Gone to Ground Read Online Free PDF Page A

deeper, softer and huskier than average, but out here it just seemed loud and grating, and he felt the urge to look around and see where the strange sound had come from.

    After leaving the horses in the catch pen, he made his way quietly back up stream, heading for the overlook that he and his brother discovered many years ago. It tickled the two boys that they could sit up on the cliff side, watching all the action in the pasture, yet no one knew they were there. They’d first found the overlook when they came to Hideaway with their father while checking the waters for the pasture. Even though the luck of the draw had surrounded this piece of deeded land with a designated wilderness, making the manning of the camp a thing of the past, the cows still had to be checked, and the waters maintained. His father, as the resident of Eagle Camp, held this pasture as part of his duties. Cowboying isn’t just a job, however, it’s a lifestyle and often when his father checked this remote pasture his wife and kids came along, especially if it was going to be a several day trip.
    As the man drew near Hideaway, he moved slower, his scuffed brown leather boots making little sound on the hard packed dirt as he looked for the boulder that marked the narrow, water-eroded crack in the rock that led upward to a narrow trail. Finally, just as he’d begun to believe that past twenty-one years of weather and floods had rearranged the landscape to such a degree that the overlook was gone, he spotted the familiar rock formation on the left side of the canyon.
    Squeezing between the boulder and the cliff side, he was surprised at how much smaller the cleft had become. Surely he couldn’t have grown so much since leaving the ranch to live in town. He began to worry that he would either become stuck, or emerge on the other side sans buttons. The horrifying image of having to call for help, then having to explain himself to the woman gave extra impetus to his squirming, and he emerged on the far side of the boulder on a trail carved between a chunk of sandstone that had split off from the main body, and the cliff wall itself.
    Now, he thought, all he had to do was to get back through on the way out. At least he’d have gravity on his side in that direction. He hoped that the trail was still intact after all these years. It didn’t bear thinking about that he would make it all the way up here, only to be faced with a blocked trail.
    After a few minutes of slithering, scooting and crawling - Damn, how the hell did this trail get so much smaller, and the wall become so much shorter - he arrived at the low opening of a small cave eroded into the sandstone wall. These cliffs were filled with caves, some that meandered miles underground through the sandstone and limestone layers. There was actually a rumor that if you found the right connections, you could make it all the way to the Grand Canyon, just like the cave network that included the Grand Canyon Caverns. Tour guides told how smoke from a fire set in the Caverns could be seen emerging from caves in the Canyon itself. No one had actually tested these caves, but he and his brother had explored occasionally when staying at the camp, and had never come close to covering all the possible twists and turns.
    His destination in this case was only a small, singular cave, not part of any interconnected labyrinth. It was roughly ten feet by six feet, and about ten feet high at the peak with a crack that extended upward even further, possibly even to the top of the plateau, and which channeled in the water that had formed the natural enclosure and the trail he’d just followed. It was a dead end, except that at the far side a triangular crack opened, allowing visual access to the pasture beyond. The man slid into the cave and made his way across the sandy floor to the gap where he crouched, looking out.
    The view was just as he remembered it at least. He could see nearly all of the pasture, with the