Leaving Blythe River: A Novel Page 14

Marcus only grunted unhappily, took the reins of his pony back, and led him to dry ground.

  “Okay,” Sam said. “We’re burning daylight. Let’s ride on. Anybody want an energy bar?”

  “I do!” Ethan shot out.

  He tried to walk closer to Sam, to lead Dora closer, but Rebar stood in the way. Ethan looked around for Rufus, who was standing chest deep in the lake and lapping his fill.

  Sam tossed him the bar. He missed it.

  “I have a question,” Ethan said, leading his mule to the energy bar and snatching it up. “That trail we just came up. If my dad took that trail on his run . . . I was thinking . . . it was still snowy that day. It was just before the weather took that big turn. If there was snow and ice on that really steep, narrow section, wouldn’t it be easy to slip off it? I was just wondering if we should be looking . . . you know . . . where a person would land. If they slipped off that trail.”

  He watched Sam and Jone exchange a look. Something solemn traveled between them, like sad news over a telephone line.

  “Here’s the thing,” Sam said. “Slip off that trail, you land in the valley. Five hundred to two thousand feet below. Depending on how far along you were and how high the trail’d climbed. So let’s say on the way back we do that. We’ll come back through that valley and ride all along the far edge where a person might land. You know why I say on the way back, right?”

  “’Cause we’re so far past it now?”

  “No,” Sam said. As if he’d much rather have avoided saying it. “Because the first places we want to look are the places you might find a person alive.”

  “Oh,” Ethan said.

  He tore into his energy bar anyway, just to calm the hunger pangs.

  They mounted up and rode on. With nothing more said.

  Well. Nothing other than “Dad!”

  And “Noah!”

  “Ow,” Ethan said, still perched on Dora’s hard saddle. He’d been in the process of lifting off his baseball cap, and had accidentally touched the top of one ear.

  They’d stopped for lunch on the near side of the Blythe River. It was a snaking, twisty track of fast water. Not whitewater, exactly, but it really moved along. It seemed to have no banks, probably because it was swollen with snowmelt. Ethan could peer into the clear water of its edge and see the rocks on the bottom.

  He did not look forward to crossing it on a swimming mule. The longer their lunch break, the happier Ethan figured he would be.

  “Ow, what?” Sam asked. “Saddle sore?”

  “Maybe,” Ethan said. “But I was actually talking about my ears.”

  He swung down off Dora, stiffly. It made him want to say “ow” again, but this time he held it in. Clenched the sound in his throat. It felt strange to stand with his feet on the ground. It felt unsteady. Ethan would have sworn he could feel the solid earth swaying like a walking mule.

  Sam came close and gently grabbed onto Ethan’s shirt collar, pulling Ethan even closer.

  “You got yourself the beginnings of a nasty sunburn on the tops of your ears, boy. And the back of your neck.”

  “Oh,” Ethan said, instinctively touching the back of his neck. It hurt.

  “Should’ve worn a hat with a full brim,” Sam said.

  “Now you tell me.”

  “I told you to bring sunscreen, though,” Sam said.

  “Yeah, that’s true. You did. But I didn’t have any. Or I couldn’t find it, anyway. I think my dad must’ve taken it.”

  “Did you bring a bandana?” Sam asked.

  “No. You didn’t tell me to bring a bandana.”

  “Then you might be destined to finish this adventure with a pair of underwear sticking out of the back of your hat.”

  “I got a spare bandana,” Jone said.

  She was squatting under a scrubby tree, lighting the burner on a camp stove. Marcus had gone as far away from the rest of the group as possible. He was watering the horses and mules two at a time in the river, starting with Rio, his Appaloosa pony, and Jone’s chestnut horse. Rufus was also drinking his fill at the water’s edge.

  “Thanks,” Ethan called to Jone.

  Then he headed over there to get it. It seemed like a simple enough proposition. All he had to do was move his feet and walk to her. But his legs had other ideas. The muscles from his calves right up through his butt felt rubbery and weak. And the skin and muscles that covered the bones he’d been sitting on—the bones that had nearly made contact with that hard saddle—fairly screamed with pain on every step.

