Thunderhead

by Douglas Preston

  At other times, she thought about the broken skull and dried blood, and what it could possibly mean. In her mind, Pete’s Ruin had changed from an unremarkable set of roomblocks to a dark, unnerving little mystery.

  By midmorning, the canyon had ended in a sudden puzzle of hoodoo rocks. They squeezed through an opening and topped out in a broken valley, peppered with scrub junipers. As she went over the rise, Nora glanced to the right. She could see the Kaiparowits Plateau as a high, dark line against the horizon.

  Then she faced forward, and the vista she saw both horrified and elated her.

  On the far side of the valley, raked by the morning sun, rose what could only be the Devil’s Backbone: the hogback ridge she had been anticipating and dreading since they first set out. It was a giant, irregular fin of sandstone at least a thousand feet high and many miles long, pocked with vesicles and windblown holes, riven with vertical fractures and slots. The top was notched like a dinosaur’s back. It was hideous in its beauty.

  Nora led the group over to the shade of a large rock, where they dismounted. She stepped aside with Swire.

  “Let’s see if we can scout a trail up it first,” Nora said. “It looks pretty tough.”

  For a moment, Swire didn’t answer. “From here, I wouldn’t exactly call it tough,” he said. “I’d call it impossible.”

  “My father made it over with his two horses.”

  “So you said.” Swire spat a thin stream of tobacco juice. “Then again, this ain’t the only ridge around here.”

  “It’s a fault-block cuesta,” said Black, who had been listening. “It outcrops for at least a hundred miles. Your father’s so-called ridge could be anywhere along there.”

  “This is the right one,” Nora said a little more slowly, trying to keep the tone of doubt out of her voice.

  Swire shook his head and began to roll a smoke. “I’ll tell you one thing. I want to see the trail with my own eyes before I take any horses up it.”

  “Fair enough,” Nora replied. “Let’s go find it. Sloane, keep an eye on things until we get back.”

  “Sure thing,” came the contralto drawl.

  The two hiked north along the base of the ridge, looking for a notch or break in the smooth rock that might signal the beginnings of a trail. After half a mile, they came across some shallow caves. Nora noticed that several had ancient smudges of black smoke on their ceilings.

  “Anasazi lived here,” she said.

  “Pretty miserable little caves.”

  “These were probably temporary dwellings,” Nora replied. “Perhaps they farmed these canyon bottoms.”

  “Must’ve been farming cholla,” Swire muttered laconically.

  As they continued northward, the dry creek split into several tributaries, separated by jumbled piles of stone and small outcrops. It was a weird landscape, unfinished, as if God had simply given up trying to impose order on the unruly rocks.

  Suddenly, Nora parted some salt cedars and stopped dead. Swire came up, breathing hard.

  “Look at this,” she breathed.

  A series of petroglyphs had been pecked through the desert varnish that streaked the cliff face, exposing lighter rock underneath. Nora knelt, examining the drawings more closely. They were complex and beautiful: a mountain lion; a curious pattern of dots with a small foot; a star inside the moon inside the sun; and a detailed image of Kokopelli, the humpbacked flute player, believed to be the god of fertility. As usual, Kokopelli sported an enormous erection. The panel ended with another complicated grid of dots overlain by a huge spiral, which Nora noted was also reversed, like the ones Sloane had seen at Pete’s Ruin.

  Swire grunted. “Wish I had his problem,” he said, nodding at Kokopelli.

  “No you don’t,” Nora replied. “One Pueblo Indian story claims it was fifty feet long.”

  They pushed a little farther through the cedars and stumbled on a well-hidden ravine: a crevasse filled with loose rock that slanted diagonally across the sandstone monolith. It was steep and narrow, and it rose up the dizzying face and disappeared. The trail had a raised lip of rock along its outer edge that had the uncanny effect of causing most of it to disappear into the smooth sandstone from only several paces off.

  “I’ve never seen anything so well hidden,” Nora said. “This has to be our trail.”

  “Hope not.”

