‘It was a myth that grew up along the trail. All the hazards of that journey, the terrain, the weather, disease, crooks, Indians . . . it somehow all got rolled up into one frightening mythological beast - the elephant; the size of a mountaintop, or a storm front, or the size of a broken cart wheel. If you caught a glimpse of the elephant ahead of you in the distance it was meant to be an omen, an omen to turn back right away, and go no further. And you sure as hell did that and thanked God you saw the elephant from afar, and not up close.’
Julian looked out into the darkness. Rose instinctively panned the camera away from him in the direction he was looking - towards the tree line across the clearing. ‘Do you think we’ll see anything tonight?’ he asked.
Grace laughed - a loose rattling sound like a leather flap caught in a wind tunnel. ‘Maybe we’ll see that elephant, eh?’
Julian turned round to look at the park ranger, then turned to look directly at the camera, his mouth a rounded ‘O’, those brows quizzically arched and his eyes wide like a nervous child’s.
Rose giggled silently. Jules had the kind of comedian’s face the camera loved.
CHAPTER 2
Friday
Sierra Nevada Mountains, California
Julian was woken by his aching groin.
Oh great, I need a piss.
He realised that he was going to have to step outside the tent.
‘Bollocks,’ he whispered to himself. ‘Shit and bloody bollocks.’
The campfire would be no more than glowing embers now and both Grace, with her reassuringly large hunting rifle, and Rosie were fast asleep, tucked away in their own tents. He really wasn’t that keen on the idea of wandering over to the tree line for a necessary piss. But Grace had warned them to pee well away from the tents, as the smell of urine could confuse a bear - could be construed as territorial marking.
‘Oh, come on, you wimp,’ he chided himself.
He wrestled his way out of the bag, fumbled for the torch and then, having found it and snapped it on, fumbled for his glasses.
‘Two minutes and you’ll be back in bed, snug as a bloody bug.’
He squeezed out of his tiny tent and panned the torch around the clearing, Grace’s parting words for the night still playing around with his over-active mind.
Did you know grizzlies can run as fast as a horse? Oh . . . and the smaller ones can climb trees?
Julian grimaced. ‘Yeah, thanks for that, Grace,’ he hissed, watching the plume of his breath quickly dissipate in the crisp night air.
He stepped lightly across the clearing, navigating his way over the lumps and bumps of long-dead and fallen trees. The beam of his torch flickered like a light sabre through the wispy night mist, picking out the uneven floor of the clearing, carpeted in a thick, spongy layer of moss. He was surprised at how much it undulated and guessed that perhaps some time in the past someone had been logging here, but never got round to finishing the job, leaving an assault course of rotting trunks and branches for him to awkwardly clamber over.
He made his way to the far side of the clearing and came to a halt on the edge, staring uneasily at a tangle of brambles and undergrowth leading up towards a wall of dense foliage - the start of the wood.
He turned to look back at the tents.
Sixty feet . . . is that far enough away?
He decided it would have to do. There was no way on earth he was actually going to step through the dense web of undergrowth ahead of him and into the woods. No way.
This is good enough.
He unzipped, feeling a sudden gotta-go rush that he couldn’t contain any longer, and, with a long groan of satisfaction, he let rip. His torch picked out the steaming silver arc and he watched with detached interest as the jet of piss stripped away - like a pressure hose cleaning a graffiti-covered wall - the delicate blanket of moss on a rounded log in front of him.
It wasn’t until he’d shaken off and tucked away, and then played his torch more thoroughly across the small arc of exposed dark wood, that his curiosity was piqued enough to take a step forward.
The exposed wood was curiously smooth, not natural. He reached out with his fingers and ran them along the surface. It was old and evenly