The Dry Land

The man and his dog walked three days deep into the canyons. Up a long wash, then up a tributary canyon where they were stymied for a day by a rockfall, then a pouroff, then a wall. But with the rope they made their way onto a narrow plateau between two great canyon systems, a day behind schedule. On the topographic maps the plateau appeared nearly flat, but it proved to be a sea of undulating sandstone strewn with head-high boulders, raked, as though by some great gardener, into long, straight windrows that nearly blocked their way. The man had suppressed worry ever since they’d struggled to make the top, and now he suffered moments of panic. Only four days left before he needed to be home and back in the office, and the desert had contested every step. He struggled hour after hour to reach the watershed that looked most likely to lead back to the wash, but the boulders led them farther and farther from the path he’d sketched. Now he relied on the GPS. It showed his progress as a looping, knotted line, like unspooled rope. The dog’s feet were raw, and he quit chasing lizards.

Then, on their fourth day out, an hour before sunset, the man found a narrow way between boulders, and this led to a long, flat stretch of slickrock. Finally making forward progress he relaxed and enjoyed the late light, somehow both orange and purple. He pushed hard until he couldn’t see the way ahead. Exhausted, he fed the dog, ate a handful of nuts, and went to sleep.

After midnight he awoke to the dog’s movement. The moon was high and almost full, and the dog stood looking southwest, his ears and tail rigid with alertness. He whined. The man sat up and the dog moved close and pressed against him, and kept looking at the black horizon. The man held still to silence the rustle of nylon, and he felt, or almost heard, the faintest shudder of thunder. He sat for some time listening, and when he looked up again he saw the strobing of lightning on the horizon. His knees had almost seized as he slept, and his feet were bruised, but he stuffed the sleeping bag into his backpack and walked north, toward a distant pile of boulders he had noted.

The thunder focused and deepened, one crack and thud after another. On a rise the wind caught up to them. A towering cloud showed pale in the moonlight. They hurried. As the first fat drops slapped around them, they pushed under the overhang of a colossal boulder, sharp-edged and new. In its lee they crouched on a flat patch of sand. The water came abrupt, as to fill a vacuum. At his arm’s reach it sluiced off the boulder and its splash soaked his feet.

The wind was at their backs most of the night, but the water whipped and tore at the narrow strip of sand, like a sea against a beach. Manes of water tossed around the edges of the boulder and soaked them. He kept the sleeping bag dry in the pack, but the dog shivered, from fear and cold, and the man drew his knees up under his sweater and jacket, items he almost hadn’t brought.

He settled as best he could into meditation and felt himself on the verge of something like prayer. He almost voiced his wish that the rain stop and the sun return. Twice the storm slacked, but the wind returned and the rain was merciless. Then the lightning, which had been distant, struck the prow of the plateau. The dog went rigid with terror. The lightning stamped toward them, from boulder to boulder. The man knew he was in danger under the boulder, but he was cold and exhausted, and he didn’t move. He drew his feet back as far from the edge of the water as he could and sat.

As he stared into the night an explosive flash lit an utterly foreign landscape. His retinas burned with a blue-lit catastrophe of water and red rock. The slickrock they had walked ran with a wind-ripped sheet of red slurry and strewn gravel and cobbles. The dog bolted into the black.

The man called and called, but the dog did not come back. He found his headlamp and shone it outward, but it showed nothing but tattered pennants of red water. Water ran a foot deep down a shallow swale just beyond the strip of sand. It carried fresh-fractured rock with it. A mangled bush of Mormon Tea rushed down. A trunk of juniper. He could see no further.

In a lull in the rain he shouldered the pack and stepped out, following the beam of his headlamp from high spot to high spot. He came to an edge. The headlamp showed only a black void below. He walked along the edge, calling the dog, until he came to a narrow rush of water. He went to step across, but he slipped on the slurry and fell to one knee in the water. It pushed him toward the edge, and when he swung his other leg out to steady himself it did not find stone and he spun into the void. Something snagged his ring and yanked his left arm over his head, but when he closed his hand he grasped only water.

*

Rebekah was a week into the wilderness survival course. They had walked ten hours a day, starting at the foot of a broad wash, itself deep in the desert at the end of a long sandy two-track, many miles from a remote town. She felt at odds with the group. There were three buzz-cut soldiers, boys really, on a military training program. She found their jargon-laden talk of machinery and weapons, their leering obscenity, their impassive faces, and their stoic competitiveness repellent. On the first day, the instructor, a lanky, middle-aged, pony-tailed man wearing buckskins, had made an unmistakable pass at her as she lagged behind the group. The two other women were twice her age and close friends, and were unforgivably fit and capable. They barely acknowledged her except to help her through difficult climbs. She felt alone, persecuted, and fragile.

And she was hungry and exhausted. Each student carried only a few approved items in a short blanket knotted over one shoulder. The coarse buckskins she’d sewed chafed at her shoulders and waist, and her moccasins were wearing thin and her feet were bruised. She slept  ̶  or, mostly, lay awake thinking obsessively about food and the pain in her neck and feet  ̶  in her Pendleton coat in the canvas blanket in the sand. They ate only a meager ration of trail-mix and jerky and what they could forage. And, at the end of the first week, following the course syllabus, they split up. The instructor took each of them separately to pre-selected, sheltered spots too far from each other to communicate. He would come by every so often to check on her, but for now she was alone.

Hungry, she devised a willow weir. She cut and stripped a bunch of wands. She rolled the lengths of stripped bark between two flat slabs of sandstone, and twisted the softened fibers into a kind of primitive twine with which she tied the wands crosswise until she had enough of the rigid mesh, or grid, to span the stream propped up with rocks. She flushed trout toward the weir. She wept with happiness when one of the fish, against her every expectation, became stranded and she managed to kick it out of the water. She cooked it on a stick and ate all of it but the bones and fins, then slept for hours.

The next day she took stock. She had a handful of nuts and the weir and a vague recollection of tips and tricks she had Googled before the trip: designs for snares and traps, making a comfortable bed, uncertain notions of edible plants. She ate half the nuts and was still hungry. She spent the morning chasing trout toward the weir, but none stranded. Then she used her knife to fray the edge of her blanket, and picked a string out. She propped a slab of stone on an upright stick, tied the string to the stick, spit a chewed-up nut onto the ground under the slab, and hid behind a boulder holding the other end of the string. She waited all afternoon, but no animal came. In the morning, the nut paste was gone.

