“This is the night you figure to beat it?” Birch asked.
Joe Willie nodded grimly. “We should,” he said.
“Long climb,” Birch said to Aiden.
“We trained for it. We’re good,” Aiden said.
“You’re looking at three hours,” Birch said.
Joe Willie and Aiden exchanged a look. “We know,” they said in unison.
Birch slapped both of them on the back. “Take a mighty good pair of legs to get you up. Not to mention walking back down tomorrow. Different muscles. Different kind of tough.”
“We got the legs,” Aiden said, and Joe Willie arched an eyebrow at him.
They walked the horses through the corral and out the gate. They stood about looking up at Iron Mountain. It stood stolidly in the bright afternoon sun, proud and ancient, an old warrior watching the sun arc its path across the sky. Johanna and Victoria hugged Claire tightly before she mounted up.
“You watch over my men now,” Victoria said.
“I will,” Claire said.
“Something for your trip,” Johanna said and handed up a small hide bag on a thong.
“What’s this?” Claire asked.
“Medicine bag,” Johanna said. “Wear it under your shirt, right next to your heart. It’s got good medicine in it. It’ll keep you balanced.”
“On the horse?”
“That too,” Johanna said.
“You need us for anything you light a smoky fire, hear?” Birch said to Aiden.
“Me?”
“Yeah, you. You’re the scout on this trip. It’s a big honour. Ojibways figure the scout is the bravest one. The one who goes first, takes on the danger first.”
“What danger?”
“Figure of speech,” Birch said.
Aiden and Joe Willie stretched some and then moved off wordlessly toward the trailhead. Claire kicked the horse up and tugged lightly on the rein for the packhorse to follow them. The Wolfchilds stood at the corral and watched them go. When they got to the trees they didn’t break stride to stop and wave. They disappeared into the trees.
“Big mountain,” Lionel said.
“Big mountain,” Birch said.
“Figure of speech,” Victoria said, and they turned to head back to the house.
It was hot. When the sun broke through the trees it flared against their bare backs in a splash of heat and they both broke sweat early. They pushed up the trail side by side. Behind them, Claire was bowled over at the casual way Joe Willie had thrown off his shirt and tucked it into the back of his jeans. It was like second nature, something he did unthinkingly, and she was touched at the display of trust it contained. Now, watching them drive their way up the steep incline of the trail, she didn’t see the narrow thrust of the arm as anything other than another part of this muscular, proud assault on the trail, on the challenge. It pistoned up and back in time with the other arm, and if he thought about it at all Joe Willie didn’t show it with his body. He and Aiden matched strides and their heads were down, eyes focussed on the trail in front of them, the pebbly, twig-scrabbled path that must have seemed mere inches from their faces. The bad leg didn’t seem bad at all. Instead, Joe Willie set the pace, a gritty, driving pace that put them ahead of the schedule they’d been on previously. She worried a little about dehydration but she knew the cowboy in Joe Willie wouldn’t let them go too far without a water stop. For them and the horses.
When they did stop the two of them were bathed in sweat. Their breathing was so hard and ragged that they were reduced to the tiniest sips from the canteen. “Pap says three hours,” Joe Willie said. “We can do her in two.”
“You figure?” Aiden asked, leaning over with his hands on his knees.
“It’ll take a helluva push, but yeah. You good?”
“Never better.”
“Good. You lead, then. Set your pace. Your call for the next water stop.”
Aiden huffed out his breath. “Okay. Ready?”
“Go.”
Claire sat a moment longer, drinking in the view as she sipped from the canteen. It was fabulous. It was like the trail in her girlhood dream. The little Arabian nickered and kicked out a tad, and Claire eased it into a walk, watching closely as it shook its head about. The horse settled into the climb and Claire let herself relax, the motion of the walk comforting and familiar now, the need to press up slightly in the stirrups now and then something that she did without thinking. Ahead of her Aiden pressed on at the same tempo Joe Willie had set initially, and they climbed the slope side by side, silent, not looking at each other. Claire nudged the Arabian and they ate up the distance easily.
Aiden strode right past the previous markers. They took the next section of trail quickly, and when they passed the little clearing where’d they’d stopped before Claire was amazed at how far they’d come so fast. Neither of them looked tired. Instead, they burned with the challenge. Now and then they allowed themselves a small glance at the other, a brief check, a search for flagging resolve, but they didn’t find it, and it began to look to Claire like they’d do the whole climb before stopping again.
Finally, Aiden stopped at their last marker, and the two of them looked at each other a moment, then up toward the bend in the trail that curved into the approach to the peak. They signalled for water and splashed some over their heads and backs before drinking. The sun was still high in the sky, the slanted light of evening slinking toward them from somewhere behind the peak they could see poking above the trees.
“Final hump,” Aiden said.
Joe Willie wiped his face. “She’s a killer.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Generally takes a goat from here.”
“Far?”
“No so much. Just plumb steep and rocky.”
