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.
