Anna Pigeon - Track of the Cat Part 10

Anna just smiled. "What's this I hear about UFOs on the West Side?" she asked, hoping to lighten the conversation.

Momentarily, he looked confused, then his face clouded. "Harland?"

Anna didn't reply.

"I'm real sick of his bulls.h.i.+t," Craig fumed. "I saw something and everybody makes this big joke. I saw green lights, moving low, and heard these thumping sounds, like footsteps. I was a mile or so away, I couldn't see clear. They'll be back. So will I. With a camera. Harland's a b.a.s.t.a.r.d."

His anger had effectively silenced Anna. For a while she stared down the mountain to the straight-sided stones of Devil's Hallway, trying to think of a graceful way to escape.

"Paul told me about you and the lion hunt," Craig said abruptly, clearly wanting to change the subject as much as she did. "Corinne's p.i.s.sed. You're not playing the game, Anna."

Again he smiled. He gave them out like earned sweets. Despite what Anna had once called her "better judgment," she was charmed.

"You won't climb the NPS ladder that way." The smile winked out, the choirboy, the elf vanished. In their place was a young man wound a little too tight, eyes glittering too brightly, muscles strung too taut. As he spoke, the slight ducking of the head, the defensive twitch of the shoulder that Anna always thought of when she pictured him returned.

"Don't climb, Anna," he said. "They're hypocrites: Corinne, that d.a.m.n Christina, Roberts, Karl with his good-old-boy act. Especially Corinne. She'd pave the whole park if she thought it'd get her the nod from the Regional Office. She's using Guadalupe to get a superintendency somewhere. She'd kill every cougar in Texas for a line on her resume."

Though it wasn't entirely unexpected, his outburst startled Anna. Rocking back on her heels, she watched the working of his facial muscles. "Inst.i.tutionalized for paranoid delusions," flashed though her mind.

Probing, experimenting with the effect of words, of ideas, on Craig's volatile emotions, Anna said: "The Park Service has its share of losers, no doubt about that. It makes the loss of Sheila Drury the more tragic. She was a first-cla.s.s ranger. The Park Service needs more like her."

Her eyes fixed on him unwaveringly. For an instant she thought she'd gone fis.h.i.+ng in a dead lake. Then the calm masking his features began rippling like the surface of a pond when, deep in the waters, creatures are struggling.

Finally the underwater beast broke free and it was Rage. "Drury was a wh.o.r.e!" Eastern spat the words out as if each was formed new, hot, bitter for Drury's condemnation. "She'd've carved up Dog Canyon, turned it into a Safeway parking lot just to advertise herself. She didn't care about this place. She never hiked or camped. If she couldn't ride her horse in, forget it. She was on her way up. She was a wh.o.r.e. To her everything was s.e.xual. She used it. She was one of Corinne's 'little girls'-"

Craig seemed to notice then that Anna, more than merely listening, was studying him as an entomologist might study an exotic insect. Abruptly, he ceased speaking. In a quick, scrabbling motion, he scooped his book into his daypack and stood up.

Anna stayed in her squat, aware that on the steep-sided trail she was safer with her center of gravity close to the ground.

Craig squeezed his bulky shoulders into the pack's straps. "They'll sell out the park," he said, his voice subdued, sad. "Like they sold out Big Bend, Big Thicket. It's just a matter of time. There's not many places left to run to. They're selling out the world."

With that, he shambled past and around the bend out of sight. For long moments Anna remained where she was.

What stayed with her was the sadness and the elfin smile.

"The high country," she said aloud. Rising, she shouldered her pack and, celebrating each step that she put between herself and the seemingly all-pervasive psychosis of humanity, began to climb.

CHAPTER 11.

In the pines, pygmy nuthatches and mule deer for companions, the breezes blew away thought and Anna achieved the peace she'd come to depend on the wilderness for. In place of doubt and suspicion came yellow b.u.t.terflies feeding incongruously at fox dung. Unself-conscious as a bird, she whistled, lending human notes to the sweet cacophony of the woods.

