Leaving Blythe River: A Novel (24 page)

What might have been two painful hours later, they rode over a rocky pass that made Ethan’s heart pound and his forehead sweat. But he convinced himself that it was not the same one. Still, he carefully chose not to look over his shoulder into the valley behind them, which would have been the best way to identify the location.

Ethan heard a sharp rapping sound, and looked up to see that Sam had just ridden over a familiar-looking shotgun lying on the trail. One of the bay’s hooves must have knocked into it. Ethan could see it skitter a few inches along the trail.

Ethan’s heart ratcheted up to what always felt like near-death speed. How hard could a heart beat before it exploded, anyway?

Rebar managed to miss the shotgun with all four hooves.

Jone stopped her chestnut right in front of it.

Sam rode on without noticing.

“This look familiar to you?” she asked Ethan.

She swung down off her horse and picked it up by its stock, holding it up high for Ethan to see. Ethan closed his eyes so he wouldn’t see it. And so his heart wouldn’t kill him.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I mean Jone. It’s my father’s.”

Ethan wondered if she could hear the tremble in his voice. The shortness of breath.

“He takes it with him when he’s running?”

“No. He takes bear spray. I brought it up here.”

“You came up here with a shotgun?”

“Right.”

“Why?”

“To find my dad. Oh. You meant why the shotgun. I thought it would protect me against bears.”

“How’d that work out?”

“Not so well, actually.”

“Yeah. Having a gun you don’t know how to use tends to cause more problems than it solves. But it’s worth something, so we’ll take it home, anyway.”

She swung up into the saddle and braced the weapon across her thighs. They rode on. It was a long, shaky ride down off that pass for Ethan.

It took them several minutes to catch up to Sam, who didn’t seem to notice that he’d left them behind. Either that or he didn’t care.

They rode through the afternoon, and Sam said nothing. And Jone said nothing. Ethan figured he knew why Jone stayed quiet. She simply had nothing to add to Sam’s silent tantrum. Ethan said nothing because Sam was riding too far ahead, and so Ethan couldn’t ask him why he was acting this way. And also because, even if he’d been closer, he likely wouldn’t have known how to start.

So Ethan hunkered over his dog and tried to keep him from slipping off the front of the saddle, even though his arms were so sore and trembly he was tempted to cry.

The sky covered over with dense, white, scudding cumulus clouds, racing above and ahead of the team on a rising wind.

In time Ethan saw, in the distance, the high trail they’d ridden their first day out. The one they had vowed to recheck. It stretched Ethan’s brain uncomfortably to think it had only been yesterday morning, so he stopped thinking about that. It was too hard to understand. The sheer face of the mountain looked a long way off across the newly green valley. Maybe farther than they could ride with the daylight they had left. Maybe only farther than Ethan wished they would.

They came upon a winding stream, wide, and with a steep bed. It looked about as deep as Dora’s knees, yet Ethan could see the sparkle of rocks on its bottom. They shone bright and colorfully varied in a ray of sun that peeked out between a keyhole of two clouds and then disappeared again.

Ethan felt cold in the stiff wind.

They rode their horses and mules across without a word spoken to each other. Dora’s hooves splashed occasional drops of water onto Ethan’s jeans, but his shoes stayed dry, and he was thankful for that.

Their path across the valley was less an organized trail and more just riding across a valley, wherever you chose to ride. So Ethan put his heels to his mule and rode up beside Jone, and looked up at her face towering above him on her tall mount.

“Was that an extra-big creek we just crossed?” he asked her.

“That was the Blythe River.”

“You’re kidding,” he said.

But part of him must have considered the possibility. Because he’d asked.

“Everything changes fast in the wilderness,” she said. “Sometimes in just a matter of hours. It was all swollen with snowmelt and rain and hail that morning.” Jone didn’t say “yesterday morning,” leaving Ethan to wonder if she couldn’t believe the compression of time, either. “Now most of the snow has melted. Sure, there’s more in the very highest elevations. But a whole bunch of it melted at once. Now the runoff has slowed way down.”

Ethan found himself deeply comforted by the fact that someone was talking to him, for the first time in hours. He sincerely wanted her to keep talking.

“Remember when we rode up that trail?” she asked, pointing to the line snaking up the mountain before them. “Remember it had all these little waterfalls? Falling on us, falling over the trail and into the valley. Remember that? Now look at it. Nothing coming down.”

They both looked at it for a moment—over and ahead of their mounts’ ears—without speaking.

“Damn,” Jone said. “Was that really just yesterday? Feels like a week ago.”

“That’s what I was just thinking!” he said, excited to hear something familiar come from the inside of someone else’s head.

They rode in silence for a few steps. Ethan felt something nagging at his brain. Something unfortunate and dark.

“So if someone is stuck out here, that’s bad, right? Less water is bad.”

“Depends,” she said. “It just all depends, hon. If someone was lost out here, it wouldn’t be hard to find water. I mean, look at us. We’ve found it everywhere we’ve gone. Lakes, the river. The river snakes all the way through this place, the whole length of it. And all these little tributaries and creeks leading into it. But if someone was injured out here. You know . . . not moving around . . . Well, I know what you’re thinking, Ethan, and I’m not going to lie to you. Time’s running out for your dad.”

“I know,” Ethan said. “I’m really getting it, I think, that we’re going home tomorrow without him. I mean, we’re going to look in the valley underneath that trail. And ride up and look over the edge in case there’s any place partway down. But then what? We’re back close to home, and what’s the point of riding out again? Where can we ride that we didn’t already? What are we supposed to see that we haven’t already seen? I mean, I know there’s more wilderness. Lots more. But not that he could have gotten to in one day of running, and we’d have no idea which way to look . . .”

