“Hold on, Pops!”
His eyelids flickered and he grabbed the rail of the raft as we careened into the first dip and back up to the top of the water. I ruddered with the paddle as we went down into another dip, up and down again, then up, this time with force. The front of the raft went airborne and came down with a splash. Another large rock loomed, cutting the river in two, eddies swirling on either side. I paddled hard to the left and pushed off it with my bare foot as we careened around the rock and down into a deep trough. We spun sideways at the bottom, then shot up and over, each of us coming off the raft into the air, then splashing back with it. Three more roller-coaster dips and catapults, then one hundred yards of relative calm.
Up ahead was an even larger series of rapids, then more calm followed by empty space where the water charged over the cliff to a jet engine roar—it was the huge waterfall that marked Irish Ridge Trail. We took the first large dip with ease, sliding down and back up the wave with practiced piloting. In the second trough, the raft spun sideways and the tent snagged on a submerged rock. The nylon pulled tight as it caught on one of the crosspieces, and the raft flipped over, dumping Pops and me into the raging river. The current sucked me down deep and scraped me across rocks and the gravel riverbed. I pushed off the bottom and broke the surface just as I rode down a trough and over a wave. I looked upstream and downstream for Pops, but the river was empty.
Suddenly, his blue shirt flashed to the surface as he turned in the water, gasping for air. His good arm reached up in a one-armed backstroke. Blood was pouring from a gash on his scalp. He turned on his stomach, then went under again.
I swam to the place in the water were he went down and dove, feeling frantically for him. I opened my eyes, but the brown offered nothing. I surfaced and spotted him struggling ten feet downstream. I reached him in three quick strokes, grabbed under his arms, and kicked with my legs to keep us both afloat. The overturned raft ran past and I grabbed it with my free arm, pulling Pops’ head out of the water.
The river turned slightly to the right, just enough to give us some swing to the far bank, but I could feel the pull of the current taking us closer to the cliff. I spied three boulders jutting from the water downstream, twenty feet apart and each one a little closer to the bank. I kicked with all my strength to the first rock and made it around to its far side. I pushed off as hard as I could, toward the far bank, and swam with Pops and the raft to the next. The raft hit the middle of the boulder and spun toward the bank. I pushed off again, like a swimmer on the last lap of a world-record race; and again at the third boulder. The force of my legs brought us out of the main current and into the calm water. A tree had fallen into the river, and a pile of limbs had collected in its dam. I kicked into the quiet of the fallen tree, bumping it gently like a broken fighter jet touching runway.
I stood in waist-deep water and pulled Pops to his feet. He was semiconscious, the deep wound in his head streaming blood. I dragged him to the shore and up onto the bank and laid him on a bed of leaves in the shade. Despite the heat, he was shivering as if he had been lost in a blizzard. I went back into the water to the raft and struggled to flip it over. The pack was still tied to a crosspiece. I floated the raft over to the side and labored it up onto the bank. The first aid kit and the poultice were still sealed in plastic. I quickly spread out the pack’s wet contents in the sun to dry and went to Pops.
His lips were gray, his face was bluish white, and his breathing was thin and raspy—whistling from his chest on the in and out. I opened his shirt. The wound was as gray as his lips. The poultice and plastic had washed away, leaving a film of dirty water in the angry tissue. I dried it with a clean shirt and repacked the entry hole with the poultice, then put the last of the root mash back in the bag. I taped plastic and gauze on the exit wound, then put a butterfly bandage on the laceration at his scalp line. One of the bedrolls was reasonably dry, so I wrapped him in it to ward off his chills, then went to the raft to assess the state of our equipment. The stretcher was in good shape; the ties had actually tightened in the water. I cut the knot on the raft logs and untied them from the carrier. I sawed the two end poles on the stretcher to make them even with the first crossbar. Then I hatcheted the other end poles at angles so they would glide over the ground. I removed the frame from the pack and lashed it to the first crosspiece, then tied the pack lengthwise as a prop to keep Pops’ good lung elevated. I put my arms through the shoulder straps and started toward the trail to test the rig. It moved easily across the ground but was heavy on my shoulders even without him.
