Necessary Evil

Chapter 21

Until she looked at her watch, Jessie had no idea that dawn was still two hours behind the mountains. The solid flat ground on which she lay was a balm to her frazzled nerves. Kier still had not come in.

"There may be a roar," he called.

"Okay," she muttered to herself. What now?

She didn't move as it started, first with some solid knocks of rock on rock, then a clattering, followed almost immediately by a rumble that sent vibrations through the stone under her fingertips. Thunder filled the cave. After a minute of what sounded like the mountain ripping open, the sound stopped.

"Throw down the rope," she heard Kier call out.

She wanted to sleep, not move. She felt as if she had been drugged. Forcing her eyes open, she crawled the few feet back to the cave entrance and the tree.

"The rope?" he called out again. He was at the bottom of the chasm, she realized.

"Just a minute," she said. The rope was hanging from the tree. "Kier."

"Yes."

"The rope's in the tree and I'm in the cave. It'll take me a minute." She knew how weary her voice sounded.

The next thing she knew, his hand was gently shaking her shoulder.

"What time is it?" she asked. "Did you get your rope?"

The roar had been an avalanche. It would look as though they had been sucked away in the flow of rock and ice, he explained as she stretched herself awake. He had lain beside her and let her sleep for sixty minutes or so, but now they needed to move deep inside the innumerable passageways of the cavern where it would be impossible to track them.

Near the opening a wide fire pit had been used many times by the youth groups that he took on wilderness excursions. In the circle of his light beam it appeared full with fine gray ash and the remnants of blackened wood chunks. Beside it was a small pile of rough-barked logs, neatly stacked and split and ready to burn. He could tell that no one had used the place since his last visit.

Jessie reached in the pocket of her coat, withdrawing a light that she used to explore the nearby walls and ceiling. They could barely make out a trail of soot above them, the remnants of a river of hot air that had picked its way over the rock, always rising, sucked by the draft until it found the mouth of the cave.

"Who comes here?"

"We bring the boys when they turn fourteen."

He told her to take off her snowsuit just as he was removing his. "We need to cover ourselves with charcoal," he told her.

"When they figure out the avalanche trick, and they can't follow us over the granite, they're gonna think about dogs- tracking dogs. Fire smell is common in the wild and will mask our scent, make our trail old fast and confuse a hound's nose. But we don't want to turn the snowsuits black."

With that he knelt and grabbed a sooty stick.

She snickered. "Oh, great. I'm already filthy."

Kier gave a concerned glance in response.

"I'm sorry. I've got an attitude. For a moment there I was really happy to have made it here."

"Your cynicism will weaken you."

"It's already kicked the stuffing out of me."

Kier examined her arm. A deep groan escaped her lips when he moved it.

"If we're lucky, all you did was bruise things."

As he helped her out of the snowsuit, he was sure that she was at ease with his touch. He had sensed it previously when she was sick and when she lay against his back, but he suspected that she could never acknowledge it. Discussing it seemed pointless, so he applied the ash in silence while enjoying the closeness.

Since he was a boy, Kier had been in these caverns many times. The first time he came with Grandfather they had used a little-known entry called witsu ka, or Worm's Way, a tiny hole with just enough room for a man to crawl in on his belly. It was much more difficult to undertake the long crawl through Worm's Way than to climb to the cave they had just entered- aptly named Tree Cave. When they brought the boys in summer, they would climb the mountain to the bottom of the chasm. One man would reach the cave using climbing gear. Once at the cave, he would drop a rope ladder.

Another entrance by way of a different cave opened onto a treacherous but passable rock ledge in the middle of a thousand-foot cliff. For as long as anyone could remember, this opening had been called Man Jumps, although there was no evidence that anyone had done so. Another cavern passageway led to a surface cave that was the fourth entrance, but a portion of this route was almost vertical, useless without climbing gear.

Two white men lost in the cavern for days had located a fifth tunnel into the caverns. For them it was an escape exit. Some months after their safe return, they had attempted to show the Tiloks the tiny hole in the rocks from which they had emerged, but were unable to retrace their route. Grandfather had found it, but Kier had never taken the time to learn it.

Because the cavern was sacred to the Tilok and on reservation land, no maps of its sprawling labyrinth existed. The only maps were in the men's heads. The Tilok had learned to traverse the interconnecting caverns from Tree Cave to Man Jumps. A few men, including Kier, could make passage from Tree Cave to Worm's Way, but those who made errors in navigation could pay a dear price. The caverns were fraught with drop-offs and confusing turns. Two Tilok men attempting to map the routes had disappeared when they either got permanently lost or, more likely, fell into a chasm. Some of the vertical shafts, which seemingly fell hundreds of feet, had never been explored.

