Conard County Watch

by Rachel Lee

  “So you never quit.”

  “I can’t even remember when I started.”

  Cope joined them, sitting on the rocky surface near Renee while wiping his face with a damp rag. “I’ve been dirty countless times,” he remarked, “but I still hate grit. This is gritty. Did Maddie bring you up that rib and vertebra we found below? I wasn’t sure if she just put it aside for later discussion.”

  Renee’s interest quickened. “No, she didn’t bring it up. Did you have an impression?”

  “Only that the fossilization kept them together. There must be what was once soft tissue in there. But I’m no expert, so I could be all wet.”

  “I need to get down and look at it.” Renee eyed her sandwich, missing only two bites, the egg in the wall that so fascinated her, and the possibility of something interesting below. Her appetite was waning, so that left an either/or choice. But the egg... The whole thing that had set her on this quest. The emerging signs of other eggs and a juvenile or adult saurian.

  “Eat,” said Cope, almost as if he read her mind. “I’ll pry the bones from Maddie or have her bring them up for you to look at.”

  “Thanks.” Renee offered him a smile. “I just hope she marked the location.”

  “Maddie’s meticulous,” he answered.

  With a sense of shock, Renee felt an unexpected spear of jealousy. Were Cope and Maddie developing a “thing”?

  Then she scolded herself and bit into her sandwich as if it were cement rather than peanut butter. None of her business. She had no claim on Cope. Anyway, she was so wrapped up in her work she didn’t leave much room for anything else.

  Except once or twice she had almost thought...

  She brushed the notion away before it could fully form. She must have misinterpreted the occasional glint in his eye, or the way he sometimes just watched her. Why would anyone want a career-obsessed and often filthy paleontologist anyway?

  Just then came a sound no one ever wanted to hear: the sound of falling rock and a cry. The cracking and tumbling continued for a little longer, then Renee, Cope and Denise all leaped to their feet. In this canyon it was impossible to tell exactly where the sounds had come from as they echoed.

  Then from below Maddie called out, “We’re gonna need some help down here.”

  * * *

  Renee scrambled for the path, Cope just ahead of her. She glanced to the side and saw that part of the “tooth” had collapsed again, pouring rock on the team below. Damn it, why hadn’t she kept an eye on it, knowing it could collapse again?

  She practically slid on her bottom all the way down, trying to keep up with Cope, who was taking the rugged path as if he were a mountain goat. Even as fear pushed her, bringing her to the brink with thoughts of one of her team being seriously injured, she couldn’t move any faster without risking her own neck. Cope seemed oblivious to the danger.

  Catastrophe met her. Part of the “tooth” rock above had crashed down and Larry was partially buried in it. At least his eyes were open and he was talking. Grimacing with pain, too.

  The below-team had already started to lift rocks off him, and Cope joined them swiftly, telling them to be careful not to move Larry at all. As soon as she reached them, Renee bent to the task with everyone else.

  “Sheesh, Larry,” she said, trying to sound lighthearted.

  “I know,” he answered. “I told you I was always in the wrong place at the wrong time.” He paused to pant a couple of breaths. “Of course, I may have just unleashed a bigger find than yours.”

  She had to laugh for his sake, but she was seriously worried. Cope organized them to get the weight off his chest first so he could breathe better, a good thing considering he was looking awfully pale.

  Finally they had Larry uncovered to the waist. Cope bent over him. “Deep breaths?”

  Larry provided them without coughing, which was amazing considering how much dust filled the air after the rockslide.

  “Your lungs are fine, anyway. Where do you hurt?”

  “Mostly my leg. I think other parts will get sore later. These damn rocks are a hard bed.”

  Cope nodded. “Just hold still and let us do the work, okay?”

  “I never argue with that,” Larry said gamely.

  “That’s my man.”

  For the first time, Renee was getting a true look at the former Marine. He seemed to know exactly what to do, and he was tossing out orders to everyone. While more rocks were lifted, he sent a couple of the team members to find wood that might make a good splint and two longer poles in case they needed a stretcher. He was thinking of everything.

  Renee was grateful. She was still dealing with the shock of seeing Larry under those rocks, and while her brain would have kicked into gear before long, she doubted it would have been as swiftly or as intelligently. It was clear this was not the first such situation he’d dealt with.

  Just as they were about to clear Larry’s legs, the next horrifying sound reached them: rock was falling above on the upper level. The sound was loud, no little patter of pebbles. As the rumble rose over them, Renee was aware that everyone looked upward and no one moved a muscle. Frozen, they awaited fate, their only protection the hard hats on their heads.

  No one even attempted to run. Time seemed to stretch endlessly as the rumble continued. Cope moved, forcing everyone down, ordering them to cover their necks.

  At last the rumbling faded away until silence filled the forest again. Only the gurgling stream could be heard, and the occasional pop of another falling rock.

  This had always been a possibility, but a remote one. Now the worst was happening. Renee absorbed it as she scanned her group and found that no one else appeared to be in trouble. Then her other main concern leaped to the forefront: the entire find might be buried again.

  “Nobody’s up there?” Cope asked almost as soon as the slide stopped.

