The Mountain Story (5 page)

“My uncle taught me everything he knows,” Byrd said, and then added, “He knows everything.”

After that he led me to a long, smooth slab of granite downwind of the water where we could watch the lake from a slight elevation. But before we settled in Byrd revealed the perilous drop at the end of it. This would be another good place to watch my step, I knew. Fate isn’t kind to the careless.

Sitting there in the cool thin air, watching the rippling waters of that hidden lake, we drank from Byrd’s old camouflage canteen, which had a dent in the spout and tasted of tin. I decided to buy him a new canteen—Frankie’d given me fifty dollars from his poker winnings that morning out of guilt for his poor parenting—when we got back down to the Desert Station. I’d noticed a huge rack of yellow ones at the gift shop. I don’t know why I didn’t wonder if the gesture was unmanly or worry that the gift would be misunderstood, but I didn’t. “We should have binoculars,” I said.

“I have some. I’ll bring them next time. We need a decent camera too. You can get good money for wildlife shots. I only have an old Polaroid.”

We observed a few ground squirrels fighting in the tall grass. I didn’t see the golden eagle or the Cooper’s hawk or the white-headed woodpecker in the surrounding pines until Byrd pointed them out. I leaned into the wind and caught a
scent—coyotes—which my olfactory memory cross-referenced with a disastrous camping trip in Traverse City with my father when I was eight.

Turning toward the scent, I sighted a pair of the wild dogs, mangy and lean, not like the fat pups we’d tossed wieners to at the campground. Byrd saw them too—past the far end of the sage bushes, the animals were staring us down. One of the coyotes snapped at the air, narrowing his gaze and licking his snout before he and his friend disappeared down the escarpment. “Los Coyotes,” Byrd said, grinning. “That’s my people.”

“Mine too, I guess,” I said.

Byrd saw me notice the bump in the sock at his left calf. Grinning, he pulled out a sizable Swiss Army knife.

“Cool,” I said. “What’s it for?”

“What’s it for?”

“What do you do with it?”

“Everything. Make kindling, open cans, skin rabbits.”

“You skin rabbits?” I couldn’t decide if I was impressed or disgusted.

“I could,” he said, proving to me that the blade was razor sharp by using it to scrape a layer from his thumbnail.

“You ever killed anything with it?” I asked.

“I could,” Byrd promised.

“If you were starving?”

“If I was starving. Or if an animal was dying. If a bird broke its wing.”

“You’d kill a bird who broke its wing?”

“Course.”

“With a knife?”

“With my bare hands if I had to.”

“I could never do that.”

“You could,” he said. “You do what you have to do.”

It took us months of shifts at the gas station (where Byrd’s guardian, his uncle Harley Diaz, hired me on) to save the money for the camera, tripod and lens attachments we hoped would bring us fortune and fame as wildlife photographers. Byrd and I took hundreds of photographs in the days we spent at Secret Lake. Sometimes we took turns with the camera but mostly I was the shooter, Byrd the spotter, and keeper of the logbook chronicling our sightings: hundreds of deer, seventeen striped skunks (or the same skunk seventeen times), sixteen gophers, seventy-three kit foxes, a vole (at least we thought it was a vole), hundreds of chipmunks and deer mice and wood rats, dozens of great horned owls and golden eagles and hawks and falcons, a hundred woodpeckers and thrashers and jays, those cool yellow tanagers and that pygmy owl and the finches and the blackbirds and on and on.

One time we were hanging out on the slab of rock at Secret Lake when Byrd heard this ticking sound, like a lawn sprinkler, and he pointed to a spot beneath a fountain of mugwort where a huge Southern Pacific rattlesnake was reticulating. I pissed my pants a little when the six-foot-long snake’s mouth yawned open and I saw the last twitching inch of a wood rat’s tail disappear down its throat. I didn’t want Byrd to know I was shaking—he seemed so fearless—and besides, he badly wanted a close-up photograph and so did I.

