“No,” I gasped down to Beau’s eyes, looking desperately up at me. “No.”
Dogs die. But not my dog. Not like that.
Not my dog that exploded out from darkness to chase the wolves away. My dog that pulled me from a river. My dog that followed me up a mountain in a blizzard. My dog that tried to jump over death because I told him to. My dog.
I tried to stretch down but I knew it was hopeless. He was wedged a good six feet down, way past my groping fingertips. Beau whined. He tried to bark, and he slid a few inches lower.
“Hold still, Beau!” I hollered. Then I remembered the rope in my backpack. And Beau’s favorite game. Tug-of-war.
I jumped back and grabbed my backpack and opened it up and yanked the coiled rope from inside and dove back to the edge of the crevasse. I circled a few loops around my waist and made sure I had enough slack to reach him and then tied a knot at the very end.
“Okay, buddy!” I shouted down to his terrified face. “Tug-of-war time, okay? Do you wanna play?” Beau whined back and slid a couple more terrible inches away. I dug my knees into the crusty snow as best I could and threw the end of the rope down the crevasse.
It dangled in front of Beau’s face. He didn’t grab it. I shook it in front of his nose and he jerked his head to keep it away.
“No, Beau! Grab it! Tug-of-war!” My voice was high and panicked. It sounded strange in my ears, like I was hearing some other kid screaming. Beau’s eyes dropped even farther into the crack. My muscles shook and my belly tossed and surged. Hot tears sprang into my eyes. “Now, Beau!” I shrieked. “Grab it, boy! Grab the rope! Please!”
The rope bounced in front of his nose. Beau snapped with his jaws and grabbed it. I felt his weight jerk around my waist.
“Yes! Good boy! Good boy! Hold on!”
I started to pull. He wouldn’t budge at first but there was no way I was giving up. I heaved back and he slid loose from the ice’s deadly grip. Hand over hand I hauled him up, my back and arms stinging, but not slowing for a second. Beau’s teeth were locked onto the rope and I prayed he wouldn’t lose his grip or let go. When he was almost to the top, a mere foot from the rim, I pulled myself up to my feet in one final lift and fell backward.
Beau’s head and front legs pulled up over the ice. Lying on my back, I could see him between my feet, scrambling on the ice with his front paws. I yanked the rope with all that I had left in my arms, and Beau, still clenching the rope between his teeth, popped up out of the crevasse and onto my chest.
I lay on my back, gasping great empty breaths to the sky. Beau shook himself and whined and clambered on top of me. His weight pressed what little air I had out of my lungs, but I didn’t push him off. I wrapped my arms tightly around my dog and hugged him and closed my eyes.
“I almost lost you there, buddy,” I wheezed into his fur. I felt his tail slapping against me.
“I’m sorry.” I said the words, and there were hard tears in my throat. “I’m so sorry.” Once I said the words there was no stopping, and I buried my face in my dog’s icy coat and I cried, big breaking sobs that shook us both. I tried to breathe between sobs, but the air was so thin I couldn’t get much. So I panted and cried, choking on my tears. I was sorry for so much.
Finally, I sniffed and shivered and slid Beau off of me. I rolled over and pulled myself up to my knees. I wiped the tears from my eyes with my sleeve so they wouldn’t freeze to ice on my skin. The howling darkness was huge around me. Like the shadow of a giant’s foot held just over my head. I knelt in the blackness and the ice and I looked uphill, squinting against the flying ice.
And then, it happened. What I’d been waiting for.
The wind roared to a higher pitch. The snow came sideways and bit with stinging flakes at my face.
And then, a breathless silence. A stillness, like a dream. The blowing gusts of snow gave way. They broke and parted and it was there, huge and beautiful and so close I could reach out and touch it.
I knelt alone in the snow with death all around me, and I saw the mountain.
Not alone. Beau was beside me, of course. And the mountain was before me. White and shining, painted impossibly bright by the moonlight. Shocking, unmovable white against the black of the sky and the storm and the darkness.
