Sara brought him a small snake, about a foot long, khaki-colored with black spots. It slid in no particular hurry from one hand to the other until it gave up trying to get away and coiled around her wrist.
“Mountain earth snake,” she said. “Virginia pulchra.” When she raised the snake up to eye level, Rice reached out, held his forefinger under the snake’s cream-colored chin. It rested its head and its tongue flicked in and out, running a sophisticated chemical analysis of his skin.
“I’ve never seen one of these before,” he said.
“You wouldn’t have. They’re rare, and fossorial. Not even supposed to be in this part of the state. It’s like the Lost World down here.” The snake became restless again and slid to her other hand. “So many people hate snakes,” she murmured, as if to herself. “I think it’s because they threaten people’s worldview—they’re alien, limbless, impossible, black magic: a stick come to life. But maybe we’re all sticks come to life.” The snake wrapped around her thumb and she addressed its impassive face. “We want to think we’re exceptional, ensouled, angel fairies or God’s special children. The magic of being animate matter isn’t enough.”
She paced off a twenty-meter square, marking the corners with sticks, and asked Rice to use her phone and take pictures of what she found. She wanted to do a quick and dirty survey so she could show Starr something relatively systematic when she presented their research proposal. Rice would have to help her, she said. They could do the field work in the spring, and coauthor a paper.
He smiled. “You can’t tell Starr about this. We’re not supposed to be down here.”
“I’ll say you got us lost.”
Their paper, she said, would establish a new standard for forest vertebrate diversity in the middle Appalachians. She said people had forgotten over the generations what a forest was supposed to look like, that they had come to accept the degraded second-, third-, fourth-growth harvested forests as normal, and the paper would radically disrupt the shifted baselines of complacent conventional perception. A few more places like this might escape the chainsaws. Maybe people would stop being such assholes.
He shook his head at her optimism but she didn’t notice. He was beginning to enjoy her company, her idealism, her enthusiasm, even her talkativeness, so he didn’t say what he was thinking, didn’t say that despite its resilience over millennia, and despite the sentience and power that even now was shaking Rice to his bones, the hard truth was this forest, undimmed since the last glacial, was going to disappear in the not-very-distant future. He’d read those scientific journals that used to sit on the shelves in the office, and the science had seeped into his subconscious, feeding his innate pessimism. First the hemlocks would go; the adelgid wasn’t in the gorge yet but it was coming. Without the year-round cover, the creek would heat up, the gorge would become more xeric. Around that time the macroclimate would be seriously destabilizing as multiple feedback loops kicked in, shit nobody’s even thought of yet. In his mind he saw the great crowns on fire, a catastrophic, soil-killing burn. Only weeds would grow in the desolate canyon, invasives, r-selected plants taking over. Species homogeneity in a geological eyeblink. Not just here. Everywhere. Wait seventy million years. Repeat.
When Sara offered him the phone, he smiled and took it from her. He said he’d be glad to help with the paper. He said he hoped it would make a difference.
Two hours later and a mile downstream, Rice crouched at the head of a hundred-foot waterfall and drank creek water from his cupped hands. After hesitating, Sara did the same. A few yards away the stream, grown powerful after gathering dozens of tributaries in the canyon, rolled over a sharp stone lip and dropped to the foaming white pool below. A dull roar drifted up and surrounded them. Slick, moss-covered cliffs reared on both sides. A gentle, steady rain pattered on their hoods. The light was failing in the gorge, and they were wet to their thighs from walking in the cold water. Sara had begun shivering. He handed her the fleece pullover from his pack. She demurred but he insisted she put it on, under her shell. A touch of hypothermic clumsiness at the wrong moment could kill them both.
