They’d just started closing the Grand Canyon down. They didn’t do it all at once, of course. It started with the canyons that had been mined. Horn Creek was one of them.
One of the good things about global warming was it made the Southwest wetter than it had been since the Pleistocene. But all that rain meant the Grand Canyon’s mines filled with water. The old adits and shafts from the 1800s filled up and stayed full. The water soaked in and leached out what was left of the metals. After a while, the mines overflowed. They became springs and spawned little creeks in side canyons that didn’t usually have water.
You can’t tell a national park hiker not to mess with a stream in the Canyon. It still seemed like desert to most people. The humidity just made the sun seem hotter. After a day hiking across the Tonto Plateau, baking like a cookie on a shale oven sheet, a hiker would see a turquoise pool rimmed with brilliant orange in a shady canyon bottom, and you couldn’t keep ’em out of it. I know. I tried.
I remember a couple who showed up with special suits. Covered them from toes to fingertips. Left heads and necks bare. They knew the risks. They just thought they could beat ’em.
“Why don’t you tie plastic bags over your heads?” I asked them. “Less painful if we get to the emergency part before you get in the water.” I could tell that fabric wouldn’t protect them. It wasn’t even waterproof. Wishful thinking and technology; put ’em together and city folk believe they can do anything they want. I’ve never been able to tolerate that attitude. There is such a thing as common sense, though I’m not saying you should never question it.
The guy smiled at me like I was a fool. “Honey, we want to get wet,” he said. “That’s the point.”
I stayed around until they asked me to call the rescue ’copter. That water was acid. Swimmers didn’t notice until they started itching. By then, the damage was already done. To drink it meant sulfate or lead poisoning, depending on the mine. Sometimes, worse than that.
There were only five backcountry rangers in those days. I was one of ’em. Five people to patrol more than a million acres. On foot. Budget cuts hit the park hard. I guess Congress figured it was in the middle of nowhere. We patrolled alone a lot. I came to prefer it. In a world full of nine billion people, you appreciate every chance you get to be alone in nature with plenty of space and time.
So, I was patrolling up Horn Creek with twenty pounds of water on my back. You didn’t want to drink anything coming out of the ground in that canyon. While the mine there had started out chasing copper, it ended up in high-grade uranium. They mined it just after World War II, back when atom bombs weren’t just in the movies. In those days, there wasn’t a place on Earth they wouldn’t have mined uranium.
I always carried a pulaski then. A ranger didn’t just patrol. We did quite a bit of trail maintenance, though it wasn’t required of us. Besides, all the older rangers carried ’em strapped to their packs. Hell if I wasn’t going to carry one, too.
I saw the herd a long ways off. I’d just rounded Dana Butte, coming out of the part of Salt Creek Canyon they call “The Inferno.” I watched those deer for half an hour as I hiked toward them. They grazed the plateau’s flattest part, right near the edge where the cliffs dropped off into the Canyon’s Inner Gorge. I counted forty does at least and was damn impressed. One stag for all those does. The sucker had a huge rack. Huge. I couldn’t exactly see the shape from that far off, but I had a sense the guy had a regular horn thicket up there on his head.
I took my pack off and snuck toward them. I wanted a better look. You’ve got to move smooth and quiet around deer or you’ll scare ’em off. God only knows why, but I’d grabbed my pulaski. I carried it low, with both hands, at my waist.
No, I take that back. God didn’t have anything to do with it. It was what I’d seen so far of that damned rack.
I got pretty close before the does smelled me. They started moving, quick and orderly, down into a little side canyon that led to the Inner Gorge. Their hooves clattered on the rock as they descended out of sight. The buck stood guard as his herd departed, keeping an eye on me and them both. I stayed low in the sagebrush. I crushed some as I pushed through it. It might’ve been that sharp sage nip that tipped them off about me.
The closer I got, the weirder his rack struck me. Now I could see it was tangled. The horns didn’t branch out straight from each other. They twisted and bent in every direction. A couple bits had flattened out, more like what you’d see on a moose. I was just close enough to see it was strange, but not exactly how strange, when he followed the last doe over the cliff into that drainage.
