He leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. Then taking his own blanket and a chair from one of the tables, he went over to the corner by the right front window. Sitting back in the shadows, he studied the barren moonlit street. A chill wind blew dust along it. He felt a draft coming up through the floor boards. Wrapping the blanket around him, he settled back. In a while, Claire was done with Sarah. Then she blew out the lantern, and he heard her unzipping the second sleeping bag, crawling in, snuggling beside Sarah.
“Good night,” she said quietly over to him.
“Good night.”
The wind picked up, throwing dust against the windows, shrieking thinly through the floorboards. Then it died, and he heard the old man snoring and the sounds of quiet even breathing over by Claire and Sarah. Abruptly the wind picked up again. He sat in the darkness, looking out at the cold dust-blown street, imagining how it must have looked, wagons stopped, people walking or leaning against doorjambs talking, or riders going past, a piano playing somewhere in the old days.
17
In the cold gray light just before dawn, they dismounted, roping the horses to trees in a clearing on the fir slope, giving them room enough to move around and crop the stiff night-frosted grass that crunched under their boots as they set off up through the trees to the shale and the cliff wall. The old man led the way, working along the base of the cliff until he reached a narrow ledge that angled up and followed it. Then he reached another ledge that angled up the opposite way and followed it as well, moving low and loose-limbed and naturally, never needing to stop to breathe or look around for a new place to climb, just crisscrossing the cliff face, reaching, climbing. From below, looking up, he couldn’t believe the places the old man was finding, certain that next time the old man came to the end of a ledge he’d be cut off and need to turn around and find another, but always there was another ledge or an outcrop of rock or a fissure for a handhold, and he guessed that the old man had come up this way several times before or else that he’d been living in the mountains so long that he could plot a course up a cliff from just one glance at it.
Soon they were above the tips of the pine trees, the air turning lighter all the while. He glanced down, and the cliff suddenly seemed deeper. Dizzy, he slipped and dangled and almost lost his handhold before he scraped his boots back into the fissure he’d been standing on.
“Don’t hug the rock. Lean out from it. Let it help you,” the old man told him, and the old man was so far above him that his voice should have been a shout, echoing, but it was low and flat, reaching him all the same, and he couldn’t understand how the old man did that.
He studied his hands, the skin scraped bloody off the tips of his fingers, flesh swollen numb from the cold, and he didn’t look down anymore after that, just kept staring up to where his hands would go next, his feet, edging along a narrow sloping lip on the cliff face, reaching up to find a place to put his hand, and there wasn’t anything, just open air and sky above his head. One more foothold, another after that, and he was groping up onto the level, running stooped to where the old man crouched, waiting for him by a mound of leafless scrub brush.
“Your hands,” the old man told him, and he didn’t need to look at them to know what he meant. They were shaking. He couldn’t stop them from shaking, and he didn’t know if it was from the cold or the blood or the fear of nearly falling, but he didn’t let himself think about it, just followed the old man running bent over to the other edge of the level, diving low, crawling flat to the rim that looked down on the sheep desert.
From this high angle, the circle of the canyon was even more apparent, the rock floor around the base of the cliff down there, the scrub grass in the middle, and directly in the middle the specks of a shack and some sheds and a corral left over from when the sheepmen had been up here. Those buildings hadn’t been on the map either, he recalled.
The old man pointed, and at first he thought the old man meant there were people down there by the sheds and he stiffened, straining to see, before he realized that the old man was pointing past the sheds toward the opposite cliff and the low black clouds scudding thickly over the horizon toward them.
Snow, he thought, remembering what the old man had said the night before, and he shivered, rubbing himself, watching the clouds blot out the sun, turning the air gray once more as they scudded toward them. Not yet, he thought, but soon, and then turning, he saw that the old man was squirming back from the edge of the cliff, rising only when he was back far enough not to make an outline against the horizon, running to the right toward the tops of the fissures that led through the cliff wall into the adjoining river valley.
