by Pam Withers
Judging from her boot prints, she’s worried and in a hurry — perhaps concerned she didn’t manage to kill me and I might be ahead. She has no idea how to avoid leaving broken twigs and upturned stones to flag her passage. In fact, it’s like taxiing along a lit-up runway. Hours into the day, I note one point where she stops for quite a while, as if wondering if I might be following her. Another time, she tries hiding in a patch of high, wet weeds, but I can tell by the way the breeze passes over them where she is, and I remain still and hidden until she stands up and carries on.
Farther on, there’s a muddy bend where it’s clear Brigit has crouched down and examined the mud as if searching for my boot prints in case I’m ahead, rather than behind. But she’s dealing with an experienced stalker; even if I’d snuck ahead, I’d never be caught unaware.
Bingo! I almost throw caution to the wind when I spot my pack, muddied and bobbing behind a log near shore. Again though, I sight signs of Brigit hiding nearby, perhaps thinking that if I’m still alive and following her, I’ll show up here to claim it. Patience, my father taught me. Slow down, clear your mind, make yourself invisible.
Patience being my specialty, I wait her out for an hour. Only when I know she’s well downstream do I emerge to grab it, open it, and cram a chocolate bar into my mouth, chased down by gulps of water from my bottle. Before snapping the pack’s buckles shut, I stash my father’s water bottle with its note inside.
• • •
The sun gets warmer; a breeze picks up and ripples the surface of the stream. The whole world smells like my mother’s favourite air freshener. I figure it must be noon when I first realize I’ve seen no signs of Brigit for half an hour. None at all. Wait! How could I lose her trail? Until now, it has been as clear as footsteps pressed into wet cement. She can’t just disappear. She has no idea how to be subtle. Unless — unless Dominik has rejoined her and wants to cover their trail. He would know how.
I find a stump, lower my ear to it, and listen for a long time. No people sounds. But the canyon around me has gone slightly quieter. Hmm. I scan the horizon left, right, and down. Oh yeah, must remember to look up, too. Just then, something drops from the tree overhead, knocks me over roughly, and headlocks me with a muscled arm.
“Ouch! Dominik! You’re hurting me!” I’m flat on my back, kicking like crazy, rocks pressing into me.
“Tak? And why would I worry about that after you tried to kill my girlfriend? Think you are such a great tracker, do you? Think she is easy prey? Think again. Classic case of the hunter becoming the hunted.”
“Huh? Dominik! Let go and I’ll explain —”
“Like I would believe anything you say. You have obviously ditched her and are following her. And she already told me what happened on Twin Falls: how you would not pull her up or down when she got caught under the falls and whistled. She nearly drowned. What do you have against my woman? Canyoneering is dangerous enough without playing revenge games the minute I disappear.”
Brigit moves into sight. Her smile is triumphant.
“Dominik!” I yell.
“So your father ran away with her mother. Who cares? Not worth turning against your guide, who had nothing to do with it. I never pegged you for a deranged creep, but you are not getting away with any more crap while I am around to protect her. Understand?”
I open my mouth, then close it again and exhale where I lie on the ground. What’s the point of fighting? Dominik is no longer my friend. But one thought comforts me: I don’t think he’d allow Brigit to kill me in his presence.
CHAPTER 19
We travel in tense silence for an hour before a rumble reaches our ears. Uh-oh, a big drop. I remind myself I was lucky not to bump into one while travelling alone and without a decent rope. There is an advantage to having rejoined my battalion, even if as a prisoner of war.
Defeated as I may feel in some ways, my body has not yet let go of the high-alert tracker mode I needed while avoiding Brigit. I remain hyper-aware of small birds hopping through leafy salal, the creak of branches stirred by the afternoon breeze, and the heat of the sun on my cheeks. So when we near the waterfall, I’m the first to see the ragged orange backpack beyond it, snagged on a dense bush growing out of a ledge halfway up the left side of the 150-foot-high gorge.