I laid it next to Pops. He was still shivering from a phantom chill. I left him in the sleeping bag and brought his legs onto the travois, then looped my arms through his and shifted him over. He didn’t stir or make any sound. I quickly laid him on his side and tied him in, wrapping the rope around the edges of the spars and crisscrossing it across his body, trussing him up like a Shawnee infant.
I picked the travois up by the straps and rested the crosspiece on my knee and hooked my right shoulder into the strap, then the left. The frame had a padded belt, which helped balance the load. I tightened it and lifted the frame up to bear the weight on my hips. My legs wobbled; I took a shaky step forward, then another. Each step sent a jolt of pain up through my shins, which were scraped raw from the river bottom. I ignored the pain and bent over for pulling leverage, starting slowly toward the trail like a draft horse, pushing off each deliberate step with Pops’ walking stick. Once at the trail, the going was easier as the travois poles slid across the wet ground. The valley dipped down and the roar from the waterfall took all the forest sounds.
Up ahead the trail forked in three directions. I stood at the confluence of the paths, unsure which was the correct choice. I gently laid my burden down. I could see the beginning of Irish Ridge in the distance, but none of the trails appeared to lead up to it. The path to my left backtracked across the valley. The middle trail seemed to meander along the valley floor, leading nowhere. The path on the right bypassed the end of the ridge and kept going south. Any one of these could be the right trail, but none seemed familiar.
I looked over at Pops, whose breathing was shallow and weak. Panic began to take me. I ran five minutes up the left hand trail, hoping to find the Pancakes or some other known marking. I came back at hiking speed, counting on it to spark a memory. It all seemed new. I did the same up the other two trails but saw nothing to help me decide.
I knelt next to Pops. He had the complexion of a man on a slow creep to death. “Pops, I need your help.” Panic, exhaustion, hunger, stitching my voice. He stirred. “Pops, I need you.” I shook his good arm.
His eyes shot open. “Sarah, are you home, love?” he said in a voice only half his. “I stopped at Riordan’s and got those peaches you like. Sarah… are you home?”
I turned back to the trails, drew my knees up to my chest, and sobbed. Pops’ life was in my hands and I couldn’t even remember the right way home. It was the most hopeless I had ever felt. More helpless than in the car with Josh, his burned and blistered head in my lap. I wrapped my arms around my knees and buried my head in them. My only hope of ever actually having a father figure who cared about me was slipping away. With Buzzy gone, Pops going, and Mom out of her mind, I had no one left. Death would have been a welcome friend. At least in my life before this I had always had Pops.
I always had Pops.
Always had him.
I looked up from my knees and he was there. Standing in the middle of the trail watching me with curiosity and calm. I turned back to Pops, who had fallen unconscious. I was frozen as he moved toward me; three steps forward, then he stopped, lifting his head as if appraising all that was before him.
Chapter 34
THE WALKING-STICK SPEAR
He regarded me for a moment more, then turned and walked slowly to the middle trailhead. I stayed in front of Pops, squatting with hands on knees, blinking in disbelief. He took three steps down the trail, stopped again, and
looked back at me, waiting. His coat shimmered in the afternoon sun, seemed almost transparent in the heat of it—antlers that looked to have grown and multiplied in the days since.
I stood and quickly shouldered the travois, shoving my arms into the straps. I secured the belt and followed. He stayed a few hundred feet ahead of me, never looking back, slowing down when I faltered, speeding up as I quickened my pace. His hooves seemed to be walking on a cushion of air. After fifteen minutes the White Stag stopped in the trail, shimmering still, and turned around to face me. I took another step, he took a step back. I stopped. He regarded me with old, sentient eyes that gave me a remarkable certainty about the trail choice. I took a step forward and he turned and dashed into the trees.
