Necessary Evil (22 page)

"I can't," she called.

"When you throw again, think only of the tree."

As he said it, she realized that she had been thinking of the rope, not the tree. With nothing to lose and a sense of wild abandon she threw the loop as hard as she could. To her amazement, it fell neatly over the treetop.

"Very impressive," Kier said. "In a minute we'll have a bridge line."

She felt a surge of satisfaction.

From his higher angle, Kier shimmied and shook the line down past the first stubby branch and pulled it tight, catching the main trunk.

"Grab this," Kier said as he dangled another length of line until she had it firmly in her grasp. "This is the swing line. Pull the bridge line taut and tie this swing line to it the way I showed you. Tie it as close to the tree as you can."

She tried it three times before convincing herself that she was doing it right. Then Kier took the belly out of the bridge line, pulling it taut to the piton, forming a single line bridge across the chasm on a steep angle from the cliff top down to the treetop.

The swing line was attached to the bridge line at about the middle of the chasm and was now well above Jessie's head. She would have to push off the rock wall and, in a pendulumlike motion, reach the tree.

"Okay. There should be a ledge there. Stand on it."

She did as he said, clinging to the rock wall.

''I'm going to loosen the line that holds you so I can let it out as you swing yourself across. If you don't make it, you've got to turn feet first to this side so you can push off again."

There was silence. If the tree on the opposite side gave way when Jessie swung, she would slam back against the rock face, dangling from her safety rope.

Taking a deep breath, she grabbed the swing line.

"Ready?"

She hesitated. Could she make herself do it one more time? The black of the abyss below engulfed her.

"Look at the stars."

She did and drank them in. Something in that vast beyond made the chasm less important, her own mortality more acceptable. She pushed off into the jaws of her terror, leaving her spirit in the arms of the universe.

Swinging easily she covered the eight feet to a branch.

"Pull yourself in."

She grabbed the branch like a cat over water, hauling herself to the tree. For a moment, she laid her cheek against the trunk of the pine, concentrating on the rough texture of the reddish brown bark, its sharp scent.

Her eyes cast about for a way to get to the cave. Using her light, she could see that the rock surface was indented with small but numerous hand- and footholds. A large branch just above her looked to be the best bet. Then she saw another branch, less stout but closer, that would take her nearer to firm footing. She tested it and it seemed to hold her weight. With one step on the branch and a hop she could make it to a man-size, two-foot-deep pockmark in the rock wall, then climb to the cave. Feeling confined in the rope harness, she decided to remove it. After a brief straggle she was free of the lines.

She placed her foot on the branch and reached for the rock. The snap was so abrupt she had no time to react. She dropped as if through a trapdoor. Her gloved hand caught a branch as she went. The spindly wood slowed her, then strained downward. As it broke, she got an arm over the bend in the tree where the trunk made its L-turn at the cleft in the rock. Twisting wildly, she eventually wrapped both arms around the base of the trunk and hung there.

She heard the sounds of a child crying, then realized it was she who was crying in ragged breaths. Air sucked into her lungs in great gulps. Her head spun. Something was terribly wrong.

"Don't breathe so hard!"

Kier was shouting at the top of his lungs.
Why was he doing that?
She took a deep, slow breath.

"Get your feet on the rock."

She felt with her left toes and found a small ledge. It seemed too narrow to support her weight.

The tree is solid, the trunk thick and strong, she told herself. She could count on it. It was her muscles and mind that were jelly. She would use her legs, the strongest part of her. She searched around with her right foot. In seconds, she found a secure shelf. After her right toe was well placed, she lifted her body with both arms and the strength of her right leg.

Gripping branches in her hands like the rungs of a ladder, she worked her way above the base of the trunk and climbed up the tree, regaining the dozen or so feet that she had fallen.

The cave beckoned, only a couple body lengths higher than her head. "Have you no suggestions?" she called out.

"Love the mountain. Remember the stars and the feeling you had."

Was he out of his mind? She would never love this cold son-of-a-bitch rock.

