Page 47 of The Darkest Chase
Tracking the Jacobins feels like a second job where I moonlight by learning how to find them even when Chief Bowden gets creative with diverting the crew’s attention.
You don’t have to catch them skulking around in the dead of night. There are little markers that will tell you where they’re planning to migrate next.
They’ll find a good, discreet spot in the woods, somewhere they can stay deep and hidden. Usually an old logging site with a lot of new growth, easy saplings they can clear.
They’ll cut themselves a road or reopen an old logging trail the forest reclaimed.
Not a big road, not something you can see from a hill. More like the kind of thing that you could walk right past five feet away without knowing it’s there on the other side of the dense growth.
Here’s where they get clever—the trees they fell for that road, they lay down on the path to create a sort of bumpy paving for their trucks. No wheel ruts people can find later.
Once that’s done, they’ll come swooping in and set up their portable sheds, supposedly with their moonshine stills inside.
They’ll hover around in one spot for about a week and disappear again, leaving behind a ghostly patch of cleared earth—hard for anyone to use as evidence when it could just be an area cleared by one of the Arrendell-owned timber companies, a little storm damage, or somebody’s weekend retreat.
They know how to make it look innocent.
They know how to disappear.
And I know how to find them, just like now.
I tell Talia to wait for me in a secluded nook in the trees partly down the slope from one of the hills while I take Rolf and climb up for a look, checking the coordinates on my phone.
Right on the money.
The last time I was here, they’d already cleared the brush and saplings.
Now, there it is.
That subtle path cut through the woods, leading north, just wide enough for their trucks and paved with fallen logs stripped of their limbs.
It’ll come out about a mile north, I think, on an old farmer’s trail, and then another few miles west to the highway. Home free to wherever they want to go next.
If the logs are there, they’ll definitely be here tonight.
I climb back down to Talia.
She’s puffing a little, sitting on a large mossy rock and sipping from a water bottle.
When I emerge through the trees, she jumps, squealing and splashing water down her front.
“You okay?”
“Y-yeah, you’re just really quiet, you know that?” She gives me a wide-eyed look. “I didn’t even hear you coming. His collar didn’t jingle.”
“Force of habit.” I unsling my pack and unclip Rolf’s leash. “Rest. I’ll set up camp.”
Talia takes a quick look around the glade.
It’s barely ten feet across, an intimate pocket of tall grass and bright sunny buttercups almost walled in on all sides by trees, save for the far side where it ends in a short rock face.
A small spring bubbles out from the rocks in a tiny, clear pool lined with mossy stones. It’s the perfect place to set up. Close to the vantage point, yet far enough down the slope and shielded enough so we won’t be visible.
“It’s pretty here,” she says with a small smile. “I like it.”
We really are different, aren’t we?
I’m thinking purely about the tactical advantage.