The Mountain Story

  That day we got lost, there I was leading Nola and Bridget through the pines, my unease mounting with each step. No part of me wanted to see Secret Lake again. It might hold sweet nostalgia for Nola but for me it was a crime scene.

  I was moving at a fast pace, but Bridget and her ponytail easily kept up.

  “Is this a high high altitude?” she asked.

  “Eight thousand feet.”

  “Do people get sick at this altitude or does it have to be Everest high?”

  “Yes.”

  “At this altitude?” she clarified.

  “Even lower.”

  “Dizziness? Nausea?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t feel any of that. I think the thin air suits me.”

  Everything about Bridget was thin, except her hair, and maybe her lips. Of course the rare air would suit her.

  Nola panted some distance behind but never asked me to slow down. I liked her grit, and found reasons to stop so that she could catch her breath. “Not much longer,” I said.

  “I could go all night,” Bridget shouted over the rising wind.

  Endorphins. Inhale deeply enough and you’re a mountain junkie for life.

  Leading the pair down a short hill, I stopped to take in the view. The mountain wilderness stretched out before us—rock and forests and more of the same in graded hues for miles and miles. I was concerned suddenly, about the women getting lost trying to find their way back. “I hope you’ve both been paying attention.”

  “I’m good with directions,” Bridget said.

  Nola paused for a breath, shifting her eyes over the marbled rock and spiny forests. “Beautiful,” she sighed.

  Bridget lifted her wrist to look at her watch and remembered she was not wearing one. “Already getting kind of dark,” she said.

  It was. The clouds were moving in, but experience told me the wind could blow them out again just as quickly. Still, sudden storms were common this time of year, and how could I leave the two women at the lake if there was a thunderstorm or, worse, a snow squall?

  “He would have been surprised that I came without him,” Nola said, unprompted.

  “He must have used a compass,” Bridget said. “This path isn’t marked.”

  I think he’s watching right now,” Nola said. “I’ll bet he had a good chuckle when we went the wrong way.”

  “A nudge in the right direction would have been nice. Which way now?” Bridget asked, taking the lead.

  “Over that section of boulders,” I said with a nod.

  “Thank God we stopped when we did,” Nola said. “We might have missed you.”

  That was true. As we hiked on toward Secret Lake I kept asking myself what I was doing with these strangers. I slowed down to wait for Nola again.

  When she reached me, huffing and puffing, she said, “I need to get in better shape.”

  “I told you that a year ago,” Bridget called.

  Nola accepted the bottle of water but declined the granola bar Bridget offered from her blue mesh bag. “I’m still stuffed from lunch,” she said.

  Bridget noticed I had no water and offered me a bottle. I waved her off and she seemed relieved. “Why don’t you have a knapsack?” she asked.

  “That doesn’t seem like something you’d forget,” Nola said.

  “We should stay focused,” I said, setting off into the patchy fog again.

  Bridget, thinking she had something to prove, kept pace with me, chattering until at last we reached the landmark that pointed the direction to Secret Lake.

  I stopped, leaning against a tree to rest. “Here’s the Tower,” I said, gesturing at the massive phallic rock formation a few yards away.

  Nola and her husband must have had their own name for the rock judging by the way she blushed.

  “It gets easier from here.”

  “I think I remember now,” Nola said.

  “What matters is do you remember the way back from here?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Nola said uncertainly.

  “I remember,” Bridget promised.

  The wind teased us from behind as we crossed a shallow meadow and made our way around a hill of tumbled boulders. There was always a breeze on the mountain but on this day the wind came up fast and hard. The closer we got to Secret Lake the more agitated I became. I was peeved at myself for skipping lunch, then remembered that I had not expected to live past dinner.

  As we neared the lake I could smell the still water and the lichen-frosted rocks and the endangered mountain phlox and the bitter tangle of wild grapes on the south edge beyond the reeds. The ground beneath us pulsed. Pausing to inhale, I felt a quickening. That sense of drawing near, being on the verge of something mysterious and explosive.

