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Trudging across the highway, Dave and Bella jumped the guardrail just past mile marker 62 and ventured into the wilderness; Dave loaded for the final time to the tune of eighty pounds, pulling Bella along by the wrist as she clutched her dirty Snorax to her chest. In his other hand, Dave balanced the bulky cat carrier with Betty inside, the three-year-old foundling, black as oil, and fit-to-burst with her first litter.
After a mile or so, Dave’s hip finally warmed up, and stopped aching, and he was moving well, despite all the extra weight. Bella managed a steady pace through the densely wooded bottomlands, though not without Dave’s constant persuasion. He distracted her with games, I Spy, and Pick A Number, and I’m Thinking Of. When that didn’t work, he finessed her along with promises of magnificent things to come: waterfalls, and deep crevasses. Finally, when promises of grandeur no longer sufficed, Dave resorted to threats.
“You want to get eaten by a bear?” he said. “Have at it. Betty and me are moving on. Remember to play dead if he gets hold of you.”
That one was good for about a mile. But eventually, even the possibility of being eaten alive was not enough. Around mile four, still a mile from the mouth of the canyon, Bella quit on him; she sat on the ground sulking, refusing to go another step.
“Aw, honey, c’mon, now,” he said. “I know you’re tired. But we’re almost there.”
She clutched her chin and hung her head in silence.
“Baby, we gotta keep moving.”
After five minutes of this, Dave finally reversed his tact, and kneeled down beside her, setting down the cat carrier, and unburdening himself of the pack.
“Sweetie,” he said. “I’m sorry Daddy’s making you walk this far. It doesn’t seem fair. But we have to.”
Tilting her chin up, Dave saw that her little green eyes were filled with tears.
“Aw, honey, I’m sorry,” said Dave
“I don’t want to go any farther,” she said. “Why can’t it just be here? Why does it even matter?”
“We’re almost there,” he lied.
“Then, why do we have to hurry?”
Dave wrapped her in his arms and hugged her until he could feel her little heart beating behind her ribcage like a scared rabbit.
“Sweetie, look at me.”
He held her at arm’s length and looked her in the eyes.
“Do you want me to take you back? If you really want to go back, I’ll take you, right now.”
“No,” she said emphatically.
“Do you want to stay with Daddy?”
She pursed her lips and nodded.
“You want to stay with Betty and her kittens?”
She nodded again.
“Then we gotta keep moving, sweetie. Just for a little while longer, I promise.”
Dave was grateful when, a quarter mile later, a big orange Tomcat picked up their trail and started following them, much to Bella’s delight, and Betty’s unease. What the cat was doing out there, two miles from the nearest house, was anybody’s guess, but it was clear after a mile or so that the Tom had chosen them with a devotion Dave could not question.
“Can we keep him?”
“I’m not sure we have a choice, baby.”
By the time they entered the craggy jaw of the canyon a half-hour later, Bella was already smitten with the big orange cat, whom she named Tito.
You see, Dave told himself—already we’re making connections, already our lives are getting fuller. The orange cat was like a sign, his sudden presence and apparent devotion was an assurance that everything was as it ought to be.
Through the broad canyon they passed along the broken trail, still patchy with snow, until the steep, wooded walls closed in around them. Tito pulled up the rear, darting in and out of the ferns and salal, occasionally falling back out of sight, only to hurry forward again in bursts, a repeating cycle that kept Bella occupied for miles.
In a sunny meadow near the south end of the canyon, they stopped for lunch, in the shadows of the broad-shouldered foothills. In a few short hours, they had already achieved a degree of remoteness. Bella soon fell asleep against Dave’s leg, clutching her peanut butter sandwich. Dave leaned back against a big fir and tried with little success to empty his cluttered mind.
Tito slunk around the perimeter, inching closer to Dave and the carrier by the minute, until he was within two feet of Dave, resting tentatively on his haunches.
“What?” said Dave.
The cat tilted its big, orange head, kneading the ground with its forepaws.
