Borderline (8 page)

“Could I?” Cyril sounded so young and so delighted that Anna laughed for the second time in less than an hour. Laughter was definitely medicinal.

“Just don’t let your guard down,” Anna said. “Be ready to get out of the way if you have to.”

“In case she unleashes her super cow powers,” her brother kidded her.

Anna and Steve put their backs against the cliff so, if the cow did decide to pursue the lettuce with more vigor than was safe, they’d be out of the way and in a position to snatch Cyril back from the edge.

Approaching slowly, Cyril held out the half-head and spoke in the sweet voice animal lovers are given in lieu of the greater gift with which fiction blessed Dr. Dolittle.

“Here she comes, what a good cow, coming to get the lettuce, there’s a good girl, you’re hungry, aren’t you, here she comes.”

Easter wasn’t coming. She wasn’t moving. Finally Cyril closed in and put the lettuce on her nose, nudged it into her lips. Still no response.

“Damn,” Anna said.

“Time for Plan B?” Steve asked.

“Let me try.” Anna took the lettuce and tried to make the prospect of following it attractive, but had no better luck than Cyril.

“The carrot isn’t working,” Anna said. “Time for the stick.”

Paul moved up behind Easter and Carmen pulled on the downhill rope. Easter collapsed, knees folded beneath her, chin on the rocks.

“Plan C?” Steve said hopefully.

There was no Plan C. Paul pushed and Carmen pulled and Cyril lured and Anna walked on the cliff side of the cow, prodding her and encouraging her. Steve made sounds that he insisted were irresistible to female bovines and they began the descent with Easter staggering, collapsing, being hauled to her feet, mooing plaintively and stumbling a few more feet before she again went to her knees.

The ledge had been fairly smooth going, a gentle slope leading upward in two zigzags following a natural sheer pattern in the rock face. They’d descended to a place where the ledge broke into ragged steps for five or six yards before the trail smoothed out again for the last turn and down to the river’s edge. Where the broken steps began the ledge was wide and only fifty or so feet above the river, forty above the sand hill capped with Bermuda grass. The cow took one look at the steps, dug all four hooves into the rock and leaned back. When Anna pulled hard on the rope Easter fell and no amount of encouragement or harassment could induce her to rise again.

Anna knelt by the stricken bovine and stared into one great brown eye. “Move or die, old girl,” she said. “Up and at ’em.”

Easter was unmoved in every way.

Anna stood again. “Let’s see if we can lift her up. Maybe it will inspire her to help us.”

Coiling the rope as he came, Paul joined her on the other end of the cow. “I don’t think it’ll do any good. I should have thought of that on the way up but my cattle-wrangling days were a while back. Cows will go up, but they won’t come down. They’ll come down slopes but not stairs. I guess stairs have the same effect on them as cattle guards; they look like horrible traps for some reason.”

“What if we pulled her and you pushed her?” Anna suggested.

“We could try, but if I remember right, cows are serious about their phobias.”

Anna looked at the cow, then down the shattered rock slope, then down toward where Chrissie and Lori waited with the raft. On the way up, she remembered the drop being breathtaking, the height precipitous. After ninety minutes cattle rustling two hundred feet higher than that, it looked as if they could almost jump down it.

Carmen sat down, her back against the cliff, her feet against the cow’s ribs. “I wouldn’t mind a little rain about now,” she said. “You guys didn’t pay me to work this hard.”

Anna sat down next to her. She, too, was drenched in sweat and reeked of cow manure where she’d repeatedly stepped in it on her backward progress down the ledge. Paul stood, hands on hips, breathing hard, staring out across the canyon, his eyes shaded by the brim of his hat, his white hair plastered to the back of his neck.

Cyril and Steve were positively peppy. The difference between twenty and forty, Anna thought without rancor. At twenty hard work eventually made one stronger. After forty it eventually made one tired.

“What now?” Cyril asked, squatting in front of the cow and cradling her nose between her hands. “Do we carry Easter the rest of the way?”

“She may be small and starved but she still weighs a good four or five hundred pounds,” Paul said.

“We could just roll her off,” Steve suggested. “Have steak for supper. The bouncing would probably tenderize her.”

