The Mountain Story

by Lori Lansens

  I didn’t climb up to the plateau—I flew. The air smelled green and citrusy from the rain. I was filled with gratitude.

  Heaving, I reached the top, wishing I had a flag to plant, and that I was not alone. The view? No Palm Springs. No Tin Town. No Salton Sea. There were instead spiky pines as far as the eye could see rising up from the granite, which transformed into angry grey faces the longer I stared.

  That’s what I did. For a very long time. I stared at the sinister forests and the shifting white rock. I stared at the gesticulating branches of the army of pines. What were they upset about? I was the one who’d been deceived. After all the work and risk to cross Devine Divide I couldn’t accept what I could see with my two eyes. The ridges did not connect.

  The rocky peak that contained the slope was separate from the one that contained the cave. The joint between the ridges was an optical illusion. There was no way for us to return to the place we were before the rock slide, no way back to the Mountain Station, no way back at all, only forward, into the honeycomb of Devil’s Canyon, up and down and around to what?

  Bridget was stranded and even if we continued on without her, Nola and Vonn and me, the only way forward appeared to lead toward our doom. We’d risked our lives to cross the crevice and now we were worse off than before. Much worse. I had to laugh, and I heard Byrd laughing right along with me. Because it was ridiculous, and we always thought ridiculous things were hilarious.

  When I was done laughing, I dropped to my haunches, gazing out on the horizon, and that’s when I saw the lone pine—the tree that Byrd had shown me in my dream. And beyond it the expansive mesa he’d described. The sound of splashing confused me. I turned to find Vonn squelching up the slope in her soaking wool socks, and hurried to lend her my hand, helping her up to the plateau. Déjà vu.

  “My feet are killing me,” she said, then stopped to take in the view.

  When tears appeared in her eyes I didn’t know at first if it was because of Bridget, or the pain in her feet, or if she was moved by the mountain’s beauty or if it was because she saw what I’d seen.

  “It doesn’t connect,” she said. “The ridges don’t connect.”

  “No. But look,” I said, gesturing hopefully toward the distant lone pine. “Just like my dream. The lone pine. Byrd said it was the way.”

  Vonn squinted. “There must be a hundred lone pines in this wilderness.”

  “It’s the only way for us to go, Vonn,” I said, pointing out the tragic circumstances of alternate routes. “So it’s the way. Do you understand?”

  “What about Bridget?”

  I had no answer.

  “I can’t leave her.”

  “We can’t stay. We have to get Nola to a hospital. We can’t expect that she’ll keep on rallying.”

  “Go on without us.”

  Not an option.

  “You go and get help,” Vonn prodded as we watched the wind stroke the treetops.

  “There isn’t time,” I said. “It could take hours to find help and get all the way back. She needs to see a doctor. Now.”

  “Bridget is trapped over there. Mim is … with her arm … I can’t, Wolf. How? Look at my feet. Now I don’t even have the stupid flip-flops!”

  I sat down on a rock then, drawing Vonn down to the spot beside me.

  “I hate the wind,” she said.

  Kneeling at her feet I unrolled the sopping wet wool socks. I didn’t want Vonn to look at her toes, so I held her eyes with mine, humming the Bob Seger song “Against the Wind” to distract her.

  “I hate that song.”

  Frankie used to belt it out in the kitchen. I purposefully botched the lyrics to amuse her.

  “Stop,” she said, grinning. “I really hate that song.”

  I tried not to look at Vonn’s toes too, and then did, and wished I hadn’t, and kept on singing to disguise my concern. Quickly I took off my own warm boots and stuffed Vonn’s feet into the fleece linings, struggling to lace them with my cold, clumsy fingers.

  “What about you?” She stared at my feet as I wrung out the wool socks.

  “I’m boiling,” I said, and she laughed. “I’m fine. I’m used to the cold. When these are dry I’ll put them on.”

  “Just for a little while, okay?” she said, her teeth chattering. “I’ll wear the boots for a little while.”

  Walking barefoot in this terrain would have been challenging in the best of circumstances. The rocks were hard and sharp and cold and my feet were already sore and bruised. I could only pray they’d stay frozen so that I wouldn’t have to bear the excruciating pain of their thaw.

