Smith gained on him, and though Cole thought himself the better driver, Smith’s truck had over a hundred horsepower more than his aging Toyota. He wouldn’t be far behind for long. To what end this mad race, thought Cole? Was he going to keep driving until he ran out of gas or Smith overtook him? Then what? Smith was armed, and Cole, with a sprained left ankle and bruised elbow, wouldn’t provide much of a contest.
Suddenly, as Cole rounded a sharp corner on the north side of Cardinal Divide, a downed tree appeared in the middle of the road. In the dim light Cole saw that the tree had fallen from the right side of the road. Cole jerked the wheel left and ran over the top five feet of the pine. He checked his mirror and to his delight watched David Smith take the foot-thick tree head on in the Ram, spinning wildly in the road as he did.
Cole kept up his pace, twisting and turning his way up to the crest of the Divide, checking his mirror often. Even if Smith was stopped, Cole’s only option was to drive on.
Highway 40 wound south from Oracle to Cochrane north of Highway One, but crossed Highway 16, the David Thompson Highway, somewhere in between. The long, narrow, winding road snaked along river valleys and over low saddles between foothills. On the south side of the Trans Canada Highway, 40 re-emerged to weave its way through Kananaskis Country, and finally exited the mountains west of Longview. From there it was another hour south to the Porcupine Hills and his family’s ranch. If he had to he’d drive all the way there, but Cole knew that between him and the Porcupine Hills there were towns and police stations and hopefully salvation. He checked his gas. He’d had the presence of mind to keep the truck topped up these days in Oracle, so he had nearly a full tank. The Toyota could get 500 kilometres on that. He’d easily make Rocky Mountain House. He felt relief. He relaxed a little, and eased his white knuckles off the wheel to flex his hands.
He didn’t see the next downed tree until it was too late. Its dark hulk emerged across the road from the blowing snow like an iceberg looming out of the fog. He locked the brakes, then let up a little to try to steer the truck to safety, but couldn’t. The right side of the truck hit the tree and the Toyota flipped on its side, catapulting over the fallen giant, and rolled into the ditch, horn blaring. The world went black, then light, then black again as the truck flipped over. Cole could not tell which way was up. He felt something hot on his face, and then a rush of cold air, and realized that the windshield had smashed and sprayed him with flying glass. The world went dim as the truck came to a stop.
He awoke to sadness. A sadness that seemed to fill his head beyond reason. His first thought was of Sarah. God, she would be sad. He had promised her. Promised her that he would be careful. Promised her that he would call. He’d broken all his promises again.
He thought of his mother, alone on the ranch, waiting for visits from Walter, who came every few weeks from his posting at Waterton Lakes National Park, and from her errant son, Cole, who lived in a world full of anger and hatred, fuelled by the very thought of his father and his father’s final moments. Even his end hadn’t cooled Cole’s hatred, Cole’s rage, and now there was nothing left that Cole could do to cool those flames.
He realized that Ian Tyson was still singing on the stereo. It was a sad ballad. “There’s a pay phone in paradise, out on the edge of town, big cottonwood trees, golden leaves coming down. I’ll wait a little longer, give it one more try, please try your call later means cowboy, goodbye.”
Cole groped to switch the stereo off. Sometimes that song helped and sometimes it didn’t
His face burned. He opened his eyes and tried to blink, but he couldn’t see.
He was right side up. He tried to move and found that he could. His right arm was fine. He reached up to wipe his face and came away with bloody fingers.
“Good Christ,” he muttered. He wiped the blood away from his eyes and tried to open them again. He could see, though his eyes stung as blood dripped into them from his forehead.
He reached and undid the seat belt. No doubt another life saved by the belt, he thought. Maybe they’d put him in a commercial.
