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had been arguing about.  She wanted to sneak
off and he didn’t.  This was his way of not directly defying his mother but
still doing what he thought was best — sneaky.  But as much as I may have
admired his cleverness, it still made me mad.  I was damn sure going to get the
journals back, tell them what I thought of them, and strike off on my own
after.
    If
you’ve read these last three paragraphs, you of course have figured out that I
eventually regained possession of the journals.  The interesting part is how I
got them back.  I would never have imagined that a decision I made on April
first, an out of character decision, would have led me to the events I’m about
to describe.
    Following
their trail was easy.  They walked straight to Highway 20, if you could call it
a highway.  It is really just a two lane road cutting through a forest of
ninety foot spruce and lodgepole pine, thick, and dark, and towering as far as
I could see.  After that, it wasn’t so easy.  I couldn’t tell if they went east
or west.
    Well,
what now Einstein?  
That’s what I was asking myself.  If I went the wrong direction, I’d not likely
ever find them or the journals again.  So I decided to search in both
directions; several hundred yards one way and the same the other.  Maybe I’d
find something=tif.  Maybe I’d pick up their track.  Nothing, though.  There wasn’t
a scuffmark, a discarded something or other, and definitely not a footprint. 
So I just took a chance and went west.  I figured she would think I would guess
east, so I went the opposite direction, knowing all the time I could be just
outsmarting myself.
    A
half-hour into it, I heard something I never, ever thought I’d hear again.  It
was an airplane, one of those little ultra light, one-seater jobs; practically nothing
more than a pair of cloth covered wings and an engine but still a plane.  It
was making tight little circles, about five miles off to the east, hard to tell
exactly. 
    My
first reaction?  Run for cover.  The months I’ve spent on my own have given me a
healthy suspicion of anything out of the ordinary; a noise, a shape, a movement,
anything unusual at all has to be interpreted as a threat unless determined
otherwise.  That is the only way to keep yourself healthy.  If you think about
it, animals do the exact same thing, right?  Dogs nose the air and circle growling
at something strange.  A deer will bolt at a sudden movement.  Birds take
flight at a sharp sound.  And an airplane circling overhead, when I hadn’t seen
one in years, definitely fell into that category.        
    Once
I was in the trees, I started walking east, peeking out when I thought it safe
and wondering how someone could get an airplane like that up and running. 
Nothing else works.  Why that?  I felt a sliver of hope that somewhere, somehow,
society was making a comeback; that man’s ingenuity was starting to repair all
the damage that had been done.  I quickly dismissed that thought as too soon
and too unlikely with people like Ponytail out there.  An ordered society would
be needed before real recovery could be achieved. 
    It
very shortly became my opinion that the explanation was simpler than that.  The
plane was such a basic machine, it probably didn’t have the same type of sophisticated
electronic components that have failed in about every other mechanical thing. 
That’s the reason my motorcycle carried me so far down roads littered with
useless cars and trucks.  It was old and simple. 
    I
next forced my thoughts to more immediate concerns.  What had the pilot spotted
that had drawn his attention?  At this time he’d been up there, essentially in
the same place, for a good ten minutes.  Why?  Then I figured it out, stupid me,
and was running.    
    At
one point, several minutes into it, when I slowed to skirt a fallen tree, with
the sounds of my pack banging around and breathing quieted, I could no longer hear
the engine