It only took two or three minutes’ walk up the two-rut to the spot where he’d pulled the Jeep off the lane. The lane wasn’t wide enough to park there, and Jack didn’t like to leave the vehicle in view of the road, just in case someone else came along. The Jeep was pretty recognizable, and he didn’t want some of the football player types to mess with it – there were some who thought it would be fun to fuck up something of his while he was out birding. Most of them were a bunch of assholes anyway, and the only high point in their lives was telling everyone how great they’d been at football in three or four years of school before they spent the rest of their existence working a machine at the plywood plant, or something else equally dull and boring. While Jack had plenty of doubts that he could ever land a job as a professional in any sort of birding activity, he knew he’d slit his wrists before he’d ever work in a factory.

Fortunately, the Jeep was just as he’d left it. It was an old one from back in the seventies. His dad had picked it up a few years before to use during hunting season, since he owned a deer hunting cabin with a bunch of guys way out in the boonies off of County Road 919. After Jack got his driver’s license he’d more or less inherited Jeep, except for the two weeks of deer camp. Though it was mechanically sound, it had seen better days. It too was camouflaged, in a hand-painted sort of fall leaf pattern, although most places it didn’t stick out a lot in the summer either. During the nice months Jack took the canvas top and doors off and left them in the garage, but the rest of the year he had them on. For some of the birding Jack did, it made almost as good a blind as his tarps, and the seats were a lot more comfortable.

Stas hopped up into the back seat and lay down as Jack set the camera in the seat and peeled out of his backpack, tossing it on the passenger side floor. There was a wooden box bolted to the floor between the seats; Jack popped it open, pulled out a fresh roll of 400 speed color film and reloaded the camera. Although it seemed unlikely that there would be anything else to take a picture of on the way back, you never knew for sure; after all, he hadn’t expected to take pictures of the circle of nude women or get the second series of the Kirtland’s Warbler. With that done, he put the film, camera, and his wide- brimmed hat into the box, and pulled out a ball cap that would be less likely to be blown off while he was driving.

He fastened the seat belt – always a good idea, but especially so when driving around in a Jeep without doors, the main reason Stas wasn’t allowed in the front seat – and started the engine. It may have been old, but it always started right up. As he backed the Jeep up so he could turn it around, Stas sat up on the seat; he liked riding through the woods about as much as Jack did, which was to say a lot.

It was only a short way out to the two-rut. Out of curiosity, Jack decided to turn right and continue on a ways, to see if he could figure out where the vehicles whose tracks he’d followed had pulled off the road. As he thought about it, he decided just to continue on up the two-rut; it got a little questionable in spots, but this was a Jeep, after all, so they were nothing it couldn’t handle. It would mean taking the long way home, an extra eight miles or so, but he hadn’t been that way for a while, and who knew what might be there to be seen?

Keeping it slow, Jack started along the two-rut, following the tire tracks in front of him. He didn’t have to go very far; in a couple hundred yards, he could see where the cars had turned off the road and followed a really faint path off into the scrub. For an instant, he thought of heading up that way, but quickly decided against it – it would be better if the women didn’t know he’d been there, and to poke around their vehicles could just lead to trouble.

It was a damn good thing he wasn’t a football player, he thought. Some of those assholes would think it would be fun to flatten the tires on the women’s cars, especially if they had even an inkling of what had been going on – what still might be going on – a few hundred yards out there in the brush. Jack made a mental note to check out that faint lane sometime, just on general principles, but kept on going without stopping, even picking up speed a little.

Boy, what would some of those asshole football players think if they’d seen what he’d just seen? Say, a gang of three or four of them, since they always seemed to run in packs. He snorted; they’d think it was a hell of a hoot, and would spread what they’d seen all over school. Hell, he caught enough shit from the football players on account of his birding activities; he’d been called “Birdbrain” for years and mostly tried to ignore them, although sometimes he just couldn’t. What the hell would the rumors say if the scene he’d just photographed were to get out around school? Life would be hell for Summer, that was for sure. Autumn, too, even though she was a couple years younger and hadn’t been out there, as far as he had seen, though that proved nothing. And if word of that pagan ritual, if that was what it had been, was to get out among some of the more pinheaded religious types around the school, of which there were too many, life would really be hell.

