December 21
The Recovery
Rumbling up the dirt road as far as it could go before getting stuck in mud, Daniel’s truck rumbled and groaned as if it were a reluctant hunting dog. Daniel patted the dash and gave it encouragement feeling a push to end this once and for all.
“Something got you spooked, old girl,” he said, jovially.
Once the tires spun up in the mud with no forward motion even at idle, Daniel killed the ignition and got out. The rain seemed to steam slightly on the hood as he went around the front end to grab his pack out of the passenger side.
It was quickly heading towards midnight and the morning of the Winter Solstice. Daniel was sure the moon he’d envisioned was above somewhere, turning the tops of a thick blanket of clouds to a silver satin. But below the rain still fell. To ward off the wet from his skull Dan pulled the thin hood out of the zip-up collar of the winter coat. Between the warmth of the cap he had on underneath it and the bulky coat itself he was already getting too warm just climbing up from the truck to the first rise. He flipped on the flashlight to find a path before him.
Once he’d mounted the top of the first ridge above the dirt road he could see a fairly clear shot over the canopy from within his grove of scrub oak to a small canyon head where he was sure the stream and its spring source would be found. But he gazed first across the rises and falls to give him a heading first. He knew if he wasn’t careful and didn’t pick up the specific stream he’d seen in his vision relatively quickly there were dozens of other canyons and runoff vales that he could stumble through before realizing he’d picked the wrong trail and had to re return to start all over again.
The inverted ‘V’ at the top of the canyon, likely just hiding the rocky outcrop and grove where he hoped to find Rachel, was at least a 500 foot rise, and maybe closer to 1000 feet. It looked to be as much as two miles away from Dan’s current location. That surprised him. The towering mountains of Woodland Hill’s backyard were so close that during snow storms his home would be dumped on while just a few blocks away where the foothills dropped suddenly towards the valley floor might get just a smattering. If the spring were really two miles into the canyon then it was very deep into the footing of the mountains. Even in summer it would be a cool area with very shortened hours of daylight hidden by peaks and ridges of the grand mountains around it.
Daniel could not look too far up and down the front of the range because low clouds and heavier rains here and there in the distance obscured the view. Soon, one of the fog-like clouds moved in alongside him and hid the view he had been taking in, bringing him back into focus. He started down that first ridge looking and listening for a telltale signs of a brook. The first several hundred feet seemed to have a sort of trail to follow, but it may just have well been a deer track than anything humans had maintained by the repeated use of it.
Darkness seemed to swirl in behind him and soon, his distance from the truck seemed indeterminate. He switched the flashlight in his hand off. It was making it difficult to focus on the surroundings by blindingly illuminating one spot at a time.
Speak Rain Page 34