Leaving Blythe River: A Novel (21 page)

“Up to you,” Sam said. “It’s two and a half miles with twenty-three-hundred feet of elevation gain. But if you think you’re up to it . . .”

“I think we’re out here to find my dad,” Ethan said. “If we’re not willing to do stuff like that, what’s the point? We can ride around out here forever, and it’s pretty and all, but I just don’t see what good we’ll be doing if we don’t look everyplace we can think of looking.”

They rode to the edge of the valley, which Ethan figured took more than an hour. Occasionally calling for Dad/Noah. Ethan had to clamp down on a small expression of pain at the mule’s every step. He found himself looking forward to walking the steep trail he could see up ahead of them, just to give his saddle-sore spots a break. Part of him knew the hike would bring its own pain. But somehow a new and unfamiliar pain felt like a worthwhile trade.

Just as they reached the junction between the edge of the valley and the climbing section of the trail, Ethan was startled by the sudden movement of a large, darting animal. He instinctively reined back on the mule and turned his head to see. Dora turned her head, too. Behind them, Ethan could hear Jone gently cooing “Ho, ho” to her spooky mount.

It was an elk, Ethan saw. Stepping out from around the flank of the mountain base and into their view. And then another elk. And then three. Two were female, with small, neat heads, necks that bulged out in front, and ears that tuned forward as if trying to bring in a radio station. The third was a huge buck with a rack of horns nearly as tall and wide as he was, bowing out from his head and then pointing skyward and halfway out along its back. Each horn sported six impressive points.

Their slightly shaggy coats looked a dusty golden brown, going to darker brown on their necks and knobby-kneed legs.

They stopped dead, apparently more surprised to see Ethan’s search team than the other way around.

For what seemed like a full minute, nobody and nothing moved. The elk just stood, wide-eyed, as if holding perfectly still might prove an effective substitute for invisibility.

Then one of the females threw her head, and they darted downhill, their hooves drumming on the hard ground. And then more elk stampeded from behind the flank of the mountain. And more. And more.

A whole herd of elk galloped by, panicky and driven. Then a whole sea. Hundreds of elk. In fact, Ethan thought, they looked like a sea. Like water flowing downhill.

And they just kept coming.

At any given moment in the procession, elk filled the trail in front of the team at least a dozen animals wide.

Every tenth or twentieth elk was a baby, desperately scrambling to keep up with its mother.

The last few stragglers bolted by, and the hoofbeats grew fainter. And still the team sat their mounts and watched the herd gallop away. The elk had white on their back ends—a broad upside-down teardrop of white with a tiny flick of tail in the middle. Some of the tails twitched as they ran away.

Another movement caught Ethan’s eye, and he turned to see two coyotes tracking the herd from behind. They appeared from behind the flank of the mountain and froze, heads down, staring at the horses and humans. Their eyes looked yellow and shifty, inherently dishonest, and their thin muzzles and painfully skinny legs distinguished them from the possibility of being someone’s dogs. Or anything domestic or tame. Ethan instinctively looked around to locate Rufus, who sat close to Dora’s back hooves.

When he looked up again, the coyotes were disappearing behind the mountain, back the way they had come.

Ethan wondered if his team had saved a weak or young elk by being in that right place at the right time. Then again, everybody and everything eats. Maybe they had starved a coyote with their bad timing.

Jone rode the few steps up beside him on her chestnut and reined the horse to a halt, looking down on Ethan from above.

“Tell the truth,” she said, flipping her chin toward the retreating sea of elk, now tiny flowing dots in the green of the valley. “Totally independent of our reasons for being here. Let’s pretend this was a pleasure trip. Would you rather be home right now, or here?”

Ethan took the question seriously. Mulled it over for a brief time.

“A minute ago I would’ve picked home,” Ethan said, “and halfway up that steep trail I might pick home again. Right now I’d say it’s pretty much a tie.”

“That’ll do,” she said.

And they rode on.

Halfway up the steep incline, Ethan was struck by the pointlessness of the task. And not just the task of intermittently peering over the edge, either. The whole folly of being out in the wilderness, looking, overwhelmed him. It came on suddenly, knocked the figurative wind out of him, and left him feeling profoundly depressed.

How much space did a lost or fallen human occupy? A few square feet? And how many square feet did this seemingly endless wilderness contain? How many human-size spaces actually existed out here to be searched? Or, rather, how many millions of them? How long would it take a team to look in even a fraction of them? And how long could a lost or fallen person survive while they tried?

“You okay?” Jone asked, looking down at him from her horse. She’d been holding Dora’s reins, ponying the mule along behind her.

“Yeah. Sure. Just winded.”

Actually, it wasn’t entirely true. The steep climb wasn’t so much making him winded, because he was taking it so slowly, stopping above each shelf in the rock face to lie on his belly and look down. But he was wearing out nonetheless. The muscles in his thighs and calves and hamstrings had just about reached their limit. They felt both tight and trembly at the same time.

