Leaving Blythe River: A Novel

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  “She caught on something?” Sam yelled back.

  Ethan could tell Sam wanted to keep moving up the hill before Rebar stalled again.

  “Seems like she is,” Ethan shouted back.

  “You may have to get down and sort it out.”

  Ethan spoke quietly to his mule. “Okay, ho,” he said. “Ho.” He waited for a beat or two, and the mule seemed to settle. But not until Sam and Jone stopped moving the rest of the stock up the mountain and waited. Dora clearly didn’t like the feeling of being left behind.

  “Ho,” Ethan said one more time.

  Then he swung down. It hurt a lot, and it was clumsy. He kicked poor Dora behind the saddle again. But this time she laid her long ears back and not much more.

  Ethan dropped to the ground in the tall weeds.

  He walked around the front of the mule, just to be safe, and examined her right rear hoof. It wasn’t stuck, exactly. It wasn’t anchored down to anything, as he had thought. She had just managed to get something wrapped around it, and the weeds were preventing her from shaking it off, and she didn’t like the feeling. Ethan couldn’t quite see what it was, but it looked like some kind of filthy fabric.

  “Ho, girl,” Ethan said. “Let me see what you’ve got there.”

  With that, the mule seemed to understand that Ethan was going to help her. She stopped dancing and kicking and stood still.

  Ethan carefully reached down and grabbed the edge of the fabric. It was fleece, he realized. As soon as he got his hand on it he knew it was fleece. He could feel it. He couldn’t tell a color—it was too dirty for that. But it had sleeves, one of which Dora had ripped trying to extricate herself.

  It was a fleece zip-up jacket like the kind just about everybody wore to go into the outdoors.

  Ethan pulled it hard. It wasn’t wrapped around the mule’s hoof. It was stuck on the burs or thorns of some of the vegetation behind her hoof, so it hadn’t given enough when Dora had tried to kick forward.

  One more good pull, and it came free in Ethan’s hand.

  Dora dropped her head and sighed deeply.

  Ethan held the fleece in his hands and examined it. It hadn’t been out in the elements for months, or years. It was fairly recently dropped. But it had been through at least that most recent rain. It was stiff from having gotten wet and then dried in its flattened position. It was more brown with mud than any other color Ethan could identify.

  He turned it around so the hood was on top and tried to tell the inside from the outside. The inside was fairly clean. And gray. Light heather gray.

  Then Ethan found the tag.

  The tag was surprisingly white and easy to read.

  It said, “Gilligan’s Ltd., New York.”

  Ethan just froze, looking at it, for a long time. Literally froze, from the feel of it. His belly felt icy inside, and it buzzed.

  He couldn’t have said how long he crouched there, staring at the fleece jacket. But soon he saw the shadow of Jone and her horse fall over him.

  “What’d you find there, son?” she asked him.

  “It’s my father’s trail fleece,” he said.

  “You sure? They all look a lot alike. Everybody wears the same two or three brands up here.”

  “Sure. I bet. Are any of them Gilligan’s Limited?”

  “I never even heard of that brand.”

  “Right. I didn’t figure you would have. That’s because it’s a sporting goods store four blocks from our apartment in Manhattan.”

  A flicker of silence. Then Jone cupped her hands and called up to Sam on the trail above them.

  “Come on back down here, Sam,” she said. “I believe we have ourselves a development.”

  “He’s here,” Ethan said. “He’s out here. Just like I thought.”

  They stood, dismounted, in a circle around Ethan’s find. Rufus whimpered to get down but Ethan ignored him.

  “I knew he was here,” Ethan added. “I just knew it.”

  “Just to play devil’s advocate,” Jone said, “just so we don’t get ahead of ourselves . . . let’s go over what this does and does not prove. He was here. Yes. We’ve established that. But we knew he came up here all the time.”

  Sam chimed in.

  “You told us he used to take off the fleece when he was warmed up, right? So if he was running that high trail above us, about this far up he’d be warmed up. You said he’d tie it around his waist. Didn’t you say that?”