  Renee did a quick nose count, glad of a useful task. “No.”

  “Then once I get Larry stabilized I’ll go up and see whether we can get out of this damn place.”

  Another thing she hadn’t thought of. She was beginning to feel like a true dolt. Nature’s violence had opened this cleft. Why had she so blithely assumed it wouldn’t close it? Especially since part of the “tooth” had broken off during the winter. This had been predictable, and she should have been better prepared for it. At the very least she should have splurged on a satellite phone so they could call for help.

  She’d endangered them all with her narrow focus on the fossils and hoping to prove a pet theory. She looked from dusty face to dusty face and realized that she’d failed them. Their safety should have been her biggest concern. Yeah, they’d volunteered, but they hadn’t volunteered to get injured or possibly killed by a rockslide. And Larry. If they couldn’t get him out of here, his death would be on her head.

  She looked up again at the mountain above, and wondered how she could have been so blind. So careless.

  Cope had apparently put it behind him for now. He once again squatted by Larry’s injured leg and told them to get him those saplings.

  * * *

  From the way Larry was acting, Cope felt fairly safe betting his injuries weren’t life-threatening. But a safe bet or not, he couldn’t judge just how much of Larry’s cheer owed to shock. None of this had probably come home to him yet. The sounds of the rock falling from above had wakened them all yet again to their precarious position on this mountain. He wondered how many would stick around if they got out of this without too much more trouble.

  Maddie and Carlos returned with some saplings that could be used either as splints or as stretcher poles. “Good job,” he told them as he hunkered over Larry’s legs. They were uncovered now and he began to feel their length with his fingertips, watching Larry’s face for signs of pain while he felt for anything that didn’t seem right.

 
At last he elicited a yowl from Larry, who quickly apologized for screaming.

  “No apologies,” Cope said. “You just told me one of the things I need to know. I’m guessing a simple fracture to the tibia. I don’t feel anything out of place.” He finished running his hands over the young man’s legs, then palpated his abdomen. Soft. No hardness. That meant no rapid internal bleeding. Yet.

  “I think you were lucky,” he said encouragingly.

  “Sure. Lucky to be under a rockfall. Man, your priorities are skewed.”

  Cope flashed a grin in response and some of the others managed laughs. No one was seeing any real humor in this, however. The strain was audible as they tried to respond to Larry’s attempt to be light.

  He pulled out the knife that he always wore in a leather case on his belt—a habit left over from his past—and began to shave the saplings into pieces suitable for a splint.

  “We’re still going to need to carry him down,” Cope remarked. “I’m going to need jackets or shirts or something to sling for a stretcher. I don’t want to chance making anything worse.”

  “So it’s not bad enough yet?” Larry asked. But he no longer sounded quite as cheerful. His close call was beginning to hit him.

  “Bad enough,” Cope answered, “but I think you’d rather be wearing a walking cast tomorrow than be in a hospital bed in traction.”

  “He’s got a point,” Larry muttered.

  Renee had busied herself using her jacket and Denise’s to string between the two much longer saplings. As Cope positioned the shorter pieces around Larry’s lower leg, Carlos offered up his shirt, ripping it into long strips.

  “Someone’s been taking first aid,” Cope remarked. “Thanks.” He began tightening the strips around the splint, making sure it wouldn’t move too much.

  “Okay, I’m headed up to see how we can best get Larry out of here. If I’m going to need to leave to call for help, I’ll shout down so you won’t wonder. Somebody give him some water, please?”

  Then he hurried up the path, feeling as if he’d stepped back in time to a different country and another continent.

  As worried as he was about getting Larry out of here before hypothermia could complicate matters, he was growing equally worried about Renee. He didn’t like the expressions that had flitted over her face once the second slide faded away. She was blaming herself, taking too much responsibility.

  Well, he could hardly blame her for that. It was one of his own failings. Didn’t matter that he wasn’t in control. Nope. It was all his fault. Renee apparently owned the same tendency. Except that rocks had moved without her help, and without her ability to stop them. What was she supposed to do?

  The argument about whether the mountain was sentient was moot anyway. Aware or not, it was a mountain and behaved like a mountain, and he’d yet to meet one that never moved at all. People had a tendency to view them as eternally unchanging, but anyone who’d clambered around on some of them soon learned that they were never perfectly still, but were constantly reacting to every stimulus that reached them, from wind and rain to less obvious activities, such as the movements of the earth itself, or even, sometimes, a human footfall.

  If groundwater levels halfway around the planet could react to an earthquake in Alaska, then why shouldn’t a mountain, and probably to even smaller forces? Forces human senses couldn’t detect. Sentient? Pointless to wonder. The inescapable reality was that the entire planet was alive and constantly changing. Leave it at that.

  When he reached the top of the path, the view of the space at the bottom of the rock face was hardly encouraging. At least the egg that Renee was so fixated on remained undamaged, although there were a few cracks around it. But as he pushed up the last bit so that he stood on his feet and could survey the entire area, he felt a knot of anger settle in his stomach. Not for himself, but for Larry, for Renee. It was a damn mess up here now. The slide buried part of the base of the cliff. The work area they’d so carefully leveled out was now a tumbled mess again. Looking upward to the top of the cliff, he didn’t like what he saw. It no longer looked stable. It looked as if it hadn’t quit falling yet.