"This mountain is killing us. It's freezing. It has cliffs. It hates all civilized people." She risked letting go with one hand to lift her middle finger and aim it at Kier. ''I suppose I could be more one with the sucker if I let go and went splat."

She hung her head, too tired to shout anymore, and regarded the dim outline of the rock. Okay, you solid son of a bitch. She crouched down on a stout branch. Crawling forward, she reached out a hand and touched the rock. She concentrated on the granite, putting her other hand out.

Now her knees were on the branch and her hands firmly clinging to the mountain. She would need to drop a foot and find a ledge on which to park her toe. As she reached out, she glanced down. Cold blackness greeted her. To put a foot down into the unknown, to teeter on that branch, seemed a thing too hard to do. Yet if she could do this one last thing, she could rest. In a cave. On a flat spot.

"I love you, you solid son of a bitch," she whispered.

Her boot shot down in a smooth motion and found a foothold. In less than two minutes, she clambered up into the cave, where she knelt and kissed the rock. Grateful.

Coyote howls to awaken your fears.

—Tilok Proverb

U
ntil she looked at her watch, Jessie had no idea that dawn was still two hours behind the mountains. The solid flat ground on which she lay was a balm to her frazzled nerves. Kier still had not come in.

"There may be a roar," he called.

"Okay," she muttered to herself. What now?

She didn't move as it started, first with some solid knocks of rock on rock, then a clattering, followed almost immediately by a rumble that sent vibrations through the stone under her fingertips. Thunder filled the cave. After a minute of what sounded like the mountain ripping open, the sound stopped.

"Throw down the rope," she heard Kier call out.

She wanted to sleep, not move. She felt as if she had been drugged. Forcing her eyes open, she crawled the few feet back to the cave entrance and the tree.

"The rope?" he called out again. He was at the bottom of the chasm, she realized.

"Just a minute," she said. The rope was hanging from the tree. "Kier."

"Yes."

"The rope's in the tree and I'm in the cave. It'll take me a minute." She knew how weary her voice sounded.

The next thing she knew, his hand was gently shaking her shoulder.

"What time is it?" she asked. "Did you get your rope?"

The roar had been an avalanche. It would look as though they had been sucked away in the flow of rock and ice, he explained as she stretched herself awake. He had lain beside her and let her sleep for sixty minutes or so, but now they needed to move deep inside the innumerable passageways of the cavern where it would be impossible to track them.

Near the opening a wide fire pit had been used many times by the youth groups that he took on wilderness excursions. In the circle of his light beam it appeared full with fine gray ash and the remnants of blackened wood chunks. Beside it was a small pile of rough-barked logs, neatly stacked and split and ready to burn. He could tell that no one had used the place since his last visit.

Jessie reached in the pocket of her coat, withdrawing a light that she used to explore the nearby walls and ceiling. They could barely make out a trail of soot above them, the remnants of a river of hot air that had picked its way over the rock, always rising, sucked by the draft until it found the mouth of the cave.

"Who comes here?"

"We bring the boys when they turn fourteen."

He told her to take off her snowsuit just as he was removing his. "We need to cover ourselves with charcoal," he told her.

"When they figure out the avalanche trick, and they can't follow us over the granite, they're gonna think about dogs— tracking dogs. Fire smell is common in the wild and will mask our scent, make our trail old fast and confuse a hound's nose. But we don't want to turn the snowsuits black."

With that he knelt and grabbed a sooty stick.

She snickered. "Oh, great. I'm already filthy."

Kier gave a concerned glance in response.

"I'm sorry. I've got an attitude. For a moment there I was really happy to have made it here."

"Your cynicism will weaken you."

"It's already kicked the stuffing out of me."

Kier examined her arm. A deep groan escaped her lips when he moved it.

"If we're lucky, all you did was bruise things."

As he helped her out of the snowsuit, he was sure that she was at ease with his touch. He had sensed it previously when she was sick and when she lay against his back, but he suspected that she could never acknowledge it. Discussing it seemed pointless, so he applied the ash in silence while enjoying the closeness.