Perhaps planted there by Karl Johnson, maybe in her mind since childhood, Anna found tongue and lips forming the music from the score of Peter Pan. Peter Pan. Haunted by the nursery melody, again and again she whistled the notes, the words floating through her mind as she walked the trails. "Tender shepherd, tender shepherd, let me help you count your sheep. One in the meadow, two in the garden, three in the nursery fast asleep." The song tickled some memory. Far from being nagged by it, Anna enjoyed a sense of elusive comfort. Haunted by the nursery melody, again and again she whistled the notes, the words floating through her mind as she walked the trails. "Tender shepherd, tender shepherd, let me help you count your sheep. One in the meadow, two in the garden, three in the nursery fast asleep." The song tickled some memory. Far from being nagged by it, Anna enjoyed a sense of elusive comfort.

On the third day the comfort was remembered.

The melody she had heard-or imagined she had-in Big Canyon when she was searching for the orphaned lion cubs, was the first four notes of "Tender Shepherd." If she didn't think but only felt, she could almost believe a kindly cosmic shepherd looked after the lost kittens.

On the third day, happier than she'd been for a while, she radioed in her itinerary and began the sixteen-mile hike out. She'd chosen the long way: across the Bowl on the Tejas then south on the McKittrick Ridge Trail.

McKittrick Ridge was a favorite walk of hers. The rugged trail wound for miles above the south fork of McKittrick Canyon. A mile to the north, hidden behind wooded hills, was Middle McKittrick, where Drury had died. And, once she began the long descent, she would catch glimpses of the white escarpment above North McKittrick, the third p.r.o.ng of the three-tined canyon fork.

Near four o'clock, she came out of the trees and looked down the three thousand feet into the bottom of McKittrick Canyon. The creek sparkled suddenly silver where it surfaced, left a white stone trail when it vanished underground. Big-tooth maple, ponderosa, gray-leaf oak, Texas madrone, and juniper veiled the canyon floor. Above, where North McKittrick forked off, she could see great ribs of the Permian Reef, pocked with sotol and yucca, pus.h.i.+ng into this water-fed paradise. White bones at the oasis.

"I'm starting down the ridge," Anna radioed Cheryl Light, the ranger on duty in the canyon that day. "I should be at the Visitors Center at about six-thirty. I'll need a ride back to the housing area."

"Somebody will be there," Light returned.

"Thanks. Three-one-five clear." For a couple of minutes more Anna enjoyed the view. Then, shouldering her pack, she started down again to the battering, badgering world of people.

The trail carved a descent in rocky switchbacks, dropping through biomes with delightful rapidity. The air grew perceptibly warmer. In places the trail was so steep a crew, now twenty years gone-probably pediatricians and ranch hands, mechanics and alcoholics by this time-had blasted steps from the living stone.

Moist and alive with gra.s.ses and succulents, the flank of the mountain protected Anna's right shoulder as she walked downhill. To her left a cliff dropped away for three hundred feet. Madrone and juniper, stunted dwarves of their highland selves, clung courageously to the few small ledges. Another thousand feet of scrub and brush then below that was water: the splendor of the desert.

Trees grew in the creekbed and up ravines that would pour their floodwaters into McKittrick come the monsoons. By the end of October the maples-rare but for this water-blessed enclave-would turn crimson. The ravines would be as red as if they ran with blood. Then, for two brief weeks, the Guadalupe Mountains would be overrun with Texans starved for fall colors.

Periwinkle blue sky, sparkling white thunderheads beginning to form, heat, and insect buzz formed a dream around Anna as she walked down the rocky incline, boots sure and flat on the stone.

Then the stone was gone, sky and cliff face reeling. She had stepped from the trail into nothing. Her left boot had struck sky instead of earth and she was pitching sideways. With a sickening sense of the world gone awry, she fell as if in a nightmare. "d.a.m.n," she whispered, her mind not yet grasping the hideous reality.

For ninety feet or so the cliff was not sheer but sloped steeply away in a limestone slide. From there it dropped two hundred feet to another wooded section. Anna twisted in air, tried to regain the safety of the path but the thirty-five pounds on her back threw her over the edge. She flung her arms out but the pack kept her on her back like an overturned beetle. All she could do was flail.

The slick nylon on the limestone reduced friction to almost nothing and Anna slid down toward the drop. Pressing hands and heels into the stone, she slowed her skid. Rock tore the flesh from her palms. On some level she was aware of the damage but not the pain.

Below, over the toes of her boots, she could see a gray horizon. The end of the slope. The end of the world.