That decided one thing right there – he was going to keep his fat mouth shut about what he’d seen out there. At least as far as Summer or her family was concerned. Nobody needed to know it; hell, even he didn’t need to know it. Though he couldn’t call Summer a friend, exactly, there was no way he could do something like that to her. After all, her business was her business, and her friends, family, or whoever it was, had gone to some difficulty to keep it their business; the odds against a wandering birder tripping over them must have been astronomical.

But still, what the fuck was going on there? He had to admit that his curiosity was aroused. Again, he wished he’d had Stas’s ears, to have better heard what was being said. As it was, about all he had heard were voices, and he was unable to hear but a few words, none of which meant anything to him. Maybe he could spend some time on the Internet; after all, information about a lot of odd stuff was easy to find there, at least if he could find the right word to use in a search engine. Maybe the thing to do would be to go directly to Summer and hint around a little, but that wasn’t something he really felt like doing. It really wasn’t that important, but keeping it a secret was, as far as he was concerned.

That meant that he had to be sure that no one saw the middle part of that roll of film kicking around in the camera box. Usually when Jack had film to develop he just used the processing at the Spearfish Lake Super Market. There was no one-hour processing in Spearfish Lake, where whoever was running the machine might see the pictures and then run their mouths, but that didn’t mean that someone at the Super Market might not go through the photos. Worse, Jack had heard stories that film with nude shots on it sometimes got “lost” in processing. The story was that people from the nudist resort at West Turtle Lake northeast of town never ran their film through the Super Market. With the Kirtland’s Warbler photos on that same roll, getting the film lost was something that he couldn’t allow to happen.

The solution was obvious – go to some place where they had one-hour processing, so he could stand right there and make sure that the film didn’t get lost. There was a place at the mall on the north side of Camden that doubled as a camera store; they did one-hour processing, and Jack had been in there several times to get one piece or another of camera equipment. His tripod came from there, for example.

That pretty well meant that he was going to have to go to Camden, maybe first thing in the morning. Well, so be it, even though it was going to mean a long drive in the open Jeep. If the weather promised to be nice, it might even be a pleasant drive, and if the pictures of the Kirtland’s Warbler came out as nice as he was expecting, he could probably even get some blowups done there. Realistically, it would take him all morning, but maybe he could go out and check out the sand bar at the end of Point Drive in the afternoon to see if any new water birds were coming through on an early migration. There was a chance he might see a girl or two in bikinis as well. The bikini watching would be better at the beach in town, but the activity there at this time of year would drive off any self-respecting migratory bird, even migratory gulls, he thought.

He came to the place where the two-rut intersected with County Road 515, a somewhat better woods road that was graded out every so often. Though still a sand road, it would take him out to 471, which was gravel and would take him back to the State Road and Spearfish Lake. Just as well, the sun was starting to set and the bird activity was winding down.

He’d missed supper again, although he’d expected to. Maybe when he got back to Spearfish Lake a stop at the Frostee Freeze would be in order, rather than getting his mother pissed off because he threw something together after she’d finished the dishes. She hated that and could really be a pain in the butt about it.

The sun had set but the sky was still bright as he rolled the old Jeep into town. Even thinking about food had gotten him hungry; in spite of everything, he was still a teenage boy with a nearly insatiable appetite. A couple burgers, fries, maybe onion rings sounded pretty good.

He turned from Central onto Lakeshore and drove partway up the block. The Frostee Freeze was crowded, but that was to be expected on a Friday night, since the place was about as much of a teenage hangout as there was to be found around Spearfish Lake. As he waited to make the left turn into the place, he looked things over with dismay. There were at least half a dozen of the football player assholes hanging around that he could see from the road, so it seemed likely that there’d be more.

