But he kept glancing toward the tree line anyhow and then he was even with the horse, gentling it, untying it, working as fast as he could with it up the slope. They were eating when he finally came up over the edge, and it was all he could make himself do to tie the horse with the others before he slumped down beside them. Chocolate bars. He was so tired, so in need of quick energy, that he hardly tasted the sugar of the caramel and chocolate at all, just chewing, swallowing one, biting into another.
“We made it. I can’t believe we made it.”
But they really hadn’t, he knew that. This was only the first step, and if they were ever going to get away, they’d need to keep moving longer, faster, farther up into the mountains.
He reached over to stop Sarah from taking another candy bar.
“Better save them, sweetheart. We’re going to need them all before this is done.”
He looked down at the blood on his hands from where he’d cut them on the boulders, wiped them on the grass, stood and walked over to the edge of the cliff, peering down past the clearing toward the trees.
No one.
“Let’s get moving,” he turned and told them.
“Already?” Claire said. “But we only just sat down.”
He pointed up to where the sun had disappeared entirely behind the mountains. The light around them was pale, turning into darkness. “We’ve still got maybe a half hour before we’ll need to stop anyhow because of the dark. We need to use all the time we’ve got.”
He reached into his knapsack and took out a terrain map, studying it, barely able to make out the contour lines in the dusk. “There’s a stream up through these trees. About a mile. Let’s see if we can reach it.” Then the wind gusted harder, blowing dust and leaves, and he looked out toward the east where black clouds were hulking in the last light on the horizon.
“Storm coming maybe,” he said.
But it never did, and the horses were still so tired that they needed to be walked, the three of them leading their horses up through the shadows of the trees into the stillness just before night.
5
At first he thought that he’d misread the map. They’d gone at least a mile now, and there was still no sign of the stream, and the trees were closing in on them in the fast-fading light. He led Claire and Sarah into a small clearing that would have been perfect for camp with another small clearing joined to the first by a small game trail that was like the narrow part of an hourglass, and the second clearing was partly free of leaves, patches of mountain grass showing through where the horses could eat, and he wouldn’t need to use the sack of oats he’d tied to the saddle horn on the buckskin when he was saddling it.
The light was so bad now that he decided they’d have to do without water for the night and use this place anyhow when he heard it. Hardly anything at all, just a faint trickle, but it was enough, and tying his horse to the limb of a tree, he pushed through bare branches, and there it was, a stream just wide enough that he couldn’t step across. It rounded this edge of the clearing, running smoothly down to a different section of the lowland they’d just come from, and he knelt in the cool stillness, stooping to rinse his hands and cup cold water to his mouth.
“Is it all right to drink?” he heard Claire ask behind him.
He was just then tasting it, cold and sweet and pure, cupping more to his mouth, rubbing his wet hands all over his face, turning to her. “This far up it almost always is. You just need to make sure it’s running and there isn’t any scum on it. Mostly the trouble comes in the spring when you get snow melted with red algae on it. That stuff will hurt you, give you cramps so bad you’d swear you were going to die.”
From one of his books, he remembered.
He almost smiled.
“Come on and try some. You too, sweetheart,” he said to Sarah beside her.
They didn’t move.
“I know it seems strange, but this isn’t like the streams near town. I wouldn’t drink that water myself. But this. This is all right. Believe me.”
They still didn’t move, so he turned again to the stream, easing down onto his stomach, dipping his face in, his nostrils aching with cold water as he drank. When he sat up, shaking his head, his wet hair dripping, he saw them drinking uncertainly beside him.
“It tastes funny,” Sarah said.
“Of course,” he said. “You’re not used to water that doesn’t have a lot of chemicals in it. This is the real thing.”
“But it’s dirty. I can feel something gritty against my teeth.”
“That’s just a little silt. It’ll give you roughage.”
“Give me what?”
“Nothing,” he said and smiled. “Just drink some more. Get used to it. This is the only kind of water you’ll have for awhile, so whether you like it or not, you’ll need to get used to it.”
“But where does it come from?”
“Up on top some place. Snow melting, lakes draining.” And then thinking of the lakes. “You’re going to see things you’ve never dreamed of before.”
“It tastes kind of sweet.”