  “Either that or stick it under one of the straps of his hydration pack,” Ethan said.

  “So it could’ve sailed out,” Jone said. “And maybe he didn’t know it, or maybe he knew but didn’t care enough to go down after it.”

  “Or maybe it came loose when he fell,” Ethan said, creating another brief space of silence.

  “Here’s a really important question,” Sam said. “So think hard on this one, Ethan. Don’t answer off the top of your head. How sure are you that he had it with him on the day in question?”

  Ethan felt his forehead furrow.

  “I was asleep when he left that morning.”

  “Okay, we’ll go at this another way. How sure are you that he didn’t lose it on an earlier run? When was he last up here before the day he disappeared?”

  “I think it was three days earlier,” Ethan said.

  “Were you awake when he left?” Sam asked.

  “No.”

  “Were you there when he came back?”

  “Yeah. I was.”

  “This is big now. So try to get this right. Did he come home with the jacket?”

  Ethan squeezed his eyes closed and tried to re-create the moment.

  “I was sitting on the couch. Reading. He came in.” A pause. Ethan knew. But he had to be sure. Surer than sure somehow. “He had the jacket tied around his waist. I know he did. He took it off, right in front of me, and looked at it to see if it was sweaty. And he sniffed it. And then he took it out into the garage and started a load of wash.”

  “He’s here,” Jone said.

  “Starting to look that way,” Sam said. “I guess there’s a tiny chance he could have come out here that last day, run, lost the jacket, then gone elsewhere. But now the odds are way against him being any place else.”

  “Think it’s enough to get the search reopened?” Jone asked.

  “I do,” Sam said. “But I don’t think that’s the way to go right now. Because of time. It’d take us almost two hours to ride home. God only knows how long it would take them to mount a search on no notice. If we think he’s right around here someplace, our best bet is to damn well find him. Sooner being better than later.”

  “You could call them on your sat phone,” Jone said.

  “Oh!” Sam said, sounding pleased. “Right. I knew there was a reason I brought that thing.”

  He moved off toward Rebar, probably to fetch it.

  “What’s a sat phone?” Ethan asked Jone while Sam was gone.

  “Works off a satellite. Like the kind they use up on Mount Everest.”

  “Oh. Right. My dad climbed Everest. When he was younger. Did I tell you that?”

  Ethan’s mood had transformed strangely, but into what, he couldn’t say. He felt excited and full of dread at almost exactly the same time.

  “No. You didn’t. I’d have remembered that. He must’ve been quite the athlete.”

  “Yeah. He was. Is.”

  “Sorry,” Jone said.

  “It just seems weird that he could get to the top of Mount Everest and back in one piece, and then slip off a trail a couple of miles from where we’re staying. On a routine run.”

  “Happens more than you think. People let their guard down, and it’s the routine ones that get them every time.”

  Ethan looked up to see Sam return, shaking his head.

  “Bad news. Something wrong with it. It won’t get a signal.”

  “So do we ride back?” Jone asked.

  “I think we need to go over this area with a fine-tooth comb
first,” Sam said. “The chances of finding him alive are damn slim. Sorry, Ethan, but I figure you already know it’s true. But let’s say he’s around here somewhere, alive. You just know he won’t be alive much longer. I’m not sure we can afford to get a fair bead on his location and then ride away and send help in five or six hours.”

  “But if we find him alive,” Jone said, “he’ll still have to lie there while you go get help.”

  “But we have water,” Sam said. “And food. And first aid. And if we know for a fact where he is, they’ll send a medevac helicopter right away, on an emergency basis.”

  They all three looked at each other. Nodded.

  Then they mounted their horses and headed up to the high trail.

  On the ride up, Ethan’s mind twirled around and through the ins and outs and illusions of that strange sensation of knowing. Long before they’d ever come up here, he’d told Sam that his father was in this wilderness. That Ethan knew it. That he wasn’t wrong. But now his father was up here, and Ethan wasn’t wrong. And that was a strangely, entirely different situation. It was real in a way he’d somehow not anticipated.