Glancing closer at the set of bushes where the pack has caught, I happen to spot the slightest movement: the wriggle of someone trying to stay still and hidden. Suspicions aroused, I run my eyes like high-power binocs up and down the wall between rim and pack — scanning dirt clumps, scraggly vegetation, and loose rock for any signs that someone or something has recently travelled down that line.
By the time my companions pause and stare in surprise at the pack, I’ve already reconstructed the scenario.
“Where did that come from?” Dominik asks.
“Washed down and caught during spring flooding?” Brigit guesses. She looks as startled by its presence as Dominik does.
No way has Brigit planted this one.
“My dad’s,” I confirm. My words prompt both to turn toward me.
“It obviously was not there when Search and Rescue swept the place,” Dominik says.
“Hmm,” I agree, but my total concentration is on the cliff, from rim to stream. The broken twigs, spilled rocks, and traces in the dirt between the cliff top and the hanging item indicate that someone relatively small — I’d bet a million dollars on Dean — free-climbed down, hung the pack on the branch, and is hiding this very minute on the ledge behind the bushes.
Not with Elspeth’s permission, that’s for sure. He’s a second-time escapee, I’m betting. Why would he do this? Just for the fun and challenge of it, knowing him. Or maybe he overheard Elspeth say something like the words she once uttered to me: Darling, before your father disappeared, he must have shed or dropped something. On a tree branch or ledge, perhaps. I feel it; I sense it.
How did Dean get his hands on my father’s pack? If Elspeth had had it all along, she’d have given it to me a week ago to help “cure” my mother, rather than encouraging me to go on some epic, dangerous search. Or just handed it to Mom herself.
No, my guess is that Brigit came across it — along with the boot — during her Search and Rescue expedition for my father, hid them in her pack, then in her house. She probably decided the boot and bandana were enough for her purposes on this trip, and left the pack behind.
I picture Dean stumbling onto the pack a day or two ago and cooking up the scheme of escaping Elspeth again and hiking through the forest to a point downstream of us to position it where we’d be sure to find it. Way more satisfying than waiting till I returned, or handing it over to Elspeth or Mom himself.
The scene is easy to imagine. Dean — enjoying his freedom in the woods and spying on us intermittently — chooses his spot and uses his considerable bouldering skills to scramble down the cliff to the bush on the ledge. Why? He wants a front-row seat to my retrieving the pack, and maybe he also wants to make sure all is well with his sister, Dominik, and me. If he only knew. And ha! Just now I catch a glimpse of his bushy black hair, though he’s doing a helluva job staying still.
Will Dominik’s sharp eyes spot Dean? Nope. He’s too distracted by scouting the falls.
“Too marginal to jump, right, honey?”
“Correct,” Brigit replies as she sets an anchor around a sturdy boulder and clips in. “Dominik, sweetie, okay if I go first and Tristan second? Then hold up a little while before you come down, please.”
“Whatever you say,” Dominik replies, beaming at her. “Then we will help Tristan get his father’s pack?”
“If that’s what he wants,” she says, turning to me friendly-like.
Brigit completes her descent. I follow, landing lightly in the shallow water below the falls, beside her on the left side of the creek. There is precious little bank here, just the torrent tumbling steeply between the gorg
e’s walls. Studying the pack hanging well downstream and halfway up the cliff on our left, I come to the same conclusion as Brigit.
“Impossible to reach without setting up a traverse line,” she says. A traverse line is for crossing a more or less horizontal and/or upward diagonal stretch of wall that’s too high off the ground to be safe for climbing without a rope.
“I’ll free-climb up a ways and find a place to anchor in, if you want to do the traverse,” she says.
That means I’ll climb up to her and then take the lead away from her — toward the bush behind which Dean is hiding and where the pack is hanging.
“Okay.” My eyes travel up to the backpack. Where did you lose your pack, Dad? When you stumbled from exhaustion and cold from that cave and got dragged into the current? Mom will get better, Dad. I promise to look after her, like you asked.
Brigit clambers ten feet up the gorge wall with our secondary rappel rope — slightly shortened by my earlier cut — which she got off Dominik before rappelling down the falls. The primary rappel rope is still dangling down the falls, of course.