Using the charred piece of wood he had picked from the fire pit, Kier began at Jessie's boots. He smeared charcoal and ash over her liberally. She seemed so exhausted, it did not even occur to him to let her do it herself. Trying to ignore the way he felt when he was near her, the desire he felt when steadying her, touching her, he sought to adopt a clinical air-to move with the precision of a good physician rather than the exquisite sensitivity of a lover. He dipped the blackened stick over and over in the pit so that when he was finished, her clothes would be impregnated with the fine powder. As he worked his way up to her thighs, she put her hand over his.

"I've got the idea," she said, taking the stick and beginning to apply the ash herself.

Embarrassed, he wondered whether his desire was too strong to remain undetected. Always things with women got this way-everything a nuance, every gesture a speech. He hated thinking about it, but he was drawn to her despite his vow never to be with another white woman.

Jessie seemed to be fighting her own feelings. He could feel it as surely as the spirit of the Tiloks in the mountains. But whatever monster gnawed at her, he knew that his was possessed of many more heads, and breathed a far hotter fire. There was a head for every member of his family-his mother, his sisters, his myriad cousins, the whole tribe. All were expecting him, the darling of the white community, to marry an Indian. To marry Willow.

Within minutes, they were covered with ash and soot. Next, to be even safer, they rubbed themselves with needles from the pine at the entrance, which took only a few minutes more. Then it was time to leave. Turning his light on Jessie, he used his free hand to hoist the pack and gave her a questioning look.

"Are you strong enough to hike?"

"I'd like to try."

"Stay directly behind me. Keep your light pointed at the ground."

"Do we have steep places in here too?"

"Stay close."

He put a hand gently on her shoulder, and was sure her head moved almost imperceptibly toward his fingers, as if she wanted to touch them with her cheek.

"I'll tell you when there's a bad edge. It'll be fine."

He squeezed her shoulder in reassurance, and surprisingly she covered his hand with hers.

The crackling of the radio made them both start. The garbled transmission continued as Kier swung his light to the source and retrieved Miller's unit. Jessie stood close while he fiddled with the squelch.

"Click twice if you hear me, Kier. The best triangulation equipment around won't locate you on a couple of clicks."

Tillman.

"Is it true?" she asked.

"Don't know. But two clicks would tell them we're alive. Right now that's a lot of information."

"Cat got your clicker, huh? Well, never mind." Tillman chuckled. "That was a gutsy bit of ridge-walking you did tonight. Especially lugging the lady around."

Kier's insides shrank.

"If you hadn't moved on that ledge when you did, I'd have shot you."

Kier's fist tightened involuntarily. The implications flooded him. So Tillman was the stalker, or at least he wanted Kier to think so. Knowing it as opposed to suspecting this finalized Kier's assessment of their predicament. Tillman, who had experimented on his tribe, the man who directed the search, could hunt and track like a Tilok.

There was no more chatter for a few moments. Then: "I'll be right behind you."

Tillman would likely be unaware of the caverns. He didn't know if his prey were dead or alive. The fact of their survival in the avalanche could only be gleaned on hands and knees, by studying every shred of evidence. Kier shut the radio off and put it away. Deeper in the caverns, it wouldn't work anyway.

Kier focused on the route to Man Jumps, the seldom-used exit that would eventually bring them to the cabin. It was a snarl of passageways until you came to a fork where the stone in the middle was covered with ancient pictographs. Kier supposed that his ancestors used the caves often on their migratory passages through the high country. They would have stayed in these caves during the summer months, when game and berries were plentiful, before the salmon runs and acorn crop.

Near the Tree Cave entrance, years of moccasined feet had rounded and worn smooth stone edges on the floor of the cavern. Missing, however, were the deep gullies in the rock, exactly the width of a human foot, which Kier had seen in places occupied steadily for hundreds of years. As they moved into a train-tunnel-size passageway that would lead them to the next chamber, fingerlike formations of dripping limestone appeared. "I tell the kids it feels like a ghost convention in here," he said.

"You take them in here?"

"There's more than just me taking them, but yes."

"So I'm not sure why that makes me feel so humbled."

"We don't come here in November. And never in a blizzard, I promise you that. So don't bother feeling humbled. And for the walk through the caverns, Grandfather comes to show the way. He knows them better than anyone."

"I keep saying it, but I must meet your grandfather."

