The Mountain Story (37 page)

Only a few flakes had made it through the dense pines above our heads but when I sat up I discovered that the surrounding rocks were blanketed in a thin layer of white. We had to head to a lower elevation, I knew, or I would lose more than my baby toes to frostbite.

“Snow.” Vonn sat upright, opening her mouth to accept the flakes. She shook her mother, saying, “Bridget. Snow.”

Bridget woke, confused. When she saw my eyes she must have realized how grave our risk was if we stayed here in the snow. She turned to wake her mother, stroking her cold cheek, “Mim? Mim?”

I was relieved when Nola blinked herself awake, and encouraged when she managed to sit up.

Vonn reached down with her white fingers, scooping the snowflakes from where they’d gathered in the folds of her coat and bringing the mound to Nola’s mouth. We all followed suit, scooping handfuls of snow to melt between our tongues and our dry, frozen palates.

“We have to go. We have to get out of the snow,” I said, helping Vonn, then Bridget to their feet.

Stepping down from the rock, I winced at the slicing pain in my heel. I remember telling myself that pain was my friend. I remember telling myself that whatever parts of my feet hurt would be the parts I’d be keeping if we got out of this alive.

In the distance we heard the screeching of a hawk.

We hiked down a long rocky slope for nearly half an hour until we’d walked out of the snowfall. Each step was excruciating. We were chilled to our marrow.

We came to a fork in the brush and I was grateful to rest as
we paused to consider the granite shrapnel and spiny brush in the direction of the lone pine. The other way presented a gentle slope and what appeared to be a long stretch of meadow grass that would be much kinder to my tortured feet. The whole
lone pine
thing now struck me as foolhardy, arbitrary, an ill-conceived goal. I chose the simpler path, announcing, “This way.”

“But that’s not the way to the pine tree,” Bridget said.

“This is the best way to get there.”

“Away from the tree?”

“It’s a shortcut.”

Nola was overcome by dizziness. I almost didn’t catch her when she started to fall.

“Will they pick up our scent all this way,” Vonn wondered.

“The coyotes?”

“No. The rescue dogs.”

“Would they know we got over the crevice?” Bridget wondered. “How could they know?”

I didn’t tell them that even if Mountain Rescue had the dogs and were looking for us and even if the dogs had tracked us all the way to the ridge from where we’d fallen, and down onto the outcropping and past the cave and to the crevice, they would never believe that we’d made it safely to the other side. They would abandon the search—reclassify it as
recovery
.

Wouldn’t
they
be surprised to find Vonn’s lime green flip-flops at the bottom of the crevice, but no bodies?

We stumbled onward, anywhere the path was less stony and the hawkweed less dense, inching through forests and over tumbled boulders, luxuriating in patches of meadow grass, traipsing through knee-high fields of chilled skunk cabbage, Nola supported by Bridget and Vonn.

We’d been walking for a while—there was no sun to tell us the hour—when Vonn spied something unusual ahead. “What’s that?” she asked, pointing. “That turquoise thing.”

“A flower?” Nola guessed.

“It’s a bird,” I said, squinting.

“It’s not moving,” Vonn said.

We inched through the forest toward the turquoise beacon, and only when we were all standing over it, did we realize what we were looking at.

Vonn picked the square of plaid from the branch and held it in her hand. “It’s a pocket,” she said. “Ripped from a shirt.”

A shirt pocket? Here?

Vonn handed the square to me. No telling how long it had been there.

“Hello!” we shouted, scanning the trees. “Hello! Hello!”

There came the sound of cracking branches and we spun—each toward a different direction, to find nothing but rock and tree and root-mangled soil. The wind roared through the canyon.

“Hello,” I called tentatively. “Hello?”

“One of the rescue fellows?” Nola said hopefully.

We hastened our pace, calculating all it meant to imagine that we were not alone. We didn’t know if we needed to be hurrying to something or away from something.

“Hello?” Vonn called again.

We paused to listen to her echoing voice.

“Please let him have food and water,” Bridget murmured.

“Please,” Nola said.

“What if he has some but he doesn’t want to share?” Vonn asked.

“This bit of fabric could have been here for years,” I said.

“Think he came from the same direction we did?” Vonn asked, stumbling over a boulder.