“You might want to re-think your plan, buddy. Bound to be a hard life up there for the likes of you.”
Tito took this as a cue to move in closer and was soon pressing his side firmly up against Dave’s thigh, executing a half circle, his tail parading proudly behind him.
“You have no idea what you’re getting into, cat,” said Dave. “You didn’t think this out.”
It was as though Dave was talking to himself.
Dave let Bella sleep for an hour or more, knowing there would still be ample light to reach the bluff, and knowing too, that the sleep would serve her well going forward. Fiercely, she slept, mouth slightly open, her fingers creating a permanent impression in the soggy wheat bread of her sandwich.
Having ingratiated himself to Dave, the orange Tom turned his attention earnestly to poor, pregnant Betty, tucked deep in the carrier, pressing himself firmly against the side of it, his swishing tail aloft.
“Cat, you’re even dumber than I thought,” said Dave.
When he reached out to pet the Tom, the cat backed off warily, out of arm’s length.
A half-hour later, Bella awoke, rested, but slightly confused.
“Are we there?”
“Not quite, sweetie.”
With some effort Dave managed to rouse Bella back into action, and they plodded on through the walled corridor toward the high country. The butt of the canyon proved as ever a steep and grueling affair, with Dave making two trips at every juncture; first to convey the supplies, fifty and a hundred yards at a time, then doubling back for Bella, who never left his sight.
Midway up the south face, they arrived at a wide, bald escarpment, the site of a recent slide, which scarred the mountainside for several hundred feet vertically. Here, Dave was forced to carry Bella up and over the loose gravel, his feet scrambling for purchase.
“My God, you’re getting heavy,” he said, grunting.
Finally, in the late afternoon, with Dave carrying Bella the final leg, Betty mewling urgently from within her hold, and Tito following at a distance of forty feet with relative ease, a pale but determined sun beating down on them from the west, they crested the wide saddle, still covered with snow.
From this perch, now familiar to Dave, but new to Bella, the whole of the alpine wilderness lay seemingly within their grasp. The saw-toothed pickets marooned in ice, the wedge-shaped valleys awash in shadows, and the plunging canyon below, the river snaking through it, until the rock gave way to the sprawling forests to the north.
“We’re home, sweetie,” he said.
But Bella was already fast asleep again.
S’tka
S’tka’s earliest memories were of warmth and security. Swaddled in hides, eyes wide, she peeked out at the great, white world from the shelter of her mother’s arms. What anxiety she knew was immediate and lingered only so long as she remained outside the reach of her mother. At night, bathed in the flicker of the flames, hushed voices washing over her, the icy wind moaning in the darkened hinterlands, her thoughts arrived formless and fluid, radiant, like the warmth of the fire.
All she knew for certain, all she could grasp that had shape and meaning, was that this was where she belonged. This was home. The mountains, huddled together against the chill, the mountains, with their wooded folds, and craggy seams were home to the people, a sanctuary from the frigid wind that swept across the sea of ice, a refuge from the beasts of the lowlands, a retreat from the
cold, flat realities of the outside world. Like her mother’s persistent clutch, like the ever-warming flame, the shelter of the mountains was eternal.
Young S’tka and her people lived by the promise of the eternal. Even when they didn’t thrive—which, through the long, lean seasons of bitterness and ice, of, privation and peril, was more often than not—they clung to the notion of a benevolent design. The Great Provider, she who created the world and everything in it—though she tested their will frequently, pushing them to the edge of starvation with cruel regularity, when she wasn’t freezing, goring, trampling, or infecting them to death—would not forsake the people. For this was The Time Before Everything Changed.
Thus the people believed that they belonged there, that they did not come to this place from elsewhere, nor were they prisoners on this ice. They were survivors, now and forever.
But the icy world was not an agreeable host, far from it, and not everyone survived it. If the bloodthirsty beasts of the wilderness were not enough, if the relentless exposure to the ravaging elements, the ever-lurking shadow of sickness, nor the unwelcome visitations of the hostile clans from the south were not enough to seal their fates, there was the land itself: violent, unpredictable, and ever-changing.
