Just the sight of her, rocking back and forth, sobbing like her world had ended, dampened Hunter’s hope.
chapter 30: Echo
It was a strange little house, a shack really. Barely tall enough for a full grown man to stand in. The outside a faded red, now mostly gray. The lower right corner of the door clawed at and chewed through by some wild beast. Flaps of tattered canvas covered the glassless windows.
How anyone could live here was beyond me. But it was definitely a house. A tiny, dilapidated house. It smelled of humans, overlain with the urine and feces of some large varmint, although a long time had gone by since any people were last here.
Empty bottles littered the floor. A torn potato chip bag lay beneath a broken folding chair. The cans they’d left behind were rusty, save for two smaller ones with pictures of fish on the outside. Hannah pulled the tab on one and sniffed it. A rancid odor drifted down. She curled her lip, then flung it out the window, where it thunked against a tree trunk. I was hopeful when she opened the second one. Her nose wrinkled. She dipped her pinkie inside, tasted it.
“Yuck! You can have it.”
The open can on the floor before me, I approached it skeptically. It smelled strongly ... of fish. Oily, salty fish. I feasted on it.
Darkness enclosed our little shelter. The wind gained force, rattling the door on its crooked hinges, beating at the canvas flaps. We had to huddle down next to the ground to escape it, but in the corner it wasn’t so bad. Snowflakes drifted in through the windows and swirled through the opening in the door to pile up on the far side of the room.
Hannah’s body trembled. I curled around her as best I could, but I, too, was cold to the bone. It hadn’t been so bad when we were moving all day, but we both needed rest. Hannah had taken a pair of socks from her backpack and put them on her hands like mittens. With them, she mopped the tears from her cheeks.
That was how I fell asleep, curled up next to my girl, her sniffles soft in my ears.
—o00o—
My mind was so slow to register my surroundings, that when I awoke it took a long time before I remembered where we were and how we had gotten there. Somehow, I had stopped shivering in the night, although I had woken many times, my toes aching from the cold. A bubble of warmth had formed between Hannah and me, the scant heat of our bodies shared.
I snuggled closer to her, rubbing my muzzle against her chest. She didn’t move, except for the slight expansion of her ribs. I wanted to get moving, so we could warm up and find someplace better than this, but I let her sleep on, because I was too stiff to move.
Golden light spilled through the tiny windows, its brightness making the room look far cozier than it felt. In summer, this place would have looked so very different.
As the day brightened, I decided it was time to go. I licked Hannah’s face, but she didn’t respond. She looked so tired and worn. So frail.
I shoved my nose in her armpit and snorted. When that brought no reaction, I swiped my tongue across her mouth. Several times.
I began to worry. Why wasn’t Hannah waking up?
So I barked. Loud and strong. My mouth inches from her ear.
She started with a jolt, her head snapping up. She pushed herself up on an elbow to glare at me.
“Don’t scare me like that, Echo! Never again.”
Yeah, well, it worked, didn’t it?
She scrunched her mouth up. Her lips were cracked at the corners, her nose red and chafed from rubbing it. Her skin had a pallor I had never seen on a human before. Ghostlike, almost.
Yes, we dogs see ghosts all the time. What do you think we’re barking at when we stare off into a dark corner of the yard, our hackles raised?
Hannah opened her second box of crackers. This time I took what she offered, even though the crackers made my mouth drier than it already was. Truth be told, I could’ve eaten the whole box by myself, but halfway through Hannah closed the top flaps and stuck it back in her pack.
I whined. I couldn’t help myself.
“We have to make them last, Echo.”
Why? I’m hungry. Aren’t you?
She smoothed the hair on top of my head. Her sock-mittens smelled of fake cheese. “Because I don’t know how far it is to Disney World, that’s why.”
I cocked my head at her.
“My Aunt Emily told me she auditioned to be a princess there once. I figure that’s as good a job as any. And maybe then if I make some money, I can buy paints and brushes and then I can sell my paintings. I don’t know how much they’re worth, though.” She shrugged. “A dollar or two? Maybe five, you think?”
