Wolfwraith Read Free

this isthmus, which jutted slightly out to sea, as the more northerly Cape Henry, marking the entrance to the Chesapeake Bay. Any skipper making this error would run his ship aground on the shallows. The early inhabitants of False Cape were said to have lighted fires in imitation of lighthouses, luring ships aground so their cargo would become available for ‘salvage‘ by the locals.
    Shadow turned off the beach at a dune crossing, marked by a tall pole with a banner reading False Cape. The truck’s wheels spun occasionally in the soft sand as he passed through a small campground in the dunes—merely a couple of outhouses and picnic tables. Coming down the other side, he entered scraggly woods, where only a few hardy live oak trees struggled for existence in the salt-air environment. Live oaks were the only species capable of growing here. The rutted, soft-sand path continued on for couple of hundred yards where it intersected the main road, a one-lane gravel trail that was the only north-south route through the park other than the beach. Shadow crossed the road and entered the meadow. This was the False Cape bayside campground: three tent sites with no modern amenities.
    A quick glance showed the campsites and the small, three-sided shelter to be empty, so he decided to check the dock. He continued past two outhouses—even primitive camping required privacy in the privy—into a path through the trees at the opposite side of the clearing.
    Shadow eased the truck down the narrow lane, bouncing over the deep ruts made by park vehicles over the years. Mud and water splattered into the woods as the tires splashed through puddles. The track went over a small swamp that never dried out.
    He broke free of the trees and looked out on the brown waters of Back Bay. He had traveled less than a half-mile from the beach to reach the bay, the isthmus being narrow here. False Cape was the park’s central landing on the bay side, between Barbour Hill in the north and Wash Woods to the south.
    Pulling into a small clearing at the foot of the pier, Shadow cut off the engine and got out of the truck. A glance around showed no hint that anyone had been in the area recently. No kayaks or other craft were beached in the clearing, or tied to the pilings of the dock.
    He hesitantly walked onto the pier that extended a hundred feet out into the bay, cautious because a few of the boards had grown old and rotted with age. Not that he was overweight; he’d lost the pounds gained while in the hospital now he was active again. He was stocky, but not overweight.
    The dock poked out into the base of a U-shaped body of water, Tripp’s Cove, which opened onto Back Bay. On such an overcast day, he couldn’t see the Virginia mainland on the far shore to the west. He barely distinguished the dark blur of a duck-hunting blind at the mouth of the cove.
    He scanned the water without bothering to fetch the pair of binoculars he kept under the truck seat. Since his arrival at the park, his eyesight had astounded the other rangers. Some wondered if it might have to do with his oddly colored eyes, but Shadow knew his vision was a gift from his Indian Grandmother.
    Shadow rarely gave a thought to his Native American ancestry; after all, there were plenty of people around here with Indian blood. He had more than most. Grandmother Min claimed they were descended from the Accomattoc, a long-vanished tribe, which had once been part of the Powhatan Confederation.
    Shadow’s grandparents had raised him after his unmarried mother died in childbirth. They’d lived in a double-wide trailer on a wooded, isolated spit on Virginia’s middle peninsula, between bay and river. Grandfather, who was also part Native American with a bit of Scottish about him, had taught him trapping, hunting and how to be a Baptist. Grandmother Min, quite the eccentric, had taught him the spiritual side of being a Native American and how not to be a Baptist.
    Now, for no apparent reason,