If it was Blossom Creek Canyon then by dropping into it and following its route they should come around and out again onto the Blue—south of the ranch and the ends of all roads, bypass the former altogether.
They funneled together through the gap, Ron taking the lead and never turning back. Once past the pines and onto a stretch of scattered scrub and grass they saw the gash in the earth from some way off. The canyon. A canyon at least. Pete shot forward toward that abyss and almost at once fell hard on his forearms with a rough pained grunt, his foot hooked on some snag invisible in the high grass. He swore without imagination as Ron shuffled up, paying extra attention to his own footing beneath the desiccated thin blades. Pete pushed awkwardly to hands and knees and waved Ron off, palms out —I’m okay, I’m okay. . .
Sue-Min saw smears of blood on both his palms.
Ron offered a similar gesture in response, though with palms angled down and presumably unbloodied. —Okay, okay, just checkin’ bro.
Pete turned and staggered into the treeless span. Ron followed after a backward look and a shrug toward Sue-Min. She hitched her pack back up and followed.
A few minutes later they clumped together to a halt at the edge of a canyon. Blossom Creek Canyon they hoped. If the ranchers spoke true, this route would take them back to the main trunk of the Blue and its trackless and uninhabited middle stretch. Pete and Ron high-fived without a glance at Sue-Min who stood just a step behind.
Pete sauntered to the edge and the others followed, Sue-Min squeezing between Ron on her left and the branches of a thick twisted fir on her right. Dirt cliffed at the top here, some eighty meters deep and at least that wide a span. Away to their left the canyon boxed off, but not so far ahead it jogged to the right and out of sight. Looked like the east wall rose there and some stone began to show through the slopes of soil. The bottom was a cleft too tight to see.
Descending the dirt wall before them held zero appeal. They saw no paths, no ramps, no natural stairs in the crumbling unstable face, no hand or footholds. Just pink grainy soil, scattered bleached protruding stones, random precarious cacti. Attempting any route down here without rope seemed likely suicide. Even on rope the descent would be sketchy. But a rock face would be different if one were ahead.
Onward then.
Now they at least had a feature to follow. So they followed. They were not lost. Probably not anyway. Probably not yet anyway. Sue-Min’s incipient panic faded some. Pete took the lead again and they picked their way along the ridge, working around standing trees and fallen snags, retreating from the indented edges of scalloped collapse.
The sun where they could see it hovered just above the western slate range in the haze. They held no discussion on the subject, but she knew they all understood they’d have to make plans for night soon. They wouldn’t be going much further than this, not today.
They came to the canyon’s bend, rounded it. Ahead two changes leapt out at once. From here on, the walls on both sides were stone, steep scoured pink tuff ribbed with dubious holds. In addition their ridge dropped away, grew lower, just as the opposite wall ascended.
They quickened their pace, worked their way down to a less elevated section of the west wall, an almost level grassy area studded with the dark forms of juniper and pines. Across the narrow canyon almost close enough to throw a stone, the east wall—or was it south now?—rose near three hundred meters overhead. The steep stone face was more of the same, scoured and striated and pink, pyroclastic tuff of some sort, ash deposited in strata over how many millennia from what volcano or volcanoes, super or just giant, then cut through by slow eons of flash flood and flow. . .
That was when they saw the cave. Sue-Min was certain she spotted it first, but she only stared in silence so it was Ron who got to point it out and proclaim its presence. Maybe two thirds of the way up the wall and a hundred meters down canyon, a black horizontal oval in the rugged salmon scarp. Ahead of her Pete and Ron conferred close, heads bent together, low excited tones.
—Let’s make for that cave. Ron.
—Yeah bro, we can camp there. We’re gonna need to camp for the night soon anyway. Pete.
No shit Sherlock. She knew that already. They all knew that already. Probably no bear or mountain lion in there, high as it was. And it was August, not hibernation season yet. So steep though. Her stomach fluttered contemplating the climb, but fuck it. She was in better shape than either of the guys.
First they needed to cross. Ron stared from the edge, left-right, down, said —I think we can descend right here, hike up to the cave from below, choose the best ascent there.