  He could barely hobble.

  Ethan heard laughter and looked up to see Sam chuckling at him. He looked at Marcus, who was watching over his shoulder and also smirking. Then he looked at Jone, who was taking everything in but not laughing.

  Ethan stopped hobbling.

  “What’s so funny?” he asked.

  “Little bit saddle sore?” Sam asked in return. He had taken the packs off Rebar’s back, spread them out on the ground, and was sorting through the contents of one in the scrubby dirt.

  It brought up a flare of anger in Ethan. Much to his surprise.

  “And why exactly is that funny? When you see somebody in pain, that’s a joke to you? Why? When I see somebody in pain, I feel sorry for them.”

  “You’re being too sensitive,” Sam called back.

  “I don’t think he is,” Jone said. “I’m with the kid. I have no idea why somebody hurting is supposed to be funny. Like those stupid TV shows with home video of guys getting hit where it hurts. Why does that even pass for humor? It’s a male thing, if you ask me. Women don’t tend to laugh so much at pain. It’s not in our nature.”

  Marcus spoke up for the first time in hours.

  “So does that make Ethan female?” he called over from the edge of the river.

  Jone raised her voice. Honed it into a sharp bark that startled everybody, Ethan included.

  “Why don’t you just shut the hell up and leave the kid alone? Both of you.” She allowed a silence to radiate for a moment. Then she added, “No, it makes him the one in pain. It’s never funny for the one in pain.”

  Sam handed her a gray plastic filter bottle of water from the river, and Jone squeezed the water through the filter into a light cooking pot. It took time. It obviously involved a lot of pressure, and the water came through in a thin stream.

  As Ethan watched, he carefully covered the ground between them.

  “Sit here in the shade, honey,” she said without looking up. “Then before we go I’ll get you that bandana. I’ll show you how to put it on so your hat holds it down. It’ll cover your ears and neck.”

  “Thanks,” he said, and tried to lower himself to the ground.

  It wasn’t easy.

  He ended up mostly falling into a sitting position, which hurt a lot. But he stifled any vocal reaction to his pain. And if Sam and Marcus had any comments, they stifled those as well.

  Rufus padded over to join him, and Ethan hooked one arm around the dog’s neck and looked up and around.

  The radically spiked towers, the ones Ethan hadn’t seen from home, were still packed white with snow. The contrast between the snow and the navy sky behind them seemed shocking to Ethan. It almost burned his eyes.

  Ethan looked in the other direction to see the sky nearly black. The clouds looked dense, heavy. Threatening. Fast moving. The air felt heavy and damp, muggy with heat, and a lazy wind had begun to push them from one side. The dark side.

  “We got some weather blowing in,” Jone said, as if reading his mind. Or simply following his gaze.

  “I hope we don’t get any lightning,” Ethan said, remembering the feeling that gathered in his chest as he listened to the tale of Marcus racing down the mountain. Counting.

  “We’re not on a peak or a ridge. I’d say our best bet is to stay down here in the valley and ride it out. Move on when things look clearer.”

  The idea of not climbing back into a saddle sounded good to Ethan. Even if there was lightning involved
.

  Not five minutes later all four of them were hunkered down, close together, holding one big tarp over their heads while the hail pounded. Now and then the wind whipped up and sent the hail sideways, into their faces. It flapped the edges of the tarp and threatened to uncover them and expose them and render them even more uncomfortable.

  If such a thing is possible, Ethan thought.

  Ethan’s stomach groaned in pain again. They hadn’t eaten lunch yet—or even prepared it—because they couldn’t let go of the tarp.

  Ethan felt Rufus leaning hard against his back, clearly afraid of the clattering noise. Hail rolled down a slight incline and joined them under the tarp, where it quickly melted against Ethan’s jeans. It made him miserable to think of riding off for a long afternoon in wet clothes. Then he remembered they were about to swim their mounts through a river.

  “How long does this usually keep up?” he asked, maybe of Jone, maybe of Sam. Maybe both. He had to speak up to be heard over the clatter of hail on tarp.

  “Sometimes just a few minutes,” Sam said.

  “Sometimes hours,” Jone added.

