“We’re waiting for you,” Claire said.
“Just a minute longer.”
He went down to the stream again, filling the two canteens, and then looking around down there as well, satisfied that everything was all right, he came back to them.
“There’s just the one last thing to do,” he said.
“And what else after that?” Claire asked.
“No, really, there’s just the one last thing to do. I know this is tedious and seems to go on forever, but it all needs to be done, and as soon as we get used to this, it’ll all get done much faster.”
“Well, what is it?”
“This business of going to the bathroom.”
“Oh, Daddy,” Sarah said.
He couldn’t tell if she was embarrassed or just thinking he was funny. “No, listen. Come on over here. It’s important.”
He walked over to the far edge of the clearing, standing just inside the trees, waiting for them.
“Peeing isn’t any problem,” he said when they came over.
“Maybe not for you it isn’t. All you have to do is stand behind a tree and let it go, but with us it’s a little more complicated,” Claire said.
“I know. I’m getting to that. Just wait a little.”
He turned his head abruptly toward where something skittered through the leaves out there. A raccoon maybe. Nothing to worry about. Just take it easy, he told himself. All the same he kept his head turned that way a moment longer before he looked back at them.
“Peeing isn’t any problem. The only thing you’ve got to remember is not to do it anywhere near the stream. We’re drinking from it after all, and if anything seeps down into it, we’re not going to like the taste very much, not to mention the hell it’ll play on our insides. Pick a slope that drains away from it. I know you’ve got to dry yourself, and the only thing I can suggest is some leaves that aren’t brittle. If you don’t want to use leaves, you’re just going to have to wash yourselves carefully after you go. You’ll probably want to do that anyhow—dried urine will leave a rash.
“OK, that’s fairly simple. It doesn’t give us much problem. But the other business, the solid waste, does. We don’t want to leave it spread all around the trees around our camp. We find a big rock like this. We turn it over and dig out some of the dirt underneath like this, and when we’re done, we fill in the dirt and then we set the rock back on top and then we wash ourselves. You can use leaves first if you want, but afterward we wash ourselves, and we have to make sure we go every day. It doesn’t matter if we feel we have to or not. We’ve got to go. There’s only one rule up here. You don’t do anything you don’t think through first. You wash yourselves every day. You go to the bathroom every day. You rinse your clothes out whenever you can. You eat even if you don’t want to. I’m making an issue of all this because there’ll be times when you’re so tired and dirty that you won’t feel like doing anything but lying there, and the next thing you know you’ll have body sores and you’ll be sick and you might just as well give up then because you won’t even have the sense of an animal.”
He started to say something more, but he realized that he’d only be repeating himself and he didn’t like the idea of making a speech at them anyhow, so he just stood there, feeling strangely empty and embarrassed while they looked at him, and then rousing himself, fighting to break the mood and sound cheerful, “Anybody hungry?”
“Yes.” Sarah’s voice was so quiet that it seemed she hardly opened her mouth or even breathed.
“Let’s go eat then. I know what. Why don’t we try a vitamin pill for dessert?”
But it wasn’t much of a joke, and nobody even smiled.
6
They ate beef jerky and a can of peaches, slipping the peaches into their mouths and chewing hungrily, sharing the thick syrup, drinking plenty of water. There was only one blanket for each of them, and they slept rolled up in the blankets, crowding close to each other, Sarah in the middle. Once Sarah woke, saying, “I’m cold,” and he soothed her back to sleep. Later he himself woke from the explosion, and he sat upright before he registered the muffled roar and saw the faint red and green of the wing lights far off up there and understood that what he’d heard was a sonic boom.
The early songs of the morning birds roused them just before dawn, and when he went to check on the horses, he found that one had gotten tangled in the rope of another after all, but they hadn’t hurt themselves, and he led them all back to camp, letting them drink from the stream, feeding them each a hatful of oats, then saddling them. There wasn’t time for a fire to cook, he finally decided, and after tending to themselves, washing, urinating, they ate as they rode, more beef jerky, some crackers, a little chocolate.
“We’ll stop somewhere later and cook a complete meal,” he told them, but it was a lie. He just wanted to get them moving and keep them moving. He needed to get them as far off as he could. Whenever they came into a broad open space, they broke into a canter, never urging the horses very much, saving their strength, letting them move at what seemed their most comfortable pace, slowing as they worked through more trees. By eight the sun was well up over the horizon to the east, warming them, drying the dampness out of their clothes. By nine they were walking the horses, by nine-fifteen riding again, and that became the pattern, ride forty-five minutes, walk fifteen. He stopped and gave the horses a rest at noon.
“This is where we’ll be going for tonight,” he told Claire and Sarah, showing them on the map where there was a lake and then pointing directly up from them toward a far-off fir slope between two low-slung peaks. “We’ll need to go some to make it but I think we can, and there are a half-dozen lakes on either side so it won’t be obvious that this one is where we’ve gone.”