With an effort that tore a scream from her lungs, she shoved out with left leg and arm. Fueled by adrenaline, it seemed as if every muscle in her body contracted and the sudden spasm flipped her over onto her belly. Spread-eagled, the pockmarked limestone ripping her clothes, Anna tried to stop her slide. Her s.h.i.+rt was dragged up, her flesh caught and burned. Screaming now, her fingers were stiff as claws scrabbling at the rock.

Then the claws caught. A bone or joint snapped in her shoulder and sudden pain almost loosed her fingers but she held on. A ledge, scarcely an inch wide where the limestone had cracked and the weather had heaved a part out ever so slightly, provided purchase for her fingers.

For a moment, Anna hung there, her bleeding chest and belly pressed against the sun-warmed stone, her torn finger-ends driven against the tiny ledge. Below her she heard the sweet simple call of the canyon wren. She was aware of the sun on the back of her legs and the sheer bliss of simply being still, suspended above death. Gradually she became conscious of the drag of the pack on her shoulders, the searing pain in her left arm socket.

It was dislocated. Soon, bone pressing against the soft tissue of nerves outside the socket, the arm would grow numb, she would lose control of her fingers, and she would fall.

Die from a dislocated shoulder, Anna thought and wondered how strangely a mind worked under pressure to think such things.

Carefully, not knowing how much her belabored grip would bear, she began to feel blindly across the rockface with the toe of her boot. Each small swipe of lug sole over the stone threatened to dislodge her precarious grasp. Her fingers began to uncurl, the strength draining out of them, turning to pain and pooling in her shoulder joint.

Then her foot found something: a root an inch or two high pus.h.i.+ng out of a crack. Enough to hold her without breaking.

"Hang on, hang on, hang on," Anna chanted silently as she began to look for footing for her right boot. This time the search was not long. A narrow crevice ran vertically down through the stone eight or ten inches to her right. With a short stabbing kick she drove the toe of her boot between the jaws of stone. Slowly, pound by pound, she lowered her weight to her feet. Her right foot slipped then stopped, resting on a natural step within the crack.

Braced on her feet, Anna pressed herself into the rock and uncurled her fingers. They moved stiffly as if the joints had rusted in their clenched att.i.tudes. Freed, her left arm fell and Anna screamed with the pain. Gripping tightly with her good hand, she prayed she wouldn't overbalance or faint.

Behind her eyelids red dots danced and she felt again as though she were falling. Squeezing against the rockface, she leaned to the left, letting her arm hang. If the dislocation weren't too severe the limb's own weight might pull it back into the socket. She tried to remember how long her Emergency Medicine instructor said it took, but her mind would not fix on the past.

With her arm lowered, Anna could see where she was. Above was the trail. Sixty feet below, the mountain dropped away. She could see the bright backs of violet-green swallows swooping high above the canyon floor. The crack she'd wedged her foot into ran from the trail to the drop. Near the top it was only an inch wide, widening as it descended until it was several feet across where it broke on the lip of the cliff.

Anna heard rather than felt her humerus bone go back into the socket, heard through her skeleton and not her ears. The pain subsided. "Thankyoubabyjesus," she murmured, and for once she wasn't being irreverent.

Awareness of the one pain was replaced by another. Blood was oozing from the sc.r.a.pes on her belly and b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Fervently she hoped it would dry like glue, stick her fast to the rock. What chance, she wondered, was there to pluck herself from this rocky crucifix without losing her grip and falling?

Still, she was alive. That one fact made all the difference. Her mind started working again.

Fifty feet of nylon cord and a good long-bladed knife were in her pack. They made up part of the weight that was trying to drag her from her fragile fingernail grip on life. The cord would be just about behind her neck coiled neatly through the handle of her first-aid kit. The knife was in the kit. A half a dozen feet above and to the right a couple of yards a dwarfed gray-leaf oak had shoved roots deep into the crack in the rock. The tree was only three or four feet tall but if the spring winds and the summer rains had not dislodged it, Anna guessed it would hold her weight. With the knife and the cord she might, with luck, rig a safety line.

But the knife and cord, four inches behind her right ear, might as well have been at home on the top shelf of the closet. If she released the buckles of the pack it would fall away, down two hundred and forty feet and the kit with it. If she tried to manhandle it, both she and the pack would fall. Soon, she knew, she must cut the pack loose. Her own weight would be more than she could support in the not too distant future.

