by Paul Zindel
“I see,” Spider Grandma said. “And you, Uta. Are you still going with him?” She watched her granddaughter look to Zack. Spider Grandma saw her catch her breath.
Uta answered softly, “Yes, Grandma.”
Spider Grandma sighed and sent her thoughts skyward searching for a vision. All that came was a memory of herself when she was Uta’s age. She remembered a brave as handsome as Zack trying to impress her with long braids and dancing in skins of bears and buffalo.
Spider Grandma smiled at Uta. “I see you know what you must do.” She went to a rusty file cabinet standing in the corner of the tent. She turned back to them holding a copy of a map. “The copy machine I use is crummy, but this will show you the safest entrance and a good route up through the mountain.”
Zack took the map and opened it. The old woman pointed to its markings. “It will show you what springs you may drink from, which roots and mushrooms not to eat, and most of the quicksand pits and weakened shafts.” She pointed to several clumps of XXX s. “These show the location of petroglyphs. When in doubt, you must follow the rock paintings of rising ropes and flute players. They look like snake charmers. Ignore the paintings of demons, or they will lead you down to death. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Spider Grandma,” Zack said.
Uta nodded.
“Good,” Spider Grandma said. She put the map in a plastic bag and gave it to Zack. “This will keep the map dry. And, there is one thing more you will need to make the journey safely.” She stood up, pulled the belt of her housedress tight, and signaled them to follow her into a smaller tent near the corral.
“I knew she’d give us a special charm,” Uta whispered.
Spider Grandma overheard her. “You’re right,” she said. “I like you both very much. It’s not every day my granddaughter and her friend come in here and tell me they’ve seen a living dinosaur. The two of you may be a little kooky, but I think you both have the spirit of the wolf. Still, you will need a very powerful talisman.” She stopped before an old, battered cabinet, stooped down, and lifted up what looked like a human skull.
“Is that skull real?” Zack asked.
“It depends on whether someone is going to buy it or not,” Spider Grandma said. She lifted off the top of the skull like it was the lid of a cookie jar. Inside was a shiny black cell phone. She handed it to Zack. “I will lend you my cell phone. I keep it hidden from my workers. They’re always trying to call Mexico.”
Suddenly, there was a flash of light.
BAM.
A thunderbolt came from out of nowhere and struck a tall, lone pine on the hillside. The wind picked up fast, snapping the lines of the hanging blankets and rugs. Zack and Uta rushed with Spider Grandma to take everything down. A moment later, the summer rain began to fall in drenching sheets, slapping the canvas roof, then rolling off onto the ground in a torrent.
6
THE MOUNTAIN
Uta couldn’t forget her grandmother’s vision of a death, the chilling dream that the old woman said had come to her on the wind. She hadn’t forgotten it because Spider Grandma was never wrong about her visions. Once she had told a miner that she had a vision his Saint Bernard dog would die on that day.
“How?” the miner had asked. “I left my dog at home. He’s in the house. There’s no way he could die.”
“I saw a necklace of blood,” Spider Grandma had told him. “Your dog will wear a necklace of blood.”
“You’re crazy,” the miner had said, and stormed off. That night when he got back to his cabin, he found the massive carcass of his dog hanging in the broken front window. The dog had tried to get out by jumping through the glass, but jagged pieces had ripped high into its throat. A cascade of scarlet had flooded down onto the sill and porch—a caked and frozen waterfall of blood. Spider Grandma had other visions, too, about ghosts causing illnesses where the only cure was dancing—and once she dreamed that the meat of a badger would cure a foot ailment. All had been true.
Uta called her mother and father and told them she and Zack would be sleeping over her grandmother’s that night, then going on a camping trip for a few days.
“Won’t they worry?” Zack asked Uta.
“No,” Uta said. “They are never afraid for me in the wilderness. They taught me how to live and survive in it. All the Ute kids are raised that way. Growing up on my reservation is like one long survival course.”