The old man was already testing one big boulder when he caught up to him. From up here it was obvious which passages in the maze down there led only to dead ends and which one connected all the way through, and they were heaving against the rock when it gave unexpectedly, tumbling, then rolling over the edge, crashing back and forth against the passage walls until it cracked solidly in place down there. The rumble echoed loudly up to them like thunder out of the mountains.
“That’s good,” the old man said. “They’ll think it’s from the storm.”
“You saw them?”
The old man didn’t answer. The boulder hadn’t blocked off the passage. It had just made the passage more difficult to get through, and the old man was already running farther along the top, pointing toward another boulder, larger, farther off.
“You didn’t answer.” He caught up to him. “Did you see them?”
“No, but you’ve got to assume they’re around.”
The boulder wouldn’t move. They heaved against it, gasping, their shoulders straining, but it wouldn’t move. They picked up a thick limb from a dead tree, wedging it under the boulder and lifting. The tip of the limb broke. The second time it didn’t. The boulder moved and settled back, and they heaved again, and the boulder rolled once, stopping. It took them three tries like that, the boulder rolling once each time and stopping, before they reached a slight incline that led down to the passage, and this time, the boulder kept rolling, tumbling over, the rumble of its impact deafening. The way it was wedged between the passage’s walls, a horse would never be able to climb over it.
“Of course they might leave the horses and go through on foot,” the old man said, running on to yet another boulder, but it was the biggest yet and they never did get it over. Slumping in exhaustion, they decided that a man on foot could climb over no matter how big the boulders were. But this way, at least horses couldn’t.
The edge of the cloud bank was directly over them now, looming past them toward the river valley and the town, bringing with it a sudden chill that made him reach into his jacket pocket for the thick wool gloves he’d brought with him, slipping them over his bloody swollen hands. Then the wind started, piercing, biting, bringing tears to his eyes, and he turned his back, flipping up the hood on his coat, looking across the remainder of the bluff toward the town. It was in light, and then the shadow of the clouds was over it, and a few white specks of snow swept past him.
“We’d better get down before the horses spook,” the old man warned, and it was as if the wind and the cold didn’t bother him at all. Sure, he had his hat down close to his head and his jacket buttoned tightly, but his face was half turned to the wind and his hands weren’t in his pockets, just directly on his knees, and he was hunkered down, looking around at the way the wind was raising dust and bending the scrub brush and scraping tree limbs together. He seemed more interested than concerned.
“One second.” He reached into his coat pocket, coming out with a photograph. It had been tacked to the wall behind the bar in the hotel.
“That’s the way the town looked just before the smallpox,” the old man had explained.
He’d been drawn to it, yellow from the lamplight and yellow on its own anyhow, cracked and wrinkled and brittle with age, five to six inches wide and high, the kind that came from big box cameras with tripods supporting them and bulky negatives and long black cloths hanging down the back where the photographer needed to crouch under to study the viewfinder. It was a long high faraway shot of the town down in the valley with smoke haze hanging over it and people and blurred movement down there, the spot of what looked like a wagon heading out of town toward the river.
“That’s from up where we’ll be going tomorrow,” the old man had said.
On impulse, he had removed the tacks, slipping it gently into his jacket. Now as he looked from it to the town and back to the photograph, he saw how right the old man had been. The photograph had been taken from up here for sure. His angle and the photographer’s were almost the same. The town was just a little more to his right than it was in the photograph, and he crawled that way to compensate, trying to line them up exactly.
“What are you doing?” the old man asked. “We’ve got to move.”