  What the hell?

  He didn’t know a whole lot about geology, but his instincts were once again sounding alarms. Something was wrong. They needed to ask Claudia to evaluate this.

  In the meantime, he needed to pick his way carefully along here and see if they could get Larry through to the path downhill. If necessary he could take off and run for help, but he felt uneasy about leaving Larry behind. He might have internal injuries. He might succumb to shock and hypothermia. No, not even with most of the team present would he feel okay about leaving Larry behind. They had to get him out of here until they could call for a helicopter evacuation. Even if he got all the way down at top speed and put the pedal to the metal until he could get a cell signal, he doubted even one of the county’s rescue copters would have enough clearance between all the trees to send down a Stokes basket.

  Even as he weighed options, however, he was moving, seeking a way across the freshly fallen rock rubble. The project had just stepped back several weeks in time. Once Renee got past her worry for Larry, she wasn’t going to be happy about this. Nor could he blame her. She was on a grant, which meant limited funds and limited time.

  “Cope!”

  The voice came from above and he craned his neck. Tall Bear, aka Tim, looked over the upper ledge down at him. “Everyone okay?”

  “No, we’ve got an injured man below. I’ve got to get him down this mountain and call for help.”

  “Hang on. Shorty and I will come help. Gray Cloud can place a phone call, too, so I’ll make sure we get the message to him. Just one to be evacuated?”

  “So far. If no more rock falls.”

  Then Tall said something that chilled Cope. “This wasn’t any accident. Stay there. We won’t be long.”

  Cope chewed on that while he scanned the rockslide and the way ahead. Taking a moment, he called down to Renee and the others, telling them to stay put, that Tall Bear was bringing help.

  Then he squatted down and eyeballed the surface they’d have to cross. He had to make it safe so nobody would break an ankle. But almost as important was making sure they didn’t grind some unique fossil into dust by trampling over it. Well, they wouldn’t grind it into dust, but they could sure damage it.

  Two birds, one task. Not the first time he’d had more than one thing to deal with at a time. Inching forward, he began to move loose rocks to the side, or wedge them in tightly where he could, always being careful not to unleash yet another, smaller slide from the hill of gravel and stones that lay ahead of him.

  Forty degrees, he thought. Nature’s natural balancing angle. The reason pyramids stood without falling. The rock had tumbled into its most stable configuration, and now he was going to move it and hope that he didn’t make it shift again. No choice, because there was no other way to get Larry out of there. The only way up to the level where Tall Bear had been standing was by way of the other end of this rock face. Behind him lay rugged, nearly impenetrable woods.

  Nor could they hope to move Larry downstream from below. He’d checked that out the second day they were here. The stream had carved a gorge with very steep sides. No way could they get Larry through there. One man with climbing gear maybe.

  So they were boxed in unless he could clear a path here. After what Tall Bear had said, he seriously doubted the man was going to offer to lower ropes over the edge and start pulling people up. Not if he believed the slide was unnatural. He’d be hyperalert, wondering what other weak points had been created, either by the rockfall or by whomever.

  Cope knew he would.

  He’d moved and wedged his way through about a foot of fallen rock before pausing to call down again.

  “Is everyone okay?”

  “Larry’s getting cold,” Renee called back
up. “We need to do something soon.”

  “I’m going to be fine,” he heard Larry call back. “I’m buried in everyone’s jackets. They’re in more danger than I am.”

  That Larry was incredible, he thought. And he probably was getting colder because he couldn’t move, added jackets notwithstanding.

  It wasn’t a bitter day by any means, but it was no day for sunbathing, either.

  “We could build a small fire,” Renee called up. “If it’s going to be a while.”

  “I don’t know how long it’ll be,” Cope said frankly. “I’m trying to clear a path for us up here that won’t cause another slide. Go ahead and start a fire. You all need to stay warm.”

  “Need some help up there?” he heard Claudia call.

  “Actually, yeah. That would be great.” He hoped he wasn’t offending Renee, but Claudia was the geologist. He wanted more from her than help moving stones. He wanted an assessment. To him it seemed extremely odd that that bottom rocks had fallen before the ones on the upper rock face. He wanted to ask her about it without it becoming a group speculation.

  “I’m on my way,” Claudia called back.

  Cope didn’t answer. He just kept working. Before long, time would become very important, because Larry was getting cold and might go into serious shock at any moment. So far the guy seemed to be staving it off, but he didn’t like the fact that Renee had said he was getting cold. Larry would be the last person to recognize he was going into shock.

  Forty degrees, he reminded himself, and edged forward.

  * * *

  Maddie and Renee sat on opposite sides of Larry, trying to keep him awake and engaged. Renee watched Claudia hike up the path to the upper level to join Cope and felt a twinge of envy. But of course, Claudia was an experienced geologist who would be able to survey the damage and perhaps explain it...or have some ideas about how to avoid a repeat.

  She wondered about the fossils, about the egg that had been her goal for so long, but knew in the balance they mattered less than getting Larry out of here safely. Getting all of them out of here safely.