“Nice combination,” he said, the dancing relaxing them. “The girl and the songs.”
Lilly was singing “. . . another new day. The mist in the meadow starts fading away . . .” She watched them as she sang, wondering where a packer had learned to dance that way. Then she melted into the lyrics.
It surprised Ty that anyone whose songs came from so deep inside her could taunt him the way Lilly did in the mountains. But he enjoyed it almost as much as the general, liking how happy mocking him made her.
“Will you bring ’em back alive?” She watched him saddle up to look for his horses. “To admire you like we should?”
“Don’t want them to go to Siberian Basin and admire that. Thirty miles is a long ride to find out they like grass better than this grain.”
She’d laughed, her laughter still with him as he forded the deepening river to pick up tracks, finding them and following them upriver to his horses, comfortable in a little meadow, the grass good, snow holding them from going higher. He gave each some grain and left them— happy in the sun.
He rode back slowly, watching the Kern gather its power as it splashed down the canyon in steps, the mists rising and falling and rising again. He kept an eye out for Gretta as he rode, suspecting she’d be ahead of schedule—Gretta an accomplished mountaineer now, strong and rockwise and tireless. A mile above the ford he picked up her tracks, deciding he should haul her pack across the river, the ford deep and swift, big slick boulders the only footing to be had. He found her there, trying to boulder-hop her way across, poised on a tilted rock and looking wonderful—strong and resilient, her years in the Sierra giving her legs the layered muscles of a runner.
“Can’t cross without getting wet,” he called above the river’s rumble. “I’ll haul your pack.”
She couldn’t hear over the river. She brushed back her kerchief and cupped an ear, the movement pulling her off balance just enough to force her to jump for another rock. Ty saw her laugh as she gave up and pushed off, saw her foot land where the rock was slick from the foaming rapids, saw her go chest deep into an icy pool. He lost her for a moment as the current hit her pack, turning her and sweeping her into still faster water. He saw her slip down a slick between two boulders, the pack floating above as she fought it.
And then—just like that—she was gone.
Even as he whipped Nightmare across the meadow, Ty regretted the half-second he’d been frozen, watching her slide off the rock. He knew how fast the water would carry her now and didn’t skid Nightmare to a stop until they were at the water again, coming off as if he were after a roped calf, running into the water and wishing he’d had that rope, had anything that could hold them from the rapids. He saw the half-second he’d lost was the half-second he needed, reaching now for the pack, needing it to reach Gretta, knowing he had to lift both to free her from the weight of it. He lifted and pulled, felt his boot slide across a rock deep in the river. Then he was in the water with her, pushing the pack away to grasp her, trying to kick the pack free of her with his boots.
Buck had seen Ty bring Nightmare out of the ford, seen him push the mare hard across the meadow, dodging trees as he raced toward the rapids. Buck was running himself when he saw Ty fly from the saddle and splash into the river. By the time he got there Ty was sliding away, struggling with something.
Buck was in the river himself, chest deep and reaching out for Ty, who was clutching at a pack, something under it pulling everything toward the rapids. Buck reached farther and felt the current take him too, sweep him across slippery rocks toward the fast water before he felt a rope across his face. He grasped at it, was pulled by it, felt Thomas Haslam’s hand reaching out for him, pulling him now with Lilly pulling too, the two of them clinging to the rope wrapped around a leaning sapling, the three of them holding to one another to keep from being swept away.
They pulled Buck up and out and his legs were already running again, splashing him out of the water to go for the frightened mare. She spun away, left him to circle back to the water’s edge where Ty had disappeared. Buck cursed her as he ran back to the ford, ran waist deep through the river and turned down the trail to meet the river again. He was well below the lip of the meadow now, the river running fast and straight, its roar drowning out all sound—but Buck unaware of that, unaware of anything but what his eyes could tell him as he scanned across the river, stumbling up along the serrated and broken bank, crashing through brush and over deadfall as he sought out some sign of the pack, some clothes ripped and hanging from a branch, some signal that would tell him what he didn’t want to happen had not happened.