I dragged Pops as quickly as I could to the spot where the Stag had broken trail. I wanted to see him one last time, wanted to look in those wise old eyes to know that everything would turn out okay. The woods were clear of underbrush, but the deer had disappeared—no white tail retreating in the gloam; no hooves on last year’s leaves. The trees were quiet; the only sound was the calling of a random bird. I stood staring at the place in the forest where the buck should have been, unsure of what I had just seen. Was I hallucinating from exhaustion, hunger, stress? Did I fall asleep on the trail and dream the animal? Or was he part of some unexplainable ordinance sent to shape an outcome? Regardless, I put my shoulder to the trail, plodding methodically step by arduous step.
At the crook of the first big incline, the four flat, stacked boulders of the Pancakes came into view. I laughed loudly. “They’re here, Pops. You can’t see them, but they’re here!” A slash of excitement and energy cut through me as I hurried my pace and pushed on past the rocks. After two hours, the path began to level out as I neared the top of Irish Ridge.
The trail was narrow but just wide enough so we could pass unhindered by the rocks and boulders that were strewn on either side of the course. Giant cotton-brained thunderclouds stretched across the horizon and seemed to be creeping closer at each break in the trees. A thick understory of redbud, dogwood, and silver bell created a canopy on the crest of the ridge and narrowed my focus so that the two trail edges became tracks and me a singular, purposeful, lumbering train pulling my cargo forward, relentlessly forward, in a deliberate, unstoppable rhythm until the night drove the evening west and the thunderheads pushed the thick air east. The boulders from the campsite loomed ahead as night and storm collided on the ridge.
I brought the carrier to the cold fire ring and laid Pops next to it. I freed myself from the travois and immediately was taken by the weightlessness one feels on a falling roller coaster. It was as if the power of the White Stag could even conjure a breach of gravity.
I grabbed a handful of pinecones for tinder and created a kindling tent from courtesy-pile wood. In a minute the camp was bright with fire glow.
Pops was unconscious by the fire, each inhale a fray with his battered lung, each exhale a triumph of volition. I took the cooking pot and flashlight and plunged over the side of the ridge to the spring. As I approached the pool, a large animal growled and moved away into the woods. Around the water, in the rim of mud, were two huge paw prints. I knelt to examine them. They were the tracks of a large cat, each the size of my palm, water from the saturated ground just starting to seep into them. Too tired and too worried about Pops, I filled the pot and hurried back up the slope to the fire. Pops was stirring, pushing against the ropes of the travois. I untied him.
“Annie?”
“It’s me. Kevin.”
“Kevin?”
“Your grandson.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I’m taking you home.”
“Where are we?”
“Up on Irish Ridge.”
His eyes darted to the unfamiliar. “Where’s Annie?”
“She’s home. We’ll see her soon.”
He laid his head back down and closed his eyes on the puzzlement of it all.
The water began to boil and I put a thumb-size portion of the poultice in the water and took it off the fire to cool. I put on a smaller pot with canteen water to make the willow tea. It came to a boil and I added a fistful of the bark and let it steep.
“I’m going to wash out the wound now. It’s probably going to hurt.”
He had fallen back to unconsciousness and didn’t answer. I opened his shirt. Even in the weak firelight I could see the spreading flower of infection on his chest. I poured the hot liquid into the wound. He didn’t flinch. I washed out the river scum, spread the exit wound with poultice, retaped the plastic on the chest wound, then dressed both holes in gauze.
By the time I was finished, the fire had burned low and a storm was filling the trees with bursting light. I fed the fire and wrapped Pops back up in the bedroll and sat looking into the flames. I thought about Buzzy and the certainty of that single rifle shot.
My mind pushed forward memories of my time with him: the first meeting under the tree house; the malevolence of Tilroy Budget; the easy friendship unburdened by the expectations of others; the Telling Cave and the horror of the burning hair and the beating and the burden Buzzy carried; our hike up to Glaston Lake and our too few days there, which gave me a first sweep of light for the future.
I jolted awake on a close shot of thunder. The fire had gone to embers, but the lightning storm was still sparking up the ridge.
