The Park Service: Book One of The Park Service Trilogy (12 page)

Coarse ice crystals grate against my skin, snot runs from my nose and freezes on my face. I stumble, get up again. I have no idea if Jimmy is still behind me, or if he’s blown off the glacier, but I reach deep inside myself and summon all of my remaining strength, and I set my teeth and pump my legs and climb. The wind whips wildly, lashing me left and right, and my pack rips free and goes flying off somewhere behind me like a kite. My fingers stiffen, my spear falls from my grasp.

I plunge forward, stepping, stepping, stepping, drop now to my knees, crawling, clawing at the ice, reaching, searching, tilting into empty space, teetering there, pulling back, too late—I free fall into quiet nothingness, the sound of the wind fading above as I flail my arms uselessly in the cold air rushing past.

My back slams into hard ice, forcing the air from my lungs. I lie in the dark, willing myself to breathe again. But either I can’t breathe, or I won’t, and all is black and still and quiet.

Somewhere high above I can hear the scream of the wind and then even that fades away with my final thought—

Jimmy.

CHAPTER 22
Who Lives Here?

Water dripping.

Echoing and amplified in a cavernous silence.

All around me is blue light.

I turn my head slowly toward the source of the drip, and I know what I see will haunt me forever—

I’m lying on the edge of a sort of subterranean lake, a deep pool melted by the heat rising from some fissure in a dormant volcano. I must be inside the crater. The lake is still and black and it reflects back the thick sheet of blue crater ice hanging as a ceiling above it. And that’s not all. It also reflects back what hangs suspended from the retreating grip of that glacial roof. Protruding from the ice, hanging precariously above the lake, is an enormous intercontinental ballistic missile.

There’s at least three meters of it exposed, another twenty meters trapped in the ice above. The point of the warhead is red, the green body wide enough that five men couldn’t stretch their arms around it, cryptic characters printed there in some violent-looking language, etched yellow triangles arranged in the international nuclear sign. I wonder how long it’s been hanging here. I wonder at what rate it’s melting free, the ice replaced every season by fresh snowpack above. And I wonder why it didn’t detonate, and if it’s a dud, or if there’s even such a thing when it comes to hydrogen bombs.

I grit my teeth and sit. I can see I’ve fallen down a crevasse where the crater glacier breaks away from the crater rim, the narrow crack above showing a sliver of blue sky and no trace of the storm that sent me here.

All I can think about is Jimmy. Did he fall into some other crevasse and land in a similar nightmare? Or something worse, maybe? Was he blown off the mountain? I see an image of him sliding down the glacier wall and plunging to his death, and the image makes me cringe.

I force myself to stand, testing for broken bones. Nope, just some bruises and scrapes. I take one last look at the evil thing hanging above that black and bottomless lake, and then I turn away with the image burned forever in my mind.

At first it looks as though I might be trapped down here with civilization’s destruction hanging above my head. But then I see a pile of fresh snow on the edge of the lake and when I look up, I see a climbable incline leading out. The ropes are still on my shoes, but the going is slow and tedious. In places where the incline steepens, I have to wedge my feet against one wall and press my back into the other, shimmying up an inch at a time. But as the blue-sky crack above grows, my spirits lift and I climb the last several meters and roll out onto the crater floor.

The sun is up, reflecting white off the fresh snow. I cover my face with my hand, peeping through my fingers and turning to take in my surroundings. I’m on the edge of the crater bowl, snowpack sloping gently down in the center and then rising again to the other side. When I spin nearly all the way around, I see Jimmy sitting on the crater edge, facing away from me with his pack sitting next to him and my pack sitting next to it.

When I tap him on the shoulder, he startles and I have to grab his arm to keep him from falling over the edge.

“Hellfire, man!” he shouts, stepping back from the edge. “You coulda killed me jus’ now.”

“How long have you been sitting there?”

“Shit. I dunno,” he says. “Two, maybe three hours now. Sun jus’ come up over there.”

“You thought I was dead,” I say, “didn’t you?”

“Yes’m, I did,” he says, picking up his pack. “But dun’ go gettin’ all sappy ’cause I ain’t even finished puzzlin’ out whether I’s happy or sad about it.”

He tries hard to look stoic, but his face breaks into a smile. I shoulder my pack and we start across the crater together.

“Where in hell was ya hidin’?” he asks.

I shudder to think what’s suspended beneath our feet.

“Hell is right,” is all I say.

