CATCH A FALLING STAR is a prequel, taking place before A PERSON IN A POSITION OF TRUST. This story has a science fiction theme to it and it pays homage to some classic science fiction movies in addition to being a thriller and a chiller. Lots of plot twists and turns in the story with some references to the future events of A PERSON IN A POSITION OF TRUST. The story begins at an archeological dig high a top a lonely mountain.

Catch A Falling Star - A Beef Matson Mystery

Chapter 1 - The Reindeer Man

"Even if you told them about Catch A Falling Star, they wouldn't believe it."

"I'm assuming there's a good reason for this little trek," called out a young man to his older companion. The young man turned so his back was against the wind as he adjusted the hood of his heavy coat so it would offer his face more protection. He looked about at his surroundings. The two men were above tree level; the ground covered only by lichen and ground hugging plants with waxy leaves that shuddered against the haunting sound of the cold wind. Above them, the young man observed the rounded cone of a mountain, the top of which was barely visible through a misty gray mass of building cloud. Off to his left, there was a higher and more distant grayish green peak, not yet obscured by clouds, a peak which had dark exposed rock jutting out, forming a toothy notch near the apex of the mountain.

The young man once again turned towards his older companion, squinting as the wind tore at his parka.
"I suppose you had a good reason for wanting to come up here," directed the young man again to his gray haired companion who was investigating something in a rocky depression.

"Privacy," called back the older man, "I wanted to come up here when our junior archeologists wouldn't be around getting underfoot and asking too many questions. Besides, I wanted to show you something."

"What is that?" asked the young man, stomping his feet on the ground in an effort to stay warm, "Something other than a good way to get hypothermia?"

"You're going to be cold standing in the wind; stand over here by this rock wall, it'll offer some protection from the wind."

The young man joined the older man, finding that the wall of piled rocks next to the depression they were standing in did break the force of the wind somewhat.

"Yes, my friend," spoke the older man, "I wanted to get one last good look up here without one of those college kids looking over my shoulder. It's good to be able to investigate this site just the way I want to without being observed by someone".

"Ironic, isn't it," replied the younger man, "especially when we were sent here to keep an eye on them."

"We can't put this whole mountain off limits to pottery hunters and rock hounds; that in itself would raise suspicion. Instead, we permit those university people come up here when they want and do their archeological digs while we watch and if they find anything interesting, we'll know about it right away and can control information about their finds.

Tell me, what do those students make of us?", asked the older man as he turned his attention back towards the rocks. "Any suspicions?"

"They've pretty much accepted me as a native artifacts specialist with the Forest Service," replied the younger man as he hunched his shoulders and dug his hands deeper into his coat pockets to find warmth. "They've got you figured out though. They don't buy your story about being funded by a grant from a foundation to study early native people's cultures. They're convinced you're connected to the government."
An anxious expression on his face, the older man immediately stopped his work and turned his attention to his companion. "You should have told me about this. What exactly have they figured out?"
"They believe you're from some law enforcement agency here to see if any of them are making off with native artifacts and selling them on the black market."

The older man laughed. "They sure do have me figured out, don't they, the little smart asses. I say let them think that I'm here to prevent artifact smuggling. All they've managed to do is to provide me with a better cover. The older man returned to inspecting the rocks, turning his attention to a rock with drawing on it. "You had me worried there, for a second. Though it would have been a real stretch for them to figure out the real reason we're here."

"Yes, it would be a real stretch for them for them to connect us to the Catch A Falling Star project, let alone come to the conclusion that…ah, such a thing exists," affirmed the younger man. "That would require a considerable stretch of the imagination for them and they're too much into the scientific method to allow themselves that much imagination. Even if you told them about Catch A Falling Star, they wouldn't believe it."

"The one who's in charge of their scout troop, what's her name…Becky?" inquired the older man.

"Rebecca."
"Well, if any one of those kids, through some very slim chance would have caught on, I thought it might be her. Smart, perceptive, way too nosy for her own good. She has a nasty tendency to ask prying questions, plus whenever those campfire kids were around, I always catch her throwing a steely eyed stare my way."

The younger man let out a shivering chuckle. "Well, she does have her good points, she makes some excellent brownies."

"Makes what?"

"Brownies. Chocolate brownies. Down there in that cabin, their meals are kind of limited; they have to truck up all their supplies in their backpacks. There's no supermarket or pizza delivery up here on the mountain. This damned, cold, godforsaken mountain. However, one of them brought some excellent quality coffee and Rebecca brought up some brownie making ingredients. She says something simple like making brownies helps keep morale up. You'd be surprised what they can cook up in the little stove they've got in that cabin".

"Brownies, yes, that adequately describes that group. A Brownie pack," retorted the older man, aggressively scraping soil away from the bottom of a rock.

