Breaking Wild

by Diane Les Becquets

  And so she began the climb. Before leaving, she had sharpened the end of her crutch so that she might use it as a trekking pole. She bore her weight on her right leg and planted her crutch uphill. She rotated the crutch back and forth as if screwing it in place. Then she transferred her weight onto the crutch. With her right hand, she found a hold in one of the rocks embedded in the hillside and was able to pull herself forward. When that step was completed, she began the process all over again. It would take her a couple of hours to make this one small climb, an ascent that would have taken her minutes in her healthier state. But she knew she would have to fight off those kinds of thoughts if she were to continue to make progress, if she were to have any hope of going home. And with that thought her body felt a surge of momentum and she moved more quickly. She prodded the snow with her crutch, screwed the crutch into the frozen ground, pulled herself forward, again and again. Her mouth touched snow, and icy rocks abraded the sides of her face, and in her mind she saw Farrell and Trevor and Julia. Her anticipation of seeing her family became both an ache and a thrill so strong in her chest that she literally felt her heart had swelled.

  She stopped only a couple of times to catch her breath. Her body was shaking from the sheer fatigue of it all, and the sun felt warm, as if teasing her forward. Maybe two hours had passed. She couldn’t be sure, but at last she’d made it to the top of the bluff. Somewhere on the rock face beneath her, and maybe seventy paces or so to her right, was the cave, and beneath that another ledge, the same ledge that had broken her fall when she had first come upon the shelter. But that was behind her now, and she had all of this land before her, and a big sky, and a warm sun. How cold was it? Maybe twenty degrees, but with her exertion she was ready to shed layers of clothing. She tried to speculate how far she could go in a day. Perhaps a mile, as long as the weather was hospitable. And how many miles was she from help? Without knowing the exact location of the cave, without a compass and a map, there was no way to tell. In some ways she felt she was staring out into oblivion, but instead of feeling discouraged, she was overtaken with how beautiful it all was, and she wished Farrell were with her and she could share it with him. And just as quickly as she had felt exhilarated for having made it to the top of this bluff, she felt saddened and her body began to chill from the perspiration on her skin and in her clothes, and she wanted to cry for all the times she might have had, the moments with Farrell when her mind was someplace else, afternoons when she might have been with Farrell or the children but had found a reason to be away. Errands she’d told him she had to run, or some billing she had to take care of for Aaron, and as she drove away, she would be filled with anticipation for another man, for danger and pleasure, the kind that had slipped under her skin when her body and mind were still clean, until she was no longer clean and the danger had become a craving. And yet all those hours spent in the cave, when the only thing she had to pass the time were her thoughts, it was her moments with Farrell that she relived in her mind, over and over again, as if her life with him were all that had ever been.

  Amy Raye took several swallows of water, ate a few pinyon nuts. She then moved on. The sun was still at her back. Soon it would be directly above her, and then the afternoon would pass quickly. She felt certain somewhere to the west of her there was a road. Eventually she would find it.

  She stopped before the shadows became too large, and smoothed out an area of snow between two large boulders. Because she wanted to save her matches, she used her fire starter instead. She cut boughs from nearby junipers to create a mattress, as well as to provide her with some insulation cover. She had divided what little meat she had left into approximately four-ounce servings. But a four-ounce serving of meat was probably no more than 150 calories. Though she’d been trying to survive on as close to a thousand calories a day as possible, to ration her supplies, she’d have to cut back more. She cooked two servings of meat that night and drank a liter of water. She would consume another serving of the elk before heading out the following morning. That would leave her with only a little more than a pound. Maybe she would be able to strike a rabbit. There should be plenty in the area now that she was off the ledge and had a greater area to cover. And maybe she would find a road or a truck within the next few days.

  Shortly after she finished eating, as she lay back against her pack and warmed her feet beside the fire, the coyotes came out. She first heard a couple of yips, then a long howl, and shortly after, all kinds of high-pitched yelps and barks. She untied the fleece from around her head so that she could hear them better. She knew she was in the middle of the coyotes’ courting season, and possibly still in their territorial season as well, when the pups from the previous year’s litters went out on their own to find new territories and begin their own family packs. But this night, the eerie chorus, more like a maniacal laughter, sounded like that of several bands, and though she knew these jackals, or brush wolves, as they were often called, were rarely a threat to humans, and even then only in more urban areas where prey was scarce, a handful of coyotes could sound like hundreds, especially as they gathered in the evenings to hunt, and the changes in their pitch and yelps could send a chilling uneasiness over one’s skin. She thought of an evening early in the fall when she’d set out with her bow and her tag for a mule deer. She had been sitting behind the deadfall of an enormous spruce, using it as a blind, when she heard the first yip and saw a young coyote trotting down the trail. Then she heard the long, high-pitched howl of the alpha. Within minutes, an entire chorus started up, and a large family of maybe eight or nine coyotes had gathered. She had never before witnessed such a sight. The pups were yipping and barking and playing, wrestling each other and turning somersaults. Within twenty minutes, the chorus was over, and each member of the pack had disappeared back into the woods.