They should only use one light where possible, Kier explained, and then they would be assured of batteries for a couple more nights. She desperately hoped they wouldn't be necessary once they were out of the cave. Hunger gnawed at them, making them more susceptible to the dank cold. Even the insulated snow clothes they had taken off the men required a certain amount of body heat to be effective.

After a time, Kier stopped.

''How do you feel?'' he said putting his hand to her forehead.

"I'm dizzy and I've never been so hungry."

"Your hunger will get less with time. It's when it comes again that you really have to eat. You can go days without food. Fortunately you won't have to."

"Let's hold that thought."

At first the drop in elevation was slight; then the path steepened to a downhill hike. Sounds of water dripping came and went. As the passageway became more nearly vertical, it also became more twisted, so that in places it felt like a spiral staircase. In his knees he felt the pounding of the long footfalls and realized how easily she could injure herself. He wondered how long she could walk.

The narrow margins of his light probably made it hard for her to place her next step without stumbling, so he suggested that she use the second light despite his desire to save the batteries.

After walking what seemed a mile or more down into the mountain, the passage leveled out, and they came to a maze of tunnels. Kier paused at each turn, constantly scanning. By developing a habit of always looking, always being conscious of where he was going, he had an extraordinary memory for even the most subtle landmarks. In addition, Grandfather had left piles of pebbles on the main route that could be found about twenty feet before every right turn and at the junction of every left turn. Of course when there were several passages off a large cavern, that method didn't work. In that situation there was either no marker, in which case memory was imperative, or there was a small pile of pebbles at the beginning of the correct passageway.

The primary drawback to this method of navigation was its ambiguity. There were several routes and they crossed one another.

"How do you know where we are going?" she finally asked.

He explained the rules.

''It was better not knowing,'' she said.

At last, they reached another flat where the walking was easier. After two sharp bends and a hundred yards on the level, they came to a rock wall that separated two passages. On the wall was a thirty-foot-long ancient pictograph. Kier shone a light onto the scene that was painted onto the smooth limestone. She stood close to him, in awe of what she was seeing. Multicolored figures, in earth-red, turquoise, and yellow, depicted people or spirit beings. The arms and legs of the figures were represented by three lines, and torsos by four lines.

"They are the sky people or spirit people who affect things here on earth." Kier pointed at certain of the figures that appeared to hover over the landscape.

Below the sky people were the hunters-tiny red men holding spears and rocks, chasing deer or elk. Between the hunters and the sky people was the sun and, to the right, a smaller sphere-the moon. They hunted in the twilight.

"This fellow here, near the hunters, has the ceremonial headdress-that is good medicine." Kier outlined the barely discernible hat. Two imposing figures stood side by side with a radiant halo depicted over their heads. Between the haloed pair stood a smaller figure. "Maybe the small fellow is on a vision quest, and these two spirit figures are standing over him."

"Or maybe they are man and woman. The halo is their love, and the smaller person their child."

"We always thought it was about sacred dreams. Maybe love is your dream."

"I know part of it is about love," she said.

She took two shaky steps to the wall and plunked down in the dirt. Kier took off his pack and set his light on a ledge, directing its rays at the painting. Then he sat close beside her. When he touched her shoulder, guiding her back to recline against him, she did not resist. He knew his large body was much more inviting than the rock. After a moment, his arm went around her, allowing her head to rest against his chest.

"What does it make you think about?" she asked.

"You first."

"My mind feels like it's floating with fatigue, a little like being drunk."

''Where is your mind wandering?''

"You think I'm imagining things when I say those two people with haloes are about love. You think it's because I'm hung up on the subject."

"I never said that. I'm just listening."

She nodded. "I guess I'm just hoping I'm not one dimensional. When I was young I seemed to have so many sides. You know? I felt more than just desire, anger, and satisfaction.

There were really good people back then. Why don't I know any great people anymore? Did they change, or did I?

"You were like a fairy tale come true if my sister was to be believed. Grounded. Got a whole philosophy about life and nature. According to Claudie, you were gentle with everything. She said you had no guile, Kier. I thought maybe all that bigness I knew as a kid could come back when I watched you with the mare. Then you ignored my wishes, dragged me away from civilization, and tricked me, locking me in a wine cellar against my will. So much for the resurrection of my youthful idealism.''

Kier stayed quiet for a while, wanting to deal squarely with his need to reconcile things with her.

"Let's cut through the baloney," he said finally. "The wine cellar isn't the issue. What we're really talking about is this rock-hard inner self of mine that-yes, is stubborn-but more than that, can't consider a white woman as a mate. And we're talking about one more thing. A bigger thing I think."