"Well, I''ve gotten everything from this site that I wanted," said the older man as he slowly rose to his feet with a grimace, the joints in his legs giving him obvious distress, steadying himself on the rocks and then brushing the dirt from his knees with a gloved hand.
"Thank God for small mercies," replied his younger companion looking towards the mountaintops. The nearer peak was now almost completely obscured by the lowering clouds and ghostlike bursts of mists were chasing each other across the expansive meadow below the peak.
"I'll tell you what this place is, or was," announced the older man with the younger man shrugging his shoulders in reply. "This was a gateway and these ancient rock drawings were warnings. There's this wall here of relatively short length, a similar wall over there, and in between there are two piles of rock. Laid out much like…ah…if it were the entrance to a subdivision. The two piles of rock straddle what is an ancient trail, a trail which leads from the forests below, and up beyond these rocks to a pass between the two peaks and down to meadows on the other side of the peaks where ancient hunters would have found grazing animals. From their camps in the sheltered forests, ancient peoples would have used this trail in the summer to hunt animals escaping the summer heat to graze at the higher meadows.

Five thousand years ago there was much more snow covering these peaks, yet enough of it melted during the summer to allow passage to the meadows on the other side. Around the same time, the glaciers began to advance and gradually covered most of this area, even during the summer months until recently, when the glaciers began to retreat. As you can see now, even the higher peaks are almost completely devoid of snow."

"Still gets pretty cold up here, though," replied the younger companion.
"But it doesn't stay cold long enough to prevent the glaciers from melting, disappearing and revealing these sites again, after slightly more than five thousand years. Now we can see this gateway again, much like it was those many years ago, except bits of the walls have fallen, remarkable really, considering that they are just piled rocks without any mortar."
"The same reason the crash site was found," added the younger man with a more serious tone, "If the glacier had not melted, it would have remained hidden."

"Yes," continued the older man, "there are advantages to melting glaciers. For instance, the retreating glaciers reveal a story, a snapshot of what happened here 5,000 years ago. The purpose of these two short walls was to herd travelers on this main trail to the gateway opening, where they then would find many drawings of what the student archeologists call The Reindeer Man. They call it the Reindeer Man because at the dig much further down the mountain, they found a drawing with a similar figure surrounded by other figures doing what they thought was a ceremonial dance, celebrating hunting, with a man dressed up as a reindeer, because of the antlers on the head.

You'll notice, that all the drawings of the Reindeer Man are on the side of these rocks that people coming up the trail would have seen, there are no drawings on the other side of the rocks, for anyone coming down the trail. I believe this gateway was built as a warning to ancient peoples that they would encounter Reindeer Man if they went beyond this point. After awhile the glaciers began to cover most of the trail and even this gateway, so using this trail became a moot point.

We know from our tests at the crash site that it took place slightly over 5,000 years ago and the dating of this site and the other site further down the mountain, date them at the same time. I'm positive that two sites of these ancient peoples tell us exactly what happened here right after the crash took place. Ancient peoples using this trail encountered the Reindeer Man with disastrous results. They also discovered that their knives, spears and arrows had no effect on him. How these peoples solved the problem of the Reindeer Man is revealed by the drawings at the lower site. Here, let me show you."

The older man pulled out a laptop computer from his backpack and brought it to a more shadowy part of the rock wall. Momentarily, he had the computer showing images of other rock drawings.

"Here see," the older man pointing to the computer screen, "I took these photos at the lower site. This is what the college kids think is a ceremonial dance to assure a good hunting season. The image in the center is what they call the Reindeer Man because of the antlers on the figure's head. See the other figures positioned around the central image? None of them have antlers, only the figure in the center. See how large the central figure is compared to the others? See the antlers? Configured just the way our creature…hmmm…our Reindeer Man's antenna are configured. Not antlers, antennae. There have never been any Reindeer in this area, not even 5,000 years ago. So why would the ancient people be dancing around dressed like reindeer? They wouldn't. None of the other figures have faces except for the Reindeer Man. See how remarkably the crudely drawn face resembles our…Reindeer Man's face, if you can call it a face. All the other figures are stick figures except for the Reindeer Man. See how closely his configuration matches our Reindeer Man?

See how all the other figures have weapons, spears and bows and arrows? Yet the figure in the center doesn't have any weapons. The kids think he's supposed to represent a reindeer with the others hunting him. However, the ancient peoples left no other drawings like this one except at these two sites. Was the reindeer dance a one-time event?

Look at the tips of the spears and arrows; the wavy lines drawn around them, after all this time, you can still tell the lines are red and yellow, while the rest of the drawing is black. There are larger wavy lines drawn around the Reindeer Man, in yellows, oranges, and reds. I believe these drawings tell the story of how the ancient peoples discovered a way to deal with the Reindeer Man and dispatch him…using fire, bombarding the creature with flaming spears and arrows.

