The Mountain Story (24 page)

Did I fall asleep? I’m not sure. I remember that I was startled by the thought that it had been some time since Vonn had complained about her toes. I started up a vigorous massage with my clumsy hands. “Feel that?” I asked.

“Numb,” she said.

I pinched the flesh of her big toe as hard as I could.

“It doesn’t feel like we just met,” Vonn said, oblivious to the pinch. I remembered Byrd saying those same words to me a few years ago.

I worked my stiff fingers around her toes, my own hands aching from the effort.

“You must regret that you got distracted from tracking the bighorn,” Vonn said.

“What?”

“You must regret you saw Bridget and Mim.”

I paused. “I don’t.”

She stared at me in the dark. “No matter what?”

“No matter what,” I said. Then I leaned over in the dark, grasping Vonn’s arms and pressed my chapped, icy lips to hers. We stayed that way for a long moment, breathing in each other’s scent. It was not a kiss, exactly—we were too cold and hungry, our mouths and lips too dry. It was something more, ripe and mature and wise and complex, but I don’t think there’s a word for it. So many details in that kiss, and something else, something in particular that I wouldn’t name, not yet, but knew I had to revisit.

Beside us Nola groaned in pain.

“Is she unconscious or asleep?” Vonn asked. “I’m scared.”

“She’ll be fine. She’s strong as an ox.”

“She’s old, Wolf. She takes bone pills! You take bone pills when your bones are like sawdust.”

“Ox. Bones. Sawdust. Stop talking about food.”

She laughed, but just a little. “Days or hours?”

“What?”

“You know what I’m asking—days or hours?”

“You can’t talk like that. You can’t think like that. I got close to the ridge today. If only I had a rope to help me reach that second branch.”

“My coat?”

“We need our coats.”

“What about your idea of using the straps from Mim’s knapsack?”

“Yeah. Not long enough to make a good rope though.”

“Right,” Vonn said, trying to stay positive. “We’ll use the straps, and the rest of the underwear?”

“Mim’s
brassiere
?”

“Mim’s brassiere,” she said, smiling.

“It’s a plan. We make a rope. I climb all the way up. I get help. We’ll be home by noon tomorrow.”

“It’s a plan,” Vonn said.

I continued to knead the flesh of her feet, relieved when she started to whimper.

“Hurts,” she said.

“That’s good. It’s good that it hurts.”

She watched me for a long while, then said, “You know about those Andes plane crash survivors from the seventies? The rugby players.”

I did.

“Did you read the book?”

I’d read the book.

“You remember what they did?” she said.

They famously turned to cannibalism to survive. I didn’t want to say it out loud.

“I can’t eat Mim.” She burst into tears.

“We won’t eat Mim.” I took her in my arms. “We won’t eat Mim.”

“Promise?” Our eyes met.

I paused. “We’ll eat Bridget.”

There was a moment of silence before she laughed. “You’re sick.”

“You too,” I said. A compliment.

We watched from our perch in the cave as the owl hooted
through the gloom then disappeared on flapping wings. “Good!” I called. “Go!”

“Think he’s been watching us?” Vonn asked.

I did, but didn’t want her to think I was flaky.

The silence stretched. When the wind kicked up to interrupt my meditation I was peeved, and turned my face toward it. Vonn nudged me in the ribs again, saying, “My feet, Wolf.”

“Do you believe in God?” I asked.

“Well now,” she said. “Duh. Haven’t we already had this discussion? I’m the fair-weather believer. Remember?”

I’d meant to ask her if she believed in
ghosts
, for a second earlier when I’d turned into the wind I’d seen something move. I was sure it was Byrd again, or maybe my mother, the ghost-angel. I checked Nola to make sure she was still breathing. The woods were quiet save for the distant hooting owl, then the sound of snapping branches.

We scanned for danger and decided it was just the wind.

“My feet are blocks of ice.”

They were. Tucking her right foot into my armpit I started an aggressive massage on her left foot again, through the scratchy wool socks.