We climbed down from the rock carefully, quietly.

“We gotta get a shot with his mouth open,” Byrd said calmly.

I crept forward, inch by trembling inch, lifting the camera and finally capturing the snake in my lens. I was about to take
the photo when the snake snapped its tail and shook his rattles. I dropped my camera and ran away through the tall grass in the short meadow.

When I stopped screaming long enough to catch my breath, all I could hear was Byrd’s laughter bouncing off the rocks. He was
howling
like he’d just seen the funniest show on earth. Then the humour of it struck me, and I laughed pretty hard too.

We averaged twenty or more hours a week up there and in all that time we never once saw another human being at Secret Lake, except, that is, for the memorable night we convinced two college girls to join us there.

It struck me that on this day, a year ago, Byrd and I and those college girls must have just missed Nola and her husband celebrating their last anniversary.

That day we got lost, there I was leading Nola and Bridget through the pines, my unease mounting with each step. No part of me wanted to see Secret Lake again. It might hold sweet nostalgia for Nola but for me it was a crime scene.

I was moving at a fast pace, but Bridget and her ponytail easily kept up.

“Is this a high
high
altitude?” she asked.

“Eight thousand feet.”

“Do people get sick at this altitude or does it have to be
Everest
high?”

“Yes.”

“At this altitude?” she clarified.

“Even lower.”

“Dizziness? Nausea?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t feel any of that. I think the thin air suits me.”

Everything about Bridget was thin, except her hair, and maybe her lips. Of course the rare air would suit her.

Nola panted some distance behind but never asked me to slow down. I liked her grit, and found reasons to stop so that she could catch her breath. “Not much longer,” I said.

“I could go all night,” Bridget shouted over the rising wind.

Endorphins. Inhale deeply enough and you’re a mountain junkie for life.

Leading the pair down a short hill, I stopped to take in the view. The mountain wilderness stretched out before us—rock and forests and more of the same in graded hues for miles and miles. I was concerned suddenly, about the women getting lost trying to find their way back. “I hope you’ve both been paying attention.”

“I’m good with directions,” Bridget said.

Nola paused for a breath, shifting her eyes over the marbled rock and spiny forests. “Beautiful,” she sighed.

Bridget lifted her wrist to look at her watch and remembered she was not wearing one. “Already getting kind of dark,” she said.

It was. The clouds were moving in, but experience told me the wind could blow them out again just as quickly. Still, sudden storms were common this time of year, and how could I leave the two women at the lake if there was a thunderstorm or, worse, a snow squall?

“He would have been surprised that I came without him,” Nola said, unprompted.

“He must have used a compass,” Bridget said. “This path isn’t marked.”

I think he’s watching right now,” Nola said. “I’ll bet he had a good chuckle when we went the wrong way.”

“A nudge in the right direction would have been nice. Which way now?” Bridget asked, taking the lead.

“Over that section of boulders,” I said with a nod.

“Thank God we stopped when we did,” Nola said. “We might have missed you.”

That was true. As we hiked on toward Secret Lake I kept asking myself what I was doing with these strangers. I slowed down to wait for Nola again.

When she reached me, huffing and puffing, she said, “I need to get in better shape.”

“I told you that a year ago,” Bridget called.

Nola accepted the bottle of water but declined the granola bar Bridget offered from her blue mesh bag. “I’m still stuffed from lunch,” she said.

Bridget noticed I had no water and offered me a bottle. I waved her off and she seemed relieved. “Why don’t you have a knapsack?” she asked.

“That doesn’t seem like something you’d forget,” Nola said.

“We should stay focused,” I said, setting off into the patchy fog again.

Bridget, thinking she had something to prove, kept pace with me, chattering until at last we reached the landmark that pointed the direction to Secret Lake.

I stopped, leaning against a tree to rest. “Here’s the Tower,” I said, gesturing at the massive phallic rock formation a few yards away.