Fearful that the instructor would show up, she stripped and took a quick bath. Her ribs and hip bones were sharp. She had lost more weight in a week than she had ever lost in a year of dieting.

Clambering up to her blanket in the sandy alcove left her panting. She barely slept.

That night a storm came up from the south. She was dry back in the alcove, but lightning hammered the facing cliffside, and a great rush of water came down the stream. She couldn’t see it in the dark, but the stone shook under her as she lay, and she was terrified that the water would reach her. But in the morning the rain passed and she was safe. From the alcove she looked down on the stream. The flood had torn out most of the willows, and those that remained were flattened and bedraggled and burdened with the flotsam of the desert above. Fresh-broken rocks bigger than her head lay tossed along the floodline, ten feet or more above the normal water level. A cottonwood trunk thicker than her waist lay splintered and wedged between boulders where the day before there had been no tree. The weir, of course, was gone.

All that day she spent making a new weir. She chased fish for hours, but the streambed was now littered with new, sharp-edged stones, and her feet became raw and cut. As the sun lowered she sat behind the boulder holding her string and waited for an animal to come to her bait. None did. She ate the rest of the nuts but one and went to bed.

*

The man fell and bounced. He stretched his arms into the black and reflexively grabbed something. A branch. He hung on to a juniper tree. He couldn’t see anything. His headlamp was missing. The water roared by him. Rocks knocked together and rasped. He felt around with his feet. He was on a steep slope of scree. The juniper grew uphill of a boulder. He let himself down into a sort of saddle formed by the roots of the tree behind the boulder. He stayed there as the sky lightened and the rain abated.

He found himself at the top of a small boxcanyon. He had fallen over the lip of a pouroff now a tantalizing ten feet above. He looked for a way back onto the plateau, but the sandstone lip was continuous, and the overhanging rock had no obvious handholds. The canyon was full of small trees and jumbled boulders. The sun came over the edge, and he spread his things out to dry. He found a flat area and slept.

Later, he picked his way downstream. It was slow going. The boulders canted every which way, and the canyon descended steeply, from pool to pool. He could not judge the depth of the water because it was thick with redrock silt. For hours he moved downhill. The boxcanyon opened into a wash. The sand was waterlogged, but the walking was easy. He rested and ate. He wanted to lighten his pack and walk back to his truck as directly as possible, but he held a small hope that the dog would find him, so he didn’t discard the dogfood. He took GPS coordinates. He was far east of his intended route. He had walked off the edge into a quadrant beyond his plans. He figured he was in the next canyon system over from the one he had walked up. But where the plateau should be in front of him there was an unfamiliar wash heading west, as though he had somehow walked under the plateau in the night. He couldn’t make sense of his location. He sketched on the back of a map, trying to reconstruct his route, but he could not explain the topography in front of him. The desert fell away to the west, ridge upon ridge, contorted and grotesque, as far as he could see. But where the plateau should be the way was open. He walked downstream all day, mostly easy walking on packed sand. He used the rope a few times, but he walked miles. Late afternoon the wash widened and he found an easy route up a fin to the desert above. He scrambled up to take his bearings. At the top he could see many miles in every direction. The canyonlands rose on all sides. He seemed to be near the bottom of a basin a hundred miles across. It made no sense. The sun was in the west and all the canyons eventually flowed south, so he felt confident he was oriented, but the mountain should be to the north and he could not see it, and his mental map of the desert, which matched the maps before him on the ground, did not match the terrain he could see.

He went back down into the wash and walked downstream, roughly south. He camped, and early in the morning he continued walking. He walked until his knees ached. As the sun lowered he realized he had been walking east for a long time. He could not recollect a broad wash running east. He went to bed, but kept waking on the edge of panic.

*

She expected the instructor to check on her, but he did not come. Two long days had passed since the storm, and she was weak with hunger. Her instructions were to wait, to not stray out of sight of her campsite, but she couldn’t wait. She put her few things in the blanket and slung it over her bony shoulder. She arranged some small, round, black stones in the shape of an arrow pointing the way she planned to walk. She took the weir and the string for the trap and walked back up the canyon the way she had come when she was assigned this campsite. The walk out of the canyon was easy. On top, the slickrock heaved away on all sides. Basalt boulders lay here and there, and she could see the tops of a few trees that grew in deep cracks in the rock. She set off the way she remembered coming. She walked toward the morning sun. The desert here was mostly undifferentiated. One stretch looked much like the last. In the far distance she could see a mesa she recognized. To her left, north, was the mountain, out of reach but always, reliably, north. After a while she came to a deep cut in the rock. The tops of cottonwoods came almost level to the slickrock. She could not see the bottom. She skirted the canyon for a while, then crossed on what must have been a natural bridge. She reoriented and kept walking.

By noon she knew she’d walked too far. She had missed the place where they had last camped as a group. She drank from a pool in the rock. She backtracked for an hour but came to a buckling in the stone she couldn’t climb over, and which she certainly had not descended. To the south the wall grew in height until it was a towering cliff. To the north it continued out of sight. She followed it until she could climb it. Above the wall the slickrock gave way to a thick band of crumbly ochre stone she did not recognize. She stood on top of the wall and looked out over the desert. For miles below her she could see the rippled, quilted surface of the slickrock. Above her was scree, then mesas. She sat for a long time puzzling over how she had got here. She had walked east all morning, except around the slot canyon. She had not seen a wall or scree slopes or a mesa. Then she had turned and walked back westward and come to this place. She could not see a single feature she recognized. She climbed back down the wall and walked. She decided to find a high point and make a fire and hope they saw her. There was very little vegetation in the slickrock. She gathered whatever wood she found and headed for a dome of rock. It looked like an ocean swell. Climbing it she felt faint.

*

He came to a running steam. The wash had been very flat for some miles. The stream flowed down into a side canyon. He followed it. Eventually, the water would cross the road. He walked and walked, but the stream fell over a cliff and he couldn’t follow. The canyon was too deep and steep to climb out of, so he had to turn around and retrace his long walk. He was nearly exhausted, and this setback filled him with fear. He sat on a rock and swore and screamed and cried. His voice came back to him and he heard nothing else but the water and the hiss of the wind through the pines. He had no idea where he was. Just somewhere east of the maps. Finally, he walked back up and out of the canyon. He stopped and laid his food out. Two more days if he stretched it. He filled his bottles from a pool and went to bed. As he settled, his calves cramped. He slept for a while. He woke and looked at the moon, now full. The stars here had always been a source of wonder for him, he had always referred to them as a sure sign that the desert was his sanctuary. In the office or at a party when he mentioned the unparalleled brilliance of the stars above the canyonlands he had always been sure of his listener’s agreement, even reverence. But now they shone from the bottom of a black abyss, and he felt that he might fall off his stony bed and plummet forever into the silent void. He was like an insect clinging to the underside of a ceiling.

