We rode the horses at a fast pace and reached the ravine within an hour.
After so many hours of traveling, with “the ravine” as the place we were looking to reach, coming upon it so quickly this morning seemed both remarkable and unremarkable at the same time. I was somehow breathless, like I’d been running blind this whole way and now, suddenly, the sun was bright in my eyes. Things were moving faster now. I could feel myself tingling, my senses heightened. We were here.
I had not realized, until I looked across the span of the ravine, that we had been climbing so high inside the Woods these last several days. What had seemed like a gentle slope was, in actuality, much steeper than I had imagined, for when we stood at the top of the ravine, it was like we were on the edge of the world. I had never been anywhere so high up in my twelve years of life, and for a few moments, as I looked down the side of the cliff, I felt my soul swoon as if it were leaving my body. I had to get down on my hands and knees and crawl back to where we had left Pony and the brown mare, a few dozen feet from the rock face. Merely watching the marshal pacing to and fro on the precipice made my very spine twitch and my knees go wobbly. There was a name for what I was experiencing, which I remembered Pa teaching me once, but the word wouldn’t come to me. It, like a million other words, swirled around in the space between me and the earth below.
I could not watch Marshal Farmer any longer and buried my face in Pony’s mane. The way this horse whickered at me in return made me think fleetingly of Argos, who would make these sweet little yapping sounds when I petted his stomach, and suddenly a wave of despair came over me. How is Argos doing? What am I doing here? How in the world did I come to be on the edge of a ravine so far from home?
I looked around for Mittenwool. I had not seen him since the night before. It aggravated me when he wasn’t somewhere nearby. He’d promised me he would stay close.
Marshal Farmer waddled over, mumbling something to himself. He was not in a jolly mood, to say the least.
He had lost the trail. That much I could tell. Here on the rocky ledge of the impossibly high cliff, there were no hoofprints in wet earth to follow, or bent twigs. We had searched high and low for horse manure or signs of a camp. It was as if the men we pursued, Pa in tow, had vanished off the face of the earth.
“So, what do we do now?” I asked.
“Hanged if I know,” he rumbled, his voice like gravel.
“I’m thirsty,” I said, not so much to him but simply to speak my feeling aloud. But this caused him to anger.
“Will you stop your yammering while I’m trying to think!”
I wanted to respond that I had not talked at all that morning, but I held my tongue. He went back to the rock face and got down on his knees. The mere sight of him bending, his back corkscrewed, made me wince. He scooted himself to the very edge, then lay prone, so that his head was completely dangling over the side of the cliff. I was full of admiration for his courage, until I heard him call me.
“Kid, come over here,” he said.
“No, thanks, I’m fine here,” I answered, my face buried in Pony’s neck.
“Come over here!”
I rolled my eyes, and crawled up to the vicinity of where he was, lingering by his boots.
“No, up by me,” he commanded. “My eyes aren’t so good. You have to look and tell me what you see.”
“My eyes aren’t so good, either,” I replied.
“Come over here now,” he said. His mouth was clenched when he said this, his face red again.
I hesitated, but I knew that on the other side of this ravine was Pa, somewhere, and in my bones and in my marrow and in my heart and in my every fiber, I believed he needed me. So I let go of my fear as best I could and, lying down, my stomach pressed against the smooth rock, pushed myself upward until I had reached Marshal Farmer. With my hands clutching the edge of the cliff, I lay shoulder to shoulder with him, our heads hanging over the chasm below.
“Look down there,” he ordered me. “What do you see?”
I felt like I would faint looking to where he pointed, but I didn’t. Below was an unquiet creek, not quite as big as a river, winding its way through a narrow trench between the rock walls.
“I see a creek,” I answered.
“No, over there!” he prodded impatiently, pointing across the chasm to the wall on the other side, which was about a stone’s throw away.
“Nothing but the cliff,” I said.
“Then over there and there!” he commanded, sweeping his arm left and right over the side, which I took to mean I should be looking everywhere for something.
“What am I looking for?” I asked.
“I don’t know! Just use your eyes, confound it.”
So I looked for heaven knows what. I made a careful sweep of the entire cliff wall across from me, looking to the right and the left. There was nothing but more of the same yellow rock face, and I was about to say so when something at the top of the cliff caught my eye. It was Mittenwool! Standing on the edge, waving at me. That was where he’d gone to! It was all I could do to contain my joy, seeing him there, and of course I didn’t say anything to Marshal Farmer.
Mittenwool was motioning for me to look beneath him. He stood directly above where the cliff curved inward on itself, billowing like a curtain. I dropped my gaze straight as a plumb line to the bottom, and there, about twenty feet above the creek, I spotted a crude, oblong pocket in the rock face. It seemed unremarkable, except for the fact that there was another one, more or less the same size, about three feet below it, and then a few more below that one. There were six in all, somewhat parallel to one another, leading down to the creek.
“I see small indents over there,” I said to Marshal Farmer, pointing to the left. “Kind of like ladder rungs carved into the wall.”