They pushed off again, handed up the canteens without looking at Claire, their eyes focussed on the wide bend of the trail as it disappeared into the last treacherous climb to the meadow at the base of the cliff. The horses seemed to sense the end of the ride and stepped eagerly into the walk. When they rounded the bend and cleared the last of the trees, Claire was stunned. The last of the trail was a series of switchbacks, snaking upward in a long coil of rocky, narrow trail that was more a suggestion than a real pathway. The Arabian reared. Claire leaned in toward its head and whispered encouragement. The horse shifted its hooves nervously but moved out onto the narrow ledge of walkway. Claire remembered to maintain a steady pressure on the drop-off side, a constant press of the foot to keep the horse moving along the inside of the trail. Ahead of them Joe Willie and Aiden had slowed, the pace reduced to hard compressions of muscle made more difficult by footslides on the loose rock. Even the horse struggled, and Claire was forced to use every shred of skill she’d learned from Johanna to keep them moving. She could feel the keen electric burn of fear in her belly, the fine hairs on the back of her neck stiff, and the dry, unblinking focus of her eyes. Her skin felt moist and she shivered. She could hear the two of them huffing hard, groaning, straining into the mountain. She wanted to yell something but worried about spooking the horses. Instead, she reached a hand up and clutched the medicine bag inside her shirt, feeling the lump of it and calming some. The Arabian sensed it and moved less skittishly. Behind her the packhorse whinnied.
When she looked up, Claire felt reduced, ant-like beneath the huge tower of Iron Mountain that stood over the last press of the trail like a protector, a sentinel, its granite face obdurate, omniscient, ancient and wise. She squeezed the medicine bag and turned her head to scan the face of the peak. It was magnificent. Joe Willie and Aiden spoke to each other but the words were unintelligible. They were pressing their hands on their thighs as they pushed and she could see the break above them on the last turn of the path, the flattened line that marked the start of the meadow. They saw it too and she heard excitement in their voices, the thrill of energy pushed to its limit, the idea of rest, completion, burning hotter than the muscles in their legs. Aiden slipped and Joe Willie grip
ped him by the belt and kept pushing. Their feet kicked small rocks loose and they were forced to turn their toes outward, angled against the steepness of the climb. Aiden reached a hand back and grabbed Joe Willie’s belt and the two of them rocked upward in turn, pulling the other along after each step.
Finally they crested, and when Claire eased the horses off the narrow belt of pathway the meadow revealed itself to her yard by yard and she saw the two of them resting on a log of fallen cedar, arms around each other, heaving air and looking around at the meadow. She walked the horses up and dismounted, dangled the canteens in front of their sweaty faces. They drank slowly, wiping handfuls of water across their brows before pouring it over their heads. It took a while before any of them could speak, Claire struck speechless by the sheer beauty of the place and the two of them still reclaiming breath.
“Iron Peak,” Joe Willie panted, pointing to the rock face at the far end of the meadow.
“We ain’t gonna climb that, are we?” Aiden asked.
They laughed like hell through struggling breath.
The great bear raised herself to the full measure of her height and sniffed the air with her block of a snout. There were man sounds coming from the far end of the meadow. The distance was too far for her to discern shape and form, but she could hear man and horses. The wind carried their scent to her and she huffed once and dropped to all fours again. She padded to the front of the small waterfall that sluiced out of a crack in the rock face. It would cover the sounds of her in the brush and tangle. The man beings would need to carry food and she was hungry. The summer in the high country had been hot and dry and the berry patches had been skimpy and far between. After her cubs had been killed in a rockslide she’d lost the urge to eat and settled for a loose rambling across her territory and that of other grizzlies so that now, healed some and easing away from the weight of the great sadness in her belly, she felt the high pangs of hunger again. Her skin hung slack from her sides and she was weak, light-headed sometimes from climbing the high country. She would eat. The wind was changing. She used the sound of the water to hide her travel along the stream to where she could emerge downwind of them, the horses quick to pick up her scent if she stayed where she was. The man beings were no longer travelling. Instead she could hear the sound of them, high pitched and shrill, still gathered at the lip of the meadow. She growled, walking carefully among the boulders and strewn windfall of trees.
She kept the man sounds at her shoulder as she circled. Men were drawn to water too and she knew they would travel to the end of the meadow near the rock face to rest, eat and erect the small hide dens they slept in. They would have fire. But her hunger was so great she did not fear flame. If she could not avail herself of ready-made food, pillage the sacks and boxes they left about, she was prepared to take a horse. She’d eaten horse before. The mustangs that still ran free in the upper plateaus provided a rare meal and she’d taken the old and slow before. She preferred berries, mice and smaller game to the sinewy stink of horse, but she was hungry and there would be no chase, the man beings tying them in place whenever they stopped at night.
The wind brought their smell to her again. She stopped. Carefully she rose to her full height again and waddled awkwardly about to sniff. There was something more in the air. Something beyond the foul man smell. Something old. Something ancient that she felt in the blood. A call. Like a challenge but of a higher order than that. She sniffed again, drew the smell into her and growled. She dropped to all fours and padded carefully along the stream’s edge, and when she crossed it she felt the call in her blood, fully formed now, the smell of it driving her into the trees far away from the man beings to lie down in a thicket, wait for the darkness, for the time, for the response to the ancient order of things.
