Savage Run

34

Once they had crawled down through the steep, narrow, and brushy chute to the trail, their commitment was made. The ledge Stewie had found was a seven-foot drop down a tongue of slick rock. It was clear to Joe that if the switchback ledge became impassable on the canyon wall, or had broken away somewhere below, it would be hard for them to turn back.

Because the ledge was so narrow, Joe did not try to shoulder around Stewie into the lead. Hugging the wall, Stewie sidestepped along the jutting fissure, calling out hazards such as a break in the trail or loose rocks. Joe followed, and Britney, with tears of fear streaming down her dirty cheeks, stayed close. They had tied the rope around their waists to each other.

“There’s something, like, cinematic about this,” Stewie called over his shoulder.

“Watch where the fuck you’re going!” Britney hissed.

“Stay calm,” Joe sighed. “We’ve got a long way to go.”

Joe buttoned the doll into his shirt. If there was any luck or mystical charge emanating from the doll, Joe wanted as much of it as he could get. The doll rested against his sweating skin as a lucky talisman. He vowed that if he somehow made the descent and got back to his family, he would clean up the doll and give it to his girls.

After the first switchback, the trail widened and they were able to square their shoulders and hike down it slowly. Like Stewie, Joe kept one hand on the canyon wall at all times. If he slipped on loose earth, he wanted to fall into the wall and not plunge into the canyon.

“I swear if I get home I’ll go to church,” Britney promised. “I don’t know which church yet. It needs to be spiritual, and healing, and forgiving. And without a lot of that religious baggage so many churches seem to have nowadays.”

Joe’s thighs began to burn as he descended. He perversely welcomed the sensation, because it took his mind off of other concerns. He was hungry, and his mouth was cottony with thirst. His clothing had been ripped by branches. His eyes burned due to lack of sleep, and despite his efforts to concentrate, there was a thick fog born of exertion, fear, and unusual self-doubt that was clouding his thinking.

They were far down the trail, which Stewie had taken to calling the Cheyenne Crossing, when Joe started to question if they had done the right thing. It would be amazingly easy to become rimrocked, that is, to get to a point where they realized they could not get back. Joe had been involved on a search-and-rescue effort of a bighorn sheep hunter who had meandered up a boulder-strewn mountain and found out he couldn’t figure out how to get back down. He fell, and the hunter’s broken body was found wedged beneath two upthrusts of granite, where he had been for seventy-two hours. The hunter died of exposure on the way to the hospital.

If suddenly the wedge of rock that served as a path ended, they would have to backtrack up the wall. Balance and gravity had helped carry them this far down, and going back up with aching muscles and minds dizzy with hunger and exhaustion would spell trouble. It would be extremely difficult to crawl up the slick rock chute they had used to slide down to the ledge.

Only when Joe looked across the canyon at the opposite wall did he realize that they had already dropped two-thirds of the way into the canyon. He looked at his watch and confirmed that it had only taken twenty minutes.

“When we get to the bottom,” Britney asked, “will we go downstream or up the other side?”

“Up the other side!” Stewie shouted triumphantly. “Then on to Saddlestring and cheeseburgers! And beer! And chicken-fried steaks swimming in country gravy!”

“A shower would be nice,” Britney said lamely.

Getting rid of you two nuts would be more than nice, Joe thought with such clarity that for a moment he feared he had actually said it.

Joe smiled, his spirits recovering. The exhaustion combined with their progress seemed to supercharge his emotions. His mood swung from the utter despair he had experienced a few moments before to near euphoria as they approached the canyon floor. It was a sensation he didn’t welcome, or trust.

The path narrowed, now only slightly less wide than the length of his boots. He pressed his cheek against the cool rock wall and held its unforgiving firmness with outstretched arms as he shuffled along. Soon, he could hear the tinkling of the stream below, but he dared not readjust and look down.

Then he heard a splash and a whoop as Stewie dropped from the ledge into the Middle Fork and screamed, “ Hallelujah!”

Joe followed, landing ankle-deep in snow-cold water that was a pleasing shock to his system. After helping Britney down from the ledge, Joe dropped to his knees in the stream, fell forward, and drank from it until the icy water numbed his mouth and throat.

