The Grub-And-Stakers Move a Mountain (2 page)

She could always pretend Ethel had eaten it. Ethel probably would, if asked. At the moment, Ethel was cavorting up Cat Alley toward the Enchanted Mountain. Dittany ran after her.

Despite the bluster March was trying to get out of its system before April came along and put a damper on its fun, despite the chill and the slop and the fact that her best pair of slacks was probably ruined forever, it felt good to be out here with the wind whipping her nose, no doubt, to a piquant shade of scarlet.

Nevertheless, Dittany was glad when they got into the lee of the Enchanted Mountain.

Nobody remembered who had given this not really very impressive lump of glacial detritus its fanciful name, or why. Approximately a century ago, two bachelor brothers named Hunneker, skedaddlers from somewhere down in the States, had decided to return to their native heath, now that the Civil War was well over, and become carpetbaggers. Because they couldn’t find a buyer for the real estate they’d acquired during their stay in Canada, they magnanimously deeded it over to the then embryonic town of Lobelia Falls, and because they couldn’t think of any use to which it might be put, they had vaguely stated that the land was to be used for the common weal.

Needless to say, the rugged individualists of Lobelia Falls had never achieved a meeting of the minds as to where their common weal lay. As a result, nobody had done anything. Over the past century the Enchanted Mountain had become a refuge for all sorts of growing things that had been developed out of existence elsewhere.

Here could be found the Pointed-Leaved Tick Trefoil (Desmodium glutinosum) along with the showier Desmodium canadense and the naughty Desmodium nudiflorum. Here flourished the demure Silene antirrhina or Sleepy Catchfly, as well as the Heart-leaved Twayblade (Listera cordata). Here also proliferated that unpopular thornless trifoliate Rhus toxicodendron, or Poison Ivy, which was a major reason why the Enchanted Mountain was not a more frequented place, except by Dittany, Ethel, and a few intrepid souls of like enthusiasms.

As Conservation Committee chairman of the Grub-and-Stake Gardening and Roving Club, Dittany had got into the habit of considering the Enchanted Mountain not only her private playground but also her personal responsibility. She was therefore horror-stricken to find the place infested on this unlikely morning by a large man steering a backhoe straight toward the only patch of Spotted Pipsissewa in Lobelia Township.

After one startled, anguished glance, Dittany charged like a tigress into the maw of the oncoming machine. “Get away from that Spotted Pipsissewa!” she shrieked.

The operator looked up in surprise, as well he might, and stalled his motor. However, he immediately tried to start it again so Dittany called up her ultimate weapon.

“Ethel, sick him!”

Ethel hadn’t the remotest idea what “Sick him” meant, but she was always glad to make a new acquaintance. Baying in delight, she clambered aboard the backhoe.

The man made the grave mistake of standing up. He proved to be even larger than Dittany had thought, but Ethel was bigger still. She draped her front paws over his shoulders and began licking his face with a tongue the size of a bath mat. He staggered backward, lost his balance, and landed unhurt in the soft mud. Assuming this was the next move in whatever game they’d begun to play, Ethel sat down on his chest and flailed him joyously about the hips and thighs with her powerful tail.

“Call off your whatever-it-is,” he gasped.

Under other circumstances Dittany might have obliged, for the man was not uncomely of countenance or much further advanced in years than she. As it was, she hardened her heart.

“She’s not mine. Ethel, stay! Don’t move until this-this person explains what he’s doing up here with that ghastly backhoe.

This happens to be town property, in case you don’t know, mister.”

“And I happen to be a town employee.”

With a mighty heave, the operator managed to unseat Ethel, flinging her on her back in the mire and sending her into fresh ecstasies. He got to his feet and began picking last year’s oak leaves out of his rather attractive red-brown curls. “I’m here to do percolation tests.”

“Why?”

“To see how fast the water drains off,” he explained with remarkable forbearance, all things considered.

“I know what a perk test is, thank you. I meant why are you doing them here?”

“Because my boss told me to. Look, ma’am-er, miss, there’s nothing to get excited about.”

“That’s what you think. Get that backhoe off this mountain within twenty seconds or I’ll put you under citizens’ arrest for vandalism.”