  Ethan sighed and leaned out slightly to look at the horses and mules. They stood with their heads down miserably, suffering in silence. Hail bounced off his scalp, stinging.

  The mountains had disappeared, replaced by black sky. Alarmingly black.

  “Shouldn’t we cover them, too?” Ethan asked, pulling his head back in.

  At first nobody answered.

  Then Sam asked, “Who’s ‘them’?”

  “Them,” Ethan said, pointing.

  “Oh. The stock. With what?”

  “I don’t know. It just doesn’t seem fair. Here we are under some kind of cover . . .”

  “They got thick skin,” Sam said.

  Sam didn’t seem like he wanted to talk much. No one did. The mood of the group had changed. On a dime, like the weather. Everyone seemed uncomfortable. Every fuse seemed suddenly short.

  “They just look so miserable,” Ethan said.

  “Yeah, well, I got news for you,” Sam shot back. “Before long you’ll figure out there’s enough misery to go around. It won’t be confined to the stock.”

  Then nobody talked for a long time.

  “See what I mean about this place?” Marcus asked.

  It took Ethan a moment to realize the question was aimed at him. He looked over his shoulder to see Marcus staring right into his face.

  “Oh. Me?”

  “Yeah. Remember what I said?”

  “I do. Mostly. You said it’s not forgiving. Like it’s hostile toward us.”

  “I didn’t say it was hostile. I don’t think it hates us,” Marcus said.

  “But it’s not on our side.”

  “No. It just doesn’t care about us one way or another.”

  A long string of words burst out of Sam. Rushed and sudden, as though they had broken through a fence.

  “What the hell were you doing asking this guy about the wilderness, Ethan? What does he know? You want to know about this place? Ask me. I’ve been up here hundreds of times. Ask the actor-surfer guy how many times he’s been up here.”

  Silence.

  The tarp rose and shifted as Marcus climbed to his feet.

  “I’m going out for a nice walk in the hail,” he said.

  And he did.

  Jone threw an elbow into Sam’s padded ribs, and he landed on his back with a deep grunt, dropping his edge of the tarp and causing them all to be pelted miserably with hail.

  The hail had turned to a driving rain, soaking the ground beneath them and melting the accumulated pellets of ice. Ethan’s stomach had taken to growling loudly enough that he was sure Sam and Jone could hear.

  Marcus hadn’t come back to enjoy their scant cover.

  “This isn’t showing any signs of letting up,” Sam said. “We need to ride on. Tactical error. We should’ve crossed the river before we stopped for lunch. I was just trying to put off getting soaked. But that river could be about to get impassable. We could even be in for a flash flood. I think we’ll be okay if we go fast. Since it blew in from the lower elevations. But it’s up here with us now. So if we’re going to get over safely, we better get to getting while we still can.”

  “You bring any rain gear?” Jone asked him.

  “Yes and no. I got some light ponchos. But the wind’ll flap them around. Drive the rain underneath them. And we’re about to get soaked to our chests in the river anyway.”

  “It’s not that cold,” she said.

  Ethan thought it felt cold. In the wind, and with his jeans soaked. He didn’t share that thought.

  “Well, it’s not warm like it was,” Sam said. “High fifties maybe. Leastways it’s not cold enough that anybody’s gonna get hypothermia.”

  And then, just like that, the tarp disappeared from above him. Pulled back. Ethan turned in the driving rain to see Sam flapping it to straighten it out for folding. Jone’s big chestnut horse spooked slightly. The other horses and mules were too busy squinting their eyes against the downpour to react.

  “What about lunch?” Ethan asked, feeling the rain soak through his hat and shirt.

  “It’s kind of a wash,” Jone said. “Even if we hold a tarp over the camp stove, it’s really hard to get it to light in all this wind. Besides, we need to cross right now, like Sam said.”

  “Oh,” Ethan said, not wanting to show how devastating he found the news. In fact, everything felt devastating. Everything had taken a turn for the worse. The weather, the mood. The wilderness. The experience. It had gone from scary and uncomfortable to downright awful.

  And now there was nothing but fear of fast water.

  “You hungry?” Sam asked him, overhearing.

