The Signal

by Ron Carlson

  “You better tell him it’s Yvonne,” Mack said.

  “Leave it,” she said, not looking back, her punctuation. “Let’s go have some coffee and get the weather report.” They helped each other step up and over the stile, and Mack followed Vonnie across to Clay’s encampment. They leaned their packs against a big pine and went in the warm tent. Half the floor was pallet planking and half was green grass. Clay had two cots and a small woodstove. They all shook hands.

  “Home sweet home,” Vonnie said. She pointed at Clay’s coffee cup, pen, open journal.

  “And welcome to it,” Clay said. “Sit down. Tell me what to write in the book; my journal suffers from a bit of the same old.” He gathered his papers and set them on the one shelf.

  “We didn’t know if they’d hired a new kid.”

  “No, it’s this old kid. Six years now. The money’s good and I do love these hills.”

  “I forgot,” Vonnie said and she went out and came back with a loaf of bread in a paper sleeve. “I brought you some sourdough from Lucy’s in town.”

  “I’ll take it,” Clay said, “if you’ll trade for coffee.”

  “With cream,” she said. He lifted the blue enamel coffeepot from the steel stove surface and poured three tin cups, and he lifted a glass jar of half-and-half from his big igloo. “Who’s coming this year?”

  “It’s all doctors from Chicago. Some of them from last year. Bluebride’s bringing them four at a time.”

  “Where will they hunt?”

  “We’ll go south of here in the deep draws below Bellows and the three bald peaks. It’s thick timber and makes a great outing. I’ve been this week clearing trails.”

  They sat at the wooden picnic table inside the tent.

  “Anybody else above?” Mack asked.

  “Nobody has come by here from Cold Springs. It’s already snowed once. You guys going to Clark again? What is it? Ten years?”

  “It’s ten years,” Mack said. “There’s still fish in that lake. How’s Deb?”

  “She’s good. That real estate license has made a difference for us, but who wants their wife dressing up every day showing strange men empty mansions? Who wants mansions anyway? But she’s good.”

  “And Dougie?”

  “Dougie thinks school is heaven on earth. We’ve got some bona-fide artwork on the fridge.”

  “And those,” Mack pointed. There were sheets of crayoned squares and faces pinned to the tent wall.

  “Those,” Clay said.

  “He’s got the philosophy,” Mack said. “People and houses. Have you heard any helicopters?” Mack asked him.

  “No, sir. Are you thinking the vice president has gone fishing?”

  “I’m just asking,” Mack said. “I hope he isn’t.”

  “That’s the best coffee in Wyoming,” Vonnie said. “I’m glad you’re here.”

  “Stop by on the way down,” Clay told them. “There’ll be more. If I’m out with these guys, just come in and fire up some coffee. Stay the night if you need to.”

  Mack nodded at Clay’s book. “Put us in the journal as two optimists,” he said.

  “I did already,” Clay said. “Have fun.”

  The two hikers stepped out into the high-atmosphere sunshine and reclaimed the trail. Now it grew steep up the first hill, a series of long switchbacks. There were yellow blazes cut into the trees every thirty yards. One year on their fishing trip, it had snowed and they used the markings to pick their way down, tree by tree, arriving at the truck with the “coldest, wettest feet of all time,” according to Vonnie, and when Mack handed her the warm ball of thick wool socks from the glove compartment, she came into his arms so fully that socks became their joke for foreplay. The blazes now were shiny yellow, coated with sap at summer’s end.

  An hour later, at the top, they discharged their packs and sat against them, legs out, breathing. From the promontory they could see south now, over the hills they’d climbed, seven ridge-lines into the haze.

  “One second,” Vonnie said. “I’m going to pee.” She went off into the trees.

  Mack fished his BlackBerry from his pack pocket and dialed Yarnell’s code. He entered: 9200 feet, W. of Crowheart 14 mi. Send reading. He had told the older man that it was a needle in a field of haystacks, and Yarnell had given him the device and said: “Yes, and this is how it will find you. If you get within a mile, the blue dot will light.” Now Mack put it in his front pocket and stretched.

