by M K Dymock
That was an even tougher question. Her father’s instinct had always been flight over fight, but in all those years no one had ever gotten close enough to challenge his response. “He’d attack you, probably, but me . . . ?” That she couldn’t answer. What would he do if he lost control? She flashed back to the killer’s whispered voice begging for her mother’s forgiveness even as he pulled the trigger.
Sol turned back to the map and a change in subject. “The glaciers were much larger fifty years ago. Some have disappeared entirely.” He circled an area with his finger. “But here would be the biggest concentration.” He caught her eye with quizzical smile. “I have an idea. How do you feel about packing in on horses?”
He was still willing to help her. Hylia thought back to what her friend Elizabeth had told her about him. “He always finds the lost—always.”
Hylia gave him a rare real smile. “When do we leave?”
40
Sol didn’t so much walk the line as he jumped back and forth across it. He hadn’t told anyone about Hylia and had said nothing about Shea to Hylia. Maybe he would once they were deep into the wilderness and she couldn’t run as easily.
Who was he kidding? If she decided to run from him in the mountains, he would never see her again. And I like seeing her. That unbidden thought bubbled up from somewhere he couldn’t identify and very much didn’t want to examine.
A rancher friend of his lent them two horses and a mule and dropped them off down a dirt road. They could get into the glacier fields by horse or by ATV, but one was a whole lot louder than the other.
The cool morning air was interrupted only by the sound of horseshoes on rock and the occasional snort. Both Hylia and Sol relaxed into their saddles as the distance between them and civilization grew wider. The day passed with neither one of them broaching the silence between them.
The faded trail started in sagebrush and rocks but soon carried them into scrub oak and then the aspens and pines. They would eventually top out above the tree line after gaining about six thousand feet. The mule carried extra layers and supplies for the changes in seasons the elevations would provide.
Occasionally they passed a few snow drifts leftover from the previous winter, which had never seemed to end. “The glaciers will have gained some ground last season,” Sol said. Weather was always a safe subject—at least it used to be before global warming.
“I heard it was a bad one.”
“You weren’t here?”
She sat up straighter in the saddle and didn’t reply right away. Nope, weather definitely was not a safe subject. “I tend to leave the area during the winter. Too many years spent in a cave makes me jumpy when the first snow falls.”
“I don’t much like the winter either,” Sol confessed. “Don’t tell anyone.”
She turned in the saddle and smirked. “Who am I going to tell?”
“Just don’t tell anyone. Admitting I don’t like the winter is akin to sacrilegious around here.”
She laughed. He didn’t meet her eye. “You’re serious?”
“When you live someplace where winter is six months out of the year, winter sports are taken seriously.”
“You have a snowmobile and skis; I saw them.”
“Yes, and I’m proficient at both and snowboarding on occasion. But darkness and snow . . .” He shivered. “. . . It surrounds you, it . . .”
“. . . smothers you?”
“Yes.”
“Why don’t you leave?”
He stood in the stirrups in a less-effective attempt to stretch his legs. “I can’t. People disappear into these mountains all year, not only in warm weather.”
“But you’re not the only one who can find them.” She ducked the branch of a cottonwood tree, and he followed suit.
“Yes, I am.” He usually didn’t admit that aloud, not wanting people to doubt his team.
“How long is the longest you’ve been gone from here?”
“We should stop for a break. Stretch our legs.”
She waited until they dismounted at the next stream and led the horses to water. Neither horse seemed that interested, as they’d crossed this same stream about five times as they followed it up. “So how long?”
“Three days. I went with my wife to visit her folks in California.”
“Three days?” His mare jerked her head at Hylia’s surprised tone.
He put a hand to the horse’s forehead and kept his glance fixed into her non-judgmental eyes. “It was enough.” A day after he left, a tourist had mistaken a deer trail for an actual trail. He’d returned in time to help carry her body down from the mountain.
“Where’s your wife now?”
“She’s dead.” Like a Band-Aid, better to rip it off than dance around it.
It was Hylia’s turn to gaze at her horse and not her human companion. “I’m sorry I don’t know what the right thing is to say. Except I know it hurts.”
This was a woman who carried the same hurt and guilt he did. He finally met her gaze. “We fought a lot. I think we both thought we were getting someone else in the marriage. I don’t know how long we would’ve lasted.” He hated that they’d ended like that and how he couldn’t fix either her death or their marriage.
Hylia came around her horse to the other side of his. “What happened?”
“We were fighting again. She told me she was going to California whether I wanted to or not. I told her to go. I got called out for a rescue in the next county over, and when I came back she was gone. Her car was missing, and I didn’t think anything of it. Some of her stuff was still around, but I figured she’d send for it or come back.”
He rubbed his hand down the horse’s sweaty neck. “A few weeks later one of my crew found her body. She hadn’t gone to California; she’d gone mountain biking and crashed over a cliff.”
Hylia didn’t fill the silence with a rush of filler words that didn’t really mean anything. Maybe that’s why he’d kept talking, when he usually shut down after ‘my wife is dead.’
