by Mike Bond
Nylon whisked as Link changed position. A coyote yipped. Cohen exhaled slowly. The snoring resumed, first intermittent, then steady. With each snore, Cohen dropped the zipper one click. An oval of darkness grew with each click. Through it came the vapors of clogged sinuses and unventilated farts, of man at his most vulnerable.
He could make out the lumps of two sleeping bags, one flat, one rounded. Cold air rushed past his hand into the tent. The full sleeping bag squirmed, relaxed. Link's mousy hair shone dully against his skull. The zipper was half down.
It caught near the bottom. Cohen stuffed the gun in his belt, held a flap in one hand, and tugged at the zipper; the tent creaked. He pulled harder but the zipper was stuck. Its track scraped his shirt as he inched into the tent. His palm crossed the silkiness of the empty sleeping bag. His knee rustled against it, and he was in.
He scanned the sleeper's peaceful face and opened the Buck knife. His thoughts fell inward. God's face was averted. Seeking the softness to one side under the chin, he jammed the knife to its hilt, angled into the skull. Link's hand flapped against the tent wall.
The Buck knife made a sucking noise as it came out. Blood purled hot and reeking over his hand, up his wrist under the sleeve. He closed the sticky blade, took the gun and ducked from the tent. It was a hundred feet to the other tent. Mort stepped through its flaps, glanced at the fire and leaped into the willows. “Lou!” he called, “Lou, Lou!”
Cohen ran along a downed aspen trunk, avoiding the crunchy leaves beneath, skirted the fire and entered the aspen as Lou ran out of the tent. Lou stopped by the fire, gun in hand, his face reddish in the light of the coals. Cohen aimed for his chest and fired.
The gun roared, crushing Cohen's ears; the bullet hit Lou's mouth and snapped his neck. He dropped, pieces of his skull ticking down on the dead leaves. Cohen squirmed through the brush, rolled him over, and dug into his pocket for the key.
The reverberations of his shot rattled along Huntsman Ridge. In a crackle of aspen leaves he moved upslope toward Claire. “What's happening?” she whispered. He unsnapped her cuffs and yanked her downhill into the aspens, away from the direction he had last heard Mort. Once out of gunshot they sprinted along the dark trail, oblivious of noise. The ground vanished and they slammed into a pool masked by aspen leaves. He struggled up and pulled her, panting, behind a granite outcrop.
“My knee, Sam!”
“What's wrong?”
“Twisted. When we fell. I can't stand!”
HE FORCED DOWN a breath and listened. Branches rustled in the treetops. The gun's muzzle reeked of cordite. He checked it; it was plugged with mud. He switched on the safety. Or was that off? Had he knocked it when he fell? He felt underfoot for a twig. Pointing the muzzle away he poked it with the twig. A chunk of mud pattered on the leaves. More inside. The twig snapped, half still stuck in the mud inside the barrel.
He pinched at the broken twig with his fingernails, whacked the barrel against his foot. Something scraped on the trail. Squinting over the outcrop he fidgeted for another twig. Irregular whisper of steps. Darkness crossed the aspen boles. Closer, a white trunk vanished, reappeared. He bit off a willow stalk and shoved it down the bore.
The steps grew louder. Mud smacked as Mort sidestepped the pool. The willow stalk snapped loudly inside the barrel.
Cohen pushed Claire down and raised the gun. Mort huffed.
His outline turned. Cohen squeezed. Nothing. He leaned forward and with his left hand snicked off the safety. Mort ducked.
25
COHEN'S GUN THUNDERED splintering the night into white fragments and throwing him back on waves of concussion. Claire screamed as Mort's answered, its bullet tearing his thigh. He squeezed the trigger again but the gun was shattered, its grip burning his hand. A bullet cracked off the outcrop; he grabbed her and scrambled into the aspens, bullets pinging through the branches.
They stumbled tripping over blowdowns and slipping on wet leaves into the meadow. With a snort of terror a great form leaped up, hooves flailing. Clenching his thigh with his left hand and circling Claire's waist with the other, he ducked around the horse and staggered along the meadow edge then uphill into the forest.
They fell, panting. He tore his jeans away from the thigh. The wound was oozing blood, but the bullet had missed the bone.