This was the third large falls they’d encountered. They’d had to climb down cliffs alongside the other two, and each time the rock faces had become more dangerous, more sheer, with more lethal exposure. Sara waited with their packs while he scouted a route around this one, edging out along a game trail that led to a foot-wide ledge that he followed until it vanished. He backtracked and climbed down a vertical crack. Twice he lost his holds on the rain-slick rock and skidded to the next ledge where he could stop himself, but there were stretches where a slip like that would have been fatal.
He felt rushed, worried about climbing in the dark, so he only descended far enough to eyeball a route that would get them close to the bottom. Back at the top of the falls he found Sara staring at the water where it bowed into a translucent, green-tinted lens and fell over the edge. She was more exhausted than he was, and she wasn’t talking. When she noticed him she took out her phone from its plastic bag in her pack and showed him the screen.
“What am I looking at?”
“No service,” she said, smiling.
“You’re surprised? Down here?”
She shook her head but didn’t elaborate. He rigged a simple belt harness with a nylon strap from his pack, explaining that the exposure was a little scary in places. He asked if she knew how to rappel and she shook her head, which surprised him. It might be better if he just belayed her while she climbed down anyway. He only had the twenty-five-foot rope he kept in his pack for emergencies, so they would have to keep the pitches short.
At the first exposed stretch, he leaned back into a wide vertical crack and braced his feet, paying out the rope as she descended. When she made it to the skinny ledge he’d pointed out, she called “off belay” like he’d told her and gave a thumbs-up. Then she sat with her back against the cliff, passing the rope behind her lower back, around her hips, and called out “Okay,” intending to belay him, imitating what he’d done for her. He called back that he was fine, she didn’t need to belay him. She gave a taut shake of her head. In the faint light she looked surprised, then outraged. He dropped his end of the rope and climbed down.
When he joined her on the ledge, she shook the coiled rope in his face.
“What the fuck was that?”
He pointed out that they had no chocks or pitons or any sort of protection to anchor her in a belay, and there was no way she could hold him. “If I fall,” he said, “I’d pull you down with me.”
“Forget it, then.” She untied the makeshift harness from around her waist and handed it to him, still attached to the rope.
Her irrational stubbornness was making him weary. “Sara, think. If I belay you it reduces the risk to both of us, to the team . . . to our partnership. But it only works one way. It makes no sense to put you at risk just so you won’t feel guilty.”
“Guilty? You think I don’t want to feel guilty?” She was shouting now, gesticulating, and she nearly lost her balance. She paused when she saw Rice shifting his weight, getting ready to lunge for her. Her hands fell to her sides.
“Your eyes are bugged out,” she said, and leaned back into the cold, wet stone of the cliff face, laughing quietly.
The rain had finally stopped, but a brisk wind was ripping up the canyon as the sky cleared and they both were shivering now. He described the signs of hypothermia and asked her to watch him for slurred speech, blue lips.
“We should use the rope here,” he said, but she didn’t reply. In the weak gray light she peered past her toes at the next stretch of climbing and then started down. She climbed slowly, carefully, but without hesitation. He watched, stowing the clammy wet rope in his pack. He cupped his cold, scraped hands close to his face and breathed on them. How had this all started? They were supposed to set up the trail cameras and hike back to the lodge for dinner. Then their transgressive descent into the forbidden gorge—how Freudian!—his disorienting
awareness/hallucination of individual forest spirits, Sara’s excitement at finding rare species. A stubborn push downstream, obstacles gradually morphing from fun to exciting to scary. Their situation was such a classic textbook fuckup he was almost embarrassed: overextending on a whim, reckless momentum carrying the victims past several points of no return. Getting dark, growing cold. Dread settled heavily in his gut, a familiar, leaden organ nestled somewhere near his liver. It occurred to him that he and Sara might not be good for each other.
When he caught up he saw they were checkmated, that when he’d scouted their route he’d mistaken the distance to the base of the cliff. The ledge where they stood was still at least twenty feet above the roiling pool at the base of the falls. He couldn’t have seen it from above, but the cliff below them was undershot and unclimbable. They stared down at the water.