  “What’s the deal with that store?” Jone asked, startling him. She was bringing up the rear on the chestnut. “That Gilligan place? I only ask because most sporting goods stores have a name you’ve heard of. Or at least they sell fleece jackets with names you’ve heard of. So I wondered what kind of store that is.”

  “Snooty,” Ethan said.

  “Hmm. That’s what I was picturing. But if it’s just for running, why not buy a good old West Boundary fleece like everybody else?”

  “You’d have to know my dad,” he said.

  “But they both keep you warm, right? I mean, who needs prestige out on the trail? What could possibly be the difference between the two jackets?”

  “About two hundred dollars,” Ethan said. He rode in silence for a moment. Then he added, “I’m only joking because I’m scared.”

  “I know,” she said.

  They fell silent again, and Ethan went back to reflecting on the strange shock of having been so concretely not wrong.

  Ethan lay on his belly on the trail, most of his upper body extending terrifyingly over the edge. Sam had hold of his feet for good measure. But it was still a sickeningly shaky feeling. Ethan had to concentrate on his bladder control just to be sure everything held.

  “I can’t see a damn thing,” he said. “I mean, I can see an edge of the shelf. But there’s nobody on it. But then I feel like there’s another part of the shelf in closer to the mountain. And I feel like I can’t see that. Part of it I can. But right underneath me here there’s this part of the rock that bulges out. Maybe the bulge goes all the way down to the shelf and there’s no space underneath it to see. But I can’t tell from here. I just don’t know how to get a good look down there.”

  He waited, hoping Sam would pull him back onto the trail. Or offer some simple solution Ethan hadn’t known enough to consider.

  Then a memory hit Ethan’s brain, and it turned his whole body to ice. Before they left, Ethan had asked Sam why more people were better for a search party. What could an extra person do? Sam had said they could hold the rope if somebody had to go over a cliff.

  “Pull me back!” Ethan called.

  It hurt to be dragged over the sharp little stones at the edge of the trail. But it was worth it not to have five or six hundred feet of empty space between the valley and his chest. The last thing Ethan wanted was to prove to himself whether that skinny ledge was enough to break a person’s fall.

  He pulled up into a cross-legged sit, and the three team members looked at each other. The more time went by with no one saying anything, the more Ethan knew what was waiting to be said.

  “We can do this two ways,” Sam said. “We can ride home and tell the ranger we found Noah’s fleece right under this shelf. Ask him to re-search the area.” He looked right into Ethan’s face. “Or you can go down there.”

  “Me,” Ethan couldn’t help noting.

  “I think you know why I say you. You’re the lightest member of the party by quite some, and the youngest by an even bigger margin. Look, I don’t blame you if you don’t want to do it. You’ve done a lot, especially for a man you claim to hate. Option number one is pretty responsible. No one is going to hold that against you.”

  “How safe is it to go down?”

  “Pretty damn safe. I brought a couple of harnesses, and the rope is good. My carabiners lock, and they’re in good shape. I’ll wrap the rope twice around my saddle horn and hold the end. Biggest danger is if you spin around and hit your head on the rocks. Going all the way to the valley is not a danger. I’m not about to let that happen.”

  Ethan just sat a moment. He didn’t speak, and he almost couldn’t have quantified what he was thinking.

  “We can go get the pros,” Jone said. “You decide.”

  “But Sam said if he’s alive, even a couple of hours could make a difference.”

  No one answered. No one needed to. It had already been said. Nobody wanted to repeat it, apparently. Nobody wanted to put pressure on Ethan’s big decision.

  “I can almost picture being lowered down there on a rope,” Ethan said. “Almost. What I can’t picture is that moment when you first go over the edge. And you have to let go.”

  “We’re here to help you with it if you want to try,” Jone said. “That’s all we can really say.”

  Another blank moment, absent of communication. It flitted through Ethan’s mind that he had no right to stall, under the circumstances. If he were lying injured down there, he would take exception to long, drawn-out decisions.