She’s clearly assuming I really want my father’s pack. The truth is, I want a rope up there to rescue Dean; I’m worried about his safety. The bush he’s behind is not well-rooted, and he probably has no safety line. Piles of jagged rocks lurk in the stream that’s a seventy-five-foot freefall immediately under him. And unlike the portion of the wall he down-climbed, the lower half is sheer, smooth granite from the bush to the ground, no ledges or handholds to speak of.
Just because his climbing skills and guts allowed him to survive his dumb journey to the bush doesn’t mean he can budge from there without help. What was he thinking? If Brigit knew her brother was present and in potential danger, she would freak. But I’m not about to reveal him yet.
A quick whistle blast sounds from behind. Dominik mimes the question of whether Brigit is ready for him to rappel down the falls and join us yet.
She holds up one finger: another minute. Does she want him up there for safety reasons? I wonder. Maybe there’s something downstream she hasn’t told us about that makes her hesitant to have that rope pulled for good? The creek certainly drops away fast and steeply below the falls.
“Tristan! Ready for you,” she says.
She has herself and the rope anchored to webbing around an elbow of rock in the cliff face ten feet above me. She drops the rope my way. I tie the rope with a knot directly on the harness. Soon I’ve passed her and am lead-climbing, making my way upward and away from her along the cliff face, wedging my hands into cracks for handholds. It’s nice to know that if I slip, Brigit and the anchor will limit my fall.
I’ve managed several dozen feet when I hear three whistle blasts from Dominik: the emergency signal. I turn and freeze. While I wasn’t looking, Brigit unclipped herself from our webbing, down-climbed with no rope back to the base of the falls, and pulled Dominik’s dangling rappel line, stranding him above the falls.
And having sprinted and free-climbed back up to the elbow of rock and clipped herself back in, she’s ignoring Dominik’s horrified look and attempts to shout and whistle at us. My eyes meet his, and I give him a flat stare: It has taken you this long to figure out that she’s dangerous?
He’ll find a way down. He may have no rope, but he can free-climb down slowly and carefully if he’s desperate. He’s a better free-climber than all of us. That, or I’ll figure out a way to help him out when I return with Dean.
I pull my focus back to my footing. I’m tiptoeing along the edge of a poor excuse for a ledge, and handholds have all but disappeared. I’m still roughly at the same level as Brigit, but because the creekbed drops steeply in this section, I’m now a good twenty feet above the boulder-choked water. The nearly vertical stretch of granite beneath my toes features nasty-looking rocks beside the roaring whitewater.
I seem to be the only person aware that there’s an all-too-smug kid behind the bush. Meanwhile, I’m being anchored by a psycho who’s being shouted at by her jilted, puzzled, and momentarily helpless boyfriend.
At some point, either Dean is going to identify himself or Dominik is going to spot him and blow his cover. If either occurs before I’m within reach of Dean and get another anchor staked, Brigit will flip out.
My ledge is petering out; I’m in the most precarious part of my traverse. Carry on for Dean’s sake. As my handholds and footholds become ever more sketchy, the pounding in my rib cage feels violent enough to toss me off the wall. Desperately I search the granite for anything to hold on to. I spot a large nose of rock halfway between me and the bush. If I can reach it safely, it offers a possible anchor site.
Three desperate whistle blasts all but rip off my ears. I look back long enough to see Dominik mouthing something at me and pointing at Brigit. The falls drown out whatever he is trying to say. What now? I look Brigit’s way, and my heart chills. She has pulled her knife from the sheath on her harness and poised it above the rope anchoring me.
“Should I cut it or yank it?” she shouts at me.
My throat closes up. Cutting it may rob me of an anchor, but I’ll still be safe if I don’t lose my footing. If she yanks it, I’ll be pitched off the wall onto the boulders below.