He studied the Milky Way from horizon to horizon. A brilliant band cut off at either end by hard horizon-lines of black. Then it was as though a cluster of stars at one end of the arc danced and reddened and he realized he was looking at a fire, not very far away. He kicked out of his sleeping bag and yelled. The echo came back to him. He stared at the fire. He didn’t blink. It faked and spun in a gust. He could not see anything in its light. He yelled again. He stuffed his belongings in his pack and walked. He stumbled over and over. He tried to light his path with the GPS, but the light was very faint. Finally, afraid he would step off an edge, he stopped and yelled some more. Something moved in front of the fire. The scissoring of legs. He yelled several times. He reached around in the dark for small stones and lined them up to point at the fire. He barely slept.

*

The fire was small. She stayed up for a long time adding sticks to it. A gusting wind kept fanning it. She sat and hoped someone would see it. She moved around the fire in case she was screening it from someone’s view. She thought she heard something over the wind. Maybe a coyote, or maybe a voice. She got up to look, but even the brilliant moon showed her nothing.

She was awake all night. As soon as she could see she circled the area looking for material to burn. When she got back to her blanket, last night’s fire was only a black smudge on the rock. She piled some duff and a few windblown twigs and soon had a sooty little fire going, but it cast very little light. She stood and turned. Then she saw a figure approach, still a long way off. She strained to see who it was. As the sun rose she saw it was a man carrying a backpack. Not one of her group.

She ran and gathered a little more to burn, but when she got back to the fire the man was near. She just stood and shivered and waited.

*

A woman as though from lost time: dirty, wearing buckskins and moccasins, gaunt and wild-haired. She stood and stared at him as he walked up. On the ground by her fire nothing but a blanket and a Pendleton shirt. She wore an elk-antler knife on a lanyard around her neck. Her skin was brown. Her elbows knobby and outsized, her collarbones articulate and sharp. She stood unblinking, wary.

The man stopped. He could not look her in the eyes, except glancingly. The scene bore on him strangely, as though on a screen, but with a clarity he did not know. He apologized for intruding. She would be scared.

She said it was okay. She gestured as though inviting him into her house, indicating that he should sit, rest, be comfortable. She crouched opposite. The fire died, leaving only blown ashes. She put on her jacket. They stammered a few words of polite conversation.

She told him she was lost. For a minute, he commiserated with her plight, then admitted, shamefaced, that he was lost, too. They sat in the intractable desert. She told him she was very hungry. That she had not eaten more than snacks in days. He gave her his last granola bar and a piece of jerky, gritty with sand. They ate this weak meal in silence. She got up and went to a depression in the rock and knelt to drink and her shirt rode up and he could see every knob of her spine.

They spoke at length about where they had been. They drew a map in the flat sand of a playa. They may have walked into the desert at the same place, where the county road crossed the big wash, but they weren’t sure. She described where her group had been dropped off. Low cliffs, the wide, sandy floor of the wash, a few willows and cottonwoods, a very long walk north with the mountain always ahead. He asked for details, but all the sandstone she’d seen flowed together in her head. She asked him about his route, but everything he said sounded typical of a thousand places in the desert. They did not know how they had got here or how to return. They agreed to walk south until they reached the county road. As they looked that way in the early morning they saw only a tortured maze of stone: mesas, cliffs, meanders too deep for the low sun, wall upon wall of stone, the folded and mangled earth irreducible to geometry or map. She said The only thing a person can do is put one foot in front of the other and keep going until you get where you want to be or until you can’t keep walking. They gathered their things and walked.

After the meal she felt revived, almost strong. Certainly, she felt light on her feet. She offered to help carry some of his load, but he refused. Finally, he gave her half his water. He took the bag of dogfood out and went to empty it on the ground, but she stopped him and carried that, too.

They were relieved to have found each other. They walked for hours, into the afternoon. The going was mostly easy, just rolling pinyon and juniper forest. He walked ahead. When he slowed to let her pass, so as not to seem arrogant, she slowed too, so he walked ahead the whole way. They barely spoke. As they began looking for a shady place to rest and eat, a jay landed on the branch of a pinyon ahead of him. They jay shrieked and flapped. He kept walking. The jay flew ahead to the next tree and shrieked some more and held its wings back in a strange way. He kept walking. But she stood and watched the jay. She asked him to hold up a minute. She walked back to the tree the jay had first landed on. The jay flew back, apparently in a panic, and landed close to her, again squawking and thrashing. When she moved toward him, he hopped away among the branches, but when she moved away from him he flew to intercept her again. She backtracked along their path to another tree. The jay’s display became frantic. An old and wind-twisted tree. In the crotch between the lowest branches she found a hollow. With the jay bounding around her head she put her hand in the hollow and lifted out a fistful of pine nuts. The jay’s winter stash. They filled his Ziploc bags with nuts, took every one they found.

He wondered where she’d learned that trick. Just intuition, she said. She was just very hungry, and had started thinking very clearly these last several days. They left the jay behind and sat in the shade and ate pine nuts. Each little seed took work, and their fingers were black with pitch.

They walked all day, hours beyond weariness, downhill and south wherever the terrain allowed. The sand gave way to white stone. They followed a broad swale for a long time and the sides rose around them until they found themselves in a canyon a thousand feet deep. They camped that night on a sandbar at a bend in the canyon, under massive cottonwoods. The beauty of the camp was dull through a scrim of fear. They slept hard.

Another day walking. The canyon narrowed and meandered. Several times they had to climb down jumbles of boulders and scout routes around pouroffs. Then the ground disappeared before them over a chute of scalloped stone. The canyon continued hundreds of feet below. Til dark they searched for a way down, but every route ended in a shear fall far longer than his rope could reach.

The next day they walked back up the canyon, looking hard for a way out. Banks of scree and unbroken cliffs on both sides. They came to a towering slab that had broken from the wall and stood free with a narrow gap behind it. They knew the promise of such formations and found a steep ramp of sand in the gap and eventually made the clifftop. The climb was harrowing, and only their desperation made them take that route. It became so steep and narrow toward the top that they were forced ledge to ledge pulling their gear behind them. He shook with fear and exhaustion when they reached the top, and she was faint. They ate the last of his food on an exposed rock face. From the promontory they could see miles of the lower desert, but could see no way down, nor any sign of the road. To the north they didn’t recognize a single landmark.

