by SUZAN STILL
“That’s west, so it’s evening.” Calypso stepped from the cave, shrugged off her pack and dropped it on the ground. They were standing at the base of a cliff soaring into an ultramarine sky that, to her cave-weary eyes, sparked electrically in the slanting rays of the sun. Before them was a steep downhill slope of tumbled boulders and low, scruffy brush.
“We’ve dropped almost a mile in elevation,” she said, glancing at Hill, who also seemed bedazzled by the sight of the sky. “That’s the Batopilas River just below us. It’s probably only a mile away.”
“I thought it was the Urique.”
“No, we’ve moved right through the mountain, from one river drainage to another.”
“Amazing! Where to now, fearless leader?”
“There’s an old mule trail that follows the river. It was built in the seventeenth century to bring supplies to the mines and to bring the bullion out. We’ll follow that into Batopilas. We keep a safe house there.”
“Is it far?”
Calypso picked up her pack and slung it over her shoulder. “Far enough. We won’t come close to getting there before dark.”
She began to pick her way down the slope toward the river. Hill started after her and then turned back, leaning his shoulders into the opening of the cave.
“Thank you,” he called. He didn’t know why he was doing it or to whom he was addressing his gratitude, but somewhere deep within him, he knew it was the right thing to do.
§
The western sky, clasped between twin prongs of cliffs, began to flame with radiant crimson and gold, and deep indigo shadows nested in the swales of the canyon. Calypso led the way down a steep scree slope made more difficult by the falling light.
“We can’t make Batopilas tonight,” she called back to Hill, who was lowering himself gingerly through a notch between two car-sized boulders. “It’s just too treacherous. We don’t need a broken leg to add to our woes.”
“I agree.” Hill’s legs were shaking with exhaustion and his entire body ached from the exertion in the cave. “Is there somewhere we could hole up for the night?” They were out of water and his words clicked off a dry tongue.
“There’s a spring up ahead.” Calypso’s voice was pinched with fatigue. “We’ll stop there for the night.”
A quarter hour of carefully lowering themselves down the treacherous slope brought them to a game trail beaten faintly into the loose gravel.
“We have to head back uphill a little,” Calypso said, pointing up the trail. “It’s not far.” Hill only nodded, then followed as Calypso turned right onto the trail.
A few more minutes of scrabbling uphill and they pulled themselves onto a tiny plateau. An extension of the cliff, like the flounce of a lady’s skirt hem, backed the flat space and from within the ruffled rocks came a delicious sound.
Rounding the edge of the outcrop, they came on a scene of astonishing beauty. The base of the rocks formed a shallow grotto, covered floor, walls and ceiling, with moss and hanging ferns. Water eddied down the back wall into a shallow pool that shown in last light like a silver shield. At the back of the pool, beside the falling water, was a figure of the Virgin of Guadalupe carved from the living stone, daubed with ochre and cloaked in shadow.
They dropped their packs and rummaged for their water bottles. Calypso entered the grotto first and knelt on the lip of the pool.
“There are animal tracks here,” she said. “Deer and raccoon.” She cast her eyes along the bank as she held her bottle submerged in the cool water. “And something else. . .” she frowned and bent to squint at the muddy border. “Sometime bigger. Maybe a large dog or a cougar. It’s hard to tell. The prints are all muddled.”
She pushed to her feet and backed out of the grotto, inviting Hill into it with a sweep of her hand. Then she raised the bottle to her lips and swallowed the sweet, cold water gratefully, in long pulls until the container was empty, her head thrown back and her eyes on the first stars winking above the iron clamps of the cliffs.
§
“How did you find this place?”
They were lounging around a small brush wood fire. Above them, the moonless night sky was limpid with starlight. A cold wind tugged at their mylar space blankets and made the fire gutter and smoke. Calypso drew her blanket more tightly around her shoulders and stared into the fire, remembering.
“It was the first time we made it all the way through the cave. We’d been trying to find the passage for months. A Rarámuri shaman told us it was possible, but we’d only come to blind ends before.”