Nola and her husband must have had their own name for the rock judging by the way she blushed.

“It gets easier from here.”

“I think I remember now,” Nola said.

“What matters is do you remember the way back from here?” I asked.

“Yes,” Nola said uncertainly.

“I remember,” Bridget promised.

The wind teased us from behind as we crossed a shallow meadow and made our way around a hill of tumbled boulders. There was always a breeze on the mountain but on this day the wind came up fast and hard. The closer we got to Secret Lake the more agitated I became. I was peeved at myself for skipping lunch, then remembered that I had not expected to live past dinner.

As we neared the lake I could smell the still water and the lichen-frosted rocks and the endangered mountain phlox and the bitter tangle of wild grapes on the south edge beyond the reeds. The ground beneath us pulsed. Pausing to inhale, I felt a quickening. That sense of drawing near, being on the verge of something mysterious and explosive.

I stopped to wait for Nola to catch up again as Bridget carried on, bounding from boulder to rock, head down, watching her feet. Then time stood still for a moment as I glanced ahead of her to notice a dense gathering of bees. Before I could warn her, Bridget leapt into the swarm.

“No!” Nola shouted.

Too late. Converged upon by the anxious bees, Bridget opened her mouth and released a piercing scream. She swatted at the insects, and spun around in circles, and jerked her head back and forth, screaming all the while. I could see that her
lustrous ponytail was acting as a net, and had trapped several of the bees in its length. The more the bees buzzed, the louder Bridget screamed.

This is where it all began.

Bridget started to run. The bees still trapped in her ponytail buzzed aggressively and she thought she was being chased by the whole swarm, so she kept on running, stumbling on rocks, and leaping over fallen trees, careening in a southwesterly direction to an area of the mountain I was not remotely familiar with. She tore through a pass between two massive granite crags and vaulted over a mountain-fed stream, and through a dense forest of white fir and juniper, and skidded down an escarpment of crumbling sediment and staggered up again and over the upthrust boulders at the top of another hill, as I followed, hollering, “Bridget! Bridget! BRIDGET!”

I chased her for what felt like an hour but was more likely five or six minutes before I thought to look behind me, and spotted the red poncho caught on a bush where Nola had stumbled and fallen. I couldn’t chase one woman and leave the other. I started back to help Nola, but before I could reach her, she shouted, “Go! She’ll get lost!”

Distant movement caught my eye and I was confused to see the teenaged girl with the green flip-flops storming toward us through the brush. Where the hell had
she
come from?

I took off after Bridget once again, scrambling over the rocks, as her screams were snatched by the matrix in the walls and hurled back into the forest to confuse my sense of direction.

Then the screaming stopped. I called out, “Bridget? BRIDGET?”

Behind me rocks clattered and I turned to see Nola in the
red poncho, trailed by the girl in the green flip-flops. I waited until they caught up to me, all of us gasping for breath. Together we spotted Bridget through the haze ahead, stomping on what, to my horror, appeared to be a blond cat.

“My
fall
!” she wailed.

“What the hell?” was all I could think to say when I realized it was a clip-on ponytail and not a dead mammal in the dirt at her feet.

Bridget’s cheeks were streaked with black mascara, her short blond hair sticking up in all directions. She clutched the back of her neck, shouting, “Stung! I got stung!”

Nola forced the panicked woman to sit down on a rock. “Where?”

She pointed to her neck. “The stinger is still in there!”

Bee stings hurt like hell but that hot pain usually fades pretty fast. “It won’t hurt for long,” I said.

“I’m
allergic
!” Bridget shouted.

I suddenly understood her terror.

“This is not good,” Nola said.

The girl in the green flip-flops found Bridget’s blue mesh bag and began to search through it.

“I forgot my EpiPen in my suitcase,” Bridget said, shaking.

“Oh dear,” Nola said. “I don’t see a stinger.”