Then the scent of cat stopped me in my tracks. Bobcats mark territory with their acrid urine just like domestic cats do. I did not wonder at that point if the plaid shirt was in any way connected to the pungent odour.

“Smells like cat,” Vonn said.

“Hello?” we called, surveying the rock and trees for the plaid shirt’s owner.

There was rustling in the brush to the left of us, up a short escarpment of rusty manganese-covered granite. “Hello!” I shouted.

“The wind,” Vonn said.

I choked the square of blue fabric, calling, “Hello! Is anyone there?”

We kept on through the forest, dizzy from the onslaught of trees. The heels and toes and balls of my feet begged me to stop. We did, when once again, there was movement in the brush.

Bridget heard it first this time and crouched, calling, “Hey! Hello!?”

There was a crashing on the other side of some thick manzanita. We stopped, holding our breath, waiting, but no animal came rushing at us and in a moment it was quiet once again.

“What was that?” Vonn asked.

“The wind,” I said reflexively, which was inane, unless the wind had legs and weighed enough to crack a branch.

“What’s that?” Vonn asked, pointing up ahead.

“Just Byrd,” I said, as I watched the figure of my friend move on through the trees.

“It’s not a bird,” she said.

“Are you all right, Wolf?” Bridget asked.

I could hear Byrd’s laughter, and because it sounded so real, I started laughing too, until I saw myself in Nola’s glassy eyes.

“Look,” Vonn said, pointing out another blue fragment half-buried in the dirt between two boulders.

It was denim. I leaned down and pinched it with my fingers and pulled it from the earth. It was like a magic trick, almost comical, as I kept tugging and tugging and finally freed a sizable pair of jeans from their earthen tomb.

“Hello! Hello! Hel-lo!” we all called out to the wilderness, shivering, not in the least because the jeans belonged to a very big man.

“His coat,” Vonn said, pointing to a large camouflage-style raincoat hanging weathered from the branch of a nearby tree.

“Stay here,” I told the women. I didn’t want to alarm them, but I’d spied through the brush a dirty red hunter’s cap on what appeared to be the slumbering head of a shirtless man. It was freezing cold, and the man was without his coat, so he was either dead or crazy.

“Oh my God,” Vonn said, holding on to her mother and grandmother as I limped toward him.

My
mental state was such that I knew I should fear
his
. I wondered if he had a gun. “Hello,” I called.

As I walked toward him, with each painful step, I was praying that he was dead so I could have his boots.

He was dead. He had no boots. No legs for that matter. Missing too was an arm. Scavengers had gutted him, made bowls of his hip bones and licked him clean. Poor bastard. Poor bastard.

A ground squirrel startled the hell out of me, darting from beneath a granite ledge nearby where I noticed the remnants
of the man’s missing leg, the right, judging by the shape of the brown-socked foot. I looked around for the twin but the left leg was nowhere to be seen. Neither was the boot that the man must have at some point had on his foot.

Struck by a thought I went to the leg, looking around for the bush knife I hoped the stranger kept there, grasping the dried muscle and desiccated skin through the rotting brown sock. No knife.

After a second’s hesitation I picked up the blackened leg bone and headed back to the spot where the man’s torso lay, though I had no strength in
my
bones to dig a grave for
his
.

“Why did he take off his clothes?” Vonn called to me, watching from the distance as I returned the man’s leg to his carcass.

“Happens sometimes when people are freezing to death. Their brain short-circuits. Maybe they think they’re burning up with heat. They take all their clothes off.”

Vonn turned, darting into the brush nearby. I was afraid she needed to vomit. But Vonn didn’t vomit. After a moment she returned triumphantly, carrying a large pink knapsack she’d spotted in some meadow grass. I can’t recall if she raced back to us or if we ran to her, but I remember we four on our knees gathered around the knapsack.

“Is it his wife’s?” Vonn wondered. “What if she’s alive? What if she’s still here?” She dumped the contents of the knapsack into the dirt: a damp and mouldy Florida State T-shirt and a yellow canteen, an exact match to Nola’s and the one I gave to Byrd. The canteen was dry, I knew, the second I picked the thing up.

“This can’t be all,” Vonn cried, clutching the empty knapsack. “It can’t be!” She shook it again. I almost laughed when a penny fell clattering onto the rock. Her face changed then, as she
felt, in the seam of the knapsack, a long, zippered compartment. She opened it and drew out a leather-sheathed hunting knife.