Mount Rainier is an awesome mountain. It is fierce and it is proud. It is almost angry against the sky.
My mouth dropped open. My heart fell down into an icy crevasse and came back up flying.
My hands fumbled at the zipper of my coat. I yanked at my clothes and pulled my camera free and held it up to everything I’d been seeking. I didn’t know if the mountain, so grand, could fit in the small frame of the camera. But I held it up and I pointed it and pressed my gloved finger on the button.
I couldn’t even tell if the picture had been taken. Maybe my finger, so numb inside its glove, hadn’t pressed the button all the way down. Maybe the electronics inside the camera had long since frozen in the bitter cold. But I held the camera up and I saw through its little square window the mountain I had come to find and conquer.
It was weird how something could look so close and so far away at the same time. Like I could reach out and touch it, but I could walk all day and night and never get there.
My breath huffed out of me and I dropped a hand to Beau’s head. He was standing, as always, beside me.
“I don’t want to die,” I said. I looked down at Beau and talked through my tears. “I don’t want to die, Beau. Not here.” As soon as I said it, out loud in the darkness with the hugeness of the mountain before me, all the anger and aloneness that had haunted my heart blew away like the clouds from the mountaintop.
I thought of the waitress at the diner, that first dark night away from home. I thought of how she’d tried to help me. And I’d been too angry. I wished I could go back. I thought of that waitress and her helping, and I lifted one foot up and planted it in the snow.
I thought of the kid who’d beaten me up. Thought of his eyes when he’d seen my head, my baldness. And he’d left me money. It was my money, maybe, but I was a stranger with a bloody face and he’d given something to me that he didn’t have to. I set my other foot in the snow and rose to standing.
I thought of the three angels, singing their songs in a hot kitchen on a cold city morning. I thought of their voices and I could almost hear them and almost smell the food they pressed into my hands and I took a step forward.
No, not forward. A step backward. A step down the mountain. A step toward home.
I thought of little Shelby, sitting on a bus on her way to see her daddy. Hurt and angry. But still wanting to make friends with the weird skinny kid in the seat behind her. Two more steps, tripping but still moving down the mountain. Beau stumbled shivering beside me.
I thought of the shuttle bus driver who figured I was a thief but who was going to stop on his own time and give me a ride home. I took another step.
I thought of Wesley. I thought of his lost son, far away and dead. I thought of the sandwich he’d given me and the music on his radio and the smell of cigar smoke and his eyes when he’d dropped me off. I thought of what Wesley had said — “We’re all in this thing together” — and I kept walking.
I thought of my mom and my dad. Of long nights in hospitals. Of quiet crying when they thought I was asleep. Of brave smiles to cheer me up. I thought of all of it, and I ached with it all.
I thought of Jess. The best of best friends. The faithful visitor. The warmest smile. The sitting beside beds and not having to talk. Just being there. The secret-keeper. I thought of the last words I’d heard her shout as I was hanging up: “I need you!”
I didn’t have to think of Beau. He still panted beside me. The friend who always was. Who followed anywhere. Who pulled me out of freezing rivers and away from crevasses I didn’t see. Who jumped over death to stay with me.
I didn’t feel alone on the mountain anymore. Not at all. I could feel them all crowded around me. I had thought I could do it
alone. But I couldn’t. And I didn’t want to.
There’s no such thing as alone. That’s the truth.
I was breathing as hard as I could — big, mouth-open breaths like a fish in the bottom of a boat. My lungs still felt empty. There was not enough air to hold me up. But I kept going.
I trudged downhill, alongside the crevasse. There was no way I was gonna make Beau jump that again. I’d head down the crevasse until it ended, then go around it. Downhill was the important part.
I wasn’t cold anymore. The wind still pushed and pulled at me with slapping hands, and it still wormed up my sleeves and down my neck. Snow still stung my face. My feet and hands and nose were still numb. But I wasn’t cold.
