The Night Before, Out on the Hillside
The body in the cave hurt him to look at. He was always the empathetic type. He had found or recovered bodies before in the forest. It was all part of the job, after all. Sometime during the winter, this guy had found himself a sheltered place out of the weather, set up a good way to collect food (whether Stephen agreed with the method or not, it was effective when done right) and somewhere along the line, he had screwed up.
The guy had half a dozen signal lines leading out to, he assumed, a series of traps, all working for his food needs. He had shelter from the wind by being below the surrounding terrain. Any fire he would set wouldn’t be out in the open. There was the remains of a windbreak or door at the mouth of this little cave in the ravine. Overall, this looked like a nice little set up, maybe. So, what went wrong?
Stephen had followed what was left of a small trail down into the ravine and across to the cave to find him. Now in the dugout, he used his little red LED to examine things more. There wasn’t much left of the flesh, and even some of the bone was gnawed on by bugs and rodents. The clothes were decent quality and would have served him well enough. There was a sleeping bag under him, and another one wadded up behind him to lean against. Stephen looked some more. He wanted to know why this guy, who had the skills and presence of mind to make a set up like this, was dead in this dugout. He knew he might not get an answer, but he had to look.
Two sleeping bags was the first puzzle for him. His beam swept along the rest of the dugout. Right away, he saw the small firepit/stove. It was made out of several cinderblocks and should have provided good heat once it was going. Next to it was a hodge-podge of mis-matched utensils a cooking pot and some plates.
Stephen looked some more. Something wasn’t adding up. He looked back at the body. Two sleeping bags. He looked at the dishes. He looked at the insides of the dugout, then back at the body. He was missing it. He looked closer at the body. He closed one eye and activated the second setting on the light, bringing forth the white light. There!
The jacket had a hole in it. He reached out and pulled aside the jacket, exposing the shirt underneath. The hole went on through the shirt and was surrounded by a rust-colored stain masked by the red light. Stephen released the pressure on the light, returning to the red light and opened his closed eye. He could still see well enough with the one eye, and he knew the dark adaption would return in the other soon enough.
The more he searched, the more he found. There was another hole, this time in one of the pants legs. Stephen felt the leg and found one of the lower bones was broken near where the hole was. Either of these two could have been the showstopper or not, but the two together were probably what spelled his demise. This led to the bigger questions of who shot him and where were they?
He searched some more. There was enough stuff in the dugout to maybe be for two people. Was this a falling out between them? If so, where was the other one? The searching continued. He knew there was more here. Too much evidence otherwise.
It was in the jacket pockets he found the other pieces he just knew had to be there. In one pocket he found a multi-tool. That would have been what he used to construct the traps and everything else. The other pocket he found some loose pistol rounds. They felt like thirty-eight rounds.
His hands went under the sleeping bags now. He found the pistol. He couldn’t tell what kind of revolver it was. He dumped it in his pocket, along with the rounds and the multi-tool. He needed to go. He had to get back to Dave and get him moving towards the house. All of this here was months-old history and they had things to do. Whoever shot this guy was long gone. He looked around one last time. His eye caught an inconsistency.
Stephen looked at the rack where the signal lines came into the dugout. Each of them had a bottle with a pebble or a can on the end of it to make noise. One of them was different. He looked at what was different.
It hung lower. He looked at the bottle. It had a pink butterfly hairclip on the neck. None of the others had any sort of decorations. Why? He left the dugout and followed that thread. Across the ravine and out along the hillside he went. Why he didn’t know, but he had to follow it.