Why the Rock Falls

by J. E. Barnard

  “I borrowed your sweatshirt,” Lacey said. “I hope that’s okay.”

  The green machine rumbled up the hill, its outsized tires gouging the gravel. Ben jumped down, hugged Andy, and kissed her forehead. Andy hugged Lacey, too, and stood waving as they roared toward the main gate.

  “She’s treating this like a major expedition,” Lacey said, “not a short scramble.”

  “She cares about us. And the rock around here is loose and often unstable, so there’s a bit of risk involved. In the rain I’d never take you up an unknown route, but time is short.”

  He didn’t know how short, and Lacey wasn’t going to enlighten him in case it made him take risks to beat Earl to the hut.

  “If we’re lucky,” he went on, “the bluff will be hardly more than a scramble, but if it’s higher, well, that’s trickier. The main differences between living rock and the climbing wall are two: we have to test every hand- and foothold before we commit to it; and we might have to belay more than one pitch. Plus we’re placing gear as we go, which will slow us even more. Any questions so far?”

  “No.” Not that Lacey would share with him. But what if she couldn’t face a cliff with the same glee she’d felt on the climbing wall? What if the mere sight of a rock wall sent her spiralling back to that grey, rainy afternoon at Capilano Gorge, and she froze? And if you don’t freeze, you’ll have to tackle Ear at the top. So yank up those neon-pink shorts and deal. “Wait. What’s a pitch?”

  “One stage of roping, when the second climber joins the first partway up. Could be fifty metres or twice that, depending where the best place to anchor and switch the belay is. I’ll know it when I see it. Now, you’ll want to follow as close to my route as you can. I’ll know by the sound what’s a solid grip, and I’ll chalk where I put my weight so you can use the same holds as much as possible. The comms are the same indoors or out. I’ll say ‘climbing’ and you say —?”

  “‘Climb on.’ If you say ‘take,’ I tighten up any slack in the rope, and if you say ‘slack,’ I let some out.”

  “Right. And if we need to start a second pitch, I’ll build an anchor partway up. You’ll join me there. But you don’t start climbing until I say ‘on belay’ and you’ve answered …?”

  “‘Climbing,’ I guess.”

  “You got it.” He glanced sideways. “If I yell ‘rock,’ it means one is falling toward you. Do not look up! Tuck your hands as tight as you can against the wall and tip your head down so your helmet takes any damage, not your face.” He sent a brief grin her way. “I promise not to purposely drop anything on you. All good?”

  Lacey breathed out slowly, mentally rehearsing the calls and answers. “All good.”

  Ben wheeled into Susan’s yard on a wave of thunder that shivered the air. The old woman hurried from a simple wooden house with firewood stacked high under the wide eaves and scrambled into the back seat.

  “Straight on past the barn,” she said. “A mile in, take the cutline on your right.”

  Ben drove conservatively, for him, but even so, the tree branches whipped against Lacey’s window and her teeth rattled in her head. The cutline, when they reached it, was straight as any road, although overgrown with grass and small shrubs. They crossed a meadow, then back into trees.

  Susan leaned forward. “You ain’t climbin’ in them jeans and boots.”

  “No. I just put them on to stay warm.”

  “Near there now, so git ’em off.”

  “You’ll have a minute for that while I sort the gear,” said Ben and steered slowly into the rock-walled ravine Susan was pointing to. Eventually he could go no farther. He shut off the truck and opened his door. “Now you can strip.”

  While Lacey eased her jeans down over her shorts, she eyed the narrowing cleft, its bottom strewn with boulders through which a small stream twisted. Not such high walls yet; she could manage a climb here. The sky might pose a different problem. What little showed between the pine-topped cliffs was a mass of grey clouds tumbling over themselves. Rain coming for sure, and maybe lightning, too. She grabbed the lunch bags from the front and joined the others at the tailgate.

  Ben handed the keys to the old woman. “You’ll wait in case the hut’s empty?”

  “Two hours. If you ain’t back by then, I’ll send help.”

  Adding the lunches to the two backpacks, Lacey loaded her pack onto her shoulders and followed Ben deeper into the ravine. No turning back now. Either they’d find the hut and Orrin, hopefully still alive, or they’d be stranded in the wilderness in a thunderstorm, and Earl would be free to kill without consequences.