“Where is he, Sam?”
“Other side of the meadow, maybe.”
“Did you kill him?”
“Gun exploded. Plugged. Don't think so.” He opened the Buck knife and cut a tail and sleeve from his shirt, sliced the tail into two pads and tied them against the wound with the sleeve.
“You're hurt!” She reached for his leg.
“Stay away!” He cut off his other sleeve, sliced it lengthwise, tried to wrap it around his right hand where the exploding pistol had torn the palm to the bone.
“Wait,” she whispered, and tied it for him, leaning against him in the darkness. “We're a mess, Sam.”
“Can you walk?”
“Feels like my knee's broken. Hit it against a boulder when we fell. But I'll walk.” She hugged him. “I don't intend to die now that we're so close.”
“Close to what?”
“To having each other, getting away.”
“Mort's still out there. He's on the radio right now, calling in the troops.”
“It'll take them time from Denver. How'll they find this place?” She stood, hissed with pain, reached down and pulled him up.
“Not going to run. Have a date with Mort.”
“Forget him. He's the tip of the iceberg. Please let's run while we can!”
He raised his injured hand. Blood had filtered through the bandage and began to patter on the leaves. Cursing, he peered across the meadow. The ridge above it became a monstrous bear that flexed its shoulders, cocked its ears of wind-rippled aspen tops. “Dawn's coming.” He stood; the pain made him sick. He covered his mouth. His hands smelled of blood, cordite, and beaver shit.
The lion roared again, a banshee yowl from the far side of the Clear Fork. He hunched his shoulders at the memory of the leopard on Tensan Ridge. “It's just a silly cougar. It isn't the man-eater.” He pulled Claire tighter, limped carefully beside her into the deeper darkness, toward the Great Bear and the higher ground sloping up from Paul's pond into Huntsman Ridge.
THE WIND-SCATTERED leaves on Paul's pond were locked in ice that he broke with his heel. He unbandaged his right hand and stuck it through the ice; pain roared up his arm. He washed the thigh wound and retied it. They each took a long drink and moved upstream. The night was thick with smells.
Something lay wet on his cheek. Another touched his hand. He sniffed, raising his face to the sky. Snow struck his lips and tickled an eyelash. White specks were slipping across the dark branches.
“Oh Christ,” Cohen sighed, “if only we'd run off the horses.”
Claire halted, gasping. “What?”
“It's snowing. We'll soon be giving Mort a nice trail to follow. Have to hole up before we leave tracks.”
“What about Paul?”
“He's dead.”
“Oh good Christ. Oh Jesus. Oh Sam – we have to get away!” She clung to him as they hobbled upstream past the last beaver ponds until the slope flattened and then fell away into a west-facing scarp. Skirting this, they descended to a niche in the sheer northern wall, overlooking a crisscross of elk trails.
“If Mort comes this way,” Cohen said, “he'll ride below us. It'll be the best chance I'll have.” He brushed the snow from her shoulders and swung himself into the niche beside her. She twisted herself against him, wrapped the torn shirt tightly around him, and fell into a shivering doze.
The prospect of death, the waning of the drug, and Claire's presence rendered him fully alive. Life tasted in the snow on his lips, in the smell of musty aspen leaves, earth and stone, his own sweat and blood odors and those of the woman beside him. He watched her. The swelling of her face was receding with the cold, but she was still far
from pretty, and he realized how meaningless appearances had become.
This is my woman. I am her man. I owe her my life. And I love her more than life itself. Why don't I tell her? How can I love part of life more than life itself?
Soon it would be light. Even now, a far blur had resolved into a cedar, short and vase-like behind a picket of aspen trunks. Snowflakes were individually visible, skating down through the still air like flat stones toward a lake bottom. He looked over the edge of the niche. Our tracks are covered. We're safe until we move, or until Mort comes back with others.
DAYLIGHT. Downslope to the left a branch had snapped. Snow-muffled hoofbeats.
He rubbed his face and watched through willow stems at the bottom of the niche. A snow clump fell, brushing his shoulder. The semiautomatic rat-tatta- tat of a flicker reverberated among the cold trunks. In the maze of white columns below a darkness flashed. A twig popped. The swish of hooves loudened on snow-smothered leaves. He shook Claire awake, clasped the knife.