I strained my ears. His hooves clip-clopped just a couple times after he dropped out of sight. They were waiting down there, not more than a couple hundred flat feet away and maybe ten or twenty feet down in the side canyon. They wanted me to pass. That was all. They wanted to come back up on the plateau to continue their easy grazing. I’d let them. But I wanted a closer look at that buck first.
I crept up to the canyon edge, quiet as I could, stepping toes first on the soft dirt between the shrubs and slowly lowering my heels. I wonder now if I held my breath. Maybe I was a little dizzy when I looked over the edge. That would explain a lot.
Because when I did look over, I saw the stag all right. He stood not twenty feet away on a narrow sandstone shelf just below the notch he knew I’d peer over. I didn’t see what was in his eyes at first because, good God, I was looking at that rack!
It was something from a nightmare of warped bone plates and twisted, sharpened spears. I couldn’t take my eyes off it until he snorted and kind of barked at me. Then I saw his face.
His brown eyes were bugged out. They blazed. His lips peeled back.
My legs went weak. I swear to this day I saw fangs in his mouth. Big ones, almost like the tusks on a javelina, two on top and two sticking up from its lower jaw. I screamed, loud and high, in such a way I’m embarrassed to admit to it.
That buck took it as a threat. Any creature would have. He reared back on his haunches. Even in my advanced state of inexperience, I could see he was going to spring at me. It wasn’t hard to imagine that wicked rack smashing into my face, because that’s what it was about to do.
Without thinking, I threw my pulaski like a boomerang. I remember the damned tool, all hardwood handle, steel axe, and adze, spinning through the air. It hit with a clunk and a splinter. The stag’s head whipped to the side. Its body twisted after it. That was all I saw, because then I turned and ran.
First, I went and got my pack. Then, I ran all the way out of the Canyon, twelve miles on rough trail climbing two thousand, five hundred feet. I ran the whole way.
I never forgot that day. Thirty years later, I still think about it probably once a month, sometimes more often if something reminds me. They closed Horn Creek to everybody shortly thereafter. A big flood tore it up the following year. Radioactive mud got sloshed all over. Before the flood, a couple other rangers saw the stag, but nobody got as close as I did that day.
They used to tease me about the teeth, so I quit talking about it. But I always wondered what happened to that stag. I didn’t want to believe I’d hurt it. It had twisted to catch itself, that’s all. I’d scared it a little, maybe. Certainly, I’d knocked it off balance. Anyone would believe I’d done what I did in self-defense, but I hated to think I’d hurt a creature just being itself, protecting its herd, only because I’d been rash.
I always wanted to go back to look for that stag. It vexed me that nature would create something so . . . distorted. I guess that’s the word I’m looking for. It didn’t make sense. I felt then as I feel now: nature makes sense. A person can’t always figure it, but you can learn something if you try. I know radiation damages things, but that stag was not sick. It was as strong and full of fight as any critter I’d ever seen. God only knows what would change a creature that way.
I take that back. I just didn’t know and couldn’t figure it. It bugged me. The Canyon had created it. Humanity ha
d helped, of course, by being careless with our concentrated radiation, but there had to be some reason the ecosystem reacted the way it did. I wanted to know what it was.
Two years ago, they lifted the Horn Creek travel restrictions for rangers. They’d flown a couple drones down there to check for radiation. It had taken thirty years, but all that mud had finally washed away. The stag himself couldn’t have lived more than another decade, but I still felt drawn to go have a look at the Horn Creek herd. I talked to Steve Mokiyesva, the park superintendent, about me going in.
“I want to check on the deer population down there,” I told him. “I studied it a bit when I first started here.” Steve had been around long enough to know that wasn’t strictly true.
I mean, we made counts of the critters we saw on our patrols. We even entered the numbers in a computer, but interest in “wildlife resources” was dying down.