“On what grounds, eh?” The man wiped his muddy hand on his shirt, pulled a map out of his pocket, and planted a far from dainty forefinger on a diagram of what was officially known and thereon designated as the Hunneker Land Grant. “We’re here, right?”

“Wrong,” said Dittany. “I mean we are but you’ve no business to be.”

“You’ll have to take that up with Mr. Architrave. He said he’d meet me here, though I haven’t seen him yet.”

“That figures.” Dittany knew Mr. Architrave of old. He’d been around almost as long as the mountain, squat and stubborn and thickheaded, holding on as head of the Water Department by sheer cussedness years after he should have been retired from a position he’d never been capable of filling in the first place. He was always having to hire new men because nobody could stand him long. This must be the latest.

“Anyway,” the operator went on, “yesterday afternoon he gave me this plot plan and told me to bring the backhoe up here today and do a perk test wherever you see one of those red dots.

And you’re standing on one of my dots right now so I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to move, eh?”

“You can ask till your teeth fall out and a fat lot of good it’ll do you. Nobody’s said anything to me about red dots, and I’m chairman of the Conservation Committee. We don’t need perk tests up here, we need a few gallons of poison ivy spray and some wood chips to make paths with. Those should come from Mr. Schwunder of the Highway Department. I suppose Schwunder got the bright idea of passing the buck to the Water Department and knew he’d get away with it because Mr. Architrave is solid caramel custard from the neck up, and always was.

Please go away, Mr. Whatever-your-name-is. I’m sure that old nincompoop has made another of his bloopers and you could do irreparable damage to some very rare wildflowers if you start messing around up here. Haven’t you something else to do?”

“We do seem to have quite a backlog of work,” he admitted.

“Mr. Architrave was giving me a pep talk yesterday about getting caught up.”

“I’m sure he was. He’d rather talk than work any day. Architrave ought to be running the Great Glacier instead of the Water Department. How long have you been working for him, eh?”

“Just since yesterday morning. And I’m not all that keen to get fired my second day out for disobeying orders, if you don’t mind.”

“Why not? You’ll be leaving soon anyway. Everybody who’s halfway competent quits after a week or two of screaming frustration and the rest come down with sleeping sickness.”

“If he’s all that incompetent, why do you keep him on?”

“Because he’s the only person in town who knows where the water mains are. He won’t map them because he’s just barely smart enough to realize he’d be out on his ear like a shot if he did. So now that you’ve heard about the birds and the bees, why don’t you pick up your toys and go play somewhere else? This is a stupid time to be doing perk tests anyway. The ground’s soaking wet on top and frozen solid underneath. You couldn’t possibly get a true reading.”

“I did ask Mr. Architrave about that,” he admitted, “but-“

“But he hemmed and hawed and started to bluster, which should have tipped you off right then and there. He’d got his wires crossed somehow and was ashamed to say so. Once he finds out where he went wrong he’ll weasel out from under and blame you, so why don’t you stop while you’re still ahead?”

“I had an awful time getting this backhoe up here,” he muttered.

Dittany looked down at the churned-up track the machine had left. “Yes, and you ran right through the Plantain-leaved Pussytoes.

Look, do you see that big boulder over there?”

“Clearly and distinctly. What about it?”

“You start up that ugly mess of metal, eh, and head straight as a die for that boulder. When you get exactly three feet beyond the ash tree-“

“Which is the ash tree?”

“What did they teach you in percolation school, for heaven’s sake? How can anybody not know what an ash tree looks like?”

“I know perfectly well what an ash tree looks like. They have bunches of orange berries on them. And you can pick off a twig and use it to keep witches away,” he added with a thoughtful inflection that Dittany chose to ignore. “They have feather compound leaves, visible buds, and no glands.”

“They don’t have leaves in March,” she replied primly, “nor do they have orange berries because the birds ate them over the winter. So why don’t you leave your rotten old backhoe sitting there till the buds come out and the glands don’t, eh? Then you’ll know where to-“

“Get down!”

The man from the Water Department flung Dittany behind him as an arrow whizzed through the air and buried itself in the ash tree. She screamed, partly from shock, partly because she’d landed against something hard and sharp on the backhoe. Ethel began to bay and the man to yell.

“Hey, you over there! Watch where you’re shooting.”