Mentally, Anna frisked herself, searching for other tools. All she came up with were lip balm, a watch, and her tiny pocketknife. The knife was less than two inches long, weighed nothing: no good for throwing, wedging, or clawing. If she had an envelope that needed opening it would be just the thing, Anna thought acidly. It occurred to her then that, in a way, that was just what she did have. The muscles of her calves were beginning to tremble. She must do something while she was still able.

Working her hand into her pocket, risking no movement that would shake her precarious foundations, Anna fished the little knife out and opened it with her teeth. The small blade, kept razor sharp, cut through the nylon of the pack just above the shoulder strap fairly easily. When the slash was half a foot long, Anna pocketed the knife and pushed her hand over her shoulder through the material. The kit was there. She worked it out though the hole and clamped its soft handles in her teeth.

With infinite care, she pulled both shoulder straps free of their buckles and, holding them so the pack would not roll back and drag her with it, she undid the buckle of her hip belt. The instant it snapped free, she released the shoulder straps and dug her fingers into the ledge.

The pack fell back, b.u.mped her legs, slid down the stone, and was gone.

Anna remained. For the first time she dared to think she was really going to make it. This hope of survival made the prospect of any mistake so terrifying that for a moment she couldn't move, not even to open her eyes.

From above, the sound of gravel grinding underfoot caught her up with sudden wild relief. "Help, help me," she called around the canvas straps between her teeth. The crunching changed tenor. It wasn't the footfall of a timely savior. The stone-on-stone ringing was caused by a rock the size of a cantaloupe rolling down the slope.

"f.u.c.k!" Anna yelled and pressed her cheek tightly against the limestone. The rock struck her behind the ear; a fist punching her from consciousness, from life. As the blackness took her she felt her fingers slipping from the ledge, her feet from their pathetic supports. In the millisecond before she lost herself, Anna was aware of a great and futile anger.

Then that, too, was gone.

CHAPTER 12.

Somehow Anna thought death wouldn't hurt this bad. She'd always pictured the Great Beyond as an unfathomable nothing; like trying to see from the tip of one's finger or smell with one's knees.

This was pain, the old familiar earthly variety.

Quite a lot of it.

For what seemed like a long while, less than quick but more than dead, Anna lived around this ache. Slowly it came to her that she could open her eyes. There was light, gray uniform light, but no shapes or colors. Vague images of a cloud-filled Heaven taken from childhood Sunday-school books drifted in her mind; images incomplete and faded.

But Heaven would be cool and it wouldn't hurt.

A shadow marred the cloudscape and Anna turned her face. Stone grated against her mouth. An ant, small and black and six-legged, crawled across the universe. Anna knew then that she lay facedown on the limestone and that she probably had to die all over again.

It had been too d.a.m.ned hard the first time.

She forced her mind clear. "Primary survey," she whispered. "I'm breathing. I'm conscious. I'm bleeding." There was a dark stain on her shoulder and her braid painted thin red lines on the pale rock. Her left arm wasn't working too well. The shoulder joint felt as if it was full of broken gla.s.s, but it did function. Collarbone cracked, she thought; tissues damaged from the dislocation.

Moving as little as possible, she looked around her. She had fallen to the bottom of the slope. No more than a yard, two at the most, separated her from the two-hundred-foot drop. She lay at a forty-five-degree angle on a natural lip, a meager flaring of stone, that marked the cliff's edge. A rock or root-something protruding from the limestone-had kept her from sliding over the edge when her heavy leather service belt caught on it. It felt as if the protrusion had pierced and ripped her abdomen, but she wasn't sure.

Pain and fatigue were calling her back into darkness but she refused to go. Focusing on the ant, making bets-if he reaches that shadow, I'll live; if he goes around that blade of gra.s.s I'll wake and find it was all a dream-Anna stayed conscious.

The ant went around the blade of gra.s.s and she didn't wake. A blade of gra.s.s. Gra.s.s had to have something to grow from: soil, a ledge, a crack. As her mind focused on that, she began to see more clearly.

The blade of gra.s.s was growing on a little flat s.p.a.ce three or four feet wide. This step had been cut into the cliff when the rock above had fallen away. A crack ran upward from it forming a chimney of stone several feet deep and as many across.

The platform at the bottom of the chimney was less than a yard from where Anna hung. If she could reach it she could rest, safe on the floor of this tiny, three-sided, ceilingless room.