“There, you see, now you’re getting the idea. Come on. We’ve got a lot of work to do. It’ll soon be so dark that we won’t be able to move without bumping into each other.”
He led them back up the rise through the trees into the clearing, and the dark was upon them enough now that it was distorting everything, making the campsite seem wider, larger.
“Here,” he told Sarah, handing her the three canteens from the saddles on the horses. “Take these down to the stream and fill them.”
“You forgot to fill them when you stored them with the saddles in the shed?” Claire asked.
“No, I didn’t forget. I deliberately didn’t do it. I figured the horses would have enough weight to carry at the start and I knew there’d be plenty of water up here anyhow. Besides, the water would just have gotten stale from sitting in them so long. What are you waiting for?” he asked Sarah.
“I’m scared.”
“To go back there alone?”
She nodded.
“There’s nothing to be afraid of. If anybody comes, you’ll be able to hear them in plenty of time to get to me.”
“But what about animals?”
“You’ll hear them too. Anyway it would only be deer or elk. This time of year the bears have all settled in for the winter. Go on. There’s a lot of work to do and we’ve each got to do our share.”
He waited until she started off, and then turned to the buckskin, uncinching it, slipping off the saddle. “Better uncinch the other horses,” he said to Claire. “Arrange the saddles for pillows where there’s a place that looks comfortable for us to sleep.”
“What about a fire? Shouldn’t we see to that before anything?”
“No,” he said and turned to her. “No fire. Not until we absolutely need one.”
“But how will we cook?”
“We won’t. Not tonight. In the morning if we’ve got time and we can build a small fire that won’t make much smoke, then maybe. But not tonight. There’s too good a chance they got their hands on some horses faster than we expected, and if they’re anywhere around up here, they’re liable to see the light from a fire and come over.”
They looked at each other, and then the pinto began tugging at where its reins were tied to the branch of a tree and Claire went over to it.
“What do you want for supper?” she asked quietly.
“We don’t have much choice, do we?”
“That’s right,” she said, uncinching the pinto’s saddle, slipping it off and carrying it awkwardly past him toward the base of a tree. She didn’t look like she was going to say anything more after that, so he just said “Help your mother” to Sarah coming up through the trees with the canteens drooping heavily from her arms, and taking the coil of rope from the buckskin’s saddle on the ground, he led the horse out of the clearing, along the narrow game trail into the second clearing.
There were three ways to do this, he knew. He could tie the horse by a long rope to a tree, but horses got curious the same as people, and if there were some smell on the other side of the clearing that the buckskin wanted to investigate, it would only get frustrated from not being able to go there. As well he could hobble its hooves together, tying the front ones to the back, in which case the horse could move just a little with each step, eventually getting over to what interested it but just as likely to get frightened, try to move too fast, fall and break a leg. Which left the third way, and he had to search the edge of the clearing for a while before he found a fallen log that was big enough that the horse wouldn’t get into the forest with it but small enough that the horse could still drag it around, and tying a makeshift halter around the horse’s head, he tied the other end of the rope securely to the log. Then he slipped off the horse’s bridle, easing out the bit, and let the horse sniff the grass, smell the air, before it finally settled down to eating.
Water, he thought. I forgot to let it get at the water.
So he led the other horses to the stream and let them drink their fill before he took them over to the next clearing and anchored them each to a log the same as he had done with the first. Then he came back with a canteen and his hat, filling the hat, letting the buckskin drink repeatedly until he needed to come back with yet another canteen, and finally the horse had drunk enough. He looked around at the little he could see of the clearing, the horses in separate parts of it, eating, occasionally lifting their heads to sense the air. The pinto made a low flat rumbling noise in its throat, but it didn’t seem nervous, and he guessed that they were going to be all right. The only thing that could go wrong was for them to get tangled in each other’s rope, but he didn’t see how he could prevent that. All the same, he waited with them.
A moon was coming up. He couldn’t see it yet, but he could make out the change in the night, a chill white glow that was spreading over the horizon. Somewhere close, a few crickets had started. He didn’t understand how they could still be alive up here with the cold coming on,. He took a deep breath, suspecting that it came out in frost, and then at last turning, he started back to camp.
“You’re not eating,” he said when he came across the clearing toward them. They were sitting on the ground, propped up huddled against their saddles. In the dark he could make out only the vague white of their faces.
“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.