Crazy Mountain Kiss (25 page)

R
ainbow Sam didn't like the look of it.

“If you took a piss off here it would evaporate before hitting the ground,” he said. “You'd have time to say the Lord's Prayer before Saint Peter sent you to hell. Explain to me again why I agreed to haul my ass up here.”

“Because you're going to hold the rope while I climb down to the cave.”

“Why does it have to be this cave?”

“Like I told you, Cinderella said she wanted to go on a vision quest in a cave, and I'm about ninety percent sure this is where she was standing when she said it. Unless this fire ring was made by someone else”—he pointed to a ring of blackened stones—“this is the spot. There's a cave below the lip of the cliff. We can't see it but it's there, I saw it from the lake. It's the only one on the rock face that looked big enough to sit in. Ergo, as you like to say, vision quest.”

“So what if it is? What do you expect to find?”

“Last night you said you'd help, no need for explanation.”

“Me and my big fucking mouth. All right, buckle your ass into the harness.”

It was the harness that had made Stranahan think of Sam in the first place. Sean had noticed it once—it hung in Sam's mudroom—and inquired about the straps, which looked like something you'd shackle onto a prisoner. Sam had told him the harness was for tree stand hunters. It was designed to distribute the weight if the hunter fell. “It's so you can dangle without your nuts turning blue.” The
remark was pure Sam, and Sean had remembered it when riding out of the mountains with Etta Huntington.

Sean buckled into the harness while Sam attached one end of a climbing rope to a tree growing on the crest of the headwall. He made two loops around a second tree and knotted the other end to a carabiner on the back of the harness. He'd pay out rope as Sean needed it, keeping the rope no longer than necessary by adjusting the turns on the second tree.

Sean stepped into a rift in the cliff. The vertical fissure in the rock was what he'd heard mountaineers call a chimney, and the irony of the word brought a grim smile to his lips. But the descent, while terrifying, was not as arduous as he'd expected, as he pressed his back against one side of the rock cleft and his boots against the other, inching down by alternating points of pressure. Twenty feet below, the chimney ended in a cul-de-sac, and from this point a ledge worked around toward the mouth of the cave, which he could now see was splattered white with bird droppings. The ledge was a couple feet wide and would have offered secure footing if it hadn't been for patches of old snow in the shaded depressions. Stranahan had started to edge along it when the rope tugged at his back.

“Pay me out a little more,” he called up to Sam.

“You got it,” he heard Sam say, but the rope remained taut. Sean realized that it must have wedged in the chimney. He could go back and try to free it, or he could unbuckle the harness and proceed without it. The cave looked to be only another twenty feet or so along the ledge.

“Is that enough?” he heard Sam call.

“The rope's caught. I'm unbuckling the harness. Tell Mother I died game.”

“You sure?”

“Just stand by.” Sean unbuckled the harness and took a step, then another. He began to breathe easier. It really wasn't so bad, as long as you didn't place too high a value on your life. Then he saw the track in the snow patch. There was only one, the pad and toes forming a
circular impression the size of a tea saucer. The track was slightly distorted by the thawing and refreezing of the snow. Stranahan guessed it was a couple days old, though that was small comfort. A mountain lion might well rest up for several days after making a kill, and what better retreat than a cave on the face of a cliff?
If it isn't one thing
 . . .

“Nice kitty,” he said.

From above, he heard Sam's faint voice and ignored it.

“Good kittycat.”

It occurred to him that if the lion really was in the cave, he was blocking its only line of retreat. This wasn't going to end well.

“Do you hear me?”

But there was only the wind for an answer, and a few moments later he'd reached the cave and ducked inside. The cave was not quite tall enough to stand in and he instinctively scuttled toward the back of the recess and sat down with his back to the rock wall. For several minutes he did nothing but listen to his breathing, amplified by the cave's acoustics, while waiting for his heart rate to dial down and his eyes to adjust to the darkness. Spread before the cave mouth were the wind-bleached teeth of the Crazy Mountains, with mantles of spring snow and crooked rivers of evergreens running under the peaks.

