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  Frank went first.

  “I can’t believe I’m actually doing this,” he moaned, taking a deep breath and dropping himself over the side.

  He fell from sight, and for a terrifying moment I didn’t know whether he’d made it. From the grunting and muttering to himself that followed, I knew he had.

  “Aleksei put handholds down here to grab onto,” he called back just loud enough above a whisper that I could hear him and hopefully whoever’s feet I heard stomping toward me through the cave couldn’t. “It’s not too bad.”

  He gave the rope a tug, and I yanked the pack back up and slipped it on. I did two last things before following Frank over the side. I covered the piton and the first few feet of paracord with vines to hide them. Then I screamed.

  The scream wasn’t out of fear—although, I’m not going to lie, I was a little afraid; I mean, who wouldn’t be? But with a little luck, our perp would hear the scream, then see the parachute in the trees on the other side of the canyon and assume we’d been the ones to jump with parachutes. I even let the volume of my scream trail off to mimic the Doppler effect of my voice getting farther away so they’d think I was actually falling. That was my plan, at least. Because if our pursuer saw the cord and got down on their bellies like I had, they’d realize there were a couple of Hardy-boy-size sitting ducks hiding ten feet below them.

  I steadied myself on the ledge next to Frank, grabbing onto the metal rings Aleksei had hammered into the rock every few feet as handholds, and pressed myself as close to the rock wall as I could. Just below the tips of our toes was the sheer drop into the canyon. Just over our heads was an armed criminal who’d proven they weren’t above using lethal tactics.

  A moment later the sound of coughing and the smell of skunk reached the mouth of the cave. Pebbles trickled over the edge and rained down on us as the perp’s feet dislodged debris from the edge. There was the bright glint of sunlight hitting glass above us. If everything was going according to plan, the glass was from the perp’s binoculars, and he or she was staring down at the parachute, assuming we’d jumped.

  It was when I saw the steel muzzle poke out from the cave’s entrance above us that I realized it wasn’t binoculars the perp was looking out of. It was the scope of a hunting rifle. But it wasn’t until the barrel started to lower toward us that I got really nervous.

  10 ON THE PROWL

  FRANK

  I RESISTED THE URGE TO GASP as the rifle barrel angled toward us. I did my best not to even breathe. Our stalker was a mere ten feet above our heads, armed and dangerous. Did they know we were there? We were about to find out.

  Just as the muzzle started to point straight down, the perp muttered in frustration and withdrew the gun back into the cave. It had worked!

  A barrage of small rocks showered past us as the perp kicked at the dirt on the cave floor. There was a crackle of static and then the sound of our pursuer’s voice retreating as they talked into what must have been a two-way radio. The wind had picked up, dampening the sound, and there was no way to tell what they were saying, or even if it was a man or a woman. All I was able to hear were a few fragmented words.

  “… jammed up… not working… got away.”

  And then silence. Our plan had worked! Now we just had to find a way down without falling.

  “This way,” Joe whispered. “Aleksei has more spikes driven into the rocks. The down climb is going to be dangerous, but I think we can make it.”

  “Is anything around here not dangerous?” I asked, carefully following my brother down the rocky cliff. Luckily, we only had to descend another ten or fifteen feet before we reached a wider ledge. And this one led to an actual path down into the canyon.

  “Finally, a break!” I exclaimed. I looked back up the cliff. The cave was now hidden from sight. which meant anyone still lurking up there wouldn’t be able to see us, either.

  The path Joe found was still dicey, but it sure beat trying to climb off the cliff in reverse without any safety gear. We crossed the canyon floor as quickly as we could, running between boulders and patches of thick brush to keep ourselves hidden. The stream running through the middle was pretty low, so crossing wasn’t too hard.

  Soon we were staring up at the parachute Dr. Kroopnik must have used to leap from the cave. Whether he’d leaped safely remained to be seen. Judging from the way the parachute was tangled in the trees, the landing hadn’t been a smooth one.

