The Retreat Page 5

  “Really, Duncan?” Mikey whined. “We have to work today and without any oil you know it’s going to take forever to clean the crud of the rabbits off these cheap aluminum pans.”

  “Your call, Mikey; run back to camp or walk with a bellyful of rabbit, it’s no skin off my balls either way. You interrupt my beauty sleep, you pay the price and if I ever catch you out with a light pack again, I’ll kick your ass all the way back to camp,” Duncan said. “You know your fat ass is picking the rabbit so take Mitch over there and show him how to dress them out for a frypan.”

  The rest of Mikey’s crew went about getting four small fires going almost exactly as Melanie had done the night before and within minutes there was water from the creek on to boil. Mikey showed Mitch how to gut, skin, quarter and debone the rabbit he had, showing Mitch how to carefully examine the liver for spots indicating tularemia. Mitch took the second rabbit; he took the knife they had given them out of the sheath and started working on the rabbit with it. Mikey had a disgusted look on his face and gently took the knife from Mitch and held it away from his face like an offensive piece of garbage. Mikey turned to Duncan and said, “Really you two, a K-Bar cheap knockoff. I would not open a tin can with this thing. Does it come with a compass on the end and a match storage area inside the handle?”

  “Man, Mikey, you sound like a teenage girl. It comes in the kit and it’s a perfectly good knife,” Duncan said, “and I didn’t ask you to get Mitch to butcher the rabbit, I told you to show him while you did it.”

  “Here, Mitch, use my knife and do it like I showed you. There…perfect. The proper tools help a carpenter become a master craftsman,” Mikey said.

  “I thought it was that a poor carpenter blames his tools, Mikey,” laughed Melanie.

  Mikey cleaned off both knives and handed Mitch’s back to him saying, “Thanks, Mitch. It is good to see that your crew has one good oarsman on it who is willing to lend a hand; these two would just keep going around in a circle to spite each other. Those two are the proverbial immovable object meets the irresistible force.”

