Missing on Superstition Mountain

by Elise Broach

  “You go first, Henry,” Simon decided. “Then Delilah next, then Jack. I’ll hold on to the backpack and be last.”

  “Okay,” Henry said reluctantly.

  He began to inch along the wall of the canyon, stepping sideways, feeling for grooves and footholds with his sneakers. He kept his eyes glued to the top of the cliff. He glanced down once, but the bottom of the gorge was so far below it made him dizzy. When his sneakers slipped against the side, loose stones sprayed into the air, tumbling through space until they disappeared. It was all too easy for Henry to imagine what would happen if he lost his grip.

  “Are you guys there?” he called over his shoulder. He didn’t want to risk turning around.

  “Yeah,” Delilah answered, not far behind him.

  “We’re here!” Simon yelled. “Try to go a little faster, okay?”

  “I’ll try,” Henry mumbled. He reached out his hand and felt for a purchase, crouching against the rough rock. The sun burned his back. Sweat trickled behind his ears and dripped inside his shirt. Far below, a large bird wheeled over the crooked chute of the canyon. It looked like a vulture.

  “Hey!” Simon called. “I think that’s the ledge.”

  “Yeah!” Jack shouted. “I remember!”

  Henry glanced up, following the direction of Simon’s finger. Some distance ahead, just beneath them, he could see a rocky shelf jutting over the ravine.

  “I don’t see the skulls,” he said.

  “You can’t from here,” Simon answered. “We’re too far above it. We should start climbing down.”

  Henry grumbled to himself. Climb across, climb down … Simon acted like it was as easy as steering a bike! He began to lower his body against the wall of the canyon, dangling one foot and tapping tentatively for anything that felt sturdy enough to step on. He shook damp strands of hair out of his eyes.

  “What time is it?” Jack asked.

  “Hang on, I’ll check,” Delilah began, then cried sharply, “Oh! The compass!”

  In an instant Henry turned to see the silver compass hurtling through the air, with Delilah grasping frantically after it.

  It bounced against the side of the canyon and started to roll. Delilah leaned way out, taking another swipe at it.

  Henry reached for her. “Delilah, don’t—”

  “It’s my dad’s!” she cried. She lost her hold and began to slide, clutching futilely at the canyon wall. Stones rained through the air all around her.

  “Hold on!” Simon yelled to her. But it was too late. They watched in horror as she bumped and tumbled down the side of the canyon, desperately clawing at rock.

  CHAPTER 23

  INTO THE CANYON

  “AHHHHHHHH!”

  Delilah’s piercing scream was followed by a faint, sickening thud when her body finally struck the canyon floor, some sixty feet below.

  “Delilah! Delilah, are you okay?” Henry cried.

  He could see the pale square of her T-shirt far beneath them.

  “Delilah?” Simon echoed. “Can you hear us? Are you hurt?”

  They strained into the silence, but no sound came back to them.

  “Do you think she hit her head?” Jack asked. “Maybe she’s knocked out.”

  Henry turned anxiously to Simon. “What are we going to do? What if she’s really hurt? DELILAH!” he yelled again.

  This time, they heard a moan, and Henry saw the T-shirt move.

  “Ohhhh!” Delilah cried, her voice catching in a sob. “My leg!”

  “Can you stand on it?” Simon called.

  “Owww! No! It hurts! It hurts!”

  “Hang on,” Simon told her. “Don’t move.”

  He looked at Henry, his face pale beneath the spiky crown of his hair. “We need to get help.”

  “But we can’t leave her here,” Henry protested.

  Delilah squirmed on the ground below. “Where’s my compass?” she wailed.

  “Forget the compass,” Simon said. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “No, I need it! You have to find it. Henry? Please.”

  “Okay, okay,” Henry answered. He peered at the slope below. He could see the dusty smear where Delilah had lost her grip and begun to slide. “I’ll find it.” He tried to sound more confident than he felt.

  “Listen, Henry,” Simon said. “I’ll climb down and stay with her. You take Jack and go for help. Can you find your way back?”

  Henry swallowed. “I think so. I don’t know.”