With his right arm he reached across himself and tried to open the door, but couldn’t. The door was pushed in against his left arm and would not budge. So he leaned across the bench seat and tried the other door, and this he was able to open. He crawled out of the truck, taking the keys and his hat, and popped open the glove box to find a heavy flashlight there. He limped around to the north side of the truck to look at the tree that had been his undoing. Fifty feet back down the road he found it, blocking the road entirely. Where the Toyota had hit it, all the branches, some as big as his leg, had been severed. He had sideswiped it, and the truck had flipped and rolled – how many times? – and he had walked away, some cuts from the broken glass his only apparent injury. He looked at his watch. The chase lasted more than twenty minutes. If he was lucky, the RCMP would be on their way and would pick up David Smith a few miles back on the road within the next fifteen or twenty minutes. Then they would find him. Cole would find a place in the trees, out of the snow, now six inches deep on the ground and still falling, and wait.
He walked toward the trees, dark and heavy with snow. The snow muffled all sound. Whereas before he swam in bird song on Cardinal Divide, now there was only a gummy silence. But something made him stop. He listened. He looked at his watch again. There was no way. He took a breath and held it, strained to hear. It grew slowly, then it became clear. There was no mistaking the roar of the Dodge Ram’s V8 racing up the crest of the Cardinal Divide toward him.
23
How long could he keep this up? Cole had been plodding up the forested slope of Cardinal Divide for what seemed a very long time, but when he looked at his watch he realized that it had been less than five minutes. With every step his ankle shot a fiery jolt up his left leg, through his hips, and into the rest of his body. He envisioned the ankle inside the splint and tensor bandage, the damaged tendons and ligaments slowly succumbing to the repeated strain of his demands on them, and finally giving way entirely. The pain, and that image, blotted out all sense of time.
He clutched the flashlight and pushed on through the trees. Branches whipping him in the face added to the already bloody mess there. His Gore-tex jacket protected him some from the branches and from the snow that dropped on him as he pushed through the forest.
Cole tried, in vain, to run along a course that camouflaged his footprints. The snow was six inches deep and very wet, and every time he stepped in it a tell-tale sign of his passage remained. So he jumped from the shadow of one tree where there was no snow to the next, groaning as he did so.
Cole had no idea what kind of shape David Smith was in. He still hadn’t seen the man’s face, except briefly when Smith pulled alongside him and fired three rounds from the shotgun at him. Since that time, Smith’s truck had collided with a tree, but Cole guessed that the man had suffered little injury. The Dodge Ram fared well enough to run him down while the Toyota had finally expired.
He didn’t have long to wonder about David Smith’s well-being. As the trees thinned, Cole faced a dilemma: run out into the open toward the crest of Cardinal Divide, or double back through the trees toward the road and try to evade his pursuer. The trees grew shorter as he climbed higher up the ridge; in a few more seconds he would be in the open. He stopped and listened and heard nothing. His own heart beat so loudly, and his breathing was so laborious, that he imagined a bulldozer could sneak up behind him. Doubling back might allow him to get to Smith’s truck, or better still, meet the RCMP at the road before Smith realized where he was going. That was, if the RCMP were coming. He could only hope.
Taking the ridge meant he would be exposed, at least until he crested the top, but he might also be able to lose Smith in the rocks. He couldn’t hear Smith, but he could feel him coming through the trees below him – he could feel the white hot anger, the rage – and so he made a split-second decision and limped toward the crest of the Cardinal Divide.
When he h
ad hiked along the ridge on the day Mike Barnes was killed, it didn’t take him more than a couple of minutes to gain the apogee after he left the trees. But now, injured and bone-weary, Cole Blackwater realized he would be exposed to David Smith’s field of view as soon as Smith broke the cover of the trees. His mind raced as he reviewed the possibilities, of which there were very few. Duck and cover? There was nowhere to hide, not until he reached the crest. Keep running was all he could think to do. Every step became more painful. Every step brought a new experience in agony. He began to wonder if he would make it to the ridge.
That was when he heard the gunshot, a clean, violent crack that echoed its sharp retort through the hills. Now there was no question whether or not Cole Blackwater could keep running. Gunfire was a powerful motivator.
The shot that had been fired was not from a shotgun. Cole knew it was from a high-calibre hunting rifle. He pushed himself harder, his whole left side suffused with pain. If David Smith had a scope on that weapon ...