How was I supposed to know? I wasn’t even sure what a dollar was good for. Hunter was always counting his dollars, then folding them up inside a couple of pieces of leather and tucking that in his back pocket. Once, at the drive-thru, I saw him give the girl inside the window a bunch of dollars. She gave him French fries. Therefore, dollars equaled French fries.
It took some prodding, but Hannah finally got herself up and out the door. Actually, it kind of fell off when she nudged it open. Two steps beyond the door, we both stopped, awestruck.
Crystals of ice clung to every surface, glittering like fallen stars in the sunlight. I squinted against the brightness. Hannah slogged over to a fallen tree and scooped a handful of snow into her sock mittens. She bit at it, smiling as it melted in her mouth. I ate mouthfuls of snow, the cool liquid running down my throat, filling me with a burst of energy.
Onward we went on, renewed from within. For a while, at least.
—o00o—
Stuck. That’s what we were.
We must have stared at it for a good hour, sitting up on the mountainside, looking down at the silvery ribbon as it twisted through the valley and disappeared around a faraway bend. A river, broad and deep. Just like the one into which I’d once been thrown. Maybe it was the same one? Water raced between its stony banks, its crashing and splashing more than a babble, but not quite a roar.
Neither one of us seemed compelled to move toward it, or even to try to find a way across. From where we were sitting, it looked pretty much impossible.
On the other side, two ridgelines away, there was an obvious swath through the trees. A road, maybe? It would be worth checking out, but ... yeah, the river. Kind of in the way.
Anyway, I didn’t like to go swimming. For obvious reasons. But I wasn’t quite sure what Hannah’s hesitation was. I’d heard Jenn and Hunter talk about Hannah’s ‘accident’ in hushed tones more than once. A couple of weeks after I joined the McHugh family, they went on a picnic to a state park. There was a lake there. At first Maura had wanted to claim a table overlooking the water, so that afterward she could take her shoes and socks off and go wading. But Hannah had started to hyperventilate, and so Jenn told Hunter to drive on to the picnic grounds in the woods. Once again, Maura’s wishes had been overridden by her sister’s needs.
Hannah slapped her socked palms together, then rubbed at her arms. White puffs of vapor drifted in the air before her as she exhaled. Shoulders hunched, she tucked her hands under her armpits. Her teeth clattered, no matter how hard she tried to clamp her jaws together to fight the shivers that had overtaken her.
If for no other reason than to warm herself, she rose and started down the slope toward the river. I was sure if I stayed put, she’d stop and come back. Yet I watched her back getting smaller and smaller between the tree trunks, her backpack making her look like a tiny beetle navigating its way through stems of grass.
I woofed, but she kept on going. So I barked again, louder, several times.
She twisted at the waist to look over her shoulder at me. And just as she did so, a packed mat of leaves slid beneath her clunky boots. She flung her arms outward, but her feet flew from under her. She hit the ground, her tiny body sliding downward over slick clay until it collided with a small boulder, then crumpled at its base.
I raced toward her, rocks and saplings blurring past. But the closer I came, the more appare
nt it was.
Hannah wasn’t moving.
—o00o—
Hannah’s hand lay palm down against the earth, her arm stretched above her head.
I sniffed at her upturned cheek, smudged with reddish-brown dirt, then snorted softly into her ear. The barest of moans rose from her throat, followed by my name.
“Echo?” She lifted her head to gaze at me through damp lashes. A single tear spilled from the corner of her eye and splashed onto the ground. “I don’t want to go to Disney World anymore. I want to go home.”
I lay down beside her and tucked my muzzle between her neck and shoulder.
Me, too.
She pulled her knees beneath her, until she was sitting, then stretched her legs out and brushed the dirt from them. “But I don’t know the way. Do you?”
I hung my head, ashamed.
No.
