Lifting the Sky (27 page)

I sniffed the air. Was that smoke I smelled?

I wrenched my boot back on and scrambled to my feet.

If there's a fire, it has to be far away. Scent travels,
I said to myself. Then I said it out loud because that's what I wanted to believe.

I sniffed the air again. Slowly I turned in a circle, peering out over the landscape. It must've been my imagination, I decided. There wasn't a ghost of smoke, not a wisp or a whisper anywhere that I could see.

The wind gusted behind me, shoving me forward and whirling dust into my eyes. I pulled my shirt tight around me and walked faster. It wasn't far now to the ridge across from the landslide. I'd have to head back into the trees and then hike along the ridge until I found someplace where I could climb down. In the bottom, Shawn had said, there'd be a creek. It might be just a trickle, he'd said, but if you followed it down you'd find the hidden mouth of the cave.

“One foot in front of the other,” I found myself saying as the wind pushed me along. I grabbed on to my side as the stitch in it nearly doubled me over again. Now I
was chanting over and over the words to that Indian prayer. “Where I walk is sacred, sacred is the ground. Forest, mountain, river, listen to the sound. Great Spirit circle, circle all around….”

Under my boots, the dry hill grass crackled like paper. The wind rattled and drummed through the trees. Above me, hundreds of rosy finches swarmed out of the cliffs.

Holding my side, ignoring the blister, I sped up. I was almost to the ridge. From there I'd head into the trees.
“Whew,”
I said out loud, and I breathed a huge sigh of relief.

That's when I smelled it for sure. I looked up, dreading what I might see.

On a pale rosy cliff high above me rose a swirl of white smoke. A patch of red glowed against the dark green of the forest. I watched, stunned, as the red patch flared up and turned bright orange and black. Watched as the flames suddenly leaped from one tree to the next.

A feeling of horror ballooned up inside me. I froze, my mind a big blank as I stared at flames snaking their way toward a scraggly dead pine out on the highest point of a cliff. I stood petrified as the flames snatched at the tree and then leaped up its trunk and turned it into a flaming red torch. Then, with an earsplitting
crack
, the tree exploded. Blazing limbs and fiery red bark whirled through the air and came tumbling and crashing down into the forest below.

There was a sound as if the jittery trees were clapping. As I stood there the applause turned into a roar.
Within seconds, before my wide eyes, it seemed as if the whole forest had burst into flames.

I couldn't think. My feet, though, didn't need brains to know what to do–
run!
Run away, run as fast as they could, run, run, back to the ranch! That's what I started to do. Then suddenly a freezing cold terror spread through me. I couldn't.
I couldn't
.

Shawn.
He was out here somewhere….

“Shawnnnnnnnnn!”
I shrieked as I started to run where only a fool would go. Shoving aside branches, leaping over fallen tree trunks, I tore through the trees toward the ridge. Behind me I could feel the fire's heat and hear a terrible roaring as if a huge monster train was crashing its way through the forest. If I didn't move fast, it'd be only minutes before it reached me.

Through the trees, to my left, I could see the gray landslide. I cut toward it and stopped short at the ledge and gaped down. My stomach lurched into my throat. The cliff dropped about forty feet almost straight to the ground.

How was I supposed to climb down? I'd never make it, at least not here…. Quickly I scanned the ridge. Way back where I'd come from, only much farther down, there was a place where I could easily get down. Farther up, toward the mountains, it only got steeper. I looked over my shoulder. A gust of wind whipped a shower of sparks in my direction. Behind me, the fire gobbled up one tree after the other. It was too late to turn back. I was trapped.

Even if I fell, nothing could be worse than staying up here.

I crouched and reached for the exposed root of a gnarly old pine that stuck out of the side of the cliff.
Don't look down,
I told myself,
and don't look back toward the fire.
I stretched a foot over the ledge and swung my foot back and forth, feeling for a foothold. My toe touched a slab. It felt as if it might crumble with my full weight, but what choice did I have? I clutched the root with both hands and swung my other foot over the cliff.

