Borderline

by Nevada Barr

  Paul started up, Anna following. Behind her she heard Cyril and Steve clamber onto the ledge to trail behind Carmen. Five was too many, Anna thought. At Easter’s elevation the ledge might not be wide enough for that many people and one cow. This quixotic quest could end in tragedy if the rescue went sour. Anna did not want that on her conscience, but doubted they’d go back if she told them to, so she shoved the thought into the back of her mind. Already crowded with the things she would not think about, the dim recesses of her skull must look like an overstuffed closet. Should the door fail, the flotsam and jetsam of her id would come tumbling out. That thought, too, she shoved in with the rest.

  Distracted from her misery by the strange phenomenon of human beings creeping up her path, Easter quit crying and lowed soft questions at them.

  “She sounds like she knows we’re coming to save her,” Cyril said.

  “She sounds like she knows we’re coming to feed her,” her brother retorted.

  “I wonder if animals hope,” Cyril mused. “Can you hope if you live in the moment?”

  “They live in the moment you open the cat food can,” Steve said.

  The climb was growing steeper and Anna could hear their breath coming harder between their words. She would remember not to count on them for brute force. Paul was powerful and Carmen was a rock. Along with her, they could do the heavy lifting if there was any to be done. The twins would be ideal for holding the offerings of lettuce, she decided.

  “Poor old Easter will end up in a beef fajita,” Paul said.

  “No she won’t!” Cyril declared.

  “Are you going to lock it in a bathroom with you till the president of Mexico grants it amnesty?” her brother asked.

  “I might.”

  Anna laughed. She hadn’t laughed much in a while and it felt wonderful. She reminded herself to take it up again.

  Paul laughed then and Anna knew he was happy because she was, and felt the rush she always did when she realized how much he loved her.

  SIX

  The ledge they followed was rapidly narrowing and the river had grown ribbon-thin far below them. Lori and Chrissie and the raft looked small as toys in the bottom of the canyon and the cliff-dwelling swallows flew by them at eye level. Cyril, Anna noticed, was hugging the wall, and Steve was trying not to. The ascending path they followed was a couple of feet wide, three or four feet in places, but with a drop of several hundred feet and no guardrails, it was not a place for the acrophobic. Anna hoped nobody froze and had to be carried out. Panic struck some people that way, rendering them temporarily catatonic. If it did, they’d have to wait their turn. Easter had priority.

  “Let’s stop and catch our breath for a minute,” Paul said, and stopped. He wasn’t breathing hard. Neither was Anna, but it was a nice wide patch on the ledge and the footing was even, a safe place to pause and firm up the rescue plan.

  Easter was about sixty feet away, ahead and slightly above them on the ledge. Seen this closely, it was clear the poor cow was on her last legs. She held her head so low her jaw was scarcely an inch from the stone. Bones poked her skin into tents at shoulders and hips and her ribs could be counted at a glance. More than a living, breathing cow, she looked like one of the desiccated corpses of cows Anna had seen at various times in the deserts of Texas and Mesa Verde, the hide shrunk around a skeleton, guts and blood and muscle long gone.

  “I don’t know if she’ll make it down,” Carmen said. “Look at the way she’s swaying. We may be looking at a dead cow.”

  “No,” Anna said. “Easter has hidden reservoirs of strength.”

  “Secret powers?” Steve asked.

  “Pity the nonbeliever,” his sister said. “If you squint you can see her cape.”

  “What do you want to do, Anna?” Paul asked.

  “Let’s get a rope around her horns with you behind her on one end and Carmen in front on the other, that way, if she gets the energy up to try and bolt you can control her to some extent. I’ll take the lettuce and see if I can induce her to walk down.”

  “What should we do?” Cyril asked.

  “Stay out of the way.”

  There was a protest but Anna heard it only as murmuring, no more troubling to her than the sigh of the wind across the canyon rim or the purr of the river below. She, Paul and Carmen uncoiled the rope then recoiled it, half to Carmen and half to Paul. In the center, Anna fashioned a simple loop.

  “You can hold the lettuce,” Carmen said kindly.

  “Keepers of the Kale of the Sacred Kine,” Steve said.