Since he was a boy, Kier had been in these caverns many times. The first time he came with Grandfather they had used a little-known entry called
witsu ka,
or Worm's Way, a tiny hole with just enough room for a man to crawl in on his belly. It was much more difficult to undertake the long crawl through Worm's Way than to climb to the cave they had just entered— aptly named Tree Cave. When they brought the boys in summer, they would climb the mountain to the bottom of the chasm. One man would reach the cave using climbing gear. Once at the cave, he would drop a rope ladder.

Another entrance by way of a different cave opened onto a treacherous but passable rock ledge in the middle of a thousand-foot cliff. For as long as anyone could remember, this opening had been called Man Jumps, although there was no evidence that anyone had done so. Another cavern passageway led to a surface cave that was the fourth entrance, but a portion of this route was almost vertical, useless without climbing gear.

Two white men lost in the cavern for days had located a fifth tunnel into the caverns. For them it was an escape exit. Some months after their safe return, they had attempted to show the Tiloks the tiny hole in the rocks from which they had emerged, but were unable to retrace their route. Grandfather had found it, but Kier had never taken the time to learn it.

Because the cavern was sacred to the Tilok and on reservation land, no maps of its sprawling labyrinth existed. The only maps were in the men's heads. The Tilok had learned to traverse the interconnecting caverns from Tree Cave to Man Jumps. A few men, including Kier, could make passage from Tree Cave to Worm's Way, but those who made errors in navigation could pay a dear price. The caverns were fraught with drop-offs and confusing turns. Two Tilok men attempting to map the routes had disappeared when they either got permanently lost or, more likely, fell into a chasm. Some of the vertical shafts, which seemingly fell hundreds of feet, had never been explored.

Using the charred piece of wood he had picked from the fire pit, Kier began at Jessie's boots. He smeared charcoal and ash over her liberally. She seemed so exhausted, it did not even occur to him to let her do it herself. Trying to ignore the way he felt when he was near her, the desire he felt when steadying her, touching her, he sought to adopt a clinical air—to move with the precision of a good physician rather than the exquisite sensitivity of a lover. He dipped the blackened stick over and over in the pit so that when he was finished, her clothes would be impregnated with the fine powder. As he worked his way up to her thighs, she put her hand over his.

"I've got the idea," she said, taking the stick and beginning to apply the ash herself.

Embarrassed, he wondered whether his desire was too strong to remain undetected. Always things with women got this way—everything a nuance, every gesture a speech. He hated thinking about it, but he was drawn to her despite his vow never to be with another white woman.

Jessie seemed to be fighting her own feelings. He could feel it as surely as the spirit of the Tiloks in the mountains. But whatever monster gnawed at her, he knew that his was possessed of many more heads, and breathed a far hotter fire. There was a head for every member of his family—his mother, his sisters, his myriad cousins, the whole tribe. All were expecting him, the darling of the white community, to marry an Indian. To marry Willow.

Within minutes, they were covered with ash and soot. Next, to be even safer, they rubbed themselves with needles from the pine at the entrance, which took only a few minutes more. Then it was time to leave. Turning his light on Jessie, he used his free hand to hoist the pack and gave her a questioning look.

"Are you strong enough to hike?"

"I'd like to try."

"Stay directly behind me. Keep your light pointed at the ground."

"Do we have steep places in here too?"

"Stay close."

He put a hand gently on her shoulder, and was sure her head moved almost imperceptibly toward his fingers, as if she wanted to touch them with her cheek.

"I'll tell you when there's a bad edge. It'll be fine."

He squeezed her shoulder in reassurance, and surprisingly she covered his hand with hers.

The crackling of the radio made them both start. The garbled transmission continued as Kier swung his light to the source and retrieved Miller's unit. Jessie stood close while he fiddled with the squelch.

"Click twice if you hear me, Kier. The best triangulation equipment around won't locate you on a couple of clicks."

Tillman.

"Is it true?" she asked.

"Don't know. But two clicks would tell them we're alive. Right now that's a lot of information."

"Cat got your clicker, huh? Well, never mind." Tillman chuckled. "That was a gutsy bit of ridge-walking you did tonight. Especially lugging the lady around."