“It’s not as high as an Olympic diving platform,” she said.
“But you don’t know how deep the water is.” The water looked dark, maybe deep, maybe not. Impossible to tell in this light. The other pools they’d bypassed had been five feet deep at most, and five feet wouldn’t be enough. “There could be rocks or logs hidden in the water, under the froth. Maybe I can lower you with the rope.”
As he said this he looked around and realized it wasn’t going to work. The ledge was barely wider than his boots and it sloped downward. No way he could hold her weight just standing here. There was nothing at hand he could use as an anchor, no root, no knobby outcrop. Twenty feet back, the cliff was split by a big vertical crack where he could wedge a leg and a shoulder to brace himself. But his rope was too short for that to work.
It made no sense to stay there, but they waited long enough that his quadriceps began to quiver. Sara’s legs were shaking, too. They had to retreat to that crack where they could rest. Then it would be a climb in the dark, returning to the top of the falls, going back the way they’d come down. They would have to use his headlamp. He could lead, slide the headlamp down the rope, belay her as she climbed. If she would even let him. It was just two short pitches. Then they could find some shelter from the rain, spend the night. He could build a fire. They would try the other side in the morning. At the very least they had to backtrack off this ledge, right now. But he remained paralyzed.
She turned to look at him, gave a tired smile, and jumped, her ponytail lifting from her back and waving above her head as she fell.
His first reaction, lasting only an instant, was that Sara might be more messed up than he’d thought. This was followed by several strobe-flashes, elements of a plan: first assess her consciousness, her injuries, how to get to her without killing himself, make a splint for a broken leg, maybe a tourniquet for a compound fracture—but then his mind went blank and before she had even hit the water he said fuck it and jumped off the cliff after her.
The laws of physics limited his fall to a little longer than a second, but his experience didn’t square with physics, and he was a long time dropping through the cool wet air. Sara splashed into the pool to his left and went under. He took a deep breath and crouched into a loose cannonball as his boots slapped the surface, trying not to knife through to the bottom. Cold water closed over his head and his pack jerked hard against his shoulders and he was still in a crouch when his feet slammed into the creek bed. It was deeper than five feet, but not much. He pitched backward, his pack cushioning the impact, but most of the breath expelled from his lungs in a big silvery bubble that broke apart and floated away from him. He reached his arms up to the sheen of the surface. The deep thrumming bass note of the falls was a loud voice in his ears and the water was colder than he’d thought possible, the broken plane of light above him like an ice ceiling. He hung there, suspended, listening to the voice, trying to understand it. Then his hands cut through the surface and he pulled himself up, spitting water and inhaling a great raggedy breath and looking for Sara.
He was sure she would be hurt, a broken leg, an ankle. She hadn’t even aimed for the deepest part of the pool. But as he swung around to face downstream, drifting with the current toward the shallows at the end of the pool, Sara was there, pants slicked to her legs, pack dangling from an elbow, stepping out onto wet gravel and looking around, shivering and dripping, hair hanging flat and wet down her back. Her eyes were wide, and in the last bluish light of the afterglow she looked rapt, exhilarated. She smiled at him and raised her arm to point at the first man-made object they’d seen since they’d left the lodge—a heavy rusted iron pipe protruding from the far side of the pool. It was the water intake for a small summer camp on the Dutch River someone had run back in the twenties. The place had folded during the Depression and the Traver family had acquired the property to add to the preserve.
He found his feet and waded out to stand beside her. “I know where we are,” he said.
Eighteen
They sat side by side at the kitchen table stabbing with forks into an open container of cold lasagna. It was after 1 A.M. The first bottle of Shiraz was almost empty.
The hour of walking from the river to the lodge in the dark, using trails Rice knew well, had passed in exhausted silence. Sara had carried a bag into the unused bedroom to change into dry clothes and hadn’t come out. Rice had changed and then fallen asleep on the sofa, waking after midnight from a dream of falling in the canyon. He’d knocked on Sara’s door to see if she wanted to eat and she’d come out bleary-eyed a few minutes later.