He sat back, water dribbling down his shirt, while Stewie and Britney did the same. He looked at them on all fours in the water, sucking and slurping from the stream, and thought, We look and act like animals.

They were in complete shade on the canyon floor. Joe looked up at the brilliant blue slice of sky. He guessed that because of the extreme narrowness of the walls, the floor got no more than an hour of full sunshine a day as the sun passed directly over. Then he heard the deep chopping sound of a helicopter.

Stewie rose, hearing it too. The sound reached its zenith as the helicopter, looking like the silhouette of a damselfly, shot across the opening above. The chopping slowly receded until it melded with the rushing sound of the stream.

“They’re looking for us!” Stewie cheered, rising to his feet. “Just our luck we’re down here in this hole, but they are looking for us!”

Downstream, the walls constricted and forced the mild Middle Fork river to boil and become whitewater. There were no banks, and therefore no place to walk, even if they had decided to head downstream instead of up the canyon wall.

Joe led the way, stepping up on the ledge that paralleled the wall they had just come down. He paused, sighed, summoned his strength, and began climbing. It was harder going up than down, and Stewie called out for frequent breaks. Joe’s shirt was again soaked. Sweat streamed from his hatband into his collar and pooled on his temples.

Eventually, Joe passed from shade into sun and he could tell from looking at the other canyon wall that they were nearly to the top. While pausing to rest, Joe tried to survey the opposite rim. He could not yet see over the top, and couldn’t tell if Charlie Tibbs had made it to the trail along the rim yet. If Tibbs were to find the trail, Joe thought, the three of them would be nakedly exposed to him. There was no place to hide along the ledge, and the rock wall would serve as a backstop to the bullets Tibbs would fire.

“Listen to me,” Joe said to Stewie and Britney, who were resting on a ledge below him. “I know you’re tired, but we need to get to the top of this canyon. No stopping, no resting. We can rest once we get over the rim. Okay?”

Britney shot a hateful look at Joe and cursed.

“Do you think he’s close?” Stewie asked, concerned.

“I don’t know,” Joe answered flatly. “But let’s go.”

It came quickly, a feeling like a storm rolling through the mountains-the intuitive realization that Charlie Tibbs was upon them. Joe tried to look over his shoulder at the opposite rim. He could see nothing, but he could feel an impending force as if an invisible hand was pushing him down. He implored Stewie and Britney to pick up their pace.

Joe figured he was less than twenty yards from the top, and the ledge was narrowing. Ahead, Joe could see where the ledge receded into the wall and, for all intents and purposes, vanished from view. The last ten feet from the end of the path to the top of the rim would involve climbing up the rock face. There were enough burrs and fissures on the face to make climbing possible, but there was nothing underneath to stop a fall if he, or one of the others, lost their footing.

It was silent except for the watery sound of a warm breeze high in the trees and Stewie’s labored breathing. Stewie was wheezing with exertion. Mirroring the feeling of dread Joe felt, the sky had taken on a darker patina and the light was fusing into the rock. A bank of dark thunderheads, heavy with rain, was beginning to roll across the sun. The temperature had dropped and there was the feeling of static electricity in the air, which signaled that a summer rainstorm was indeed on its way.

Looping the rope over his head and shoulder to get it out of the way, Joe began to climb. Hand-over-hand, he found holds that would support his weight and he pulled himself up the wall. His biceps and shoulders were screaming with pain by the time he reached the top, but he managed to kick out and swing himself over the edge, where he lay gasping for breath. But he needed to fight through his exhaustion and hurry to bring Stewie and Britney up.

Crawling toward the trunk of a tree, Joe looped the rope around its base and tied it fast. He tested it with his full strength, then crawled back to the edge of the rim. Stewie and Britney stood still, their pale faces tilted up to him. He dropped the rope in a loose coil at their feet.

“Can you climb up the rope or do I need to try and pull you up?” Joe asked, his voice hoarse. “It’s tied off on a tree up here.”

“Ladies first,” Stewie said, then made a mocking face as if realizing what he had said and taking it back. This guy takes nothing seriously, Joe thought.

“I don’t think I can climb it,” Britney said vacantly.

“Then tie it around your waist and do your best to help me when I pull you up. Use the handholds in the rock to help yourself. If the rope slips, don’t panic-it’ll pull tight from the tree.”

