Free Night Wings by Joseph Bruchac Page A

pathetically gasping for breath as the rest of the nefarious crew comes back to make sure their antiquated guide is still capable of keeping on.
    This gives me plenty of time to shove the rope that Grampa Peter passed to me into my shirt and under the waistband of my pants. By the time Stazi reaches in to extricate me from the brush, I have also managed to get the smile off my face that appeared when I realized some things. One, of course, is that Grampa Peter really has been faking this routine of being a tired old man. He’s playing possum. Another isthat I had indeed seen something on the ground when we were yanked out of the van. It was a coil of thin nylon rope that must have been lost by some previous hiker. And it was plenty long enough to be used the way Grampa Peter told me to with that one word he whispered.
    “Snares.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN
One Big Bird
    “N o bars.”
    We’ve stopped for our four captors to drink from their canteens. Tip is frowning at his cell phone and tapping it with an index finger.
    “Tip, Tip.” Field’s patronizing voice comes from behind me. “You’re wasting your time with that. Reception is spotty at best in mountains such as these, filled with magnetite ore. And who were you about to call?”
    “Just tryin’ to check my messages,” Tip complains. “No law against that.”
    Field looks at an electronic device of his own that he has pulled from one of the many pockets in the khaki vest he put on just before we started our hike. And now he is frowning too.
    “Strange,” Field says to himself. He looks over at Grampa Peter as if to ask him a question, but catches himself before he does so. He’s learned that even though my grandfather may look as if he is about to keel over and die at at any minute, it hasn’t done a thing to loosen his tongue.
    Field shoves the device in his hand in front of my face. “Know what this is, boy?”
    I nod my head. “It’s a GPS unit.”
    We see a lot of them up here. I have never used one myself. Having lived near here all my life, I don’t even use a guidebook like the ones put out by the Appalachian Mountain Club. But these days most hikers and hunters and fishermen carry GPS units with them whenever they go out. On a nice day in the summer, you can sit on certain high spots that look out over the main trails and see three or four different parties of flatlander hikers walk for a hundred yards or so, then stop to check their satellite coordinates, then walk, then stop, and so on all the way up the mountain. As if they could get lost on a marked trail in broad daylight. Actually, maybe they could.
    “Well?” Field snaps.
    “It isn’t giving you a reading,” I reply.
    “I know that. The question is why.”
    I don’t know the answer to that. I understand why Field is confused. There’s nothing, except for that big bird that is still circling high above, between us and the location of that geosynchronous satellite. Strange. I almost say he really should hand it to Grampa Peter, because if anyone in the world can get a piece of electronic equipment to work, it’s him. But I am not about to go out of my way to be helpful. So all I say is, “I don’t know much about stuff like that.”
    “Idiot,” Field snarls. I think for a minute he is going to hit me with the GPS.
    Stazi comes up just then. He’s holding his own GPS unit.
    “Might be sunspots. Solar flares can interfere, ja?”
    “Hmmpph,” Field says, then jams the GPS back into one of his pockets, turns on his heel, and almost bumps into Louise, who is looking up into the sky, shading her eyes with her palm. Why he didn’t notice her behind him is beyond me. Her perfume, which smells like a mixture of rotting roses and a cat box overdue for a cleaning, is so strong that I can tell whenever she is within a hundred feet of me.
    “That is one big bird,” she says.
    “Where?” Tip reaches into the pack he’s placed at his feet. He pulls out a long-barreled machine pistol.