She turned her eyes toward Hill.
“You can imagine how we felt once we’d started into the tube. I was sure we were going to die in there. I only kept going because Javier was ahead of me and I didn’t want to get separated from him. And he says he only kept going because I was behind him and he didn’t want to make me back up!” She laughed, shaking her head.
“So when we finally staggered out, we were exhausted and ready to die from thirst. It was summer, too, and so hot! I don’t know what we would have done if Suré hadn’t appeared, like a miracle.”
“Suré?”
“A Rarámuri man. We just looked up and there he was, standing on a boulder. He led us here.”
Calypso could still see him in her mind’s eye, with his long, bronze runner’s legs, his breechcloth and sky blue cotton shirt with long, gathered sleeves, staring at them as if they were as startling to him as he was to them.
“Kuira,” Javier had said. Hello.
“Kuira,” the man responded, his voice almost a whisper, as was customary among his shy people.
“Wawik?” Javier asked hopefully. Water?
The man shook his head. “Ke.” No.
At the time, they had only been at Rancho Cielo for two years and were still learning the language of the local indigenous. His linguistic cache almost expended, Javier asked, “Wawik—dónde?” Apparently bilingual, the man had pointed downhill and beckoned for them to follow. In due course, he led them up the game trail to the spring in the grotto.
“Suré works for us now,” Calypso said. “He had to give up his native ways because the cartels wanted him to grow marijuana instead of corn. When he refused, they threatened to kill his family, so he had to leave his little farm.” She sighed. “It’s so unfair, Walter. You really ought to write an exposé. The Rarámuri are being pushed off their lands, just like the Mayans in Chiapas. It’s the story of modern Mexico.”
“Not so very modern. Remember, it started with the Conquest, in 1519. It’s not exactly hot news.” Hill tossed another stick on the fire and chafed his hands together. “I thought Mexico was supposed to be hot and tropical.”
“It’s autumn, Walter, and you’re two thousand feet up in the Sierra. But when we get to Batopilas, you’ll see that it’s tropical. Up on our plateau there are pine and fir, but down here in the canyon there are date palms and citrus trees.”
They sat in silence, listening to the night wind moaning through the cliffs and spires of the canyon and the nearer, more companionable crackle of the fire. “It must be all over by now at the ranch,” Calypso ventured at last. Her voice was small and tight with worry. “When we get to Batopilas I’ll call. Or maybe there will be news waiting for us. Or maybe even,” her voice brightened, “Javier.”
Hill sat wrapped in his mylar blanket and stared glumly into the fire. He didn’t want to think about what had happened at Rancho Cielo, and he definitely did not want to voice to Calypso the nagging concern that weighed on him as if he were carrying a set of barbells.
“Maybe so,” he replied. “Maybe so.”
§
The growling of their stomachs woke them long before dawn. The fire had burned down so that not even embers remained, but the cold wind that had gained in ferocity during the night had died with it. Despite the emergency blankets, they were both stiff, sore, and deeply chilled.
“Do you have any food left in your pack, Walter?” Calypso had pushed hers
elf upright and was stacking tiny sticks in the blackened fire pit. “I’m all out.”
Hill sat up, dreading the next stage of ascension that would require him to rise to his feet.
“I’m out, too.”
Calypso lit the pyramid of sticks and sheltered them from the wind with her body until they flared into flame. She filled an aluminum bowl with water and set it on rocks near the flames.
“I still have some tea. When we’ve had that, I’ll see if I can find the ingredients for an energy drink the Rarámuri make. It fuels them to run day and night, sometimes for two hundred miles or more.”
“I feel like that, sometimes, when I’ve had my second espresso.”
“Yes, but do you do it?”
“What?”
“Run.”
He reached to a boulder, and with a grunt, pulled himself to his feet.
“I’ll be grateful if I can still walk.”
After tea, Calypso scouted the vegetation around the grotto.
