The Signal (16 page)
Authors: Ron Carlson
Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Married people, #Literary, #Western Stories, #Westerns, #Marriage, #Ranchers, #Wyoming, #Ranchers' spouses
How he loved this range, these woods. He stopped every ten minutes and listened over his whistling breath, but there was no more helicopter. He was talking to himself, waving his arms. “Helicopter. How much bullshit is that? It’s not in the book,” he said. “The glass helicopter is not in the book. You’re not in the book.”
He didn’t let his mind go back to Chester. He had to get down.
He stayed off the trail, climbing parallel to it and then he descended carefully counting switchbacks and there were twelve until he was in the long shadows of the upper meadow and he crossed the wooden bridge on the Wind and almost ran to the campsite on Valentine Lake. From there he surveyed the high wilderness valley: no smoke. He untied the clothesline and coiled the fifty feet of nylon cord into his pack. The sleeping bag and coffeepot were still in the trees. “I’ll see you again,” he said. In the lake he saw two fat forms pass over his old tent, rainbow trout in the late day. Then he left the main trail going the other way around Valentine, the hard way. It was up and over the rocks, but it was shorter if he could gut it out. He climbed the southern shoulder of the bald mountain, a thirty-degree staircase, stepping in his shadow every step, his shirt sweated to his back under the pack. He rounded the mountain and crossed the summit valley easily, weaving in and out of the aspen there on the high ground, his shadow tall and then taller. He looked up and said, “Don’t get dark. Just wait.” There were elk gathered in two of the meadows, thirty in one herd, stone still, their heads following him. When he topped the ridge and saw the eastern slope, the sun was gone. Here there was a good game trail all along the escarpment above Jamboree, a stream they said that flowed all the way to Lander. At points the worn path was a foot from the lip of the cliff, two hundred feet above the winding stream which he could not hear. Several times watching his footing, he walked right into trees where the elk had passed under and he had to go around. It was darker, but the hundred-mile horizon glowed. Vonnie was somewhere below him. She had water and candy and was walking carefully with her injured leg down the open trail in the last light. She’d regroup at the trailhead and straighten her car perhaps, waiting to see him.
Mack moved quickly along the path. This route led him two miles through some shallow hillocks to Lost Lake, where they had fished the second or third year. He had gone out to gather firewood and found an ancient wooden canoe banked against the hillside, two paddles and a lead rope lodged inside. They sat it in the lake a day to swell and that night paddled through the mirrored waters, catching fish. “We’re the only people who have trolled in the upper lakes of the Winds,” he had told her.
“Except for the guy who hauled it up here.”
“It’s Hiram’s,” Mack said. “He only uses it for exercise.”
Now Lost Lake was still in the new night. He knew where there were three good Mepps spinners in a hollow log across at the old campground. He was full of ghosts.
He followed the outlet down to Prairie Lake where one year they’d come across a woman curled in a campground while her husband fished. Vonnie talked to her and found that her period had started and she was miserable. They’d given her Vonnie’s cure: an ounce of Jack Daniel’s and a NoDoz. In those days Vonnie always brought a half pint of the whiskey which they had in their coffee at night. Prairie was a silver plate now and the night had become cold. He struck from the end of the lake cross-country up and over the two ridges where, later than he thought, he joined the main trail. He loved the moment of crossing onto a recognized trail. When he hit it, he wanted to run, but he held himself. You think you can see, but you cannot. It’s dark, buddy. No running in the dark. “No running period,” he said aloud. He walked fast. He was a mile above the big meadow. The dark meadow was trouble. Not the stream which he stepped right through, but with no moon it was hard to keep the trail and he fell twice and then slowed down, high-stepping the sage.
He approached Clay’s tent close and called, “Hello the camp!”
“Yo” came the return and Clay appeared. “Mack, you’re late. I just ate, but come on, I’ll open another can.” Mack crossed and entered the warm shelter. The tent smelled like Dinty Moore stew and the two men looked at each other. Mack felt his eyes adjust in the hissing lantern light.
“Where’s Vonnie?” Mack said.
“Okay, Mack,” Clay looked at him. “Where is she?”
Clay tried to talk Mack into sitting still, waiting, spending the night. “She’ll be along,” he said. “She’s got a flashlight and knows this trail. Give it an hour. She’ll be here.”
“She might, but I’m going back up.”
“Where’s your pack?” He told Clay about the poachers and their location so he could radio in the report.