He heard the far-off constant rumble of a motor as he mounted, and looking back the way they’d come, he made out the flash of a helicopter a long way off down there above the trees.
“For us?” Claire asked. “Them looking for us?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. It could be just the forest service checking out what looks like the start of a fire. It could be anyone. If it is them, they won’t be anywhere near us today. There’s a lot of square miles up here for them to cover, and their best bet is still to come tracking us on horseback.”
“You’re sure they’ll be coming?”
“They didn’t try very hard for us back at the cabin. In some ways the point isn’t even to catch us, just to keep after us.”
“You mean if they catch up to us again, they might give us a headstart?”
“They might. It’s hard to say. But the snow will be here soon. It’s held off too long already. And when it comes, this won’t be like any camping trip anymore. They’ll want to end it as fast as they can so they can get out.”
The helicopter rumbled closer to them.
“We’d better go,” he said, nudging his horse, Claire and Sarah coming behind. There were fir trees mixed in with the bare aspen and dogwood now, giving them better cover, and he knew that in a few hours they would be up where there were only the fir trees, so tall and thick that they wouldn’t be spotted even if a helicopter did fly over.
They came to where a stream angled down from left to right ahead of them, stopping briefly, letting the horses drink.
“Can’t we ride up through the stream and try to hide our tracks?” Claire asked.
“It wouldn’t work. The bed’s too soft, the water too slow. Three horses riding up would leave tracks that maybe wouldn’t wash away for another day or two. What you want is swift water and a gravel bottom, and even then the trick would only slow them down—it wouldn’t stop them. They’d just split up and follow either bank until they saw where we came out, and then they’d be following again.”
He had a strange kind of doubling. The streams twisted and turned, and he followed it. Soon there would be dogs after him he knew, but he did not bother wading in the stream to try to throw them off his scent. That would only slow them down, and
since he would have to come out of the water sometime on one bank or the other, the man working the dogs would merely split the pack along both banks until they picked up the scent again, and he himself would just have wasted time. He’d been here before, said this before.
No, he’d written it. And there had been a helicopter then too, and he was suddenly certain that the helicopter was definitely not the forest service at all, shaking his head to clear it, not just nudging his horse now but kicking it, urging it farther up into the trees, shouting for Claire and Sarah to follow. He surged up to a fir bough, leaning low to clear it, straightening, galloping farther up the slope, getting control of himself, slowing as he neared the top.
“What was that about?” Claire asked, riding up behind him.
“Nothing,” he said. “I thought I saw something. It was nothing.”
The next level was entirely fir trees, close and cool and shadowed, no longer the thrashing of the horses’ hooves through crisp fallen leaves, just the slow steady muffled plodding over the thick carpet of dead brown lodgepole needles. “We won’t be going to that lake after all,” he told them. “If that is them in a helicopter down there, it would be too easy for them to land in a nearby clearing and check those lakes up there to find us. There aren’t that many lakes anyhow and they aren’t very big, just a small cluster of them.”
“Then where will we go?”
“Up around to the left. The map says there’s another stream up there.”
“But I want to see the lake,” Sarah said.
“I know it. So do I. But this is how we’ll be doing things for a while. We’ll pick a spot where we want to go, but we’ll figure the spot is so obvious they can guess we’ll be going there, and then we’ll pick another less attractive place. It’s a matter of guessing and second-guessing. Don’t worry. You’ll see lakes in time. A lot of them. But not just yet.”
The level became another rise, and they angled up across it.
7
The stream was better than he’d hoped, not like a brook but a real stream, wide and swift and deep, surging loudly down a trough of rock into a big smooth stone basin and then swirling over the lip of the basin down the slope again. They reached it an hour before dusk, hearing the roar before they came plodding slowly up through a thick patch of trees and saw it strangely magnified.
Sarah was already off her horse and running toward it when he stopped her.
“Hey!”
She turned and looked at him.
“First we work. These horses are a lot more tired than you are, only they can’t take care of themselves. You just pitch in and help, and then maybe we can all have some time in the water.”
She looked once more at the water and came slowly back.
“Another thing. The way you threw those reins around that branch, your horse could have broken loose in a second. If she got deep into those trees and something spooked her, we could have spent all night trying to find her. I told you, you’ve got to be careful.”
She was knotting the reins securely now, not looking at him.
“Fill the canteens the same as you did before and then help your mother.”
She nodded, still not looking at him, and she didn’t look at him all the time he was uncinching the saddles, watering the horses, feeding them the last of the oats, at last tethering them.
“Okay,” he said, coming up behind her and touching her shoulders. “Now we can take care of ourselves.”
But she didn’t make a move to come with him, and he had to tug at her.
“Hey now, listen,” he said, turning her around, lifting her chin to look at him. “When somebody corrects you, take it. No moods. No pouting. I’ll forget this if you will. But next time, do it right. Is that a deal?”
She nodded slowly.