“You can go down there, Sue,” Steve said, “but not by yourself. And I don’t have anybody to spare to send with you.” He’d heard about the mutant stag. “It would be good to see who’s down there, how they’re doing.” Steve never called any creature a “wildlife resource.” He was of the Hopi deer clan, and flute clan, too. He nodded. “I tell you what. You can go down Horn Creek for your final patrol.” He looked me hard in the eye. My stomach turned sour. “You know it’s time. They need help at the outreach center. They’d fix your hip.”
The outreach center is where they send old rangers to ease them out of the service. They keep us working as long as they can to get some labor from that pension money. It’s up in that goddamned city where they need people to talk to folks who can’t make it to the parks themselves. People to tell stories and show pictures. Technology and wishful thinking. I’d have spat on the ground if we’d been standing outside.
I got the message. My hip was slowing me down. Growing up in the gas fields had left me with asthma. It got worse every year. There were junior rangers who needed a promotion. It couldn’t happen until a senior slot came open. “All right,” I told him. “I’ll let you know when I’m ready.” It took another two years.
In those two years, a backcountry ranger didn’t have much to do. They’d completely closed the Canyon to casual hikers by then. A massive flash flood swept two tourist mule trains and forty-seven hikers off Bright Angel Trail. Eighty-two people killed, all total. One of ’em was famous, so the Park Service took it more seriously. It was that guy who started the pay-per-view home movie site. Any person could put their movie up there. The more people who watched it, the more expensive it got, but he kept the top price below five bucks so most people could still afford it. He made a lot of people rich and got rich himself. His site still makes people rich today. Anyway, after that flood, tourists were only allowed below the rim on guided tours.
It was for their own protection.
* * * *
Wolves had come back in from the north rim. The rattlesnakes were bigger, fatter, and more defensive. All the rain made for meaty mice, but they were harder for a snake to catch. Tourists needed a guide and a babysitter. Danger and beauty be damned, they looked more at their devices than they looked around, even here! No, I wasn’t the tour guide type. That was what the park needed then.
Steve left me in a tough place, so it served him right to have to wait. He wanted me to take someone with me so he’d be sure I wouldn’t just lie down to die out there like old Bruce Tanaka had. If I didn’t have anybody, I guess he wanted to know that, too. He was a man sensitive to family ties. So much so, I’d have bet he knew I had trouble with mine. Steve would never go to the outreach center. He had family right here, people to care for him.
I didn’t think again about my final patrol until I heard from my niece Katy. I’d met her a couple times when she was still a kid, maybe twelve or thirteen years old. We’d gotten along okay then. My sister even left her with me for a couple weeks once when she took off after some new dude. Katy had been a wide-eyed critter, ready to go anywhere and do everything. I’d gotten a real kick out of her.
Katy had just turned eighteen. I knew because she sent me a birthday card on her birthday to catch me up on her life. Her mother had moved to that goddamned city. Katy had finished school. She wanted to come see me, wondered if I could get her a special trip below the rim. Something different than what everyone else sees. I smiled real big when I read that.
So, there I was, on March eighteenth, waiting for Katy’s bus to arrive at Grand Canyon Village. I admit I was looking for a kid dressed in a T-shirt and cutoff shorts in the line of people filing off the bus. Longer legs and arms, sure, but still the pony-tailed critter who’d trailed me around five years ago, watching me like I was the most interesting thing she’d seen in her whole life.
Katy was taller, all right, and topless, though that was hardly strange anymore. What struck me were the bright green tattoos all over her shaved head. They split and spread over her cheeks like tendrils creeping from a vine. Her shoulders, chest, and stomach were blotched with them. When she got closer, I saw they were fuzzy, like patches of moss. Vein-like stringers connected the patches. Looking at them made my skin crawl. I’d seen the style on other tourists, but I’ll admit it shocked me to see it on Katy. It was photosynthesizing nanotech embedded in the skin and left to grow. For what purpose besides style, I didn’t know.