Kier's insides shrank.

"If you hadn't moved on that ledge when you did, I'd have shot you."

Kier's fist tightened involuntarily. The implications flooded him. So Tillman was the stalker, or at least he wanted Kier to think so. Knowing it as opposed to suspecting this finalized Kier's assessment of their predicament. Tillman, who had experimented on his tribe, the man who directed the search, could hunt and track like a Tilok.

There was no more chatter for a few moments. Then: "I'll be right behind you."

Tillman would likely be unaware of the caverns. He didn't know if his prey were dead or alive. The fact of their survival in the avalanche could only be gleaned on hands and knees, by studying every shred of evidence. Kier shut the radio off and put it away. Deeper in the caverns, it wouldn't work anyway.

Kier focused on the route to Man Jumps, the seldom-used exit that would eventually bring them to the cabin. It was a snarl of passageways until you came to a fork where the stone in the middle was covered with ancient pictographs. Kier supposed that his ancestors used the caves often on their migratory passages through the high country. They would have stayed in these caves during the summer months, when game and berries were plentiful, before the salmon runs and acorn crop.

Near the Tree Cave entrance, years of moccasined feet had rounded and worn smooth stone edges on the floor of the cavern. Missing, however, were the deep gullies in the rock, exactly the width of a human foot, which Kier had seen in places occupied steadily for hundreds of years. As they moved into a train-tunnel-size passageway that would lead them to the next chamber, fingerlike formations of dripping limestone appeared. "I tell the kids it feels like a ghost convention in here," he said.

"You take them in here?"

"There's more than just me taking them, but yes."

"So I'm not sure why that makes me feel so humbled."

"We don't come here in November. And never in a blizzard, I promise you that. So don't bother feeling humbled. And for the walk through the caverns, Grandfather comes to show the way. He knows them better than anyone."

"I keep saying it, but I must meet your grandfather."

They should only use one light where possible, Kier explained, and then they would be assured of batteries for a couple more nights. She desperately hoped they wouldn't be necessary once they were out of the cave. Hunger gnawed at them, making them more susceptible to the dank cold. Even the insulated snow clothes they had taken off the men required a certain amount of body heat to be effective.

After a time, Kier stopped.

''How do you feel?'' he said putting his hand to her forehead.

"I'm dizzy and I've never been so hungry."

"Your hunger will get less with time. It's when it comes again that you really have to eat. You can go days without food. Fortunately you won't have to."

"Let's hold that thought."

At first the drop in elevation was slight; then the path steepened to a downhill hike. Sounds of water dripping came and went. As the passageway became more nearly vertical, it also became more twisted, so that in places it felt like a spiral staircase. In his knees he felt the pounding of the long footfalls and realized how easily she could injure herself. He wondered how long she could walk.

The narrow margins of his light probably made it hard for her to place her next step without stumbling, so he suggested that she use the second light despite his desire to save the batteries.

After walking what seemed a mile or more down into the mountain, the passage leveled out, and they came to a maze of tunnels. Kier paused at each turn, constantly scanning. By developing a habit of always looking, always being conscious of where he was going, he had an extraordinary memory for even the most subtle landmarks. In addition, Grandfather had left piles of pebbles on the main route that could be found about twenty feet before every right turn and at the junction of every left turn. Of course when there were several passages off a large cavern, that method didn't work. In that situation there was either no marker, in which case memory was imperative, or there was a small pile of pebbles at the beginning of the correct passageway.

The primary drawback to this method of navigation was its ambiguity. There were several routes and they crossed one another.

"How do you know where we are going?" she finally asked.

He explained the rules.

''It was better not knowing,'' she said.

At last, they reached another flat where the walking was easier. After two sharp bends and a hundred yards on the level, they came to a rock wall that separated two passages. On the wall was a thirty-foot-long ancient pictograph. Kier shone a light onto the scene that was painted onto the smooth limestone. She stood close to him, in awe of what she was seeing. Multicolored figures, in earth-red, turquoise, and yellow, depicted people or spirit beings. The arms and legs of the figures were represented by three lines, and torsos by four lines.