The sun fell. She made a trap, baited it with dogfood, and sat back behind a tree holding the string. When it was almost too dark to see, a packrat approached, going from rock to rock. They barely breathed. The rat circled the trap and sniffed the stick and the string, then darted into the space below the propped rock, to the dogfood. She pulled the string and the rock crushed the animal. They made a fire and cooked the rat on a stick and swallowed the meat unchewed. They drank their fill of water and slept.

Two days they walked looking for a way to the lower desert, but the cliff arced miles into the distance, and they did not find a route. They gathered wood and took turns tending a fire. They were weak with hunger. They stopped talking of where they were. They bent all their effort and every thought to moving south, toward the road. They walked looping paths. They followed drainages to impossible drops. They skirted mesas for hours only to find the way blocked by unwalkable scree. Over and over they followed routes that led nowhere.

Three days after the food ran out they found more pine nuts. They ate until their stomachs hurt. They gathered what they could and found a way into a canyon they must have crossed through but it didn’t look familiar. They found the stream dammed by rockfall. Cattails ringed a marshy pond. They dug roots until they had a large pile, and roasted them on coals. They stayed there a few days sick with stomach pain, but regaining strength. She took an exploratory walk and returned with her blanket full of prickly pear fruit. They burned the tiny spines off and ate as much of the sour fruit as they could. They harvested hundreds of the fruits, a very long day of painful labor. They tried to dry the sliced fruit on rocks, but ants and flies got to it and most of it went bad. Some they roasted and dried. The spines got in everything, a torment, but the fruit gave them strength and hope. While they stayed at the pond, they kept a large fire going, day and night. Days, they fed it with green pine, and nights they piled it with deadfall. Surely, someone could see the smoke from miles, but they saw no sign of rescue. A few times a day they heard a jetliner in the distance.

They set many snares along streambanks and in other places they thought an animal might pass, but they caught nothing. A week or more went by. The season of the cactus fruit passed. They made an industry of pulling and roasting cattail roots. She sobbed as she worked because a day’s hard labor produced barely enough flavorless starch to get them through the night.

Then one morning he walked upstream and found a jackrabbit hanging in a snare. It was stiff, dead for a while, but they ate it. They felt strong the next day.

It was getting cold at night. He was comfortable in his sleeping bag, but she had to borrow his sweater and extra socks. Even so she was cold. They decided to look for a more sheltered place. They walked west and came to a small canyon. They walked upstream. The canyon opened at a bend. In the cottonwoods they found a southfacing alcove a hundred feet wide, deep and dry, with a sandy floor. The ceiling was stained black by long-cold fire. Near the back wall they found several ancient fire-rings. They made a fire and sat. As they lay down later they noticed black and red figures painted on the wall above them, a long gallery of them.

The little valley was lush and comfortable. The low fall sun came in under the overhang and warmed the stone. There were acres of cattails in a marshy area nearby, and trout in the stream. They worked for several days harvesting cattails. She built a weir, and placed it in the stream at the end of a channel he built of stacked rock. They set snares all up and down the valley. On a huge fallen slab they kept a smoky fire and tended it whenever they could.

One morning they woke to frost on the ground. She was cold, and had singed her blanket in the night as she huddled close to the fire. She spent that day gleaning the dry verge of the cattail beds. When she returned in the late afternoon she found that he had started building a house.

He had gathered flat sandstone slabs from a nearby scree slope, and had stacked them nearly knee-high in a rough semi-circle at the back of the alcove, leaving a narrow opening for a door. Over several days, between other tasks, he fetched and stacked stones and mortared them with mud from the stream. His work got better as he went. Finally, he set juniper poles across the wall and piled armloads of cattail reeds on top. Then alternating layers of reeds and mud until the little hut was enclosed, though they had no way to close the doorway.

There was a long warm period, then frost every night. She moved into the stone hut and slept on a bed of dry cattails. As it got colder she tried heating the hut, but the smoke was unbearable and the warm air went right out the door.

Sometimes they found trout behind the weir. In what must have been late November or early December, he came home from checking the snares and found her crouched over the fire cooking three good-sized trout on sticks. She said it must be her birthday, it must be Thanksgiving, and they ate the fish, and a handful of toasted pinenuts each, and a bowl of cattail mush. He went to his pack and came back holding something before him hidden in his fist and smiled and handed it to her. It was a square of chocolate wrapped in foil. He had saved it these months thinking it might help in a time of despair. But, he said, what better time than a time of gratitude. Or happiness, she said, and they split it. The sugar was deeply exotic, extravagant.

The low sun reached the very back of the alcove, but it did not warm the hut. She had tried and tried to weave a door of cattail leaves, but everything failed, fell apart in the first wind. One night he took his sleeping bag down from the tree where he hung it to keep it from the rodents and laid it out by the fire. He sat down and took off his tattered boots. She turned and stood by him, and then knelt close behind him and he couldn’t breathe right. She lay behind him, fit to him, with her back to the fire. Neither one dared move and the early-winter night stretched on longer than any they’d known, but they were warm.

They were lucky with trout for a couple of weeks. They worried that they’d eat every one and have none left. But they filleted them and smoked them, and kept them on the roof of the hut under bundles of cattails. They caught several rabbits. He tried smoking the meat and saving it, but it rotted quickly. Deer had come down from the plateau, and many dotted the meadow beyond their canyon. They heard turkeys, but didn’t see them.

He made forked fishing spears from a design he’d seen in a scouting manual when he was a boy. He tried to find wood long and straight enough to make a throwing spear, but soon quit. He tried to make a bow, but all the wood he tried broke, and the arrows were crooked, and he could not make a sharp point or devise a way to attach the turkey feathers he’d found. Prompted again by the scouting manual, he notched two heavy sticks, and bound them crossed, and sharpened the four points. He doubted he could hit an animal with it, but he didn’t know what else he could make for hunting larger animals.

A little way upstream they found a short boxcanyon, walled by cliffs. Just a thicket of chokecherry and serviceberry with a seep at the back. They foraged for fallen fruit, but found none. She gathered bare seeds from the ground and planted them all up and down the canyon. While he was there he thought of her weir, the way it funneled the fish into a narrow space they couldn’t escape. At great effort over a month or more, he cut hundreds of willow wands and speared them into the sand at a narrow neck in the canyon just above the boxcanyon. He wove the wands together as best he could. They formed a fragile fence higher than his head.

