Beyond the New Horizon

by Christine Conaway

  Andy understood and testing each footfall made his way to the trailer. He used the door as a ramp and grabbed the closest saddle and threw it on the ground behind him. John got to his feet and with the use of his good arm dragged it to firmer ground.

  They didn’t speak, and every time the trailer creaked or groaned, they paused to see what it was going to do. The ground still continued to sluff away, and the trailer grew unstable even with it tied to the tree.

  With the tack out, and resting on firm soil, John helped Andy grab whatever they could get his hands on. When they couldn’t reach anything else, Andy tied several of the horse's lead lines together, giving him a thirty-foot rope. With a noose tied around his waist, he handed John the bitter end and had him clip it around a tree.

  “You sure you want to do that?”

  “Hell no! But I think we should get as much out as we can. Don’t you?”

  “Andy, there is nothing in that trailer worth losing your life over.”

  Andy laughed, but his voice held no humor, “Don’t intend on giving my life. I look at it like this. If Sam thought it was worth carting up here, it must be stuff he thought we needed. Right?”

  He threw black garbage bags out the door as the trailer rocked and rolled under his feet. John pulled them up to higher ground. He reached for one of the plastic totes and found it too heavy to lift one-handed. He was able to slide it to the door, but that was all.

  “Damn, don’t know what’s in this one, but it has to be full of heavy shit. Let it sit right there, it’s too heavy for you to lift. I’ll get these pillow cases. Two at a time he threw them out. One of them landed and rolled off down the embankment.

  John watched it go and hoped whatever was in it survived the fall. He thought that maybe one of them could climb down and get it later.

  “That’s it, Andy. Come on out before that thing goes.”

  “Okay, just one more. It’s the last one I can reach.” He hefted a tote to the trailer door and set it down. Carefully he stepped onto the door, dragging the tote with him. As soon as he stepped off, the trailer slid a few inches stretching the nylon strap he’d used to hold it. He pulled the tote away from the door and went back to get the heavy one. Grunting, Andy managed to get it on firm ground.

  “John, grab the rest of those other lead ropes and give them here.”

  John did, but couldn’t see what he was gong to do with them. He started to tie them together.

  “No…don’t tie them, give me the snap ends.”

  John waited to see what Andy was going to set out next when he backed out of the trailer, holding the ends of the lead lines. As soon as he got on firm terrain, he began to pull. When it was obvious he couldn’t do it alone, John took one rope and pulled. He was rewarded when a five-gallon bucket came sliding out onto the door. It tipped onto its side, but John managed to pull it up beside him.

  “Damn, there’s something heavy in it.”

  “These too. Can you grab another?” Andy handed the second line to John and pulled his own bucket to the door. As he stepped out the door, the trailer slid several inches.

  “Get yours out of there if you can John or let it go. We need to move before that strap breaks.”

  John looked where it was tied to the tree. The weight of the trailer had almost cut the tree completely through. If he remembered correctly, the straps were rated at twelve thousand pounds, but it didn’t look like the tree was. The tree was going to lose, and he didn’t want either of them to be standing in the way.

  He gave his bucket a yank, and it came flying out the back. It was not as heavy as the previous one, and it surprised him. He sat down hard when he’d put all of his weight behind the pull. With a loud crack, the tree went flying over his head, branches smacking him as it went by.

  Eyes wide, John watched his trailer tumble off the edge, pulling the tree behind it. He realized how lucky they were. He shook his head. If Andy had still been in the trailer…

  They sat in stunned silence until the crashing and the sounds of bending metal told them it had landed below.

  “That was too freaking close!”

  John agreed with a nod. He lay back and let his body unwind. He couldn’t believe how weak he felt. It was a chore to lift up his head. He grasped the thought that they had both been operating on high adrenalin and the rush had worn off. He began to laugh. To his own ears, he sounded half-crazed and laughed harder when Andy joined in, sounding much the same way.

  After they had a chance to catch their breath back, John sat up and looked at the pile of things they managed to save. Andy had actually gotten quite a few of the totes, boxes, and bags. When John had been pulling them to the high ground, he hadn’t been paying attention.

  “Dang, I sure wish we had unloaded the trailer into the cabin. Seems like we lost quite a bit of stuff.”

  “Really?” As if he just realized John couldn’t have known, he said, “No, you don’t John. Look behind you.”

  John turned and looked at the cabin. His bottom jaw dropped in horror. “Oh my God. What if Mary and the girls had still been in it.”

  “God works in mysterious ways,” Andy told him, and stood up. He slapped John lightly on his shoulder and gave him some privacy. Being a man, he wouldn’t have wanted anyone to witness his tears. He walked toward the drop-off, where the cabin used to sit. It lay in shambles at the bottom of the slide. He mentally thanked God that John had moved his family to the valley when he had.

  “When you're done there, we need to figure out what our next step is going to be. Myself, I really don’t want to spend the night here.”

  “Oh, don’t get your panties in a wad.” John sat up and wiped his face.

  “Oh, that was nice. I save all this shit for you, and you have your mind on my panties…I need to see what the hell is in this container. The damn thing weighs a ton.”