He came back to the ford at last, crossed it and came into camp. Exhausted. Bleeding.... Wild.
“We have to find him,” he said to Thomas Haslam. “He’s down there. In that river. Down there.”
“Them,” Thomas Haslam said. “It was Gretta . . .” He looked at Buck, his voice not working, his face disintegrating. Buck felt as though something inside Thomas Haslam had torn a hole through both of them.
“They’re gone.” Haslam had to suck in breath to say it, admit it. Because after he said it there was nothing more he could say.
Lilly reached out, touched him, touched Buck, tears filling her as she reached out for something that made sense.
Ty had pushed the pack ahead, holding the girl as they sluiced through the first rocks. The pack jammed on something and Gretta came free of it, both of them going under it, coming up into foaming water that turned them around and around again. She was behind him now and he tried to push her up, onto something, into air. But the pack came back at them, hitting her, knocking her below him as he struggled to get his legs downstream, bring her up so they could fight toward the shore.
A rush of water more powerful than anything he’d ever felt drove him down and down into rocks deep below the rushing current. He felt Gretta slip from him, her body pulled around a boulder he couldn’t see. And then he was on the surface again, gasping. Something hit him from behind and he turned to touch it and felt himself go down again, not knowing what he had touched. He felt for it, felt the dull crack of his head on a rock and was spun around again, lifted, all his body seeming to come free of the water as he went over a ledge and crashed down into a pool where everything was dark and slow as though slow-motion had taken over his life. He felt something brush against him. Then a darkness closed in.
Later he remembered clinging to the branches of a fir, its great roots exposed where the waters that had cut away its life. But he hadn’t the strength to hold on, lift himself above the power that flung him there and then reclaimed him, swept him back like a toy. He tried to push off rocks but the river denied him, spun him until he was going headfirst again, his strength no match for the water’s power.
After that he remembered only surrendering, becoming no more than the river itself—until it left him on the shallows of a rocky bar, waters pounding past in a darkness that told him nothing. The moon lifted to show him a bank close by. He reached for it, the cold shaking him so violently he had no choice. But the river recaptured him, willows slowing him just enough to find an aspen he could cling to, free himself from the sucking sweep of waters. He crawled onto the flat of a boulder and slept until his own shaking woke him, made him stand, jog, and dance the night away to fight the cold, keep some flame alive in a life he knew had no right to be.
Some time toward morning he fell again, collapsed until a morning sun revived him and he heard the pop-pop-pop of a helicopter going away. He watched it grow smaller as it searched its way down the river. Beyond it clouds were moving in, gray and thick, telling him no helicopter would be back, not soon enough. He sat, his body so sore it was an agony. One boot was gone, his clothes were shredded, heavy with wet, one foot was bloody and raw from the long night’s battle.
He still had his knife, used it to cut strips from his shirt. He wrapped the foot, cut thicker strips from his pants and fashioned a sole, made a shoe from the wraps so he could walk—if he
could stand.
He looked at the cliffs above him. The crashing river before him. Downriver its banks were choked with growth, huge boulders, more growth. Upriver, cliffs, sheared-off rock—and growth so thick it looked impassable.
The gray sky chilled him. He knew he had to move. Up the river was all he could think of, back to where he’d started. Maybe Gretta was there, cast onto some shoal as he had been. He couldn’t think of her dead any more than he could think of himself alive. He couldn’t think either of those ways. He just knew he had to go up, that back at Junction Meadows were his horses. Buck. The Haslams. Jeb Walker and Lilly.
He started, each movement uncovering some new pain, something torn and broken in him. But each step bringing him closer to his high country, safety—taking him up against the relentless waters. Every few steps he stopped, let the pain settle as he scanned the banks of the river, looked across it for some sign of Gretta, even a glimpse of the trail that ran along the east bank, provided a way to follow the great river to its source. But he saw nothing: across the river everything was hidden in timber; on his side nothing but cliffs to climb and brush to fight. No sign of Gretta, no sign of anything human.