  She started up the narrow crevasse, Swire behind her, scrambling over the rocks that filled its bottom. About halfway up it ended in a badly eroded path cut diagonally into the naked sandstone. It was less than three feet wide, one side a sheer face of rock, the other dropping off into terrifying blue space. As Nora stepped near the edge, some pebbles dislodged by her foot rolled down the rock and off the edge, sailing down; Nora listened but could not hear their eventual landing. She knelt. “This is definitely an ancient trail,” she said, as she examined eroded cut marks made by prehistoric quartzite tools.

  “It sure wasn’t built for horses,” Swire said.

  “The Anasazi didn’t have horses.”

  “We do,” came the curt reply.

  They moved carefully forward. In places, the cut path had peeled away from the sloping cliff face, forcing them to take a harrowing step across vacant space. At one of these places Nora glanced down and saw a tumble of rocks more than five hundred feet beneath her. She felt a surge of vertigo and hastily stepped across.

  The grade gradually lessened, and in twenty minutes they were at the top. A dead juniper, its branches scorched by lightning, marked the point where the trail topped the ridge. The ridge itself was narrow, perhaps twenty feet across, and in another moment Nora had walked to the far edge.

  She looked down the other side into a deep, lush riddle of canyons and washes that merged into an open valley. The trail, much gentler here, switchbacked down into the gloom below them.

  For a moment, she could not speak. Slowly, the sun was invading the hidden recesses as it rose toward noon, penetrating the deep holes, chasing the darkness from the purple rocks.

  “It’s so green,” she finally said. “All those cottonwoods, and grass for the horses. Look, there’s a stream!” At this, she felt the muscles in her throat constrict voluntarily. She’d almost forgotten her thirst in the excitement.

  Swire didn’t reply.

  From their vantage point, Nora took in the lay of the landscape ahead. The Devil’s Backbone ran diagonally to the northeast, disappearing around the Kaiparowits Plateau. A vast complex of canyons started on the flanks of the Kaiparowits wilderness and spread out through the slickrock country, eventually coalescing into the valley that swept down in front of them. A peaceful stream flowed down its center, belying the great scarred plain to either side that told of innumerable flash floods. Scattered across the floodplain were boulders, some as large as houses, which had clearly been swept down from the higher reaches of the watershed. Beyond, the valley stepped up through several benchlands, eventually ending in sheer redrock cliffs, pinnacles, and towers. It looked to Nora as if the valley concentrated the entire watershed of the Kaiparowits Plateau in one hideous floodplain.

  At the far end of the green valley, at the point where it joined the sheer cliffs, the stream passed through a canebreak, then disappeared into a narrow canyon, riven through a sandstone plateau. Such narrow canyons—known as slot canyons—were common among these southwestern wastes but practically unheard of elsewhere. They were thin alleys, sometimes only a few feet across, caused by the action of water against sandstone over countless years. Despite their narrowness, they were often several hundred feet deep, and could go on for miles before widening into more conventional canyons.

  Nora peered at the entrance to this one: a dark slit, slicing into the far end of the great plateau. It was perhaps ten feet wide at the entrance. That, Nora thought with a rising feeling of excitement, must be the slot canyon my father mentioned. She pulled out her binoculars and looked slowly around. She could make out many south-facing alcoves among the cliffs across the v
alley, ideal for Anasazi dwellings, but as she scanned them with the glasses she could see nothing. They were all empty. She examined the sheer cliffs leading up to the top of the plateau, but if there was a way over and into the hidden canyon beyond, it was well hidden.

  Dropping the binoculars, she turned and looked around the windswept top of the ridge. An overlook like this was a perfect place for her father to have carved his initials and a date: the calling card of remote travelers since time immemorial. Yet there was nothing. Still, from the top of the ridge it seemed likely that Holroyd would finally get his GPS reading.

  Swire had settled his back against the rock and was rolling a smoke. He placed it in his mouth, struck a match.

  “I ain’t bringing my horses up that trail,” he said.

  Nora looked at him quickly. “But it’s the only way up.”

  “I know it,” Swire said, drawing smoke into his lungs.

  “So what are you suggesting? That we turn around? Give up?”

  Swire nodded. “Yep,” he said. There was a brief pause. “And it ain’t a suggestion.”

  In an instant, Nora’s elation fell away. She took a deep breath. “Roscoe, this isn’t an impossible trail. We’ll unload and carry everything up by hand. Then we’ll guide the horses, unroped, giving them their heads. It might take the rest of the day, but it can be done.”

