Wildside

  She smiled. “We can put the coveralls back on and huddle for warmth. Worse comes to worst, we can unpack the chutes and wrap ourselves in them. But I do want my sleeping bag, so let’s go get it.”

  We walked cautiously through the pines.

  “Well, damn,” said Clara. “How are we supposed to climb that?“

  The creek hugged the ridge face, a rock-strewn bed perhaps thirty feet across. We could cross it any number of ways, walking easily from boulder to boulder. In the spring it would probably be a different matter, with spring melt raising the water level substantially. It was several thousand years of spring torrents, though, that had created our problem. The water had undercut the face of the hill, cutting into the rock. Instead of the steep rocky hill I saw above the trees when I was still in the meadow, the lower part of the hill was a rock face, its very lowest part overhanging the base twenty to thirty feet above the ground. Looking upstream and down, the problem seemed equally severe.

  “Next time, remind me not to put the climbing rope in the cargo pack.”

  “Upstream or down?” asked Clara.

  We could see quite a way upstream and the overhang was clearly visible in that direction.

  Downstream, the creek wrapped around the hillside and we couldn’t see as far. I pointed my shotgun that way.

  The overhang was, if anything, worse in that direction, jutting out the entire width of the creek.

  However, this also solved our problem. A huge blue spruce on the east side of the stream grew up past the overhang, its trunk only a few feet from the cliff above. Unlike the other pines around us, it had low, easily reached branches.

  Clara went up and checked it out. “This will do it, Charlie,” she called from above. “There’s a ledge and a couple of ways up.” I joined her.

  Above the overhang, the cliff was rough and easily climbed. Then it changed quickly to the steep hillside I’d been expecting, rocky, with lots of stunted pines and scrub to hold on to. I soon tired of the pine sap on my hands, but I didn’t worry about my grip slipping.

  It took us forty-five minutes to reach the stand of aspens where the cargo pack lay. It took another half hour to untangle the cargo chute and stuff it into the cargo pack. The cargo pack itself was a heavily padded duffel five feet long and two and a half feet in diameter. It weighed two hundred pounds and it had not been my intention to have to carry it anywhere. The idea was to have it land near the site and be able to unpack it, carrying its individual contents to where they were needed.

  “Look on the bright side, Charlie. This time we have the rope.”

  “There’s that.”

  We rested for a while, at the edge of the aspens, drinking water from our canteens and scenery from the world. The opposite ridge face had fewer trees and more rock. Something moved and I looked closer. “Bighorn sheep.”

  Clara had a small set of binoculars in her kit. We watched them jump from boulder to boulder where a missed landing would mean a fall to the death. I remembered my close brush with the ridge top and shivered.

  “I almost landed on top of the ridge by accident,” I said.

  “I thought you were a little low, but couldn’t really tell. Your canopy blocked my view. How much did you miss it by?”

  “I dragged a heel.”

  She stared at me. “This is too dangerous. You could’ve hung up on the cliff or fallen.”

  “I know. Believe me, I know. Hopefully, we won’t have to do any more parachuting, though.”

  We dragged the cargo duffel straight down the hill, Clara working from below while I belayed it from above with the rope, working in stages. Gravity is our friend, at least in this case. I was very glad I didn’t have to take it up the hill. It only took an hour to work it down the hill.

  When we reached the overhang we had to move it sideways, to reach a point where the stream wasn’t directly below. We lowered it to the ground on a doubled rope, then pulled the rope back up and looped it around a convenient tree and rappelled down ourselves.

  We were on the wrong side of the creek. Directly below the chute’s landing place, the overhang wasn’t as severe. I’m sure it overhung the creek during the spring melt, but in late summer we’d ended up on a rocky spit on the west side of the creek.

  Above the streambed, the overhang had a raised shelf where some harder stone had resisted the cutting action of the water. The softer stone above formed a deeper pocket, a cave almost.

  “Look.” I pointed. “If we put a fire in the doorway, that would make a great camping site. Also a place to store equipment.”