“It’s not working,” she said, and I could sense her stirring panic. I stripped the sock from her foot and rolled it like a glove over her chapped, frozen fingers. I couldn’t make out the details in the dark, just the outline, enough to see that all of her toes were swollen and stiff. I took her foot in my own rigid hands, trying to massage the blood back down through her calf and into her ankle, the arch, the heel, the ball. I was afraid of how cold the smallest toe felt.

“Am I going to lose my toes?”

“No,” I said.

Vonn didn’t resist when I drew her foot toward me, just shut her eyes as slowly I took her toes into my mouth, warming them with my tongue, sucking gently to draw down the blood. I was moved by her groans, which were not sounds of pleasure. I couldn’t save her from pain, but I hoped to save her from frostbite. We watched each other in the darkness and shared, in those strange moments, one of the greatest, strangest intimacies of my existence.

Then there was movement in the bushes to the west. Even with my senses impaired and my mouth distracted I could smell it. Vonn quickly pulled her toes out from between my teeth and put the sock back onto her foot.

“Coyote,” I said, imagining he’d tracked us here, lured by Nola’s blood. Or maybe our failing bodies were giving off a scent that cried out to its appetite.

Movement in the trees to the north of us meant there was more than one. Two. There were two of them, stalking us. This was happening.

I’d dragged a small branch into the alcove in case of curious wildlife—I was thinking squirrel, rat, spider. I never imagined confronting two aggressive coyotes while stranded on an outcropping over Devil’s Canyon. I’d have grabbed a bigger branch.

I stood at the entrance to the cave, listening to the animals stalk us from the bush, waving my stick and shouting, “Git. Git! GIT!” I tried to make myself a large menacing presence but those canines must have been as hungry as we were because they didn’t retreat very far.

Then the first dog returned, advancing from the left, the second from the right, weaving through the brush and over
the rock toward our shelter. I hollered at them. So did Vonn.

Bridget woke to see the menacing coyotes and started to scream. She screamed her bloody head off. The coyotes retreated into the bush and howled along with her. What a haunting sound that trio made, snatched by the canyon walls and repeated by the devil himself.

We waited. I could hear them—rustling bushes and snapping twigs—but I couldn’t see them. “Git!” I shouted, but the coyotes must have thought I said, “
Come
,” because they stepped out of the brush, posturing.

“Throw something at them, Wolf!” Vonn shouted.

I looked around for a rock but when I couldn’t see one within reach I grabbed the big plastic peanut butter jar and chucked it as hard as I could, beaning the closest coyote right between the eyes.

The coyote shook off the strike and came back to life snarling and snapping, able to see me better in the darkness than I could see him. The other coyote snapped up the plastic jar to crush between his incisors, then started to shake it like they do, to break the prey’s neck. The jar snapped off the lid and the beast disappeared in the cloud of ash.

The mangy animal sneezed. I stood my ground, brandishing the branch, shouting—we all were. Bridget picked up Nola’s knapsack and hurled it. The dog caught it impressively in its teeth, his mate joining in the killing frenzy, tearing it to shreds. I stomped forward, swinging my impressive stick. The beasts, confused by the bloodless sacrifice, dropped the canvas sack and bolted.

I gave chase, claiming my territory so they wouldn’t come back, but I was slow in the dark, pulling myself over the rock and through the brush, following them by sound. I could tell
they were headed for Devine Divide, and it occurred to me then that the wily coyotes might be tricking me—trapping me. I pressed on against my better judgment. Maybe I was afraid that if I quit they’d find out how weak I really was.

They were on the rock near the sterasote bush. I could see them moving in the shadows, then, after a brief hesitation, one after the other, the beasts made spectacular leaps over the wide gulf that separated us from the slope on the other side.

The first coyote stuck the landing gracefully in the moonlight but the second stumbled. I was pretty sure he was limping behind his partner as they trotted up the slope and disappeared into the darkness.

“Wolf?” Vonn called.