“She wouldn’t have run into them,” Clay stated, “if they were by Upper Divide.”
“I need fresh socks and a shirt,” Mack said. “Do you have any salt tablets?”
“Gatorade in the cooler.” Mack sat at the little picnic table in the elk hunters’ tent and changed clothes and drank a cup of cold coffee and a quart of blue Gatorade and refilled the bottle with water. Clay gave him a nylon bivy sack.
“I won’t need this,” Mack said.
“I know,” Clay said, “that’s why you’re taking it.”
Mack stuffed the little cloth tube into his pack. He thought about telling Clay about the helicopter but no.
“I’m just going up there a quarter mile to Cold Creek where she’ll be standing perplexed about how to cross without getting her feet wet and we’ll come down and eat the rest of your stew.”
“Sounds like a plan. You want a gun?” Clay pointed to the two holstered pistols hanging from the pan rack.
“No, I’d hurt myself. But my light is dead.”
Clay retrieved his strapped headlamp and showed him how to turn it on. “Brand-new batteries,” he said.
“Perfect. I’m golden.” Mack stood and shouldered his daypack and adjusted the lamp on his forehead. “See you in a minute.”
“I’ll be here,” Clay said. “Be careful.”
The temperature in the great night had fallen another ten degrees, and when Mack looked up, his headlight beam was swallowed by the void. There was nothing between him and the four trillion stars except the unending waves of dark chill dropping steadily onto the mountain meadow. The headlight lit the trail perfectly in a three-foot oval and he stepped carefully up the path and across the stepping-stones in Cold Creek. He went up the hill into the forest again and he wanted to see Vonnie coming down or find her sitting on a log taking a break. Every stride matches hers coming down, he thought. We’ll meet very soon. He thought about whether she might already be below, starting her car, wheeling around for the drive down. He didn’t think so, but if she were, he was making a long walk in the dark for nothing. No, she would have stopped and seen Clay.
It took him two hours to reach the summit rim and descend into the high mountain valley. Badgers were working darkness all along the way; they’d look at the light and waddle into the rocks. He turned his light off in the willow meadow and could almost see the trail; it was open there, but when he entered the forest, he had to turn it on. “Hi Vonnie,” he said aloud, walking and talking. “Just where have you been? Well, hello Vonnie. It’s dark and Clay’s got the soup on. Vonnie, that I was impossible to live with does not alter the fact that I love you and would like to try again. No, I mean, Vonnie, I’m happy you’ve found a responsible and resourceful partner and I hope he is kind to you for the rest of your days. Me, I’m just a broken townie. No, I know I burned my bridges, but didn’t you know I’d swim back across.”
Then he was up and over the little hill that led down to the Wind River. He could hear it in the night. He didn’t want to run into the moose now, but he never got the chance. Suddenly there were a lot of tracks on the trail, a parade of big feet. He backtracked them to the little trail’s turning. He hadn’t seen this tiny trail the day they’d gone in.
And then he saw her rod, at least the tip of it. There on the trail was the broken foot-long end piece of her precious bamboo fly rod. She had broken it off right here and stepped on it. He squatted and turned off his lamp. Hi Vonnie. Where are you? Who are you with? In his concentration, he imagined the picture of her held or struggling with Canby and his sidekick. He wanted now to run, to yell, and so he sat still. He took off the headlamp and held it in his hand as he followed the little trail out along the mountainside toward the poachers’ camp. He didn’t want it on his head anymore. This way, when they shot, it wouldn’t be between his eyes. There was no hurry now and he tried not to hurry. The trail was printed heavily with boots and hardened in the few hours since they’d been created. He followed it up to the landslide and stopped, breathing quietly, and then he decided to climb over for the prospect. If they had a fire, he could see it from on top. He turned off the lamp and started, but as soon as he crawled onto the rocks, he dislodged one, and it rolled and then another moved, and there was no way to get over this without a big fanfare. They’d think a car was coming. He slid down and stood. Was he panicked? He checked his watch. Five minutes after midnight. He sat down and turned on the lamp and checked his hands. Muddy but okay. He wasn’t nicked up. He wasn’t panicked. His heart now was in his jawbone, but he wasn’t panicked. Too much. Okay, then. He reassumed the path and walked down around the rock spill and the crazy trees, light off, carefully. On the other side he could see nothing. It was dark in the woods, and where he could see through to the mountain, it was darker. Two hundred yards, and he got on his hands and knees and felt the boot prints still. He was close. He could hear nothing except the omnipresent air as the earth turned and the throbbing felt concussion of his heart. He was goddamned close. He was too close and he sat down and thought, tried to think.