One warm day they walked a long way around the deer meadow, back in the trees to flush the animals onto the grass below. Of the dozen deer they flushed, a single yearling bounded away from the herd and into their canyon. They walked side by side upcanyon, and the yearling ran ahead until it came to the willow fence. Throwing rocks, they herded it into the boxcanyon. They ran and closed the way out. They could hear it crashing in there. On his signal they moved forward. It panicked, springing back and forth at the back wall, crashing through the bushes and the spring. They stood til it calmed, then stepped forward again. In this way, over an hour or two, they closed in on the panting deer. When Rebekah stepped around a chokecherry, the deer bounded straight at the man and he threw the four-pointed crossed sticks. He missed and the deer escaped back down the canyon. But the near-success encouraged him.

Midwinter they rationed the food. They ate the smoked fish and a little cattail every day. They found a few pines with nuts, and walked longer and longer distances trying to find more. He became lethargic, didn’t get out of the sleeping bag some mornings. Her eyes sunk and her arms, that had been muscular, were now like sticks. They had trouble keeping warm. Most days were dry and clear, and the alcove absorbed the heat of the sun all day. But a few times it snowed, and the overcast could last for days. Then they despaired. They barely spoke at all, and never to complain.

He liked to sit in the sun at the mouth of the canyon and look down on the deer in the meadow. Over the winter they browsed closer and closer to the mouth of the canyon. He watched their daily pattern: in and out of the oak thicket all day; then, at dusk, single-file down to a narrow place in the rocks where they drank; then they browsed the meadow into the night. He didn’t know when they slept, or exactly where. They grew accustomed to his presence up on the rock. When he moved they watched him, but they were not alarmed. He began taking walks down into the oak thicket, back in the trees, and soon found their beds and the tunnel-like passages they made through the dormant trees.

One day, while the deer were drinking, he took a heavy sharpened stick into the meadow and stuck it in the ground. He returned to his lookout, and watched as the deer returned to the meadow to browse. They approached the stick and smelled it, but didn’t appear alarmed. Every day he took something down and left it, and pretty soon they stopped paying any attention to these things.

Late one night, by moonlight, he took a mat of woven and tied willow wands, like the weirs Rebekah made, but with larger squares, and laid it in the trampled mud where the deer drank. He left it there. The next day at dusk the deer went down to the water as usual. They paused and sniffed the netlike grid, but soon stepped over it to drink. After a few days they paid no attention to it. They just stepped into the square spaces and continued their routine. That night he took a heavy armlong club he’d shaped and went down and tied his rope to the mesh and took the other end up into the rocks, where he found a comfortable place and waited. The rope draped down the jumbled boulders and into the icy water, and only a few muddy feet of it lay on the shore where the deer drank.

All the next day, cold and cramped, he watched the deer browsing in the meadow. At dusk they moved toward him, first one, and then the whole herd. The first to reach the muddy beach paused, then went to the water. The others crowded around, jostling to drink. Their hooves cracked the shelf of ice that had survived the day’s warmth. The man wrapped the rope around his hand several turns. When the deer turned back to the meadow and several stood with their hooves in the mesh, he pulled on the rope as violently as he could, he threw himself backward with all his remaining muscle. The rope snapped taut and the rigid mesh flipped upward, and the deer bounded away except two, whose legs were caught in the willows. He leapt down the boulders pulling in the rope as he went, trying to keep it taut. The deer panicked and thrashed, but the mesh rode up their legs. The weir bent and twisted as they struggled, and the more it twisted, the less room they had to move. He went straight through the frigid water, nearly tripping on submerged rocks. The deer tried to bolt in opposite directions, and both went down.  He swung the club at the nearer deer and broke its leg. He hit the other deer across its neck at the shoulders, and the animal convulsed. He swung and swung until he finally connected with their heads. They lay still in the freezing mud, bloody and bent. He panted. His heart raced. His hands shook and he felt a surge of joy and nausea. He tasted blood and his jaw ached, and pain came up from his knee. After a while, he left the deer tangled in the grid and hobbled home. He couldn’t sleep that night. Rebekah put her arms around him for the first time and tried to hold him still. Her arms felt like poles of wood, and her hands were coarse and hard.

In the morning they went down to the meadow. He stood holding his knife looking at the bloody deer. Their heads were crushed, and blood had run into the muddy hoofprints and frozen there. She cut them free. He watched as she rolled one onto its back and cut around its anus and tied it off with string. She held the knife blade-up and slid it under the belly skin, then cut up to the throat. She cut around the legs and at the base of the jaw. She struggled to get the guts out. The carcass was stiff.  With the other deer, he tried to do exactly what she had done, but his knife was dull and he made a mess of it. She helped. It took all day, but finally they had two clean carcasses and two skins. They hauled the deer on a pole between them up to the fire-ring and hung the carcasses from a branch. She stretched the hides on a flat rock in the sun.

The venison saved them. Spring came and they gorged on cattail shoots, ravenous for something fresh and green. Finally, the chokecherries ripened. They were almost too tart to eat, but they contained some nutrient they lacked. They spent days cooking chokecherries, rubbing the pits out of the scant pulp, and drying the pulp on rocks around the fire. By June the alcove was in shade all day. They gained weight. The deer left the meadow for the summer.

She spent her days gathering fuel and processing food. He walked daylong loops around the camp. He returned with his pack full of acorns, but they couldn’t find a way to make them edible. He set snares everywhere he found a game trail. He noted that the trails converged on a long stone shelf that led down into the desert. He followed the trail and came to a trampled area below a white band in the stone. Smooth, dished, fist-sized depressions dotted the white stone. He tasted salt. Chipping at it with a stone he uncovered a band of nearly pure salt, shining white and flecked with pink. He filled his bag. When he gave her some on his finger she jumped in place and laughed and cried and put her arms and legs around him and kept her face on his neck for some time.

She used the last of the precious dogfood to bait a snare and caught a raccoon. She cut the meat into thin strips and salted it and hung it around a mound of coals. They ate it with dried berry paste, and it was delicious.