She stretched her right arm out. Her fingers just curled around the sharp edge of the broken rock, but it was a solid grip. The toe of her right boot reached to the crevice floor. Gingerly, she tried dragging herself toward safety but the belt that had saved her life now held her fast and the pain in her gut threatened to overwhelm her.

She lay still wanting to cry but unable to focus even on self-pity. Giving up was seductive: a moment of fear, then an end to fighting. Fleetingly, she wondered if death were a narcotic, if inside her death and adrenaline waged a small-scale chemical war, fighting for her will.

Involuntarily her left foot twitched and several pieces of gravel were sent down the mountain. An instant of sound; an eternity of silence. Anna was not yet ready for the eternal silence.

Adrenaline won.

Twisting her injured arm, almost welcoming the clean ache of grating bone, she crawled her fingers along the stone until she had worked her hand underneath her belly. She could feel the smooth metal of her belt buckle. It was hung up on what felt like a post. Once free of it, she would have one chance to jerk her body the two feet to the crack. If she slipped or her strength failed or her clothing snagged, she would slide off the edge.

Two hundred feet.

A cold rush of fear froze her as surely as an arctic wind and for a moment Anna could neither see nor breathe. When it pa.s.sed, it left her weakened.

Now or never, she thought. Bucking away from the stone, she pushed at the buckle with cramped fingers. For an instant it remained caught. Then with awful suddenness she was free and slipping. With strength born of desperation, she dragged the weight of her body across the limestone. When her face cleared the vertical lip, she saw an upright slab within, a powerful handhold. Seizing it, she tumbled into the crack in the rock.

"Oh G.o.d, oh G.o.d, oh G.o.d," she heard herself saying when she became cognizant and she laughed. "Oh G.o.d for a chamber pot." The inevitable adrenaline reaction was setting in.

Nausea was next, then trembling weakness. Then pain rea.s.serted its dominion. Anna took stock of her situation. Looking out, back across the smooth limestone she could see the protrusion that had broken her slide: a k.n.o.b of iron ore an inch and a half high. The natural ore, harder than limestone, remained like an upthrust thumb when the rock had eroded away. Anna's NPS belt had snagged on it.

Delicately, she unbuckled her belt and unzipped her hiking shorts. The iron had not broken the skin but a dark red welt ran up her abdomen. Where the iron had caught under the buckle her flesh was already turning dark purple. With torn fingers, she palpated her belly. There was pain but no rigidity. A good sign there was no internal bleeding. Training started to take over, Anna falling into the secondary survey pattern she'd been taught to use to a.s.sess for injury.

She stopped herself with a snort. No one would find her where she was, halfway down a mountain, hidden in a hole, her pack tumbled into the thickets a couple hundred feet below. Shouts would not carry up the cliff nor down to the canyon floor. What difference did it make if she were badly injured or not? Her belly hurt, her head hurt, her left shoulder was killing her and so what? She must climb.

Bracing one foot against each wall of the stone chimney, she began working her way up. Ten feet and she was singing "Itsy bitsy spider" to blank the pain from her mind. Fifteen and her legs began to tremble. Fear of falling slowed her inching progress. Thirty feet up there was a narrow shelf she could brace her b.u.t.t on and, the weight off her legs, she rested.

Afraid to stop too long lest her strained muscles begin to cramp, Anna pushed herself on before many minutes had pa.s.sed. Blood was dripping down her neck on the left side but the drip was slow. She had no idea how much was blood and how much sweat. Salt burned deep into the sc.r.a.pes on her chest.

"That which does not kill us, makes us strong," she repeated. It was her mother-in-law's favorite aphorism, but she didn't believe it. "That which does not kill us, does not kill us," she amended and squeezed upward foothold by foothold, her body the wedge that kept her from falling back down.

Forty-five feet and the crevice began to narrow. For a little while the going was easier. Then the chimney was gone. The stone above, weakened from weathering in the cracked surface, had fallen away. A gigantic chip of limestone had broken off leaving ledges, like shelves, tapering away from the chimney's top. A shallow crack several inches wide was all that remained of the chimney. It ran the last three yards to the trail.

Anna braced herself and let her breathing slow. There was no advantage in going back down, even if she could have. Up then. Eight, maybe nine feet. Close enough she could call for help and be heard. But there was no help and Anna doubted she had the strength to stay braced for more than an hour at most.

This is probably it, she thought, I will probably die. "I may die," she said aloud to see how it sounded. Absurd but true. "Don't think about it."