The lasagna wasn’t authentic but Sara had gone to some trouble to make it healthy, with whole wheat pasta, spinach and mushrooms, pine nuts, ground turkey. It was the first decent food Rice had encountered in a long while and he overate spectacularly.
“I can’t fit any more,” he said, setting his fork on the table.
Sara peered into the glass dish. “This was supposed to last you a while.”
When she stood, her chair tipped over, and before he could stop himself he reached out to catch it. He froze, remembering her reaction in the closet that first day. He held the chair, waiting for the elbow, but it didn’t come, and after a moment she smiled. “Your face,” she said. “You look like you’re waiting for a grenade to go off.”
He mumbled something about not wanting to spook her.
She crossed her arms, seemed to find him amusing. “You know, I’ve got pretty good radar, and I can tell you’re not going to hit on me.”
He raised an eyebrow at the abrupt conversational turn but couldn’t think of a response. This wasn’t comfortable territory.
“I get hit on a lot, I think guys decide I’m right there in that sweet spot of moderately good-looking but not beautiful and undoubtedly oh so grateful for the male attention. Guys who know I was raped have managed to restrain themselves recently, but with you, it’s not even on the table. I’m not complaining, it’s a big part of why I’m okay being alone with you. But I’m curious. You’re hardly a eunuch, and you’re not gay.”
“Nope. Are you?”
“Some guys think I am. I’ve sure tried it.”
“Really?”
“Oh, great, suddenly you’re interested.”
He started to object but she bugged her eyes and said “Men!” and went back to watching him. The wine had disinhibited her, and this scientific inquisitiveness made him squirm. He felt some sympathy for the skinks she studied. He watched her hands, half-expecting her to draw nail clippers from a pocket and come at him for a DNA sample.
“So am I right? How’s my radar?”
“You’re right. I’m taking a break from all that.” He stopped, thinking it hadn’t been a year, that it seemed impossible the world could actually circle back to November again. All that shit last year should’ve unsprung the calendar, slinging him in a straight line through unfamiliar seasons toward whatever hell or oblivion waited for him.
“Oh, no. I’m sorry.” She must’ve seen it in his face. “Nasty breakup?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s okay if you don’t want to talk about it.”
He didn’t reply. The investigator’s phrase “sexualized torture-killing” came to mind, and he knew if anyone was qualified to hear him talk about this it was Sara. Maybe someday.
She replaced the top on the depleted dish of lasagna and opened the refrigerator, her face composed and pale in the yellow light from inside. He couldn’t tell if she was disappointed. When she turned back she frowned at him.
“Now you’re staring at me.”
She was right, he was staring. Making a decision.
“The bear hunters you caught on the property, when you called the game warden. Big stocky guys, red hair?”
“Uh-huh. Their dad runs that store in Stumpf.”
“Did they threaten you?” He was afraid this might put her off, but she seemed to trust him now and didn’t hesitate.
“Of course they did. They’re assholes. I told the sheriff, and sure enough they all had alibis the night I was attacked. He said he had to cross those guys off.”
“Alibis can’t be hard to come by around here. The Stillers are bush-league drug dealers with violent inclinations. If they’re selling bear parts, too, poaching up here and selling the parts, they had a motive to want to hurt you, run you off.”
“Ha,” she said, not really laughing. “That sure backfired.”
“How?”
“They got you instead.”
He thought about the dead bear the mushroom picker had showed him, his failed undercover adventure with the gall buyer. “So far I haven’t slowed them down much.”
She didn’t respond but her look was challenging, and just a little bit fierce, like she wished she could catch those guys on the mountain again. Self-Defense Sara taking them down with flying elbows and crackling stun gun. Bear poachers pissing their pants. They might be better off with Rice as the caretaker.
Bearskin Page 11