The mesa that loomed to the north had appeared unclimbable, but one day the light was right and he saw ancient eroded steps hammered into the stone. The way was very steep, but most of the steps were in good shape and he quickly made the top. He hadn’t been so high since fall. He looked down on the desert. For many miles to the south the canyonlands lay in gothic shards and baroque volutes. Beyond the sea of stone he thought he could see the lower desert, its red buttresses and blue depths. East and west the endless cliffs. North the mountain. All winter, after they had quit trying to find a way south, he had imagined that they had wandered so far off course that they were no longer in sight of the landmarks that could guide them out of the wilderness, but the mountain was right where it should be.

He returned to camp and sat down by her as she worked on the stiff hides. She rubbed them back and forth on a now-polished pole, working them into pliability. He said they should try walking north, that he could see no way south back to the road. She protested that the way north ran into cliffs and a waterless walk of at least several days. They were afraid to leave the alcove and to abandon all their work. They agreed to try harder to attract rescue. Nine or ten months had passed, and they had seen no sign of people.

Back on the mesa, at its very prow, he arranged rocks into an arrow pointing at their camp. He gathered wood, dragging gray logs and sticks from a wide area. He piled branches waist high around the trunk of a big pinyon that stood alone near the prow. In the afternoon he lit a fire under the pile and fanned it til it caught. The flames rushed pale into the green branches of the tree and a dense, sooty smoke rose straight up in the clear air. The column of smoke stood plain against the sky. The fire burned so hot he couldn’t approach. Insects and mice fled all around. As the wood settled and flaming branches fell, he flipped them back into the fire. When it started to die down he threw armloads of green branches onto the coals. As the sun set he added dry wood. The fire was brilliant, almost white in the night. It reached far above his head.

All night he fed the fire. At sunrise he added green wood. Wind came up and tore at the column of smoke, but he was sure it would be visible for fifty miles. He took a nap, then stoked the fire again. A towering monsoon cloud formed in the south. It grew and grew, black and seething. It came up the desert at a terrific pace, driving a lightning-whipped wall of dust before it. He clambered down the cliff and ran home. The rain drove him back into the alcove. He sat with Rebekah and they watched the stream rise. The weir, stones and all, leaped downstream as though on a cloth pulled from a table. Splintered sections of the willow fence somersaulted by, propelled by water and rock and yanked trees. Foot by foot the beach washed away.

The rain stopped. The stream rushed, then subsided. The sun set on wreckage.

Sunrise, they went around looking. The meadow was a shallow pond. Where he killed the deer, what had been a still, narrow pond by the stream, was now a red-stained torrent. Rocks shook and rumbled.

She walked upstream to the boxcanyon, to a sunny spot. From where he sat he heard her yell. He ran to her. She hardly ever made a sound. She stood by the flat rock they used to dry fruit and hides. As he approached, she pointed at the rock. A huge snake lay in the sun. Gopher snake, she said. They watched. It barely moved. She leaned back against the man. He put his hands on her hips. She moved them under her shirt to her ribs. He didn’t move at all. She turned in his grip and faced him.

Monsoons every afternoon. He tried to get back on the mesa but the stone was damp and slick. He tried another signal fire, at the base of the mesa, but it made as much steam as smoke, and the wind dispersed it.

He walked three days north, contouring around the mesa. The walk ended on a narrow stone shelf with cliff above and the most tenuous scree below. He had placed cairns, but even so he strayed from his route several times on the way back home. He felt deep relief when he dropped back down into the familiar canyon and saw her there working.

The monsoons finally stopped. The meadow grass green and tall. Ibis stalked its marshy edge. Blackbirds trilled like cellphones and ducks rasped in the cattails.

He took another three-day walk, this time around the other side of the mesa. The way led to the foot of the red cliffs. He looked and looked for a way up, but the heights and vertical climbs left him shaking with fear.

The nights grew cooler. One year, he said. She smiled. What is a year, she said, exaggerating the wonder in her voice. It’s one of the many words we have, he said. It’s a good word because it has a definite referent in the cycle of the seasons. She looked at him and smiled. She would not stop looking and smiling. She stood and leaned over him where he sat and held her hair back and licked his lips and put her tongue in his mouth, then stood and laughed. He said, Most of our words do not have referents now. Give me an example, she said. He said, Cellphone. She said, There are still cellphones. No, he said, There are not.

She was sick in the morning. She knelt by the stream and her body heaved. Later she was okay. Every morning she was sick. They understood.

She learned how to work with cattails. She wove them into mats and stacked the mats in the hut. She finally made a functioning door. She hung cattail mats three deep all around the inside of the hut. He said, We can’t do another winter here. We need to find the way out. She said, If we don’t find it we need this to return to.

He took a long walk west. He hadn’t til now because the way was very exposed, a long pitch of stone almost too steep for his badly-worn boots. As he walked off level ground onto the canted plane of stone he felt hot and panicky. The stone fell steeper below him. If he lost his footing and started falling there would be no way to recover. He leaned into the stone and went using his hands. As the stone became steeper he found himself at the very limit of his grip. He went back. He drew on the back of a map. The canyon, the meadow, the stream where it fell through the rocks, the mesa and the long routes he had walked on either side of it, the terrifying pitch of sandstone. On all sides barriers except the way they had arrived a year ago. He tried to draw the route they’d walked before they found the alcove, but it was a jumble in his memory, and he had long since learned that whatever map his mind contained would be schematic, a radical reduction of the solid world it represented, the way words stand pale for things, the way daytime fire is pale in the sun.

He went back up the mesa. He searched all the surrounding country for a way, but it was unintelligible. The ground was black where he had set the signal fire. The area was clean of deadfall. He went to the other side of the mesa and gathered wood and lit another big fire and tended it that day and night and into the next day. Peak hiking season, and hunters would be out, though he doubted they hunted anywhere near. When the fire smoldered he went back down to the camp.

They did better that winter. The snares were productive. He treed and killed a family of raccoons and she made jerky. She had put away a large supply of cattails. She wore the deer pelts, and slept in them. Out of the raccoon furs she made hats and sleeves for their hands. Even when it was overcast they were comfortable in the hut. They huddled together on the pelts under his stinking sleeping bag. She got big and tired easily. He wished he could do something for her, but she seemed out of reach. He worked and sulked and daydreamed of being rescued.

By the time the cattails put up shoots she was almost immobile with back pain. She spoke to him aggressively or not at all. He took over her food work, but did it all wrong. She barked at him, then apologized. He was mostly stoic. He built another stone wall, a new room adjoining hers. As it got warmer he moved in there, took a pelt for himself and left her with the sleeping bag.