“Watch,” Joe Willie said.
“What?” Aiden asked.
“The cliff.”
“Why?”
“Just watch.”
The three of them turned to face the cliff. They’d sat in the icy water under the waterfall, the three of them, Aiden and Joe Willie to assuage their tortured muscles and Claire for the pure electric thrill of it. After the heat of the climb the water felt sharp, like a knife that cut into their very centres, and they’d laughed like children in a sprinkler, shocked by the sudden chill of it. After, they’d made camp, and as the sun began to slide behind the mountains to the west across the great chasm of the valley, he’d asked them to walk with him, leading them to the lip of the meadow before pointing to the spire of rock. It sat hard against the sky, and as the sun slipped lower they saw it begin to change. It wasn’t anything immediately obvious, but the longer they looked the more they saw the barely perceptible shifts of it, the motion like a gauze curtain in a small breeze absorbing the colours of the setting sun, holding it briefly then curling into yet another subtle hue. They watched as it eased from high orange to a red that revealed the iron in its face, into pink and onward, deeper, into blue-grey. When it became dark enough for the rock to reassert its stern countenance they began walking back toward the camp.
“That was awesome,” Claire said. “Thank you.”
“My favourite place,” Joe Willie said. “I used to come here if I’d been bashed about to lay in the crick and let it heal me and then watch that rock change colour like it done there. Always made me feel right again.”
“And now?” she asked.
“Now,” he said, watching the cliff as he walked. “Now I been bashed about some.”
“Did it help?”
“Yeah. It did.”
They walked the rest of the way in silence. The sharp scent of juniper and pine added a fragrant undertone to the chill edge of the breeze, and the crunch of grass and root and stone at their feet filled the encroaching darkness with echoes off the wall of rock behind the trees. A bat flapped wildly by and they could hear the yip of coyotes from somewhere far below them. The meadow had slid through a hundred darker shades of green into a grey that intoned a long purple evening around a fire, and they stepped quicker to get it started before complete darkness fell.
While Joe Willie and Aiden scavenged kindling from the brush, Claire dug the makings of supper from the bags that Lionel had stowed in the tarpaulins. She hummed to herself contentedly while the sound of an axe cleaving dry timber thunked in the gloaming. The two men spoke quietly and the sound of their voices was calming, the way she imagined voices had sounded forever while fires were being lit and people gathered after the events of a day. When the first flames licked upward she walked an armful of food to the log near the fire.
Aiden sat with a long stick of green alder between his knees and he squinted up at the sky and the rippled edge of rock high against it. The flames lent his face a mystic quality, and Claire smiled to see it.
“Like it?” she asked.
“It’s nothing I ever saw. Or even imagined I’d see.”
“It’s an old place,” she said.
“Yeah,” he whispered, nodding. “Yeah. It’s got that deep quiet about it like it’s got its breath held in. Like it might explode with secrets if it spoke.”
She laughed. “Yes. Like a sly old man who’s seen everything.”
“Grandmother,” Joe Willie said, stepping into the light of the fire. “It always kinda felt like an old woman place to me. Don’t know why.”
“Old nonetheless,” Claire said.
“Amen,” he said.
They sat and Claire handed out sandwiches and fruit and placed a pot of tea near the flames that had stoked nicely. They ate quietly, each of them content to look around at the night, the sky, and the reflection of the fire off the rock in the near distance. Deep shadows behind the talus boulders danced about with the lick of the flame against the night. There was a sudden snap of branch from the far end of the meadow.
“What was that?” Aiden asked.
“Nothing,” Joe Willie said. “Anything that was anything wouldn’t make a sound. Sometimes a rock’ll roll off the cliff and hit s
omething. Make a noise.”
“How’s your leg?” Claire asked.
He looked at her, and the fire gave the sober look an intensity like a picture of a Renaissance saint. He rubbed it. “You know, it’s not that bad. Hurts some but no deep-in-the-bone ache. I been tryin’ this hill a long time.”
“Could you ride?” Aiden asked.
Joe Willie stared into the fire and chewed awhile. He took a drink from the thermos and wiped at his mouth before he set it back down at his feet. “Maybe,” he said. “But never like before.”
“What was it like?” Aiden asked, quietly.
“Like the wind,” Joe Willie said. He closed his eyes and leaned his head back. He drew the night air deep into his lungs and exhaled it long and slow. He slumped with it, sat upright and gazed into the fire. “Never the same way twice,” he said. “Like when you step outside on a frosty morning and you feel it on your face, all full of winter and the taste of snow.
“Then you step outside again and it’s summer. There’s a warm to it that’s all sage and cows and growing things. Or it’s autumn and it’s like it’s full of smoke but there’s nothing burning. Every time there’s something in it that you make your own. Every time there’s another feel to it, another story, another way of being in the world that you carry around in you forever.
“To ride is like that. Every time is different. Every time there’s something more. Something more that fills you up, makes you live. Something you carry around like luggage everywhere you go. And when you lay it out you remember all of it, not just a piece, but all of it because it’s what kept you living, gave you breath. Like the wind.”
“You miss it,” Aiden said, poking at the fire.
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