  Clomping behind me in my hiking boots, Vonn put me in mind of a child in her father’s shoes. I felt sorry, as we made our way back down the slope, for lonely children, and frozen toes, and for Nola, and Bridget, alone and afraid across the divide.

  Vonn was relieved to see that Bridget had reappeared. She was wearing Nola’s oxblood poncho and perched on a rock a few feet back from the edge.

  “You okay?” I called.

  Bridget waved.

  “She lost her voice,” Nola said.

  “You drink lots of water?” I called.

  She nodded, then pointed up at the slope behind me, looking vaguely hopeful.

  “It doesn’t connect,” I called. “The slope doesn’t connect to the ridge. It’s not the way back.”

  Bridget shook her head, protesting.

  I shouted, “It looks like it connects but it doesn’t! We’re going to have to figure something else out!”

  She met my gaze across the crevice.

  “We’re going to get you home!” I called. “I promise, Bridget!”

  “I won’t leave her alone,” Nola said. “We’ll get another log. We’ll make another bridge.”

  “There isn’t time.” I caught a whiff of rotting flesh as Nola found my eyes. We were so sure the sterasote poultice would save her life, but we’d been foolish to hope for more miracles.

  “You and Vonn go on,” she said. “I’ll stay here with Bridget.”

  I cupped her cold cheeks. “We’re gonna be okay, Mrs. Devine. We’re going to get out of this.”

  Soaking, shuddering, Nola said resolutely. “I won’t leave my daughter.”

  “You have to.”

  “I won’t go without her.”

  Bridget, across the divide, was waving her arms. Finally, when she had our attention, she stomped her feet angrily. GO! she mouthed, pointing up the slope. GO WITH THEM!

  Nola called back hoarsely. “I’m not leaving!”

  “I’m not leaving either!” Vonn called out.

  Bridget, shrunken and shivering, gestured calmly toward the slope. Go, she mouthed again. Please.

  I had the strongest sense of déjà vu as I watched Nola, beside me, put her hand over her heart. Vonn picked up the cue and pressed her hand to her heart too. Across the crevice Bridget did the same. I didn’t know that other people did that too. I raised my hand to my chest and put my palm over my breast where the tattooed owl kept Byrd, and Glory, and Frankie, and now Nola and Bridget and Vonn Devine.

  Nola’s face lit as she gestured to the horizon with a shaking hand. “A rainbow.”

  Vonn sighed with delight—even then, even there.

  Bridget would not turn to look.

  “It’s a sign!” Nola called over the wind as the rainbow disappeared.

  “I don’t care about the rainbow!” Bridget squeaked hoarsely, but the mention of a sign did seem to intrigue her. She was about to look for the rainbow when Vonn raised her hand trembling to point at something else instead.

  The coyote was crouched near the sterasote bush about fifteen feet from Bridget. I don’t know how long the beast had been there, upwind where I couldn’t smell him.

  “Bridget,” I called calmly. “Behind you.” Then I leapt to my feet, shaking my fist at the space between the coyote and me. “GIT!” I shouted.

  On the other side of the crevice Bridget stared at the coyote.
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  “Don’t. Run. Bridget,” I called evenly. “Don’t. Run. Unless you’re running AT him.”

  Bridget could only stare at the crouched beast with the twitching haunches.

  I could see she wanted to bolt. “Don’t do it, Bridget!”

  “Don’t run!” Nola called.

  “Don’t run!” Vonn shouted.

  But Bridget ran. She ran as fast as she could run, silently screaming, and the coyote chased her into the dense brush of the outcropping. We could hear the sound of breaking limbs and snapping twigs.

  The coyote howled. Bridget couldn’t scream but yowled with her broken voice. A haunting duet.

  Then the beast went silent. None of us could breathe. Even the wind paused to find out what the hell happened between the lost woman and the hungry coyote. I pictured the beast with Bridget’s neck in its jaws shaking her rag-doll body, and had to staunch the rise of vomit. I don’t know what Nola or Vonn were thinking or doing. I couldn’t look at either. I stood there, cursing.