The other side looks much friendlier. There’s no wind at our elevation, but beneath us billowy clouds float across the sky providing glimpses of the landscape below. A wide glacier, with few visible crevasses, slopes down into a canyon where the ice melt rushes out and becomes a river. The river runs northeast into a pine forest, the trees powdered with fresh snow, and beyond the forest, cupped on three sides by a ring of jagged snowcapped peaks, is an alpine lake so big and blue that it reflects back mountains, trees, and sky, giving it the appearance of another upside down world in itself.

Anxious as I am to get away from the crater and its frozen cargo, we sit on the summit lip, eat handfuls of fresh snow, and look out over the view.

“Ya think she made it?” Jimmy says.

“Huh?” I say, my mouth full of snow.

“The bear,” he says. “Do ya think she made it?”

“How do you know it was a she?”

“I dunno,” he says, “jus’ figured it.”

“Yeah, I think she made it.”

The sun rises higher and chases the shadows into the folds of the mountains. Far beneath us some enormous predatory bird hovers motionless on a breeze, circling above the river.

“It’s so quiet up here,” I say.

“I know it,” Jimmy says. “And I’d bet my head ya can see three hundred miles right from where we sit.”

“We use kilometers where I’m from,” I say, “but it doesn’t matter because you can’t see farther than the cavern walls.”

“Ya ever miss it?”

“No, not ever.”

“Ya ever think about yer family down there?”

“I miss my dad sometimes.”

“Yeah, I figured it so.”

“You ever think about yours?”

“I miss my mum mostly,” he says.

Jimmy looks away and picks at the snow. After a while, he stands. “Well, we better get on gettin’ on,” he says. “I’m hungry and this snow ain’t helpin’ it none.”

With the crevasses hidden under fresh snow laid down by last night’s storm, it’s slower going than I thought it would be, and by the time the roar of the river reaches us, our shadows have disappeared in the pink glow of sunset on the mountain.

We stand on the bottom edge of the glacier and watch the water rush out from beneath our feet and pour into the river, and we watch the river disappear into the twilight forest.

“The river’s gotta end up at that lake,” Jimmy says.

“That what we’re heading for?”

“North’s how the train was headin’,” he says. “Sides, they’s bound to be plenty to eat.”

We pick our way down off the glacier and follow the river into the forest. It must run much higher in some other season, because the banks are wide and strewn with boulders and fallen sun-bleached trees, the bone-colored wood water-stripped, the roots still attached and sticking up like gnarled fists. The river runs down the center of this hazard-filled boneyard, reflecting the last light and creating the impression of a silver highway hemmed in on either side by the clean, dark pines.

Jimmy and I both stop at the same time.

Silhouetted against the silver rapids, a fox sits on a boulder staring off downriver with its fluffy tail swooshing back and forth across the surface of the stone. Other than the clock-like swing of its tail, the fox is as still as the stone it sits on, and it looks almost as if it were parked there patiently waiting on some long overdue friend to come up that silvery road.

A rush of wind tickles my ear, and Jimmy’s spear flies toward the boulder and disappears, taking the fox with it. One second the fox is sitting there, the next second it’s not.

We camp on a high bank beneath the overhanging bows of a tree. I scrounge up wood and build a fire while Jimmy skins out the fox. When the fire burns down, we skewer the meat on pine branches and lay it to roast over the coals. Then we sit in the dark listening to the fat sizzle and smelling the meat cook while we pass the fox’s pelt back and forth, admiring it.

Jimmy tosses me the pelt and leans forward and turns the meat, the fox’s naked legs flopping from side to side.

“Looked a lot bigger wearin’ its fur,” he says.

I stroke the pelt, inspecting it in the dim glow of the coals. Thick brown fur, gray highlights, a black tip at the end of its soft and bushy tail. It’s beautiful. Jimmy hands me a skewer of meat; I hand him back the pelt.

“What will you do with it?” I ask.

“The fur?” he says. “Hell, I dunno. Ya want it?”

“No, I don’t want it.”

“Well, maybe I’ll make ya a hat.”

The meat is burnt on the outside and half raw yet on the inside, but after almost two days without food we devour it and suck the bones and lick our fingers. Jimmy cracks the bones and eats the marrow, but the idea grosses me out so I toss mine in the fire and watch them blacken. When we finish we’re still hungry, and Jimmy gathers pinecones in the dark and sets them in the coals to roast and then we fish them out with sticks and pry them apart and eat the seeds.

If the moon is in the sky, it’s trapped somewhere on the other side of the mountain and the night is as black as anything I’ve ever seen. The coals burn down to just a dim glow beneath the ashes, and we lie on our backs looking up into absolute nothingness and listen to the river rumble down the canyon.