  A minute later Vonnie came back, and they stood stiffly and packed up. They walked the ridgeline for half an hour, pacing carefully, and then descended in four long narrow switchbacks to Cross Creek, a rivulet that they could step over and where the trail ascended sharply, the first place a person would be happy to have a horse. Slow and even was their way. They’d known sprinters, friends who rocketed ahead, marching in a race, then stopping for five minutes at each turn, blowing, and it had been proven to all parties that slow and steady, slower and steady, was best and most workable through a long day. At the top of this ridge they sat again and ate apples, not talking, eating them all down to the seeds. Behind them two pikas began to call from the rock spill, piping their hopes for any dropped candy, apple cores.

  “They remember us,” Mack said.

  “We’re invaders,” Vonnie said. “They’re scared. Are they pikas?”

  Mack piped back at the rocks, squeaking an imitation of their call.

  “I thought they only lived in Utah,” Vonnie said, picking up the old argument about the creatures.

  “These two are following us, hope in their hearts,” Mack said. “I’ll leave them some trail mix.”

  “Leave them your knife and your flashlight, you woodsman.”

  They drank from their canteens and started walking again. This hill gave onto a gradual rise, and the forest grew thicker and darker.

  Half an hour later in the deep shade, breathing, Vonnie stopped on the clay stairway of the trail and said, “This is your ptarmigan farm.”

  He looked up and knew the place. “It is. I’ll get them someday. They’ll be delicious.”

  “Don’t go through it again.”

  One year they had come upon a dozen of the big white mountain birds walking up the trail ahead of them, almost tame it seemed, and Mack had tried to kill one by throwing shale. He could get ten feet and throw, missing by inches. The birds didn’t panic but walked ahead. Dodos he called them, throwing and missing.

  “There is a dodo here,” she had said. As he hurled the stones at the unhurried assemblage, he described how he would cook the bird, how good it would be to have this savory fowl turning on a spit over a campfire. Then he described how he would fashion the elaborate spit out of green willows. Then after half an hour he gave up and the birds dispersed into the woods and let them pass.

  “I’m grateful their extinction won’t be pinned to me,” he had said. “But I would have so happily made that spit.”

  Now they came to Broad Meadow, a huge open circle through which ran Cold Creek, a jewel. They could see snow in patches in the far shade. The trail went right to the creek, which was a pretty amber flow as wide as a road, a foot or two deep and glistening in the rocky sunlight.

  “Don’t even think about it, Mack.”

  “It’s our trip,” he said.

  “It’s a trip, but we’re not doing any of that stuff. We’re going to fish Clark and hike out, like we said. I’m glad you’re feeling better,” she said. “But no way.”

  He had always carried her across, from the first year when it had been a surprise to both of them. He had suddenly picked her over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry, his hands clasped under her butt, and as he splashed through, she had laughed.

  “Then you carry me,” he said now. She walked upstream to the place where the stepping-stones were set and she walked carefully across and continued up the trail. He watched her for a moment. Then he knelt and washed his face in the cold water. He stood and took a deep breath and blew it out, and he fo
llowed her, keeping his old boots dry for the first time as he crossed Cold Creek.

  They had married in the dooryard of the home place, before fifty friends and Vonnie’s family and the three horses standing witness at the corral fence. A half hour before the ceremony his buddy Chester Hance had carried Vonnie off as the bridesmaids were having their pictures taken on hay bales in the barn. He’d lifted her sidesaddle onto Rusty as if for a photo, and then he’d mounted behind her and trotted up the famous horse trail into the aspens, waving his hat and hollering, “This lady has been abducted! She is too good for this horrid fate.”

