The Madman of Black Bear Mountain (6 page)

Two matches bought us enough light to make it to the back of the cave. It wasn't large, but the back wall was out of sight of the entrance, so there was no way someone was going to be able to spot us, especially not in the pitch black that engulfed us when the second match went out.

“I guess this will have to do,” Frank's voice floated out of the darkness. “I . . . OOF!”

I heard Frank stumble to the ground a few feet away.

I crouched into a fighting stance, ready to face an unseen threat in the dark cave.

“You okay, bro?” I asked.

“Yeah, I think I tripped over something. Can you spare another match?”

“Only two more left after this,” I said as the match sparked to life in my fingers.

“Weird,” Frank said, examining a loop of rope sticking out of the cave's dirt floor.

He gave it a tug and the dirt began to shake loose, uncovering
more rope hidden beneath the surface. “There's something down there,” he said.

He scooped the dirt away with his hands and gave another big tug. The ground beneath the rope gave way as Frank yanked a rusty metal box to the surface.

“Ouch!” I yelped as the match burned out on my fingertips. I'd been so engrossed in Frank's discovery, I hadn't been paying attention to the match. I quickly lit another.

“Only one more match left,” I told Frank, excited to find out what was in the box.

Frank used his pocketknife to pry off the lid. It opened with a groan.

“Is it treasure?” I asked eagerly.

“Not unless you consider expired cans of tuna and beans treasure,” Frank said, holding open a box full of rusted cans of food. “Someone must have stashed it here years ago to keep an emergency cache of food somewhere bears couldn't get to.”

“Hey, is that tuna fish in oil?” I grabbed one of the cans. “Sweet—it is!”

I could see Frank's face scrunch up in disgust as the match burned out. “I've seen you eat some gross stuff before, Joe, but if you take a single bite of that tuna, I swear I'm gonna puke.”

“Trust me, dude,” I told him. He couldn't see me grinning in the dark, but I had a plan.

Going by feel, I used the awl on my Swiss Army knife to punch a hole in the top of the can. Then I cut a couple of
inches of cord from the small roll I keep in my survival kit and jammed it in the hole in the top of the can, making sure to get the makeshift wick nice and wet with the fishy oil.

“Here goes nothing,” I said as I sparked my final match to life and held it against the cord.

The match flickered and fizzed, and for a second I didn't think it was going to work, but the cord not only lit, it stayed lit! Our cave was dark no longer.

“Behold!” I announced. “It's a tuna torch!”

“I never thought I'd say this about something that smells like burning rotten fish, but that is awesome,” Frank said. “With all the oil in the can, that could probably burn for an hour.”

“Now that we have light, let's try to figure out what the heck is going on,” I said. “I know I came on this trip for adventure, but facing off with bears and hiding from cannibals in caves is too much, even for me.”

“Maybe we'll get lucky and someone will have seen the smoke from our signal fire before it went out,” Frank said. “Do you think the rest of the Geccos are all right?”

“I guess the one good thing about the Mad Hermit coming after us is that it keeps him away from them, for a while at least,” I offered. “I don't know if we could even find our way back to camp if we tried. I think our best bet is to look for the research station and call for help.”

Frank nodded solemnly. “I don't even want to think about what may have happened to Jim and Max.”

It sounded like the rain had begun to let up a little, and another noise started to echo into the cave from somewhere outside. It sounded a lot like snoring.

“Uh-oh,” I squeaked as it dawned on me that we might have unwittingly sent an odoriferous invitation to a very unwanted guest.

“The tuna torch!” Frank gasped.

I quickly blew out the flame, but I had a feeling the damage had been done. Turned out there was one major problem with our DIY candle: it reeked of stinky fish. And judging from the snorting and grunting coming from the mouth of the cave, bears love stinky fish.

The high-pitched scream we heard next definitely didn't come from a bear, though. We ran to the front of the cave to discover that the bear wasn't alone.

Jim was alive!

