“After a week he is either healing, beyond repair, or dead.”
I look up at her. “Then why are we going?”
“My question exactly. I’m not really all that crazy about this when it comes right down to it, but you had to come and I wasn’t about to be left alone. It sounded like a worthwhile mission, and . . . well, kind of exciting.”
“You also wanted to see what this crazy person would do next.”
“That, too.” She grins. “I admit that I waffle from excited to scared. The excited part is stronger and afraid you’ll back out.”
“What if I get you killed?”
“I trust you.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t trust me. I killed Mom and Sam and Matt’s dad.”
“Reba!” I jump and she drops into the chair across from me. She reaches and grabs my hands in hers. “Damn it! You didn’t kill anyone. If your mother died giving birth to you, would it be your fault?”
“No, but this isn’t the same thing. A baby has no conscious decision in the matter. I did.”
“You made a decision based upon what you knew at the time. What you didn’t know was that your parents would chase after you.”
“They were there because of something I did that I shouldn’t have done, that I did without their permission.
“We can’t go around blaming ourselves for things we have no control over.”
“I had control.”
“No you didn’t. You can’t control other’s actions.”
“Yeah, but I can limit their reactions based upon my actions. If I hadn’t of taken off, they wouldn’t have wanted to go after me.”
Her eyes roll. I don’t give a shit.
“Why did your mom go? Your dad was already here, you told me. Why didn’t she give him some time to find you?”
“Because she was my mother. That’s the way she was. She had no patience or faith that someone else could do what she wanted.”
“Then it was your mother’s fault.”
I glare at Mandi.
“It was her action alone that started everything. When she showed up it all began, is that right?”
I yank my hands away. “It wasn’t her fault!”
“Bullshit! It all started when she showed up. The accident with your car, which led to Matt’s dad making that phone call to the sheriff, who then called Vander what’s his name, who sent his goons, who killed Matt’s dad and drove the rest of you into the mountains. You did not wish for your mother to come; quite the contrary, if you did have a choice, which you didn’t, you would have forbidden her.”
I unclamp my jaw. “It was not my mother’s fault. I couldn’t have forbidden her. I was the kid. She was the mother. She was the boss.”
“Exactly! You were only a kid, not even of legal age yet. She was the responsible one who made a bad decision.”
“Based on my bad decision.”
She rolls her eyes again.
“And I’m still not of legal age. Not for another month.”
“So?”
“So, that means that if something happens and you get killed, it’s your fault, not mine, even though you are here because of me.”
“Right.”
Damn it! She wasn’t supposed to agree with me. I glare some more at her.
She raises her right hand. “I swear upon whatever that I am here of my own accord and that if I die it is only because I chose to be here, not because Reba Price made me or coerced me, or bribed me.”
“You’re not going to die.”
“Of course not. It’s all speculation. We’re just going for a hike. But . . . if I do, promise me that you won’t blame yourself.”
“That’s stupid.”
“Promise me.”
“I can’t.”
“I’m not going until you promise me.”
“Well then, I guess we don’t go.”
“Promise me.”
“Damn it! Fine! I Promise!”
“And crossing your fingers is just for children. A promise is a promise.”
I uncross my fingers. “Fine!”
Chapter 14
We peer across the valley. The sky is big and blue, and not a breeze. There is also no message from Matt, and no answer on his cell phone. We don’t leave another message. I consider calling Christi again, or Dad. The thought goes away and we go back down to the house. Our packs are loaded; snowshoes hang off the backs. We have a small tent but neither of us wants the extra weight, so we leave it. The sleeping bags will have to be enough. In the caves, they will be. The day is warming up so we go with light jackets, putting our heavier ones at the bottom of the packs. Cooking gear, food, and clothes take up the rest of the space. We brought our own freeze dried stuff and energy bars from our shopping spree at Bob Wards in Bozeman. We top off from Sam’s pantry. With two water bottles each and full hydrators, our packs are heavier than we like.
I fire up the GPS. Mandi opens the topo map on the hood of my wrecked car from a year ago. I point on the map. “The way we went last year was longer in distance but we were able to make all but the last mile on the ATV. It is shorter going directly on foot, however, from what Sam said, it is rougher going. It’s also what I needed the waypoint for. I can’t tell from this exactly where it is. I thought I’d be able to.”
“Can you find it by taking the longer route?”
“I think so. It’s about ten miles. Not bad if we weren’t carrying these packs.”
“We’ll take our time; lots of breaks.”
“Sure.” I take a waypoint where we’re standing so that we can find our way back to here.
My phone rings.
Mandi and I look at each other and then I dig it out of the pack. It rings only once more. There is nothing when I open it.
“What does the caller ID say?” Mandi asks.
“Unavailable. It might have been Matt calling from a different phone. Maybe a sliver of a signal got through, enough to make it ring. It says there is no signal now.”
“Whatever. Better go up and check for a message.”
“Yeah.”
We leave our packs on the porch and walk up to the gate. I get a signal well before we get there. There is no indication there are any messages. I check anyway. Nothing. I call Matt. No answer. I wait for his greeting.