  She thought upon the families, and how after they mated, many would remain monogamous for several years. She thought of wolves, and eagles, and black vultures, and prairie moles as well, and she wondered why she couldn’t have the good, decent flow of life that these animals had, as if it just wasn’t in the cards for her. And yet she wanted to be like the eagles and the albatross that mated for life. She had been like the alcoholic who promises herself she won’t take another drink, who wants to come clean, and then picks up cheap beer at the convenience store on a Sunday morning or a Wednesday afternoon. How much easier it would have been to tell Farrell she had a drinking problem. How much easier it would have been to ask for his help then.

  Was she wrong in allowing herself the hope of seeing him again? She had been gone for over seven weeks. What might he have discovered during that time? Who of the men whom she’d encountered or been involved with may have come forward? She had been the one who managed the bills. Would Farrell have looked at old phone records or accessed her email? She had always deleted text messages and calls, but she wondered how many new messages and calls there had been.

  And with the cold and fatigue and hunger and the night hours came her greatest fear. What if Farrell wouldn’t take her back? There had been the time years before when she’d called Farrell from Anchorage, when he could barely understand her over the phone because she was crying and she wasn’t sure Saddle was going to make it, and she needed money, she needed a way to get home. He told her he would wire her the money, he would pay Saddle’s bill, but when she got home, they would need to talk.

  She’d driven eight hours from McCarthy. She’d left behind her books and the cookstove and what few belongings, including clothes, she’d brought with her. Saddle lay beside her on the bench seat of her truck, and though he was breathing, he wouldn’t wake up.

  When she got to Anchorage, she drove to a twenty-four-hour animal hospital she’d located from a phone book. She scooped Saddle into her arms, entered through the two glass doors, and begged someone to help her. Saddle was still unconscious. His pulse was weak. A technician led Amy Raye to an examining room. X-rays were taken; fluids were given.
Saddle was bleeding internally and had a fair amount of swelling on the brain. Emergency surgery was needed. It would be expensive, and he still might not make it.

  The vet was a woman in her fifties, with black hair and dark freckles and a kind face. Amy Raye did not have a credit card. She did not have enough money with her.

  “Is there someone you can call?” the vet asked.

  And Amy Raye thought of Farrell, and she asked to use the vet’s phone. When Farrell answered, there was too much noise in the background. He was at a bar with some friends. Julia was visiting her mom. And in that second when Amy Raye first heard he was in a bar, she was angry at him that he could be drinking and having a good time while Saddle was hurt and might not make it, and she was angry that Farrell, whose love had come to her like the wind on the mountaintop and thunder in the rain, could be out drinking with friends while she was gone. She was irrational and alone, and she needed Saddle to be okay. She needed Farrell, and she needed to go home.

  The vet operated on Saddle. He would be watched for twenty-four hours.

  “And what about you?” the vet had asked. “You’ve been injured, too.”

  Amy Raye walked with a limp, and blood was on her jeans and on the hem of her shirt.

  “I just want him to be okay.”

  “And if he could talk, he would say the same about you. Here, let me take a look.”

  The gash on Amy Raye’s hip needed stitches and needed to be cleaned.

  “I don’t have insurance,” Amy Raye told her. “And I don’t have enough money.”

  “I can take care of that,” the vet said. “Do you have a place to stay?”

  “I can stay in my truck.”

  But the vet lived close by, and after she stitched Amy Raye’s hip and bandaged the wound, she brought Amy Raye home with her, scrambled eggs and fried bacon, made coffee and poured orange juice, and Amy Raye ate as if nothing had ever tasted better. She slept a few hours on the woman’s sofa, took a shower, and then went back to the hospital to be with Saddle, and she thanked God for good people, for this woman whose husband had left her, and whose heart had refused to become bitter, for Lew, and for her grandfather, and for someone as kind to her as Farrell.

  As soon as the bank opened and Amy Raye picked up the money Farrell had sent her, she stopped by a grocery store to buy dog food and a sandwich and snacks for the road. After she made her purchase, she saw some hikers, a college-age group, who were replenishing their supplies. One of them had just put his cell phone away. Amy Raye asked him if she could borrow it. She would pay him ten dollars. He told her to use the phone. He didn’t want her money. He told her to take her time. They were in no hurry.

  She dialed the number. The phone on the other end rang too many times. She almost hung up. A familiar voice answered.

  “Nan? It’s Amy Raye.”

  The person on the other end gasped. “Oh my God. Where are you? Where have you been?”

  “I’m sorry, Nan. I don’t have a lot of time. Is Grandpa there?”

  The silence on the other end lasted long enough for Amy Raye to know something was wrong.

  “Aims, it’s been nearly six years. No one knew how to reach you.”