Ethan briefly thought of mounting his mule again and forgetting the idea of checking below. Maybe even forgetting the idea of being out here.

He stopped in the middle of the trail behind the team and waited for them to notice. It took a moment, and it made him feel panicky inside, as if he were being left behind. He didn’t know why he didn’t solve the problem by calling out to them, but he didn’t. It just felt like a task that would require energy he didn’t have, and couldn’t find.

It was Sam who finally looked over his shoulder.

“Why’d you stop?” he called back down the trail.

Ethan walked a handful of tough, painful steps to catch up, so he wouldn’t have to yell.

“How many days has my dad been gone?”

“’Bout five, I think.”

“Can a person survive out here for five days?”

“Well.” Sam scratched one bearded cheek. “Depends.”

“On what?”

“Mostly on whether they’re injured, and how, and how bad. And whether they can find water. But there’s been a lot of runoff. What with the snowmelt, and then yesterday’s rain. And hail. A person could gather hail for drinking water. It melts fast. They’d just have to have something to hold it in.”

“He had one of those hydration bladders with the sip tubes.”

“Don’t count him out just yet, then,” Sam said.

“You feeling discouraged?” Jone asked.

“Yeah,” he said. He had planned to elaborate, but then he never did.

“Want to get back up on your mule and I’ll get down and do the looking-over-the-edge part?”

“No,” Ethan said. “He’s my dad. I’ll keep looking.”

There was another reason to stay down with his feet on the trail. Another incentive to keep walking. One he didn’t bother to put into words. He would have been terrified to try to mount with his stiff, shaky legs, on a trail not much wider than the mule. On the drop-off side.

He began to move his concrete muscles again, hiking up to the next spot that might have broken a person’s fall. But before he even got to it, before he dutifully dropped to his belly and peered over the edge at the top of a tree that seemed to grow out of solid rock halfway up the mountain, he knew he would see nothing but a tree. The pointlessness of looking had begun to seem permanent and inevitable.

He looked back to check on Rufus, who looked to be having a worse day than Ethan. The dog limped along gingerly, continually falling behind. It was only the frequent stops to look over the edge that kept the team from riding away and leaving the dog behind completely.

“Dad!” Ethan yelled out, to disguise the fact that he saw no purpose in doing so. To disguise it even from himself.

“Noah!” Jone added in her big, deep voice.

As if they were really doing something useful.

By the time the trail leveled off and crossed a saddle between two mountains, Ethan’s legs no longer dependably supported him. He willed them to move at each step. Forced them, almost. They only barely responded. Every fifth or sixth step, one of his knees gave way and bent without permission, threatening to pitch him forward. But he always managed to catch himself in time.

Sam got down and dropped the bay’s reins in the dirt, a signal to the horse to stay put. Then he walked back to Ethan. To help him mount, Ethan figured.

Sam helped all right. He swung a big arm around Ethan’s waist—the way he’d done when he’d found Ethan stumbling home from the grizzly encounter—and lifted him right up off the ground. He carried Ethan to Dora and plopped him onto her saddle.

Jone still had Dora’s reins, and neither she nor Sam returned them to Ethan so he could ride for himself. Ethan grabbed the saddle horn and allowed himself to be towed.

They rode in silence for ten or fifteen minutes, picking their way through loose shale and around boulders. Ethan wondered how long it had been since they’d passed under a tree. They must have been up above the timberline.

In time they came to a tiny mountain lake, and had to ride precariously downhill through piles of loose stones to reach the water. Ethan could hear the sound of a waterfall or cascade, but he couldn’t see it. He figured the sound must have been lake water overflowing and forming a stream, running down to lower elevations.

He looked up to see a tight formation of pinnacles clustered together as a backdrop to the lake, still laced with snow. Beneath them the lake bore a perfect reflection of the spires on its glassy surface.

“Don’t even bother getting down,” Sam said.

They rode their mules and horses into the lake to the animals’ knees and let them drink. Jone handed Ethan back the reins, looping them behind Dora’s neck again.

Ethan watched the mule drink and envied her. He was thirsty, too.

When Sam’s bay had sucked in his fill and lifted his head, Sam rode him carefully ashore, towing Rebar behind. There he dismounted, and filled three of the filter bottles with lake water. He picked his way through the loose shale to a spot just behind Ethan and Dora.

“Think fast,” he said, and a full filter bottle of water flew in Ethan’s direction.

Ethan registered the irony of those two simple words as the bottle flew end over end. He told his arms to reach up. To at least try to catch it. And they might have obeyed, eventually. But they certainly didn’t respond in time.

The bottle sailed by Ethan’s head and landed in the lake with a splash that spooked Jone’s horse. Then, thankfully, it bobbed to the surface and floated.

“I’ll get it,” Sam said. “I know you’re tired.”

He waded out into the lake after the bottle and handed it to Ethan.