Our soaking-wet teacher cowered just outside the cave with his tattered rucksack cradled to his chest—and he was standing face-to-face with what looked like the same humongous bear that had ransacked our camp earlier!

Jim shrieked. The bear yelped. And the equally terrified bear and teacher turned to run as fast as they could in opposite directions. Only Jim ran smack-dab into the cave wall, knocking himself out cold.

And that wasn't even the most surprising thing! It was the huge stack of partially burned money that fell out of Jim's bag after he hit the ground.

H
E'S ALIVE!” I CRIED, LOOKING
down at Jim and the bundle of strange-looking charred currency now lying by his side. The showdown between the bear, our teacher, and the cave wall had me shocked, elated, and baffled all at once.

“And he's rich!” Joe added, reaching down to pick up the cash. “I've never seen money like this before.”

The bills were about the size of normal paper currency, but they were a pale peachy color with strange foreign writing on them and singed, frayed edges, like someone had tried to light them on fire. “I have no idea what they say, but these are all hundreds.” Joe's pupils practically turned into dollar signs as he flipped rapidly through the stack.
“There must be, like, fifty or sixty thousand bucks here!”

I grabbed one of the bills. All the text was printed in a Slavic-looking language I couldn't decipher, maybe Russian or Ukrainian, so the only thing I could read were the numbers. They were hundreds, all right, but instead of Benjamin Franklin, they had a picture of an old bald dude with a pointy goatee.

“Too bad these are Lenins instead of Franklins.” I pointed to the large drawing of Communist Party founder Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. “These must be rubles from before the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. They may have been worth a lot once, but you could probably buy more stuff with Monopoly money now.”

“Jim isn't rich?” Joe frowned at Comrade Lenin.

“Not unless the burn marks on the bills came from a time machine and he's on his way back to the USSR.”

Joe asked the million-ruble question. “So what is he doing, wandering around the woods with a bundle of worthless money from a place that doesn't even exist anymore?”

“I don't know,” I said as Jim began to stir. “But something smells fishy, and it isn't the tuna.”

“Ugh, Frank? Joe?” Jim said groggily as he lifted himself off the ground. “Boy, is it good to see you guys. I had this awful dream that I ran into a bear.”

“Did you dream about finding a stack of rubles, too?” Joe held up the money.

“Huh?” Jim rubbed his noggin and blinked away the
fuzzies. As soon as he had his focus back, he suddenly turned two shades pinker. “Oh, that. I, um, it's just, uh, well, you see—”

“What we see is our teacher in the middle of the woods with a bundle of old foreign money,” Joe said before Jim could ramble on anymore. “What we'd like to know is why.”

“I was going to give it back, I swear!” Jim blurted guiltily. “But then I got lost and—”

“Give it back to who?” I cut in.

“Max,” he said as Joe and I looked at each other in befuddlement. “I took a stroll before bed last night to stargaze. It was only when I opened my bag to take out my telescope and found the money instead that I realized she must have taken mine when she left. You know, because our backpacks look so much alike.” He looked sheepish. “I meant to bring it right back, but, well, I kind of misread my compass. I've been wandering around the woods like a doofus ever since. I guess I'm not much of a woodsman.”

Jim looked at his feet in embarrassment as we tried to make sense of the story he'd just told us.

“So you weren't abducted?” I asked.

“Abducted? Whatever gave you that idea?” Jim looked perplexed. “The only thing to blame for me going missing is my own backward sense of direction.”

“But what about the blood we found in your tent?” Joe wanted to know.

Jim laughed self-consciously and held up a bandaged finger.
“I kind of got my finger caught in the zipper. I feel terrible if my clumsiness scared everybody. I so badly wanted everyone to have a great trip, and here I've gone and ruined it.”

Joe turned to me, looking every bit as baffled as I was. “So if he wasn't abducted, then who—”

“So wait,” Jim cut in, nervously eyeing the bundle of rubles still in Joe's hand. “If I didn't imagine the whole thing about finding the money, does that mean the bear wasn't a dream either?”