“Matt, this is Reba. We’re heading out now, taking the same route as last year. Hope to see you.”
We turn around and head back down.
It doesn’t take long to get to the rocks, a mile or so into our hike. I lead Mandi inside. We drop our packs and squeeze into the inner chamber. “This is where Matt and I ensconced ourselves after discovering we were surrounded by sabre-toothed cats. That was before I took over the job from Sam as their human goddess.” Now that I think about it, I wonder if they would have hurt us at all. Maybe they came that first time to tell me they’re ready to do my bidding, not to eat me.
“I’ll bet Indians used this,” Mandi says. She looks up. “A natural chimney. Cover the rocks with hides and this could be comfortable even below zero.” She shines her flashlight about and finds cave art. “Wow!” She starts to touch them, and then pulls back. She knows the damage that can be done by the oils from our skin. There are stick figure men throwing spears at stick figure deer. Another scene shows four men attacking what could be a bear, maybe a grizzly.
“I didn’t see this when I was here before. Never looked that close.”
There are several other drawings that make no sense to me. Mandi loves them all. I get my camera from my pack and take pictures for her.
“How old do you think they are?” I ask.
“Two hundred years . . . two thousand years. No idea.”
When we step out to continue our trek, she has me take a waypoint. “Can you believe that?” She says. “This is undiscovered stuff; will probably be turned into a historical site.”
“They may name it after you. The Mandi Saulminor Cave Art Discovery of Oh Nine.”
“Yeah, rig
ht. You discovered it before I did.”
“I didn’t see the art, though. Besides, I’m already the sabre-tooth goddess. Don’t need another title.”
Mandi laughs. We return to the trail and proceed on our easterly course.
We top a ridge and stop. We had been moving into the snow over the last quarter mile. It is deep in the hollows, shady areas, and north-facing hillsides. I check the GPS. “Just crossed 7,000 feet,” I say. “This is where I vomited in front of Matt.”
“This isn’t all that high. You sure it was elevation sickness?”
“Until then I had spent my entire life below a thousand feet; and I was trying to show off. It was stupid. I raced like an idiot, thinking I could tire Matt. He wasn’t even breathing hard and I was dying. Thin air and working too hard.”
“You’re in much better shape now.”
“If living at 5,000 feet makes me in better shape.”
“You’ve hiked some into the higher elevations. I’ll bet that hike yesterday when we went to the cat’s den was near 9,000.”
“Really?”
“Yes, and I don’t recall you throwing up along the way.”
She’s right. My muscles were burning, but I wasn’t light headed, and my lungs were doing fine.
We turn south onto a well used trail for about ten minutes, then stop and take a water break. I was worried I wouldn’t remember the way, but it is coming back to me rather easily. I don’t think the snow is going to get any worse as I don’t believe we get any higher than we are now. As a matter of fact, it feels like we are already on top of the world. There is very little nearby that is higher than we are. To the northeast, though, rise the majestic snow covered peaks of Glacier National Park, on my list of places to go this summer.
We turn easterly again for a while, drop down off the ridge and then start edging toward the south.
In less than an hour, with one break, we’re standing at the base of a rock wall rising at least two hundred feet high, seeming to go on forever to our right. I point to the left. “With the ATV we had to go that way, a good four or five miles yet. I remember standing right here with Matt’s GPS. The destination was the other way though.” I point to a position at about two o’clock. “Something like three quarters of a mile.”
“I say let’s go for it,” Mandi says. “We can get around this.”
I agree. I take a compass bearing. Two hundred degrees, roughly. I’m not worried about getting lost. Stay on the heading and we’ll come to one of two creeks, if they are still there. If they aren’t, the creek beds will be. The waterfall, before the explosion, split and made two creeks. After the explosion the waterfall was dumping into the mountain. We didn’t stick around long enough to see if it filled up, and where it dumped out, if it did. If my calculations are correct we will come out on the downstream of the left fork with the water running east. If I’m off we could run into the other one which would be running northwest. In any case, I’ll know where we are. All we’ll have to do is walk to where the creeks split, a hundred yards or so below the waterfall.
After we each wash down an energy bar with water, I get a lesson on snowshoeing. Our first challenge is a field of snow, easier to walk through then go around.
“It’ll fool you if you’re not careful,” Mandi says. “I’d be willing to bet that it’s as much as twenty feet deep in spots. You could be walking along just fine and then suddenly, you’re buried.”
I stand in my snowshoes and watch her demonstrate. “Weird.” I try to duplicate. “This isn’t as easy as it looks.”
“You’ll get used to it.”
We slowly move across the two hundred foot field of snow. “Is there something wrong with this picture?” I say. “We’re a month and a half into Spring and we’re running around in snowshoes.”
“In Texas, yes, I’d say there was something wrong with the picture. In this country, no. The picture would be normal any time of the year.”
“Remind me not to move here.”
“You already did. You live in Bozeman.”
“Oh, yeah.”