  Nola cleared her throat, attempting to find her voice. “Bridget?” she finally called, all business. “Bridget Devine, you answer me!” Her tone said, I will not stand here and have you killed and eaten by a coyote, young lady! “Bridget!”

  We waited. There was a flash of lightning in the sky to the east. Another sign. I watched the outcropping, praying that Bridget would appear, but every time I closed my eyes I was assaulted by the image of the coyote burrowing into her gut and emerging with twisted lengths of steaming intestines in his teeth. I could smell the blood.

  What happened next I’m slightly hazy on because I had doubled over to vomit gritty rainwater. In my periphery, I saw a massive red bird eclipse the sun. I heard the clatter of rocks behind me, and when I turned, I had to blink several times, because Bridget was, impossibly, there, balanced awkwardly on the slope in Nola’s oxblood poncho. She tried to speak but still had no voice.

  We three stood there looking at Bridget, who was flushed and confused and as shocked to find herself with us as we were to see her alive. It’s hard to imagine that she did what she did without divine intervention.

  Vonn reached Bridget first, almost knocking her off her feet, then Nola, then me. We embraced each other fiercely, merging our sweat and filth and flesh, but only for a moment. The coyote was still a threat.

  “I have no memory. From there to here,” Bridget croaked, gazing at the other side of the wide divide. We all turned to look across the crevice just in time to watch the coyote make the leap in a graceful arc. I stepped forward when the animal landed on the slope a few yards above us but he disappeared before I had a chance to protest.

  That day, that third day we were lost, we didn’t relive Bridget’s astonishing jump across the fifteen-foot crevice. We didn’t even discuss the miracle of it. Once Bridget had rejoined the rest of us, we went on with the next task, which was to get us all up the slope to the plateau so that we could find a route that would take us to the distant lone pine.

  We didn’t talk about the loss of the yellow canteen either, as we trudged up the slope, Vonn clumsy in my boots, and me bearing Nola’s almost dead weight. “Doing great, Mrs. Devine,” I said.

  “Nola,” she said hoarsely, smiling.

  “Doing great, Nola,” I said.

  “I have a good feeling about this,” Bridget said.

  “Me too,” I lied.

  When we reached the plateau, I pointed out the lone pine. “See! See the pine!” I shouted over the wind.

  “And the mesa!” Bridget shouted.

  “I see it! There’s plenty of room to land a helicopter,” Vonn said, turning to smile at her mother.

  Bridget, still sailing on her crevice-leap high, smiled back at Vonn and began to search the honeycomb canyons for the best way to reach our destiny.

  “Isn’t this the most miraculous thing?” Nola breathed, coming alive with hope.

  Something nagged at me—the truth—I suppose, which was that the lone pine was random, and the mesa likely another illusion, and the air still not stable enough for a helicopter rescue.

  “What do you think, Wolf?” Nola asked.

  I began to lead the Devines toward the lone pine, a place foretold by a spectre in a dream.

  After a short while Nola stopped, lowering herself onto a long flat boulder. “I’m frozen. Can we rest a minute?”

  We stopped.

  “Frozen,” she repeated as we four embraced again to share our body heat.

  Cue the sun. I can’t help how it sounds. That’s what happened. The sun burst forth, wiping away the curtain of cloud, warming our frigid bodies, saving our souls.

  Nola turned her face toward the sun. “Can we stay here for a little while?”

  “We have to,” I said. “There’s no sun once we get down there. It’ll be cold as hell. We have to dry off now, while we can.”

  We sat on the warm rock, leaning against one another for support.

  “Feels so good.” Vonn unzipped her peacoat and spread it over a rock to dry. Nola and Bridget and I did the same.

  Vonn. I remember looking at her in that moment, Vonn Devine with her dust-smeared face and ratty hair and crusted eyes. Our days marooned on the mountain hadn’t dimmed her beauty, and her betrayal—our betrayal—with the granola bar had bound us inextricably.

  The sound she began to make then wasn’t humming so much as moaning but I recognized it as the Bob Seger one I’d been singing to her. She looked up to catch me staring. “What?”

  “I thought you hated that song.”

  “Pip never cared for Bob Seger,” Nola said.

  “He’d be proud of you,” I said, surprising myself.

  “Pip? He would?”