  “Give us some slack,” Anna told Carmen and, Paul leading, the loop in her hand and Carmen feeding out line from her half of the rope, they walked toward Easter. Horns that had looked stubby and sweet from a hundred yards were sharp and intimidating up close and on a narrow ledge with a three-hundred-foot drop to one side.

  “Don’t even think about getting gored,” she said to her husband’s back.

  “I am thinking about it. I am thinking about avoiding it at all costs. Don’t you even think about getting near the cow till I’ve got her head,” Paul said.

  Anna said nothing.

  “You’re thinking about it,” he said. “I can feel you thinking like cats running up and down my spine. Let me get her head.”

  “Stay on the cliff side,” Anna said unnecessarily. Paul was a prudent man, not given to rash decisions. He approached Easter the way he did drunks and poachers and frat boys bent on killing each other, firmly and kindly and, above all, carefully.

  This time the worry wasn’t warranted. The cow barely had the strength to roll her eyes in his direction as he sidled in between her and the cliff and grabbed hold of her horns. As Anna slipped the loop over them so Paul and Carmen would have a degree of control over the animal, Paul was not keeping the poor starved thing still so much as holding her head up for her.

  The rope in place, Paul moved several yards up slope and gripped his end so, if needed, he could stop or slow the animal if it surged forward. Carmen closed the gap to ten or fifteen feet downhill from Anna and the cow so she could control it if it bucked back toward Paul.

  Easter stood shaking, head hanging to her hooves, making no move to help or hinder their efforts. But for the occasional eye roll or weary twitch of her hide it seemed she hardly knew they were there.

  “Okay,” Anna called to the twins. “I’ve got a job for you. Bring me the lure.”

  “Lettuce sherpas,” Steve said. “For this our parents are paying full tuition at Princeton.”

  Both of them came forward and they crowded a bit close for Anna’s liking but she said nothing. The danger from the cow seemed slight. “You want to lure her?” she asked Cyril.

  “Could I?” Cyril sounded so young and so delighted that Anna laughed for the second time in less than an hour. Laughter was definitely medicinal.

  “Just don’t let your guard down,” Anna said. “Be ready to get out of the way if you have to.”

  “In case she unleashes her super cow powers,” her brother kidded her.

  Anna and Steve put their backs against the cliff so, if the cow did decide to pursue the lettuce with more vigor than was safe, they’d be out of the way and in a position to snatch Cyril back from the edge.

  Approaching slowly, Cyril held out the half-head and spoke in the sweet voice animal lovers are given in lieu of the greater gift with which fiction blessed Dr. Dolittle.

  “Here she comes, what a good cow, coming to get the lettuce, there’s a good girl, you’re hungry, aren’t you, here she comes.”

  Easter wasn’t coming. She wasn’t moving. Finally Cyril closed in and put the lettuce on her nose, nudged it into her lips. Still no response.

  “Damn,” Anna said.

  “Time for Plan B?” Steve asked.

  “Let me try.” Anna took the lettuce and tried to make the prospect of following it attractive, but had no better luck than Cyril.

  “The carrot isn’t working,” Anna said. “Time for the stick.”


  Paul moved up behind Easter and Carmen pulled on the downhill rope. Easter collapsed, knees folded beneath her, chin on the rocks.

  “Plan C?” Steve said hopefully.

  There was no Plan C. Paul pushed and Carmen pulled and Cyril lured and Anna walked on the cliff side of the cow, prodding her and encouraging her. Steve made sounds that he insisted were irresistible to female bovines and they began the descent with Easter staggering, collapsing, being hauled to her feet, mooing plaintively and stumbling a few more feet before she again went to her knees.

  The ledge had been fairly smooth going, a gentle slope leading upward in two zigzags following a natural sheer pattern in the rock face. They’d descended to a place where the ledge broke into ragged steps for five or six yards before the trail smoothed out again for the last turn and down to the river’s edge. Where the broken steps began the ledge was wide and only fifty or so feet above the river, forty above the sand hill capped with Bermuda grass. The cow took one look at the steps, dug all four hooves into the rock and leaned back. When Anna pulled hard on the rope Easter fell and no amount of encouragement or harassment could induce her to rise again.