He followed my hand, but couldn’t see a thing for all his squinting. He pushed himself back from the edge and nudged me with his swollen knuckles to do the same.
We went back to the horses and rode them about a quarter of a mile through the Woods, parallel to the ravine, and then repeated what we had done before. Here the rock was much steeper, so to be able to lean our heads over the side of the cliff required more upward pulling than my arms could muster. I thought Marshal Farmer would help yank me up, but he only bullied me into it.
“Come on, kid! Get your puny little self up here,” he said harshly.
I pulled and pulled, and finally managed to peer over the edge to get a closer view of the other side of the ravine. There, to my relief, was Mittenwool, still standing where he had been before. And far below him were the six indents above the creek. But from this vantage point, at the juncture directly opposite the cliff wall, I could see what I had not been able to see before. Above the “ladder,” where the wall folded inward, was a large ledge leading to a hole in the rock face. It was maybe a dozen feet high and across, but was far back enough on the ledge to be hidden from view unless you were right across from it. Otherwise, just a few feet left or right, you’d completely miss seeing what was most certainly the mouth of a cave.
5
“HOLY MACKEREL,” MARSHAL FARMER whispered gleefully, “we’ve found it, kid. We’ve found it.”
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“Look for yourself! Even my old eyes can see it’s a cave. It should be pitch-black in there, right? But it’s not. Why do you think that is?”
“Because it’s lit inside?”
He nodded. “Exactly!”
“So Pa is in there?” I asked, my heart jumping.
“I’d bet money on it,” he answered. “They use those holes in the wall like a ladder to climb up from the creek bed.”
“But how do they get down to the creek bed from up here?”
“That I don’t know. There’s got to be a way, eithe
r down or across. What’s over that way?” He motioned for me to look to our left, where, much farther upstream, the creek seemed to fork around a narrow waterfall. “Is that a cascade up there? I feel like I can hear something like that. Dang these old eyes and ears.”
“There’s a waterfall, yes, sir.”
“Let’s go.”
He slid back down the rock and I followed him.
We rode for another half hour, Pony keeping to the tree line like he knew I didn’t want to be able to see over the edge, and the marshal riding alongside the ravine, though not close enough to it that he could be spotted from across the chasm.
When we finally stopped, the marshal motioned for me to come over, and it was all I could do to stay steady when I rode up next to him. We stood on an overlook that faced out over the ravine and, across from us, another overlook a few feet below ours. It was about a six-foot leap to the other side. Between the two overlooks was nothing but a straight drop to the frothy creek below. This was the narrowest point of the ravine, for immediately to our left the gully widened, dividing into two separate landforms that rose steeply like the sides of the mountains they were.
I couldn’t even look over the edge without getting dizzy, my knees rattling. I walked Pony back to the trees a good dozen feet or so from where Marshal Farmer stood looking for whatever it was he was looking for, which I imagined was a magical way across the narrow chasm.
“Silas!” said Mittenwool, walking out of the Woods toward me.
“You found the cave,” I whispered gratefully, careful the marshal wouldn’t hear me.
“He’s in there, Silas! Pa’s in the cave. I saw him.”
I covered my mouth to keep from gasping.
“His feet are shackled, but he seems all right,” he continued. “There are men in the cave with him. I don’t know how many because they were coming and going. Their horses are at the foot of the Falls. There’s a path down to the creek on the other side, which you can’t really see from here because it’s right behind the waterfall.”
“How do we get to the other side?”
“We’re going to have to jump,” said Marshal Farmer, who had approached from behind and thought I was talking to him.
I turned around quickly.
“What do you mean, jump?” I asked.
“The path down to the creek must be on the other side of the Falls.”
“I know, but—”
“What do you mean, you know? How can you know?”
“I just mean I’m assuming. But it doesn’t matter anyway if we can’t get to the other side of the chasm.”
His nostrils flared. “There is a way to the other side, and that is to jump!”
I found this so ludicrous, I practically laughed. “We can’t do that!”
“He’s right, unfortunately,” Mittenwool murmured, still standing next to me. “It’s the only way across.”
“We are not jumping over the ravine,” I stated loudly, not believing what I was hearing. From the marshal, maybe, but from Mittenwool, who was always so protective of me?
“I spent all night searching for a safer path,” Mittenwool said, staring past me at the chasm. “There’s no way across. Maybe if we went all the way back down the way we came, we’d find a bridge or something, but that could take a whole day.”
Marshal Farmer was talking at the same time as Mittenwool, so I only heard the last bit of what he was saying. “…horse of yours will get you over.”
I looked at the other side of the ravine. “But I…I never even rode a horse before a couple of days ago,” I stammered.
Marshal Farmer clucked his tongue, like I wasn’t telling him anything he hadn’t guessed. Then he came up next to me to check the girth on Pony’s saddle. He pulled on the cinch strap to tighten it, then patted Pony’s shoulders and nodded admiringly.
“This is a fine horse you have here, kid,” he said, sounding gentler than he’d ever sounded before. “Just keep your heels down, and hold on tight. You’ll be all right. Arabians are good jumpers.”
