It was a stiff half-hour's climb up through dense timber to the escarpment on the east side of the valley where the bare rock pushed up a hundred and fifty feet higher than it did anywhere else along the rim. There were boulders there as big as London buses, piled where the glacier had left them; and in among them there were a lot of cozy little caves where Frazier and I had flushed everything from weasels to a mothy brown bear. The one where I'd met the cougar was up high, with an approach across a rockface that made it too hard to get to to interest most critters, or most hunters. The time I'd gone up there I was chasing a wolverine with a 30-30 slug in him who didn't know when to lie down and be dead. It wasn't the kind of chore that was any fun; I did it because if I hadn't, a long line of hunting Draveks would have come out of their graves spinning like roulette wheels. I went up soft and easy and my carcajou was there, a yard inside the overhang, dead. I had one foot up to make the big mistake when I smelled cat and saw him, curled up in the back, logy after a kill maybe, just starting to move. I faded back and slid all the way to the bottom and spent the next week growing new skin on my palms and the seat of my pants. I'd never been back.
The sun was making rose-colored patterns up high on the rockface. I went up fast, not being any fonder of the climb than the last time, but even less fond of doing it in broad daylight. I made it to the ledge in ten minutes and came up over it and went flat, and looked back into shadows. It was no different than the last time, except for no kitty.
Inside, there was the same smell of wet rock and animal droppings that all these caves had. I had to duck to get in past the outer vestibule where the wolverine had died, and was in a bigger chamber, about right for garaging a VW, if you could get it inside. The floor here was the dirt that had drifted in during the last few thousand years, more or less smooth-packed; the walls slanted up to a craggy ceiling with air spaces with roots showing in them. That gave me enough light to show me that things were just like I left them, without a hiding place for anything bigger than an aspirin. If I was hoping to find a ten-volume journal telling me what it was all about, I was out of luck.
The trip in had taken forty minutes; the search consumed another thirty seconds. I prowled the cave again, used up that odd half minute. This was the end of the line. It had been a swell chase up to now, but it looked like I was going to go back to the frat house minus the motorman's glove after all.
I went back into the outer cave and looked out over a view of pine tops down to the sparkle of the lake a mile away and tried to think like a guy sitting in the dark beside a coffin writing notes to a stranger about something that he had to do that he knew was going to kill him; but all that got me was an attack of claustrophobia.
I looked over the anteroom, went out and studied the front porch and wondered how many little men with binoculars were watching me, went back in and scraped my foot across the spot where the devil cat had used up the last of his chips, and saw the shine of metal. . . .
It was a stainless steel lock box, not locked; all it had in it was a heavy plastic envelope, sealed. I got that open and took out a sheet of paper with typing on it and read:
In the back room. Look up high, on the left. The opening looks too small, but you can make it. About fifty feet.
Brace yourself.