  Jone spoke again, suddenly. “Aw, hell, I’ll go,” she said, mostly to Sam. “If you can handle my weight.”

  “Between me and this big horse, twice over if I had to.”

  “No,” Ethan said. “No, that’s not right. He’s my father. I’m the one who wanted to come up here. I’ll go.”

  He rose to his feet, aware that he was already shaking. Badly, as if he might shake himself apart. He couldn’t help wondering what the trembling would become when he was dangling on a rope five hundred feet over the boulders below.

  “Okay, I’m going to let go of your hands,” Jone said. “And you let go of me. But nothing’s going to happen. The rope is tight. You won’t move. Only thing is, you might feel yourself tipping over backwards some. See if you can keep your feet braced against the rock.”

  Ethan tried to say “okay.” He failed.

  But, oddly, the shaking had stopped. Maybe he was beyond that level of fear now. Maybe he just couldn’t afford to feel.

  “One,” Jone said. “Two. Three.”

  Jone let go. Ethan did not.

  “Okay, let’s try this another way. I’m going to take one of your hands and move it from my arm to the edge of the cliff. Okay?”

  He might have nodded slightly. He tried.

  She moved his right hand, and he grasped desperately at the rock edge of the cliff, just above his head. It held, but felt less secure than Jone’s sleeve.

  Ethan thought about the time earlier that morning when Jone had called him brave. Not because he wasn’t afraid, but because he was afraid but he was doing it anyway. He hadn’t meant to think about that. He hadn’t really tried. It just popped into his head.

  He moved his own left hand. Let go of her sleeve. As he did, he proved to himself that something she had told him was true. The rope was taut. And solid. He was not in danger of falling.

  “Lower me down,” he said.

  “Sam!” Jone called. “Take him down!”

  Then Ethan was moving, but slowly. He kept the toes of his athletic shoes braced against the rock and more or less walked down. Or so it felt.

  He didn’t look around. He just kept looking up at Jone, who gave him a thumbs-up.

  “You’re doing great,” she said.

  “I don’t know about that,” he said, happy to have his voice back. “But I’m
doing it.”

  “You’re almost down. You’re going to be able to put your feet down in . . . three . . . two . . . one. Okay, if you take your feet off the wall now, you can stand up.”

  Ethan felt around gingerly with one foot only. Jone was right. It was solid. It was horizontal. It was there.

  He looked around to be sure he wasn’t about to step down too close to the edge, and in doing so got a glimpse all the way down into the valley.

  “Oh, crap,” he said, his head spinning dangerously.

  He squeezed his eyes closed until the feeling passed. Then he stepped down with his other foot and straightened up.

  “Leave the harness on,” Sam called. “It’s safer.”

  “Roger that,” he called back up. Then, more to himself, “Like I needed convincing.”

  “What do you see?” Sam bellowed.

  “There’s a space under that bulgy rock. It’s not much, but it’s a space. But I have to crawl along it to really see what’s under there.”

  “Let me know if you need me to play out more rope.”

  Ethan moved two steps toward the rock face and ducked down. Nothing underneath. He eased forward onto his hands and knees and crawled along. He literally needed to duck his head down just inches from the dirt to see underneath the overhanging rock. Nothing.

  He moved along it to the left, crouching, ducking, looking.

  And then . . .

  In a strange moment, one Ethan would go over literally hundreds of times in his head, Ethan saw a human figure lying on its back under the rock. A man. A man Ethan felt quite sure was not his father.

  Still, he felt the discovery like a near-fatal jolt of electricity.

  The figure in the tiny crawl space was thinner than his father. Thinner than even six days out here alone, without food, could possibly explain in Ethan’s head. His closed eyes were too sunken. His tangled hair was no color at all. His short beard—less than a full growth but much more than a five o’clock shadow—was no color at all. His skin was no color at all. Ethan literally could not see where the man’s dirty gray skin ended and his dirty gray shorts and T-shirt began.

  And yes, in a distant way Ethan registered the gray shorts and T-shirt. Yet still he could not click his father’s image into anything he saw before him in that moment.