—Sounds good to me, bro. Lead on.
Ron looked back at Sue-Min a second, said —Whadda you think, baby? Looks good?
Only he turned before she could answer, dropped to his knees and slid his legs over the edge. Pete followed soon as Ron was all below. He looked up at her once his head had descended, said —Come on in, the water’s fine!
What an asshole. She let him climb down at least two full body lengths before she commenced her own descent.
The slope on this side was moderate, the handholds regular and reliable. Soon she reached Pete and Ron at the bottom, or almost at the bottom, wedged between walls only a few feet apart and tapering beneath to a terminal V too tight for traverse, both braced in position with arms and legs splayed out, an awkward pair of mothmen. She wished she’d worn her gloves for this shit. She saw Pete had his on now.
The stagnant murk in the crease beneath their feet could only be Blossom Creek. What they saw of the stream was little more than a foot wide and all but dry, its pitiful arrested trickle of water a black coffee hue. Oily black coffee. Only hard rain or snowmelt would make it flow again. Broken branches choked the creekbed’s acute angle. She considered how much further each flash flood would propel the jumble of jagged wood, how long some of it lingered in this isolate groove. . .
They had to chimney along from there, splayed legs and outstretched arms holding them over the creekbed’s crevice. It was a familiar caver’s maneuver, and they progressed in this peculiar style as if awkward angels.
Below them bleached branches clogged the trench, broken ends awaiting only one missed step to punch through clothes and flesh and draw blood, or just the next flash flood to move them along. She looked upstream at what she could see of the sky. Distant rain would send a torrent toward them even when the sky overhead was blue. No cumulus clouds, no rain. At least so far as she could see.
They made their clumsy way along, hand foot foot hand. Where the cave mouth had to be close to overhead Sue-Min saw forms below like broken rib bones protruding from the opaque water. Human ribs. Three curved gray somethings arching up from the coffee hued creek amidst more vegetal forms. And there—wasn’t that cracked rod a barely submerged long bone? Once more she took a breath to speak out, but froze.
No way those could be human bones. No way would she give Pete a chance to mock her, think he was bonding that way. Or worse, to offer sympathy if Ron mocked her. Just funky sticks, bones of livestock or mountain goats at most, nothing to see here. . .
Neither of the guys noticed. They pressed ahead until they estimated the cave was right above. The left slope seemed steeper now, nearly vertical. Sue-Min contemplated climbing it wearing her frame pack, how to balance. Yet the alternative was to leave the pack down here, with all her gear, likely to slip into the foul stagnant cola below no matter how tightly wedged. No way to open it here either, take out just those items she might need—and no way to tote that stuff up without a pack if she did. Going up would be all or nothing.
Ron went first, gripping the corroded ridges of tuff, faded khaki pack bobbing on his back as he rose. Pete followed straight off. Sue-Min was ready to go second after Ron, but got no chance. It hadn’t taken long for that to become the pattern . . . Ron, Pete, her, repeat.
Her turn came. She all but pressed her breasts against the wall as she took a grip. The rock was not so friable as it appeared, and th
e thin horizontal ridges cut by ancient floods and flows offered hand and footholds more stable than expected. The slope, though not as extreme as she anticipated, was still steep, and she steeled herself to flatten against it if she slid, avoid tumbling backward and losing all stability. Pressed face forward she might yet regain her grip in a slide.
Somehow they all three made it, crawled and scrambled over a rough rock lip and into the cave. Sue-Min let herself collapse back, panting on the pebbly dusty cave floor with her pack pushed up for an uncouth pillow. Both her hands were sore and torn in several places, and she could feel the palm of her left wet with blood. Ron reclined in a position much like hers, but Pete still stood, though he trembled. She thought already of their inevitable return, whether experience would render it easier on the descent or the change in direction might make it worse. She’d at least dig her gloves out of her pack for that.
Once she got back up and looked around she found the cave was not deep, only a rockshelter really, its rear walls extending nowhere full into dark zone, barely deep enough for permanent twilight at best. The ceiling rose in half a dozen low scalloped domes whose curves extended out to the walls, giving the shelter’s interior the look of a dirty compressed cathedral. Its floor area altogether amounted to little more than a good-sized theater stage, especially if all the curtains were drawn.