  “Starving.”

  “Can you make do with a couple of energy bars?”

  “Yeah. Sure. If I have to. I mean, it’s better than nothing.”

  Sam finished folding the tarp in the pouring rain. He tucked it away in one of Rebar’s big canvas packs, then rummaged around on the other side of the mule. Ethan wondered why Rebar never tried to bite or kick Sam. Maybe the disagreeable mule knew better by now.

  Ethan looked down and around to see where Rufus had gone. He found the dog crouched behind his heels, head down, eyes mostly closed against the deluge.

  “Well, one good thing about all this,” Jone said. “If your dad’s alive, he needs water. And here it is. All you can drink.”

  Ethan was thinking that his father had been out here for a few days now. Longer than a person can normally go without water. He wondered what his father could have done to make it to this moment. Was the early snowmelt enough? Or had his father’s hydration bladder still been fairly full when . . . well, when whatever happened happened?

  Ethan was opening his mouth to ask a bunch of questions Jone would never be able to answer when Sam appeared before him, dripping, holding out two energy bars.

  Ethan accepted them gratefully.

  “One or two?” Sam asked Jone.

  “One’ll do. I had a big breakfast.”

  “What about your friend?” Sam asked her.

  And that was the end of Jone’s fuse, right there.

  “Damn it, Sam,” she snapped. “What the hell is it with you, anyway? He’s not my friend. I barely know him. He’s our neighbor. Not mine. Ours. And I don’t even know where he is. For all I know he might’ve walked half the way home by now. I wouldn’t blame him if he did.”

  “He’s right over there,” Sam said. As though it were unfortunate news to have to report. “Here. Bring him one.” And he tried to push a wet bar into Jone’s equally wet hands.

  “The hell I will. You just damn well get over whatever this thing is you can’t seem to get over. You’re leading this expedition. Some leader. You go offer the man something to eat.”

  Sam sighed. Then he walked slowly in the direction of Marcus, who was crouched in the pouring rain near the horses.

  Jone shook her head
.

  “Stubborn old mule,” she spat, more or less in Ethan’s direction. “And I don’t mean Dora. And I don’t mean Rebar.” Then she looked over at Ethan. Her face softened. She set one large, square hand on his head. Well, on his soaking-wet baseball cap. “Let’s go ahead and mount up,” she said. “Get this river crossing over with.”

  It was Ethan’s first indication that everybody had issues with swimming across a fast-moving river. Not just him.

  They sat their horses—and Ethan’s mule—at the very edge of the Blythe River in the rain. In honor of the river crossing they were a pack train again. Sam had tied each horse and mule to the next—first Ethan’s mule behind the bay, then Jone’s chestnut behind Ethan, then Rebar, and Marcus on his pony dead last. Much the way he’d tied them to ride them up to Ethan’s A-frame earlier that morning. But in a different order.

  Was there significance to the new order?

  Ethan’s head swam at the thought that it had been earlier that same day when Sam had come riding up to begin this expedition. That seemed impossible. So much ground had been covered since then. So much sheer time. The dawn seemed like something that must have transpired a week ago.

  “Don’t just hold that rope,” Sam told Ethan. “Tie it real good to your saddle horn, and then hold the end anyway, just in case.”

  Ethan looked down at Rufus, who looked drenched and unhappy at Dora’s hooves. Sam had tied the dog up into a makeshift rope harness and handed the end of the rope to Ethan. That way nobody could wash away.

  Unless they all washed away.

  Ethan looked at the river. It was running higher and faster than when they’d decided to push on.

  He tended to the tying of the rope as a way of not looking at the water again.

  “I don’t know about this,” Jone said.

  “If this was a pleasure trip,” Sam said, “I’d agree. I’d say why not be safe? Scrub the trip, or go a different way. See something else. But a man’s life is at stake here.”

  An image exploded in Ethan’s brain. He pictured his father sitting in a restaurant or a bar. Eating prime rib or drinking Scotch. Talking up a much-younger woman. Not out in the wilderness at all. That’s what everybody else thought. What if everybody else was right? What if four people and six animals were about to risk their lives for a man who wasn’t even out here in the first place?