A bullet ricocheted off a rock, and at that very moment he heard a second shot. Smith had spotted him and was zeroing in. The crest of the ridge was near, and Cole felt hot tears running down his face as he winced with pain, pushing for the relative safety of the crest. A third shot rang out as he gained the crest and loped toward the sharp drop-off point. Here he was shielded from view by the swell of the land, but he once again had to choose which way to go. The ground, slippery with snow, made the choice difficult. He stopped, keeled over, and vomited. He wiped blood from his eyes and sucked breath into his lungs. He could not outrun David Smith. That much was obvious. There was enough daylight left that Smith could track him easily for the next hour. Cole figured he had less than five minutes before Smith was over the top of the ridge.
The Cardinal Divide was a broad, sweeping foothill ridge that ran roughly east and west, against the grain of the mostly north-south trending hills. Its western terminus was tucked into the wall of Front Range peaks that guarded the flank of Jasper National Park. To the east, it extended into the foothills and fingered toward the prairie. Along its crest it was devoid of trees except where the road crossed it at a low point. The ridge itself sloped gently, but fell off sharply to the north. A rocky band maybe fifty feet thick crowned the ridge there. Below the rocky outcrop the ridge fell away at a steep angle in a grass-covered slope.
With sudden clarity, Cole knew what to do. Determined, he ran along the ridge line to the east, dragging his feet in the snow, pushing as much of it as he could while covering as much ground as possible. He ran right along the rocky drop off, his head dizzy as the earth slipped away to his left and disappeared into the fog below. He came to the place where he had sat and watched the grizzly sow and her cubs and pressed farther down the slope, and then quickly turned back. He counted on the fading light and the wet snow to cover his tracks. He struggled back a few hundred feet and then, fearing he would meet David Smith running down the slope, found a crevice in the rock and, flashlight tucked under one arm, lowered himself in. He wedged himself there, feet on tiny knobs of stone, his head a few feet below the top of the rocks. He had chosen a place where his tracks had come close to the rock, and he took pains to step from those broad tracks to the stone without disturbing any snow.
And he waited, his heart beating so loudly that he worried David Smith might hear it. He closed his eyes and calmed his breath. He felt the searing pain reach from his ankle up his leg and into his torso. He breathed slowly.
Two minutes is a long time to wait for death. In two minutes there is plenty of opportunity for every bad decision you’ve ever made to play itself out in the theatre of your mind. So it was with Cole Blackwater. He even had time to re-run some of the really colossally bad mistakes he’d made. The moment of indiscretion when he had met Nancy Webber that turned into a marriage-ending affair. The lie that he told to preserve his ego, and the life path that it cost him. Had cost Nancy. The foolish belief that by returning to the family ranch something good might come. He pressed his eyes shut and tried to block out the awful sound, the roar of the shotgun in the barn that always ended that dark memory.
The only good decision he made was to follow Sarah to Vancouver. He pressed his mind to hold onto that choice. He had, over the last three years, worked hard every day to be a good father, a loving, if not completely dependable, father to his daughter.
That was what he was thinking when he heard David Smith’s laboured breathing above him. In the crepuscular light he saw Smith not fifteen feet away, walking along his tracks. The man appeared to favour his right leg. He too had been injured, but not as badly as Cole. He wore a grey-green canvas coat and a camouflage ball cap, and in his arms, held at the ready, was a short-barrelled hunting rifle with a scope mounted on top, the type that Cole had used as a young man hunting deer in the Eastern Slopes. Cole held his breath as David Smith moved above him, studying the tracks. He made up his mind to jump backward if Smith spotted him as he had at the admin building only a few hours before. He would take his chances with the fifty-foot drop, loose stone, and what would certainly be a long, bone-crushing roll down the steep northing slope of the Cardinal Divide.
Cole watched as Smith stepped carefully past his hiding place. Now, thought Cole, was the moment to make his move. He guessed that Smith would come to the end of his tracks, where Cole had turned around, in less than a minute. Left elbow aching, Cole hoisted himself up the narrow crevice. He put the flashlight down in the snow and pulled himself up to the crest. He grabbed the heavy flashlight. His adrenaline surging, his temples pounding, he began to slowly close the gap between himself and David Smith.