While the guys unpacked and set up camp she strolled about the hole. Beneath the rear north side dome she found the excised wings of dozens of Catocala moths, strewn in a tight spread little more than one meter round. Hindwings only, some up, some down, like powder-scaly tarots, their insides striped in red and black, outsides black and white. She’d seen this sort of thing once before, in a famous shrine cave near Capitan, New Mexico. The wing scatter marked a spot where bats fed. Or perhaps the work of a single energetic bat.
But no bats hung here. And why only the bright-striped hindwings, evolved to startle birds in flight? Where the drab forewings?
She found the probable culprits over in the final south side alcove, loose cluster of at least two dozen Townsend’s big-eared bats, their little charcoal bunny ears poking down within reach, so cuddly she wanted to pet them. But, rabies. It was always a maybe. Not just from a bite—the aerosol of their saliva could spread it alone.
Sue-Min noted the shifting feel of the floor beneath her feet, a sense of gravel grinding. She looked closer at the layer of tiny cobbles covering much of the cave. River cobbles. Dusty pebbles two, three, four centimeters around. Rounded, roughly. From the river. Someone hauled them up here a handful at a time. The Mimbres or other Mogollon who worshipped in this place? Why? She knew of prehistoric Southwest cave shrines strewn with pottery sherds in the hundreds, sometimes a thousand or more . . . others stuffed with inordinate numbers of sandals, prayer sticks, cane cigarettes. . . These rounded but dusty river cobbles though? Could this rocky carpet be the remnant of some rain ritual, some offering to ancestors in the watery underworld of night, the rain-bringers who returned as the clouds themselves, came back as the very raindrops. . . ?
Ron called her to where he was making camp. Sue-Min opened her own pack and drew out what she’d need for the night. She forgot to pack a sleeping pad so Ron placed his own under her bag despite the perfunctory protest she made. That settled, they zipped their bags together, creating a single quilted envelope. She smiled at Ron across this square . . . then saw what Pete was doing, what he held. . .
Pete hadn’t yet spread his bag out at all. Instead he moved methodically through the cave, a flattened wand coated in gray plastic extending from his hand.
Sue-Min turned on Ron. —No way. You brought me here with a looter? Did you not know about this? Tell me you didn’t know he was gonna do this. Tell me honestly.
—Aw baby, I didn’t think it mattered. He’s only looking for Spanish gold, not the stuff you study. Studied. It’s a total long shot anyway. Still, Coronado did come up the Blue, you know. And they do say he stashed some gold in a cave here somewhere.
—Coronado came here looking for gold! He didn’t bring any!
—Sure he did. He had to pay his men with it. Makes sense he would cache some for the return trip, when he would need it the most.
—You know looters are like my natural enemy, right? Archaeologists hate looters worse than we hate . . . Nazis.
—Well, you’re not really an archaeologist, are you? I mean, not anymore, not since they kicked you out.
He looked up at her, seemed to catch the blank stare that paved over her rage and turned away . . . then dared an amendment —And Pete’s not a looter. He’s not looking for Indian artifacts. He’s only looking for Spanish gold . . . or maybe Spanish armor.
Sue-Min’s voice came clipped as she answered, precise as a laser —Pothunters, treasure seekers, metal detectorists . . . they’re all the same. They trash sites, remove artifacts from their context, erase their provenience, leave them with no connection to their origin, and ruin any data. They destroy our national heritage.
Ron was down on one knee, unpacking items she mostly thought unnecessary—why had he brought four bags of unpopped popcorn? He did not look up. Pete meanwhile continued crisscrossing the cave floor, electronic wand angled down around 45 degrees. He swept it in short arcs to either side and ahead, ignoring Sue-Min and Ron.
—You know how I hate these guys, and now you drag me out in the middle of nowhere with one? I’m telling you, if he really finds anything I’m shutting him down the second he moves to break the ground!
She had no idea how she’d do any such shutting down unless perhaps Ron backed her up, but thin as Pete’s chances were of finding Spanish gold, things would probably never come to that.