  She looked skeptical. “If something doesn’t already live there.”

  We checked it out cautiously. The only thing in the pocket was driftwood, carried there by the spring melt. I put on my television announcer voice. “This modest efficiency apartment features fresh air, good security, and it comes prestocked with firewood. This offer void where prohibited. Tax, title, and license not included.”

  Clara poked the firewood, looking for snakes and scorpions. “Okay,” she said grudgingly. “It looks good.”

  We unpacked the ax, chain saw, and shovel and hauled them and the rope across the stream and into the meadow.

  We took care of the trees at the south end of the meadow first, two pines about thirty feet apart and growing over fifty feet into the air. They were right in the approach path and the perfect height to take both wings right off the Maule.

  We cut an angled notch a little over halfway through the trunk on the side away from the meadow, then a straight cut from the other side. When it started to go, I yanked the chain saw out and backed away quickly. When the tree struck the ground it was almost gradual, with branches striking first and breaking with a rolling cracking sound, then the trunk proper struck and I felt almost lifted off the ground when the shock wave hit my feet. Then I was blinking in the cloud of dust and vegetable debris that blew out from under it.

  I’d never dropped a tree that large. I felt simultaneously pleased with myself and guilty. And then we did it again. And twice more at the other end of the meadow.

  “Seems a shame,” I said. “All this wood, unused.”

  “Well,” Clara said, “we can always use it for firewood. Nice thing about pine is that it burns green.”

  “Now that is a great idea.”

  The rest of the field prep involved cutting some bushes out flush with the ground and hauling the larger rocks over to the edge of the meadow. Then we took wire stakes with orange wind streamers on the ends and lined the runway.

  It was only five o’clock when we finished, but the western ridge cut the sunlight off and we retreated to the cave and started stacking firewood for the night.

  “What do you want for supper?” Clara asked.

  “What’s the choice?” I joined her at the duffel. “Lessee—freeze-dried stroganoff, freeze-dried chicken curry, or freeze-dried shoes.”

  She looked down. “Shoes? Oh, the beef stew. I didn’t think it was that bad. Marie just didn’t use enough water last night. She burned herself picking up the pot and spilled some of the water—then didn’t want to take the time to boil more.”

  “I didn’t know that. Where was I?”

  “Talking to base on the radio.”

  “Base?” I blinked. “And how are you, Mr. Base? Did you remember to close your doors? Are your antennas okay? How do you feel without two planes in your belly.”

  She looked away from me. “Well, we had beef stew last night, anyway, so that eliminates that. Leaves the curry or the stroganoff.”

  I felt ashamed of myself. “Sorry. You don’t make fun of how I feel about Marie.” I picked up the aluminum pot and the Katadyn water filter. “You choose—I’ll go get the water.”

  She looked up at me, her eyes red. “You don’t have any preference?”

  “Well, maybe the curry.”

  She smiled. “Then we’ll have the stroganoff.”

  I laughed and took the pot and filter down to the stream. The water
unit was a pump with a combination ceramic, activated charcoal, and silver filter that would take out bacteria and parasites. It was an expensive one, but we’d chosen them because it was the one used by the Red Cross in disaster relief work. I squatted on a rock jutting out into the stream and flipped the intake hose over the next rock and into the running water. Something exploded out of the water and nearly yanked the water filter out of my hand.

  My shout brought Clara up, shotgun at the ready.

  “What was that?”

  I was standing back from the stream’s edge, the filter and kettle held up, like they’d protect me.

  My entire front was soaked.

  The end of the water filter’s hose was twisted and, upon closer inspection, proved to be bitten almost in half.

  “Uh, I think it was a fish. Makes sense, I guess. It’s not like anybody’s fishing these waters. Well, the bears and the eagles, but no humans.”

  Clara got a strange look on her face. “Uh, this is Colorado. My father goes fly-fishing. There must be huge trout in these waters. Isn’t there a fly in the survival kits?”