I took the knife from Vonn’s trembling hand, pulling out the blade to examine it, before I returned it to its sheath and the sheath to my pocket. Tenacious Vonn continued to search, and found two more treasures in the same compartment as the knife—a small jar of Tabasco sauce along with some waterlogged pouches of salt and pepper and a tiny tin of peppermints. I naturally saw the tin of peppermints as a sign from my mother—it was the same brand she always carried in her purse.

Watching Vonn open the tin I drooled in anticipation. Inside were a full complement of twenty minuscule mints—five each, two of which we quickly agreed we would have immediately, saving the next for sunset, and the next for sunrise. We watched each other place the tiny treasures on our tongues, the most sublime thing any of us had ever tasted.

“What about this?” Vonn asked, opening the Tabasco sauce. “Can we drink it? A drop? Please?”

“No!” I said taking it from her, jamming it into my coat pocket. “That would make the thirst worse.”

“It couldn’t be worse,” Bridget said.

“Couldn’t we have a little?” Vonn begged.

I shook my head and started forward, disgusted to find myself salivating over the thought of shaking the hot sauce over some steaming ground squirrel flesh.

Vonn slipped into the harness of the flaccid pink knapsack.

“That would be the worst,” Vonn said. “Being alone. Up here.”

“Shouldn’t someone say a prayer over the poor man’s body?” Nola asked, and all of us stopped to look back.

“I did,” I said, which was a lie. I’d said a prayer for Nola.

(Later I found out the man’s name was Pedro Rodriguez. While living his dream to hike the Pacific Crest Trail alone, he’d gotten lost and became trapped in Devil’s Canyon. The man left his wife, four daughters and seven grandchildren. The pink knapsack belonged to his eldest granddaughter and he was carrying it for luck. When we found him he’d been missing for three months.)

The trees gave way to a long stretch of corrugated granite. I felt my life force draining into the veins of the rock as I charted the white bands of feldspar, drawn like chalk arrows we were meant to follow.

Vonn called from behind me, pointing at something in the woods to the west, “Wolf, look over there.”

We four changed course to investigate a nearby rock and what appeared to be a large lizard but was instead the corpse’s left leg, and a few feet away from it, astonishingly, a single, weathered leather hiking boot.

The pine boughs above me shivered as I sat down to pull the hiking boot over my stiff left foot. It was several sizes too large, which meant that I could switch feet easily to give each of my soles a break from the rocky ground. I looked around for its mate but couldn’t find the right boot anywhere.

“This is bad,” Bridget murmured.

“We need to move to higher ground again,” I said. “Looks like the snow’s stopped but there’s not much daylight left.”

Behind me, Vonn opened the bandage on Nola’s wound, releasing a potpourri of infection from the blood-blackened sterasote. Bridget gagged. I moved upwind.

“I am so sorry,” Nola said, holding her breath.

“I need to clean Mim’s arm. And I’m going to need fresh bandages,” Vonn said, taking off her coat.

“No,” Bridget said. “Use my shirt.”

“Not now. We need to keep moving,” I said.

“Why are we going back up?” Vonn asked. “It’s cold up there.”

“I know, but we need to get visible. In case there’s a plane looking for us.”

“Or a helicopter,” Bridget added. “They have to be looking for us by now.”

The committee of vultures was circling again, and I worried they’d get the wrong idea if we stopped too long. “Come on.”

Vonn shook her head, gesturing toward Nola’s purple, pus-filled arm. I started toward them but my muscles were spent, my vision blurred, my gut in spasm—the whole works beginning to shut down. I had to sit and rest before I reached them on the rock.

“Rest,” Vonn said. “I’ll do this.” She dressed the wound with some fresh sterasote leaves, pretending it was doing any good.

One of the circling vultures broke ranks to swoop down. He settled on a tree growing out from a fault in a rock nearby, the eager reaper with his pickled red head and massive talons, getting an estimate on Nola to report to his friends. I hate spies.

“Git!” I shouted, and he did, but I knew he’d be back.

“Come on,” I told the Devines. “We need to keep moving.”

Vonn hastily rewrapped Nola’s wound and we carried on toward higher ground, manoeuvring over boulders and branches and roots, our path presenting itself as a multiple choice of barely possible and impossible routes.