“What is it?”
“I don’t know yet.”
Sarah retched again, nothing coming up, her face ashen, her stomach heaving violently. With his hand 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.”
“My God, you mean she’s going to die?”
He looked sharply up at her, gesturing with his head that he didn’t want Sarah to hear as Sarah said “No more” and vomited again, hardly anything coming up.
“Not if I can help it. We’ve got to get her down out of here. Quick, hold her while I saddle the horses.”
He was running across the clearing to where he’d tethered the horses, this time to trees because there wasn’t room enough for them to move around anyhow, close enough for them to reach the stream and drink, pale mist rising off it in the cold morning air, thinking, salt, I’ve got to get her some salt, why didn’t I think to bring salt?
10
The shack was padlocked. He could see that from where he lay on top of a slope that angled down through the pine trees toward the front door. The window next to it was shuttered as he assumed the others would be. There was a corral to the left and a feed shed, it padlocked as well, and the place looked like nobody had been around for a while, but he couldn’t take the chance.
He crawled back from the top of the slope, not standing until he was sure that he could not be seen by anybody from below, and began circling through the trees, stopping from time to time to study the shack from a different direction. Still no sign of anybody. He kept checking the ground ahead of him for any tracks where somebody might have gone down to the shack, but there weren’t any, although that didn’t mean much. The men hunting him would know enough to hide their tracks. All the same he checked the ground.
He came carefully down
through the pine trees well off to one side, glancing at the shack, glancing around him, continuing to circle. If he had finally noticed the dot on the map that was this shack, they could have too, and since this was the only
one nearby, they could easily have guessed that this was where he might come for more equipment and food.
And salt. Up above where he had first been studying the shack, Claire and Sarah were waiting, and if he needed to take his time and check this shack out thoroughly, he also needed to hurry. If Sarah kept on retching, she might start showing blood.
There was a clump of trees on the other side of the corral, and when he had completed his circle, certain there were no tracks, he came up through it, stopping to listen for any sound of someone waiting, going on up, reaching the corral and circling it as well, keeping the feed shed between him and the shuttered window on this side. There were no windows in the shed and the door was securely locked he saw, so he didn’t have to worry about someone in there. No one would be able to break out in time to get at him.
He hurried over to the side of the shack, listened next to the shuttered window for any sound from in there, finally made his choice, picked up a piece of pipe, ducked around to the front door of the cabin, and worked the metal between the lock and the door. One quick jerk and the lock cracked away, wood splintering. The next thing he was dropping the pipe, angling in through the door, gun ready, and there was no one.
At least he thought there was no one. But it was dark in there, especially after the bright sunlight he had come through, and he ran crouched to the corner on his right, stopping motionless, waiting for his eyes to adjust before he was sure. There were wooden bunks one on top of the other against the left wall, mattresses gone, no springs, just wooden slats. There was a black potbelly stove to the right, metal ducts going up through the ceiling. The place smelled of damp rotting wood, equipment packed high on shelves against the back wall, heavy bulging burlap sacks hanging from the rafters.
He was a moment before he relaxed enough to move, breathing slowly. At the door he waved for Claire and Sarah to come down, waiting, not seeing them, fearing someone had come upon them, and then through the trees up there he saw them emerge, Claire riding double with Sarah, holding her, leading the buckskin and the pinto. They grew larger as they came down, and just where the rocky trail that led down to the shack turned into soft ground, he motioned for them to stop, going over, helping Sarah off. She slumped down onto the ground.
“Feeling any better?”
She nodded weakly.
“Sure.” And then to Claire dismounting, “Wait here with the horses. I’ll bring you what I find and you can load it.”
He found two sleeping bags wrapped in plastic on the second shelf. They weren’t what he was looking for but they were the first things that caught his eyes and he took them out to Claire anyhow, going back in, looking for the salt. The rancher who stocked this place surely must have left some. The rancher would need it for his horses in the spring, and for any of his men who might get caught in a blizzard up here or for anybody else who might get into trouble.
But there wasn’t any on the shelves, just cans of beef and salmon and sardines, flour and Bisquick and pancake mix wrapped in plastic bags, navy beans, raisins, everything but salt, and there wasn’t any salt in the first sack he took down from the rafters, nor from the second, and he was beginning to get worried now, rushing toward the third and final sack when he suddenly realized and went back to the second, and here it was, only he had thought that the plastic bag mixed in with the coiled ropes and leather straps and cinches was nuggets of sugar candy and now he was tasting it bitterly and it was rock salt, tiny solid chunks of it, clouded white and sometimes specked with black. He took a big piece, sucking on it as he hurried out the door and over to Sarah.
“Put this on your tongue,” he said. “Don’t try to swallow. You’ll only bring it up. Here,” he said to Claire, giving her some, and then back to Sarah, “Suck on it. Take a sip of water. Just a sip.”
And then he heard it again, the drone of the helicopter. At first it was so far off and low that he couldn’t be certain, and then it was unmistakable. He looked at Claire, and she heard it too. They didn’t need to say anything. Claire was already hoisting Sarah up onto the horse and he was already putting his boot into the stirrup of the buckskin when he realized. The shack. He couldn’t leave the shack looking like someone had been here.