  I stopped to wait for Nola to catch up again as Bridget carried on, bounding from boulder to rock, head down, watching her feet. Then time stood still for a moment as I glanced ahead of her to notice a dense gathering of bees. Before I could warn her, Bridget leapt into the swarm.

  “No!” Nola shouted.

  Too late. Converged upon by the anxious bees, Bridget opened her mouth and released a piercing scream. She swatted at the insects, and spun around in circles, and jerked her head back and forth, screaming all the while. I could see that her lustrous ponytail was acting as a net, and had trapped several of the bees in its length. The more the bees buzzed, the louder Bridget screamed.

  This is where it all began.

  Bridget started to run. The bees still trapped in her ponytail buzzed aggressively and she thought she was being chased by the whole swarm, so she kept on running, stumbling on rocks, and leaping over fallen trees, careening in a southwesterly direction to an area of the mountain I was not remotely familiar with. She tore through a pass between two massive granite crags and vaulted over a mountain-fed stream, and through a dense forest of white fir and juniper, and skidded down an escarpment of crumbling sediment and staggered up again and over the upthrust boulders at the top of another hill, as I followed, hollering, “Bridget! Bridget! BRIDGET!”

  I chased her for what felt like an hour but was more likely five or six minutes before I thought to look behind me, and spotted the red poncho caught on a bush where Nola had stumbled and fallen. I couldn’t chase one woman and leave the other. I started back to help Nola, but before I could reach her, she shouted, “Go! She’ll get lost!”

  Distant movement caught my eye and I was confused to see the teenaged girl with the green flip-flops storming toward us through the brush. Where the hell had she come from?

  I took off after Bridget once again, scrambling over the rocks, as her screams were snatched by the matrix in the walls and hurled back into the forest to confuse my sense of direction.

  Then the screaming stopped. I called out, “Bridget? BRIDGET?”

  Behind me rocks clattered and I turned to see Nola in the red poncho, trailed by the girl in the green flip-flops. I waited until they caught up to me, all of us gasping for breath. Together we spotted Bridget through the haze ahead, stomping on what, to my horror, appeared to be a blond cat.

  “My fall!” she wailed.

  “What the hell?” was all I could think to say when I realized it was a clip-on ponytail and not a dead mammal in the dirt at her feet.

  Bridget’s cheeks were streaked with black mascara, her short blond hair sticking up in all directions. She clutched the back of her neck, shouting, “Stung! I got stung!”

  Nola forced the panicked woman to sit down on a rock. “Where?”

  She pointed to her neck. “The stinger is still in there!”

  Bee stings hurt like hell but that hot pain usually fades pretty fast. “It won’t hurt for long,” I said.

  “I’m allergic!” Bridget shouted.

  I suddenly understood her terror.

  “This is not good,” Nola said.

  The girl in the green flip-flops found Bridget’s blue mesh bag and began to search through it.

  “I forgot my EpiPen in my suitca
se,” Bridget said, shaking.

  “Oh dear,” Nola said. “I don’t see a stinger.”

  “On my neck,” Bridget answered, hyperventilating.

  “Breathe,” Nola commanded.

  That seemed a strange thing to tell a woman whose throat was closing from anaphylactic shock.

  “Where on your neck?”

  Bridget wheezed, pointing.

  Nola searched. “No stinger. No sting mark.”

  Bridget’s face darkened as she struggled for air. “There!” she rasped, pointing again.

  “There’s no stinger,” Nola said. “Breathe. Breathe.”

  Bridget pointed once more to her nape. “Right there!”

  The girl in the green flip-flops looked too but did not find a sting mark either. I failed to see why it mattered where Bridget was stung. She didn’t have her EpiPen. Her throat was going to close up and the Mountain Station was at least a mile away.

  “I do not see a thing,” Nola said. “Not a thing.”

  Bridget wheezed dramatically. “In the middle!”

  “Nothing.”

  Bridget’s irritation seemed to be mitigating her allergic reaction. “Look under my hair!”

  Nola took a moment to do so. “I don’t think you were stung.”

  “I was stung,” Bridget insisted.

  “You’re breathing pretty well though,” I pointed out.

