It was one of those days that stick in your mind down through the years; a hot day, with a breeze on the lake that riffled the surface just enough to bring the bass out of the deep hollows and up from under the sunken logs to snap at the big juicy flies the wind was bringing out over the water. Frazier and I had landed half a boat full before the wind died and they stopped hitting. The two girls—Gwen and Rosanne—had laid out a nice table while we cleaned the haul and packed what we couldn't eat in the freezer. After dinner we went down to the shore and sat under the trees and finished off the bottle—the third bottle of the day. We had a big laugh with it: the third fifth on the Fourth of July.
There'd been a big pine stump outside the cabin. We counted the rings; two hundred and forty-seven. Then we buried the dead soldier under it, with full military honors. . . .
It took me under ten minutes to find the stump, grub away enough packed leaves and hard dirt to find the gap down among the roots and pull out the bottle. The label was gone and the metal screw cap had been replaced with a hard, waxy plug, but it looked like the same bottle. I held it up to the light and made out something inside it, pale through the brown glass.
My mouth felt a little dry and my pulse was rocking my hand a little, but otherwise there was just the feeling of unnatural awareness you get when all the days of anticipation focus down to the second you've been working toward. I made a couple of tries to get the sealing wax loose, then cracked the neck off the bottle and reached in and teased the paper out.
It was just one sheet, folded and rolled, and all it had on it was two words:
COUGAR CAVE