  Anna knelt by the stricken bovine and stared into one great brown eye. “Move or die, old girl,” she said. “Up and at ’em.”

  Easter was unmoved in every way.

  Anna stood again. “Let’s see if we can lift her up. Maybe it will inspire her to help us.”

  Coiling the rope as he came, Paul joined her on the other end of the cow. “I don’t think it’ll do any good. I should have thought of that on the way up but my cattle-wrangling days were a while back. Cows will go up, but they won’t come down. They’ll come down slopes but not stairs. I guess stairs have the same effect on them as cattle guards; they look like horrible traps for some reason.”

  “What if we pulled her and you pushed her?” Anna suggested.

  “We could try, but if I remember right, cows are serious about their phobias.”

  Anna looked at the cow, then down the shattered rock slope, then down toward where Chrissie and Lori waited with the raft. On the way up, she remembered the drop being breathtaking, the height precipitous. After ninety minutes cattle rustling two hundred feet higher than that, it looked as if they could almost jump down it.

  Carmen sat down, her back against the cliff, her feet against the cow’s ribs. “I wouldn’t mind a little rain about now,” she said. “You guys didn’t pay me to work this hard.”

  Anna sat down next to her. She, too, was drenched in sweat and reeked of cow manure where she’d repeatedly stepped in it on her backward progress down the ledge. Paul stood, hands on hips, breathing hard, staring out across the canyon, his eyes shaded by the brim of his hat, his white hair plastered to the back of his neck.

  Cyril and Steve were positively peppy. The difference between twenty and forty, Anna thought without rancor. At twenty hard work eventually made one stronger. After forty it eventually made one tired.

  “What now?” Cyril asked, squatting in front of the cow and cradling her nose between her hands. “Do we carry Easter the rest of the way?”

  “She may be small and starved but she still weighs a good four or five hundred pounds,” Paul said.

  “We could just roll her off,” Steve suggested. “Have steak for supper. The bouncing would probably tenderize her.”

  None of the women dignified that with a response but Paul looked interested. He loved animals and was kindness itself to Taco and Piedmont and Anna’s little tuxedo cat. But having been raised on a dairy farm, wringing the necks of fryers, butchering hogs and the occasional cow, he tended to be pragmatic about food animals.

  Idly, Anna coiled the rope they’d been using to pull Easter with. It was light, a tough plastic line, but a hundred and fifty feet of it was still bulky.

  “Hey,” Anna said, a thought striking her. She stood, shouting, “Hey!” down at Lori and Chrissie, who’d unloaded the camp chairs and sat on the shore reading. “Will one of you bring up an oar? The longest one you can find.”

  “What are you thinking?” Paul asked, sounding alarmed. “We can’t carry her. We don’t have the manpower.”

  “Woman power!” Cyril said, but didn’t look as if she believed there was enough of that to manhandle a cow down to the river either.

  “We don’t carry,” Anna said. “We lower. Tie her feet up, thread the paddle through, tie a line to either end of the paddle so she swings beneath it the way the great white hunter did in those old cannibal cartoons and lower her to the grassy knoll.”

  “Grassy knoll,” Steve said. “Where have I heard that before? And did things come out well in the end? Could this be a sign?”

  “Why do you want a paddle?” Chrissie hollered back up. She’d not yet risen from her camp chair.

  “Just bring it, please,” Anna called back. “Takes too long to explain,” she added nicely. She was beginning to take against the young woman and, on the first day of a three-day camping trip with lots of close encounters on the docket, she didn’t dare let even a hint of it show. Backcountry groups most often bonded; it was one of the reasons people loved them, but a group could go sour faster than an arts department at a university. Not only did it ruin it for everyone but it could prove dangerous in situations where working together for the good of the team was paramount.

  Chrissie took her time gathering all the paddles together then holding them one against the other in front of Lori, choosing the longest. Anna sat back down and schooled herself in patience. Cyril did not have to. After five minutes of watching this meticulous process, hands on hips, she shouted: “Just pick one already.”

  Peer pressure did what usurped authority dared not and Chrissie selected a paddle and headed toward the little hill where the ledge began.