Mostly he saw the relentless work of the river, its waters taking everything out of the mountains toward the big valley, the sink where a sea had once been, where the great Kern would be swallowed into the earth just as that sea had been.
Sometimes he would fall asleep where he stopped, looking for a way to go on. In his sleep he would see the river rushing down until it became nothing, wasting its great life going nowhere. He would jerk awake with the thought, frightened to think anything would push so hard to rush into the sun-scorched earth, disappear.
In the years that followed, Ty Hardin would take Nightmare down to look across at that place where the river had thrown him on its banks. Had he been airborne, he would think—an eagle seeking food or even a helicopter on a search—he would have seen the bridge scarcely a mile below, seen the hot springs that he could have crossed to in safety, seen the trail that could have returned him safely to his horses, to his people.
But he also understood that what he couldn’t see was of no use. What he couldn’t conceive, worthless. He’d only known he had to go up—no matter the miles—to what he knew, not down, hoping for something he didn’t. And so he’d gone up where no man had gone, crawling and hobbling across a country so broken it seemed more a hundred miles than the ten the Kern had cut in such a breathtaking line that no man could navigate it, walk in its shallows, work with it—survive it.
It had taken him two days and two nights of almost constant movement to do what could not be done. He ate wild onion and miner’s lettuce and elderberries—green and sour. He ate currants and serviceberries and the leaves of flowers so bitter he couldn’t swallow. When he scraped himself on rocks, he pressed yarrow to his wounds. When he was trapped on cliffs without drink, he dipped his tattered clothes into tiny pools under dripping rock, sucked until he could move on.
He wouldn’t rest until he fell asleep, and then only rested until he woke, pulled himself forward again, moved until he could move no more because he was sleeping again, sleeping even as he slowed, collapsed against whatever he could find until he could move again.
It was as though he never rested, as though he had no choice but to keep moving up against everything the river was bringing down, his mind just as determined as his body—but his mind going in no direction he could understand. Things coming back to him and leaving him in no order that made sense. Only Fenton and Cody Jo—and Willie—seemed constant, as though they held the key to what kept him moving.
He saw Otis Johnson’s big body at the foot of his bed. “Didn’t mean to treat you so rough,” he said. And then he was gone and Ty was teaching Walker Johnson to tie a diamond hitch, watching the boy run under a pass at the football game, the pass unbelievably long but the boy running and reaching and balancing the ball until the rest of him caught up with it and he was pulling up in some end zone as quietly as he’d learned to pack Ty’s mules, as he’d talked with Jeb Walker around Ty’s fires. And then it was Fenton in the fire, his face alive in the fire, worried. “Goddamn it,” he said. “Don’t get yourself killed.” And Fenton turned, held Cody Jo. The two of them looking at Ty from the fire. Cody Jo was crying. And Ty found he was crying too, woke to find himself crying, crying as the Red Cross volunteer dressed his torn leg, crying as he walked the night away after Willie died, crying because the river had taken Gretta—crying when he came over Goat Pass and saw the High Sierra: saw the order, the peace.
Lilly Bird was the first to see him as he came from where no man could come. “Ty?” she said. “Ty!” And then she was holding him, weeping, taking him to the others. “It’s Ty.” Her voice broke over the word. “Alive!”
Alice Haslam was there. And Buck. All of them. All but the Search and Rescue teams, far down the Kern by then, searching for Ty’s body even below where they’d found Gretta’s, searching where the water’s power relented, where it finally let you see into it. The helicopters were flying by then, their blades cracking the air as they probed for the dead packer far below where he’d returned to his horses, his people.
“It’s all right.” Alice Haslam looked at Ty, her throat closing on her words. “It’s all right.You’re here.You tried.”
Ty’s mouth worked, but nothing came. He turned to Buck.
“Why’d it take her?” he said, looking up at the Kaweah shelf where he so wanted to take his horses. “Thought of climbing up there. Calling it quits.”