Spider Grandma set up cots for them all to sleep on in the main tent. She put down a plate of boiled duck hearts and feet for Picasso. Within minutes after she’d crawled into bed, she was snoring.
In the morning, the sun blazed down to dry the tent and sandy ground that surrounded the stand. By the time Zack and Uta had woken up and washed, Spider Grandma had taken a walk with Picasso and had coffee and fresh bread waiting for them.
“Will the cell phone work inside the mountain?” Uta asked.
“When you are near a main shaft,” Spider Grandma said. She scribbled a number on a piece of paper and gave it to Zack. “This is the pay phone outside my tent. You call me every few hours. If I don’t hear from you, I will know you are lost and send Larry Ghost Coyote and Uta’s brothers to round you both up. Remember: follow only the cave drawings of the flute players and the climbing ropes!”
“Got it,” Zack said.
Zack put Picasso into his little trailer and climbed onto the motorcycle. “Thank you, Spider Grandma,” he said. Uta gave her grandmother a big hug and a kiss, then swung up behind him. He started the motor.
“I hope you find what you are looking for,” Spider Grandma called as they drove off. “Picasso must miss this pet called Honker, too!”
Zack opened the throttle and raced the bike up toward the speed limit. Picasso began biting at the wind. “You don’t have to come with me,” Zack told Uta. “What if we meet one of the big ones again?”
“I’m going,” Uta said, determined. “Just slow down before the wind tears my hair out.”
By noon they had stopped at a convenience store. Uta had money to fill up one of the saddlebags with sandwiches and bottles of apple juice, and they headed back to Zack’s house. As they drove up, they noticed that the boards across the mangled front entrance were still in place. There were no signs any raptors had come back during the night.
Zack circled the house with the motorcycle, before parking in the breezeway. He let Picasso out of the trailer and headed for the storage shed by the corral.
“My dad bought spelunking equipment to explore the caves,” Zack said.
“What’s spelunking?” Uta asked.
“Cave exploring,” Zack explained, flinging open the door. A pile of motley supplies were clustered at one end of a worktable. He picked out the gear he wanted, including ropes, flares, and a pair of spelunking helmets with double flashlights mounted on top of them.
“Check the batteries,” Zack said, handing Uta the helmets. He crammed the rest of the equipment into one of the empty saddlebags.
“What about Picasso?” Uta asked.
“He’s coming with us.”
“Are you crazy?”
“I’m not leaving him.”
“He’ll end up as a dino snack!”
“No way. He handled himself fine with the mother raptor. He can run circles around any dinosaur. Besides, he’s my pal!” Zack climbed onto the motorcycle and started the engine.
“Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you,” Uta said, swinging up behind him. “I think he looks like a walking coconut ball.” She held on to Zack’s waist as he raced the bike down toward the highway.
“He’ll be fine.”
“What’s the rush?” Uta asked.
“Bones’ll be over snooping,” Zack said. “He’ll want brownie points for checking on me. He’ll see that the door of the house was torn off. He’s a paleontologist—he’ll know what’s going on.”
Zack turned up the speed. He knew how Bones’s mind worked, how greedy he was and what a power trip he was on. “We�
�ve got a few hours’ head start before he’ll follow us. He’ll put my dad’s accident together with the claw marks on the house. That’ll lead him to the rockslide and Silver Mountain.”
The afternoon sun blazed down on them as they neared the power dam and crossed over the crest road. Uta signaled to make a sharp turn down a dirt road that snaked steeply until it ran level with the spillway at the bottom.
“You know the entrance your grandmother marked on the map?” Zack asked.
“Yes,” Uta said. “When I worked here I used to take tour groups down in the elevators. She wants us to go in through what used to be one of the commercial caves. A franchise owned it and used to sell tickets. It had lights and railings, but the tour only went into the mountain for a few hundred yards. The company that was running the cave went bankrupt, and the state closed everything except for self-tours of the dam. You can still see the turbines and generators, but there are no more guides. No more going down inside the caves.”