I’d tried to mark our trail, but I’d done a poor job of it and after several hours I’d lost our scent in the wind. I could try to retrace our path, but we’d been gone over a day now and there was an even bigger chance that we’d end up more lost.
We could follow the river. But upstream or downstream? Either choice could be wrong. Our best bet was to find that road in the distance. Even if it was only a driveway or a long country road, it would have to lead to another, busier road eventually. Yes, we had to cross the river somehow.
As if she’d been thinking the same thing, Hannah scanned the river. Not far downstream, a thick tree spanned its width. Its limbs had long since been stripped clean by raging spring waters. At its very end, a few feet from the far bank, the tree dipped into the water. And there, a tangle of broken limbs clustered, caught up by what remained of the tree’s branches. Climbing over might be hard, but at that point the water looked only a couple of feet deep.
Hannah looked at me. “I’ll go first.”
I followed her the rest of the way down the hill. At the bank, we stood a few minutes longer, trying to summon our courage. Had it been a wide, sturdy bridge, we would have raced across it. Had it been a log lying across a dry ditch, we would have both taken our chances at falling. But it was neither.
And yet it was our only chance.
Knees wobbling, Hannah stepped around the array of roots that remained and pulled herself up onto the weather-smoothed trunk, until she was straddling it backward. She scooted toward the other end a few feet, then stopped.
“Come on, Echo.” She extended a hand. “I’ll help you.”
Below, the river flowed madly, its silty waters dark and deep. I inched closer, taking it all in, calculating my chances, theorizing on the many ways this could go terribly wrong. At the far bank, foam swirled in the little eddies formed by the debris trapped there. My confidence was diminishing by the second.
She wiggled her fingers at me. “If I can do it, so can you.”
Easier said when you have two hands.
“Whatever. If that’s your excuse ...” She swung her legs around to sit forward and began to scoot across, but she was barely a quarter of the way across when she looked down and froze.
I trotted to the tree, put my feet up and jumped. It took several tries, but I was finally standing atop it. Hannah lowered herself until she was practically hugging the tree. With the hump of her backpack, she looked like a turtle sunning itself. Carefully, she looked back at me, and smiled weakly.
“We got this, Echo.”
Right behind you.
I gave a little woof of encouragement and she kicked her feet to scooch forward, inch by inch.
The hard part for me was that the surface of the log had been smoothed over by the elements. I had no fingers to grip with. It wasn’t soft like dirt, where I could dig my nails in. Every step was like walking on a curved surface of ice. So I let Hannah work her way across. When she was nearly to the other side, she looked back one more time
Just as our eyes caught and I took my first step, a strap of her backpack caught on the nub of an old branch and broke. The pack shifted abruptly on her back, sliding until the weight of it slipped from her right shoulder and slid down her arm. She caught the strap in her hand, her knees clenched to the log.
Her knuckles whitened. Its weight pulled her toward the gurgling water.
Let go!
Her fingers loosened. The backpack plunged into the greenish-brown murk. Water splashed up to hit her in the face.
More determined than ever, Hannah continued on, until she was at the end. Nimbly, she picked her way across the web of debris and was soon standing on dry land.
I ran, my toenails skittering across the narrow, sloping track before me. Then, with nothing more than my faith to guide me, I leaped —
Into Hannah’s waiting arms.
With an oomph, I knocked her to the ground and then smothered her in kisses. She pushed me away just in time for us to both sit up and watch her backpack bobbing along down the river before it disappeared around a far-off bend.
We had no food left. We were cold and tired to the bone. My pads were cracked and Hannah complained of blisters on her heels. We didn’t know where we were going — or if anyone out there was even looking for us.
But we never, ever gave up hope or abandoned that courage borne of desperation.
Because who knew when we would need them even more?
—o00o—
The road was farther away than it had seemed from the mountainside. It took us half the day to get there. The ground was rougher, the trees denser. Several times we had to climb to a vantage point to gauge its position again. But we finally got there. And it turned out not to be a road, like the kind cars drove on, but a wider path. Yet it was something and it bore evidence of traffic: footprints, the human kind.