The hooves came closer. They thumped over a log. He held his breath. A stone crunched. The hooves moved past. He tipped his head up sideways. Aspens blocked the view. In an alley between the white trunks a bull elk paused, trotted forward, and paused again. His pelt, varying from gold on the back to burnt umber on his chest, rose and fell gently with his silver breath. The elk licked his nose. A drop of moisture hung prism-like on his nostril. He half-raised a back foot as if to scratch his belly, then dropped it. He rubbed his head and ear on a sapling, sniffed it, and moved on.
The snow had stopped. The sky above the slender aspen boughs was milky slate. Wind ran coldly upslope, carrying the roar of Rock Creek from the gorge below. He wondered if Mort had ridden for reinforcements.
“How's your knee?” he whispered.
Carefully she raised her leg. “Can't bend it.”
A bluejay screeched downhill in the cedars. He was surprised, again, at the noises of the forest. Sticks snapping with cold, the soft thump of clotted snow falling from a branch, the yammer of a flicker, the chick-a-dee-dee-dee of that little black-and-white bird, all conspired to rid the forest of silence. Added were the chill, erratic soughing of the wind, the chafe of bough on bough, twig on twig, of dead and leaning trunk in the embrace of another yet alive, the almost silent quality of snow crystals hardening and bark tensing round aspen boles.
When far-off branches snapped he held his breath but Mort did not come. Near midday, when the northwest-tipping aspen shadows lay shortest on the snow, a bough swished suddenly above them and he grabbed the knife. A small owl looked down. It fluffed its wings. One eye closed, opened. It wore a gray business suit and a white collar. Its beak was a flat black nose. Its tiny wire-like talons were black against the pale, mottled bough. Its eye shut.
They did not move. The owl closed its other eye. The sun inched steadily westward. Cohen stretched in the niche and rubbed his feet, flexed his shoulders and clenched his jaw to still the clattering of his teeth. Gently he rubbed Claire's back. She took his frozen hands in hers, opened her jacket, and held them against the warmth of her breasts. He pulled her close and the weird feeling returned, of there being no boundary between them.
He was surprised by a sharp pain in his hand. Over his makeshift-bandaged palm his fingers curled white and hard. Across one finger was the scar cut by a stone when he had stumbled in an unnamed Himalayan stream, at last light, the leopard at his back. Across the next finger was the redder mark of Clay's knife, cut more recently, also at last light, when he had grappled for it on the bank of the Severn.
Stunned by the full circle of this pain, he tried to count the days since the Kali Gandaki trail. It's another lifetime, not mine. It's a dream to show me the way, and now I know and will awaken. Strangely reassured, he glanced up, but the darkening trunks were the same, the waiting snow, the dull, cold light. Claire shivered beside him. The sun had set, and warmth fled from the deserted earth as from the carcass of a winter kill.
Shivering uncontrollably he hugged her tight. What if we leave now? Under cover of darkness? How far can I walk, or she, and how soon will our tracks across the crusted snow reveal us? If tomorrow's sunny, the snow'll melt and our chances of escape will be better. As terrifying as it is to sit, it's the wiser choice. And it gives us time to heal, if only slightly.
A fat white moon rose over the cirque, illuminating the snow so that each aspen trunk, willow clump, and cedar stood out in chiaroscuro. He huddled closer to Claire and tried to share his minimal warmth with her. His hands were too numb to move. If we don't go tomorrow we'll freeze.
He awoke to an uphill crackling of brush, barely discernible over the wind. The moon stood straight above them. He cocked his head. He could hear, or perhaps only feel, a rhythmic thudding. It grew; he pulled Claire down. A branch snapped. A doe, black nose flared, eyes wide, crashed past the niche, bolted over a fallen trunk and was gone in the downslope aspens. Snow skipped after her in little bundles, coming to rest in willow scrub and against aspen boles. The aroma of the doe's fear lingered. He listened for following coyotes but there were none.
SOMETHING HAD CHANGED in the air, something bark-like or moldy, a burning. He wrinkled his nose. An unpleasant odor. He licked a finger and wet the insides of his nostrils, sniffed.