"What's that?"

"Whatever happened to you, that has you so angry."

"You dragged me around in a blizzard instead of driving to a phone booth."

"But that's not it," he said.

"Are you a mind reader?"

"Is it the divorce?"

"No."

"So what is it?"

''You first. Why do you think I care what you think of white women? You're going to say that I'm somehow attracted to you and that this is some kind of issue with me."

"You're trying to say you're not?"

"Kier, all the problems in life don't revolve around you, for God's sake."

"My unwillingness to be with another white woman, in your mind, is just a rejection of the white man's civilization and ultimately of you. Same with the government. But the reason it bugs you so much-"

"Kier, please spare me. Why are you talking about my feelings? Talk about your feelings. Don't tell me about mine. That's my job."

Kier's anger exploded inside him. He quit talking and sat staring at the dreamers on the wall.

"Okay. Okay. I'll just listen. You talk," she said. "Let's not degenerate. You just talk."

"You're sure?"

"Definitely sure."

"Now I don't know what to talk about," he said.

"Stop stalling before I scream."

"It started with my mother. All my life I have felt my mother's love. Always I have wanted to please her. But more than that, bigger than that, I wanted to be like my grandfather and never betray my heritage. Indian people are being swallowed up. We haven't preserved what is Indian. Often we're not good at what is white. I have gotten along pretty well in both cultures. That's what I was raised to do. But I can't let myself disappear into the white man's world, get fat off peddling Indian mysticism. I almost did that once."

"So you're going to marry an expectation instead of loving a person. It makes poor Willow sound like a political statement. God. I thought I was cynical."

"Ah. So you know all about Willow."

"Well, Claudie told me. I'm a snoop at heart. That's why I'm a cop."

"So now you've decided I'm not in love with her when you don't know either of us."

"We got naked in the same hut. I know you."

"Well, let me explain my side of this."

"Go ahead."

"I guess," he said, sighing, "I don't quite look at my relationship with Willow the way you and Claudie do."

"Let's leave Claudie out of this."

"Okay, the way you do. You know the saying about 'stir-the-oatmeal kind of love'? It's not Hollywood, but it's caring." He watched her with eyes that pleaded for her understanding, even as he supposed it was something that she did not intend to give.

"You see there, you've just admitted it. This is some dogeared old affection that's like friendship. It's not really love."

''It's what I want. I'm not looking for anything else. Anything glamorous."

He heard her take in a deep, ragged breath. "So that's it. Okay. I can respect that. I suppose there're a lot of happy families out there stirring the oatmeal. Personally, I'd rather be passionately in love, howling at the moon, screwing my brains out till we knock the bed over."

Kier thought about that and realized that nothing good could come from continuing the debate.

"I judge from the long, Indian-like silence that we've exhausted that topic. Let's try another unfinished topic."

She leaned closer against him, placing her hand on his chest. He surmised that the rummy, frivolous feeling that accompanied exhaustion was relaxing her. He took hold of her shoulder and pulled her tight. She let her body meld to his.

"Back there on the cliff you were starting to tell me about your boyhood fears of the TV bear. I interrupted you."

"Well, it wasn't just the TV bear. To this day when bears come to a camp in the night and they wake me, my heart races for a few seconds. Like when I was a child."

"Kier afraid of a bear?"

"No. I'm afraid of things that I can't control. It just happened that the TV bear captured my imagination when I was young."

"How about love? You can't control that. Or the pain of it.”

"Never thought of it that way."

"Maybe it's time you did. I still remember certain very powerful emotions from my growing up. When I was a little girl, I always wanted my daddy's attention."

"Every little girl wants that."

"Yeah, but this was a big deal in my life. Really big. He wasn't the cuddling type. Never touched me. I'd sit for hours and daydream that I'd found a way to impress him. I have these memories of getting all excited about something, trying to tell him, and him not even looking up from the paper."

Kier held her close, but said nothing. She put her head on his chest.

"Is it something to do with your dad, that you're upset about?"

"No, it's not."

"Let me ask a question?"

"Okay."

"Why were you visiting your sister?"

"I'm not up to this yet."

"Can't talk about it?"

"Not now. Tell me about Willow."

"What's there to say? In a couple months we'll get engaged, get married, the whole thing."

"Did you ever tell Willow all this… this stir-the-oatmeal and native-loyalty stuff?"

He made no immediate reply. As he thought about her question, he was not searching for an answer, but searching for a reason. He could not think of one, except the anxiety that accompanied the thought.

"No."

"Well, I pray for the poor woman's sake that you do before you propose."