  As her foot splashed into the rocky stream, she hoped this ravine wasn’t like a desert arroyo that would fill rapidly with racing water, scooping up everything loose in its path and churning it all downhill. What had Ben said about the lost pair when they’d first met? Something like, “If they’re in one of those canyons, we won’t find them until they wash out in the spring.” It wasn’t spring, and surely the rain wouldn’t come hard enough or long enough to flood this ravine. But the walls were rising higher, and for the first time she felt the tremors of her old claustrophobia. She shrugged the pack higher and trudged on. Somewhere overhead, thunder rumbled again.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  The farther they walked into the ravine, the cooler and heavier the air grew. The song of the stream became a living thing. From time to time, Ben checked his position on a satellite photo. When Lacey asked, “Did you lift that photo from the SAR base?” her voice whispered back from the rocky walls.

  Ben half turned, holding out the laminated sheet. “We’re about here. From the shadows, the bluff is lower farther along. We’ll get to the top faster there.”

  “I appreciate that. This part must be four times as high as your climbing wall.” Lacey looked up — and up — at the wall towering over them, and the lanky pines crowding the rim. Pines, not towering cedars. This was not Capilano Gorge. “You’re sure we won’t miss that hut?”

  Ben tapped the page. “We should come up just ahead of that clearing.”

  They trudged on through a mossy twilight world. In the rocky depths, the air tasted of water; that might be moisture from the stream or a sign of rain in the west. Lacey checked the time on her phone. Earl might already have reached the hut. They’d been twenty minutes behind at the ranch, and now another twenty, plus whatever time it took to climb. The hush of the forest was screwing with her ability to calculate time or distance. There was no internet signal, either. Why hadn’t she snagged a radio from the SAR base? It wouldn’t work down here, either, but it could catch a signal once they reached the top.

  Ben stopped and slung his pack onto a boulder. “This is it. Still a two-pitch climb, but we have to reach the top before the rain hits.”

  Lacey shivered as she stepped into her harness. She kept the windbreaker and sweatshirt on. Ben was clipping carabiners and other equipment to his harness, and he hooked a handful to hers, too.

  “I’ll set gear as we go,” he said, “and you clean it as you follow. If you can’t get it out easily, leave it. If you get into trouble or just need a rest, clip in wherever you are. Now we’ll do a buddy check: your harness, your knot, your GriGri.” As he said each one, he tugged at her connections. “Now you do mine.” After that he slung his pack back on and clipped it across his chest. “All set?”

  What else was there to say but yes? Lacey’s heart thudded like the steepest stage of a treadmill run. Her palms dampened. She wiped them on her thighs. Then she closed the GriGri over the rope and fed out the first slack as Ben put his hand on the rock face.

  “Climbing,” he said.

  “Climb on.”

  He seemed to flow upward in a series of yoga poses. She tried to mark each place he put a hand, and where his foot shifted sideways rather than up, and made mental notes every time he gave a verbal command. She’d never remember it all. Even with the chalk trail he was leaving, following him up there would be a slow and clumsy scramble.r />
  He reached a wide ledge and hooked on securely. “First pitch. I’ll build an anchor here.” When he was ready, he gave her a thumbs-up. “Belay on.”

  Her turn. Resisting the impulse to check the time again, for surely it couldn’t be nearly as long as it felt, she answered, “Climbing,” and put her right hand on the first chalk-marked rock.

  She was nose first into a vertical twice her height when she lost focus. Somewhere up there, Earl would be reaching the cabin soon. If Orrin hadn’t died of his injuries, he’d be killed. Suddenly in a hurry, she grabbed a round cobble above her head and pulled herself upward with her right foot groping for its next hold. The cobble fell away beneath her hand. It rattled past her leg and ricocheted from boulder to boulder across the ravine.

  The sound clattered back between the walls like the chittering of monsters in a horror movie. She clung by one foot and one hand, belly to the wall.