The dirt road snaked along in the shadow of the looming dam. “That’s where we go in,” Uta said, pointing to a narrow stream that flowed out of the mountain and emptied into the spillway. Zack slowed the motorcycle and drove along a gravel path lining the stream. For a distance they were in a gorge, a cut in the mountain that grew sharper, narrower. The remnants of rusted railings and sand-covered footpaths built by the cave franchise surrounded them.
“A raptor could be around here, you know,” Zack said.
“No,” Uta said. “Too busy. There are lots of inspectors that drive around. Engineers. Men who fix the power lines. Raptors aren’t stupid. They can’t be if they’ve survived this long.”
Zack thought the gorge looked like a carved, ancient temple. Layers of shale and petrified sediment rose high on the sides, time lines that marked the passing of millions of years. Soft rock had broken off in squares and rectangles, geometric erosions that gave an eerie, sculpted look. As the slit of sky narrowed, the slopes became encrusted with vines, enormous clusters of lilies, and half-rooted trees clinging desperately to promontories.
They passed the point where the gorge became a covered, darkening cave. The last rays of light struck thick layers of moss, which had blanketed the rocks. Leaves and logs that had floated into the cave were blackened with rot. Small, translucent trout moved in the pools of the stream. Cave crickets hopped everywhere.
“They have bugs in here,” Uta said. “I had to learn a whole spiel for the tour, like how caves have some kinds of things that can live only part-time in a cave, and other stuff like eyeless fish, white crayfish, and blind beetles that can live their whole lives here. I never saw any of those.”
The path curved and became part of the stream. The headlight caught the first of the stalactites hanging from the roof of the cave.
“This is as far as we go on the bike,” Zack said. They got off and put on their spelunking helmets. He let Picasso out of his trailer, and they split up the food and gear into their backpacks.
“That’s where we go,” said Zack, looking into a black hole from which the stream flowed.
He turned on the lights on their helmets and took off his sneakers. They rolled the bottom of their jeans up and started along the left side of the stream. “It’s shallow,” Zack said.
“It’s narrow,” Uta complained.
“Don’t worry. I read once that passages of caves never stay narrow for very long.”
Picasso drank from the cold running water. He wagged his tail and was confident when the water barely covered his feet. He began to dash around Zack in widening circles, until he was happily swimming out into the middle of the stream, then returning to the shallows.
Uta found the water chilling on her feet. “Hey, slow down,” she yelled ahead.
“Come on,” Zack called back.
It took Uta a while to get used to the light beams that shot out straight ahead from her helmet. As long as she looked straight at what she wanted to see, there was light, but to both sides of her was darkness. She heard Zack calling, “Honker! Honker!”
“You’re nuts! You-know-who is going to hear you, too,” Uta said.
“He might’ve gotten away from her.”
“No way.”
They trekked into a wider expanse. The stream was thirty to forty feet wide here, and flowed around mounds of massive white-and-yellow stalagmites. In the combined light from their helmets, they saw the limestone and dolomite drippings had taken fantastic shapes. There were points and cones and spirals like beautiful, glistening daggers protruding from everywhere. Uta’s thoughts drifted back to Spider Grandma and her remembrance of other worlds.
Uta used to ask her grandmother about everything. About love and sex and death, and why they were born as Indians. She would stop by the stand every day with a new tale of some animal she’d found. Uta knew how to set a chipmunk’s broken paw or feed a fallen eaglet from an eyedropper. She’d tell Spider Grandma about a mouse she’d saved from a well, or how she helped pick ticks off a fevered horse. She dreamed of becoming a veterinarian or a zoologist and her grandmother always encouraged her to follow those dreams.
Uta became aware of the stream bottom softening, her feet sinking deeper the farther they went.
“Did you check the map for quicksand?” she called to Zack.
Zack opened the plastic bag, took out the map, and looked at it. “No quicksand around here,’ he said.