“In a second,” he repeated, crawling farther to the right, comparing them again, then crawling forward a bit. He stood and hunched the way the photographer would have, looking now at the picture as if it were the viewfinder in a camera, shifting it slightly back and forth to line it up with the town. He almost managed, although he knew he could never line them up exactly. The picture had been taken in summer for one thing, and where it showed bushes in the foreground, there weren’t any, and where there were bushes now, there weren’t any in the picture, and there had been leaves then on the bushes, but now the bushes were bare, and there was a similar problem with the town. Although the town now was the same as then, it had nevertheless somehow changed, gotten smaller, shrunk, settled with age, and the absence of blurred motion down there made it seem smaller yet. Then and now, the photograph as old as the town, he had a strange sense of doubling, and as the wind gusted, sweeping more specks of snow past him, he was afraid that the force of it would rip the photograph out of his hands, leaving only the brittle corners.
“Come on, we need to go,” the old man urged. Even
he
seemed to be feeling the cold now, shoving his hands into his coat, hunching his shoulders in the wind. “It’s only a photograph.”
But it wasn’t just a photograph, or at least there was something about the photograph that made it seem more than what it was, and he didn’t understand. He had it and the town lined up as exactly as he could, compensating for the hundred-year change in terrain and the difference in the town, but there was still something wrong and he couldn’t place it, something unaccountably different, some unregistering detail that made him realize his fear wasn’t from the chance that the wind might rip the picture out of his hand but from the picture itself, and then he saw it. Down there in the left-hand corner in among thick-leaved bushes at the cliff edge. A man hunched almost visible, his mottled jacket blending almost perfectly with the brush, his face barely distinguishable from the intersecting leaves.
Or was it a man or just a shadow pattern? He couldn’t tell. And was that a rifle projecting through the bushes or just a barren branch pointing toward the picture? No, that was wrong, it would have been pointed toward the camera, toward the photographer. Toward
him
. He glanced toward where the bushes would have been, and the old man was over there now, scampering toward the edge of the cliff, his mottled coat the same as in the photograph, and as the wind gusted, chilling him to the bones, his eyes widened and he couldn’t move.
“We’ve got to go,” the old man insisted. “If this wind gets any stronger, when we climb down it’ll blow us off the cliff.”
But he still couldn’t move, just stood there, eyes wide, watching the old man hurry along the cliff, and then abruptly the photograph was gone, ripped out of his hands, corners crumbling, jerked by the wind out over the cliff into the valley. Running, reaching for it, he was almost over the edge before he realized, stopping, glancing furtively toward the old man easing himself down over the edge. He glanced back at the photograph, just a speck now, hardly different from the snowflakes, flipping, tumbling down out of the high ground into the sheltered valley.
The next thing he was easing over the edge the same as the old man, touching a narrow ledge down there, gripping a lower handhold, setting down, inching along, feeling for a lower handhold, thinking, I need to get the photograph, but he knew he never would. He gripped an outcrop and let himself down, bracing his boots in a crack in the rock, grabbing another handhold, stepping farther down, dangling, groping, dangling again, feeling an urgency even greater than when he had saddled the horses back at the corral the first day of the chase, taking chances now that he would never have thought to manage climbing up, just a few feet to the left of the old man by the time he reached the bottom.
The horses were whinnying down there through the trees, and the old man and he just needed to look at each other once before they slid down through the shale, running into the trees. He knew without the old man having to tell him that they needed to split up, coming on the horses from opposite directions in case anyone was down there with them. It was only after he circled widely, spotting the horses skittering nervously in the clearing that he realized it didn’t matter if he and the old man had split up or not. The old man didn’t have a gun. He cursed himself for not letting the old man have the pistol Claire carried. Then he suddenly realized why the old man hadn’t asked for it. The old man must have been hiding a gun on himself all along.
He kept circling through the trees, stopping, listening, circling again, hearing the wind in the trees, the snow like pellets clicking down through the fir needles, seeing the old man in the clearing, his hand out, walking toward the horses, calming them. It was only later that he knew he should have checked the woods more thoroughly, but he was afraid the old man would take the horses, and he hurried into the clearing.
“It’s just the wind, the snow,” the old man was telling the buckskin, patting it.