  “Yeah. A spoon lure, a fly, and some bare hooks.”

  “There’s a willow tree downstream.” Clara said.

  “So?”

  “So, we don’t have to have freeze-dried shoes for supper.”

  In ten minutes we were back with several willow branches, one of which she trimmed down to a supple wand about eight feet long. She tied the fishing line to the thick end and then again to the thin end, leaving another twenty feet to fish with. She tied the fly off and said, “Get back—I’m just as likely to hook you or me as a fish. This is almost the perfect time of day—though it’s late in the year for this.”

  I took my shotgun and backed off.

  She flicked the wand sideways once, then twice, and the line floated in the air, making a shape like a cursive S. The fly settled on the water near the other side of the stream. Clara pulled it with tugs and jerks, working it across as the current carried it downstream.

  When it was downstream almost the entire length of the line, it vanished into the water and Clara jerked the pole back.

  A fountain of water and fish exploded out of the stream. The pole folded nearly in half and I realized why Clara had tied it to the base as well as the tip. She stepped rapidly back from the bank and the fish splashed down again. The line straightened and Clara ran along the shore, letting the fish run ahead of her. Suddenly the fish jumped again and she yanked hard on the line. The line parted with a musical note, but not before the fish had been pulled sideways. It landed hard on the rounded stones of the near shore and began flopping.

  “Oh, no you don’t!” shouted Clara, and she ran down the rocky shore and reached it right before it flopped back into the water. She flipped it several feet back from the stream.

  It wasn’t until I saw her next to the trout that I realized how big the fish was. It was as long as my arm and my entire hand would’ve fit in its mouth, but with those teeth, I wasn’t about to try.

  “Wow. So, is it a salmon?”

  Clara shook her head. “No. It’s a trout. A brown trout, I think. Certainly not a rainbow trout—those are saltwater fish that were introduced into these waters by man.” She picked up a round rock and whacked it in the head. I winced and the fish stopped flopping. “You know how to clean a fish, Charlie?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. ‘Cause I’ve never done it before.”

  I looked at her in disbelief.

  “Honest. The only other fish I caught, my dad cleaned.” She picked up the fish with a couple of fingers hooked in a gill slit. “My dad would die to catch a trout this big. It’s gotta weigh at least five pounds.”

  We walked back to the campsite. “It’s your fish,” I said, “so you have to clean it…but I’ll show you how.”

  We wove a broiling basket from the remaining green willow branches and baked fillets over the coals. We ate a good portion of it, but it would’ve taken two more people to finish it off. Clara experimented with the fire to try and smoke the rest of it, but eventually ended up with more char than fish. She incinerated her mistakes.

  “Charlie,” Clara said after we ate, “I want to wash.”

  I held up one of the disposable wipe-n-wash packets.

  She shook her head and pulled out all the aluminum cook-ware—a small kettle, a liter-and-a-half sauce pan and a liter sauce pan. We used a cooking pot to dip water from the stream for washing. Neither of us were too anxious to dip our hands into that stream, especially in the dark. She arranged rocks to support the pots over the coals and set out a small bar of soap and a bandanna to use as a washcloth.

  “You’ve got the watch,” she said. She pointed away from the fire, toward the open side of the cave and the stream. “Watch that way.”

  “Huh?”

  She began unbuttoning her shirt.

  “Oh.” I picked up my shotgun and sat on the far side of the fire, my back to the heat and the cave. My eyes probed the dusk and I listened for creatures among the pines, but what I heard was the stream and the fire and the closer sounds of Clara undressing, then splashing water and hands rubbing across soapy skin.

  My imagination supplied visual details and my body ached. I thought about Marie and checked my watch. It was over in five minutes. The air was cold and she probably didn’t want to expose wet skin for long.

  “It’s okay, Charlie—you can look now.”

  I stood, deliberately casual, and turned. She was sitting, her legs tucked into her sleeping bag, and wearing her spare flannel shirt. Her shotgun lay across her lap, but she was toweling at her hair with a T-shirt.