  “That cliff may seem high to us, but for a BASE jumper, it’s dangerously low,” Joe observed. BASE jumping is like skydiving, only you leap from a fixed object like a cliff or building top instead of an aircraft—the exact kind of extreme sport I had no interest in trying. “It’s super risky even in ideal conditions. It’s a miracle he made it at all.”

  “He must have gotten tangled up and had to cut himself down,” I surmised. I looked from the parachute’s severed cords to the rocks on the ground below. That was when I saw the drops of blood. “I think he’s hurt, Joe.”

  Joe nodded solemnly. “The tracks look like he was dragging his bad leg a lot worse than usual. He left a clear trail of prints in the mud. It should be easy to follow.”

  The tracks led us down the canyon and onto a game trail back through the forest. Following the prints might have been difficult for an amateur, but this wasn’t the first time Joe and I had tracked someone through the woods. There were more trees and less brush, making Dr. K’s escape route easier for us to follow than it would have been in the thick brush we’d had to whack through to get to the cabin.

  We’d followed the trail for about a mile through the woods when Joe suddenly froze in place on the path in front of me.

  “Please tell me that’s just from a really large kitty cat,” he said, staring straight down at the ground.

  I knelt to look at the huge feline paw print stamped in the forest floor next to Joe’s boot. “Um, do you consider mountain lions kitties?”

  “That’s what I was afraid of.” He looked around nervously. “We may not be the only ones tracking Dr. K.”

  “Dr. K’s been studying them, so we know they’ve been in the area,” I said. A chill ran down my spine. The naturalist in me was buzzing with excitement. The rest of me was terrified.

  The mountain lion. Scientific name Puma concolor, aka the puma, panther, cougar, catamount, or ghost cat, depending on who you ask. They’re not technically lions and don’t have the regal manes of their larger African relatives, but they’re one of the most elusive and fiercest predators in North America. A full-grown male can top nine feet long nose to tail and weigh over two hundred pounds. They might not be larger than black bears, but they’re often even deadlier hunters. Black bears are omnivores, and a lot of their diet comes from fruit, berries, nuts, and grubs. They don’t actually hunt large game like full-grown deer all that often. Mountain lions? They are pure carnivores, and large prey like deer is their favorite delicacy.

  The huge paw print Joe had spotted verified the premise of Dr. Kroopnik’s research and was important evidence in his quest to document the presence of a viable northeastern mountain lion population. It was a thrilling discovery—or it would have been if I hadn’t suspected it might be stalking a friend of ours. We still didn’t know why Dr. K had run off with Aleksei’s garnets, but even if he had stolen them for himself, I wanted the law to bring him to justice. Not a hungry mountain lion!

  Normally, there would be nothing to be afraid of. You’re more likely to get hit by lightning than attacked by a mountain They almost never pose a threat to humans except in unusual situations when the animals are sick or starving—and from the thriving ecosystem on Black Bear Mountain, there was plenty of natural prey. Scientists don’t usually fall into the category of natural mountain lion entrées—but if that scientist was wounded? Apex predators may hunt weak or injured animals to conserve energy. Could a hungry cougar have caught a whiff of Dr. K’s blood and be contemplating him as a dinner option?

  And even if two healthy teenager
s like Joe and me might not normally tempt a mountain lion’s taste buds, it’s never smart to let your guard down if you cross paths with one of the most formidable predators in America. I would never intentionally harm an animal like that, but I sure would try to chase one away if it threatened us. Joe tightened his grip on the hatchet, and I picked up the heftiest stick I saw.

  We crept along quietly until we saw the trail disappear behind a large boulder a few yards ahead. Joe looked back at me. I knew what he was thinking. A boulder like that would make a great ambush spot for somebody. Or something. He gave me a hand signal to follow him off the trail and circle around. I had just given him the thumbs-up when we heard something rustle behind the boulder.

  We both froze. Whatever made that sound was a lot larger than a squirrel or a skunk. What we heard next could only have come from one creature. It was the bloodcurdling yowl of a mountain lion.