  “You are,” Nola agreed.

  Bridget rubbed her neck, pouting.

  The silent girl found my eyes. I took the briefest moment to wonder about her presence, and her peculiar manner.

  “I was stung!” Bridget swore.

  “We should head back,” I said, turning to Nola, “in case she has a delayed reaction.”

  “That’s it,” Bridget said. “It’s a delayed reaction.”

  The fog had become a viscous soup through which we could see neither earth nor sky.

  “It’s thick as stew,” Nola said. I would quickly learn that Nola had a talent for stating the obvious.

  “Are you sure you know the way?” Bridget asked.

  Hubris, meet Wolf Truly. “I’m sure,” I said, and started walking.

  Bridget’s voice rose as we inched through the clotted clouds. “I can’t see anything.”

  Gnarled tree roots slithered back and forth between the slippery rocks. We were stubbing our toes and catching our heels. The teenager lagged in her green flip-flops but was remarkably sure-footed, considering. I caught her scent—red licorice and Dove soap.

  “We appear to be in quite the pickle here,” Nola said, laughing to hide her worry.

  “What’s your name again?” Bridget called to me through the haze. “Have I forgotten or did you not say?”

  “Wolf,” I said.

  “Beg pardon?”

  “Wolf.”

  “Wolf? I would have remembered that. Wolf.”

  “Wolf?” Nola repeated. “Did you say your name is Wolf?”

  “It’s short for Wilfred. Wilfred Truly.”

  “Wouldn’t it be Wilf if it was short for Wilfred?”

  “It’s just Wolf,” I said. “That’s what my mother called me. That’s the way everyone says it. Wolf.”

  The girl in the green flip-flops did not tell us her name or attempt to communicate in any way. It occurred to me that she was mute.

  “We need to find our way back,” Nola said, adding gratuitously, “before dark.”

  When we came to a juncture of sorts, I sniffed the air, hoping to catch a scent of the trail home, but all I could distinguish was Nola’s lavender sachet, the ginger sweat of Bridget, and the soapy teenaged girl.

  “Which way now?” Bridget asked.

  “The lake’s this way,” I said, pointing.

  We walked silently for nearly an hour, over the rocks, through the granite passes and the village of thick white firs. We carried on past the cluster of live oak. No acorns, just leftover shells from the rats and squirrels. I was sweating in spite of the dropping temperature. At some point I realized we’d begun making a gentle descent. I knew that the way back to Secret Lake should be a gradual ascent. I remember telling myself that it was just a different way, a shortcut that would eventually take us back up. And so I led them. That must be said.

  Nola’s cheeks were pink from the cold. Bridget had zipped her hooded jacket all the way up over her tousled blond hair and pulled her second coat on too. The mute girl was shivering in spite of her peacoat, and I found myself twitching with empathetic pain when I lowered my eyes to her scarlet toes in the green flip-flops.

  I found a rock, and leaning against it yanked off my boots, tore the sub-zero hiking socks—Byrd’s gift to me one Christmas—from my feet and passed them to the girl, stupidly mouthing, take them. She pressed the woollen socks back into my hands, shaking her head.

  “We’ll be back before it gets too cold anyway,” Nola announced with conviction. “But that was a very nice gesture, Wolf. Does anyone call you Wilfred?”

  I thought of my aunt Kriket. I thought of my father. I thought of my friend Byrd. “No.”

  The wind danced in the trees, scolding the heckling jays as we trudged on. “Come on, everyone,” I said, “this way.”

  Time on the mountain could be deceitful and disappointing, like the girl I once thought I loved. Time shifted and shrank, bounced and echoed, slept with college professors and rejected true love. We walked on in silence for what seemed like a very long time before we stopped to catch our breath and consider the course.

  “I think we came around here,” Bridget said. “Remember you pointed out that tower? Shouldn’t it be right over there?”

  We moved forward, unexpectedly knocked off balance by a patch of small, loose rocks when we started down a short slope. We only slid a few feet though, and none of us were toppled.

  “That could have been much worse,” Nola said.