When the day came, her breathing got heavy. He asked if he should boil water. He had some vague memory of a need for boiling water. Maybe from a book. She said, Your pan holds three cups. What are we going to do with three cups of boiling water. He said he didn’t know. Sterilize his shirt, maybe. She said, Keep your fucking shirt on. What can I do, then, he asked. She said, Just go away and find a doctor. But don’t go so far’s you can’t hear me in case I need something.

He sat looking over the meadow at the deer. He heard her swear and moan every so often. More and more often. He went back to the hut and called in, Do you want something. She said, Rub my back. He did for a long time. His wrists hurt. She turned this way and that, finally squatted with her hands on the wall. She soaked the sleeping bag. She got loud, but to him she sounded under water, or in another room. The baby boy came all at once. He took away the heavy sleeping bag and got her water. The baby ate and slept. She lay on her side facing away from the man. He wanted to leave. He felt nothing he had expected to feel.

The monsoons came again, then the cottonwoods went yellow. She did everything she had done before, but now holding the baby. Watching her, he felt weary. When he took him from her, the baby wailed for his mother. The man asked her what they should name him. Is he a referent, she asked. Everything she’d said to him was aggressive. But then she smiled. Let’s think about it, she said. No hurry. No certificates to fill out.

For a while it felt like a truce, but then she warmed to him, and then he felt he loved her, and she noticed, and they were better than they’d been before. The canyon walled out so many dangers. He felt protective, and protected and grateful. As it got colder he felt dread, too, but he worked hard to find meat and pelts, and he did rest knowing that he couldn’t do much more.

He had started tallying days with charcoal on the wall. He counted the days since the boy was born. They decided that he had been born on the solstice. It seemed poetic. They didn’t know, really. More or less the longest day of the year. How about Solstice, he suggested. For his name. She looked at him with a tight-lipped smile. How about Steve, she countered. He was embarrassed. It just seems weird to be out here in all this rock and stuff and call him some name, he said. She said, It just seems weird no matter how you cut it. Just because we’re camping doesn’t mean we have to name him all Native American or whatever. Camping, he said. Roughing it, she said.

Some time later she was working on baking a bowl she had shaped from a lump of clay he had brought home. It just slumped and cracked in the heat. She was frustrated, but wry and a little amused. How about Screaming Hawk, she said. He laughed. They came up with many names as they lay under the pelts and sleeping bag that winter, but they took to calling him Steve. It was a sardonic joke at first, but it stuck. He called him Steve, My First-Born in the Wilderness. She called the man Steve’s Dad. Steve’s Dad called her Becka.

Every seven days he climbed up the mesa and made a signal fire. By Steve’s first birthday he had burned almost all the wood off the mesa. They saw no sign of rescue.

They became adept at fishing and snaring. They found reliable ways to preserve and store the few ingredients the desert offered. A few times they ate venison, but mostly they lived on trout, jackrabbit, cattails, pine nuts, and berries. Their daydreams of hamburgers and candy faded. They had long ago come to a silent agreement not to speak of food fantasies.

Every few months he became fevered with finding a way out. He walked many, many miles trying to reconstruct their route to the canyon, but each walk ended in exhaustion and bafflement. His boots came apart. She made him moccasins. He couldn’t walk as far in the thin shoes on the stony ground, and they didn’t grip as well, so he stopped going up the mesa.

Their third winter in the alcove was hard. There had been almost no pine nuts that year, and very few rabbits. Steve ran everywhere. He became angry and aggressive when they spent cold days in the hut. They ran very low on food. Steve became slack and lethargic. He slept almost continually and looked vacant when he was awake. Desperate, the man walked to the next canyon with his pack full of snares. He set the snares and walked through the oak woods at the top of the shallow canyon. Deep in the thicket he found a way up and out the other side of the canyon. He must have missed it when the trees were green. The next canyon was lush, full of birches, chokecherries, and maples. At the bottom he found a long pond full of fish, enough to get them through to cattail season.

So it went, day after day, month after month, the unrelenting work of eating and staying warm and raising the boy. Then they had a daughter. They added another room to the hut. They discovered how to use ricegrass. The rabbits flourished again. The pinyons produced an enormous harvest of nuts one year. They struggled to save their food from packrats until the man built a ladder to reach a ledge above the alcove. He discovered a granary up there, right above their fire-ring. Birds had long ago found the corn, but he fixed the walls with mud and they kept their food there. The girl grew. She followed Steve and mimicked him. They called her Marcy. When she was difficult, Rebekah would hand her to the man and say, Have Marcy.

When Steve was about five years old, his father took him out to the pond canyon to fish. There was a large flock of turkeys there, very wary and impossible to approach, but they spent a few days building a tent-shaped enclosure of woven split willow and lured in a dozen of the birds with boiled ricegrass grains. Steve and his father danced and whooped. The man had never, in all his life, felt so jubilant. It took them several trips over a few days to carry the big birds back to the canyon. They built a pen and clipped the turkeys’ wings and fed them grass and seeds and acorns. Steve cared for the birds himself. They met the boy every morning at the gate of the pen where he fed them. He worked hours every day gathering food for them. They repaid him with eggs and something close to docility.

Once, when a large amount of cattail root became moldy, the man said, What is the point of this. Rebekah held her hand palm up, toward the children. What is the point for them, he asked. She shrugged. And what was the point before they were born. She said, Shut up your stupid shit. We were going to get rescued. He went out past the meadow and lit a big tree on fire. It burned for two days and took a patch of oaks with it. The smoke of a thousand cookfires went up into the sky by day, and by night a house-high flame lit the canyon walls, but still there was no rescue.

Each passing day was a diminishment. He broke a tooth and knew it was gone forever. When he was about forty, over a few months he lost his ability to focus on small objects closer than arm’s reach. Teaching the children a song, he forgot some of the words, and Rebekah didn’t know the song, so it was lost forever. He discarded old words: once, in talking with Steve, the word Soviet came into his mind. He hadn’t thought of the word in years. He considered what it meant. An old dead political system from the other side of the world. He considered explaining the Soviet system to Steve. The roundness of the world, the billions of people, the years gone by, the revolutions, the nations in a standoff, the base in Greenland, the missiles in Cuba, the suited men, the red telephone, children huddled under desks, Soyuz, Khrushchev, Kennedy, Kennedy dead, Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby, the FBI, the NSA, cellphone surveillance, desk jobs, pornography, dating, alcohol, dying alone a ward of the state. None of it intelligible. Concepts and words without context or referent in the solid world at the child’s fingertips. A great gift to be a child free of such things. But also a tragedy to be isolated and ignorant of the machinery of politics, to have no inheritance of admonitory political myth, no monsters, no enemies, no suspicion or will to power. Not one person in all the world to forgive except his own parents, who are doomed to be the greatest and the most contemptible people the child will ever know.

