“Ty Hardin!” the woman exclaimed. “Ain’t you a sight.”
She was across the room in a moment, hugging him and making over him, the sweetness of her powder telling him what his eyes had not.
“Beth,” he said. “It’s you.”
“I’ve growed.” She laughed, her bracelets jangling.
“I sure didn’t expect to see you here.”
“Who else could run this place, honey?” She turned to Lilly, whose smile seemed frozen on her face, and gave her a hug. “And you’re Ty’s sweetie.” She patted Lilly, admired her. “You take care of him, hon. We been awful fond of him—since he was a boy.”
They all went out for dinner at the Elkhorn. Jasper kept trying to tell them stories about bears but he had a hard time outtalking Beth, who seemed to have the history of Missoula tucked away in her head. Most of the history of the Swan as well. She talked about Bob Ring going off to Seattle and finally just disappearing. About Gus Wilson coming into town to pry his brothers free from The Bar of Justice and falling in love with Loretta, taking her off to Canada to open a government sawmill. She even talked about Bernard’s parents coming out to put flowers on his grave, how the Forest Service stuck with Ring’s story, always calling Bernard’s death an accident. She talked about Spec and Tommy Yellowtail too. And about how Horace and Etta left all their money to the church, making sure the church took care of Jasper first. She talked about other people too, most of them dead—just still alive to her.
In the morning Ty set out for the Swan, wanting to see Fenton’s big house before they started back for Sun Valley. Lilly, quiet during the long dinner, had decided to stay in Missoula. “Beth says the Catholic church is still the way it was. I’d like to see it. I’d like to be in church today.”
Ty drove out alone, surprised to find houses and little pastures where he remembered only lodgepole and aspen and bear grass. There were almost twice as many stores along the road at Seeley Lake. Even the pack station looked different, all the logs of the big house varnished and a lawn running out to the barn, everything manicured as though for a calendar picture.
“Bed and breakfast now,” the woman cleaning up inside told him. “They do a nice business. Hire some boys to take folks for rides up to the lake and back. The owners go south in the winter.Works out all right.”
The Murphys had left too. A young couple was running the store. They weren’t even sure the Murphys were still alive.
“What do you do with the cabins?” Ty saw that a few new ones had been built. “I knew the people who lived in that old one.”
“Rent them to the writers.” The young woman looked at Ty. “Not many like you around anymore. But there’s always a writer or two. They like a cabin in the woods.”
They started back early the next day, hardly talking as they drove along the Bitterroot and crossed the pass to drop down along the Salmon toward Ketchum.
“They say they got hunting camps all through the mountains now. “Even down in Lost Bird Canyon.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Lilly said. “You should have told me about Bernard and Willie. About what happened. What that did to her.” That edge was coming into her voice, as though something were threatening her.
“Hard to think I got myself lost up there.” Ty spoke softly, reaching over with his free hand and massaging Lilly’s neck, her shoulders.
“Don’t even try that.You’ve never been lost in your life.”
“In that snowstorm I was. If Spec hadn’t put the lodgepole up in that tree, I believe I’d still be wandering around back there.”
“What do you mean in a tree?”
“Like a signpost.” Ty eased her head onto his shoulder. “Saved me.” They were widening the road that wound down from the mountains. Ty had to slow to get by all the equipment.
“ Yo u’ve been kind of like that, Lilly. Outside the mountains. Kept me from getting lost.”
“You learned something back there.” Lilly looked at him. “That country told you something. Didn’t it?”
“It did.” Ty picked up speed as the construction dropped away behind them. “I learned it’s gone.”
“What’s gone?”
“Where I grew up. It isn’t there anymore.”
42
The Highest Pass
They came in over Goat Pass, Ty free-herding his mules and so happy to have Lilly with him that Thomas Haslam saw his smile from three switchbacks below. Lilly saw it too, and when they reached the basin she dropped back to ride with him.
“Haven’t felt so happy since that first night in Sun Valley,” Ty said, tying his his mules back into their long string.