  The entire crew enjoyed a combination of rabbit and Wise oatmeal while Melanie laughed as Mikey and his crew had to scrub the nasty pots and pans clean with rocks and sand from the creek. It took them almost half an hour to get them clean enough for Melanie’s taste. The four attackers packed up and slowly made their way from camp just as the sun was starting to rise. Melanie and Duncan went through the camp with a fine-tooth comb to make sure any evidence of their stay was eliminated. Duncan turned to Melanie and Mitch and pointed at his chest with a single finger up, pointed at Mitch with two fingers up and Melanie with three fingers. Melanie came to Mitch and whispered, “Keep a minimum of thirty feet distance but keep Duncan in sight. Stay quiet and if he puts his fist in the air then get down and slowly and quietly move to cover. The rest of the trail hand signals are pretty self-explanatory.” Duncan took them down a game trail and Mitch set out three minutes later. He carefully watched how Duncan moved effortlessly down the game trail while not having to move branches out of the way or cause any disturbance on the ground with his feet. Mitch felt like a bull in a china shop and sounded like an elephant moving through the woods disturbing every branch and stepping on every dry stick. Mitch quickly learned that moving down a game trail was as much of a fluid dance than a traditional hike, you had to keep bobbing, weaving and “feeling” your way through the woods; you had to be able to move your body while planning your steps and shuffle your feet while feeling the forest floor with your feet. You had to step with your heel and be able to balance on it if your arch or toe came in contact with debris; it was like climbing an old staircase and not making it squeak. It took extraordinary balance and grace as well as a plan on how to move. He nearly jumped out of his skin when Melanie silently came up behind him and quietly put her hand on his shoulder. He turned and she had her fist up in the air. Melanie pointed her fingers to her eyes and pointed them at Duncan. Mitch had lost sight of Duncan while he was working on his forest quiet shuffle. He finally saw Duncan who was crouched behind a tree on the game trail. Melanie guided Mitch to the side of the trail and found him a place of cover and showed him which direction to cover while keeping in visual contact with Duncan. Duncan made some hand gestures to Melanie who slowly moved off to the left flank of the two while keeping within eye contact of both Duncan and Mitch. Melanie moved slowly but surely in almost slow motion with her body crouched down, covering barely a foot per minute. Mitch was looking at Duncan when Duncan pointed to his eyes and gave Mitch a quadrant to look at and showed Mitch to look up. Mitch searched the woods to the indicated line and finally spotted the hunter who was clad head to toe in camouflage and was sitting in a deer stand on the side of a tree. His back was to the trio and was overlooking a small glen in the woods ahead. It was not hunting season so the rifleman must have been a poacher. Duncan gave Mitch hand signals to pass the information onto Melanie. Melanie scanned the forest and gave them both a slow hand sign that she saw the hunter. Duncan then gave them both hand signals. Melanie slowly reached into her plate carrier and removed a map. She studied it for a few minutes then looked at Mitch, made a walking sign with two fingers over her open palm then pointed at her rear end. Mitch gave her rear two big thumbs up and a big smile while she gave him the middle finger in response. Melanie took a tangent route away from the hunter while Mitch quietly backtracked down the trail on a parallel route until he could start slowly moving on a diagonal to intercept Melanie’s route. Mitch did not even bother looking for Duncan since he knew where they were going. Mitch had a constant itchy feeling in the middle of his shoulder blades and knew that any noise or bush movement could result in the hunter’s bullet potentially entering his body. He fought the urge to just run and could taste the adrenaline from his body in his mouth; it tasted like copper. He knew he was suppressing both his fight and flight automatic responses simultaneously. The three carefully made their way around the poacher until they arrived at a rough forestry service trail that the service used as an access to fight potential forest fires. Duncan crawled onto the trail searching for signs of the poacher’s passage while being covered by Mitch and Melanie. Duncan returned to Mitch and Melanie, pulled a map from his plate carrier and showed them where the Poacher’s ATV was likely located. Duncan then keyed his radio microphone multiple times. Melanie tapped Mitch on the shoulder and signaled him to follow her while Duncan faded back into the forest, moving in the opposite direction. Mitch had taken a brief glimpse of the map and noticed all the trails, creeks, roads, game trails and likely hunting spots were marked on it. He saw where they were and saw that the deer stand they had just left had already been marked on the map; this poacher’s deer stand had previously been located by the Retreat’s crew. Melanie worked her way back to the glen where they had spent the previous night and began setting up camp in the same way she had the night before.

  “Whew,” Melanie finally said, “hunting game and potentially being hunted by people can get a little nerve-racking, don’t you think?”

  “Holy crap,” Mitch confessed. “That’s twice today my bowels almost let go, the space between my shoulder blades still itches. What is Duncan going to do to the guy?”

  “Nothing,” Melanie said. “The drones and sensors saw him come in but that poacher has three or four deer stands already set up, we just didn’t know which one he would be in. That is why we stay so vigilant in the woods when we are outside the ten-mile ring of the Retreat and we don’t go out there when hunting season is open. The forestry road is at the twenty-mile ring, inside that exclusion zone we remove all the hunter’s salt licks and take down their tree stands and remove their trails and trail markers. We also drop some wolf urine around the area to keep the deer away; nobody has taken a deer inside our twenty-mile ring for the last year but some hunters are just stubborn. The poacher came in on an ATV so Duncan will probably disable it and make him walk back to his camp; it is good practice for the security crew to shadow the hunte
r back to his camp. There is another forestry road at the fifty-mile line that we encourage the hunters and poachers to use by keeping it cleared better; some are just slow learners and if we see the same people then their camp might be set upon by bears that trash everything looking for food. Some of these guys are just trying to feed their families while others are just trying to kill stuff. We have been known to drop off fully butchered and processed deer at the camps of the former with a note where the better hunting is on the other road while the killers get their stuff ruined. Duncan can get pretty creative in causing a few twisted ankles and knees with his traps and it’s pretty nasty to walk ten miles with a twisted ankle.”

  “Sensors…drones…exclusion zones?” Mitch asked. “You guys take this whole security thing seriously.”