  Ben had taken up the slack the instant the rock loosened, holding her there, but it took some concentrated breathing on Lacey’s part to calm her heart rate. Her left arm tingled and wouldn’t obey the order to stretch to another handhold. She left it for the moment and nudged her loose foot onto a tiny protuberance. Then she stretched again for the tiny ledge Ben had marked and followed his verbal directions for every move after that. She came up level with him and stepped thankfully onto a shelf twice as deep as her feet, clipping immediately into the anchor. He nudged her shoulder.

  “Good job.”

  He didn’t sound sarcastic, the way Dan would have. She grinned weakly. “Now what?”

  “We switch the ropes over, and you belay me up the next pitch just like if you were standing on the ground. It isn’t as vertical so will be easier. Like before, watch my marks and try to use those holds only, because they’re already tested against my weight.” He switched the strap that held the draped belay rope from his harness to hers. “Make sure you turn that GriGri so the rope doesn’t cross itself.”

  That done, she got her hands back into position. A stray gust of wind sent grit over the ravine’s rim. The glasses protected her eyes, and she didn’t bother to raise a hand to wipe the rest of her face. It was just dirt. Her hand on that rope was a lifeline, for Orrin as well as for Ben.

  Ben’s first upward surge took his feet past her head. Watching, she recalled the first time she’d seen him, halfway up that immense sandstone wall above the Ghost River. If he could climb that, this one was a walk in the park. For him. She concentrated on feeding out the rope’s slack as he called for it, grateful that the basic communications were the same whether in a safe, plastic, prebolted gym or when clipped onto a natural rock wall way out in the wild, with the threat of rain and the distant thunder and, somewhere up there, a would-be murderer. Maybe Orrin was already dead and this race was for nothing? She shook her head, refocusing on Ben’s every movement. He seemed to be aiming for a ledge that sloped gently up to the right, almost a natural path that would be easy to scramble up even without a rope. She’d need easy by then.

  As she gazed upward, trying to gauge how far they still had to climb, something moved among the trees. At first she thought it was the wind rustling the branches, but then her brain translated the moving thing to green camo fabric. A head in a dark balaclava leaned out between two trunks. She called, “Hey, who’s up there?” but the new knot in her gut already had the answer.

  Ben was splayed spiderlike across an almost sheer stretch of rock. He looked down at her voice, and then up as something tumbled off the ravine’s rim.

  “Rock!” he yelled and tucked tight to the cliff.

  As his voice echoed, she flattened against the wall, clutching the belay rope. A fist-sized stone ricocheted past her. Ben yelled “Rock!” again, and more words she couldn’t make out. The belay writhed like a snake in her hands. Pebbles and dirt stung her exposed skin and skidded off her helmet. Was he falling?

  When the stinging shower passed, she risked a glance upward. Ben hung from the wall by one hand and one foot. She leaned out and adjusted her grip on the braking rope, making as secure an anchor as she could. He didn’t move on, just hung there exposed to the next missile from above.

  “Ben? Are you okay?”

  “The bastard got my shoulder.” Ben’s voice sounded strange. “You’ll have to take more weight for a bit.”

  “Was it Earl?”

  “Likely. If he throws anything else, yell. Climbing.” The rope jerked in her hands as he began a three-point crawl sideways and up.

  Another rock came crashing over the edge, easily as big as her head. She yelled, “Rock!” and slammed her body against the wall again. When the sand, grit, and crashing passed, she dared to look up. Ben was still on the rock face, crabbing sideways faster than she would’ve dreamed possible. He went under the ledge she’d seen earlier, instead of up on top.

  Earl hefted another rock at his brother. It bounced off the ledge and shot across the ravine. When Lacey lifted her head again, he had vanished into the trees. The belay rope had stopped moving. An empty loop drooped from the ledge. Her climbing partner was gone.

  “Ben?”

  There was no answer. Fearful, she leaned sideways and looked down, the impossibly long way down, to the tumbled boulders of the creek. The broken body she feared to see existed only in her imagination. Then where was he?

  As she stared up again, Ben’s head appeared above her, one finger at his mouth.

  “Shh,” he half whispered. “You’re tied on to a tree now, since my arm’s useless. Come up slow, take in your slack, and you’ll be fine.”

  Behind him, something moved.

  “Earl,” she yelled.