The ancient peoples then built this gateway to warn users of the trail not to venture beyond this point lest they encounter Reindeer Man. The built this gateway at point that they knew was beyond Reindeer Man's range. The other, more elaborate drawings were made at a much safer place lower on the mountain, far away from the creature's haunts, which was probably already a community gathering place or inter tribal place, where the story of their victory against Reindeer Man was told in rock paintings which also included information on how to use fire to kill the creature."

"Well, I guess your interpretation of the drawings could be considered…well, what is the word?" the younger man fumbled for a word, "Supposition?"
"There's more," replied the older man as he brought up another photo on the laptop. "Look at this," turned the laptop screen towards his companion. "The kids think this drawing shows the reindeer man symbolically returning to the earth to contact the earth spirit to tell him to bring more animals for hunting. Note the wavy colored lines representing fire? That's exactly what would happen to one of the creatures if you set it on fire. Reduced to kindling."

The younger man's eyes widened. "Then there were three of them that survived the crash. Maybe three pods and one of them somehow was able to grow after the crash and become the Reindeer Man…5,000 years ago. Amazing. Boggles the mind." Light around the two men dimmed as heavy mist suddenly raced around them mixed with snowflakes that zigzagged around the rock walls. "Looks like the cloud deck has just fallen in on us," warned the younger man as snowflakes powdered his jet black hair, "We should be heading down."
"In just a few minutes," answered the older man; "I still want to look things over a bit."

The older man closed the lid on his laptop and stuck it back into his backpack. "Something else I also want to show you." The man motioned his younger companion over towards an area where the rock wall was paralleled by another wall of short length and a four-foot depression had been dug into the earth. The two men huddled between the black rocks. "This is probably where the ancients took shelter when a squall like this moved across the mountain."
"We should be getting…" attempted the younger man.

"Look at this," the older man pointed to another rock drawing. "This other image is repeated over and over on the walls, even on the rocks set in the path. It's a drawing of the landscape in the distance. Even after more than 5,000 years the landscape is still much the same. It indicates the point where the trail crosses over the ridge in between the two peaks. Notice the notch in the peak drawn on the left; it matches the notch on the peak over to our left exactly. On the other side of the notch is where the crash site is, or was, I should say, since we've removed all traces of it. This drawing is another warning; it shows where travelers on the trail could expect to encounter the Reindeer Man.

We know that the creature likes to stay close to its, for lack of a better word, birthplace; we just didn't know what its range was. Hard to determine something like that in a lab. Being out here in the field, looking at these ancient drawings, I can tell you that the ancient Reindeer Man did not venture beyond the pass. Looking up to where the crash site was, we can conclude that the distance to the pass from the crash site is the limit of the creature''s range. Another part of its peculiar behavior; it will not stray beyond a certain radius of where it originated. At least this adventure with the college kiddies helped us determine another facet of the creature's behavior.

So we did get something out of spending two weeks on this mountain. The most I was expecting was that some pieces from the crash site would have been found at these excavations. You know, that the ancient peoples would have found the site and taken some souvenirs of the craft for themselves. Then somehow, we would have had to explain those to the archeologists. I didn't expect to find that one of the creatures made its way out into the environment."

"Well," responded the younger man, pulling his hands out of his pockets and folding his arms in front of him in another effort to stay warm, "If Reindeer Man did make his way out into the environment, then perhaps there are still more of them around here…today."

The older man turned away from the wall and faced his companion. "No," he replied firmly,"Absolutely not. There was only one, and that one was destroyed by the ancient people."

"How can you be so sure?" countered the younger man.
"The lack of evidence. The only evidence exists for a Reindeer Man of 5,000 years ago. There is no evidence of a contemporary Reindeer Man. The creature would have made its presence known. It certainly does have a unique way of attacking its prey."

"Yeah," added the young man, "I've heard what it does to lab animals"

"Believe me, attacks like that would not go unnoticed on humans or animals. No attacks of that kind have ever been recorded in this area. Once our own Reindeer Man was grown in the lab, there was concern about whether such a creature existed in the wild. The project did quite a bit of research into the records for this area and found no evidence whatsoever of the existence of a…" the older man chuckled, "a Reindeer Man in these mountains."

"Still," added the younger man, "suppose this creature was able to reproduce and its descendants still live on this mountain somewhere. We know what masters of stealth these creatures are. They could be living up here in this isolation, unnoticed and dragging their victims off…"
"Now who's engaging in supposition? No remains of the creature have ever been found…"

"Maybe they go off to die in caves; maybe they don't leave remains"
"There aren't any caves on this mountain. Yes, they would leave remains, just like the dead fir trees near the tree line."