Then he crawled forward on his hands and knees. He knew he was in trouble because he couldn’t tell how much time had passed. This was no good. He made a step and then another. The trail had widened and he made another step. He put his hand on a tree and stepped to the next, put his hand there. Tree by tree, he moved until he put his hand on the head of a tenpenny nail. He froze and opened his eyes as wide as they would work, trying to make out forms on the ground, the old tent, anything. Again he was aware he didn’t know how long he had been there. He was standing in the butchers’ camp; he knew it without any further evidence. He could smell blood. Somehow suddenly he lifted the headlamp and turned it on. And off. The three shapes had stunned him and he lighted the space again. The three gutted elk hung from the bar, but the camp was empty. A dozen cans littered the cold fire ring and there were strips of red cord around the area and bright wood chips and dirty rags. He studied the perimeter, the old log that had been a bench, behind which were cigarette butts and Vienna sausage tins, the ten trees, every one with a nail or two. The ribs of the elk in their open chests were bright in the light. She would have left something here, somehow. He turned off the lamp and stood in the center of the abandoned camp. They came in here this afternoon. She sat there. Where. Not on the log. In front of it. Who else is here? She had her daypack. Would they tie her hands? She’d sit on the ground. He got on his hands and knees in front of the bare log and shined the lamp underneath. The shiny thing pressed into a seam in the wood was her ring. Mack put his forehead against the smooth old deadfall and closed his eyes. Her beautiful ring. He put it in his pocket.
He quit the camp and crossed the trail, dropping down the hillside a hundred yards where it became a steep declivity under a thick stand of pines that had dropped their billions of needles for three hundred years. There were pockets of mulch here two feet deep. Mack found a shelf and kicked a duff bed. There’d be no fire. He was no longer cold, but it would be serious tonight, freezing. He pulled his boots off and slipped into the bivy sack on the soft deck of needles. He pulled cakes of the stuffing in fistfuls up over his bed. He sat up and drank some water. When he lay down his ears sizzled with the lake water again. A day. Vonnie was wearing shorts, but she had her fleece and her vest. She was strong. She would be strong.
Day Six
An eight-point buck was stepping through the deep dawn, each step a muted crash in the thick tinder. He passed twenty feet from Mack, who watched him unmoving. The light was the same as it had been at the bottom of the lake, magnified and undisturbed, a grotto. The deer was in no hurry and disappeared seamlessly into the fifty shades of gray at this hour. Mack sat up and listened. Frost lay in paisley patterns throughout the wood, wherever it could set unimpeded by the branch cover. He couldn’t hear a thing and his ears burned sharply now with the lake water. He couldn’t tap it out but tried. “I’m right here,” he said to the world, and he drank from his canteen and started for the trail. It was five-ten A.M. and maybe twenty-five degrees. He had no plan.
The elk hung unmoving in the abandoned camp and he went through, glad to be leaving no tracks in the frozen dirt. He walked the narrow trail along the treeline, a gentle up and down ringing the mountain. A mile later it dropped and crossed a game park clogged with tall willows. At the bottom it crossed the Dubois trailhead path and there was a new Forest Service sign with an arrow that said eight miles. His own trail departed that and narrowed and almost disappeared except for yesterday’s boot tracks in the leaves. Frost was general. Mack scanned the sky and there were no markings. The sun had not yet clipped the far peaks. Now the path was only a deer trail and the thick cover offered no forward view, bush to bush. Mack pushed through as it led across the valley and into a canyon he hadn’t perceived. He stood and took it in, another mystery in his mountains. Even at the narrow mouth the cliff sides were steep, some fissure in the ancient topography, a shift when the continent settled. The corridor was about as wide as a two-lane road and choked with scrubby piñon and aspen protected from the open world. A rill he could step over ran down the center of this place and he could see, as he ascended, where the party had crossed and recrossed the pretty waterway. He liked lost places like this, private surprises not seen by a dozen pioneers; there were thousands of secluded recesses in the wild and they filled him with hope, always. Until now. The canyon narrows and the tiered rocky walls grew taller, the slice of pale blue morning sky closing to a slash above him.
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