“Arabians?”
He chuckled softly, like he’d just let me in on some secret, and mounted his horse. Then he snapped his fingers at me impatiently to do the same. I glanced at Pony, who puffed through his nose, like he was assuring me that he could do this.
Mittenwool had walked to the edge of the cliff and was peering over the side, looking more worried than I’d ever seen him look before. I was sure he was going to tell me to turn back now. It was what he’d been saying all along, after all. And here we were, about to see all his fears borne out on this reckless jump across an abyss.
Instead, when he caught my eye, he said, “You can do this, Silas.”
My mouth dropped open, that’s how surprised I was.
“Pony’ll get you over,” he said assuredly, his eyes bright.
I held his gaze for a long second, my eyebrows still high up on my forehead, and then I shook my head in disbelief. “Well, all right, then,” I whispered.
“That a boy!” whooped the marshal. “Now come over by me.”
I took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, like I was blowing out a candle. Then I climbed into the saddle. Only a few days ago, I could barely scramble up there, and now it was the most natural motion in the world to me.
I kneed Pony to follow Marshal Farmer’s mare onto the overlook. There, at the very edge of the ravine, Marshal Farmer and I let our horses take it all in: the six-foot jump across, the chasm between the cliffs, the raging creek far below.
The marshal nudged me.
“I got my bearings now,” he said, gazing down into the chasm. “This here is called the Hollow. And those woodlands across from us, that’s Hollow Forest on a map. Straight up the mountain is Rosasharon, not more than a two-hour ride that way.” He swept his arm to the left. “I know the sheriff there. He’s a good man. After we find the path down to the creek, we’ll head right back on up to Rosasharon, raise a posse, and be back here with a dozen men by late afternoon. If all goes well, I’ll have Ollerenshaw clapped in irons by tonight and you’ll be with your pa again! Doesn’t that sound good to you?”
“Yes, sir,” I answered.
“Told you I’d find him, didn’t I?”
“Yes, you did!”
His face widened in a satisfied smile. Then he turned his mare around and trotted back to the trees to get a good run on the jump. I followed close behind.
“I’ll go first,” he said when I sidled up next to him. “You come right after me. Heels down. No hesitating. If you hedge even a little, your mount will know it and pitch you over the cliff. Trust me on that.”
“I won’t hedge.”
“It’s fine to be afraid. Just don’t hedge, or your horse will know it.”
“I won’t hedge.”
He clapped his big callused hand on my shoulder, which was such an unexpected gesture, I flinched without realizing. This made him grin so wide, I saw his bottom teeth clearly for the first time, like three brown peas stuck randomly in his gums.
“All right, kid!” he thundered happily. “I’ll see you on the other side!”
Then he clicked his tongue, slapped the reins, and spurred his horse hard. The mare bolted forward quite majestically, running at a full gallop onto the overlook. About twelve giant strides in, she quickened her pace and leapt over the ravine with a kind of wild abandon. It stirred me to see that dour horse take off so, like she was flying. But no sooner had she landed on the other side than I heard a horrible crack, like a gunshot fired across the chasm. The sound of bone crunching reached me before my eyes even understood what was happening; that the horse had tumbled forward onto the bare rock. The marshal flew headfirst over her neck onto the stone, flipping a few times before landing dead-still, his body crumpled up like a strin
g puppet. But the mare, still not finished in her wild fall, then skidded into him, long legs askew, and rolled over him. The cascade of noises echoed through the ravine. The clang of horseshoes on stone. The braying, like a long, shrill cry. Followed by a stillness that I was afraid would crush me.
I did not hesitate, at this point, but drove my heels into Pony and put my faith in his limbs and muscles, and we galloped at full speed over the rock ledge and jumped over the abyss.
SIX
Take courage, my heart; you’ve been
through worse than this.
—Homer Odyssey
1
PA HAD A SERIES OF BOOKS THAT I loved to peruse at night called A History of the Earth, and Animated Nature. It was made up of four volumes, but the one I liked the most was the second volume, which told the history of all the animals of the world. It was filled with luminous depictions of every creature imaginable. The moment Marshal Farmer uttered the word Arabian, I could picture the page in the book that read, Of all the countries in the world where the horses run wild, Arabia produces the most beautiful breed. How had it not occurred to me before? All along, Pony had seemed familiar to me. His profile. The arch of his neck. The high carriage of his tail. It was there in the book, in those drawings of his desert forebears.
And could he jump? Pegasus himself could not have done a better job leaping over that chasm, with me astride, gliding through the air with graceful majesty.
Pony landed easily on the other side, without so much as a skid or a bump. I jumped out of the saddle and got down on my knees by Marshal Farmer’s head. He was breathing, but there was a trickle of blood coming from his mouth, and his body was bent at an unnatural angle. I felt light-headed just seeing him like that.
“Marshal Farmer,” I called out, gently slapping his face.
“Ho there,” he said feebly, opening his eyes. “You get across all right, kid?”
“Yes, sir, I’m fine.”
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