“All right then. Come on. Let’s soak our feet.”
He was already sitting on the rim of the basin, taking off his boots and socks before she made a move to join him.
8
“These maps. You might as well learn about them. In case something happens to me.”
There were three of them, wrapped in a plastic folder in his jacket pocket. He took them out, opening one that depicted the area around them. It was two feet square, an apparent jumble of blue curving lines and occasional random numbers.
“The lines are slopes and ridges. The numbers are altitude. There are only two things you need to know to read one of these. First, the contour lines don’t always represent the same height. You need to look at this code down here at the bottom of the map. Vertical scale fifty feet, it says. So all right, every blue line means a change of fifty feet. If the line curves like this , you’ll be going up. If it curves like this , you’ll be going down. Horizontal scale one inch to one thousand feet, it says. So you know that if you get only a few contour lines every inch you’ll be heading into country that isn’t very steep. But if you get the contour lines so close together that you can hardly tell them apart, you’ll have a cliff in front of you. Like this:
Where the lines curve and spread up, that’s the draw we came up last night. The close straight lines on either side are the cliffs. Of course the draw could still have been so cluttered with rocks that we couldn’t have managed it. The map isn’t detailed enough to give that kind of information, and from now on, we’ll just have to take our chances. We’ll chart a route before we start, and if we come to a place that isn’t passable, we’ll need to chart another route. The trouble is, the people against us can read a map as well. They know which places look easy, and they’ll be waiting for us there. We’ll need to pick routes that aren’t as likely as others.”
“You said two things,” Claire told him. “What’s the second?”
“This,” he said, reaching into his pocket.
Sarah’s eyes widened with interest.
“So far I haven’t needed to use it. Our direction has been fairly simple and mostly we’ve been able to see the spot we’re going to. But once we get over the next ridge, we’ll be going down to a level that’s almost as low as where we started, and then we’ll be going up again, only the country on the other side is full of box canyons and intersecting ridges, and in a while we’ll be so turned around that we won’t know which way is north and south anymore. We’ll need to start lining up our map and using the compass.”
“What about the sun?” Claire asked. “Or that business about moss on trees?”
“Moss grows every direction on trees, and the sun doesn’t move directly east to west. The only way to be sure is to use a compass. There’s an awful lot of hunters who tried it the other way, using the sun, and all they managed to do was get themselves lost and die up here.”
“Isn’t that what we are anyhow? We know where we are and everything, but we’re lost just the same, aren’t we? Where are we going? What are we going to do?”
“I don’t know,” he waited and said, “I suppose we’ll try making it over the top of these mountains and down the other side—unless the snow gets here first. If it does…”
He didn’t know what else to say, so he just let his words trail off and sat back against a tree, watching Sarah play with the compass. She turned it, smiling as the needle always swung around to the same direction.
9
“Daddy, I’m sick.”
He was back at the house just after Ethan had died and the doctor had given them the pills, him rushing up the stairs to her, saying “How bad?” her answering, “I have to throw up.” Only he wasn’t back at the house at all. He was huddled cold and damp in his blanket in the clearing near the stream, and someone was shaking him, saying “Daddy, I’m sick,” as he came awake enough to see her lurching away from him, her hand over her mouth, to behind a tree and retching. He was instantly up and around to her, holding her. Claire was beside him.
“What is it?”
“I don’t know yet.”
Sarah retched again, nothing coming up, her face ashen, her stomach heaving violently. With his h
and over her stomach, it felt like something in there punching at him.
“Daddy,” she moaned, gasping, and the spasms were convulsive now, abrupt hollow sounds coming up her throat from her stomach as she heaved once totally and a thin stream of dull yellow bile shot out of her mouth, collapsing her. She lay on her side in the grass by the tree, holding herself, knees tucked up, moaning.
“Ssshh,” he said. “Take it easy. There’s nothing to worry about.”
And he’d said that before too and he didn’t know what was happening to his mind as he knelt beside her, touching her cold clammy forehead, feeling her frantic heartbeat, standing, trying to think.
“Is it something she ate?” Claire asked. “Some of our food that went bad?”
“No, we all ate the same thing, and anyway you can see that she digested it. She’s not bringing up anything but bile.”
“What is it then?”
“I think it’s altitude sickness.”
“It’s what? I don’t understand.”
“She’s smaller than us and she’s reacting faster and that run up through the draw the other night must have taken more out of her than I thought.”
“I still don’t understand.”
“Salt. She’s used up all her salt, and there hasn’t been enough in the food we’re eating.”
She was on her knees again, saying “Daddy” just as she shot up more bile and he was kneeling beside her once more, holding her, saying, “It’s going to be all right. Don’t worry. It’s going to be all right,” looking up at Claire. “The air’s too thin up here. You have to work harder and you sweat more. But you need the salt to keep water in your blood, and if you don’t get it, you just keep sweating, losing more water. It doesn’t matter how much water you drink. You’ll just keep losing it.”