  “What about the skulls?” Jack asked. He scrambled closer to Henry, nimbly gripping the rocks.

  “We can’t do anything about them now,” Simon said.

  Jack groaned. “See? I told you it was a bad idea to let her come. She’s ruined everything!”

  “Shhh,” Simon said. “She’ll hear you. It doesn’t matter now. We have to get help.”

  Henry shook his head slowly. “You’re the one who should go,” he said to Simon. “You know the way better than I do.”

  Simon looked at him, hard. “But that means you’ll have to stay here with Delilah. On the mountain.”

  “I know,” Henry said. His lungs felt so tight in his chest he could barely breathe.

  “Henry…”

  “Just go,” Henry said. He squared his shoulders. “I’ll climb down and stay with her until you get back.”

  “Henry,” Simon said again, “I don’t know that we can make it back here before dark. We’ll go as fast as we can, but—”

  “It’s okay,” Henry told him. “Just hurry.” He scanned the slope below him. Where was the compass? He longed for the shiny clarity of its arrow, pointing steadily in a known direction. He looked down the funnel of the gorge to where Delilah lay on the canyon floor.

  Simon thought for a minute, then nodded grimly. “Okay, maybe you’re right. Here, you take the backpack. You need it more than we do.” He took out a bottle of water, then zipped the backpack and carefully looped it over Henry’s outstretched arm. When he took his hand away, Henry felt a pang of hopelessness, as if he were losing his last defense against the mountain’s strange magic.

  “Don’t worry, Henry,” Simon said. “We’ll come back as fast as we can. Jack, let’s go.”

  Henry slid the backpack over his shoulder and watched as his brothers scrambled along the cliff above him, with Simon calling instructions and Jack reaching for foot- and handholds, crawling and hopping from one to the next.

  “Hurry,” Henry said, mostly to himself.

  But Simon heard him. “We will,” he answered.

  “What’s going on?” Delilah called. Henry could barely make out her pale upturned face. “Did you find the compass?”

  “No, but it’s probably right below me. I’ll look for it on my way down.”

  “Your way down? You’re coming down here?” Delilah sounded shocked.

  “Yes,” Henry said, making his voice firm and loud to compensate for the quaking in his stomach. “Simon and Jack are going for help.”

  “Why doesn’t Simon stay here with me?”

  Henry scowled. Of course Delilah thought Simon would be the better one to stay. Truth be told, he was the better one to stay. He wouldn’t be scared. He would know what to do in an emergency. And he knew the kind of science-y stuff that could be helpful when you were out in the middle of nowhere, with rocks and trees and wild animals all around.

  “Because Simon will be able to get help faster,” Henry told her, beginning to climb down the side of the gorge.

  Delilah watched him skeptically. “I don’t think this is such a good idea,” she called. “We’ll both end up stuck down here.”

  Henry didn’t think she sounded sufficiently grateful. Or at all grateful. Also, she seemed to have an annoying excess of opinions about her pending rescue. “This never would have happened if you hadn’t dropped the compass,” he yelled back. “Would you rather be down there by yourself?”

  Silence from the canyon, and then “No.… Hey, look for the compass!”

&nb
sp; “I told you I would,” Henry answered. He continued his descent into the canyon, feeling the watchful eyes of the mountain all around him.

  CHAPTER 24

  LOST AND FOUND

  HENRY PICKED HIS WAY down the slope, avoiding the loose dirt where Delilah had slid. He stopped twice, to wipe sweat out of his eyes with his shirt and to take another sip of water. He didn’t see the compass anywhere.

  Delilah watched from below. Every once in a while, she called out, “Watch that root,” or “Go to the right—it’s not as steep.” More often, she asked, “Did you find the compass?”

  Henry could see her clearly now, propped against a boulder. Her clothes were covered in dust, and her left leg lay stiffly in front of her.

  Finally, the pitch of the ground changed, flattening. Henry half stood and scrambled the rest of the way to the bottom of the gorge.

  He brushed off his pants and ran over to Delilah. “Does it still hurt?” he asked, leaning over her.