Uta glanced down at the water for a moment. The reflection of the flashlights blinded her. When she looked up, Zack had disappeared around a bend. Her heart began to race. Keep calm, she told herself. Don’t let Zack think you’re a baby.
She moved forward, trying to concentrate on the area between herself and the bend. The water was up to her knees now. She plodded straight through the bottom mud. With each step, ooze slipped up through her toes.
She cried out as her right foot suddenly slid out from under her. Before she knew it she was sitting waist deep in the stream, her left foot doubled up beneath her.
Zack came rushing back around the bend with Picasso. “What’s the matter?”
“My right foot’s stuck!”
“The mud’s thick here.” He gripped her under her arms and tried lifting her up. He couldn’t.
“Ahhh!”
“What?”
“Something’s moving on top of my leg! Oh, my God, I can feel it.”
Zack chuckled. “It’s all in your mind. There’s nothing. Probably just weeds. Weeds—”
“Stop laughing and get my leg out! It’s in some kind of a hole!”
The helmet lights reflected off a long dark ribbon drifting toward them. Uta saw it and began screaming, “SNAKE! SNAKE!”
Zack waded forward and intercepted it. “It’s a plain black snake, not a poisonous one,” he said, tossing it away from Uta. “I thought you loved everything about the wilderness.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t like snakes!”
“Lean on me,” Zack said.
Uta looked around, half expecting a raptor to jump from the shadows at any second. Zack traced with his hands down her right leg and into the mud in front of her. “It feels like there’s a pole laying on top,” he said. “Like your leg slipped under a rotting log.”
“Pull it off!”
Zack slipped his hand around the log, grabbed it, and began to pull upward.
“It’s coming,” he said.
“Something’s wiggling.” Uta groaned. “The log’s wiggling!”
Zack lifted the dark shape to the surface. “It looks like a …” He was about to say stump, when he realized the stump had slimy, moving barbs. A moment later, he was aware that the “log” had a huge, glistening black face and glaring yellow eyes. The form exploded into life, bursting free of the water and Zack’s hands. Uta shrieked as the creature convulsed in the air, then splashed back down on top of her. Zack screamed with Uta. She struggled to stand up. Picasso barked as the squirming dark mass swam away downstream.
“What was it
?” Uta shouted. “What?”
“A catfish!” Zack said, a shudder running through him. He started wiping off the slime from his hands on the wet gravel. “A giant catfish! We’d better find a place to get out of the water.”
“Right!”
Zack put his arm around her to help her walk. “It’s getting deeper, but here’s a big chamber just around the bend.”
Uta saw rays of sunlight pouring down from a gash in a dome. She broke away from Zack and was the first to scamper out of the stream and onto the floor of a massive cave chamber. “It’s dry,” she cried. “At least it’s dry. Let me see the map.”
Zack caught up to her and turned over the plastic bag. She took out the map. “Where are we?”
Zack pointed to a squiggly black line at the bottom of the map. “This is the stream we just came out of,” Zack said. “The one with the long Indian name.”
“I see it, all right. And I know what the long Indian name translates to, too,” Uta said.
“What?”
“The Stream of Big Catfish.” She rubbed at her jeans. “Turn around and don’t look,” she ordered, shivering.
Zack looked away as she slipped off her jeans and twisted them to wring out the water. “Good. At least I’m not soaking now, just wet,” she said, putting the jeans back on. “Why is it hot down here?”
“The cave wind’s blowing in from the south,” Zack said. “There are cracks all over the ceiling.”
“Then it’s a good time to call Spider Grandma.”
Zack took the cell phone out of his backpack and dialed the number Spider Grandma had scribbled onto a piece of paper. He handed the phone to Uta but moved close to the receiver so he could hear, too. There were several rings before someone answered.
“Hello,” came Spider Grandma’s voice.
“Grandma, it’s me,” Uta said.
“Is everything okay?”
“Yes.”
“I’m glad you called,” Spider Grandma said. “Something’s come up with Dr. Bones.”