Dittany stared up at the long shaft, still quivering from its impact with the tree. “That’s a hunting arrow,” she said shakily. “It could kill a moose.”

“If we’d been a few steps closer, it could have gone straight through the pair of us,” said her protector even more shakily.

“What the hell kind of town is this, anyhow? You all carry bows and arrows like Robin Hood and his merry murderers. Do you take pot shots at each other for fun, or what?”

“No.” Dittany wet her lips. “We’re drilled from the cradle up never to shoot unless we’re sure of a clear target. We never have accidents.”

“Then maybe this was no accident, eh? Look, Miss-“

“Henbit,” she replied automatically. “Dittany Henbit.”

“Miss Henbit, I don’t know about you but I’m either mad as hell or scared as hell, and I’m not sure which. I’m going to have a look over that ridge. Can you hold the dog back here?”

“I’ll try. Be careful.”

Dittany clung to Ethel’s collar and watched him crawl forward, using whatever cover he could find, until he disappeared over the top of the ridge. No other arrow followed, and she let out her breath at last in an immense sigh of relief. That must have been simply a wild shot, then the bowman would have heard the yelling and barking and held fire. But why hadn’t he or she heard them earlier, arguing over the backhoe? The shot couldn’t have come from far away or the arrow wouldn’t have penetrated the tree so deeply.

Ethel whimpered, and Dittany took a firmer grip on her collar.

The dog was being oddly well behaved, now she thought of it. Normally Ethel would have gone bounding up to a hunter and spoiled his shot if she’d got the chance. Why hadn’t she done so this time? Either she’d been too interested in the argument over the backhoe, or the wind hadn’t carried the hunter’s scent over the ridge, or else she’d recognized it as that of somebody she knew and disliked. Ethel had a few unfavorite people, and with those she could be remarkably snooty.

The arrow had stopped jiggling. Dittany scrutinized the shaft and was surprised to see a solid inch-wide black band above the feathers. Everybody who shot in and around Lobelia Falls had some sort of mark on his or her arrows to distinguish them from anyone else’s. They all knew each other’s marks in the same way that one lobsterman knows another’s pots by the shape and color of the buoys. Dittany’s, for example, had a narrow band of pale green next to the feathers to show she was a member of the Grub-and-Stake, and three rings of pale blue above it. The pale blue identified her as a Henbit and the three rings indicated that she was the third generation of her family to belong to the club.

In some families the marks got far more complicated, but they were easy enough to read when one knew the code. Never in her life, though, had she seen such a simple, ominous mark as this. A hunting arrow shot from a bow with a 70-pound pull could be a deadlier weapon than a rifle bullet. That one black band made her very uncomfortable indeed.

The man from the Water Department was gone what seemed like an awfully long time. Dittany, more uneasy by the moment, was inching her way out from behind the backhoe and wondering how insane she’d be to go and look for him when he came stumbling over the ridge, his face a ghastly mask.

“What happened?” she cried. “Did you see who shot the arrow?”

“No.” He sat down on a stump and wiped a shaking hand across his mouth. “I saw Mr. Architrave. Pinned to the ground.

With an arrow clean through him, back to front. Excuse me, I think I’m going to be-“

He was. At last the sounds of distress from behind the backhoe ceased and he came back, wiping his face again.

“Sorry,” he muttered. “Didn’t know I was such a sissy. Miss Henbit, you’ll have to go for the police, eh? Take the dog just in case.”

“You’re not staying here alone?”

“What else can I do? It’s not right to leave him.”

“But what if the archer comes back?”

His face twisted into a wry attempt at a grin. “That’ll be my tough luck, won’t it? For God’s sake, could you hurry?”

Luckily no place was far from any other place in Lobelia Falls.

Three minutes and twenty-seven seconds after she’d left the Enchanted Mountain, Dittany was at the police station, panting out her story to Sergeant Mac Vicar.

“And you say John Architrave is lying on that bleak mountainside pierced through the heart by an arrow black and dire,”

said the sergeant, who sometimes beguiled the duller stretches by reading Arethusa Monk’s books.

“I said Mr. Architrave was dead,” Dittany replied. “I don’t know what part of him the arrow went through because that man from the Water Department didn’t tell me and I’m only assuming it had a wide black band around the shaft because the one that almost hit us did.”