Free Night Wings by Joseph Bruchac Page B

Clearly he is one of those people who likes to shoot at anything that moves whenever he goes into the woods.
    Field holds up his hand.
    “No gunfire,” he commands. “Too high for you to hit with that popgun anyway.” He snaps his fingers. “Come on, give me the glasses.”
    Tip looks like a dog that’s been kicked in the teeth just as it was about to bite into a bunny, but he puts the gun away and pulls out a set of binoculars.
    Field lifts them up to his eyes, focuses. “Got it. Moving fast, whatever it is. Now it’s diving.”
    He’s following the dark-winged shape, but as it moves across the midday sun, he’s momentarily blinded.
    “Blast it!” He drops the binoculars from his eyes.
    “Eagle?” Stazi asks.
    “Couldn’t tell,” Field says, rubbing his eyes and blinking. “Sizable, though. Probably a golden eagle.” Then he smirks at me. “Unless it’s your fabled Poh-moh-lah.”
    He thinks he is being funny. But I was also watching that huge-winged creature as its flighttook it across the sky. Even without binoculars I could tell that it was larger than any eagle I’d ever seen before. I also saw that the direction it was traveling led down as if it was going to land above the little pass through the rocky hills just ahead of us. The same direction we are going.
    Field and Stazi and Tip and Louise are ignoring me now. They are still trying to decide whether or not to break out the cameras and work this sighting into the narrative of their dramatic quest. They’re also taking turns drinking something that has the sharp smell of alcohol from a silver flask that Stazi has just produced from his back pocket.
    I look over at Grampa Peter, asking the question with my eyes. What was that?
    He links his thumbs together, spreads his open palms wide, then nods his head.

CHAPTER TWENTY
Distant Rumble
    “R ight or left?” Field is talking to Grampa Peter the way you would to someone who is mentally challenged. Grampa Peter is still pretending it doesn’t bother him. He keeps playing the part of the feeble old man who is so broken that he’ll do whatever they ask him to do—aside from talking.
    Grampa Peter nods toward the pass just above us. The way is narrow, with ridges rising and falling. The land looks as if it were made by the hands of a giant, pushing rocks together here, dropping piles of boulders there. Sometimes we’re at the edge of long drop-offs and other times we’re squeezing through narrow crevices.
    We’ve stopped twice for Field to shoot more of his dumb speeches about the danger and difficulty of his quest. He’s actually changed his shirt each time—making it appear as if we have been on the trail for days rather than just a few hours. If we had stayed on the regular trail, we would have been at the Lake of the Clouds Hut by now, which is only three miles from the trail-head at the end of Base Road.
    We haven’t run into any hikers or seen any sign of other people, even from the overlooks that give us a view of one or two of the other trails. I suppose that’s not so strange. This is a vast area, and even on a beautiful summer day like this, when lots of people should be out hiking, you can avoid others by not using the easiest and most direct routes. But things feel sort of wrong to me, and I still haven’t seen a plane or even heard the distant rumble of a jet from the cloudless sky.
    It’s really steep here, almost straight up. Tip is huffing a little, and Louise has a grim and determined look on her face as she climbs. Stazi is reaching back and helping Field, who looks a little winded. At first none of them notice what Grampa Peter and I hear at the same time. It’s a rumbling, but not from the engine of aplane overhead. A couple of pebbles fall from the rock face next to us, and then the ground begins to shake.

    “Avalanche!” Stazi yells.
    I look up, but only for a second. Grampa Peter grabs me by the shoulder and yanks me up onto a ledge. You’d think I weighed