Stranahan kneed forward until he could look down at the lake. Yes, this must have been where she sat, with the splendor of nature's creation as counterpoint to the terrors in the valley. He turned to face the interior of the cave, which appeared to be about ten feet wide at the mouth and nearly as deep. He felt the hard barrel of the Maglite in his pocket and rotated the head to turn it on.

And caught his breath.

Along both sides of the cave as well as the back wall Stranahan saw pictographs, stylized rock paintings that remained startlingly vivid after perhaps hundreds of years of weather. The rock face at the back of the cave was black granite, veined by white quartz. The side walls were sedimentary extrusions that had worn away into a smooth brick-red surface. Sticklike figures were outlined in black on the
reddish surface. The pictographs on the black rock were different colors—brick, green, and an off-white he couldn't place on his palette. Partly because the flashlight needed a fresh pair of double A's, Sean did not yet see them as individual pieces of art, but rather as a choreography of shapes and colors. His knowledge of the art form was basic, but the artist in him had no doubt that these were particularly fine examples of Native American rock art, in fact superlative.

There was nothing to confirm Cinderella's presence, though someone had certainly been here, for in a corner of the cave, stacked upright, were what appeared to be primitive torches made by bundling and binding sticks together. The ends were bushed to form cavities that held pieces of bark, dried grasses, and caked tree sap that was as varnished as peanut brittle. Near the torches were several cans that held traces of a substance that looked similar to caked clay in the can he'd seen back at Bill's camp. He also saw sticks with whittled points, their ends charred. A small pile of coals at first perplexed him, for his light revealed no fire ring or ashes. Sean realized that the charcoal must have been carried down from the top of the headwall, where they'd found the fire ring.

His light abruptly went out. Working by feel, he unwrapped the fresh batteries he'd taped to the barrel of the flashlight, knowing in advance he might need them, unscrewed the cap and made the switch. No cigar. It was the bulb that was shot, not the juice. If he was the kind of man who was prone to self-chastisement, he'd have given himself a verbal lashing for not bringing a backup light. Instead, he felt around for one of the torches he'd seen earlier, found a pack of matches in his pants pocket, and struck one on the chemical strip. It flared. He dipped the head of the torch while he rotated the match under it. The match burned down and went out. He struck three matches at once. This time the dried grass tinder in the head of the torch crinkled up, winking like a cigarette, before dying back down. He thought a few moments, then pulled a cotton bandana from his pocket. He tore it in half and wrapped one half around the tinder
bundle at the head of the torch. The bandana went up in flame, there was a secondary flare-up as the sap crackled, and he had light, brilliant light that caught the colors of the paintings and made the figures appear to dance on their rock canvas.

Sean felt icicles of breeze as the hairs lifted on the nape of his neck. He'd suspected, at a gut level, that these were not pictographs of Native American hunts and pagan sun worship, had known the moment he saw the cans and charred sticks that the paintings, far from writing a bygone chapter of Rocky Mountain history, told of a more recent struggle in pigments that probably were still in the act of curing. The figures on horseback were not carrying Shoshone flat bows, chasing herds of bison, but were twirling lariats, roping short-horned cattle. Stranahan brought the torch closer to the figure of a woman who was standing inside a circle studded with stars. It was the largest of the pictographs, in the very center of the back wall, the ochre figure nearly three feet tall. The woman was holding her palm out toward the stars, with two red hearts trailing dust as they soared from her hand toward the heavens, while another heart remained in her palm. The woman in the pictograph was missing one arm.

When Sean had glassed the cave through binoculars the day before, he'd held out hope that if it was the place where Cinderella had conducted a vision quest, he might find a clue to her death here, perhaps even the missing journal her mother had mentioned. What Sean was looking at was the story of her life, told in a language that was nearly as old as the mountains.

“Kemosabe.”

Startled, Stranahan jerked his head around to see Sam backlit at the mouth of the cave.