Did he really want to go in there? With that many of the assholes present there was bound to be the potential for problems. On the other hand, there seemed to be some adults around, so things might not get too out of hand. Just grab the food and go, he thought. Maybe this wouldn’t be all that bad, Jack thought as he parked the Jeep. If I can just get in, get my food and get out of here, things ought to be all right. “Stas, stay,” he said to the dog, who was now sitting on the seat.

The Spearfish Lake Frostee Freeze was strictly a late spring through early fall affair. In the distant past, or at least so Jack had been told, it had been an A&W, but those days were long gone. Sometime in that long ago it had metamorphosed into a soft ice cream place, and later on a limited menu of hot dogs, hamburgers, and the like had been added. It was still a drive-in, and a number of kids had jobs as carhops, which made it something of a rare bird, and it had actually become something of a tourist attraction.

There were only sixteen covered spots where you could order from the car like it had been done everywhere in the old days, but this time of night on a Friday all of them were filled and there wasn’t much hope of finding a spot open. To keep the volume of business up, one of the carhop stations had been converted into a walk-up window where you could place your order, and several picnic tables close to the orange and white building encouraged people to hang around for possible additional business.

It seemed like something of a miracle that there was only one person at the walkup window, and they were just finishing up their order. In his mind Jack went over what he wanted. Somehow the onion rings didn’t appeal as much as they had when he was coming into town so he decided to give them a pass. But it didn’t seem fair to just eat while Stas was watching; he’d been a good dog today, so when he got to the window he ordered three hamburgers, two loaded, one plain for Stas, along with his fries, a Coke and a water. The girl behind the counter was Ashley Kielhorn, a classmate. “Your order is number 43,” Ashley said as she handed him his change.

“Thanks, Ashley,” Jack replied politely. “Any idea how long it’s going to take?”

“Ten minutes, anyway,” she told him in a voice that said she thought it was a pretty stupid question. “It’s pretty busy here tonight.”

“OK, thanks. See you around,” he told her, thinking that if it was ten minutes he’d be damn lucky. Fifteen minutes, maybe twenty. That was about what you could expect from fast food in Spearfish Lake.

So how to kill what would most likely be twenty minutes? The picnic tables seemed to be pretty full of kids he knew, but mostly didn’t like. The football-player and cheerleader count was pretty high, and he didn’t much feel like dealing with those people right now. The logical thing to do was head back over to the Jeep and keep Stas company, or let the dog keep him company, however it worked out. He sauntered back to the Jeep, trying to keep out of the way of the football players and the cheerleaders hanging around the picnic tables, and flopped down in the seat. Stas was still in the back, but after he sat down, the dog walked up between the seats, plopped down in the right seat and laid his chin on Jack’s lap.

Jack didn’t really have all that much to complain about at the moment. After all, he’d gotten the Kirtland’s Warbler photos, at least one of which should be good enough, and that was a big deal as far as he was concerned. But then, there was the question of the ritual or whatever it was that he’d tripped across. What the hell was that all about? What the hell was Summer Trevetheck doing involved with that? Looking at her in the nude, she seemed somehow more appealing than she did when she had clothes on, although that seemed like a stupid observation.

The idea of taking the film down to the mall in Camden in the morning did seem like a good idea. It would take at least three hours, two of them driving, then he could look forward to a good afternoon out on the end of the point.

Somehow the time passed. From time to time the loudspeaker would blare out with Ashley’s voice, calling out order numbers. Slowly the numbers worked their way through the thirties, so they were getting closer. When she called “41” Jack figured it couldn’t be too much longer, so he again told Stas to stay, while he got out of the seat and walked over in the general direction of the pickup window.

There were a number of people hanging around the pickup window on much the same mission. Among them were Mary Lou Kempa and Frenchy LeDroit. Wonderful, Jack thought. The two most obnoxious members of the football crowd in the same spot, which was too close to him. Just at a guess, Mary Lou was drunk. For that matter Frenchy seemed a little loaded too. Jack figured they were either going to screw each other silly or cause trouble before the evening was over, and probably both. Just so long as they could keep from doing it in the next five minutes. There were others around who looked like they’d be in the same boat.

