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time. Stay quiet, see what we can hear.”
    Virgil took a few sips of water, while Johnson popped open a beer, and they listened: and heard the woods, but nothing out of place. When Johnson had finished the beer, they walked to their right along the game trail until Johnson, who was watching the GPS, said, “We’re about there. We need to go off this way. . . .”
    He led the way downslope, into the Orly’s Creek valley. A few dozen yards into the trees, they found themselves paralleling a shallow dry gully, and Virgil said, “This probably goes down to the break in the bluff.”
    Johnson nodded, and they followed it down; a minute later the gully got deeper, and the way was blocked by a shoulder of the yellow rock. They moved into the gully, which got steeper, but took them through the lip of the bluffs. At that point, the slope became even steeper, and they paused to assess. The ground beneath their feet was a combination of damp black earth and crumbled bits of the yellow rock.
    “It’s doable, if we use the rope,” Johnson said. “But we couldn’t get back up unless we left the rope here.”
    “Don’t want to do that,” Virgil said. “If we had to get out some other way, they’d know where we’re getting in.”
    They decided to take a chance—they’d use the rope, doubled around a tree trunk, then they’d pull it down, and find another way out of the valley. Doing that, after the decision, took only a couple of minutes, with Virgil leading the way down. They pulled the rope down after them, repacked it, and walked down the valley wall to the trail they’d seen in the ag service photos.
    It turned out to be six feet wide, and well packed, marked with ATV tracks. A few incipient gullies across the trail, caused by water draining from above, had been filled with broken rock.
    “Some good work here,” Johnson said. He looked up and down the track. “But why would they build it?”
    “Cooking meth,” Virgil said. “But it’d have to be an industrial operation to build a road like this.”
    Johnson was looking up at the overhanging trees. “You know what? Half the trees here are sugar and black maple. They could be cooking syrup.”
    “Thought that was all up north.”
    “No, they got sugar bushes all the way down into Iowa,” Johnson said. “The wood makes damn good flooring, I can tell you.”
    “I know about flooring, now. Frankie salvages it from old farmhouses.”
    “Yeah, that’s a fashion,” Johnson said. They were both looking up and down the trail.
    Virgil asked, “Which way?”
    “Right. I think.”
    They moved off down the trail, listening and watching. Virgil asked, “What is it with these trees?” He pointed to a young maple that had been girdled with an ax or hatchet, but left standing.
    “They’re killing the tree, but leaving it standing to dry out. Making firewood,” Johnson said. A hundred yards farther on they came to the built spot that Virgil had seen on the photos, and it turned out to be a woodlot, with a few face cords of stacked wood set off to one side.
    “Could be the answer to the trail,” Johnson said. “Somebody’s harvesting firewood. You’d need an ATV to tow it out of here.”
    “But this isn’t the end of it . . .”
    Virgil led the way out of the woodlot. The trail had narrowed to a single-wide track, blocked by a pile of brush—the leftover ends of trees cut up for firewood. An ATV could get around it, but nothing wider. The trail eventually led to three metal sheds of the kind sold at lumberyards. They’d been painted with a green-on-black camouflage pattern, and all had tightly sealed doors, with padlocks. A half-dozen propane cylinders sat on the ground beside one of them.
    “Smell it?” Virgil asked.
    “Yeah.”
    They could smell the acetone.
    “Cooking meth,” Virgil said. “And not long ago.”
    “They could use the same setup to cook syrup, the same setup I have,” Johnson said. “I wonder why that never occurred to