“Nope.” Joe pointed to giant paw prints in the mud, causing Jim to blanch. “And you didn't dream about it raiding our camp last night either.”

“You mean that beast was in our camp?” he gasped, clutching the soaking-wet, torn rucksack to his chest like it was a kid's blankie.

I wanted to trust him, but I was having trouble piecing together what had happened to us the night before and how Jim wandering off with Max's bag fit into it. I looked from the “accidentally” taken money back to Jim. I was starting to get a sneaking suspicion about someone else who might have had a reason to lure that bear into camp.

“Did you find anything else in Max's rucksack with the rubles?” I asked.

“N-nothing exciting, really, just some regular gear, you know?” Jim started to turn pink again and gripped the bag even tighter. “I didn't mean to take it, though, the stuff in the bag. Which was just stuff and nothing important, really.”

Jim chuckled nervously.

Joe eyed him skeptically. “If you didn't do anything wrong, then how come you're acting so shady?”

“Shady? I'm not shady! Why do you think I'm shady?” he blurted shadily, his words running together in a nervous jumble.

“Then you don't mind if we take a look?” I asked.

Jim looked genuinely hurt. “Don't you guys trust me?”

“We really, really want to, Jim,” I said. “But we're going to need your help.”

Jim stared at his feet and handed over the bag without meeting our eyes. “I'm sorry if I let you guys down.”

Sunlight began to peek through the rain clouds, giving me a good view inside the tattered rucksack. At the very bottom, under a water bottle and some rope, was a ratty leather pouch. A sparkle of light escaped as I opened the drawstring and pulled out a gleaming green gemstone.

“Whoa!” Joe exclaimed.

But green was only the beginning. The clouds parted as I held it up and rays of sunshine burst into the forest, hitting the stone and sending a brilliant rainbow of colors sparkling over us.

“Is that . . . ?” I started to ask, but I was too stunned by the light display refracting through the gemstone to get out a complete sentence.

“Yup.” Jim nodded. “It's an uncut demantoid green garnet.”

“I used to dream of finding one of these when I collected
rocks as a kid,” I said in awe. “It's one of the rarest precious gems in the world! But what's it doing here? I thought the good ones were found almost exclusively in only one part of Russia.” I looked through the pouch and found two other demantoids, though neither one as big.

“I have no idea,” Jim replied. “But I doubt anyone has discovered one that big in nearly a century. There might only be a few in the entire world!”

“That money you found may not be worth much, but I bet this sure is,” Joe said, dropping the stack of rubles and holding the green stone up to the light.

I looked from the Russian money to the Russian gemstone, and it hit me. There was another notable foreign import to Black Bear Mountain that might connect the two.

“What if that Russian mobster's plane was carrying more than just the Russian mobster when it crashed thirty years ago?” I asked.

I
COULDN'T STOP MARVELING AT
the gem and the way it put on a zillion-color light show when the sun's rays hit it just right. It felt like holding a Ping-Pong-ball-size magic disco ball in the palm of my hand!

“I wonder if this is the important ‘work' Max tried to cancel our trip for,” I said. “Do you think she was so anxious to get rid of us because she'd stumbled on a treasure left over from the wreckage during her research?”

“Makes sense.” Frank nodded. “How else would she end up coming across a stack of burned Soviet-era bills and rare Russian demantoids on Black Bear Mountain? I'm guessing that gangster's ill-gotten gains crashed along with him aboard that plane.”

“A crash like that could have scattered debris over the
entire mountain,” I said. “Investigators never would have been able to find every piece of the wreckage, especially not in rugged terrain like this.”

“It would have been like searching for a gemstone in a haystack,” Frank agreed. “That stuff could have ended up under a rock somewhere and no one would have even known it was missing.”

“Or maybe someone did know,” I said, eyeing our gem-stealing science teacher. “I know you said you picked up Max's bag by accident, but how do we know you didn't have a sparkling green ulterior motive for choosing this place for our camping trip to begin with?”

Jim stepped back like he'd been slapped. “What? No! I had no idea what was in it. How would I?”