Leaving Blythe River: A Novel (18 page)

Not five minutes later all four of them were hunkered down, close together, holding one big tarp over their heads while the hail pounded. Now and then the wind whipped up and sent the hail sideways, into their faces. It flapped the edges of the tarp and threatened to uncover them and expose them and render them even more uncomfortable.

If such a thing is possible,
Ethan thought.

Ethan’s stomach groaned in pain again. They hadn’t eaten lunch yet—or even prepared it—because they couldn’t let go of the tarp.

Ethan felt Rufus leaning hard against his back, clearly afraid of the clattering noise. Hail rolled down a slight incline and joined them under the tarp, where it quickly melted against Ethan’s jeans. It made him miserable to think of riding off for a long afternoon in wet clothes. Then he remembered they were about to swim their mounts through a river.

“How long does this usually keep up?” he asked, maybe of Jone, maybe of Sam. Maybe both. He had to speak up to be heard over the clatter of hail on tarp.

“Sometimes just a few minutes,” Sam said.

“Sometimes hours,” Jone added.

Ethan sighed and leaned out slightly to look at the horses and mules. They stood with their heads down miserably, suffering in silence. Hail bounced off his scalp, stinging.

The mountains had disappeared, replaced by black sky. Alarmingly black.

“Shouldn’t we cover them, too?” Ethan asked, pulling his head back in.

At first nobody answered.

Then Sam asked, “Who’s ‘them’?”

“Them,” Ethan said, pointing.

“Oh. The stock. With what?”

“I don’t know. It just doesn’t seem fair. Here we are under some kind of cover . . .”

“They got thick skin,” Sam said.

Sam didn’t seem like he wanted to talk much. No one did. The mood of the group had changed. On a dime, like the weather. Everyone seemed uncomfortable. Every fuse seemed suddenly short.

“They just look so miserable,” Ethan said.

“Yeah, well, I got news for you,” Sam shot back. “Before long you’ll figure out there’s enough misery to go around. It won’t be confined to the stock.”

Then nobody talked for a long time.

“See what I mean about this place?” Marcus asked.

It took Ethan a moment to realize the question was aimed at him. He looked over his shoulder to see Marcus staring right into his face.

“Oh. Me?”

“Yeah. Remember what I said?”

“I do. Mostly. You said it’s not forgiving. Like it’s hostile toward us.”

“I didn’t say it was hostile. I don’t think it hates us,” Marcus said.

“But it’s not on our side.”

“No. It just doesn’t care about us one way or another.”

A long string of words burst out of Sam. Rushed and sudden, as though they had broken through a fence.

“What the hell were you doing asking this guy about the wilderness, Ethan? What does
he
know? You want to know about this place? Ask
me
. I’ve been up here hundreds of times. Ask the actor-surfer guy how many times
he’s
been up here.”

Silence.

The tarp rose and shifted as Marcus climbed to his feet.

“I’m going out for a nice walk in the hail,” he said.

And he did.

Jone threw an elbow into Sam’s padded ribs, and he landed on his back with a deep grunt, dropping his edge of the tarp and causing them all to be pelted miserably with hail.

The hail had turned to a driving rain, soaking the ground beneath them and melting the accumulated pellets of ice. Ethan’s stomach had taken to growling loudly enough that he was sure Sam and Jone could hear.

Marcus hadn’t come back to enjoy their scant cover.

“This isn’t showing any signs of letting up,” Sam said. “We need to ride on. Tactical error. We should’ve crossed the river before we stopped for lunch. I was just trying to put off getting soaked. But that river could be about to get impassable. We could even be in for a flash flood. I think we’ll be okay if we go fast. Since it blew in from the lower elevations. But it’s up here with us now. So if we’re going to get over safely, we better get to getting while we still can.”

“You bring any rain gear?” Jone asked him.

“Yes and no. I got some light ponchos. But the wind’ll flap them around. Drive the rain underneath them. And we’re about to get soaked to our chests in the river anyway.”

“It’s not that cold,” she said.

Ethan thought it felt cold. In the wind, and with his jeans soaked. He didn’t share that thought.

“Well, it’s not warm like it was,” Sam said. “High fifties maybe. Leastways it’s not cold enough that anybody’s gonna get hypothermia.”

And then, just like that, the tarp disappeared from above him. Pulled back. Ethan turned in the driving rain to see Sam flapping it to straighten it out for folding. Jone’s big chestnut horse spooked slightly. The other horses and mules were too busy squinting their eyes against the downpour to react.

“What about lunch?” Ethan asked, feeling the rain soak through his hat and shirt.

“It’s kind of a wash,” Jone said. “Even if we hold a tarp over the camp stove, it’s really hard to get it to light in all this wind. Besides, we need to cross right now, like Sam said.”

“Oh,” Ethan said, not wanting to show how devastating he found the news. In fact, everything felt devastating. Everything had taken a turn for the worse. The weather, the mood. The wilderness. The experience. It had gone from scary and uncomfortable to downright awful.

And now there was nothing but fear of fast water.

“You hungry?” Sam asked him, overhearing.

“Starving.”

“Can you make do with a couple of energy bars?”

“Yeah. Sure. If I have to. I mean, it’s better than nothing.”

Sam finished folding the tarp in the pouring rain. He tucked it away in one of Rebar’s big canvas packs, then rummaged around on the other side of the mule. Ethan wondered why Rebar never tried to bite or kick Sam. Maybe the disagreeable mule knew better by now.