  She cringed and nodded. Her leg was red and swollen, the knee scraped and dark with blood.

  “Hey, you’re bleeding,” Henry said, awed.

  “I know!” Delilah said, wincing. “Good thing we have Band-Aids.”

  Henry unzipped the backpack and dug around in the bottom until his fingertips brushed the paper wrappers of the Band-Aids. He handed her two and watched somberly while she opened them and tried to orient them on her knee to cover the blood.

  Finally she gave up. “It’s too big a cut,” she said dejectedly, wadding the Band-Aids into a sticky ball. “And you know what else? I can’t stand up. I already tried. My leg is killing me. And”—she covered her face with her hands—“I lost the compass.” Henry was suddenly afraid she might cry.

  “It’s okay,” he said quickly. “You can get another compass.”

  “It’s my dad’s.”

  “I know, you keep saying that. Is that why you’re so upset? Do you think he’ll be mad at you?” Henry reached into the backpack again and took out the granola bars. He wasn’t really hungry, but it was something to do, and it might make Delilah feel better. He handed her one.

  Delilah tore open the foil and took a bite. “He can’t get mad at me.…” She stopped. “He died.”

  Henry stared at her.

  “It was a long time ago,” she said quickly. “When I was six.”

  “Oh.” Henry didn’t know what to say. He’d never met anybody who didn’t have a father. He thought of all the photographs in Delilah’s living room, the man with the crinkly brown eyes. “What did he die of?” he asked finally.

  “A car accident,” Delilah said.

  “Oh,” Henry said again.

  She didn’t say any more. But Henry immediately understood why she couldn’t lose the compass and why she couldn’t replace it with another one.

  “I’ll keep looking for it,” he said. “Maybe it rolled all the way down to the bottom.”

  Delilah was quiet.

  “Do you want some water?” He fished around in the jumble of wrappers and bottles.

  “I guess.” Delilah took the bottle without enthusiasm and drank a little. She shifted against the rock. Her face crunched with the effort.

  Henry glanced around. The sun was high in the cloudless sky, blazing into every crevice of the ravine. The crooked, pebble-strewn path that must have been a creek wound through the canyon floor, flanked by a few squat trees, gray-green shrubs, and patches of yellow and blue wildflowers. The walls of the canyon seemed even steeper from down here, rising sharply on either side to the woods at the top. Henry saw no sign of Simon and Jack. Good: they must already be on the path down the mountain. Suddenly, he caught his breath.

  “Look!” he said, touching Delilah’s shoulder. “There are the skulls!”

  On a ledge high above them, three white globes flashed in the sun, neatly lined up along the rock.

  “Wow, that’s pretty spooky,” Delilah said, her eyes wide. “It’s like they’re watching us.”

  “Yeah … watching the whole canyon,” Henry agreed. Like sentinels, he thought to himself.

  “Why would someone have put them there?”

  “I don’t know. To scare people?”

  “That’s what I was thinking,” Delilah said. “But why?”

  Henry shrugged, feeling an urge to change the subject. “What time is it?”

  “Almost three.”

  “There’s plenty of time for Simon and Jack to get home and back here with help before it’s dark.”

  “Yeah,” Delilah said softly.

  Henry wondered if she was thinking the same thing he was. What if Simon and Jack got lost? Then who knew how long it would take them to get down the mountain? And what if they couldn’t find their way back? There were so many paths, and the mountain was full of canyons. But it didn’t help to think that way. Henry shook his hair out of his eyes and stood up.

  “I’m going to look for the compass.”

  “Okay,” Delilah said. She squinted up at him, shielding her eyes with her hand. “Thanks, Henry.”

  Which made Henry feel bad for what he’d thought about her before, that she was bossy and ungrateful. He set off along the creek bed, his sneakers crunching against the loose stones. He heard a bird call, a sharp, echoing cry, and he looked up to see the dark shadow of something passing overhead—a hawk or another vulture, he wasn’t sure. The canyon floor was a maze of boulders and rocky inlets. He kept scanning it for a flash of silver or glass, but he saw nothing. He was almost directly under the ledge with the skulls now.