He ran back through the open door, starting to hook the sacks up onto the rafters when he thought better, dumping the second sack, stuffing its ropes and straps into the first, hooking that one onto the rafters, taking the empty sack and filling it with cans and boxes from the shelves, careful not to take so many from one place that the gap would be obvious. He ran to the door again, closing it behind him, setting down the awkward bulging sack and fumbling to replace the padlock as best he could, shoving its screws back into the wood, cramming a big chunk of wood back into the door. The repairs wouldn’t fool anyone up close, but from far back it would look like no one had been there, and anyway it was better than leaving the door broken open to advertise, and he’d spent as much time fixing it as he could afford, picking up the sack and racing with it to Claire and Sarah with the horses, hooking it onto the saddle horn of the buckskin and swinging up into the saddle. The helicopter was louder now, its muffled roar approaching as they reined around, Claire holding Sarah on the bay, him leading the pinto. They galloped up the rocky trail, stones flying, hooves clattering, over the rise and into the shelter of the woods.
11
He didn’t have a chance to check the map for the best route away. He just had to get them out of there as fast as he could, over ridges, down through draws and hollows, up more slopes and down again, cornering themselves once and riding hard out of the box canyon, angling around and up from it, deeper into the forest, higher into the mountains. He stopped just once to listen for the helicopter, but it had either set down or swung behind a ridge or gone away. At any rate he couldn’t hear it anymore, although that didn’t matter; they would hear it soon enough again or hear riders eventually behind them, and he kicked his horse into motion again, skirting a meadow, angling deep into a twisted maze of ravines and draws and hollows.
He stopped just long enough to give Sarah another sip of water and some salt, and then looking at the heavy soapy lather on the horses, seeing the way they heaved to breathe, he knew that he couldn’t make them work this hard any farther without killing them. Dismounting, he led the buckskin and the pinto, letting Claire and Sarah ride slowly behind him on the bay. They angled down a dry creek bed, pebbles crunching, fir trees crowding on both sides, the branches meshed so thickly overhead that there was no sun. He took out the map, studying it as he walked, but shut in by the trees he couldn’t line up the map with any landmarks, and they had come this way so randomly that he couldn’t tell where he was. The creek bed angled down more steeply now, and he followed it, catching glimpses of sunlit rock down through the trees. Then the trees were thinning, and the rock was more open down there, and they came out onto a slope of shale that led down to an enormous open canyon, cliffs to the right and left of him, circling around to meet about a mile away. The cliffs were high, and the shale slope he was on slanted down to a smooth rock floor that finally merged with brown scrub grass that took up most of the middle. He had never seen anything like it. The reflection of the sunlight off the cliffs and rocks was almost blinding. A strong breeze whistled over the cliffs across the canyon.
He found the place on the map almost immediately. At least the edge of it was on his map. He had to pull out a second map to get the main part of it. SHEEP DESERT, the map said, and he could see why. When the sheepmen had moved into this part of the country, the cattlemen had driven them high into the mountains, grudgingly allowing them only the worst land.
“In the end the cattlemen didn’t like them to use even
this
land, and you got the range wars,” he told Claire and Sarah. “A group of ranchers would come up here with rifles and kill the shepherds and drive the flocks up onto these cliffs and over the edge. The people who owned the sheep then hired Basques from Spain to come over here and mind the flocks, and these Basques had been shepherds for as far back in their families as anyone could remember and they didn’t like anyone even looking at the sheep. So the next time the ranchers came up to places like this, the Basques lay in wait and ambushed them. Back and forth. More ranchers coming up. More Basques protecting the sheep. In the end the ranchers won of course, but that kind of war was going on in this country right up into the nineteen twenties. If we went right across, we’d still find shacks and fences and rock walls left over from when the Basques were here.”
But they weren’t going across. This kind of rocky floor around the bottom of the cliffs was exactly what he’d been hoping for. The graveled stream bed they’d been following would help hide their tracks, and the shale slope they were on would help even more, and the rock floor down there would finish the job. He could see where breaks in the cliff walls slanted up to the country on top, so they wouldn’t be trapping themselves by going into the canyon, and he could tell by how far the trees were back from the tops of the cliffs that there was mostly rock around the rim, so they wouldn’t be leaving tracks up there either. They’d be long gone by the time their hunters figured out which break in the cliff they had used to get out of there.
The only problem was scratches that the horses’ hooves might leave on the rock, and after Claire dismounted, carrying Sarah to the bottom of the shale, he ripped up one of the blankets, wrapping thick wadded pieces around the horses’ hooves, tying them around their ankles. It took the horses a while to get used to the wads of cloth under their hooves, pawing them flat so they could walk more easily, but then they seemed to be all right, and the three of them mounted, Claire still holding Sarah, him leading the pinto, riding slowly around the rock floor at the base of the cliff to their right. With the pieces of blanket tied to their hooves, the horses made a faint muffled clopping sound as they walked. Except for that and the shriek of the wind over the cliff tops, the place was still and quiet.
He passed up all the breaks in the cliff for the first third of the way around the canyon. It would be too obvious going up right away, and besides that would only be taking them back in the general direction that they’d come. He wanted to get as far off in the opposite direction as he could, heading into brand-new territory. The sun was past its zenith, slanting down toward them, and even with his wide-brimmed hat on he could feel the heat soaking through onto his head. He unbuttoned his jacket, pulling his wet shirt away from his chest. He looked up at the stark blue sky, and there was a bird up there. A hawk, he guessed. Or maybe a falcon.