And I wasn’t angry.
Not even a little bit.
Here’s what I get: everything. Taking my weak little steps through the snow down that mountain, I got it all. I thought of all my sickness, all my anger, all my fear. All that was just the darkness, just the storm. I got lost in it. But there’s always the other side of the storm. And the people who get you there.
All the world’s a storm, I guess, and we all get lost sometimes. We look for mountains in the clouds to make it all seem like it’s worth it, like it means something. And sometimes we see them. And we keep going.
I kept going.
For hours, maybe. I have no idea. I just know it got darker and warmer and I kept going. The wind got so strong it almost blew me down the mountain, but I kept going. I couldn’t hardly hold a thought in my head, but I kept going.
Right up until I didn’t.
I stumbled a lot that last long march along the crevasse. Every few steps, really. And I just got back up and kept going. But there came a time when I stumbled and lay in the snow with the wind howling over me, and I didn’t get back up.
For a while I didn’t even realize that I hadn’t gotten up. My brain was long-gone from cold and exhaustion and the thin, oxygen-starved air. I’d been walking numb like a ghost with only faces from my memory in front of me. It was only when I felt Beau nudging me with his nose that I blinked and saw that I was lying down. There was enough snow over my outstretched arm that I could tell I’d been lying there for a few minutes.
I squinted into the windy dark. Just ahead, through the snow, I could see a darker shadow. It was a ledge, a little cliff, with a small hollow underneath. I pulled myself up to my hands and knees.
“I need to rest,” I told Beau, though my lips were so dead from the cold it just sounded like a groaned mumble. “Just for a little bit.”
He whined back. It sounded as weak as my mumble.
I crawled toward the hollow.
Beau walked beside me, so close he was almost underneath me.
I love that dog.
There was a little space, under the overhang, out of the wind. It was probably still bitter cold, but I was long past feeling it. The space just felt soft, and still, and quiet. Beau curled up beside me, right against my side, and laid his head across my chest. He was shivering. I put my arm over him.
I thought about my notebook, but it was no use. My brain couldn’t count syllables. And my hand couldn’t hold a pencil. And maybe there was nothing more to say.
I tried to fish my camera out from under my layers, but the numbness now was past my fingers and through my hands and starting up my arms. I lay back in the darkness and breathed in the cold, shallow air.
I blinked. Sometimes I blinked for a long time. And memories flashed through my mind. And faces. All good things. Those are what made it through the storm. I smiled in the darkness.
“I almost made it,” I mumbled to Beau, though whether I meant to the top or back home I wasn’t even sure.
At some point I woke up with a start and realized that Beau wasn’t under my arm.
I jolted up in the blackness and looked around. There was wind and there was dark and there was snow. But there was no Beau.
My dog had left me.
I swallowed once, hard and hot.
And I lay back down.
It had been my plan. I would climb the mountain. I probably wouldn’t come back. If I died, Beau would find his way back. He was a dog, and a smart one. He would know enough to leave me, know enough to follow our path back down to people who would help him. It was my plan.
But it was still hard. Hard to be left behind. Hard that he left me, there, alone. But I wanted him to go. I wanted him to live. That’s the truth.
“Good-bye, buddy,” I whispered into the storm. I don’t think any sound came out of my mouth. But my lips moved. “Good luck. I love you, Beau.”
The wind closed in around me, and the darkness.
I was alone. But not really, at all.
My face smiled through the cold as I thought of my dog climbing down the mountain into open arms, helping hands, warm places. And I thought of him coming home to Jess, to my mom and dad so far away. But so close. Right there with me, really. I smiled through the cold.
And I closed my eyes to die.
Days pulled out of time.
Those weeks that were a lifetime.
Watching him come back.