  “Henry?” Delilah’s voice drifted to him. “Did you find the compass? I can’t see you anymore.”

  “I’m here,” Henry answered. “But I haven’t found it yet.” He sighed, ready to turn back.

  Then something caught his eye. Amid the pebbles at his feet was something long and white, gleaming in the sun.

  A bone.

  Henry sucked in his breath. He crouched down, gently brushing the stones aside for a better look. Then he realized it wasn’t just one bone. There were bones everywhere.

  CHAPTER 25

  REMAINS FROM LONG AGO

  “DELILAH!” HENRY CRIED. “There are bones here, a bunch of them.”

  “What do you mean? Where?”

  “Near where the creek used to be. Mixed in with the stones.”

  Henry sorted through the rocks, gently clearing a space around the bleached white bones. He remembered the list of dead people in Missing on Superstition Mountain; the bones found at the bottom of a canyon. Were these human? Did they belong with the skulls? He couldn’t tell. He saw something larger, a long, white bone with a row of flat teeth protruding from it. It was a jawbone, he realized, way too long to belong to a person.

  “I don’t think these are human bones,” he told Delilah, relieved. “Maybe a deer.”

  Then, as he scanned the area, Henry glimpsed something large and dark under a shrub a short distance from the creek bed. He walked over to it, thinking it was fur, the remains of some big, brown animal. But when he touched it tentatively with his finger, it felt hard. Like a shoe.

  “I found something,” he called to Delilah.

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know … something made of leather.”

  Carefully, Henry extricated it from the undergrowth— a hardened pair of leather pouches with a strap connecting them. They were so worn and tattered they were falling apart. The leather looked ancient to Henry, as if it had been washed with rainwater and dried by the sun a thousand times.

  “It’s a saddlebag,” he said loudly. “And it looks really old. I bet the bones are from a horse.”

  “Let me see.”

  Carrying it gingerly with both hands, Henry walked back along the creek bed to where Delilah was lying. He knelt beside her and set the crumbling saddlebag on the ground.

  “Wow,” Delilah said. “Who do you think it belonged to?”

  “I don’t know. Somebody from a long time ago.”


  “Look at the fancy buckles.”

  Even though they were blackened with tarnish, Henry could see that the buckles on the saddlebag were fancy, intricately decorated with swirls.

  “Let’s see if there’s anything inside,” Delilah said. Gently, she unbuckled the flap of one of the pouches and held it open while Henry slid his hand into the darkness. His fingers closed around something small but surprisingly hefty. It was a little sack, also made of leather, tied with a strip of rawhide.

  “What’s in it?” Delilah asked, leaning forward, then moaning. “Ow!” She fell back against the rock, clutching her leg.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, it just hurts. I hope they come soon.”

  “Me too,” Henry agreed. He gently untied the string and pried open the neck of the sack, brittle with age. Dust and bits of leather sifted into his lap. He squeezed two fingers through the opening and felt pieces of hard, cool metal.

  “It’s money,” he told Delilah, pinching one of the coins and lifting it into the sunlight. It was silver, as tarnished as the buckle. Henry recognized it immediately. “Delilah,” he said urgently. “Look! Hispan et Ind—they’re Spanish coins, just like the ones in Uncle Hank’s coin box.” They were identical: the severe profile, the columns and shield.

  “From the Spanish explorers!” Delilah cried. “They must have been left in this canyon a long time ago. They could have been here for two hundred years!”

  “I wonder if they’re from the Peralta Massacre,” Henry said.

  “Wow,” Delilah said. “I remember that. I read about it in my book from the library—when the Apache Indians fought the Spanish, leaving the bones of men and mules all over the canyons.” She reached across him. “Let me check the other bag,” she said, lifting the flap.

  “What’s this?” Delilah’s hand emerged holding a thick, tattered piece of brown paper, folded twice. She sat forward and opened it on her lap. “Oh! Henry, look! It’s a map.”

  It was a crude map drawn in ink on dark heavy paper, the edges frayed and crumbling. At first, Henry couldn’t tell what anything was. There was no writing on it.