The man took the pack and ten days’ food, mostly cattails to leave the most nutritious food for his family. He took a bone needle and several lengths of nylon string from his old climbing rope, and pieces of leather for his moccasins. As lightly as he could, he kissed the children goodbye. He put his arm around Rebekah. He walked out of the canyon and down the meadow, down through the tumbled boulders following the stream. He set off across the slickrock on a bearing that he thought would lead him to the canyon system they had walked out of seven years earlier. When he came to a canyon, he built a tall cairn. He went down the canyon. It dead-ended. He climbed out and tried another. He tried canyons until one led him to a larger canyon. He walked for days, building cairns as he went. He stopped to re-sole his moccasins. He found himself at the end of a canyon, at a hundred-foot pouroff. He forced himself through his fear of heights and descended through balanced boulders to a scree slope. He lost his footing and fell on his back and rode his pack on the loose scree to the valley floor, just a little bruised. He built a cairn. He walked down the valley. It bent west and narrowed. For a long day he walked in water, sometimes swimming for long stretches with his pack held high. He slept in only his buckskins, fetal and shaking by fires. He backtracked. His food ran out. He spent a morning looking for pine nuts and found ten of them. He came to a cliff. Standing out from the cliff a few feet was a slab of stone. He recognized it. He descended to the valley down the steep ramp of sand behind the slab. In the valley he knew to turn upstream, not down. He walked and walked.

Two days later he walked out of a canyon into the desert. Sand and sage sloping away to the south. He stood on the edge of the two-track. He turned west. At the next wash-crossing a circle of RVs. People in the shade of awnings. The smell of lighter fluid and cooking meat. Bright red coolers banked under a juniper. Children staring at him as he walked. The sharp smell of beer. The pink fat woman standing frozen with a yellow bottle of French’s mustard. The men coming at him fast as the horizon swung up and he slept in the sand.

The man didn’t speak to them. They knew what to do. They gave him lemonade, so sweet his broken teeth ached. He drank and vomited. They got the pack off him and put him in the back of a pickup. He slept all the way to the town. A helicopter picked him up. He felt okay, but he just sat and watched, and they assumed he was injured and dehydrated and probably insane. They strapped him to a stretcher and put him on a drip. The plastic antiseptic smell of the cockpit. The EMT’s deodorant. The blue light of her teeth. Shampoo. Aftershave. Urine, presumably his. The rhythmic beeping of something, and its banks of lights. The lifting and tilting of the helicopter. Its sound, unlike anything in his recent world, continuous, droning, designed, relentless, reliable. He slept and woke. The EMT asked him questions and he looked into her blue eyes and thought about what she was saying, but he didn’t answer.

He lay in the hospital bed, trying to get used to its softness. He kept waking with a start because the mattress, as it molded to him, felt suffocating. He ate Jello, then mashed potatoes. A pair of Federal rangers came and asked him questions, but he just watched them talk and didn’t answer. A social worker came and went. He graduated to whole meals. He had diarrhea. A doctor came a few times a day to check on him. Asked him questions and felt him over for injuries. Asked him if he spoke English. Habla Español, he asked. The man just stared. Parlez vous Français. Sprechen sie Deutsch. While the man slept the doctor came in quietly and clapped his hands by the man’s ear. He jumped awake. You can hear just fine, he said. You see us. You’re half starved, but pretty healthy. Fit as a marathoner. When are you going to tell us who you are and what the hell happened out there.

The rangers came back with a high-strung woman in a suit, an attorney. They spoke to him for a while, but he ignored them. He felt contained, without needs, remote.

A woman in jeans came into the room and took many pictures of him and left in a hurry.

A nurse washed his hair. She talked to him without expecting an answer. You have every kind of mess in this hair, she said. She asked if she could cut it. He must have acquiesced with his eyes. She got scissors and a mirror. She said, Take this. He took the mirror and held it up to himself. Gaunt, almost skeletal, brown and ropy. He recognized his eyes. His hair was striped with gray. His beard with the beads Rebekah had braided there. He had never seen them. The scar from when he ran into a branch in the night. He had never seen that either. He drew his lips back to see his teeth. A few chipped and one missing, but nice and white. His Adam’s apple sharp and protruding. The nurse cut his hair close and rough. Sorry, she said. I gotta cut around all these sticks and sap, or whatever it is. And your beard, she asked. He nodded. So, you do speak English, she said. Or understand it at least. Where you from, hon. She sat on the edge of the bed and put a towel around his neck and washed his beard in warm, soapy water, then cut it off as close as she could with scissors. Gonna have my girlfriend come up here and finish this right, she said. If the rules allow it.

She left the mirror. He looked old and haggard. He ate lots of food. The rangers came and went. A police officer was stationed outside his door. His photograph had appeared online. People were curious about the man who had stumbled out of the desert half-starved wearing buckskins and rags. He got out of bed. News vans were parked outside. He went to his door. The policeman stood up and looked at him. The man said, Looks like there’s lots of people want to talk with me. Yessir, the officer said, and got on his radio and called someone. The man sat on his bed and waited.

The rangers, attorney, and social worker came. They asked him lots of questions. What is your name. Brigham Snow. How long were you in the desert. Seven years. How did this happen. I was hiking. I got lost. Where were you. I don’t know. I looked always for the road and then one day I found it. How did you survive. I ate trout, cattails, chokecherries, ricegrass, turkey eggs, venison, raccoon. I was pretty much an Anasazi. You should contact your family. Yes. I am scared to do that, but I miss them. When you are recovered, can you show us where you lived. I moved around continually. I am not sure I could find my way back. Under boulders. Under ledges. In canyons. Wherever I could find shelter.

When the doctors were satisfied he was well, the rangers took him out to the parking lot, made a way for him through the crowd of reporters and spectators, helped him toward a waiting police truck. Lots of cameras. Shouted offers to pay for his story. Manufacturers of outdoor gear pressed their cards on him. He turned before getting into the truck for the long ride back to the city. Into a microphone he said, I am glad to be safe. I want to thank the people who helped me.