  John turned and watched Andy take the lid off. He pulled out some pictures and a few towels and squatted down beside it. He grinned at John, “I was close. The damn thing is full of cast iron pots and shit.”

  John laughed. “Guess that’ll come in handy. The question is, how do we get this stuff back to the valley?”

  “A better question would be, is the valley still a valley? Look over there.” Andy pointed off to the north, “Does anything over there look familiar to you?”

  John felt the color leave his face and his stomach threatened to empty itself. To him, it looked like the whole mountain range had rearranged itself. Nothing was where it should have been.

  He had lived in the area his whole life and climbed most of the peaks at one time or another. Now John didn’t recognize any of them. The gentle rolling top of Old Baldy was gone, replace by a shear rock plateau. The trees on Jasper no longer stood green against the hillside. It looked to him as if the hill where Gina and her friends had moved into the cave had inverted itself, or the top had gotten taken off the hill.

  “I don’t know…how could this happen?”

  Andy saw that he needed to get John’s mind off the new terrain and get it back on their situation. “John, what about the horses? You said yours were up here?”

  John looked at him, his face blank. He blinked as if he was confused and shook his head. “Yeah…they’re here. Someplace.”

  “Time to get off your ass then and let's go find them.”

  Andy had used a tone of voice meant to jar John back to the here and now. It was bad enough John was injured physically without him being gone mentally too. Andy had always been a follower, that was why he had always been content to work for someone else. He didn’t like, or want to make the big decisions, but it looked like right now that he was going to have to. He unsnapped the lead lines from the buckets and untied the ones John had tied together. He snapped a line on each of the halters he’d found in the trailer, formed them into a coil and hung them over his shoulder and across his chest.

  “I’m assuming the horses were put the other side of the creek?”

 
John nodded, and stood up. “There is no more creek. That’s why we moved out of here this morning. I should have known something big was going to happen.”

  “Don’t give yourself so much credit. There’s no way anyone could have predicted all this.”

  The crevasse the trailer had fallen into, was on their left and as they walked it grew progressively shallower, to end when it reached the creek bed. They could look up it and see that rescuing the rest of John’s belongings might be possible. The barrels that had been in the front of the trailer were now on the ground. One had obviously contained flour, which was spread out everywhere.

  It was obvious the horses had come down for water. Hoof prints in the wet sand surrounded the few remaining pools.

  Once across the creek, they followed a well-defined path through the brush. Andy stopped in front of John and looked around, “Well shit! Other than a couple of downed trees, it doesn’t look like anything happened here. How could an earthquake rearrange our mountains and leave this area basically untouched?”

  “I think it wasn’t just an earthquake. What if the quake was the end result of one of the volcanoes erupting?”

  “We don’t have any volcanoes…do we?”

  “At one time we did. There supposedly a hot one down in the eastern corner of the state. But, what if there was some kind of a chain reaction and more than one of them went. Surely, that could bring on an earthquake.”

  Andy shrugged, “What I know about volcanoes you could etch on a grain of rice. I saw a special one time, that said that someday, the caldron under Yellowstone was going to blow, but this…I don’t know.”

  “Maybe they are all connected, and we just happened to have the weakest mantle. Maybe she was just letting off some steam.”

  “I hope you’re right John. I really do.”

  They didn’t find the horses in the first meadow, but there were still two more to check, the biggest being the farthest away.

  “I’m so stupid,” John confessed. He used his thumb and forefinger and let out a high pitched whistle.

  Andy jumped away, “Next time how about a warning first.”

  John had the grace to look sheepish. “Sorry, thought you saw me.”

  They heard a whinny followed by the sound of something coming toward them through the brush. Clyde slid to a stop in front of them, followed by the rest of the herd.

  “Let’s only put two of the halters on. My bunch will all follow Clyde, and I think that big bay there is the alpha of the other group. We’ll ride Gina’s gelding and Clyde. With any luck, the others will follow along.”

  John was still favoring his arm, and Andy wondered if he was physically up to riding. “You okay with this, John? I could ride down and get some help.”

  “I’m up to it. I sure don’t want to spend the night up here. Besides that, you might get lost on your own.”

  Andy laughed as he buckled the halter on the bay horse John had pointed out. He let the horse sniff and nuzzle him and gave him a scratch under his chin. When he felt the animal was familiar with him, Andy led the way back to where they had piled the saddles.

  “It would have been a bitch riding to the valley without saddles wouldn’t it?”

  “That it would. I guess we all owe you a thank you for saving them, and the rest of the stuff too.”

  “Guess you could say I was looking after my own interests too. I’m not sure what the kid and I would have done if old Carlos had turned us away.”

  John laughed, “You know, that’s not his way, and don’t let him hear you call him old…he says it’s offensive.”

  Andy laughed and finished tightening the girth. He did a quick measure of the stirrups and decided they would be fine. He saw that John couldn’t lift Sam’s saddle up onto Clyde with only one good arm, “Better let me get that for you, John. No sense in doing any more damage than you’ve already done.”

  Saddled, they started off, the loose horses following along behind them, just as John had predicted they would.

  “It’s going to be dark before we get there,” Andy said.