Only the gnarly root and the toehold kept me from sliding straight down. Then my other foot touched a shelf. Slowly I let go of the root. For a moment it seemed almost as if I hovered in midair, and then I snapped back close to the wall and clutched wildly at it while my toes explored the narrow shelf. Then, clawing at the wall, I inched my hands down till I crouched hunched on the outcrop. I dangled one leg over and felt for another foothold. I climbed down to it. From one narrow ledge to the next, I let my feet feel their way down. The footholds felt as soft as hands, but they didn't crumble. And then, when I'd almost reached bottom, I let go and slid down the rest of the way.

I leaned in to the cliff. If only I could've stayed there forever, arms spread out and my cheek pressed against the cool face of the cliff. If only I didn't have to
think.

Slowly I pushed myself away from the wall and looked around. Down here, the light was gray-gold and fuzzy, but up there, on the rim, white smoke puffed up like Halloween ghosts tweaking their sheets in the wind.

But even down here, I didn't feel safe. What if those
trees on the rim caught on fire and fell into the canyon? I had to find the cave. Find it fast.

Wheezing from the smoke, I plunged through a tangle of berry bushes and shrub toward the center of the narrow valley, toward what had looked from above like a gray river of rocks. Huge boulders and chunky shale slabs clogged the creek bed. I scrambled up onto a boulder and turned in a circle, looking around. A trickle of water thin as a garden snake twisted down through the rocky creek bed.

“Just follow the water,” Shawn had said. “It disappears into the cave.”

I scrambled down off the boulder. I hadn't gone far when the trickle seeped under a boulder as big as a truck and disappeared out of sight. Even climbing up on the highest rocks and looking around, I couldn't for the life of me figure out where the water came out.

The creek bed twisted between steep canyon walls that jutted out and then drew back into deep shadows. I was directly across from the gray shale landslide. My eyes darted to every gash, scar, and dark shadow on both sides of the canyon walls. A feeling of hopelessness sank through me. There was no sign of a cave.

And even worse, no sign of Shawn.

It wasn't until I looked up at the rim and saw black smoke boiling up that I realized I'd been praying.
Please,
I prayed, as if my very life depended on this one word.
Please, please
,
please,
I repeated over and over as flames leaped at the trees overlooking the canyon. “Please,” I said when
a sound rose as if the trees were now moaning in pain. “Please,” I said as they exploded and came crashing down into the canyon.

In spite of the heat I felt myself turn icy cold.

“Please,” I whispered. “I'm here to find Shawn. Please.”

As I said that last “please,” a quick, sudden knowing washed over me like a wave breaking over my head.

I was in a place where I shouldn't be, looking for a cave I was supposed to know nothing about. It was such an ancient, secret, forbidden cave—the entrance to the underworld—that the water ghosts and little people had made it invisible.

And suddenly something, I don't know what, but
something
felt different. All the panic I'd felt seemed to lift out of me, the way you might feel if you'd just aced the most challenging, most tricky test ever. Or maybe how you might feel if you'd gone through some kind of initiation. And it was right at that moment when I heard the loud gurgle.

I looked down.

A clog of twigs and leaves gushed out from beneath the boulder I stood on. The litter bunched up and then swirled and slowly started floating down through the alleyway of gray boulders. They snaked around a jagged outcrop and then disappeared out of sight. I was about to jump down and follow along when I spotted a pile of debris heaping up along the edge of the outcrop. It suddenly bulged up, and then with a gurgle it disappeared into a narrow slit at the foot of the cliff.

The entrance to the cave was just a mere crack in the earth.

“Hang on, Shawn,” I cried and I slid off the boulder and stumbled over the rocks toward the place where the pile of leaves and twigs had vanished. I'd been searching for an O- or a U-shaped mouth—no wonder I hadn't seen it! Then, pushing my backpack ahead of me, I wriggled through the narrow opening.

Talk about a mouth. The cave entrance was clammy and dark and it drooled and smelled like sour breath. I had a sense of teeth grazing my head, and the strange, eerie feeling that I could be swallowed whole in one gulp.