  “Mitch, this is our environment and we are the apex predators,” Melanie explained. “Good intelligence is the most critical thing in winning any engagement; if you know what your competition or enemy is doing then you can engage on your terms versus theirs. Trading stocks is the same thing; you do your homework, find the best angle and exploit it to the best of your abilities which needs to be better than everyone else’s. If you do it badly then you lose some money; if we do it badly then someone could lose their life.”

  Mitch pondered what Melanie was talking about as he automatically went about gathering firewood and reconstructing a firepit as he had watched the others do. It took him a few tries to get a fire going with a magnesium fire stick and once the fire was lit, he went to the creek to get some water to put on to boil. Melanie had two fires going in the time it took him to put together one but he felt like he was making a contribution to the team instead of feeling like a bump on a log. Duncan returned and that evening Mitch took a turn on watch getting used to the sounds and feel of the forest around him. He woke Duncan for the second watch but was too keyed up from the day’s adrenaline and his watch to sleep but finally nodded off into a deep slumber.

  Mitch awoke the next morning to the smell of breakfast and found he was famished. Mitch put on his boots and headed over to the fires for some food.

  Duncan looked up and smiled. “Looks like you’re out a bottle of scotch.”

  Mitch looked confused until he saw his rifle back at his bedroll. Mitch hung his head in shame and walked back to pick up his rifle and brought it over to the team. “I guess you’d better show me how to clean this thing, because there is no way on earth you’re getting two bottles out of me.”

  “Don’t worry, Mitch,” Melanie laughed, “I was down two cases before I figured out to keep the strap around my arm when I went to sleep so I did not forget it in the morning, especially if there is coffee on which I noticed the three-day packs don’t have,” while shooting a glare at Duncan. “Look on the bright side, Mitch, you’re still up after your share from the failed ambush last night.”

  The three of them packed up and Duncan continued down the path while demonstrating all the team’s hand signals to Mitch as they went. The team finally arrived at the cow gate that brought them back into the Retreat’s wire where thankfully there was “coincidentally” a security truck there to take them back to the Welcome Center. Mitch, Duncan and Melanie turned their firearms into the armorer’s cage where they were microscopically inspected by Angus the armorer. Angus just looked like an Angus with red flowing hair and a beard that almost made it to his huge barrel chest and stuck out at many weird angles. All the three of them got was a “Humpf” after their firearms were stowed back in their proper place and the trio was dismissed from his august presence. Melanie headed in one direction while Duncan and Mitch headed back to the changing room where a set of sweats was awaiting Mitch; Mitch was thankful to peel the rank camouflage clothing from his body and toss them into the waiting hamper.

  “What do we do with this stuff?” Mitch asked while pointing to the three-day pack.

  “We’ll take them over to the guys who make them; they can recondition them and sell them as “slightly used” at a discount or give them away to some of the Bovill folks as marketing.” Duncan followed Mitch out of the changing room and walked over to a large warehouse structure that was one quarter filled by the three-day pack company where Duncan gave them some feedback on the contents. Overall, it was a good pack that a beginner like Mitch intuitively knew how to use. Duncan kept looking at his watch while the two walked back into the Welcome Center.

  “Mitch, I have another surprise for you in the vein of begging for forgiveness instead of asking for permission,” Duncan confessed in his best naughty schoolboy impersonation. “I went ahead and converted the upstairs office space into two condominiums, one for you and one for me so you have a more permanent place to stay while you are here. Here are the keys; go check it out and let me know if it meets your satisfaction. The construction company and Mikey really appreciate you sticking with the plan on the Retreat concept and have been working on their own time to do something special for us. Melanie conned your condo designer into helping pick all the décor so it would feel like home to you because we all, even Mikey and Angus, feel like you are family to us.”

  “Geez, Duncan,” Mitch said wistfully. “That might be the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me and I really appreciate it. I don’t have any real family around anymore and please make sure everyone gets paid for their time out of my personal account.”