Snow obliterates most sound, and so it was that Cole could get behind David Smith without being heard. Smith stepped onto the rock that Cole sat on to watch the grizzly family, and looked down to see Cole’s tracks end twenty feet down the ridge.
Smith stopped.
Cole stepped onto the rock.
He brought the flashlight back behind him with his right arm and swung.
At that moment Smith turned, realizing that his quarry had doubled back, and saw Cole looming right behind him. Smith gasped. His eyes bulged and his mouth opened as if to speak. Cole arced the flashlight down at Smith’s head. But Smith was able to raise his left arm and the barrel of the rifle as Cole swung the heavy flashlight toward him. The blow caught the gun barrel first, knocked the rifle from Smith’s hands, and then hit Smith in the side of the head with an audible crack. The man went down on one knee, the gun falling into the snow on the edge of the drop off.
Cole winced in pain as he completed the swing, his left ankle giving out under the force of his blow. The two men knelt in front of each other in the snow. Smith put his right hand down to steady himself. His eyes lacked focus. Cole blinked back tears and raised the flashlight again. As he struck, Smith lunged at him and the blow hit the man’s back. Smith and Cole were locked in each other’s arms, Cole beating at the man with the light and Smith punching at Cole with left and right jabs to his sides and kidneys. They rolled on the rocks and in the snow this way, pummelled each other with blows to the body, back, and arms, each man protecting his head. Cole pushed Smith away with his right foot and managed to land two quick punches to David Smith’s face so that a spray of blood erupted from his nose. But Smith then found Cole’s weakness. As the two men rolled, Smith’s knee connected with Cole’s ankle, and he roared in pain. Smith brought his foot down on the ankle and Cole blacked out. He felt a fist connect with his face and the world went momentarily white. He hit the rocks and felt the cold of the snow on his neck but he did not make any sound.
“This has gone far enough.” David Smith spat blood as he spoke. “Far enough.”
He struggled to his feet. Cole saw Smith through clouds of blood and the dizzying pain that obscured his vision.
“You fucking people come in here and try to fuck everything up. You try to destroy my town, and ruin my career. I own this fucking town,” Smith ranted. He moved backward, turn
ed around, and searched the ground.
“And no Goddamn pointy head or some two-bit has-been is going to stop me.”
Cole struggled to sit up. He felt like puking and his left arm didn’t want to work so he kept falling over.
“I’m going to make things right again. Now things will be back to normal around here.”
He’s looking for the rifle, thought Cole. If he finds it, I’ll never see Sarah again. He steadied himself with his left hand and tried to make his legs work. He was nauseated and couldn’t see anything but dim outlines. But he knew Smith neared the gun in the snow. He could see, through the miasma of pain and blood and memory, Smith bend over.
“Now, Mr. Blackwater ...”
The retort a pistol shot makes when heard in the open is so much quieter than one might expect, especially after hearing the blast from a rifle or shotgun. So it was that Cole heard the pop and then a voice yell through the snow: “Don’t make another move!”
It was a female voice, and Cole’s brain tried to connect it with a face. Why did Nancy Webber have a gun?
“Don’t touch the rifle!” the voice called again. Cole tried to turn to see who spoke, but he fell sideways instead, his burning face cooled by the heavy, wet snow.
So it was that he didn’t see what happened next, but heard four quick pops, and then nothing more.
24
Alberta could break your heart. It was a place of paradox. The way the prairie grasses rose to the undulating swell of the Porcupine Hills and gave way to the twisted pines and clutching aspens at their summit. The way the land plunged again, down into valley after valley, the rise and fall of ridges of rough fescue along the corrugated spine of the Whaleback. Finally, the perpendicular thrust of the Front Range Mountains, peaks dragging their ragged edges along the basement of heaven. It was heartbreakingly beautiful. But what could break your heart without remorse was how little regard some had for its majesty. Torn and ripped by off-highway vehicles. Plundered by logging and oil and gas companies. The guts ripped out of the land by mining. That left your heart in pieces.
The Cardinal Divide Page 35