The spring of S’tka’s seventh cycle, while lagging well behind the women as they foraged upon a grassy hillside just below the snowline, everything changed. It began as an angry rumbling that rose up from the center of the world, a thunderous report so loud that it seemed to envelop everything. S’tka glanced up just in time to greet a frigid blast of wind rushing down the mountain, pelting her face with granular ice. And in its wake came a terrible wall of white that rolled up the forest in front of it like a mat of reeds, engulfing everything in its path.
“E’ma!” she shouted. “E’ma!”
But S’tka could scarcely hear her own voice above the roar of the collapsing mountainside as it tumbled over the rock, churning the trees to splinter, and cleaving the mountain practically in half. In a terrible instant, S’tka watched as the torrent of filthy snow swallowed her mother and the others whole.
“E’ma,” she whimpered.
And then, like frozen rain upon the ice, there came a hiss, which seemed to last an eternity before finally relenting, followed by an awful stillness that took hold of everything. And there came a silence like no other, a silence so complete that even the world, and the sky, and everything in it were small by comparison.
Honey, I Can’t
Flat on his back, Dave stared dully up at the wash of stars, ears ringing, face burnt to a crisp, desert air ravaging his sinuses and clawing at the back of his throat.
What the fuck just happened? Where is everybody? What am I doing on my back?
The questions circled the inside of his skull like dazed houseflies.
Think, Dave, think.
One second they were at the head of a convoy barreling hell-bent through the desert of Al-Qa’im, adrenals pumping, senses tingling. Smitty was moving his lips silently in prayer. Baxter was gripping his rifle fiercely, sweating like a boxer, as the desert night blurred past.
The next thing Dave knew, he was on the ground, his teeth mired in the grit of sand. Numb from the shock, he couldn’t tell whether he was hit.
He tried to call out to Barlow, but blood pooled in the back of his throat. Dave’s heart was starting to pick up speed. Feeling was creeping back into his hands.
Breathe, Dave, fucking breathe. Stay calm, man, let the world come back into focus.
Every ten or fifteen seconds the sky flashed red, just long enough to see the tendrils of smoke wafting east, away from the city, quickly followed by a string of percussive thuds, reverberating as though from deep in the earth. Through the ringing of his ears he could hear the ragged cries of those he assumed to be his brothers. But how far off? A hundred feet? Thirty feet?
Is that Baxter? Smitty?
“Duane,” he tried to call out, but it was a garbled and breathless effort, as the blood again caught in the back of his throat.
He grit his teeth with a crunching of sand. Bit by bit, he swallowed the blood, as the sky flashed hellish red, and the mortar blasts thrummed like drumrolls in his chest.
He could feel most of his body, eventually. The mental fog began to lift. He clenched a fist and swallowed some more blood. It was time to move. Time to sort shit out. Time to throw his life back into peril and help his brothers.
So why couldn’t he move? Why was he stuck on his back in the damn sand like a capsized tortoise?
“Daddy,” Bella said with breathless urgency from outside his dream. “Daddy!”
Dave bolted upright, and drew a shallow breath, appraising the cool, musty darkness as he surveyed the cavernous space, broken only by the weak light of dawn puddled at the entrance.
“Daddy, wake up.”
“What is it?”
“Betty. She’s sick. I think she’s dying, Daddy.”
Dave’s heart contracted like a fist. Groping in the darkness, he located the lantern and lit the pilot, summoning the shadows, which sprung to life like genies on the stone wall. In the glow of the waltzing flame, Dave and Bella arrived hunched at the carrier in the corner, squatting to peer in at Betty’s dark figure, as she wheeled restlessly within, mewling in a pinched and urgent manner.
“It’s okay, Betty,” said Dave. “Just do what your body tells you.”
Raising her hackles, Betty arched her back then mewled again, pushing the length of her body forcefully up against the wall of the carrier.
“Daddy,” said Bella. “What’s happening?”