  Duncan tossed him a set of keys and said, “My door says “Jefe” on it and yours says “Patron.” I need to clean up a bit and go over some stuff so I hope you’ll come over to my joint for some dinner.

  “I’ll see you in a bit.” Mitch was excited to see his new place. He unlocked the door and walked into the foyer. It had tall ten-foot vaulted ceilings and as he walked down the corridor he saw he was in a fully loaded business center. There was a virtual room that looked like the bridge on the Star Trek Enterprise, complete with an unidirectional treadmill in place of Kirk’s captain chair. The opposite side of the hall had a large windowed boardroom and a couple of more traditional executive offices complete with wet bar and sitting areas. He saw he had a complete gym with a whirlpool, walk in shower and both a steam room and a sauna. He came to a large double door with a large number 1 on the door. The door opened up into a completely open concept kitchen, living room, dining room and great room. The great room had a massive fireplace with a real woodburning fireplace that was aglow and crackling. The décor and design were almost like a modern concept Viking great lodge. Mitch took it all in seeing that every piece of the design was a fancier yet understated version of his San Francisco penthouse condominium. Mitch continued through the room and saw four single doors off the great room that must be guest bedrooms and a bathroom. Mitch went over and saw they were exactly that as well as a laundry room and theater room. Towards the living room, Mitch saw a set of double barn doors that were closed and he saw that once opened they led to the master bedroom with a sitting room and a fireplace. The sitting room had huge floor to ceiling bookcases that were full of books; Mitch looked at some of the titles and saw there were sections on philosophy, religion, political science as well as sections on homesteading, nature, farming and livestock care. It would take years of contemplation sitting in the room to take in all the material. Mitch saw another barn door in the master bedroom that must go to the master bathroom. Mitch opened it and heard water running in the shower. The shower was a huge walk-in car wash style shower, surrounded by glass with twenty heads spewing water onto the naked form of Melanie. Melanie turned and saw Mitch standing there with his jaw lying on the ground.

  “Holy crap, Mel,” Mitch stuttered. “I’m sooo sorry, I thought this was my bathroom.”

  Melanie laughed. “It is your shower, silly; I suppose I could go back to my place to shower if you really wanted me to.”

  Mitch stammered, “It’s OK, Mel, I’ll just go wait in the kitchen.”

  “You stink, Mitch. Why don’t you come have a shower?” The suggestion and welcome look Melanie gave Mitch gave no r
oom for misinterpretation, even for the usually female clueless Mitch. Mitch took exactly one half of one second to start tearing off his clothes to get into that shower as fast as humanly possible, almost tripping in the process. Melanie laughed but refused to engage until Mitch had been scrubbed clean a few times to remove the stink, spending extra special time in certain special areas. Mitch and Melanie finished their shower and got dressed to go see Duncan’s man cave and have dinner. Duncan was in the kitchen putting the finishing touches on their meal. Duncan’s space was similar to Mitch’s for layout but the décor was more Bass Pro Shop meets REI and had pictures of Duncan all over the world either hiking, diving, climbing or hunting. Duncan had a glass of scotch in his hand and welcomed the two into his kitchen, offering them a small libation.

  “Is that eau de rut I smell in the room?” Duncan asked.

  “Screw you, you lowland Scot,” Melanie said turning to Mitch. “You do know they say there is nothing more worthless than a lowland Scot.”

  “I’ll have you know that the McFarlanes stood with the highlanders at Culloden so we are honorary highlanders,” Duncan said. “I’m glad you two got this out of the way since Melanie has been clawing at the walls since she could not get you to make a pass at her. You might be the only person in the world who might be smarter than she is. I’m sure the two of you will spend years trying to figure that out but I am honored to call you both friends.”

  The three of them enjoyed a dinner together and Mitch was even developing a taste for the golden Scottish nectar of the gods as Duncan would say. Mitch knew not to even try and keep up with a Scot and never liked the feeling of not having his brain in complete control at all times, unless, like later that night, his little brain was in charge with Melanie. Mitch never left the Retreat after that and only reluctantly left for the quarterly board meetings at Olympus that he was obligated to attend.