Cigarettes. He remembered Mort's yellowed fingernails, the ashy stench of the Mirabeau Suite at the Hotel des Thermes. An uphill stick popped, clear and decisive. A horse snorted. Wind came up and rattled the trees, carrying the odor of manure and the glacial chill of Huntsman Ridge.
Mort appeared in a distant alley of aspens, riding the contour on level with the niche. An owl called.
“It's him?” she whispered.
He rolled into the niche and grabbed her. “In less than five minutes he'll pass right by here.” Cohen scooted to the edge of the niche. Too steep a drop. He crawled out one side. “Climb on my back!” he hissed.
“You can't carry –”
“Climb on my back! He's got to think I'm alone.”
She locked her arms around his neck. He bit his lip, took a deep breath, and stood. Pain roared up his leg, knocking him down. Warm new blood spilled on the snow. He stood again, clenched her legs against his hips, and staggered along the edge of the headwall, away from Mort, pulse pounding in his head, his breath sounding alien, unreal.
Between the headwall and the cirque a steep ravine dropped toward the rushing sound of Rock Creek. He slid over the edge and down into the ravine, each downward jolting step tearing through his thigh. He halted, panting, and looked behind. He had left a clear trail, one foot dragging, blood black on the snow.
“Please let me walk.”
“Not a chance.” He turned downslope again and soon reached a clump of cedars. Again he looked back. Mort had not yet started down the ravine. He glanced up at the moon. Well past midnight. Rock Creek was louder, like wind in a tunnel.
He began to run, ignoring the leg and Claire's off-balanced weight on his back. A half mile downslope he reached the granite cleft of Rock Creek. In its moonlit cavern maple and aspen leaves floated over shuddering boughs jammed crosswise in the current, and a water spider cast his solitary wake in a pool rimmed with ice.
He put her down in the middle of the creek, held her shoulders and peered into her eyes. “You do exactly as I say.”
“I always said you wanted a submissive wife.”
“Don't fool. Mort's ten minutes away. I want you to walk upstream, in the stream, until there's no stream any more. Then you'll be on the side of Huntsman Ridge and there's a thick stand of blue spruce you can hide in. I'm going to lead him down the creek and into the canyon, where I can drop on him from above. He won't be expecting it. Afterwards I'll ride his horse up to you and we'll be free.”
“You're going to die. I'm going to die with you.”
“Bullshit.” He put the Buck knife in her hand. “I don't think you'll need this, but I feel better with you having it. If I don't arrive by noon tomorrow, I want you to walk east
along the side of Huntsman Ridge. In ten miles of hard going you'll reach the Glenwood Springs road, where you can hitch a ride away from all this.”
She leaned against him. “Come with me.”
“Can't. Unless I leave tracks downstream, Mort'll find us in no time.” He pushed her away. “Go.” He grabbed her shoulder. “And don't you dare step one foot out of the water, no matter how cold your feet get. Not one footprint!”
She was gone into the darkness, her steps lost in the plashing water. He regained the bank and walked downstream, leaving large, bloody tracks. The canyon narrowed to a tall granite box where juniper roots clung perilously to fissures along vertical walls and brown needles littered thumb-wide ledges and snow-topped streamside boulders. He descended beyond this place and then stepped into the creek, its cold burning his feet and jarring his thigh. He caught his balance and waded back upstream, leaned carefully across his earlier tracks, grasped a ledge, and pulled himself up. Brown needles fluttered down from the ledge onto the tracks. Swearing, he jumped out from the ledge and landed one-legged in the water, trying not to splash the snow. Supported by one hand on the wall, he leaned over and picked each brown needle from the snow and tossed it in the water. Again he pulled himself up the wall, avoiding the needled ledge, and stretched gingerly up a crack above it. His fingers found a slanting seam that he climbed to a scraggly ledge clustered with junipers. Where this ledge expanded to a hand's width he was able to stand, hidden by the junipers.
He calmed his shivering and took a careful bite of snow. In the moon-bright snowy canyon the aspen trunks stood out darkly; the canyon walls cindery, the creek and its junipers black. His tracks below were a shadowed jagged stitch along the creek bank.