  Roscoe shook his head. “We’ll kill horses on that trail, no matter what we do.”

  Nora knelt beside him. “You’ve got to do this, Roscoe. Everything depends on it. The Institute will replace any horse that gets hurt.”

  From the expression on his face, she saw she had said the wrong thing. “You know enough about horses to know you’re talking through your hat,” he replied. “I ain’t saying they can’t do it. I’m saying the risk is too high.” A truculent note had crept into his voice. “No man in his right mind would bring horses up that trail. And if you want my opinion, I don’t think we’re on any damn trail, Anasazi or otherwise. Neither does anyone else.”

  Nora looked at him. “So you all think I’m lost?”

  Swire nodded, pulled on his cigarette. “All except Holroyd. But that boy would follow you into a live volcano.”

  Nora felt her face flush. “Think what you want,” she said, pointing toward the sandstone plateau. “But that slot canyon out there is the one my father found. It has to be. And there’s no other way in. That means he brought two horses up this trail.”

  “I doubt it.”

  Nora rounded on him. “When you signed on to this trip, you knew the danger. You can’t back out now. It can be done, and we’re going to do it, with you or without you.”

  “Nope,” he said again.

  “Then you’re a coward,” Nora cried angrily.

  Swire’s eyes widened quickly, then narrowed. He stared at Nora for a long, silent moment. “I ain’t likely to forget you said that,” he said at last in a low, even tone.

  The breeze blew across the fin of rock, and a pair of ravens rode up the air currents, then dipped back down into space. Nora slumped against the rock, resting her forehead in her hands. She didn’t know what to do in the face of Swire’s flat refusal. They couldn’t go on without him, and the horses were technically his. She closed her eyes against a growing sense of failure, terrible and final. And then she realized something.

  “If you want to turn around,” she said quietly, glancing over at Swire, “you’d better get going. The last water I remember was a two-day ride back.”

  Swire’s face showed a sudden, curious blankness. Then he swore softly, as he realized the water the horses so desperately needed was in the green valley that lay ahead, below their feet.

  He shook his head slowly, and spat. Finally, he eyed Nora. “Looks like you get your wish,” he said. And something in the way he looked at her made Nora shrink back.

  By the time they returned to camp, it was noon. A palpable air of anxiety hung over the group, and the thirsty horses, tied in the shade, were prancing and slinging their heads.

  “You didn’t happen to pass a Starbucks, did you?” Smithback asked with forced joviality. “I could really use an iced latte.”

  Swire brushed his way past them and stalked off to where the horses were hobbled.

  “What’s with him?” Smithback asked.

  “We’ve got a tough stretch of trail ahead,” Nora said.

  “How tough?” Black blurted out. Once again, Nora could see naked fear on his face.

  “Very tough.” She looked around at the dirty faces. The fact that several of them were looking to her for guidance and reassurance gave her another twinge of self-doubt. She took a deep breath.

  “The good news is, there’s water on the far side of the ridge. The bad news is that we’re going to have to carry the gear up by hand. Then Roscoe and I will bring the horses.”

  Black groaned.

  “Take no more than thirty pounds at a time,” Nora went on. “Don’t try to rush things. It’s a rough trail, even on foot. We’re going to have to make a couple of trips each.”

  Black looked like he was about to say something, then stopped. Sloane stood abruptly, walked over to the line of gear, and hefted a pannier onto her shoulder. Holroyd followed, walking a little unsteadily, then Aragon and Smithback. At last, Black raised himself from the rocks, passed a shaky hand over his eyes, and followed them.

  * * *

  Almost three hours later, Nora stood at the top of the Devil’s Backbone with the others, breathing heavily and sharing the last of the water. The gear had been brought up over the course of three arduous trips, and was now neatly lined up to one side. Black was a wreck: sitting on a rock, soaked with sweat, his hands shaking; the rest were almost as exhausted. The sun had moved westward and was now shining directly into the long grove of cottonwoods far below them, turning the stream into a twisted thread of silver. The sight seemed inexpressibly lush and beautiful after the barren wastes behind them. Nora ached with thirst.