  “I wish Rick were here,” she said.

  I couldn’t think of anything to say to that, so I just shrugged and added some wood to the fire.

  There was some water left so I bathed my upper torso, getting rid of the worst of the sweat from the day’s work. My spare clothes were in the Maule, so I had to make do with my outer shirt, rinsing my smelly undershirt and spreading it near the fire to dry or not before morning.

  The fire was just under the overhang and the smoke blackened the rock above. I wondered how long the smoke stains would last—human marks in this unmarked place. The trees we’d cut down bothered me, but forest fires and beavers probably produced the same result naturally. I consoled myself that even if I spent a lifetime, I couldn’t begin to touch this wilderness in the way humans had back on the tame side.

  Not unless you spend that lifetime letting other humans into this place. Like Clara, but for different reasons, my thoughts turned back to Rick and his lover, Christopher. There was a security nightmare I didn’t even want to touch. Should we bring Chris into the secret? Rick hadn’t asked us to, but how much longer could Rick maintain the relationship with that big a secret between them? And if I brought Chris in, how would Clara react? And would Chris be willing to keep such a secret? What friendships did he have that required complete candidness?

  When I first found the gate, the secret had given me a sense of power. I know something you don’t know. But the longer I held it, the thornier and heavier the secret became. And I didn’t dare drop it, did I?

  “What are you thinking about, Charlie?”

  I looked up, startled. Clara was brushing her hair now. I’d been staring at the fire, crouched beside my spread T-shirt.

  “I wish Rick were here,” I said.

  She frowned. “I just said that, but I didn’t mean it.”

  “What did you mean, then?” I asked.

  She looked away, out into the darkness, staring at nothing. After a moment she said, “I guess I meant I wish Rick still loved me.” She half laughed, half sobbed, “I don’t think that’s what you meant, though.” Her eyes glistened wet in the firelight.

  “No.” I hesitated, afraid of hurting her more. “I wish Rick were here so I knew he wasn’t talking about the gate to Chris.”

  “Rick wouldn’t do that,” Clara blurted out. “He’d
talk to you first.”

  “How can you be sure?” I asked. I couldn’t help myself—I said, “I mean, look what he did to you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Jesus, she was going to make me spell it out. “Well…Chris and…all that.”

  The corners of her mouth turned down. “He called first.”

  “What?”

  “He called me first, and told me. From the bar. He didn’t ask me—he told me. But he told me before he did it.” The tears started in earnest, streaming down her cheeks. “He won’t tell Chris about the wildside without talking to you first.”

  I found my bandanna, unused, in the pocket of my folded coverall and took it to her. She didn’t see me hold it out, so I sat on the edge of her sleeping bag and wiped her face. She leaned against me, still upright, rigid, but leaning. I put my arm around her and she said, “Are you still watching the perimeter?”

  I hadn’t been. If something had come out of the dark in the past five minutes, we probably would’ve died, but I said, “Yes, Clara. I’m watching.” I lifted the shotgun from her lap and put it beside me.

  She let go then. The rigidity went away and the sobs came. I sat there, her head on my shoulder, stroking her back and staring into the dark. She fell asleep, later, sliding down into the bag. I pulled it to her chin and fed the fire until she woke by herself, near dawn.

  She complained about my not waking her for her share of the night watches, but I didn’t stay awake long enough to hear it.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “I SAY PUSH IT.”

  Marie landed the Maule into a fifteen-knot headwind, letting it slow to nearly thirty-five knots ground speed before touching down in the meadow. The brown grass quickly killed the rest of her speed, using less than two-thirds the length of our runway. She turned the plane and taxied back to where Clara and I waited, midway, near the cave and cache.

  “Well, that wasn’t too bad,” Marie said, dropping to the ground. “Though you don’t get nearly as much sleep when you have to split the watch two ways instead of four.”

  “Can’t argue with that,” I said. Clara let me sleep until Joey raised us on the radio, but I was still blinking in the morning light. “What’s happening with Rick?”