  By accident, the mute girl and I locked eyes. She blanched, and gagged, and then turned to vomit in the bushes. I tried not to take it personally.

  Together with Nola and Bridget, I watched the heaving arch of the girl’s spine. Nola moved toward her but Bridget held Nola back by grabbing the red poncho. I didn’t pretend then, or now, to understand the ways of women. I reckoned they knew best when one of their kind wanted to be left alone.

  “Are you all right?” Nola called.

  The girl wiped her mouth with her coat sleeve and nodded in response—so, not deaf. She rose to her feet and stepped up to join me in the lead.

  Bridget shared a look with Nola and we walked on, until we came to another fork in the overgrowth.

  “I wonder what time it is,” Bridget mused, crossing her arms over her chest. I judged it to be somewhat later than four in the afternoon. In an hour or so the mountain would be dipped in night and Nola and I were the only ones properly dressed for the cold. I hadn’t bothered to check the mountain weather forecast back at the tram station but I knew, at this time of year, we’d be lucky if there was no rain—or snow. “Let’s keep moving,” I said.

  We plodded on a little farther, up the striated granite and frozen flecked quartz, serenaded by Bridget’s chorus of complaints. “I’m so cold. Can we hurry up? The rocks are so loose.”

  It was clear to me that the silent girl in the green flip-flops was moving as quickly as she could, and Nola faster than I’d have expected, given her age. We continued on over the rocks for another ten or fifteen minutes, which should have brought us to Secret Lake but nothing looked familiar anymore, or rather everything did—the same spiny pines peering out at us from the fog in all directions. The same ragged rocks.

  “Hear it?” Bridget said. “Sounds like a waterfall.”

  We could all hear the sound of a roaring falls, an auditory illusion that the mountain is famous for. “The wind,” I said. “It’s the wind.”

  “Sounds like it’s this way,” Bridget said, pointing left.

  “It’s the wind,” I repeated.

  “It does sound like a
waterfall,” Nola said.

  “It does.”

  “Isn’t that where the tourists would be?” Bridget asked. “At the waterfall? Shouldn’t we try to find it?”

  “The only waterfall is Corazon Falls,” I said. “That’s six miles away from here—down in the canyon. There’s no trail to Corazon Falls. Come on. We need to get back to the Mountain Station.”

  An owl began to hoot in the trees overhead, stopping us in our tracks. It was later than I thought. When we paused in a small clearing to catch our breath I tried to remain calm but I knew we were lost. I’d never been lost before. At least not in a mountain wilderness.

  The owl hooted once more. I was sure it was a sign—from Byrd? God?—a warning. “We can’t go on,” I said. “It’s suicide to walk in the dark. We need to find a spot to settle in.”

  “You’re not serious.” Bridget stiffened. “Are you saying we’re stuck here for the night?”

  “We’ll be good. We’ll be fine.”

  “Oh my God. Oh my God.”

  Nola reached out to squeeze her arm. “One night. You can make it through one night.”

  The girl in the green flip-flops said nothing but I could see she was afraid. Bridget sniffled, but I couldn’t find words to comfort her. Mostly I was irritated that she’d gone running off from the bees in the first place.

  We looked around, sifting through the fog for a suitable shelter. Finding no overhangs or caves, we quickly agreed that the site of a large fallen log seemed as good a place as any to wait out the cold night.

  Leaning down to clear a spot before she sat, Bridget was startled by a skittering cadre of black beetles moving in and out of a tunnel in the dirt, and let out a blood-curdling scream. Backing away from the clattering insects, she caused a cluster of rocks to loosen at her feet and roll down the nearby incline, which was deeper and steeper than I’d first imagined.

  None of us wanted to sleep with the beetles so we decided to roll the log away from their burrow. Nola suggested a flat spot up the hill near some manzanita, which would help block the wind. Agreed, we four leaned down to roll the log away from the offending insects, but we were pushing against gravity and the rocks were unstable beneath our feet. With much grunting and huffing we managed to move the big log only a few yards up the incline. Bridget complained that the beetles were still too close, so we four bore down once more.