  Ben dodged as a heavy body tackled him from the side. The two rolled out of her sight. Crashing brush and yells racketed down. She heard her name and something about the ledge, but thunder crashed almost overhead, and she lost the rest of Ben’s instructions. Then the noise faded, leaving her alone on the cliff with no belayer and absolutely no faith in her ability to follow Ben’s path to the top without direction. The stream’s song rose in the sudden silence. For a moment longer, she clung to the security of the anchorage, steadying her breathing. Then she tested the belay rope, unclipped from the anchor, and began to climb.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Against all her instincts, Lacey forced herself to move just one limb at a time, to test each hand- or foothold, to press into the rock instead of pulling out. Each new handhold was a victory. Each foothold took her closer to the fratricidal struggle above. The growing noise assured her Ben was holding his own: blows and grunts from both men, the crunch and snap of forest debris beneath their thrashing bodies. She pushed the final loop of trailing rope up over her shoulder and reached the sloping ledge. If she moved her left hand over here, and then her left foot, the right hand should be able to reach that tree root sticking through the crumbly soil at the top …

  Just in time, she stopped herself grabbing the tree root. It might be dry, rotten, not attached to any living tree. Her hand moved on, crimped onto a tiny crack in a much larger rock. One foot nested into a gap. Her other hand found a hold, and she rose waist high above the ledge, a metre-wide path of mingled rock and dirt. She tested all her hand and footholds and then lifted the lowest leg up, and farther up, until her knee brushed her chest and her foot settled firmly on the flat surface.

  The relief sent tremors down her arms. She suppressed them, took a few deeper breaths, and dragged the last foot up. Then she cautiously stood up. Thunder cracked. Damp wind slammed into her, shoved her stumbling up the slope. She fetched up against the tree her rope was tied to. Unclipping, she followed the trail of broken bushes along the lip of the ravine. Rain spattered down, releasing the dusty pines’ aroma, turning the rocky gorge more like that distant Vancouver afternoon with every step.

  By the time she reached the brothers, Ben was down, his face buried in dead leaves and his legs over the ravine’s rim. One arm lay limp at his side, the other was crooked around an exposed t
ree root almost as thick as his wrist. Earl, bareheaded now, with blood streaming from a gash above his eye, alternately kicked him in the ribs and stomped the tree root. If he broke it free of the sandy soil, Ben would fall. With every breath haunted by visions of Capilano Gorge, Lacey crept forward. With every yank of Earl’s arm, more dirt crumbled away. With each kick at Ben’s ribs, his torso slid farther off the rim. How could she stop Earl without sending them all over the edge?

  Lacey spotted the dead branch just before she stepped on it. One end was jagged, as if it had been stepped on or rolled over during the struggle. She crouched and wrapped her cramped fingers around it. Lifting it silently, she rose as Earl shifted his weight to kick again. Branch raised, she loped toward him.

  Earl stared. Then he swung himself around a tree, away from the ravine, and crashed away through the undergrowth. Ben groaned. The hand clutching the tree root was white beneath the blood and dirt. The other dangled, half over the edge.

  Lacey knelt beside his head. “Hold on while I get you up.” She grabbed his backpack strap and tugged. When his hips were within reach, she got a hand through his climbing harness and, with a lot of help from his legs, hoisted his lower body fully onto the lip. He rolled away from the edge, panting, unable to even raise a hand to wipe the twigs and needles off his battered face.

  “Lie still. I’ll be back.”

  Picking up her branch, she ran after Earl, who could still faintly be heard crashing through the trees. Wind-driven rain pelted her exposed skin. Every rock and stick stabbed into her thin soles. She came out on a patch of gravel and skidded around the Jeep parked sideways across it. Huddled amid the pines was a weathered wood cabin with a roof so moss covered, it was almost indistinguishable from the branches above. No wonder it hadn’t been spotted from the air.

  Avoiding the sagging front step, she peered in the tiny window. In the pale green light from a rear window, she made out a table and stool, a small iron stove next to a loose pile of branches, and a set of rough bunks against an end wall. One lower bunk was occupied. Earl bent over it with his balled-up camouflage jacket in his hands. About to smother his father?