  The young women hurried out of the barn, and they could hear Vonnie’s laughter as she struggled to say help and just laughed. Chester was a good rider. His colorful ransom note was discovered nailed to the barn door on a shirt cardboard. Half the letters were backward, and it occasioned another round of drinks. The entire scenario required Mack to ride up the trail backward on Copper Bob singing “Home on the Range.” The horse knew what to do even with the man on wrong. The wedding party stood below as he disappeared still facing them, singing and happy into the trees. A moment later Chester hollered again and galloped into view. “I don’t care if that gal is from the East Coast, she’s more bobcat than any of the locals I know.”

  Someone called out, “As if you know any!” and the wedding party turned to see Mack and Vonnie ride down the trail together.

  Sawyer Day, who was a justice, presided in his string bow tie, and they had a barbecue in the fragrant May day. Amarantha’s husband Brett ran the pit, and she had set a fabulous buffet on sawhorse tables just off the porch. The fifty guests danced on the plank floor of the barn until midnight and then one o’clock; the band was jazz-bluegrass from Cheyenne, led by a guy who had been at school with Vonnie. They played the extra hour gratis as a wedding gift. As the trucks filed out the ranch road in the dark, full of friends calling back their jokes and good wishes, Vonnie and Mack sat on the old porch swing and it grew silent, except for the sounds of the house settling which hadn’t felt such traffic for two or three years.

  It was the moment between the old and the new worlds. His father would have sat up with them a minute like this on the porch; he liked the still night, the sleeping ranch. And then he would have stood, pivoting with his hand on Mack’s shoulder, and Mack that night felt the hand there, a blessing. His father would have stepped down into the dooryard on his way to the bunkhouse for this night, and still walking away, he would have touched his hat and raised his glass.

  The horses looked at the couple from across the way. After half an hour in the night, Vonnie said, “I’m home.”

  “We’ll keep this place,” he said.

  “Somehow,” she said.

  “There isn’t much in making funky websites for the citizens of Jackson,” he said. “We’ll be land poor.” For Mack the night yard was full of ghosts, and he knew he wasn’t up to running a guest ranch. He could never greet the guests with the equanimity and grace—and real friendliness—his father mustered. He would feel a fraud.

  “There’s stuff,” she said. “I’ll teach.”

  “You married a ranch hand,” he said.

  “I did. I love that you’re a hand.”

  “And you’re a heart,” he said.

  “Now we’re really talking,” she said. “Let’s kiss.” The three horses stood in the dark, their eyes unmoving. She whispered, “I didn’t marry you for that horse. Let’s go inside.”

  Now it was the warm high center of the day, and Mack and Vonnie ten feet apart moved up the trail, the sun on their necks. She stopped when they stepped into the beginnings of the rock field between the two verdant mountains. It was a mile of slumped talus through which the pack trail wound, a white line in the gray rock, struck there by horseshoes for uncountable years. The wind now blew north unimpeded, cuffing every loose sleeve. “Let’s go up to the cairns and eat some lunch,” he said.

  “This has always been a weird place,” she said, falling in behind him. For a while the world was rock and sky pressed by the wind. This was where the earth ended and the sky began, and the sky worked steadily for more. The trail was rippled and craggy and every step asked a balance, and Mack and Vonnie kept their arms out as if skiing. Mack’s knees burned as they stepped over the top and found shelter from the sharp air. They sat at the crest against a sunny wall of the granite and looked ahead at the pitched green pine slopes of the massive upper valleys of the Wind River Range. South were the rocky towers of a grand cirque, Armitage, Bellow, and Craig, mountains that were in a score of picture calendars in Europe every year, mountains that had claimed a hundred lives, mountains with a dozen saucy nicknames each, the nicknames climbers give to dangerous places, wicked names and apt. North were the blankets of evergreens that ran aground at 11,500 feet and showed the round rocky promontories of the oldest mountains in Wyoming, striations of silver rock run and capped most of the year with snow at the summits.

  “You get up here and you can see the planet again,” she said.

  “Our planet,” he said.

  “It’s not ours.”

  “You don’t know that. It looks like ours.”

  “You got any Vienna sausages?” she asked.