“You were happy? I’d never seen you look so sad.”
“Your songs filled me with all those places along the river. The people.Your father. Those singers. I felt like you....Is it possible to be so sad you’re happy?”
“Yes, I think so. Or the reverse. Maybe that’s what I am now.”
Lilly’s career was in full flower. After singing for the skiers and snowboarders and all the people in their bright clothes at Sun Valley, she’d gone back to Tahoe and done the same for them there. In the spring she’d sung at the top of the hotel in San Francisco. And after Ty’s trip she was off to Chicago to sing at a supper club in the Loop.
But it was Ty’s trip that pleased her. She’d set aside time, refused to let anyone talk her out of it. He was taking the Haslams into the Upper Kern, the country that had taken Gretta but that they still loved as no other. He brought them there a different way, taking the high trail south, hugging the spine of the Sierra to cross Pinchot and Glen passes, camping in Ty’s hidden places, and finally crossing towering Forester Pass—if the snow would let them—to drop into the Upper Kern.
“Will we cross the Kern where it’s just a stream?” Lilly asked. “Go into Milestone?”
“If snow doesn’t stop us. And later camp right under Whitney. The country on the way there just as pretty as Whitney too. Only thing prettier is the Kaweahs. Under them there’s that high shelf. Lakes. Meadows. I want you to see it.”
“Will we go onto the shelf?”
“We can look. No way to get there. Except ropes.”
“No Ty Hardin route we can use?”
“Just cliffs. Can’t even sneak Sugar’s burros up there.”
She was looking back at him as she rode, her hat hanging behind
her, her hair moving in the wind, picking up light from the sun. “It’s a short list of people I’d take there, Lilly.You’d be at the top.” “Yes ...I think I know that,” she said.
The trip went so wonderfully Ty hardly missed Buck, who was helping Angie out in the valley. The camps good. The feed rich. The weather clear. The Haslams were so much help each camp seemed set up by magic. And he was taking Lilly along a route she’d never traveled, the country meaning all the more to him because she was in it. He liked the smell of her, the touch. He liked it that she was never edgy in the mountains, would lie on the warm rocks and talk with him after her baths. He loved the songs she sang around his fires, her visits in the night.
His one worry was the snow on Forester, and it was a worry he couldn’t shake. He and Buck had crossed snow there once, taking their whole party over a treacherous cornice. He had no stomach for trying that again. Lars hadn’t believed Jasper when Jasper told him what they’d done—not until Jasper brought in a photograph a guest had taken. Lars was so impressed he’d had it blown up, framed to hang behind his bar. Each time Ty looked at it he wondered why he’d ever tried to cross in the first place.
His worries grew as they closed on Forester. They wound down into Vidette Meadows and climbed again along the creek, riding late through upper meadows, up still higher to finally drop from the trail to the creek again, camping in the last timber just below the highest meadow. Sugar had shown him the spot, a huge rock dropped by glaciers and split by ice, half of it on its back, a giant table made by some god of housekeeping.
It was a fine place
for a layover, which Ty needed to check the pass. He was on Nightmare and gone by first light, the camp shovel slung under his leg like a rifle. He rode under cirques and cliffs scooped so clear he wondered how old Josiah Whitney could think of anything but glaciers. At the high lake, before the trail moved onto the long moraine stretching down from the pass, he saw it—blinding white and rising almost to the pass itself. The pass looked open, blown free of everything by winter storms. But there was at least a mile of gleaming snow below it.
He rode on, knowing the snow would be firm, that the hard part was not the snowfield but getting his mules across the rocks and onto it, how steep it was when you got there, how much ice lurked under the surface, how to come down from the cornice left at the top.
Nightmare had become such a part of him, he let her make her own way. She scrambled onto the snow without hesitating, working hard to pull up the first pitch and then moving easily across the blanket of white—like a deer crossing a divide to find better feed. She found crude switchbacks left by shifting winds, worked her way along them, used deep sun pockets for purchase. He rode it out easily, thinking of that chaos of cliffs and tumbled boulders fifty feet below them, knowing he was riding across a country made safe—for now—by the leveling powers of winter.