Not far from where we joined the path, we saw a sign. We walked to it. As much as I stared at it, I couldn’t make any sense of it. There were no pictures. To me it was just slashes and circles.
Hannah’s brow puckered as she sounded the letters out. “Norrrth ... rim ... traaaail. North rim trail. Main ... main ... A-C-C-E-S-S, whatever that is, road ... eight ... mmmyyy-less ... miles ahead.” She fixed me with a disgruntled stare. “That’s a long way.”
Maybe, but we’d already come pretty darn far.
But even one mile would be a marathon to us that day. We’d eaten the last of the snow that morning before it melted under a tepid sun. Our bellies were so taut with hunger after sacrificing Hannah’s cheese crackers to the river gods that they no longer growled for food. The only message my body was sending to my brain was that I needed to lie down and sleep. For days. Preferably someplace warm. Which meant nowhere in sight. Hannah was tired, too. She stumbled along with her eyes half closed, her arms hugging her body. Our hearts, though, begged us impossibly onward — to home.
Yet we knew no better how we were going to get there than we did Disney World.
We followed the trail anyway. Better than staying put and blindly hoping someone would come to our rescue.
“We’ll get to the road, Echo. Keep going until a car comes by. I’ll wave at them, get them to stop ... No, you run out into the road and lie down. I’ll kneel right beside you, like you’ve been hit ...”
No. Way.
“Okay, okay. It’s just that I want the first car we see to stop for us.” Halting, she turned to face me.
It was dangerous to stop going forward. Inertia is a powerful thing. The longer we stood there, her staring at me as thoughts struggled to form into words, the more likely it would be that we wouldn’t move at all. And then ... the corners of her mouth sank. Her lower lip twitched.
No, Hannah. Now is not the time.
She inhaled a shaky breath. “But —”
We need to go. To the road. Eight miles.
“Yep, only eight miles.” She turned her head to look in the direction we’d been heading. “Cars drive down roads all the time, right?”
I waited, but still her feet didn’t move. Silent tears trailed down her chapped cheeks. As much as I
wanted to console her, wallowing and moaning about our predicament — the one that she’d caused when she decided to run away from home — wasn’t going to solve anything. We needed to get to that road before dark, or it was going to be another hellaciously cold night. Come morning, one or both of us might just not wake up.
So I went on, not looking back. Expecting to hear the soft plod of her boots on the dirt-packed trail. She wasn’t going to stand there alone.
Yet she did. Sniffling and moaning in between sobs. Feet firmly planted. But then her whimpers stopped abruptly. Which concerned me even more.
Don’t look back, I told myself. Keep going. She’ll catch on, eventually.
Against all reason, I slowed, turning to look back so I could figure out why she wasn’t coming.
Hannah stood fixed in place, eyes wide. Directly between us, two half-grown black bear cubs raced, loping playfully along. One reached out with a paw to swipe at the hindquarters of the other. The cub in front twisted around to bat at its sibling in retaliation. They tumbled along the trail in Hannah’s direction.
Hannah’s gaze shifted from the cubs to follow a sound coming from her right, where something large was crashing through the underbrush. Her mouth opened in a silent scream.
Galloping from the tree-line was a full-grown mama bear, muscles rippling beneath a mantle of thick black fur. Claws sliced at the earth as she propelled her powerful bulk forward, until her shadow enveloped Hannah’s frail form.
chapter 31: Hunter
From the moment Hunter learned that Hannah was missing, he had sensed she was in danger — but not for a second did he ever think Hector Menendez had anything to do with it.
Yesterday, he’d sat in his living room for hours, alternately staring at the TV and pacing to the back kitchen door, a sense that he’d overlooked something gnawing at his insides. No word came of Hannah. A quick check with the Appletons provided no leads as to Echo’s location, either.
Say That Again Page 25