None of the women dignified that with a response but Paul looked interested. He loved animals and was kindness itself to Taco and Piedmont and Anna’s little tuxedo cat. But having been raised on a dairy farm, wringing the necks of fryers, butchering hogs and the occasional cow, he tended to be pragmatic about food animals.

Idly, Anna coiled the rope they’d been using to pull Easter with. It was light, a tough plastic line, but a hundred and fifty feet of it was still bulky.

“Hey,” Anna said, a thought striking her. She stood, shouting, “Hey!” down at Lori and Chrissie, who’d unloaded the camp chairs and sat on the shore reading. “Will one of you bring up an oar? The longest one you can find.”

“What are you thinking?” Paul asked, sounding alarmed. “We can’t carry her. We don’t have the manpower.”

“Woman power!” Cyril said, but didn’t look as if she believed there was enough of that to manhandle a cow down to the river either.

“We don’t carry,” Anna said. “We lower. Tie her feet up, thread the paddle through, tie a line to either end of the paddle so she swings beneath it the way the great white hunter did in those old cannibal cartoons and lower her to the grassy knoll.”

“Grassy knoll,” Steve said. “Where have I heard that before? And did things come out well in the end? Could this be a sign?”

“Why do you want a paddle?” Chrissie hollered back up. She’d not yet risen from her camp chair.

“Just bring it, please,” Anna called back. “Takes too long to explain,” she added nicely. She was beginning to take against the young woman and, on the first day of a three-day camping trip with lots of close encounters on the docket, she didn’t dare let even a hint of it show. Backcountry groups most often bonded; it was one of the reasons people loved them, but a group could go sour faster than an arts department at a university. Not only did it ruin it for everyone but it could prove dangerous in situations where working together for the good of the team was paramount.

Chrissie took her time gathering all the paddles together then holding them one against the other in front of Lori, choosing the longest. Anna sat back down and schooled herself in patience. Cyril did not have to. After five minutes of watching this meticulous process, hands on hips, she shouted: “Just pick one already.”

Peer pressure did what usurped authority dared not and Chrissie selected a paddle and headed toward the little hill where the ledge began.

“How do you get up?” she called.

Cyril’s shoulders slumped and her head fell dramatically to her chest. “Dear sweet brother, wombmate of mine, I will let you be the pretty one for two whole hours if you will go down and help Chrissie find her rear end. I believe she already has both hands and a flashlight but she needs your intellect to guide her.”

Steve didn’t move. “Three hours,” he said.

“Two and a half.”

“Done.”

He rose gracefully from where he’d squatted on his heels and walked down the sloping ledge. Anna expected a catty remark from Cyril about Chrissie or at least an apology for the other girl by way of distancing herself but it didn’t come and Anna was pleased. The vile hordes of humanity raping and squandering the earth would have to take out Cyril Kessler and her brother before they could claim total dominion. Anna hadn’t cheered up enough that she could muster any faith that the hordes wouldn’t win out in the end, but it was nice to pretend for a bit.

Odds were Anna was wrong about Chrissie, anyway, that she was a fine young woman with outstanding talents and capabilities and simply rubbed her the wrong way. There’d been enough surprises, both pleasant and un-, in Anna’s past that she’d come to accept the fact she was not a great judge of character and her first impressions of people weren’t to be counted on for much.

Sitting three in a row like monkeys without evil, Anna and Carmen and Cyril watched placidly as Chrissie handed the paddle to Steve. He extended it back down to help pull her up the short rock scramble between the hill and the ledge then started back toward where they rested, spines to the wall, feet to the cow.

Paul did not join them. He squatted near the cliff’s edge, looking down. If Anna was very quiet she could almost hear the gears turning in his mind as he worked through the logistics, risks and practicalities of lowering a cow down.

Anna planned to wrap the lines around solid outcrops, shove her gently over the side, and see what happened.

Steve arrived carrying the oar, Chrissie puffing and panting behind him.

“Carmen, we’ll need a couple of shorter lengths to tie her ankles. Can we cut this line?” Now that Anna could almost smell Easter’s salvation, her mind had opened sufficiently to encompass civility.

“In for a penny . . .” Carmen said. “Anybody got a knife?”