“What are you doing here, Sam?”

“What am I doing here? I'm only trying to see if my bud's breathing oxygen. I've been hollerin' for twenty minutes.”

“I think the cave deadens the sound.”

Sam brought the smell of the wind and his own sweat inside with
him. He said, “Then I saw the fuckin' cat track. I thought you'd be gurgling in the corner and I'd be facing a lion licking the blood off his whiskers.” He brandished the knife held in his right fist.

“You climbed down without the harness?” Stranahan was having a hard time believing Sam would or could have descended the rock chimney.

“Yeah, no net. And I thought it was scary finding an iguana in my boat. So what's so fucking interesting you couldn't bother to tell me you're alive?”

Sean reached for the one of the torches standing against the cave wall. He held the head of it over the flame still flickering from the old torch, the fire flaring up, flooding the cave in light.

For the first time since Sean had known him, Sam Meslik was speechless.

 • • • 

C
limbing up the chimney proved a lot easier than descending it, the “Oh shit” factor notwithstanding. Sean found his backpack where he'd left it on the headwall, rummaged through it, made a face, and then removed a pocket-size Moleskine sketchpad and an artist's soft lead pencil. Fifteen minutes later he was back in the cave.

“No camera, huh?” Sam said.

“No, I thought I'd packed it. Do you have your cell phone?”

“There's no reception up here so I left it in my truck. I didn't think about taking a picture with it.”

“Then we'll have to do this the old-fashioned way.”

With Sam holding the torch, Sean began sketching the pictographs, concentrating on detail while consciously trying to avoid reading too much into individual pieces of art. There would be plenty of time for that later, and he needed to get it all down before they ran through the stack of torches. Ignoring Sam's occasional “What the fuck?” he worked for an hour and a half, four torches burning to ash, before folding the pad back into his shirt pocket.

“You want me to light the last one?” Sam said. “Try to make some
sense of this before we leave? I mean, there's some weird shit going on.”

Stranahan was tempted. It often proved more enlightening to examine evidence at the scene than in a laboratory, or in this case Sean's studio, but the torches themselves were evidence and he wanted to leave at least one intact.

They were back to the trailhead by late afternoon. Sean dropped Sam at his truck on the outskirts of Bridger.

“Gotta change the U-trou after that little escapade,” the big man said, and hitched his pants, walking away bowlegged like a cowboy in a western. The image struck a memory and Sean called him back.

“You have a DVD player, right?”

Sam nodded.

“Then I've got some more work if you want it. Jasper Fey gave me a disk of the western series he works on. I never got around to booting it up.”

“What would I be looking for?”

“I don't know. A man with a sign on his chest that says I did it. Anything strikes a chord.”

“Will there be good-looking chicks who take off their clothes?”

“It's cable, I wouldn't be surprised.” Sean found the DVD in the glove compartment and forked it over with a twenty. “Beer's on me.”

“What about Killer? Guard dog needs his kibble.”

Sean reached for his wallet and Sam stopped him with a beefy hand on the forearm. He dug down with his thumb until the arm tingled. “Just playing with you, Kemosabe.”

 • • • 

B
ack in his studio, Stranahan decided on chalk pastels, largely because he already had sheets of sanded art paper that had a good nap to hold the color. Also, pastels would provide the most accurate representation of the pictographs, and though that was neither here nor there with respect to their interpretation, Sean was an artist first. He unfolded several sheets of newspaper over his drawing board to
provide cushion, then clamped on a salmon-tinted sheet of pastel paper that closely matched the color of the sandstone. He placed the board on his easel and got to work copying the pictographs on the left wall of the cave, bringing his pocket-pad sketches to life. Working with a charcoal stick reminded him of the charred sticks. Sean supposed that the artist had used the points to make the initial sketches, then went over top of them with chunks of charcoal. He used the same technique, first tracing the outlines of the pictographs with a fine-tipped vine charcoal stick, which could be erased if he made a mistake, then using a broader, compressed charcoal stick for his final application.