Dead Low (Loach Book 3)

A cold fire, cut bamboo nobody carried, and stones turned damp side up. Crumbs, and no table.

Late in the dry season the air in the hollows is too hot to lift a loaded Loach, the stream beds are bleached white, and every morning somebody shoots at a scout from country with no trails in it. Jack Calloway and Curtis Talley follow what little there is: one sandal print going into the rocks, and a line of dark stones down a dry bed that leads them into a gorge.

The trail ends where the bamboo has been tied together overhead to hide it. When the hunt goes wrong on a bamboo slope, two men who have spent a year reading ground from the air have to cross it on foot, with searchers working up the hill below them.