  “Where is he?” Amy Raye asked.

  “Aims, he’s dead. He’s been dead four years now.”

  Nan’s words were like a truck, a very large truck, hitting Amy Raye in the middle of a road, while she had been standing there looking in another direction. Her eyes filled with hot liquid. The air seemed to thicken.

  Their conversation lasted a few more minutes, long enough for Amy Raye to learn that her grandfather had developed lung cancer, that it had spread to his brain, and once it was in his brain, he had gone fast. Nan had since gotten married to Danny Foster, a local boy whom Amy Raye remembered from school. Nan and Danny had moved onto the farm. They’d needed a place to stay. Grandma Tomlin needed their help on the farm.

  But her grandmother wasn’t there when Amy Raye called, and when Nan pressed Amy Raye for information, she was still trying to take everything in and said she couldn’t talk. She said she was borrowing the phone from someone she didn’t know. She said she would call back another time.

  She gave the college boy his phone. She walked out of the grocery store and got into her truck. She turned onto the highway and headed in the direction of the animal hospital, and as she drove, she screamed her lungs empty, and hit the steering wheel until her palms turned blue. And back at the hospital, she wiped the tears from her face; she got out of the truck and went in to get Saddle.

  —

  When Amy Raye returned to Farrell, Julia asked Amy Raye to promise that she would never go away again, and Farrell made Amy Raye dinner. And after they ate and were sitting on the futon on Farrell’s porch, Amy Raye told him about her childhood, about her father working as a highway patrolman, about her mother working weekdays and every other weekend at the library. She told him about the horses and the barn, and she told him about Lionel and Nan. And she cried when she told him these things. He held her hands as she spoke. He kissed her face. He told her he loved her. He told her she was safe and that everything was okay now. And she had believed him because she had wanted for it to be so. “I don’t want to go back,” she’d said. “I can’t. I won’t go back there again.”

  But that night Amy Raye didn’t tell Farrell about the man working next door when she was only sixteen, and the other men, until she could not remember how many men there had been. And she didn’t tell him about the night it had been raining and she was on her way home from the Sensing Farm’s Free Rein Stables where a girl from school whom she’d almost become friends with was boarding a two-year-old quarter horse mustang. The girl had wanted to show Amy Raye her new horse, and when Amy Raye said the horse reminded her of a hemlock because of the horse’s gray-brown coloring like that of the hemlock’s bark, and because she thought the horse would grow to have great stature, and a hemlock could grow to be a hundred and fifty feet tall, the girl said that was what she was going to name the horse, and Amy Raye thought the name was a fine one.

  “I think his father was a free-roaming mustang,” Amy Raye said.

  “I don’t know,” the girl said. “The mother came from a long line of domesticated quarter horses. I don’t know much about the father.”

  The girl had purchased the horse with the help of her parents from a breeder in Kentucky.

  “Why do you think he was free roaming?” the girl asked.

  “Something in his eyes,” Amy Raye said. “You ever see a wild horse?”

  “No.”

  “There’s places out west that round up the wild horses and auction them off. Maybe Hemlock’s father was one of those.”

  “Maybe,” the girl said.

  “Have you ever been out west?” Amy Raye asked.

  “No.”

  “I think I’d like to go out west,” Amy Raye said. “I think I’d like to see the wild horses.”

  “I’ll let you ride him,” the girl told Amy Raye. “I’m going to start breaking him in soon.”

  “I’d wait another year,” Amy Raye told her. “He’s still awfully young, but I’d like to ride him.”

  The evening had grown dark and the rain was coming down hard.

  “I better be getting home,” Amy Raye said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  The two girls had recently graduated from high school and were both spending the summer working at a convenience store on the edge of town. Amy Raye had plans to start college at the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga in the fall. The other girl was going to take a year off and save her money by living at home.

  Amy Raye climbed into her 1991 Ford Ranger that she’d bought two years before from money she’d saved from working on her grandparents’ farm. The Sensings’ farm was a sixteen-mile drive from her house, down Highway 50. Amy Raye was about hal
fway home and was singing along to “Eighteen Wheels and a Dozen Roses” over the radio. The windshield wipers were turned on high. She might have been driving too fast, but she didn’t recall. And she was so busy singing and thinking of the quarter horse mustang that by the time she saw the blue flashing lights, the highway patrolman was right up on her. She slowed down, and as soon as the shoulder was wide enough, she pulled over and came to a stop.

  A lot of minutes seemed to pass before the patrolman was at her window, tapping on it with his flashlight. When she rolled down her window, the rain poured in. The patrolman asked her to step out. She rolled her window back up and did as he said. But standing outside her truck, the patrolman and she were both getting so wet, and Amy Raye wasn’t wearing a rain jacket or a hat like the patrolman, but rather a pair of cutoff jean shorts and a white tank top with an Opryland decal, so the patrolman said why didn’t they get in his patrol car so they could get out of the rain.