Ethan looked down and around to see where Rufus had gone. He found the dog crouched behind his heels, head down, eyes mostly closed against the deluge.

“Well, one good thing about all this,” Jone said. “If your dad’s alive, he needs water. And here it is. All you can drink.”

Ethan was thinking that his father had been out here for a few days now. Longer than a person can normally go without water. He wondered what his father could have done to make it to this moment. Was the early snowmelt enough? Or had his father’s hydration bladder still been fairly full when . . . well, when whatever happened happened?

Ethan was opening his mouth to ask a bunch of questions Jone would never be able to answer when Sam appeared before him, dripping, holding out two energy bars.

Ethan accepted them gratefully.

“One or two?” Sam asked Jone.

“One’ll do. I had a big breakfast.”

“What about your friend?” Sam asked her.

And that was the end of Jone’s fuse, right there.

“Damn it, Sam,” she snapped. “What the hell is it with you, anyway? He’s not my friend. I barely know him. He’s
our
neighbor. Not
mine
.
Ours.
And I don’t even know where he is. For all I know he might’ve walked half the way home by now. I wouldn’t blame him if he did.”

“He’s right over there,” Sam said. As though it were unfortunate news to have to report. “Here. Bring him one.” And he tried to push a wet bar into Jone’s equally wet hands.

“The hell I will. You just damn well get over whatever this thing is you can’t seem to get over. You’re leading this expedition. Some leader. You go offer the man something to eat.”

Sam sighed. Then he walked slowly in the direction of Marcus, who was crouched in the pouring rain near the horses.

Jone shook her head.

“Stubborn old mule,” she spat, more or less in Ethan’s direction. “And I don’t mean Dora. And I don’t mean Rebar.” Then she looked over at Ethan. Her face softened. She set one large, square hand on his head. Well, on his soaking-wet baseball cap. “Let’s go ahead and mount up,” she said. “Get this river crossing over with.”

It was Ethan’s first indication that everybody had issues with swimming across a fast-moving river. Not just him.

They sat their horses—and Ethan’s mule—at the very edge of the Blythe River in the rain. In honor of the river crossing they were a pack train again. Sam had tied each horse and mule to the next—first Ethan’s mule behind the bay, then Jone’s chestnut behind Ethan, then Rebar, and Marcus on his pony dead last. Much the way he’d tied them to ride them up to Ethan’s A-frame earlier that morning. But in a different order.

Was there significance to the new order?

Ethan’s head swam at the thought that it had been earlier that same day when Sam had come riding up to begin this expedition. That seemed impossible. So much ground had been covered since then. So much sheer time. The dawn seemed like something that must have transpired a week ago.

“Don’t just hold that rope,” Sam told Ethan. “Tie it real good to your saddle horn, and then hold the end anyway, just in case.”

Ethan looked down at Rufus, who looked drenched and unhappy at Dora’s hooves. Sam had tied the dog up into a makeshift rope harness and handed the end of the rope to Ethan. That way nobody could wash away.

Unless they all washed away.

Ethan looked at the river. It was running higher and faster than when they’d decided to push on.

He tended to the tying of the rope as a way of not looking at the water again.

“I don’t know about this,” Jone said.

“If this was a pleasure trip,” Sam said, “I’d agree. I’d say why not be safe? Scrub the trip, or go a different way. See something else. But a man’s life is at stake here.”

An image exploded in Ethan’s brain. He pictured his father sitting in a restaurant or a bar. Eating prime rib or drinking Scotch. Talking up a much-younger woman. Not out in the wilderness at all. That’s what everybody else thought. What if everybody else was right? What if four people and six animals were about to risk their lives for a man who wasn’t even out here in the first place?

Didn’t that seem like just the kind of curveball Noah Underwood could be counted on to throw?

“All right,” Jone said. “If we’re going to do this thing it best be right now.”

Then it was too late. Sam put his heels to his huge bay horse, and the rest of the train had no choice but to be pulled along. The earth dropped out sharply from under the bay’s hooves, and Ethan watched the horse sink deeply into the river. Deep enough to plunge Sam into water up to his chest. Then the bay bobbed up and swam valiantly.

Suddenly Ethan was in water up to his neck, and then Dora swam just as valiantly, lifting them up so that most of Ethan’s torso rose out of the river.

It was a sickening sensation, as though Ethan’s heart had stopped. And he couldn’t tell if it was the icy water or the fear of the current and drowning that drove his shock.

He felt the pull of the river draw them downstream. But at the same time, the bay was swimming closer to the other bank. It wasn’t a wide river. No wider than the pack train was long. Maybe they could reach solid ground on the other side before they washed away.

Ethan had a panicky image of the current swallowing Dora, pushing her head under. Pushing both their heads under. But it didn’t come to pass. The river pulled them off course, but it didn’t sweep them uncontrollably away.

Except poor Rufus. He had been pushed to the far end of his rope, downriver. If the rope came loose, he would be gone. If he slipped out of the makeshift harness, he would be gone.

Then Sam’s big bay was stumbling out onto relatively dry land, shaking himself off like a wet dog. He surged forward, urged by Sam’s heels, and Dora came up onto dry land, too. Ethan pulled Rufus’s rope hand over hand until the dog was able to climb up and out onto the bank.

“Dumb horse,” Sam said to his bay. “Shaking water off yourself in the pouring rain.”

Just then Rufus did exactly what Sam had described. Shook water off his coat in the pouring rain. But Ethan had never pegged Rufus as the smartest dog in the world.