“There’s a wild lime tree here and we’re in luck. It still has some fruit.” She came back to the fire with a handful of small, leathery green limes. “Now for some chia seeds.”
She followed the trickle of water that emanated from the grotto and crept darkly down through the rocks toward the river.
“Chia’s a member of the mint family,” she called back to him. “It grows wild along water courses here in the canyon. The seeds are very nutritious.”
Hill’s eyes followed as she picked her way through the rocks, bending to harvest seeds into her bowl from dry, wind-beaten seed head spires, and he marveled at her resilience. Despite the hell of the last two days, she looked fresh and beautiful, with her cheeks rouged by wind and her hair in a long braid over her shoulder. Her blue jeans were faded and abraded and she wore them, he reflected, as if she were on the street in Paris, with indefinable chic.
From his vantage point on the edge of the grotto plateau, the backdrop of canyon fell away behind her in shadowy shelves of indigo. She was so at home there, so comfortable in the wildness and chaos of it all, that Hill felt the old tug. He would never be free of it. For him, Calypso was the summation of womankind and rather than make him morose, this realization brightened his mind, like the sun that was just beginning to spill over the high cliffs to the east.
Here he was, in this impossibly feral place with the woman of his dreams, who was, in fact, a waking reality. In the sacred ceremony of life, he had just ingested the wafer, or the sliver of peyote, or the sacred mushroom. With the day’s dawning, his being flared like gates of light opening, allowing the holy moment to enter.
Even one instant of this pure and vivid life was worth all the rest, with its bills and sweltering airports, bad food, boring and officious people, and all the other accumulated ills of Western civilization. He would not trade this instant for all the rest of it put together. This, he knew in a flash of insight, was the purity of love and he rejoiced in it.
§
Calypso came to the fire, her face glowing from the climb back to the plateau, and set down the bowl with it’s small clutch of mottled gray and tan seeds. Then she went to the cliff face and bent toward the riffles of water-worn rock as if searching for something.
“It’s still here!” she said and held up a round, fist-sized stone in triumph. “I’ve used this every time we’ve come here,” she said over her shoulder, as she washed the rock in the pool.
Settling cross-legged by the fire, she set the aluminum bowl with the harvested chia seeds in her lap, then tore open two small pouches of honey from her pack and dribbled the amber runnels over the seeds. Finally, she threw in the limes, poured a small amount of water over everything, and then commenced macerating and grinding the lot into a paste using the stone as a pestle. When everything was a nasty, greenish-looking pulp to Hill’s watching eye, she began to add water until there was a thick, sludgy drink, clear to the brim of the bowl, which she held up to him with a smile.
“Here. Drink this. It’ll give you strength.”
Hill took the bowl from her and stared into it.
“I’ve never felt more dubious,” he said. “We’re a long way from medical assistance.”
Calypso sighed in exasperation.
“Here. Give it back to me.” Hill complied and Calypso tilted the brew to her lips without hesitation and drank deeply. “If I die in the next few moments,” she said acidly, “just bury me here. Don’t trouble yourself trying to lug me down the mountain.” She smiled at him brightly and when he reached for the bowl, held it just out of his reach. “You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t want any medical emergencies.” She shifted the bowl further still, as he leaned, reaching for it. “And no gagging, grimacing, or agonizing allowed.”
“I promise,” Hill said and his stomach gave a vicious growl as if in agreement. “I’ll be manly as Socrates with his hemlock.”
She relented and handed him the bowl. He sipped the liquid reluctantly and then his face brightened with wonder. He took another tentative sip and raised his face to the warmth of the just-risen sun.
“Well, I’ll be damned! It tastes good! Delicious even.” He buried his lips in the green liquid and drank deeply.
Calypso sat by the fire, snapping sticks and throwing them into the flames, a small smile playing around her lips. She could feel the tangy brew making its way inside her. Its living warmth, along with her fondness for Hill and his nattering ways, was the heat she needed to fuel another day of exertion.