  I grabbed onto Joe’s arm to make sure he stood his ground in case he had the same impulse that I did—to run! It sure was tempting, but I also knew that was just about the last thing we should do. Running from a large predator can remind them of prey and trigger their hunting instincts. When faced with a large, aggressive animal like a bear or mountain lion, you’re supposed to stand up tall, wave your arms around, and yell to make yourself seem as big and intimidating as you can. We’d done the same thing when confronted by a large black bear on our last trip, and it had worked. Would it scare off a mountain lion? I didn’t know, but we didn’t have much choice except to try.

  We held our breath, waiting to see if the animal would show itself. There was another rustle, and then the creature emerged. It had a terrifying muzzle, all right, only this one didn’t have fangs. We were staring down the barrel of a tranquilizer gun.

  11 ENDANGERED SPECIES

  JOE

  MY FEAR VANISHED AS I looked from the tranquilizer gun to the guy holding it. We were going to have better luck reasoning with him than a with mountain lion, that was for sure.

  “Frank?! Joe?!” The gun dropped to the scientist’s side as Max Kroopnik ran over to embrace us. Actually, limped over was more like it. It was clear he’d reinjured his left leg badly. “You’re the last people I expected to see!”

  “You haven’t been eaten by a mountain lion!” Frank exclaimed, hugging him back.

  “I about feel like it,” he said, looking down at his tattered, bloody clothes.

  “That’s one heck of a wildcat impression you got there, Doc. I thought for sure we were about to get pounced on,” I told him.

  “The idea was to scare whoever it was away, not actually eat them.” He grinned and limped back behind the boulder, using the large rock to prop himself up. We followed him as he reached down into a bundle of gear, pulled out a digital recorder, and pressed play.

  “YOWWWWLLL!” it growled.

  “Field recordings I made of a large male I’ve been monitoring. I’d hoped it would chase off whoever’s been after me. I just didn’t expect it to be you two.”

  “Technically, I guess you could say we have been tracking you, but we’re not after you,” I said. “At least we weren’t at first. We came to Black Bear Mountain to make sure you were okay.”

  “Aleksei sent us a letter from prison saying he hadn’t heard from you and was worried something had happened,” Frank explained.

  Max smiled. “I can always count on Aleksei. How is the big guy doing?”

  “Um, okay I guess, besides being in prison and worrying about you,” I replied, looking at the bedraggled scientist. “He said you’d written that there were suspicious people snooping around the mountain. Then when he didn’t get another letter five or six weeks later like usual, he wrote to us and asked us to check on you.”

  “I’ve had the sense for a few months now that people are following me around the mountain,” he confirmed. “That’s odd that he didn’t get my last letter, though. I haven’t been to town, but I handed a letter for Aleksei and a couple others off to Dan to mail for me when he stopped by on one of his trips up with some hikers.”

  “Dan sure has a knack for turning up around here at convenient times,” said Frank.

  “Or inconvenient, if you’re the one trying not to get crushed by a tree or to send a letter. Do you think he intercept—”

  “Wait, you said you weren’t the ones after me at first. What does that mean?” Max cut me off, limping back a step and tightening his grip on the tranquilizer gun at his side.

  “We know you took Aleksei’s garnets, Dr. K,” Frank said, his voice sympathetic but firm. Dr. K was our friend, but he was also a suspect. Which seemed to come as news to him.

  “You think I’d steal from my best friend?!” he asked incredulously.

  “I’m sorry, Doc,” I said. “We’re not saying you did it. We just think it’s possible. All the clues point to you taking the garnets from Aleksei’s hideout, and until we can rule out theft, we have to consider you a suspect.”

  “It’s a working hypothesis,” Frank explained.

  Dr. K gawked at us. “Aleksei told you he thought I was in trouble. What do you think? I destroyed my own lab and nearly killed myself jumping off a cliff as part of a robbery ploy?”

  I shrugged. “Stranger things have happened around here. I mean, Aleksei did crash a plane to fake his death and spend the next thirty years pretending to be a mythical man-eating mountain man,” I reminded him.