  “How do you get up?” she called.

  Cyril’s shoulders slumped and her head fell dramatically to her chest. “Dear sweet brother, wombmate of mine, I will let you be the pretty one for two whole hours if you will go down and help Chrissie find her rear end. I believe she already has both hands and a flashlight but she needs your intellect to guide her.”

  Steve didn’t move. “Three hours,” he said.

  “Two and a half.”

  “Done.”

  He rose gracefully from where he’d squatted on his heels and walked down the sloping ledge. Anna expected a catty remark from Cyril about Chrissie or at least an apology for the other girl by way of distancing herself but it didn’t come and Anna was pleased. The vile hordes of humanity raping and squandering the earth would have to take out Cyril Kessler and her brother before they could claim total dominion. Anna hadn’t cheered up enough that she could muster any faith that the hordes wouldn’t win out in the end, but it was nice to pretend for a bit.

  Odds were Anna was wrong about Chrissie, anyway, that she was a fine young woman with outstanding talents and capabilities and simply rubbed her the wrong way. There’d been enough surprises, both pleasant and un-, in Anna’s past that she’d come to accept the fact she was not a great judge of character and her first impressions of people weren’t to be counted on for much.

  Sitting three in a row like monkeys without evil, Anna and Carmen and Cyril watched placidly as Chrissie handed the paddle to Steve. He extended it back down to help pull her up the short rock scramble between the hill and the ledge then started back toward where they rested, spines to the wall, feet to the cow.

  Paul did not join them. He squatted near the cliff’s edge, looking down. If Anna was very quiet she could almost hear the gears turning in his mind as he worked through the logistics, risks and practicalities of lowering a cow down.

  Anna planned to wrap the lines around solid outcrops, shove her gently over the side, and see what happened.

  Steve arrived carrying the oar, Chrissie puffing and panting behind him.

  “Carmen, we’ll need a couple of shorter lengths to tie her ankles. Can we cut this line?” Now that Anna could almost smell Ea
ster’s salvation, her mind had opened sufficiently to encompass civility.

  “In for a penny . . .” Carmen said. “Anybody got a knife?”

  Paul dug a well-worn black-handled jackknife from the pocket of his shorts. Anna measured a rough twelve feet of rope. He cut it. She folded it in half and he cut it again so they would have two six-foot pieces to tie Easter’s ankles together.

  As he made the second cut, the rumble of thunder rolled down the canyon, crashing against the walls like a great ball bowling down ninepins. Drops of rain, spaced far apart but cold and large, were hurled down from a sky that touched the canyon rim.

  “Things are about to get slippery,” Anna said. “Paul, take the back legs.” She handed him one of the short pieces they’d cut. When Easter had decided enough was enough and collapsed she had done it like a lady. Her legs were folded neatly beneath her and her scraggy tail curved around her bony shank.

  “We’re going to roll her so her spine is toward the cliff and her legs are sticking out toward the river,” Anna said. “Carmen, you and me and Paul are going to do it. You guys”—she nodded at the three students hovering too near the edge, too near the cow and too close to her—“step back, give us space. Cyril, be ready with the oar. As soon as we get the legs tied together you’ll thread it through. Steve, were you a Boy Scout?”

  “For a while,” he said.

  “He dropped out in protest when they got all nasty about gay scout leaders.”

  “It was the holidays,” Steve said. “I was working on my gay apparel badge.”

  “Knots,” Anna said.

  “I did knots.”

  “That’s all I need to know. Tie one end of the rest of the rope to the blade end of the paddle. A knot that will hold a cow. Got that?”

  “Do you want me to tie the other end on the other end?”

  “Not yet.” She started to put herself between the cow and the drop, heard Paul’s sudden intake of breath and thought better of it. “Let’s get hold of the horns. Paul will roll her rump. Ready?” Carmen was on the cliff side of her, her hands partially overlapping Anna’s where they held one of Easter’s horns in each hand. Carmen wore fingerless leather gloves to keep days and months of paddling from tearing her hands apart and Anna envied them. Between the rope and the sweat, hers burned. Paul had Easter’s tail in one hand; his other was on her drop-side hip bone. “On three,” Anna said.