  She turned to look back down the hogback ridge up which they had come. The hard part, bringing the horses up, was still before her. My God, she thought. Sixteen of them . . . The ache in her limbs fell away, replaced by a small sickness that began to grow in the pit of her stomach.

  “Let me help with the horses,” Sloane said.

  Nora opened her mouth to answer, but Swire interrupted. “No!” he barked. “The fewer there are of us on that ridge, the fewer are gonna get hurt.”

  Leaving Sloane in charge, Nora hiked back down the trail. Swire, his face dark, brought the animals around, bare except for their halters. Only his own horse, which would lead, had a rope clipped to the halter.

  “We’re gonna drive them up the trail, single file,” he said harshly. “I’ll guide Mestizo, you bring up the rear with Fiddlehead. Keep your head up. If a horse falls, get the hell out of the way.”

  Nora nodded.

  “Once we get to the upper trail, you can’t stop. Not for anything. Give a horse time to think on that ridge, and he’ll panic and try to turn around. So keep them moving, no matter what. Got that?”

  “Loud and clear,” she said.

  They started up the trail, careful to keep the horses well apart. At one point the animals hesitated, as if by general consensus; but with some prodding Swire got Mestizo moving again and the rest instinctively followed, noses down, picking their way among the rocks. The air was punctuated with the clatter of hooves, the occasional scrabble among the rocks as an animal missed its footing. As they began to gain altitude, the horses grew more fearful; they lathered up and started blowing hard, showing the whites of their eyes.

  Halfway up the ridge, the rubble-filled crevasse ended and the much more dangerous slickrock trail began. Nora craned her neck upward. The worst part of the journey stretched ahead, just a cut in the sloping sandstone, eroded by time into the merest whisper of a path. In the places where it had peeled away, the horses would have to step over blue space. She stared at the series of wicked switchbacks,
trying to suppress the anxiety that welled up deep within her.

  Swire paused and looked back at her, his eyes cold. We can turn back now, his expression seemed to say. Beyond this point, we won’t have that option.

  Nora gazed back at the bandy-legged wrangler, his shoulders barely higher than the horse’s withers. He looked as frightened as she felt.

  The moment passed. Without a word, Swire turned and began leading Mestizo forward. The animal took a few hesitant steps and balked. The wrangler coaxed a few more steps, then the horse balked again, whinnying in fear. His shoe skidded slightly, then bit once again into the sandstone.

  Speaking in low tones and flicking the end of his lasso well behind the horse, Swire got Mestizo moving again. The others followed, their trail experience and strong herd attachment keeping them going. They worked their way upward at a painful pace, the only sounds now the thump and scrape of iron-shod toes digging into canted slickrock, the occasional blow of fear. Swire began singing a low, mournful, soothing song, words indistinct, his voice quavering slightly.

  They arrived at the first switchback. Slowly, Swire guided Mestizo around the curve, then continued up the rockface and past a deep crack until he was directly above Nora’s head. Once, Sweetgrass skidded on the slickrock and scrabbled at the edge, and for a moment Nora thought she would go over. Then she recovered, eyes wide, flanks trembling.

  After agonizing minutes they arrived at the second switchback: a wickedly sharp turn over a narrow section of trail. Reaching the far side, Mestizo suddenly balked once again. The second horse, Beetlebum, stopped as well, then began to back up. Watching from below, Nora saw the animal place one hind foot over the edge of the trail and out into space.

  She froze. The horse’s hindquarters dropped and the foot kicked out twice, looking for a purchase that wasn’t there. As she watched, the horse’s balance shifted inexorably backward; the animal dropped over the edge, rolled once, and then hurtled down toward her, letting out a strange, high-pitched scream. Nora watched, paralyzed. Time seemed to slow as the horse tumbled, limbs kicking in a terrifying ballet. She felt its shadow cross her face, and then it struck Fiddlehead, directly in front of her, with a massive smack. Fiddlehead vanished as both animals hurtled off the edge of the ridge into the void. There was a moment of horrible, listening silence, followed by double muffled thumps and the sharp crackle of falling rocks far below. The sounds seemed to echo forever in the dry valley, reverberating from ever more distant walls.