“We tried.” Jone’s voice sounded deeper than usual. Sad and a little consoling. “We said we’d try, right?”

“I guess,” he said.

But still it felt like a hard pill to swallow. To turn around and go home and not know any more about the welfare of his dad than they’d known at the start.

“That’s not a full day’s ride tomorrow,” she said. “Maybe a morning’s work at best. Or at worst, I guess I should say. Even if we ride all along the base of the cliff and then go slow back up the trail so’s you can look over. It’s still only a handful of hours.”

“So we’ll be home early,” he said, which sounded like a tragic thing to be.

“Or we can knock off a little early today,” she said.

“Oh my God I would love that!” Ethan blurted out without thinking. “It is so hard to hold this dog onto the saddle with me. Every muscle in my body is killing me. My arms are killing me. My back is killing me.”

She reined her horse to a halt.

“Sam!” she called out sharply, cupping one hand around her mouth.

Her voice was loud, and Sam wasn’t far ahead. Ethan felt Sam must have heard her. But he and the bay and Rebar kept going as if he hadn’t.

“No, wait,” Ethan said. “No. I take back what I said. We can’t stop now. If my dad is out here . . .”

“Honey. It doesn’t matter. By the time we get there it’ll be too dark to search.”

“But if we keep going, we’ll be there earlier tomorrow morning.”

“Ethan,” she said. And there was a deep gravity to the one-word sentence. Ethan winced in preparation for what would come next. “I think it’s time we can stop acting like this is life or death. I’m sorry to have to say it. But I think you can take care of your own needs now and consider that we’re more recovery than rescue at this point.”

Ethan said nothing. He just sat his mule and felt the last thread of his hopes lift out of him.

Jone laid the reins down on the chestnut’s neck and made a megaphone with both of her hands. “Sam Riley, you stubborn, pig-headed old bastard!” Her horse jumped slightly at the tone and volume. “We got a decision to make! So you get your ass back here and talk to us whether you’re talking to us or not!”

A pause. Then Sam’s bay stopped. Rebar took a step or two and then stopped behind them. But Sam didn’t turn them around, or even look over his shoulder. Horse, man, and bad-tempered mule just stood their ground, facing off toward the mountains.

“What’s wrong with him?” Ethan asked Jone quietly.

“He’s a man,” Jone said. “That answer your question?”

A moment later Sam’s rein hand came up, and he turned his bay around and rode back to them, stopping a few steps too far away. His face looked blank and expressionless. If he was angry, Ethan thought, he had a strange way of showing it.

“It’s like this,” Jone said. “It’s going to take us maybe an hour to ride to the edge of the valley and another hour to ride all along it. If we do that tonight, we’ll have to camp there, with no water. Because it’ll be too late to go up that trail again and have enough light to look proper. Ethan’s tired, and I think we all are, so I propose we stay put right where we are. Right here near the river. What we got to do tomorrow we can do in a morning, easy. I think we need to knock off for the day.”

Sam sat in silence for a minute or so. Ethan actually wondered if the older man had heard all that. He must have. But Ethan saw no sign that he had.

Sam swung down off his big bay.

“Wait,” Jone said to Ethan. “Let me get down first, and I’ll take the dog from you.”

As he handed Rufus down to Jone, Ethan couldn’t help letting out a telling expression of pain. A kind of muffled grunt.

“Holy crap, that hurts,” he said, in hopes of explaining the strange noise.

“Need help getting down?”

“I don’t think so. Let me just stretch a minute. It’s down, you know? Gravity ought to get me there.”

Meanwhile Sam was unsaddling his horse and taking the packs off his mule.

Ethan stood in the stirrups, kicked his leg out of the right-hand one, and lifted his right leg. It didn’t lift far. Not nearly far enough to clear Dora’s back.

“Here,” Jone said, and stepped in. “I realize this is mighty undignified, but just bear with me.”

She came up on Dora’s left side, wrapped an arm around Ethan’s waist, and simply pulled him off the saddle. His right leg, and then his foot, slid over the saddle seat, and both feet landed on the ground.

“Ow!” he said.

“Sorry. I wasn’t aiming to hurt you.”

“It wasn’t that. It wasn’t your fault. There’s no move I can make right now that doesn’t have me saying ‘ow.’”

They stood a moment, smiling small commiserating smiles at each other.

When they looked up, Sam was walking away.

“Where’s he going?” Ethan asked, though he knew Jone could know no more about the subject than he did.

“No idea. Maybe he has to relieve himself.”

“Oh. Right.”

“I know you’re tired,” she said. “But I’m going to walk the couple hundred yards back to the river and fill up that big water sack. The one that filters water by gravity.”

“Oh. Is that what that hanging bag was? I wondered.”

“Might do you good to walk with me. Keep from getting too stiff.”

Ethan took a few steps with her, then looked around for his dog.

“I’m worried he’ll try to walk with us.”

“If he does, you can stay back with him if you want.”

They took two more steps. Rufus sat down to watch them.

“Guess I was worried about nothing,” Ethan said.

“I don’t know how long he’s been gone exactly,” Ethan said. “But longer than it would take to do what you said.”

Jone only grunted.

They were lying side by side on sleeping bags in the grass, watching the clouds slide through. Resting up for the work of setting up tents and cooking dinner. Hoping Sam would come back and help. At least, Ethan was hoping that.