  “You’re tough as nails, Mrs. Devine.”

  “Nola,” she said. “Please.”

  “Nola,” I said.

  “It’s nice to have a man call me by my first name,” she said. “Pip used to call me Noli.”

  “I couldn’t do that,” I said.

  “I didn’t sprinkle his ashes at the lake,” Nola said.

  “That’s okay, Mim,” Bridget said.

  “Pip would have thought it was cool. The coyotes and everything,” Vonn said.

  “I think so too,” Nola said.

  “Even better than the lake.”

  “I suppose. It’s just that we didn’t have a moment with him. We should have had a moment.”

  We were quiet for a time, listening to the wind, and then Vonn started to sing the Seger song in a parched, whispery voice. I joined in with my broken, scratchy vocals, and finally Nola sang too, wheezing but with perfect pitch. We must have sounded horrible, painful, but to our ears we were a gospel choir, singing for Patrick Devine.

  We were having a moment, singing that song together, and I was irritated, I think we all were, when Bridget broke the spell, shushing us, pointing to the sky. But this time it wasn’t a helicopter sound that she heard. It sounded like a plane. We heard it too. It sounded exactly like a prop plane.

  “It sounds like a plane,” I said. I knew Mountain Rescue had a couple of prop planes. Thank you, God.

  “Maybe I got the helicopter part wrong,” Bridget strained to whisper.

  Planes couldn’t fly as low as a helicopter but they could see us if they were looking. We started shouting all at once. “Help! Here! Down here!” Then I had an idea. “The poncho! Stretch it out like a target!”

  Bridget took off the poncho, and we stretched the plastic so that it formed a bull’s eye over the rock.

  The steady, even hum of the motor grew closer and we began to shout again. “Over here! Over here! Here!” We went on like that for longer than you might have expected, given the number of times the wind had fooled us. Eventually our necks got tired.

  At last Nola stretched out on the sun-warmed rock, looking up at the sky. One by one we took our places beside her, four in a row so we could rest while we waited to catch sight of the rescue plane that we were still convinced was about to ap
pear from around the next peak.

  Time—impudent, insufficient, incoherent time—passed. The sound of the plane died down, or shifted in tenor or tone. I couldn’t say how much time passed between elation and surrender.

  “The wind,” I said stupidly.

  “The wind,” Bridget agreed.

  “We have to go,” I said, watching my feet attempt to plant themselves before I collapsed again on the warm rock beside the Devines. How was I going to hike without shoes or boots or even flip-flops to protect my soles? How was I going to leave the rock? It was so warm. We were so tired.

  I knew it was folly to stay there. I was exhausted, dehydrated, hungry, but we had to press on or Nola would die.

  “Not yet,” Nola said.

  “We’re dry.” I struggled mightily for the strength to sit up again. “The sooner we hit the trail the quicker we’ll find something edible or maybe we’ll come on a stream.”

  “I’m going to stay here,” Nola said. “I don’t see where I’ll find the strength to go on.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “Maybe it’s my time, Wolf.”

  “Not yet.”

  “I won’t go without you, Mim,” Vonn said.

  Bridget nodded in agreement.

  “We’ll find food, Mrs. Devine,” I said.

  “We could have had that granola bar,” Bridget said in a strained whisper.

  “Bridget!” Nola snapped.

  Bridget lunged at me then, swinging wildly. I caught her in my arms.

  “It’s your fault,” she hissed.

  “Bridget!” Nola shouted.

  “It’s all his fault!”

  I backed away. Maybe she was right.

  “You got us lost! You made her eat the granola bar!”

  “No!” Vonn rose up from the rock. “He didn’t make me do anything.”

  Vonn stood before us in my too-big climbing boots and, reaching into the deep pocket of her cargo pants, drew out a rectangle of silver foil. One of the other granola bars. It was one of the other granola bars. I felt punched in the gut.

  It took a moment for Vonn to find her voice. “This is the only one left. I ate the other whole bar on the first day. And I drank the water. All of it.”

  We stared at the silver foil in Vonn’s filthy palm. A shadow darkened the evidence and we looked up to find three huge black birds soaring high overhead—three—when there had only ever been two. I don’t know if the others found that strange.