  “I might,” he said. “I’ve got this for you now.” He handed her a round of fresh pita bread and then a thick slice of yellow cheddar. He peeled the lid from a tin of sardines in olive oil and lifted half of them onto her open bread with his pocketknife.

  “All the food groups, thank you very much.” They ate in silence. It was strange and pleasant out of the wind, and they could now both feel the high chill of being sunburned.

  Then the trail was packed dirt winding down the first western slope, sage and berried-scrub and willows until they entered the trees again at a place they called the Gateway because of the great dead skeleton of a ponderosa standing over the trail, and high in it on a huge branch strung an old withered pair of hiking boots that had hung there through the years. Every time they saw someone barefoot in Jackson, one of them would say, I know where her shoes are, or I know where that guy could get a pair of boots. The descent leveled off and they crossed a tributary of the river, a stream that needed just a long step, and then the trail followed it gradually downhill. This became a valley that twisted north and south, the creek bubbling as they went and they moved apace. It was in this place that Mack always began to feel finally a long way from his truck, from town, from all of it. He could breathe; they were almost in.

  From here Mack could see the switchbacks of the western trail that led over the rim to Jackpine Lake, which was really three lakes, where his father had taken him when he was ten. It had been a great trip and a lesson, his father talking on the drive out from town, saying, “What have we got now?”

  “Sir?”

  “How many horses?”

  “Eleven.” Mack knew them all by heart.

  “Here,” his father said, “right now?”

  “None. No horses.”

  “And how many acres and ranches and buildings big and small, including tractors and saddles and tables and chairs and ladders and fences all totaled?”

  Mack looked at his father’s face as he drove. The faint smile. “None?”

  “That’s right, Mack. Just us and the truck and our gear, as I see it. You with me?”

  “Yes, sir, I am.”

  At the trailhead they’d packed up and when they had climbed over the first hill, he’d said, “And how many trucks?”

  “No trucks,” Mack had said.

  They’d camped at Jackpine, between the lakes, and the next day they’d walked around Larger Jackpine, and his father had said, “And now no tents, no pans, no stove.”

  “Daypacks and gear,” Mack had said.

  At the far end there was a rock spill onto which they walked. First they’d stashed their packs and stepped out carefully to fish.

  Mack already knew the answers. “Our poles and some gear.”

  “That’s abou
t right,” his father had said. “You got your knife, Mack?”

  “My knife and some matches. Four flies.”

  “Well, this is very fine indeed,” his father had said. “We’re just about ourselves now. This is working perfectly. Three lakes and three days. We’re getting down to some very fine mathematics.” He swung his line free and gathered it back to cast. “Let’s fish.”

  Mack had looked at the man, sleeves rolled, lifting a cast out onto the blue-brown mystery of the lake surface, and that line marked the known world from the unknown, and Mack wondered how he understood the depth of this little bay, how he knew where the fish were, how he knew everything he knew. The wondering seemed to hurt Mack’s heart which he understood simply to be love, the aching desire to measure up, to master the mathematics.

  The stream joined the Wind River in a muddy open glade criss crossed with game trails, deer, elk, and moose tracks, a party. Mack walked the perimeter of the area and toed a small fist of bear scat. “This guy got into the gum,” he said. “There’s a bear full of tinfoil in these woods.”

  The sun was way west now and the shadows had changed, the day turned. They walked up along the Wind River to the two fallen logs, a bridge they’d used all the times, and they walked across the mountain river and sat down.

  “Can you feel the altitude?”

  “I think so. Let’s have some water.” Three deer came upstream and saw them and turned around and walked down.

  “That’s a nice pack Kent got you.”

  “I got it.”

  “For this trip?”

  “For my trips.”

  “Kent backpacks?”

  “He might.”

  “At two hundred seventy-five dollars an hour, it would be expensive hiking for that guy.”

  Vonnie rose and hefted her pack back into place high on her shoulders, cinching the waist strap. She led them away from the river on the old trail through the pines. A mile later she stopped at the rim of the upper bowl. Mack joined her and they looked down into the wilderness. “Where are we going to camp?”