CHAPTER 20
The eyes she directs at me are those of a predator. And now I notice for the first time that she is no longer anchored to the webbing on the rock elbow. After down-climbing and sprinting over to pull Dominik’s rope, she must have been so distracted or crazed that when she got back to her station, she accidentally clipped onto my rope instead.
She is inching along the ledge traverse toward me, putting herself in greater danger with every step. She must think she’s still anchored in.
Drops of sweat drip from my forehead into my eyes. Was I really so naive as to trust her and her elbow of rock as my anchor? If she tugs on the rope, I plunge to certain death. And if I go, my rope will pull her down with me. Her body will hit the rock-strewn killer rapids with a force I don’t even want to imagine.
Dean surely can see what’s about to occur, but he hasn’t moved an inch. Frozen with terror and indecision, he’s no doubt aware that identifying himself now could as easily provoke her as stop her from committing a murder-suicide.
I size up the distance between my current position and the nose of rock ahead and above. It will require several minutes of tricky effort to reach, plus some webbing currently tucked away in the pack on my back to create an anchor called a “chockstone.” If Brigit sees me pause and dig in my pack, I fear she’ll turn suspicious and enraged. It’ll trigger her to do the deed.
Both sweat and chills have taken over my body. Is there anything I can do or say to persuade Brigit not to commit this crime?
The tense stillness is broken by her shout. “I’m not trying to hurt you, Tristan. I just need you to be in danger so that your father will come save you. It’s your father I want, not you.”
That’s comfort?
“But if he doesn’t appear within five minutes, I will yank the rope.” She waves her knife for effect. “Someone has to pay for my mother’s death.”
My heartbeat accelerates with the same velocity that my body is about to demonstrate on its way to the bottom of Swallow Canyon.
What I need is someone or something to distract her long enough for me to reach that rock protrusion, anchor in, and therefore protect her as well as myself. My goal is to fasten a carabiner to the wall and clip it to the rope between us. Her pull may dislodge her if she loses her footing, but she’d pendulum on my piece of protection after a twenty-five-foot fall, with minimal risk of injury.
I look back at Dominik, whose body language implies he’s trying to decide between jumping the falls into the stream (which could easily kill him) and free-climbing down the falls’ left side to try to stop Brigit. Either move will force her to act, I’m certain. I shake my head at him, trying to communica
te that he should sit tight.
“Three more minutes,” Brigit screams gleefully, like she’s timing a fun race.
Embrace calm. I squint at the rock knob, picture where the webbing rests inside my pack, and calculate exactly how long it will take to retrieve it and put it to work. I look toward the orange pack on the bush and suddenly know what to do.
“Dad,” I shout toward the bush. “Dad, I know where you are, and I know you’ve planted the backpack there to lure me up. You can see Brigit doesn’t want me to have it. And I don’t want it. I think she’ll leave both of us alone if you take it off the bush and toss it into the stream. Slowly — very, very slowly — so you don’t fall.”
From an angle that Brigit can’t see but Dean can, I tap my harness and point at where my intended anchor sits in the pack. Understand what I’m really asking, Dean, please. You’re a sharp climber, the one and only Mini Spider-Man. If you distract her, I can reach that anchor point before she jerks on the rope. No need to show yourself. Just reach out and dump the pack.
“You’re not tricking me,” declares Brigit, but her slightly higher-pitched voice offers me a glimmer of hope. “Two minutes now, if your dad doesn’t show.”
“Dad, dump the pack!” I order, my voice gone hoarse. “Slow and easy.” I creep forward as I speak.
“Sixty seconds, fifty-nine, fifty-eight —” Brigit counts. Her eyes can’t be on her watch, me, and the bush all at the same time.
Slowly I move my hand to my backpack buckle while sneaking another foot toward the rocky point.
Well ahead, a hand appears from behind the bush and moves impossibly slowly toward the pack.
“Thanks, Dad,” I shout loudly enough to grab Brigit’s attention, trembling as I take two more halting steps.
The counting has stopped; no doubt Brigit’s mouth is hanging open. But I know better than to look back to see. Her eyes must remain riveted on Dean’s hand, because one glance at me and the tug will happen.