“Give me the cheat sheets. I’ll dole out clues when you beg for them. You’re the one that picked a high difficulty multipart cache to start with”, Peter said, grabbing the paper.

Ralph kept his eyes on the trees right above six feet from the ground, looking for a hole or crevice that could be hiding a film canister. Peter was picking through the clues for this find, slowly decrypting the ROT-13 text. Ralph saw a patch of bark in one tree that looked a bit too shiny, just below a crook. He shimmied up the trunk to get his hands up in the spot where he figured it was hiding.

“Got it!”, he said falling back to the ground with the small black cylinder in one hand.

“OK, open it up and reveal our new path”, Peter said, folding up the cheat sheets.

“It says, forty five feet east northeast”, Ralph said, turning the laminated card over to see a large brown eye printed on the back. There was a key hanging from a lanyard which hung from a hole punched in the card.

“Let me see that”, Peter said, holding out his hand.

The card looked like something done professionally or at least by a very adept scrapbooker. The directions were in a fancy script font and the color photo on the back was kind of creepy. It looked like a macro photograph of a hairy dog’s eyeball.

“Here, let me have the key”, Ralph said. Then he reached up and placed the film canister back into the crook of the tree keeping the card and key in his hand. He stood with his back to the tree trunk and aligned himself with the bearing east northeast. There was a path leading that direction, not a trail but more like a deer track where the brush had been opened up by people or animals passing through. He started walking counting his steps.

“Eleven, twelve, how’s this?”, he yelled back to Peter.

“You’re only about twenty feet from the tree. Fifteen more steps I think.”

Ralph continued on to twenty seven steps. He stood still and turned in a circle looking for something that might be the next clue. Just to his right was a space in the brush that formed a rectangle about 12 inches by 6 inches that was just bare red dirt. There had been something there for a while, but it wasn’t there now.

*****

Eric had stashed the ammo box he grabbed from the cops under a bridge in North Aberdeen. He didn’t look at it too closely, just making sure that it was still locked. Now he had retrieved it and brought it back to his garage since the cops were off his trail. He grabbed the lock and saw it wasn’t the normal padlock he used for these dead drops.

He thought that some bozo had fucked up and lost the normal lock and threw this cheap thing on here after they bought it Wal-Mart. He tried the key anyway, it didn’t work. So, he grabbed a hacksaw and started cutting through the lock’s center. With these cheap locks, the rivets holding it together were the weakest part of the package.

Once he had cut through the rivets on side, he grabbed a locking pliers and ripped the lock apart. He pulled the latch and opened the box.

“What the fuck?”, he yelled.

*****

“Hey, Peter! Come over here and check this out”, Ralph said standing in front of the recently vacated spot on the forest floor.

Peter walked through the brush where Ralph had just bushwhacked. He got up to where Ralph was standing and saw the bare red dirt rectangle.

“Looks like someone’s not playing fair”, he said.

“Is that the size of an ammo box?”, Ralph asked.

“Yes it is. Did the cops find this geocache and think that they had some big clue?”, Peter asked.

“Read the next couple of clues, this sucks”, Ralph said, pointing at the cheat sheets.

Peter went through the encoded messages that people had left on the website for people who got stuck. Some words came to him easily as he got used to the ROT-13 encoding, but some still took a little thinking through.
The first clue read:

FZNYY QRRE GENPX RAR GUVEGL CNPRF 50 PNY NZZB OBK NJNVGF

Which Peter read out loud to Ralph, “Small deer track ENE thirty paces 50 CAL ammo box awaits.”

“Well, that’s what’s supposed to be here. What else about this one?”

The next clue spelled out:

VS FNFDHNGPU UNF FGBYRA GUR OBK TB GB GUR LBHAT FGERRG OEBQTR

Peter started reading this one, “What? Sasquatch?”

“Really? Keep going!”

Peter grabbed a pencil and wrote the letters under the second word just to be sure and then continued, “It says, If Sasquatch has stolen the box go to the Young Street Bridge.”

“Oh, That’s just too cheesy. Look at this card again, does that eye look familiar now?”, Ralph asked hold the card up so Peter could see it.

“I guess that could be a Sasquatch eye”, Peter said looking at the next clue.

****

Eric was very disappointed that he wasn’t greeted by neatly bundled piles of US currency. He pulled everything out of the box that looked exactly like all his other boxes. There was a log book, filled with names and dates, a couple plastic toys, a Seattle Supersonics Squatch doll and a laminated card that said, “Go to the Young Street Bridge.”

Apart from the fact that the contents convinced Eric that he had risked life and limb to steal the wrong ammo box, he thought that is was a little ironic that this box had just spent the last three days wedged in the beams of the very bridge it was instructing someone to go visit. He started putting the things back in the box, trying to control his anger and frustration. When he picked up the Squatch doll, he saw the small card wedged in it’s basketball shorts.

“Please take me home. -Sasquatch”

*****

“Don’t read the next one yet! Let’s go down to the bridge, I found this part by myself”, Ralph said, putting his hand on the cheat sheets.

“OK, boss. No more clues until we reach another inevitable dead end.”

Ralph went back to the tree and grabbed the film canister. He pushed the card and the key back into the container and wedged it in the tree. Peter had already started walking back to the van and he hurried to catch up.

“I call shotgun!”, Ralph yelled.