I did know the look on her face. Same as when she was a kid. Tears welled in my eyes. I got a knot in my throat. I didn’t trust my voice, so I just opened my arms to her.
“Aunt Sue!” She dropped her backpack on the ground and hugged me close.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to touch the tats, but it seemed rude not to return the gesture. The green stuff on her back felt like a mild rash: bumpy but not swollen or warm with irritation. The fuzz felt like hairs standing up on goose bumps. She smelled like fresh-cut grass. “Good to see you, gal. I’m so glad you came.” I stepped back to get a better look at her. She pushed her glasses up on her head and wiped her eyes with a knuckle.
She looked plenty strong to carry lots of water, and she’d brought a sturdy backpack, which showed she was ready and willing to do it. My heart felt full for the first time since Sergei left, ten years ago. It was kind of . . . instant love, and it turned me to water.
This must be what it’s like to have people, a clan, I thought, and it broke my heart the way dreams do when they come true. I wiped my eyes, but the tears kept coming. I admitted to myself I hoped to the heavens she’d love it here as I had and that she’d stay. That we would stay.
Katy brought her glasses back down, smiled, and gave a little shrug. She sniffed and then swallowed. Her expression changed to one like you’d see in the movies, all puppy love and excitement. “When do we leave?”
“Since you’re ready, we’ll take off this afternoon.” I’d gotten the food and everything ready the day before.
“What will we see?” she asked, but it was like she asked herself more than me.
The question seemed strange. She’d been here before. I hadn’t told her about the mutant stag. After more than thirty years, I didn’t expect we’d see him, but I would no longer be surprised to see something equally as strange. I watched, waiting for her to say more, but she didn’t. She just looked at me with that same set expression. “The Canyon,” I said after a bit. Shouldn’t have to say anything else.
Then I noticed her glasses’ frames were kind of thick. Two tiny lenses shone at their upper outside corners. All of a sudden, I wasn’t even sure she was talking to me.
I pointed to the glasses. “Data specs?”
She nodded quickly, like a dog wags its tail. “Stereoscopic.” She took them off and handed them to me. “Lightest, toughest pair on the market.”
I held them in my hand. They were indeed light.
“Got them just for this trip,” she said. “This too.” She brushed her fingertips across the green fuzzy tats on her breasts, and smiled, again like she had as a kid. She wanted me to like her, to be proud.
> “What for, exactly?”
She looked around, checking to be sure nobody was close enough to hear. Then she looked back to me, eyes shining like they had the time I taught her to catch lizards with a lasso made from a grass strand.
“Killer content, Aunt Sue. You’re taking me to a place no one’s seen for thirty years. We’re going to get some KC.”
That shook me a little. I thought she’d come mostly to see me. “What does ‘KC’ do for you?”
“Makes me a rich and famous movie producer.” Like that was all anyone would ever want. As she talked, she touched the green tats, fingers brushing and circling around on her belly and then shoulders.
“What do they do for you?” I asked, pointing my chin towards the spot she stroked on her shoulder.
She dropped her hand, embarrassed. “Sorry, I can’t stop touching it. It’s only two months old.” She said this like it was her baby. “It charges the specs. Enough to get through a day if it’s sunny out.”
I bit my lip to keep my mouth shut. I hadn’t thought about her taking that kind of tech down with us. I would take a camera, but that was it. Just a slight tilt of my hand and the specs would fall to the ground, where they would get quickly crushed under my boot. I took a deep breath. I knew that wasn’t the way to handle it. Not if I wanted her to think about making a life here.
“These things are expensive, aren’t they?” I asked, determined not to be an old-fashioned ass.
She nodded, as if impressed with herself. “Them and the phototats cost me my college fund.”
That stunned me. I wanted to believe she was smart, someone the park would hire. The park only hired people with degrees. She held her hand out for the specs. Couldn’t wait to get them back on. She was still just a kid—full of hope and wonder. It wasn’t her fault she lived in a world where an eighteen-year-old could lawfully spend her whole college fund on tech that would be obsolete in less than ten years.
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