“Clint told me the autopsy showed she died instantly, but I didn’t believe him. When I was sworn in, the first thing I did was pull up the report.” The horse took a step back and Hylia’s eyes found his. “It took a while for her to go. Had she been found sooner, she might’ve had a chance.”
Her hand closed the chasm between them as she grasped his fingertips. “I don’t know if the guilt will ever go away,” Hylia said. He knew she spoke as much about herself as she did about him. “But I don’t know if it’s supposed to completely. Maybe it’ll always be there to remind us to be better.”
He considered the little girl being raised in a cave and the one who managed to find her way out. “Then we’d best be better.”
41
Fight or flight was the instinctive response of every creature to danger. Fight had effectively been trained out of Hylia, leaving her with only flight. But she was really, really good at fleeing.
The farther they ascended into the mountains, the calmer and more in control Sol became. The closer they grew to Merrell, the more panicked she was. When she woke up on the third day— or was it the fourth?—next to him in the two-man tent, she had to admit it wasn’t only her father that brought on the need to run.
She’d always offered only a small part of herself to other people. Only a few were ever given the truth, and even then, a small sliver. Sol held more of her than anyone she knew. Each day they rode together, her mind constantly found escape routes. She made him teach her tracking skills, but only so she could get better at hiding. She asked him questions about his process so she could outwit him when the time came to run.
And yet at the end of each day she lay down next to him to sleep.
Hylia stood in the chill morning air and stretched until her back popped. Sol looked up from the fire, where he mixed some powder into what he called eggs. “Stiff?”
Years of being told to swallow any and all complaints hadn’t taken effect as much as fleeing. “Yes, very. When we get
down, I’m going to get a massage every day for a week.”
He flipped the eggs. “You don’t strike me as someone who gets massages.”
She laughed, and the sound filled the trees above. When had she become someone who laughed? “I’ve had a few. I worked at a resort down in Mexico, and the new masseuse needed someone to practice on.” The experience had been difficult at first. Allowing someone to touch her skin, see her bare back and legs. But with every carefully applied sweep of her hands, the elderly woman had given Hylia something she’d not felt in ages: the sense of being cared for.
“Come eat while it’s warm.” She took the outstretched plate and mug—grateful for even fake eggs. “How did you get to Mexico?”
“The getting down isn’t the hard part, it’s the getting back. I crossed back over with a group in Arizona and hiked two days through the desert. Well, I hiked two; they hiked three.”
He laughed. “They didn’t know who they had on their hands.”
“I did have some prior experience.” She took a bite and forced herself not to grimace at the egg film left on her tongue. Any food was better than no food, and warm food was a bonus. “I take it you’ve never been. I mean to Mexico, not walking through an empty desert trying to avoid border patrol.”
“My grandfather was always after me to go,” Sol said. “His parents had crossed over and somehow found their way north to the mines. They used to go back every Christmas to escape the snow for a few weeks when he was a kid.” Before he even took a bite of his own food, he kicked dirt into the small fire. Another fifteen minutes and the campsite would be relinquished back into the forest.
“Did he know about your dirty little secret?”
He looked perplexed for a minute before his face lightened. “The hatred of winter? Yes, he shared it as well. He said my siblings had more Scandinavian blood, but I got his share of Mexican. My grandmother’s family immigrated from Norway,” he said by way of explanation.
“But you never went.”
“I always intended to, but then everything . . .”
“I get it.”
They mounted up and headed out. As the horses took them above the tree line and into bare country where only rocks grew, Hylia knew her anxiety came solely from her father. They’d avoided coming this high and had stayed in the trees to keep from being seen. To get over this range and into the next, they had no choice but to leave the protection of the forest.
They walked mostly in silence until Sol broke through. “Tell me about your summers. How did you survive?”
“We roamed, only staying in once place for a few weeks, going higher as the snows melted.”
“Did you ever run into anyone?”
“Of course, but they thought we were just backpackers and paid us no mind.”
Except there was one man who paid them mind. They’d spotted him on the trail not long after Hylia turned eighteen. They were coming to the end of the season and were slowly making their way back to town.
They ran into each other on a more popular trail Merrell only allowed them to follow because it led them over a steep pass that was otherwise impassable. The man, Kyle, he would go on to introduce himself as, had greeted them with a large smile. Merrell returned it with a glare, Link a grimace, and Hylia a look of pure terror.
Her mind boggled at a boy, there in the mountains with them, close enough to touch. He made eye contact with her, and she tried to smile, but it may have come off looking like a horror movie clown’s.
Whatever he thought of them, he kept his face jovial and launched into a litany of questions. Where had they come from? Where were they going? How far back had they gone? Any trails they’d recommend? Merrell’s hand twitched a few inches away from the pistol he always carried.
With a calmness that was a total lie, she turned the questions back on him after explaining they were hiking this area for the first time. Merrell muttered something about needing to make time and took back down the trail.