"Maybe it evolved into a smaller size?"
"Even at a smaller size, its existence would have been quite noticeable. Believe me, given the creature's voracious appetite, it would have become an alarming nuisance a long time ago."

"Nuisance? More like a plague," the younger man added, observing his surroundings with a worried look. "We really need head back down now, the weather's really moving in. You can't see the peaks anymore and the snowflakes are getting a lot bigger. We should at least get down below tree line. Once the snow really hits up here, you won't be able to see the trail. At least in the forest, you can just follow the open path through the trees. These rock walls have been up here 5,000 years; my bet is that they'll still be here tomorrow."

"Yes, yes," said the older man picking up his backpack and zipping the pockets closed, "it just was good to be working without being observed. Yes, this is not the place to be during a snowstorm. Coffee and fresh baked brownies, you say? That's beginning to sound awfully good…" The young man raised one of his arms, an indication to the older man to be silent.

"Did you hear that?" the younger man spoke in a soft voice. The older man paused silently for a few seconds and then replied in a hushed voice. "Yes, I do. Footsteps on the gravel. Dragging footsteps."
"A bear?" asked the younger man.

"No. Not way up here, especially not this time of year."

"Whatever it is, it's walking on two feet. Just like a Reindeer Man would. Perhaps there are Reindeer Men…"

"Absolutely not." The two men stood in silent pose, their ears scouring the air for more sound. They heard the dragging footsteps again but could see no one in the mist and heavy falling snow. The footsteps seemed to be getting closer. The older man unzipped his backpack and pulled out a pistol.
"That won't have any effect on a Reindeer Man," advised the younger man.

"The only living Reindeer Men are in a laboratory. There are none on this mountain. This pistol, however, will be quite effective on any animal or…human."

The younger man picked up a large rock to use as a weapon and the two men slowly backed into the relative shelter of the depression next to the wall. The snow was rapidly beginning to blanket their heads and coats. The two men stood in anxious silence as the dragging footsteps now came from a rise next to the rock wall and seemed to be slowly approaching their position. Suddenly, there was a fall of small rocks and pebbles and the footsteps stopped. The dragging sound of footsteps on the gravel continued again and began to quicken their pace heading for the mouth of the depression. It was now apparent that the footsteps were now zeroing in on their position. The footsteps could now be heard above the mouth of the depression and rocks and pebbles began to cascade down the rise into the depression. The older man raised his pistol and pointed at the opening between the two black rock walls. He prepared to fire at whatever appeared at the opening. Something began to slide down into the depression causing a wave of rocks and pebbles to fall ahead it, the rocks and pebbles bouncing off the rock walls and into the depression. A crouching figure slid into the opening of the depression, blocking the two men's possible escape. The figure stood erect and faced the men.

"Kevin…Arthur! I finally found you guys. I…" The figure was that of a young woman. She paused, staring at the pistol the older man was pointing at her.

"Rebecca!" exclaimed the younger man.
"I guess you guys weren't expecting me," said the young woman.
"Oh," replied the older man, much relieved and lowering the pistol, "I carry the pistol because you never know what kind of critter you might run into up here."

"Yes," replied Rebecca nervously, still staring at the pistol, "there are occasions I've thought it would be wise for me to carry one as well." The older man quickly put his weapon back into his backpack.

"I came up here to get you guys," Rebecca continued, "The low pressure system south of here suddenly changed course and intensified; a whole big chunk of the state is going to be hammered by the storm, maybe as much as three feet of snow here in the mountains. This is not the place you want to be during a heavy snowfall. The way the snow is coming down now it was hard for me to even find this site."

"Yes indeed, we should be heading down," replied the older man as his younger companion discreetly deposited the rock he was holding on the ground.

"Yeah, the weather is really beginning to suck," added the younger man, "It changes incredibly fast up here. We need to get below tree line as quickly as possible."
"Just think of the fresh, hot coffee that's waiting for you down at the cabin, it'll make a fast trek down the trail worthwhile," advised Rebecca.
"And your brownies, of course," added the younger man.
"Speaking of which…" Rebecca quickly slipped off her backpack and unzipped it, removing a plastic container. "Oh good, they're still a little warm. Got a couple of my brownies for you two. It'll help keep your energy up on the way down."

The two men helped themselves to the brownies with Rebecca returning the container to her backpack and putting the pack back on. Then the young woman and man helped the older man with his backpack after which the trio hurriedly began the trek down the snowy trail towards the warmth and safety of the cabin, with the older man munching on a brownie as he trudged through the snow. "Good brownie," he called out. The falling snow quickly muffled the fading chatter as the group continued down the trail with the storm enforcing a lonely isolation on the site they had just left; a blanket of white steadily covering the ancient rock walls under a heavy blue-gray sky.

CHAPTER 2 - GETTING AWAY FROM IT ALL

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