Stewie helped Britney tie a harness, and when it was secure he smiled up at Joe and gave him the thumbs-up signal.

“I hate this,” Britney whined.

“Joe hates it even worse,” Stewie cackled.

Joe wrapped the rough rope around his forearm and backed away from the rim until the rope was taut.

“Here goes!” he called out, and eased his weight backward. She was heavy, but he was able to pull the first three feet of rope up fairly easily. But then Britney apparently lost her hold on the wall and the rope pulled back, straining against him, cutting through his shirt and skin. He grunted, and braced against the tree, raising Britney another two or three feet. He expected to see her hand reach over the rim at any time, which it did, and he watched through the pain as her hand groped around in the grass, trying to find a root or rock she could use to pull herself over the top.

Then there was a rifle shot and Britney’s hand vanished. Her body instantly became dead weight against the rope and Joe was flung forward into the dirt, the rope sizzling through his hands until he was finally able to double it around his wrist. Another shot boomed across the canyon and Joe felt a tug on the rope that was not unlike that of a trout taking his fly.

Suddenly, Joe was being pulled forward, hard, toward the edge of the canyon. The rope burned through his hands, flaying his palms open, before he managed to dally it around his forearm where it held tight. It made no sense that Britney’s weight could cause this. Then he realized that Stewie was climbing the rope, scrambling to get to the top.

“Stewie, I’ve got to let out the slack!” Joe yelled, letting the rope hiss through his hands until it pulled tight, straining the knot he had tied on the tree.

Another shot ripped through the canyon, but the rope didn’t jerk.

“Stewie, are you okay?”

Stewie’s terror-filled face and wild hair appeared at ground level above the rim, and Joe held out a bloody rope-burned hand to help him over the edge.

The two of them stumbled back away from the rim and fell into a gaping depression in the dirt made by the upturned root pan of a spruce tree.

“Britney?” Joe asked, still trying to get his breath.

Stewie emphatically shook his head no.

“The son of a bitch practically cut her in half,” Stewie spat, enraged. “Then he shot her again to keep her spinning.” He reached over and grasped Joe’s arm, his eyes wild. “Don’t let her hang there and get blown apart.”

Joe unsheathed his knife. Reaching through the vee of two gnarled roots, he sawed through the rope, letting Britney’s body drop. The pounding of his heart in his ears drowned out the sound of her body hitting the surface of the Middle Fork of the Twelve Sleep River.

“Poor Britney,” Stewie seethed. “That poor girl.”

As a bullet slammed into the tree trunk, shaking pine needles and pinecones to the ground, Joe realized that cutting Britney loose had pinpointed where they were for Charlie Tibbs.

With his chin in the mud of the depression, Joe peered through the roots to the opposite rim. Thunder rolled across the mountains, reverberating through the canyon.

There was a stand of thick juniper on the other side of the canyon, bordered on both sides by spruce. The juniper would be the only place, Joe thought, for Tibbs to hide. The distance was 150 yards-out of range for Joe to aim accurately. Nevertheless, he fitted the thick barrel of his.357 Magnum through the roots and held the weapon with both hands. He sighted on the top of the juniper bushes, aiming high, hoping to lob bullets across the canyon and into the brush.

Joe fired five shots in rapid succession, squeezing the double action until it clicked twice on empty chambers. The concussions seemed especially loud, and they echoed back and forth against the canyon walls until they dissipated and all Joe heard was a ringing in his ears.

He rolled onto his back, ejected the spent cartridges, and reloaded, keeping one cylinder empty for the firing pin to rest.

“Did you hit him?” Stewie asked.

“I doubt it,” Joe said. “But at least he knows we’ll fight back.”

“You bet we fucking will,” Stewie said.

They lay in the root pan depression for what seemed like an hour waiting for more rifle shots that never came. To Joe, the images and sensations of the last two days played back in his mind. He could not believe what he had seen and been through. His entire life had been reduced to one thing: getting away.

The first few raindrops smacked into pine boughs above their heads, sounding like gravel on a tarp. Thunder boomed. The sky was close and dark, the bank of thunderheads pushing out what little blue remained. Any possibility of a rescue by air was now remote.

Joe lay on his back with his.357 Magnum on his chest. The first drops on his face made him flinch. He closed his eyes.

The rain came.