  “Not if we get in gear. I for one don’t want to fall into any surprises along the way. Sam and Gina rode this way a couple days ago and cleared out the trail, so it should be easy to follow it.”

  Riding non-stop to the top of the hill, overlooking the winter pasture, John stopped. “I wonder how many more surprises we’re going to find before this is all over?”

  With a couple of the loose horses between them, Andy didn't know what John was talking about. The horse he was on was extremely well trained, and with the barest pressure of his knees, pushed through the milling horses.

  “Well, holy shit! What do you make of that?”

  “Talk about waterfront property.”

  The lower end of the pasture was full of water, with a swift moving creek running into it. He could see Carlos’s trailer and the tent sitting high and dry and the small herd of cows grazing in the upper end.

  “Would you look at that,” Andy said and pointed.

  John didn’t see what Andy was talking about. Other than they now had a lake where pasture used to be, he saw nothing out of the ordinary.

  “The trail coming in. That ridge wasn’t there before.”

  John felt his front pocket for his glasses, “Damn, I forgot I lost them. Tell me what you see.”

  “Those two groups of trees you go between to get in here, they now sit on the edge of about a five or six-foot drop. It looks like a big sheet of the ground just lifted up and stayed there, or this side dropped that far. It goes almost all the way across the mouth of the cut there.”

  It had been snowing for a while, neither man bothered by it until they had sat in one spot. They weren’t dressed to be out in a snowstorm, and John shivered. He missed his big coat. He could imagine if it was snowing where he was, Sam and Gins were probably getting it worse. He was thankful he had insisted she take it, but he sure could have used it.

  “Sitting here isn’t getting us any closer.” He pointed to the west, “The gates that way. Go ahead and ride in front. Maybe get it open before the horses get down there. We sure don’t want them tangled in the barbwire.”

  Andy led off down the hill following Sam’s old tracks, he saw the snow had almost disappeared with the drop in altitude. By crossing the hillside back and forth, he made it to the bottom. Two of the horses still followed him, but they were respectful when he dropped the reins on the horse he was on, and climbed down. The horse didn’t move but stood as if ground tying was something he did every day.

  Andy laid the gate back against the fence and led his horse through, the other two following. John rode through his herd behind him. He closed the gate and remounted and faced John, who hadn’t moved since he cleared the gate opening. “What’s up?”

  John pointed, “At first I thought maybe our creek rerouted, but it hasn’t. Look at that. There's another creek running from out between those two hills right there.” He studied it for a few minutes, “I wonder if that’s Silver Creek that’s somehow been rerouted? Kind of makes sense where the water went to if that’s the case.”

  “I wouldn’t know. Any chance of that water getting up to the trailer?”

  John shook his head, “Nope. The bottom end of that pasture is a big bowl and the other side of that, it drops off pretty quick. It’s all downhill from there.”

  Andy started to ride off when John hollered at him, “Stop. Hear that?”

  Andy stopped, but didn’t hear anything. He sat in silence straining to hear whatever it was that John thought he heard. “I don’t hear anything.”

  “I do. Sounds like my Jeep.”

  ChapterTwenty-nine………Waterfront property

  Sam wound his way through the last of the trees and slammed on the brakes, throwing Gina into the dash. Lucas hit the back of Sam’s seat and cried out.

  “What the hell. What was that for?” She clamped her hand over her mouth and slid back in her seat, glaring at Sam. “You could hav
e said you were stopping.”

  “Oh wow…Where did that come from?”

  Gina turned and looked at Lucas, “Where did what come from?” She looked at Sam, but he was staring straight ahead, and it didn’t appear as if he had even heard her question.

  She looked forward, trying to see what the two guys found so interesting. She saw a beautiful valley, the grass now brown, but she could picture it in the spring when everything was new. Some cows grazed on the grass along one side of the lake, and she wished she’d had her camera. She hadn’t taken the time to fully appreciate the view on her last visit. They had gotten there just before dusk and left at first light. She had either been too tired or not awake yet, she didn’t remember how pretty it was,

  “Hey! Now I see them. It looks like John and someone have brought the horses down.” She squinted and leaned forward in her seat, “Someone is riding Sailor. He must be a special guy because Sailor doesn’t let just anyone ride him but me.”

  “It looks like Andy. I thought they would have brought the trailer over first. I’d hate to think someone could steal everything in it.”

  “Yeah, people are just roaming all over these hills looking for something to steal.” She laughed to show she was kidding and was surprised when Sam glared at her.

  “Not right now they aren’t, but give them time.”

  “How do we get down, Uncle Sam?”

  “I don’t know just yet.” He got out and walked to the front of the Jeep. He realized if he hadn’t been so shocked at seeing a lake where the pasture used to be, he would have driven right off an embankment. There would have been no good outcome from that. He heard the sound of gravel rolling and stepped back. “Lucas, back the Jeep up. Whatever you do, make sure you have it in reverse.”

  “I don’t understand…why aren’t we going down there?”

  Sam pointed to the ground. Gina followed his finger and saw the drop-off, and it dawned on her that the road ended right there. There were no tracks going over the edge, but further out, she could see visible signs the tractor or something had been through there before.