About the only friendly face Jack could see was Vixen Hvalchek, who wasn’t involved with the group but was just licking at an ice cream cone. Vixen was a girl who Jack hadn’t taken much notice of over the years, although like most of the others he’d known her for years. She was short and thin, had long dark hair, goofy glasses, and an acne-scarred face. They’d been lab partners in chemistry class the year before so he’d gotten to know her a little, but nothing like at all well. “Hi, Vixen,” he spoke casually. “How’s your summer going?”

“Boring,” she said between licks on the chocolate cone. “I never thought I’d find myself saying this, but I’m looking forward to being back in school and getting it over with. How about you?”

“About the same,” he admitted. “Just trying to pass the time.”

She smiled at him a little. “Seen any good birds lately?”

“As a matter of fact, yes,” he told her. “I had a really neat sighting today, a Kirtland’s Warbler.”

She shook her head. “Never heard of it.”

“Oh, it’s probably some damn thing he dreamed up,” LeDroit snorted. While Jack and Vixen had been keeping their voices low, the big football player had been obviously listening in, waiting for a chance to put someone down to show off what a big deal he was. “Probably just some goddamn sparrow and he couldn’t tell the difference.”

Ashley called his order number just then, but right then Jack felt like he didn’t dare turn his back on them.

“Yeah,” Mary Lou joined in. “It’s probably just some bullshit he’s dealing to try and get into your pants, not that anyone would want to touch someone like you.”

“You don’t have to say something like that to me,” Vixen said snidely. “You’re the one who can’t keep your pants on around guys. How many this week, you blonde slut?”

Oh, fuck. Here we go . . . Jack thought as Mary Lou got to her feet from the picnic table and hustled the two or three steps over to where Vixen was standing. “You can’t say something like that to me, you ugly little shit,” the blonde girl yelled, obviously ready for a fight.

The heat was obvious in her voice as Vixen replied, “Mary Lou, I think you should cool off.” To make her point, she rammed her ice cream cone into the cheerleader’s face.

Half blind, drunk, and her rage blinding her from anything but the urge to attack, Mary Lou’s hands swung at Vixen. As with a lot of girl fights, she attacked with her fingernails, trying for Vixen’s face or hair, just something to punish the impertinent girl. Vixen saw it coming and attacked as well – but more effectively, with an uppercut that started down somewhere near her waist, followed by a jab to the eye. The combination of the two was enough to put the cheerleader on the sidewalk.

“You little shit!” LeDroit bellowed. “Nobody lays a hand on my woman like that. I’ll fuckin’ show you . . . ”

“Keep your hands off her,” Jack said quietly. “You want to show how big a man you are by beating on some girl?”

“Fuck then, I’ll beat on you,” LeDroit snarled. “You’re too goddamn mouthy for your own good, Birdbrain.”

Jack was no fighter, although he’d been in a few over the years. There was no getting out of this one, and it was going to hurt. The only hope was to try to keep things from boiling over and hope that cooler heads would prevail. It sure wouldn’t be any football players, but there were some adults around. “You sure you’re sober enough to stand up?”

“I can stand up all I need to if I’m going to pound the crap out of you.”

Fortunately both Jack and LeDroit’s attention was diverted by Mary Lou, who snarled out, “You fucking bitch, that was a cheap shot.” She scrambled to her feet, and charged Vixen, her head held low, arms wide, claws extended. But Vixen was ready for her; as Mary Lou reached out to grab her opponent, Vixen grabbed her hair and yanked her head down, to be met with her rising knee. It was one hell of a hard hit, and Mary Lou fell to the pavement again, her face bloody.

“You little shit, I’m going to kick your ass for that,” LeDroit snarled, his attention off Jack for the moment. He whirled and stepped towards Vixen, only to trip over Jack’s extended foot. That might buy the chance to run, Jack thought. “You motherfucker,” he cried from the ground, scrambling to get up, but he changed his mind when his face was full of a growling gray and white husky, his mind set on business.

Stas, thank God! Jack thought.