Pete doubled back. Apparently he struck out so far. Beelined toward their bedroll till Ron requested he hold.
—Whasamatter, Bro?
—Can you maybe leave off with that thing till morning? Any gold here isn’t going anywhere before then. Night’s coming down and we should all crash now, get an earlier start than we did today, you know?
Pete shot back a puzzled look and shrugged. He flicked a switch on the detector and let the hand that held it drop to his side, turned and stepped back to his pack to begin spreading his own bedroll.
The cave held no wood except a few dusty twigs, so they built no fire. Instead they chatted across the gap between the sleeping bag islands where they sat, passing Ron’s half empty flask back and forth as they spoke. Their prospects for tomorrow, their luck in finding the cave, the strange pattern of the rocks they’d passed. Then Ron changed the topic altogether —When you get down to it those ranchers were decent guys, you know? Real all-Americans, really. I mean, what could be more American than cattle ranchers living down a canyon in Arizona?
Sue-Min hung her head, said nothing, which was fast becoming her routine when Ron was wrong, so she was surprised when Pete replied —Dude, those ranchers were fucking assholes. Their story about the bulls was . . . bullshit, and you know it. And don’t tell me you didn’t see how that one guy was checking out your girlfriend.
Sue-Min was shocked she agreed with Pete for once, but still she held her tongue.
—Duuude. Ron’s answer was forced and artificial, hands palms up on his knees in a phony Buddha pose. —Dude. You’re just projecting. They’re all right.
—Ha! Canyon dwelling inbred weirdoes . . . we’ll all be lucky if they’re not burying your truck somewhere with their backhoe right this minute.
Ron shook his head. —Chill, man. We’ll be fine.
That was it for the conversation, and as the Jack Daniels in the flask was already exhausted, they tugged off their hiking boots, crawled into their sleeping bags, and slipped into sleep, one by one.
Sue-Min woke to a mass crushing her midsection and a beefy hand clamped hard over her mouth. The cave was dark but the reek of sweat and Polo over the low aroma of rock dust told her at once it was Pete. Who the hell even slathers cologne on for a backpacking hike? She sought to struggle but her
legs were trapped in the sleeping bag and Pete knelt on her arms so all she could do was thump her knees bluntly against his back through the padding of the bag. She torqued her neck, tried to scan to the sides, but the burly home builder increased his pressure and pinned her head in place. What the fuck was going on? Where was Ron? How could Pete . . .
She couldn’t see Ron, couldn’t see much of anything. Though the cave was shallow its roof was so low no moonlight entered far. Sue-Min squeezed out a short set of stifled squeals, hoping to get her boyfriend’s attention or at least wake him if he could somehow still be asleep while his best friend raped her. Because she knew that’s where this was headed. Any woman would know. Pete had always given off that creeper vibe. She hadn’t worried much because Ron was always with her when Pete was around. But where was he now? The first flashes of heart-pounding panic faded and a wintry calm filled her frame in its place. She was going to survive. Not only survive. She was going to stop this. Even if she had to hurt him. Even if she had to. . . In that moment her mind became icy clear.
She tried to bite Pete’s hand but his grip on her jaw covered her chin and was too firm for her to open her mouth. She struggled again to scream but her whimpers dwindled in the back of her throat. Pete shook the shadowed silhouette of his head. His movements seemed at once both frantic and subdued. Something didn’t add up. Was Pete himself frightened of something? His face was no more than a blur but she felt certain now he was scared. Terrified. Of what—of Ron? Where was Ron? Where—?
Pete was linebacker big, outweighed Ron pretty well and her by maybe double. Sue-Min was no weakling but he was strong and had surprised her. She needed a weapon. What? Her Leatherman was zipped out of reach in her pack. A loose rock might be good but the cave floor offered only a mix of dust and the little river cobbles. A few scattered sticks. If she could find a sharp stick she might stab him in the eye. Worked for Ulysses, right? But his knees pinned her arms at the elbows, her hands already growing numb. Still, if he really wanted at her he would have to get up and peel her bag back at some point. She had to be ready to make her move when that happened. She couldn’t expect a second chance.
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