Kyle, either oblivious to or ignoring the hint, stepped into place beside Hylia and asked if she was enjoying her visit. She had to wonder how long he’d been in the mountains to be showing any interest in her. It had been months since she’d seen her face in a mirror, deodorant wasn’t so much a thing for them, and her hair had had a comb through it yesterday—or maybe the day before.
No, he couldn’t be interested in her like she was a girl. He just wanted to know about the area or was lonely from too many days on the trail. That knowledge relaxed her, and she responded better to his questions—of course, all her answers were lies.
Merrell’s steps grew faster between glares over his shoulder at them. For every question Kyle had, she turned it back on him. “How long have you been hiking?”
“Oh, gosh.” He counted his fingers. “I guess I’m going on four days. I must smell something fierce.”
She blushed, figuring if that was his way of making fun of her. “Where are you headed to?”
“Nowhere particular. I’m doing a circular route around the mountains, trying to bag five peaks over 11K. Tomorrow I’m hitting Twin Peaks; you been?”
Truth be told, she didn’t pay attention to the names of mountains they ascended. She remembered them by things like ‘the one where we they got caught in a hailstorm.’ “No,” she said, although she probably had. “How long have you been in the area?”
“This is my second summer. I like to come work the shops. I just finished up my job and had a week before school starts. Are you in college?”
“School’s stupid,” Link muttered. He was twelve now and liked to believe he knew everything and if he didn’t, then that thing didn’t matter.
Merrell’s shoulder stiffened. She could sense a shift in his mood like the change in wind before a storm. Too many questions. He would snap soon, but she didn’t know what that would look like. She never did.
“No.” Then she added, “not yet,” so as to not be odd. It was the first time she’d realized she should be getting ready to go. Her mother had always talked about how Hylia had to get good grades to get into a good college. A wave of absolute longing rolled over, and she didn’t want to answer any more questions.
She didn’t need to, as Kyle kept the conversation going for both of them. “I majored in business because that’s what my parents want, but I don’t know . . .” He looked up at Merrell and lowered his voice. “Sometimes parents don’t know everything. Are you applying soon? You look about seventeen or eighteen.”
Merrell wouldn’t allow this to go on much longer, but Hylia had mixed emotions. This boy terrified her, but in a way that was a little exciting. “I haven’t decided.”
His eyes brightened. “You should totally apply to University of Washington. I could give you a tour. It would be way–”
Merrell whirled around, and it took her too long to figure out what had finally set him off. “Who are you?” His voice echoed off the peaks Kyle wanted to climb.
Kyle took a step back. “I . . . what do you mean?”
Merrell’s trembling fingers touched the pistol—an action Kyle hadn’t noticed—yet. “Who sent you?”
Hylia launched herself at her father and wrapped her arms around his in a giant hug.
Link stood between the three of them, standing at his full height—if that could somehow make the boy more intimidating. He couldn’t know the reason for the danger, but he could suspect its source.
“Don’t worry.” She said with pleading words. “I’m not going anywhere.” She turned back to Kyle, who was stumbling back over the rocks littering the trail. Could she hold her father back?
Kyle put up a hand. “I’ll leave you alone.” He didn’t turn around to run until he was several yards down the trail.
Merrell wrenched his arm out, pistol in his hand.
“He’s gone,” she said. “He wasn’t anybody to worry about.”
“You don’t know that,” he bellowed. “You can’t take a risk.”
She stood to her full h
eight. “He’s just a dumb kid.”
He finally put away the gun, but they didn’t stop hiking for a full eighteen hours just in case that dumb kid had been something more.
Hylia watched Sol saddle up his horse. She’d kept her father from killing an innocent boy. She considered the chances of keeping him from killing a threatening man.
42
Sol knew they had to be close, but they couldn’t keep wandering without some sign.
Hylia tightened the cinch on her saddle. The mare sighed as if resigning itself to the day ahead.
“We’re getting close,” Hylia said. “I don’t recall this particular area, but it makes sense with what I do know.”
“What do we look for?”
She paused for a moment. “Garbage that can’t burn. We couldn’t carry it with us, and we couldn’t leave it strewn around. We buried it. If we found a site, we could dig it up, see how old it was.”
Sol mounted his horse, and she followed. “That we can spot easier than tracks,” he said. “It’ll attract wildlife, vermin. If we know where they’ve been, maybe we can figure out where they’re going.”
Come afternoon, they left the horses in a meadow and took to the ridges, where the ground grew rockier and steeper. They walked mostly on shale. With each hunched-over step, their feet slipped a few inches. Sol gasped for air as they summited a saddle that had to be at least 13,000 feet high. To his utter annoyance and some admiration, Hylia climbed behind him with barely a breath.
He stopped on top and pointed. “There.” He swallowed the thin air. “There’s the start of the glaciers.”
To his relief, she bent down and made a quick gasp. “I can’t imagine anyone mining this high.”
“You’d be surprised at what I’ve found up here. No heavy machinery like below, but some old shovels and pans. Once the big companies took over the lower mountains, folks moved up here in desperation.”
He glanced behind them to the grove where they’d left the horses hobbled and grazing. “Since you come from a family of horse thieves, do you think they’ll still be there tonight?”