Savage Run

28

With the cabin behind them, Joe Pickett, Stewie Woods, and Britney Earthshare ascended the first mountain. Joe led, keeping to the trees, and eventually found a game trail that switchbacked its way to the top. Descending, they plunged steeply into twisted, gnarled, almost impenetrable black timber. They crawled more than walked through it, sometimes covering much more ground moving sideways to find an opening in the trees than actually distancing themselves from the cabin.

The frequency of the rifle fire had slowed. Joe checked his watch. It was now three to five minutes between shots. Then the shots stopped altogether.

Finally, they reached the bottom of the slope. By then Joe was thinking about the probability of being tracked. While the black timber would be as difficult for a horse as it was for them, it would be obvious that the only place they had to run was downhill. There was no reason to flank the cabin or try to work their way back to the road where they could possibly be seen. The best strategy, Joe figured, was to get as far away as possible, as quickly as possible.

Stewie was doing remarkably well, considering the circumstances and the tough climbing. As they crawled through the timber his chatter was nonstop. He filled Joe in on what John Coble had told them about how it had been he and Tibbs who had rigged the cow with explosives, and how boring it was to be a fugitive.

“If this was a movie, we would have stayed at the cabin and plotted and then set a bunch of booby traps,” Stewie riffed. “You know, we would have dug a pit and filled it with sharpened sticks or fixed up a trip-wire on a bent-over tree or something so when Charlie came tonight-whoops! — he would get jerked into the air by his feet. Then we’d surround him and beat him like a pinata.

“But this ain’t no movie, man. This is real life. And in real life when some dickhead is shooting at you there is only one thing you can do, and that is to run like a rabbit. Like a scared fucking bunny.”

Joe ignored him.

Occasionally, when a branch snapped dryly or two trees rubbed together with a moan in the wind, Joe would spin and reach back for his pistol. At any time, he expected Charlie Tibbs to appear above them or for long-range rifle shots to start cutting them down.

At the bottom of the slope was a small runoff stream that coursed through boulders. Joe stepped up on the rocks and led them downstream for half a mile before cutting back up the next slope.

Britney objected and Joe explained that the foray was meant to make them more difficult to track since they would leave no marks on the stones.

They stayed in the shadows of a steep granite wall and followed it up the second mountain until the wall finally broke and let them through. After five hundred yards of spindly lodgepole pines, the trees cleared and they started toward the top of the mountain, laboring across loose gray shale. The temperature had dropped ten degrees as they climbed due to the increase in altitude, although it was still hot and the late afternoon sun was piercing.

Stewie’s labored breathing and the cascading shale as it loosened under their feet were the only sounds as they hiked upward.

“Try to get over the top without stopping,” Joe called over his shoulder to Stewie. “If Charlie Tibbs is going to see us with that spotting scope of his, it’s going to be here, while we’re in the open.”

“Stewie can’t get his breath!” Britney pleaded to Joe. She had dropped back and was climbing with Stewie, his good arm over her shoulder.

“He’s fine,” Joe grumbled. “Let’s keep going. We can rest on the other side.”

“What an asshole,” Britney said to Stewie in a remarkably out-of-place Valley Girl intonation. “First he hits you and then he tries to kill you.”

Stewie tried, between attempts to catch his breath, to reassure Britney that he was all right.

Joe sighed and waited for them to catch up, then pulled Stewie’s other arm over his own shoulder. The three of them summitted the mountain and stumbled down the other side, again through loose shale.

Joe kept urging them on until they approached larger trees that provided some cover and shade. He stepped out from Stewie’s arm, letting it flop down, and found a downed log to sit on.

Stewie crumpled into a pile of arms and legs and sat still while he slowly caught his breath. Britney positioned herself behind him in the crux of a weathered branch. Joe noticed that she had gouged her shin sometime while they were climbing and that blood from the wound had dried in two dirty streams running down her leg and into her sandaled foot.

Sitting back, Joe felt cool as the sweat beneath his shirt began to dry. He removed his hat and ran his fingers through hair that was getting stiff with salt from sweating beneath his hatband. Patting his shirt and trouser pockets, he did a quick inventory of what he had brought with him. While he had started the day in the cocoon of his pickup surrounded by radios, firearms, equipment, as well as Lizzie, he now counted among his possessions his clothing, boots, and hat, his holster and belt, the long coil of rope, small binoculars hung by a thong over his neck, and his spiral notebook and pen.