For a moment, it was a standoff, with LeDroit and Stas nose to snarling nose. Then the cooler head Jack had hoped for showed up: a little guy, smaller than he was although pretty muscular, in his thirties, with a dark complexion and a neatly trimmed Van Dyke. “Knock it off, the bunch of you,” he said in a voice that said he expected to be obeyed. “Frenchy, if you want to play football this fall, grab your girl and get out of here.”

LeDroit looked at the little guy, thought about it for an instant, then came to his senses. This guy may have been small, but nobody fucked with him if they knew what was good for them. He had a reputation of having forgotten more about martial arts than even some black belt wearers had ever heard of, and you just didn’t fuck with him. Ever.

“Stas,” Jack called quietly, to get the dog out of LeDroit’s face. With the other football players around it seemed like a good idea to get out of there. Vixen too; under the circumstances, he couldn’t leave her behind. “Come on, Vixen,” he said quietly. “I’ll take you home.”

“Fine with me,” she said, a little shakily. “You got your order? ”

Jack had totally forgotten about it and wasn’t sure he wanted it, but grabbed the sacks from the pickup counter, took them in one hand while he took Vixen by the other, and headed for the Jeep with Stas trailing along behind. Still, Stas made it to the Jeep and hopped up in the back seat before he and Vixen got there.

“Nice moves, Vixen,” Jack grinned as he got into the seat. “Where’d you pick that up?”

“Dad used to watch too much TV wrestling,” she said. “Shit, I wish that hadn’t happened. I’m just going to catch it from the cheerleaders even worse.”

“Yeah, I’ll probably catch it too,” Jack agreed as he turned the key. “Like we were saying, thank God we’ve only got another year.”

“Yeah, I can’t wait to put that shit behind me,” she agreed as he backed the Jeep out of the parking space.

He glanced around the parking lot; LeDroit had Mary Lou on her feet now, heading toward his car but not there yet. “We better get out of here,” he told Vixen. “I don’t think we want them following us.”

“Me either,” she nodded as he turned onto Lakeshore. “Uh, Jack, if you don’t mind, I’d just as soon not go home yet. My folks aren’t home, and, well, I don’t think I want to be alone and have the football team show up.”

“Or the cheerleaders,” he smiled. “At least tonight. We can go to my place, my folks will be home and watching TV.”

Vixen shook her head. “I’d really rather not have to talk to anyone but you until I can settle down a little. Is there anyplace we can go and be alone? I really need to talk to someone.”

“Got a problem?”

“Other than tonight, no,” she sighed. “But I’ve gotten goddamn lonely and bored this summer, and I’ve been starved for a friendly face. I walked down to the Frostee Freeze in hopes of meeting someone I knew. Thank God I did. Jack, you and your dog saved my ass.”

“Don’t leave yourself out of it,” he grinned. “Like I said, nice moves. I just did what had to be done. It was Stas who kept things from getting too far out of hand.”

“Stas? Oh, your dog.” She turned in her seat and reached her hand out to him. “You did good, Stas,” she smiled. “Thank you.”

“I don’t think I need to lecture him for not staying in the Jeep, this time.”

Stas sniffed at her hand, and started to lick it. “Oh, see, he likes me,” she smiled.

“If I know Stas, and I think I do, I think he likes the ice cream you’ve still got all over your hand,” Jack laughed.

“Yeah, I guess they are kind of a mess,” she giggled. “But I’ll let him have his reward. He earned it.”

“I’ve got a burger in the bag for him, but I don’t want to give it to him until we’re stopped. Do you have any idea where you want to go?”

“Someplace where we can be alone and not have any football players find us,” she sighed.

“Well, that leaves out two or three places along the lake where I go to check out the birds sometimes,” he said, then an idea came across his mind. “We could go out where I was this afternoon. It’s out in the pine barrens a ways. Nobody would think of looking there.” Except Summer Trevetheck and whoever the other women were, he thought. His curiosity was just enough to wonder if they were done with whatever it had been they had been doing. Without looking at his watch, he thought it had to be a couple hours since he’d seen them. Or, if he chickened out about that, there were plenty of other places to pull off the road out in the pine barrens. This was a Jeep, after all.

“Then it sounds good to me,” she smiled.

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