A shaft of smoky light streamed through the crack and then evaporated into the total black night of the cave. In the dim light all I could see was the narrow, slimy ledge I'd wiggled onto and a few rocky stairlike shelves that dropped down from it and then dissolved into darkness. The trickle of water dribbled over the ledge and then vanished into the cracks between rocks.

“Shawn?” I shouted into the blackness.

In a clear crystalline voice the cave called out, “Shawn! Shawn! Shawn!”

I held my breath. Silence.

My shoulders slumped. I could feel all my hopes come crashing down, one on top of the other. It had been too much to expect. After everything that had gone as wrong as it possibly could, I'd hoped that something good would happen. Maybe even something
miraculous.
Like for Shawn actually to be there. In the cave. Safe. Alive. Of
course he'd probably be injured. Something had for sure kept him from getting back to his grandma's ranch—but he'd be waiting for me and totally thrilled out of his boots that I'd found him.

But … maybe I was too late. What if he was …

I couldn't even
think
the word. I took a deep breath and shouldered back into my pack and slowly, carefully wormed my way off the slippery ledge.

Blinking to get used to the dark, I inched down the steplike ledges. They seemed to go on forever. I was about to give up and just curl up where I was when my feet touched dirt and what had to be the bottom of the very deep hole.

Total silence. Total darkness. Total stillness and
nothing.

Good thing I wasn't afraid of the dark. Except maybe
this
dark …

I got the heebie-jeebies staring into it. It was a black so black that I couldn't even see my own lights. There was no up, no down, no left, no right. It was like the confusion I'd felt once when I'd gotten caught in a blinding blizzard, only this time it was a total blackout instead of a whiteout. Holding my arms out in front of me, I slid a foot forward on the dirt floor. My legs wobbled like a horse that'd been ridden too fast, too far.

I was safe, but just try to tell that to my body.

Inch by inch I felt my way forward, the jet-black darkness so thick it was as if I waded through ink. Twigs, leaves, hard stones, and soft things crunched under my boots—oh thank goodness, thank heaven that nothing squirmed or
wiggled beneath them! I bent over and groped around on the ground for sticks, leaves, twigs, anything that I could use for a fire. Blindly, wildly, I pulled my stash to me and heaped it up into a pile. I felt in my pack for my matches. Stopped breathing. I'd lost them. No. There they were. My hands shook so badly that it took half my box of matches before I got one that sparked. I tucked it into my pile, hunched over it, and blew. As a blue flame blazed up and grew I put more twigs in it and then I squinted around at the darkness.

I was definitely in a deep hole. Huge, by the little bit of it that I could see by the feeble light from my fire. For a quick second, as my fire flared up, I glimpsed dark red and ocher-colored slabs heaped along one side of the cave. Against the wall ahead of me was a jumble of sticks and brush that had probably been washed there by water. I shuddered as the thought hit me that if a sudden downpour flooded the cave, that'd be the way I'd end up, too. Smashed into the wall with a bunch of sticks.

I dragged myself over to the jumble of sticks and hauled back an armful. I dropped them and made one more trip and then plunked myself down by my fire. I pulled my trail mix and bottle of water out of my pack.

I drank all the water, but I couldn't swallow one bit of the trail mix.

This is what it must feel like to be at the bottom of a bottomless pit,
I thought. Somehow it was easier to think about being deep underground in a black hole than it was to
think about the fire raging outside. Or about how I'd come within a pinch of getting caught in it. Or about who might be caught in it now. Because one thing was for sure. Shawn wasn't here in this cave.

And of course it wasn't Shawn's fault that I'd risked my life to come find him. It wasn't even his fault that I'd abandoned my poor sweet doggie when he'd needed me most. And then run out on my mom who, come to think of it, was probably crazy with fear because by now she'd surely spotted the fire. It wasn't anyone's fault that I'd run from my dad. Run from throwing all the horrible words I could've or should've hurled at him before I left.

Or was it the other way around? Hadn't
he
thrown out those horrible words—hadn't
my dad
been the one who'd run out on
me
?

I was
so
tired….

I tossed the last of the sticks into the fire. Not bothering about the bumps and lumps in the dirt under me, I lay down, stuffed my pack under my head, and stared up into the darkness. The fire suddenly blazed up and I flinched.