“Use the cold to get to the warm,” Fenton had told him. “Old snow, packed snow,” Fenton’s voice seemed alive in the chill lifting from the snowfield, “can solve your problems. Don’t need to know where you are so much as where you want to go.”
And Ty knew where he wanted to go. He could see the pass; in his mind he could even see down into the Upper Kern. He wondered if it weren’t Fenton who was somehow getting him there, the past still alive in him getting him there. The place where he’d grown up might be gone, but there was still the past that place had given him.
The snow took him almost as high as the pass before he saw the trail. It was snaking out from under the snow thirty feet below him, the snowfield ending abruptly in a sheer face, just as smooth as though carved by the same god who had leveled the rock table back in camp. He felt a little sick by the finality of it. It seemed much higher than the one he and Buck had crossed. But he also saw it was south-facing, that the sun had been hitting it all morning. He pulled his shovel from under his leg and was off Nightmare and at work, the mare’s reins on the snow all she needed to hold her.
He shoveled for three hours before he had a trough Nightmare could start down, helped by four rough steps he’d hacked high in the passage. He eased her down them, slid her the last ten feet to come down safely on the trail, the pass just ahead. He led her up to the pass, the other side of it just dizzying granite cliffs, the trail a dropped thread winding down and down—a thousand feet into the basin below. But it was clear....It would do.
He turned back, still leading Nightmare, wanting to get across the snowfield before it got still softer. They had to make three runs at the chute before they made it up, Ty scrambling ahead on the last try without even looking back, hearing the mare struggle behind him, struggling himself until he was on the snowfield, moving without stopping to cross it, jogging when he could, sliding and slipping when he couldn’t jog, making his way down and down to the point where they’d left the trail that morning, a hard day’s work and a mile of softening snow behind them.
They were out of camp before dawn, across the broad snowfield only a few hours after the sun had begun its work.
“Are we riding into heaven?” Lilly had to squint to see, the snow dazzling under the early sun.
“Only one trail higher.” Ty had them leading their horses now, sliding them down the chute and leading them up onto the pass. He rode Nightmare down himself, rode her up onto the pass where Lilly waited. They looked back at Jug, the big mule all the others followed and the mule who needed Nightmare as a colt needs his mother. Jug picked his way down the chute, nose to it to make sure. “The highest is Trail Crest, over the Whitney ridge. Nearly fourteen thousand feet there. So many folks running up and down that trail, they’ve closed it to stock.”
“This one will do.” Lilly held her hat on her head with one hand, the wind whipping hair across her face. “Just us and the sky.” She laughed, looking out at the country ahead. “We are on our way to heaven.”
“We might be.” All Ty’s worries fell away as he watched his mules slide down the trough, each inching into it carefully before sitting back, sliding down, shaking off the snow and moving onto the pass. He was watching the mules but his mind was on Lilly.
“If you come visit tonight,” he looked at her, “I’ll know that’s where we are.”
“Told you an hour in the morning’s worth two at night,” Ty told Thomas Haslam. They had crossed the pass so efficiently that they were unpacking in Milestone Basin in time for a late lunch.
“You did,” Haslam said. “Told me it’s hard to beat a tight rope too, which must apply to a lot of things. I’d just rather not get up the night before to find out what.”
“We got started a little late.” Ty was coiling a lash cinch.
“That’s why it took me two years to recover from my honeymoon. I’m surprised you let us sleep till four.”
“I’ve softened.”
“Alice is right.You’re more like Fenton each day.”
“There’s worse things.” Ty wound the last loop around the coil, threaded it through the cinch ring, hung it on a snag. “If you think about it.”
The next day Ty put a lunch in a day pack and hiked with Lilly into the smaller basin where Sugar had camped, where Maria and Nina had fed him so many years ago, Sugar calling his burros in from the shelves above.