  “I’ll admit, I did get some wacky ideas from Aleksei, but staging my own disappearance wasn’t one of them. I just wanted to keep the garnets safe from whoever is trying to steal them.” He reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a plastic specimen bag, the kind scientists use to pick up interesting things they find in the field, like bits of animal hair or funky mushrooms and whatever other weird stuff scientists find interesting. Only it wasn’t fur or toadstools in this one. The bag was full of radiant green demantoid garnets.

  He placed the bag in Frank’s hand. “So you know I’m telling the truth. You can probably keep them safer than me now anyway.”

  Our eyes stayed fixed on the bag as Max slid his body down the boulder with a groan and took a seat on the ground. The garnets ranged from the size of a Ping-Pong ball—which we knew from experience was HUGE for a gem this rare—to tiny pebbles, but even the pebbles were gorgeous.

  “I used to dream of finding one of these when I collected rocks as a kid,” Frank said in awe, eyes fixed on the largest stone. “But I never could have imagined finding any this big.”

  “Aleksei calls them Siberian emeralds,” Max said as he massaged his bad leg. “There might be only a handful of them in the entire world, and probably no one except Aleksei has found one in nearly a century.”

  I knew from last time that demantoids were one of the rarest precious gems in the world, and the best ones are found almost exclusively in one part of Russia—the Ural Mountains, where Aleksei was from. It wasn’t just the rarity that made demantoids so valuable either. The transparent gemstones were green on the surface, but green was only the beginning.

  “ ‘Demantoid’ is derived from the French word for ‘diamond,’ ” Frank said reverently. “But these refract even more light than diamonds do.”

  The clouds parted as Frank held up the bag and rays of sunshine burst into the forest, hitting the stones and sending a brilliant rainbow sparkling over us. I’d seen some on our last trip too, but I still couldn’t stop marveling at the gems and the way they put on a zillion-color light show when the sun hit them just so. It was like Frank was holding a bag full of mini magic disco balls in the palm of his hand.

  “Something else, aren’t they? The beauty and intricacy of nature never cease to amaze me,” Max said, looking up at the stones from his seat on the ground. “I’m not trying to profit off them. I’m trying to protect them.”

  His words snapped me out of my demantoid daze. I wanted to believe Max. Badly. But I couldn’t entirely rule him out as a suspect until we had more information. “From who?”<
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  “I wish I knew,” he sighed. “I was on my way back late at night after checking my trail cameras for mountain lion activity when I realized there was someone in my research station.”

  “What did they look like?” Frank urged.

  “I didn’t get close enough to find out,” Max said, sounding a little embarrassed. “I was still on the other side of the bridge when I saw the flashlight moving around. It was too dark to make out much more than shadows from that distance. And after what happened to me last time someone snuck in, I wasn’t about to take any chances. I’m afraid I’m not as courageous as you boys.”

  “There’s nothing to feel bad about, Doc,” I tried to reassure him. “Having someone stuff you in you in a cabinet and steal your identity tends to leave an impression.”

  “And I know for a fact how brave you are,” Frank added. “I wasn’t alone on that raft when it went over the falls.”

  “Yeah, and you do spend your free time chasing after mountain lions,” I said. “But just because we think you’re brave doesn’t mean you’re off the hook yet. What happened next?”

  “Once I saw whoever it was tearing the place apart, I figured they had to be after the garnets,” he continued. “The press our last little adventure got brought all kinds of thrill seekers and treasure hunters out of the woodwork. They usually just stomp around and make a mess of the woods. I don’t know how many times I’ve had to clean up after them. This was the first time one of them had the audacity to ignore the no trespassing signs I had to put up and actually break in.”

  “He wasn’t a big, military-looking dude with a crew cut, was he?” I asked, recalling the description we’d received of the treasure hunter calling himself John Smith.

  “I tried looking through my binoculars, but the person was dressed in black and wearing a face mask. They might have been kind of big, maybe. I couldn’t really tell much from that angle.”