Paul dug a well-worn black-handled jackknife from the pocket of his shorts. Anna measured a rough twelve feet of rope. He cut it. She folded it in half and he cut it again so they would have two six-foot pieces to tie Easter’s ankles together.

As he made the second cut, the rumble of thunder rolled down the canyon, crashing against the walls like a great ball bowling down ninepins. Drops of rain, spaced far apart but cold and large, were hurled down from a sky that touched the canyon rim.

“Things are about to get slippery,” Anna said. “Paul, take the back legs.” She handed him one of the short pieces they’d cut. When Easter had decided enough was enough and collapsed she had done it like a lady. Her legs were folded neatly beneath her and her scraggy tail curved around her bony shank.

“We’re going to roll her so her spine is toward the cliff and her legs are sticking out toward the river,” Anna said. “Carmen, you and me and Paul are going to do it. You guys”—she nodded at the three students hovering too near the edge, too near the cow and too close to her—“step back, give us space. Cyril, be ready with the oar. As soon as we get the legs tied together you’ll thread it through. Steve, were you a Boy Scout?”

“For a while,” he said.

“He dropped out in protest when they got all nasty about gay scout leaders.”

“It was the holidays,” Steve said. “I was working on my gay apparel badge.”

“Knots,” Anna said.

“I did knots.”

“That’s all I need to know. Tie one end of the rest of the rope to the blade end of the paddle. A knot that will hold a cow. Got that?”

“Do you want me to tie the other end on the other end?”

“Not yet.” She started to put herself between the cow and the drop, heard Paul’s sudden intake of breath and thought better of it. “Let’s get hold of the horns. Paul will roll her rump. Ready?” Carmen was on the cliff side of her, her hands partially overlapping Anna’s where they held one of Easter’s horns in each hand. Carmen wore fingerless leather gloves to keep days and months of paddling from tearing her hands apart and Anna envied them. Between the rope and the sweat, hers burned. Paul had Easter’s tail in one hand; his other was on her drop-side hip bone. “On three,” Anna said.

Easter hadn’t the strength to fight them and they turned her onto her side without much effort. She more or less fell over when Anna hit “three.”

The rain was sporadic and the thunder surrounded them, cracking down from upriver, rolling overhead, drumming up from Lajitas. “I’m getting wet,” Chrissie said peevishly. “I’m going back.” Either it was an idle promise or she realized it would be no drier where she’d come from than where she was. She didn’t move.

Anna looped her rope around Easter’s leg above her hock so the jutting bone would help keep it from slipping off. Rain made the adventure more dangerous but Anna resisted the impulse to rush. The mental image of the cow’s feet slipping through the ropes, the beast dangling by her hind legs while the half-tethered oar beat at her, then slipping from the other knot and falling to her death, was too grim to allow for hurried work.

“I want to help,” Chrissie said suddenly.

Anna ignored her.

“Stay out of the way, Chrissie,” Steve said, not unkindly.

“You stay out of the way.”

Anna tuned them out and looped the rope around Easter’s other leg. As she slipped her hand beneath the hoof to lift it, a bolt of lightning struck so close Anna ducked and covered her head as if that could ward off a zillion volts of electricity.

“Holy moly,” Steve gasped.

Chrissie shrieked.

“We need to get down,” Paul said. “This is getting unsafe.”

“We’re almost done,” Anna said. “Another minute.”

“Anna.”

She knew if she looked up, he’d never leave off until he’d gotten all of them to a safer place than a stone aerie in a lightning storm. “Done,” she said. “You got that rope tied around the blade end?” she asked Steve.

“Done,” he said.

“Cyril, bring the oar, handle-first.”

“Let me,” Chrissie said.

“This isn’t the time for improvising, Chris,” Steve said.

“You just want to have all the fun. Don’t be such a bore.”

“Somebody bring me the damned oar,” Anna said firmly.

“Thank you,” she heard Chrissie sniff. Lightning cracked again. Chrissie screamed and the oar handle slammed against the side of Anna’s face. It bounced off, struck Easter between her wildly rolling eyes and the cow began to fight with the last reserves of her strength, flailing with hooves and horns, trying to get to her feet.