“Sshh, baby,” he said. “It’s okay.”
Betty slid onto her side, where she spread her hind legs and licked irritably below her abdomen.
“Why is she doing that, Daddy? What’s wrong?”
“She’s preparing.”
As he said it, Betty loosed an uneasy squall.
“Help her, Daddy.”
“Honey, I can’t.”
Betty yowled again on cue, then positioned herself on her back. And just like that, it began. A few more fervid licks between the hind legs, one last miserable mew, and the first kitten crowned, emerging moments later, pink and writhing and impossibly tiny from between Betty’s splayed haunches, cord and placenta attached.
“Daddy,” said Bella, after a moment. “Why is she eating it?”
“It’s not what you think, honey. C’mon,” said Dave, rising. “Let’s give Betty some space.”
“Is she going to die?” said Bella.
“No,” said Dave.
“Are the kitties going to die?”
“No,” said Dave. “Betty will take care of her kitties.”
“What about us?” she said, as Dave led her from the cave into the pale light of the new day. “Who’s going to take care of us?”
“We’re gonna take care of ourselves, baby.”
Actually it was not that Dave couldn’t move, it was not that he was physically paralyzed, though he could feel he was hit in the hip, but that wasn’t holding him back. The will to move had simply left him. He could feel his whole body, it just refused to move. Just this once, his body had decided it was not going to move. It was not going to do what was expected of it, it was not going to fulfill its duty. He was going to lay right fucking there in the desert, and he was going to close his eyes, and he was going to blot out the miserable cries. Even through the hood of his eyelids he could see the sky flashing crimson, as the mortars drummed in his chest. But goddammit, he was not going to move. He didn’t care if he died. But in the end, whether it was his training, or his conscience, he moved mechanically to the aid of his brothers.
Now, a purple heart and over a decade later, Dave was ready to live again, if only for Bella. With expert efficiency, he built a small cooking fire out on the bluff and set a pan of water to boiling. He’d stockpiled over thirty gallons of fresh water from the creek in the weeks leading up to the final transition, four and five gallons at a
time, up the steep wooded bank, and through the little glen, then up again the crumbling hillside to the plateau.
Twenty minutes after the coals flattened out, Dave and Bella were eating oatmeal with raisins around the windswept fire.
“Why this place again, Daddy?” she said.
Every day, she reminded Dave more of a young Nadene, with those absorbent green eyes.
“Well, for starters, we have to name all these mountains,” he said, encompassing them with a sweep of his spoon.
“The sort of pointy one is Mt. Kiss,” she said of Phantom. “Because it looks like a white chocolate Kiss.”
“What about the fat one?”
“Hmm, let’s see,” she said, scrunching her nose.
Soon she’d named them all, though Dave knew there was a good chance she wouldn’t remember most of the names the next day, which was good news, because she could name them again.
When they returned to the cave to monitor Betty’s progress, they found her recumbent in the rear of the carrier, anxious and alert, engulfed by an indeterminate mass of kittens, all jostling for position at her deflated belly; the pink one, practically hairless, two or three gray ones, one orange, two, possibly three black.
“Ooooh, look, Daddy,” said Bella. “Can I pet one?”
“They’re not ready,” he said.
“Why?”
“They’re too young, honey. They need more time with their mommy.”
“But Daddy, I want to pet one, they’re so cute.”
“Soon, Bella.”
“But Daddy.”
Bella spent most of the day in the cave by candlelight, watching Betty groom and feed her litter. Over and over, Dave reminded her to give them space, not to touch them, not to alarm Betty, who seemed somewhat distressed by Bella’s constant attention, or maybe it was the big orange Tom, never far off, who was putting her on edge.
Meanwhile, Dave busied himself around camp; stowing the last of the supplies and staking out a small garden on the plateau. At midday, he paused in his labor to coax Bella away from the cats, into the light of afternoon, where he revived the cooking fire, added water to the leftover oats, and reheated them.
Legends of the North Cascades Page 4