Looking at Stewie and Britney, he saw that they had brought even less with them from the cabin.

Stewie painfully untangled himself and sat up, his arms around his knees. He looked up at Joe.

“Thanks for helping me up the mountain.”

“Sure.”

Britney rolled her eyes.

“What do you think our plan should be?” Stewie asked. “How long should we hide out before we head back?”

Joe had been thinking about this on their long march up the mountainside.

“I don’t know.”

Britney huffed, blowing her bangs up off her forehead. The Valley Girl speech pattern was back. “What do you mean you don’t know? Why did you lead us up that freaking mountain, then?”

Joe grimaced. This was not where he wanted to be, he thought, and these were not people he wanted to be there with.

“We don’t know if Charlie Tibbs is tracking us,” Joe explained patiently. “If he is coming after us, he has a horse and he seems to know what he’s doing. Even I could follow our sloppy tracks up this mountain.”

“I didn’t know we were supposed to tiptoe,” Britney whined.

“John Coble said that Tibbs was the best tracker he had ever seen,” Stewie said.

Joe addressed Stewie. “If he turns away and goes back to where he came from, we’ll know it tonight, I think. He might even follow our tracks down to the stream, where I hope he’ll get confused about where we came out and turn back. I can’t imagine him trying to run us down at night. If he leaves, we can sneak back to the cabin tomorrow. You’ve got a cell phone and a radio in there, right?”

Stewie nodded yes. How do you think I called your wife? was what Joe expected him to say. But Stewie wisely kept his mouth shut.

“The phone only works at certain times,” Britney said. “Like when the weather is just perfect or the sunspots are lined up or something. Most of the time we can’t reach anybody and nobody can call us.”

Joe nodded. “I’ve got a phone and a radio in my truck, if we can get to it. Provided Charlie Tibbs doesn’t get there first.” He thought of Tibbs’s methodical work on the SUV and imagined him doing the same to his pickup. “Plus they’ll be looking for us by tomorrow, is my guess.”

“At least when I was in the tree I had electricity and could use my cell phone to call my friends,” Britney said, speaking as much to herself as to Stewie or Joe. “I had food, at least. But I guess that was California and this isn’t.”

Stewie’s misshapen mouth exaggerated his frown. “And if he comes after us?”

“Then we die,” Britney offered.

In a thick pocket of aspen trees below where Stewie and Britney were resting, Joe found a spring that burbled out of a granite shelf into a small shallow pool that had been eroded into the rock. From the shelf, trickles of water dribbled down the rock face and, with the help of other spring-fed trickles further down the mountain, worked their way in unison toward the valley floor to birth the next stream. Joe drank from the pool, pressing his cheek against the cool lip of it, sucking the water in through his teeth to catch the pine needles that floated on the surface. If there was bacteria in the water, he didn’t care. Giardiasis was the last thing he was worried about right now.

He put his hat in the water, crown down, and filled it as much as he could. Holding it in his hands like a newborn puppy, he walked back up the mountain to give Stewie and Britney a drink.

Stewie accepted the hatful of water and Britney crinkled her nose at the very idea. She left to find the spring for herself.

After drinking, Stewie wiped his mouth with his sleeve.

“I’ll bet you ten thousand dollars that he’s already coming after us,” Stewie said.

“No bet.”

“A thousand?”

“No bet.”

“Can you hit anything with that pistol?” Stewie asked, gesturing with his head toward Joe’s holster.

“Nope.”

“How well do you know this country?”

“Not as well as I wish I did,” Joe confessed, sitting back down on the log.

Stewie cursed the fact that they didn’t have a map.

He looked beyond Joe to the jagged peaks of the mountains, which were brilliant blue and snow-capped. “Unless I’m completely wrong, it seems to me if we keep going west we will hit a big canyon that will stop us cold.”

Joe nodded. “Savage Run.”

“I always wanted to see that canyon.” Stewie’s face screwed up in a clownish, pathetic grimace. “But not like this.”