“Are you back?” I called to the woods from wishful thinking. “Buzzy, is that you?” An intense bolt streaked the low sky, illuminating the camp and the ridgetop.
I saw him for only a second, then another second in after-image, a huge mountain lion crouched between two boulders on springed haunches ready to leap at me. I took up a smoldering stick and flung it. “Get out of here!” He stayed for a moment, then turned and went down the side of the ridge.
In panic, I threw two arms of wood onto the coals and almost extinguished the fire. I pulled the bowie from the side pack pocket and unsheathed it. It was a full foot long; the bright blade reflected the moon and the storm clouds passing in front of it. It was razor sharp but too short for anything but close defense.
I took up the walking stick, felt its heft in my hand, tested its strength with my foot. I lashed the knife to the end of it, fashioning a formidable spear. I stood and jabbed at the air, slashed at an imaginary foe.
The fire finally began to catch the wood; I stacked on more to light up the camp. As the flame built, I sat next to it and Pops, spear ready, facing the steep side of the ridge, where the big cougar had retreated. The light of the fire made it impossible to see into the woods, so I just crouched, staring at the wall of dark, whirling with the spear on every night sound.
Pops stirred, then opened his eyes. “Kevin?”
“Yeah, Pops,” I answered, not taking my guard off the darkness.
“I’d like my jug… please.”
“I don’t think it’s a good time for mash.”
“I got a hole… in my chest… size of a baseball. If I’m gonna die… want to die… with the taste of good mash… on my lips.”
I heard an owl hoot on my left and spun to it. “I’ve got a better idea: don’t die.”
“That’s my plan… but it’s good to have… a backup. What are you doing… with the spear?”
“There’s a big mountain lion out there. It was ready to strike when I threw a stick at it.”
“Why didn’t… you wake me?”
“Didn’t want to worry you. Besides, you’re shot and infected. You’re not in great shape for lion slaying.”
“I’ve got eyes and ears… another set… will be helpful.”
“Not as helpful as that crossbow pistol.”
Chapter 35
UNDER THE PROTECTION OF RED CLOUD
My recollections of that night on Irish Ridge so many summers ago often flash before me in the smallest of detail, as if it was all captured up in a documentary that my brain has stored in a vault all its own: the way the light of the fir
e gave color back to Pops’ face and softened his lines to years younger; the way my sense of hearing became catlike, able to discern even the faintest of night sounds; the way the clouds passed over us, making it seem as if the moon was moving; the way Pops’ eyes darted with fear I’d never seen.
It was the soft break of a twig behind us that made me whirl with spear ready. The big cat was sitting at the edge of firelight, only twenty feet away. I scrambled to my feet, grabbed the spear and a smoldering stick. “Hya!” I yelled. “Get out of here!” I jabbed the spear at him. The animal didn’t move. I flung the stick at his head, missing by inches. He didn’t flinch—just continued staring at me with quiet malevolence, tail flicking back and forth as if he was contemplating the fate of a wounded house mouse.
I stood over Pops, spear engaged.
“Try not to show any fear whatsoever,” he hissed. “He can smell that I’m wounded.”
But my hands were shaking and my knees felt ready to buckle. The cat continued to sit, watching us impassively. The fire was at embers and I moved carefully to the courtesy pile and threw wood on the coals, keeping one eye on the big cat.
“What’s he doing now?” Pops asked.
“Same. Just watching us.”
I waved the spear over my head and screamed, but the cat stood its ground. It was as if Pops and I were the occupants of a turned-around zoo, with the cat as a curious keeper observing our every movement. Or maybe we were in some protective cordon that the animal couldn’t penetrate. Regardless, the cat stayed, watching and watching. Tail twitching.
After a half hour of locked eyes and tensed muscles, I realized Pops had fallen unconscious. My legs were on fire from the standing, from the journey, and my back and shoulders were aching for relief. I had to sit, had to ease the pain in my legs—but only for a moment; only for a moment. That was all—just to ease my legs; only for a second; a second or two… tops.
The Secret Wisdom of the Earth Page 31