We break camp at dawn, filling our canteens in the river and splashing cold glacier water on our faces before strapping on our packs and heading off downriver. Jimmy ties the fur to the outside of his pack, and as he limps along ahead of me it looks as if the fox has leapt onto his back and is clinging to his shoulders and hitching a ride. We’re not gone long when I hear a sort of whimpering behind us. I look back but see nothing among the rocks where we passed.

“Did you hear anything, Jimmy?”

“Jus’ the river. Why?”

“No reason.”

I pick up a river stick, leaning on it to test its strength, and it feels about the right length so I take it with me for a walking stick and start after Jimmy. Not a minute later, and I hear the whimpering again, this time even closer behind me. I stop, turn. There, following at my heel, is a baby fox. It stops, plops down on its haunches, looks up at me with coal black eyes, and opens its little pink mouth and yawns.

“Jimmy,” I call out. “You aren’t gonna believe this.”

Jimmy backtracks and steps up beside me.

“Shit,” he says.

The fox pup trots around behind us, and when we turn, it moves behind us again, as if it were playing some kind of game.

“Take off your pack, Jimmy.”

“Why would I?”

“He’s following his mama on your back.”

Jimmy shrugs off his pack and sets it on the ground. The little fox runs up and buries its face in its mother’s fur.

“Should we eat it?” Jimmy says.

“No, we can’t eat it,” I say, punching him on the arm.

“Well, what’ll we do with it then?”

“Let’s just bury the fur inside your pack and go on,” I say.

Jimmy stuffs the pelt inside his pack, concealing it as best he can with the tattered skins now loosely covering its contents. Then he straps the pack on again and we continue walking.

The fox pup whimpers meekly behind us.

“Don’t look back,” I say.

We walk for several minutes with nothing but the sound of the river running and then I peek over my shoulder.

“Thought ya said not ta look back,” Jimmy says.

“I did say it.”

“Then why’d ya look?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well?”

“Well, what?”

“Is it back there?”

“Yeah, it’s back there.”

“Shit.”

We noon on a sandy shoal where the river splits and pours thick into a deep pool. We sit on our packs and watch the little fox come trotting along the river behind us.

“I’m pretty dang hungry now,” Jimmy says.

“Me too,” I say, “but we’re still not eating it.”

The fox lopes up and plops down next to Jimmy’s pack. Jimmy stands and snatches his spear, heading off toward the river with it. When I reach to pet the little fox, it shies away, keeping its eyes on Jimmy’s pack. I open his pack and pull out the fur and lay it over my lap, patting it as an invitation. The pup takes a half step forward and stops, dropping on his belly.

“Come on, little fox,” I say, “it’s okay.”

I feel funny talking as if it can understand, but I pat the fur again and it shimmies a head closer. We go on like this for the next hour, inch by inch, me talking it toward me, and by the time Jimmy walks back into camp with a half dozen small trout hanging from a string, the fox is sitting on my lap.

“If ya plan on feedin’ that whiney little thing,” Jimmy says, holding up the fish, “it’s comin’ outta yer half.”

We build a small fire and roast our fish, three for Jimmy, two for me, my third one raw and in the mouth of the pup. He eats it with his little paws holding it down, and it’s all he can do to tear small chunks from the fish by biting into its back and thrashing his little head from side to side. After we eat, the pup sits on the riverbank and licks its paws while Jimmy and I swim in the pool. The river water is ice cold, but it feels good to be clean when we finally climb out of it, shivering.

We rinse our tattered clothes in the river and hang them from branches to dry. Then we pull everything out of our packs and spread the packs to air on the sand, and we sit next to them naked with our arms around our knees and skip stones across the pool. I look at Jimmy’s thigh, the wound fully healed now, but a nasty red scar there from my crude stitch job.

“Does it still hurt?”

He looks at the scar and shrugs.

“Nah, not really,” he says, skipping another stone.

“Never?”

“Only when I think about it.”

Jimmy nods to the pup, now running in circles and playing with a pinecone.

“He is kinda cute.”

“How do you know it’s a he?” I ask.

He shrugs. “I dunno. I jus’ figured it.”

The pup bats the pinecone and it rolls down the bank into the water. He runs after it and buries his nose in the pool and comes up with the pinecone dripping in his mouth.

“Ya got a name for ’em?” Jimmy asks.

“If we name him, we’ll have to keep him.”

“Ya already gotta keep ’em,” Jimmy says, “ya fed ’em.”

“I guess you’re right. But I can’t think of any name.”

Jimmy nods toward the contents of our packs spread out and drying in the sun: furs, broken lengths of rope, canteens, an empty food pouch, my father’s pipe, and Uncle John’s knife.