“That’s not what you’d do, Ty.” Buck was kneeling, dressing Ty’s mutilated foot. “You don’t know what quits is.” He hunched a shoulder to clear his eyes. “You never did.”
The helicopters came in with reporters from Bishop and Lone Pine and Sacramento. Thomas Haslam heard one of them radio out that the Park Service had saved the life of a packer.
“No.” Haslam stopped him in the midst of his transmittal. “No one rescued Ty Hardin but Ty Hardin. Ty Hardin and maybe that river that could have taken him in a moment. And he wouldn’t have needed any rescuing if he hadn’t tried to save Gretta. Which there was no way to do. He just had no choice but to try.”
Others gathered, took out their pencils, not sure what to write. “Your Park Service people can take credit for what they did do, but you can’t give them credit for saving Ty Hardin. For whatever is in him that made him try to save Gretta.” He looked at the reporter with the radio, looked at the others, his voice shaky.
“There aren’t people like him anymore,” he said. “Maybe you can’t say that in your papers, but it’s time you heard it.” His voice broke as he saw their puzzled looks. “There is no way left to become this man.”
They grew uneasy, watched him fight back his tears, not sure he could go on.
“With all these rules and regulations,” Thomas Haslam took a breath, “it’s a wonder these mountains have any room left for a Ty Hardin.”
None of that went into the papers, the reporters embarrassed by Thomas Haslam and confused about what he’d meant. But it made them mindful of what had happened. And that’s the way they reported it:
Sierra Packer Survives Kern Rescue Attempt Fails to Save Girl in Swollen Rapids Makes Heroic Return to Victim’s Family Alone Ty read the story himself, read it and looked at Lars. “They don’t
have it right, Lars,” he said. “I don’t believe they can get it right.” “What in the world do you mean, Ty?” Lars uncapped a beer and
put it in front of him. “Surviving them rapids was a miracle. And no
one understands how you could get back through that country, alone.” “Just came back to my horses,” Ty said, “. . . and I never was alone.”
41
Switchbacks
After that Ty knew how much of his own life came from the people he loved. At first he lived it more than he understood it. He would hear Fenton’s voice as he tracked horses, watch with Spec as deer pick
ed their way through a glade, feel Cody Jo’s despair about people who were bruised, haunted by some darkness. Willie seemed everywhere, in the streams and fires, the moons that helped him through his nights.
It was Lilly Bird who made him understand it, though it took time before he realized her life had made a life of its own somewhere inside him. Before that it was her songs. Not the words so much as what she did with them, her voice giving weight to the simplest line—sometimes cutting into him so sharply he would turn away, gather himself. And he wasn’t the only one her voice touched. He would watch Alice and Thomas Haslam come together when she sang, see the general stopped, embarrassed to be moved so—even find Walker Johnson taken by the world she opened with her songs.
Ty had taught Walker Johnson to pack, just as Otis wanted him to— before Walker went on to other things. But Walker returned for trips when he could, helping out, listening by Ty’s fires, comforted by Ty’s mountains. As a boy he’d packed for Ty each summer, become almost as good a packer as he was a player on his high-school teams. He’d graduated with a shelf full of trophies, but he only looked at them for a week before he sat down and wrote Ty that he wouldn’t be packing that year. He was signing up in the army—just as his father had done before him.
Ty missed packing with the boy. He’d liked his quiet ways, his patience with the mules and the comfort he took in the woods. But Ty saw the mountains could never hold him. There was something else he needed. Ty had seen it watching him watch the others around the fires, wanting to know their histories, why they came, chose their work, lived where they lived.
Ty knew there would be no answers in the army and worried when Walker joined. But there was no need. The army saw what he could do with a football. Mostly they wanted him to do that. And when he was discharged the university was waiting, wanting him to do the same for them. Ty and Cody Jo had even gone to see Walker’s last game, watched him run under the long pass as drums rolled and students chanted and the players surrounded Walker in the end zone. To Ty Walker seemed the quietest one in the whole stadium. He saw why when they met with Walker and Otis after the game.
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