It takes us a half hour to pick our way to the top of the . . . what do I call it? Hill? Mountain? Huge earthen barrier? Take away huge snowfields, and I wonder why we didn’t go this way last summer, dumping the ATV below. Once we reach the top and look down at our decent, I know why. Dad would have been petrified. Mom would have never made it. I’m wondering if we can. We take our best flip of the coin guess and start exploring to the west, looking for reasonable hand and footholds for a decent. Fortunately there is no snow on the southern side. After finding a spot to go down, and then becoming stopped by a shear drop-off, we climb back up and then explore to the east. A moderately better choice. Even still it takes us another hour to work our way down without incident. Nearly two hours and we have made no more than a quarter of a mile horizontal progress. I’m thinking we should have gone the long way. Too late now.
We spend the next fifteen minutes picking our way down a twenty percent grade and into a soft forest floor of tall trees. I suddenly become aware of them, the trees. “What kinds of trees are these, Mandi?” She’s seemed knowledgeable on plants so I assume . . .
“Most of them are ponderosa pines.” She points. “Those are red cedar. That one there is a rocky mountain juniper.”
“Oh.” She doesn’t disappoint me. We stop for water and I check our bearing. I had set a waypoint just before the snowshoe lesson. We’ve come only three-quarters of a mile. Nothing is feeling right. We had gone way east before descending, so I add a few degrees onto the two hundred, and we head in that direction.
Five minutes later, Mandi stops. “Listen.”
I listen but hear only my heart beating. It is deep-in-the-forest quiet. “I don’t hear anything.”
“Water. Don’t you hear it? We’re coming to a creek.”
I strain my ears again. “Wind maybe.”
“It’s water. I know what I’m hearing.”
We level out and in another minute I’m hearing it, too. As we get closer the landscape changes. “That’s quaking aspen,” Mandi says. “They like it in the mountains near water.”
“You cheated!” I say. “You saw the aspens from way back and knew we’d be coming to water. You didn’t hear it at all.”
“I saw the aspens and then I listened. I used one sense to activate another.”
“You’re weird.”
“Look who’s talking, you with a sixth, seventh and eighth sense. I’m stuck with my basic five.”
“You don’t want to be burdened with a bunch of extras. Five is plenty.”
“It’d be fun.”
“Feeling an animal’s pain is not fun. Watching someone die before they actually do is not fun either. Talking to a sabre-toothed cat is eerie at best. Mental telepathy has some possibilities, but it feels like sneaking in and watching someone do their most private bathroom things. It’s invading privacy in the extreme!”
“All right! I get the point.”
I realize I’ve been waving my arms in the air, and getting louder. I hook my thumbs under the straps of my backpack. “Sorry. It’s one of those, ‘be careful what you wish for’ things. It might seem like fun, and you might wish you could do it, but in the end you’d give anything to get rid of it.”
“What’s so bad? Really? You saved my life because of it. You talk to animals. There really hasn’t been anything else, that I’ve seen anyway, unless there’s more that you haven’t told me.”
“I haven’t used anything at all since coming up to Bozeman. It was a sort of promise to myself that I wouldn’t. I saw you commit suicide because I had no choice in it. It was there and I had to act on it. Same with the sabre-toothed cats, and the deer. I didn’t go out looking for it. I was dragged into it.”
We stop at the edge of the creek. It is running east, hard and fast, lots more water than last July. Mandi stares at it, very quiet. She is all of a sudden bothered by something. Is it how we’re going to get across the cr
eek, because that certainly is bothering me? I don’t think so. I don’t think she is even thinking about the creek. It has something to do with what I said, but what?
I touch her arm. “Mandi?”
She pulls away. Yep, it definitely is something I said. Face it or wait it out. I sigh. Dad would wait it out with Mom. Now I understand why.
I step up close to the creek and look up and down. It looks like there might be a tree lying across way down. “Maybe we can get across down there,” I say, and start heading in that direction. A minute later I glance back. Mandi is coming, slowly. What the hell did I say?
The one tree I thought I saw ends up being two lying parallel. I cross on one. Mandi crosses on the other. She waits for me to head out, set our course. I look at the mountain—or is this a hill—of pines looming above us. If I’m off by a tenth of a mile we could pass right on by my first intended destination, and then not know where we are. My best bet, I decide, is to follow the creek up to its source. Even if the waterfall is gone, I’ll know the area and will be able to find my way from there.
I put the creek on my right and start walking. I don’t look back for Mandi. Where else is she going to go? Maybe her mood will swing again.
The progress is reasonably quick considering I’m having to bushwhack through brush and over or around fallen trees. I hear the waterfall long before I see it. We round a bend and then, there it is. A lot different. Lots more water falling from two different places; the bulk out of the mountain, the remainder from above.
“Cool!” Mandi says. Her mood is swinging back. “Is this where . . .”
“Yeah.” I point. “See the top falls.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s where all the waterfall used to be, before the explosion. It virtually ran across and off the roof of the cavern. Inside that hole is a huge, deep cavern. That’s where my mom was when she set the dynamite on the fire, thirteen sticks of it. The explosion collapsed the ceiling, and the creek fell in. We were gone before it finished filling up the cavern so we never saw how it made its exit.”
Sabre-Toothed Cat Trilogy Page 97