“I can’t imagine how he got those burros here,” Lilly said. They’d been out for almost an hour, following a faint game trail through woods and above willows and up the rocky drainage to the high lake. “It doesn’t look as if it’s been touched.” She stood on a rock by the lake, shooting stars and monkey flowers and Indian paintbrush rimming it. “Ever.”
“Sugar hardly leaves a track,” Ty said, thinking she looked pretty as a wildflower herself.
They bathed, Ty staying in the icy water longer than he thought he could just to be with Lilly. When they came out they needed sun, flattened themselves naked on the granite, let it warm them as they talked lazily about the lunch, happy to be with each other in this high country that embraced them completely.
“Sometimes you scare me, Lilly.” Ty wasn’t afraid to talk with her about anything here.
“You don’t scare at all, Ty Hardin.” Lilly held herself still, collecting the sun’s warmth.
“When you feel threatened, I scare.” He rolled onto his side, kissed the wet of her hair. “You don’t get that way here, do you?”
She turned her head toward him, found his hand. “No, I don’t ... up here you take care of everything.”
“You think it’s real up here?” Ty’s voice was such a part of them it seemed a breeze lifting from the lake.
“It makes me sure I love you, up here. It makes you . . . possible. Is that real?”
She sat up, wet hair falling over her shoulders in strands, beads of water drying on her arms, her breasts.
Ty sat up too, feeling whatever she was going to say was in him already, as though he were she, she were he. They had this thing to say to themselves, were sorting out how to make it count.
“I want in me . . .” She searched his face, wanting to touch him with her need, “...your child.”
She watched everything about him shift, as though a cloud had moved in.
“Shush.” She put a finger to his lips. “Not now. Just know I want to carry in me ...you.” And then she held him to her, let her hair fall across him, her wetness become his.
Ty was still bewildered when they made camp two days later at Crabtree, the great hump of Whitney’s western flank lifting above them, the meadow alive with spring flowers that in the Sierra must wait for summer.
She hadn’t let him talk about it at all after she’d
said it, not even as they came down from the lake. She had come to him in the night but again hadn’t let him say a word. And when he’d stopped his string as they made their way to Whitney, pointing out the high shelf below the Kaweahs, showing her the lakes and meadows, she had just looked at him, smiled at him.
“Ty’s dream,” Thomas Haslam had said to them both. “Guess it’s good to have a dream. Even a crazy one.”
“When I find a way onto that shelf, you may not get an invite.”
“Oh I’ll get one. And I’ll probably be fool enough to accept. Watch you fight the bogs and mosquitoes and deadfall to stay alive over there.”
Lilly had just laughed, loving Ty in his high country, Ty with his friends and his animals. His peace with himself.
After dinner Ty took her onto the ridge behind camp to watch the last light on the Kaweahs, far out across Kern Canyon. He leaned against a boulder, Lilly leaning against him, pulling his arms around her against the cool.
“I never expected,” he said, “after Willie and the baby, after Montana, that anyone could want such a thing. With me.”
“I do.” Lilly didn’t bother to turn her head, her voice low but the two of them so complete there was no need. “I never thought there’d be a ‘you’ in my life. Never thought there could be ...this.”
The last light slanted up from behind the Kaweahs, purple and pink shafts lifting into low clouds, the Kaweah shelf dropping into night.
“Be careful, Lilly. Up here you can forget about out there.” He kissed her hair. “That’s what the doc says.”
“Tell him not to worry.” Lilly turned and held him. “I am careful. I think about out there.”
Clouds had gathered by the time they got back to camp. Ty busied himself setting up shelters. But he didn’t move his things under one, helping the others move theirs but leaving his sleeping bag at the base of a big lodgepole.
“ Yo u’ve forgotten,” he told them, smiling. “It doesn’t rain at night up here.” Then he walked out into the meadow to listen for the bells. He took comfort in their sound at night.
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