Something caught my foot and I reached down to find the remains of Nola’s knapsack. The dogs had torn it up pretty bad and it didn’t look salvageable for much. I looked up into the heavens, thinking,
Really?

When I returned to the cave I saw Vonn’s shadow standing guard, holding a large spiny branch.

“They jumped the crevice,” I called out. “Fifteen feet. Must be fifteen feet.”

“They could come back.”

“They won’t come back. They won’t bother. We’re too much work.” I wondered how much longer that would be true. “How did the Cahuilla get over?”

“Who are you talking to?” Vonn asked.

“Myself. I don’t know. The Cahuilla didn’t jump to get here. Not that far.”

I was alarmed to turn and find that Nola hadn’t been awakened by the conflict with the coyotes.

“She never woke up?”

Vonn and Bridget shook their heads.

“Fifteen feet,” Bridget commented. “That’s far.”

I kneeled beside Nola. Her forehead was hot, her breathing laboured. My body ached and my spirit sagged. I said a silent prayer for the Devines, and rain.

In my dream, Vonn’s toes were in my mouth. But then Vonn morphed into Bridget—you know how that happens in dreams—and she pointed out Nola’s arm where the undershirt-bra-bandage was loose and sterasote leaves were falling to the ground, glowing like tiny green gems. I nearly lost it—in my dream—when I saw the wound. It was healed, entirely, miraculously. Bridget gestured for me to look into the trees ahead and I grabbed my stick, ready to fight coyotes. Instead I saw an angel dancing among the pines, entreating me to join her. It was my mother, in her white, batwing-sleeved dress. I followed, even when she began to run, and I called out, “Glory. Glory! GLORY!”

She led me through the brush and over the rocks, back to the spot where the mangy coyotes had jumped the crevice. There she balanced impossibly at the top of a free-standing lodgepole pine. “Trust,” she said.

“Trust who?” I shouted.

“Make a bridge, Wolf! Make a bridge with the mossy pine.”

“Bridget what?” I shouted.

“You still here?” Byrd laughed and plopped down beside me on the rock.

“I’m dreaming, Byrd. Did you see my mother? Where are you?”

“The matrix, dude. In between the rocks.”

“Cool.”

“Your eighteenth birthday blew scagg.”

“I know.”

“You’re supposed to be the
guide
.”

“I know. Is that the way?” I asked, pointing across to the slope.

“That’s the way.”

“So that will take us back up to where we fell?”

“That’s the way,” Byrd repeated.

“The way we get rescued?”

“It’s the way you have to go,” Byrd answered with a shrug. He pulled his yellow canteen out of his knapsack and took a long drink before passing it to me.

The dream drink was cool and crisp and soothed my parched throat and reconstituted my spirit.

Byrd gestured across the crevice. “There used to be a land bridge. Slender. Like the wing at Angel’s Peak. It broke off. They walked across a little tightrope bridge.”

“They?” I followed his finger to see evidence that there had once been a land bridge.

“Imagine what that stone sounded like when it fell …” Byrd mused.

“You think a person could jump that?”

Byrd shook his head. “Suicide. It’s not just the leap, it’s the landing. You have to be a mountain goat.”

“Or coyote.”

The slanted rock on the other side appeared to meet the
ridge where we’d fallen. “So I make a bridge? Then I go up there? I take the Devines up there and then what?”

“You’ll see a lone pine.”

“A lone pine?”

“And a mesa beyond it. That’s the way. Go toward the lone pine.”

In this dream, Nola appeared, rising from the ridge on the other side of the slope, led by two large dogs on long leashes. Only it wasn’t Nola, it was my mother wearing Nola’s red poncho instead of the white dress, and they weren’t dogs but coyotes.

In my dream, Nola called, “Listen to your mother, Wolf!”

That’s all I remember of the dream, and at least some of it I’m making up.

I’ll tell you what happened when I woke the next morning on the mountains, our third day lost, but first, for the rest of this story to mean anything, you have to know what happened to Byrd.