Jessie watched the world spin around her in those days after they found Mark on the mountain. TV cameras; doctors; reporters; police; Mark’s parents, including her like she was a part of the family. The three of them had driven through the storm and over the mountains, following the path that Mark had taken to Seattle. His mom never put her cell phone down, receiving the updates from the authorities, the search and rescue coordinator, the state police, the National Park Service. She spit the news out as fast as it came in her ear, sharing it with Mark’s dad and Jessie.
The rescue teams had gone up, through the raging storm, through the darkness and the danger, and they’d found him tucked in a little empty space under a snow ledge. So close to dead that they thought he was.
But he wasn’t. Not quite. Not yet.
Because of the state of the roads he beat them to the hospital in Seattle, flying through the clouds in a medevac helicopter.
Jessie and his parents ran in, escorted by police and shouted at by reporters, and there he was: scary pale and graveyard thin, lying in bed and hooked up to a jumble of tubes and pumps and beeping machines. He wasn’t moving. The doctors had rattled off all the things he’d had: frostbite, dehydration, exhaustion, hypothermia, shock. Cancer.
The whole trip had been too much. The sleeplessness. Not enough food. The stress. Without his medicine, for most of it. At the very time that his body was beginning to fall apart.
He lay without waking for days, and all they could do was sit beside him and wait and listen to the words of the doctors.
“He should be dead already,” a doctor said once, and Jess had almost punched him. “He shouldn’t be dead at all!” she wanted to shout back into his face. “He shouldn’t even be sick!” But punching and shouting wouldn’t help, and she didn’t want them to make her leave. She needed to stay there, with Mark, by his side.
She was there when he finally woke up. His eyelids fluttered and he stirred and then his eyes opened and they found hers, alone in the room with him. His parents were out in the hall, talking to the doctors.
He smiled, a weak smile.
“Hey, Jess.”
Jessie opened her mouth, but no breath would come up from her lungs. Like the air was too thin. Her eyes blurred.
“Am I dead?” he asked. He didn’t sound scared.
Jessie shook her head.
“No,” she answered, her voice a quivering croak.
“Oh,” Mark answered, his voice peaceful and soft and only mildly surprised. His green eyes were so calm, and so wet and bright, and his head was so bald against the whiteness of the pillow. “Good.”
And that was it. Oh. Good.
But, then, a sudden dark storm in his eyes. He raised his head from the pillow.
“What about Beau? Is Beau alive?”
Jess blinked, and then blinked again. She looked away from Mark, o
ut the window at the sunlight, thinking of Beau.
Then she told him.
She told him how the rescuers had started up into the blizzard. There had been a phone hotline tip that Mark had headed up the mountain from Paradise. They hadn’t really thought that they had any chance of finding one skinny kid in all that weather, on all that mountain. But she told him how, less than a mile from the parking lot, they’d seen the little brown-and-black dog with the mismatched eyes coming down toward them. Frozen. Shaking. Barking. She told him how when they’d tried to pick him up the dog had run away from them, leading them back up the mountain.
She told him how they’d followed that shivering little dog as he floundered through the deep drifting snow. Even when he’d veered off the trail, they’d followed their guts and stayed with the dog.
She told him how he’d barked to warn them of the deadly black crevasse. How he’d hesitated for only a moment before leaping over the crack, barely making it to the other side.
She told him how they’d followed that little dog right to where Mark lay, curled up and almost frozen to death. She told him how that little dog had limped all the way back to his boy and collapsed right there beside him, his chin resting on Mark’s frozen gloves.
Beau hadn’t left him behind, she told him. He’d gone for help. And then brought it back.
Mark didn’t even wipe at the tears on his cheeks.
“Jess. Did he make it? Is he alive?”
Jess sniffed and wiped at her eyes and smiled.
“Yeah,” she said. And then she laughed. “He’s alive. They couldn’t get him off you. They had to carry him down on the stretcher, right on top of you. The vet’s amazed. Says there’s no way he should have survived all that.” She reached out and grabbed Mark’s hand. “But he had to survive it. To save you.”
The Honest Truth Page 11