, and too much poop, which had turned out to be bears.

“Shouldn’t maintenance go and get it?” I paused. I had work to do for this weekend’s big geology program, but then again, who would pass up an ATV ride in a national park? That I’m getting paid for? “On second thought, I got it,” I said.

“Great!” my boss chirped. “I heard it stinks. Take a shovel and hop to it.” Oh. There’s the catch. I love my job, I told myself, and half-smiled……

Filling my plastic tote of animal parts and paraphernalia, I lugged the heavy box onto the back of the golf cart parked just at the edge of the amphitheater. Edges of the box almost slipping through my fingers, I strapped it down with bungees and hopped in the cart. Holding my breath as I passed the RV dump station. Crossing the road to the hot asphalt meadow where the seeds to sprout were cars and tourists. I pulled up behind the Canyon Village education center, parked behind two National Park Green ATV’s. I unlocked a staff door, flinging it open with one hand and bumping it with my hip to keep it open long enough to haul the box full of bison skin inside.

I was surprised to bump into my boss, Brett, in the back room. Campaign hat tilted to one side, he had a sharpie clutched between his teeth and two enormous mudstones clasped in each hand. Those rocks taste like sand, I thought.

“Jerst der mern eh wernted ter see,” Brett said, carefully placing the mudstones into a bubble-wrapped bin at the bottom of a shelf of similarly rock-filled bubble-wrapped bins. He spat the sharpie into a now-free palm. His other hand rummaged in his pocket before returning to sight with ATV keys.

I placed my own bin of program supplied on a middle shelf, eyeing the nearby bin full of additional bison pelts. The bit about not having enough skins had been a bit of a white lie; I had simply forgotten to switch out a summer pelt for the winter one. But I wouldn’t be admitting that to guests.

I pulled the golf cart keys out of my own pocket and held them up for Brett. “You want to trade?” I said.

“Just what I had in mind,” he replied. I moved to hand them to him, but with practiced ease, he began an underhand toss. “Catch on three. One two three,” and the ATV keys collided with shoulder as I flinched to one side. Instinctively, I released the golf cart keys, which collapsed in a heap at Brett’s feet. I should have expected as much.

“Whoops, my bad,” he said, picking up the golf cart keys and beaming at me. “Well, you can’t win ‘em all. ATV’s parked out back, shovel and gloves’re already strapped in” he said, and winked and turned away. The golf cart keys jangled as he spun them on his finger.

“Thanks,” I called back. I stood in the storage room for a minute, feeling the spot on my shoulder where the keys had collided. I like Brett. I do. I love my job, I thought, and forced a half-smile.

The hum of people from the visitor center’s main floor seeped in from under the cracks in the door and between the wood beams that met at the corners of the room. Like a hive of bees, or a nest of snakes, or a den of badgers, or, well, those weren’t very flattering ways to think of guests, I finished the thought. But the aura of movement from the rest of the park filled the building, even where I couldn’t be seen by prying eyes. At least I could get a little out into the backcountry, I thought.

I turned and left the storage room, locking the back door and hopping in the ATV that already had packed into its back a snow shovel, hacksaw, and box of size large latex gloves. I hoped that whatever dead thing I was moving off the side of the trail wasn’t too decomposed as to make a mess of the snow shovel, because I really didn’t fancy cleaning burst intestine today. Hopefully it was only a day old and had just been festering in the summer swelter. That was something we all had in common.

The ATV hummed to life with a vibration that brought the muscle of my body into harmony with it. I backed the small vehicle out into the larger parking lot and threaded by way through throngs of people before reaching the main road. The staccato rhythm of the machine and my legs joined the skin of the road as I turned towards Inspiration Point and the Yellowstone River. But I wouldn’t be going that far down; driving on the shoulder of the main road, I could go against the flow of one-lane traffic if I looked professional enough. In uniform, I always felt like I did. Out of it, not so much.

It wasn’t long at all before I reached the trailhead to take me to wherever the alleged dead deer was. There was barely a parking lot there, and what of it that was there was empty. Which was fine because I didn’t need to park anyway. I took note of the trail map anyway, just in case, and wiped the sweat and its sticky fingers from my forehead.

The trail intersection I had been told to go to was less than three miles down, but I’d have to be wary of washouts in the trail, especially this close to the river valley. The summer had been brutally hot, that much was clear, but in some many places where the trees didn’t totally shade out the ground, the sun had cooked any extant plant life. We’d had reports of erosion and trail-washouts after every heavy rain, and even sometimes without precipitation at all, the skin of the earth peeling away in great swaths like rubbing your fingers over a scab enough times until the blood begins to pool up to the surface again. The blood of the earth here, at least, was much, much deeper than we could ever erode to. Hopefully.

I was about to swing my ATV onto the trail when a solo hiker, a man, waved me down, him suddenly standing in the middle of the trail. He caught me off-guard, I hadn’t seen him, hadn’t heard him, certainly hadn’t smelled him, as I pulled up to the trailhead, but he walked out from behind the trail information kiosk all the same. He was tall, burly and as thickly knotted as a slab of quartz overgrown with tree roots. His long, brown beard, streaked through with vivid red, reached the middle of his sternum. But his skin, it was… I couldn’t quite get a bearing on what color it was. It made my head swim, staring at it. His skin was a pale, ashy white, practically the same color of the washed-out trail. His eyes, I noted as a glanced away from his thick, oddly-colored arms, were the color of water. They shimmered. They changed.

“Excuse me,” he said, voice hoarse and deep and very much how I imagined an army office to sound. “Are you here to clean up the deer?”

I smiled and tipped my hat. “Sure am. Did you call it in?”

“Nah, family ahead of me on the trail did, though,” he said. He chuckled, as if remembering an ironic joke, and said, “Little girl of theirs wanted to poke it with a stick.”

“Kids will be kids,” I said, easing into the interaction. “But, we don’t want to risk bears, or really anything, and people getting too close. All about risk management. I’ll just be hauling it a couple hundred feet into the woods, if that.”

The pale man huffed with what was maybe a laugh. His teeth were stained yellow, and his eyes never left mine. “You folks run a tight ship here.”

“We try our best,” I said. He stared at me, in silence. “Anything else I can help you with while I’m here?”

“No, I’ll be heading back to my camp, I think,” He nodded to me and stepped out of the way, and gestured towards the packed dirt path between short wooden pylons, barely wide enough for the ATV to pass through.

I gently tilted the throttle forward, and eased my way off the main road and into what was, more or less, officially backcountry. The distinction was debatable this close to the visitor center, but it did mean that if, against all odds, something happened to me, the other rangers would have to come get me with the other ATVs. There would be no golf carts or ranger vans here. The radio pinned to my shoulder cycled its way upwards in terms of level of importance.

In the single mirror attached at the vehicle’s handbrake, I could see the man still standing at the trailhead. He watched me until I could no longer see him as the trail curved around the pines…….

That’s in for this week! I know it’s on the shorter side, but I’m hoping to have the rest of the story wrapped up in the next part. Notice I didn’t say next week, but next part. Because, if all goes according to plan, I should have a very exciting announcement next week. We’ll have to see how it goes.