In her mind’s eye, she clambered downhill through the boulder field, all the way to the old mule trail that ran along the riverbank. The river would be rushing over its stones, with a slight morning breeze riffling the surface and water ouzels bobbing on spray-misted rocks midstream. Alders, bare now in the autumn cold, would lift their dark limbs in silhouette against the clear and piercingly blue sky. It would be a scene of serenity and peace and it would belie all that the dreams had told her.
§
It was an image straight out of her dreams but it was real, and it was standing not five feet away, elevated on a flat outcrop of rock. Without a sound, a large animal had materialized and with a gasp, Calypso turned to face it. She heard Hill give a yip of alarm and brought her hand down, in a gesture demanding his silence and immobility.
This, she knew instantly, was the creature that had left its prints in the mud of the grotto. It was not a large dog or a panther, as she had suspected, but a wolf.
“Good morning,” she crooned softly. “You’re looking very beautiful this morning.”
It was true—the wolf was a magnificent animal, tall, lean and sleek. Its charcoal and gray coat, deep, soft, and silvery, russet around the face, sifted gently in the morning breeze. Its yellow eyes stared into hers unwaveringly and Calypso stared back.
The standoff continued for several seconds, during which the wind brought the sound of the river’s rushing far below, the chirp of birds in nearby bushes, and the green scent of the grotto. Calypso’s mind was frozen. She could think of nothing to do about their situation. The wolf seemed equally undecided.
The small sound of rolling pebbles broke their trance. The animal turned its head toward the noise, and Calypso’s eyes darted in its direction, as a man emerged from the foliage near the mouth of the grotto.
“Down, Lobo!” he commanded and the wolf sank dutifully to the stone. Calypso had expected a Rarámuri but the man was Anglo or part-Hispanic and spoke English. He was tall, lean, and gray-haired like the wolf and his stance was tense, as if any quick movement on her part would set him into instant and deadly motion. She had met men like him before, men cut off from the mainstream of society, accustomed to making their own laws, imposing their own judgments. Altogether, she thought fleetingly, she would rather take her chances with the wolf.
“What are you doing here?” he asked, scanning Calypso and Hill behind her with pale blue, expressionless eyes.
“We’re hiking
in the canyon,” Calypso answered. “We spent the night here. We’re just preparing to leave.”
The man continued to stare, and the wolf’s yellow eyes were also unwavering. Calypso felt a crawl of dread move through her. Had they escaped the battle at the ranch only to fall into far worse hands? She squared her shoulders and stared back at him impassively.
The man moved closer. He was wearing faded jungle camouflage pants and a black windbreaker, and something in the way he moved caused his image to blur into the surrounding shadows, rocks and greenery, and then come into focus again, mirage-like. Ex-Recon, her intuition told her. Silently, on crepe-soled boots, he crept closer until he was standing above her, with the wolf at his feet.
“I won’t hurt you,” he said, never breaking his stare.
Calypso did not believe him. Everything instinctual was aroused. Red lights flashed and alarm bells clanged beneath her immobility. She felt her body tense, her breath coming in short gasps, and her leg muscles tighten. She knew she should run, but instead watched him warily, feeling already overpowered.
The move was too sudden for her to anticipate. In an instant, he had leapt beside her and her arm was in his vice-like grip. Before she could react or even cry out, he whipped his hand from his jacket pocket and flung a fistful of white powder into her face. She heard Hill’s yell and felt the collision of his body against hers as he tried to intervene. Then a wave of dizziness hit her brain and she felt herself slip down, away from the man’s grip. Her last impression was of the stones coming up to meet her and then everything went black.
§
A confusion of sounds, like voices on a tape being eaten by a boombox. Through one squinted eye, a sliver of piercing light. The voices warped and gurgled through the background, alternately liquid and viscous. She felt deeply ill. The hard surface under her seemed to be spinning and the centrifugal force of it blasted her out of consciousness again, sending her into a blackness slashed with yellow sabers of light.