Take Only Pictures (21 page)

Digger danced in place, anxious to keep moving, but Kristine kept him reined in, watching with dread. Her heart lurched as one of the horses tripped on the steep stairs. Even from a distance, Kristine could see how hard the little horse was working and how the rider was making his job harder. “Give him his head,” she whispered to herself. Shouting would have done no good. The horse stumbled again and fell to its knees. The boy pitched forward on the horse’s neck. “Give him his head and stay put. Stay put! Stay put!” she yelled in vain, hearing her father’s voice telling her to never quit a wreck.

Struggling to regain his footing, the horse lurched forward, pitching the boy off onto the rocks. As his father attempted to dismount on the downhill side of the trail, his horse scrambled on the sharp rocks trying to keep his balance, but he lost his footing and pitched off the switchback, taking the rider with him.

Kristine leapt from her own saddle and began scaling the switchback, climbing from pass to pass like a ladder.

The horse rolled down a switchback, landing on the rider. She saw his momentum leaning for another roll. “Brian!” Kristine screamed. The cowboy whipped his head around to look above him as the horse rolled, losing his rider but continuing down the mountain. “Move, move, move!” she shouted as the horse tumbled right at Brian’s string. But he was frozen, his mules all in a line on the trail when Grumpy smashed into them.

Tied together, the mules scrambled to take the impact of the horse, and Brian held tight to the rope he’d looped around his saddle horn.

“Let them go!” Kristine shouted. “Drop your lead! Drop your lead!” She pulled her knife out of her belt as she reached the mess of animals writhing frantically between levels of the trail. She sawed at the leads that connected them. As they came free and rolled, she prayed that they could find purchase on the trail and that they wouldn’t reach her own stock. The third mule in line lay on the trail, and without the weight of the babies pulling from behind and below, stayed put. She cut his lead and swatted the second mule, hoping he and the first mule could make it back to the trail above where Brian sat, stunned.

“Dismount on the mountain side and leave your horse. See if you can get those two up onto the trail.” She slipped on the rocks. On blood. She didn’t know who was cut or how bad it was. She didn’t know whether to pull packs off or try to get the animals to the trail with their loads still on. Below her, she saw gear. One of the baby’s packs must have come undone on its own, littering the hillside. She continued scaling the mountain in between the switchbacks to reach the rider. He groaned, which was good. He wasn’t dead. But bones poked through ripped jeans. Kristine stood stunned for a moment at a loss for what to do. They needed help. That was clear. She wasn’t going to get this rider out on a horse. She hollered up the mountain, “How’s the boy?”

“He’s sitting up now,” one of the riders answered. “But he’s bleeding. Can we get down to help him?”

“I want off the horse,” the boy’s friend called from his perch in front of his father.

“Stay put!” Kristine ordered. She held up her hand, trying to think. “Not yet. It’s too dangerous. Sit tight for a few minutes.” She shut her eyes, sorting out all she needed to do and prioritizing it. The roar of the waterfall behind her did nothing to help her plan her next move. “Brian, you got those mules up?”

“They’re on the trail, but their packs are falling off.”

“Leave them. Cut the switchbacks down to my horse and ride like hell back to the Aspens. We’re going to need a chopper for a busted leg and maybe a concussion.”

“Got it,” he hollered back.

“How far behind is your other string?” she asked Takeisha.

“He said he’d be another twenty getting the last mules ready to go.”

“Do you have any emergency training?”

“No,” Takeisha answered meekly.

“Okay. Who’s got enough of a level spot to get off their horse safely?” she called up to the riders.

“I think I could get off,” the rider at the turn of the switchback said.

Kristine went to his side and held the horse until he was off. “We need an emergency kit. I think Gloria, the woman who was lecturing you about bears, carries one. Head up to Shadow and tell the packer to get her here as quickly as he can.” He carefully inched past the horses, stopping briefly to whisper something to the crying child on the rocks before he continued up the stairs. Kristine pointed his horse down the switchback and slapped him on the rump, making him skip a switchback. She led each of the other riders to the wide section of trail and helped them off. The riders rushed to the boy and his father.

“How bad is it?” one asked. “Is he going to die?”

“He’s not going to die,” Kristine said. She thought about what they needed to do for the injured as well as the stock. “We shouldn’t move them, but it’s likely to take a while to get help in here. Some of you stay here with them, keep them talking. Takeisha, let’s go try to round up the stock, and a few of you come with us to get some food and sleeping bags.”

Two men quickly volunteered to go down the mountain and gather supplies from their bags. “Just tell us what to do. We want to help.”

Now they’re ready to listen, Kristine mused. “Yep, we’ve got this,” she mumbled under her breath, leading the way down the trail.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Gloria hadn’t liked the situation at all down at Fish Creek with the bear scavenging a dead horse. As she had hiked the trail to Rosalie, she kept replaying the talk she’d tried to have with Kristine. At that point, the issue of balance had felt like the key point to her, and balance could be managed. Limit the number of trips taken into the backcountry or at least to certain sites. Control the amount of food brought in or packed in and require guests to use bear boxes. In Yosemite, her colleagues had made great progress with bear boxes in the areas most saturated with tourists. She knew they didn’t solve all of the problems, but they at least acknowledged bears as the local wildlife, acknowledged that people had a part in their own safety.

But now here at Rosalie she had a problem much bigger than the one down at Fish Creek. This group had brought another issue to light. The group that Leo had packed in was a miserable mess of chaos and overkill. Their attitude appalled her. Not only did they ignore the way their presence attracted wildlife, they insisted that the wildlife was an inconvenience. She’d highlighted Leo’s part in that by packing people in with no limitations on what they brought with them. Campers like these contributed to the problem of balance by tempting bears with an easy meal, eventually making them reliant on a diet of human food and putting campers in real danger. Once food-conditioned, bears became territorial and confrontational, learning that humans were happy to drop and abandon their food when rushed.

She’d approached the Rosalie camp with all this in mind. When she’d reached the group, the long hike had tempered her anger. Though they reported no bear visits, she camped near them, expecting to be on duty during the night when their food supply would be more vulnerable to bears. However, she still kicked herself for taking a day hike to collect evidence of bear activity in the area. She had returned to a trashed camp.

The party said the old bear had lumbered in and had not responded to their efforts to scare it away. This alarmed Gloria. Wandering around during the day wasn’t completely out of character when a bear was grazing on berries or even taking the opportunity to root around in an unsupervised campsite to bulk up on calories. But human presence should have acted as a deterrent. Even habituated to humans, unless someone was holding an item it had claimed as its own as a food-conditioned bear would, the bear should have had zero interest in the people and run when confronted. It troubled her enough that she decided to spend another day in the backcountry hoping that the bear would return.

Though the bear disappointed her, she’d been pleased to hear Kristine defend her and light a fire under the campers to clean up the area. The Kristine she’d stormed out on hadn’t seemed to care about such things. She’d been the complete opposite of the indifferent woman who’d blown off her concerns. It occurred to her that the response that had pissed her off so much was the one out of character, yet she had been too upset to discuss it with Kristine. Chagrined, she knew she owed Kristine an apology. Unfortunately, she had no time for that now. After the group finally left to return to the Lodge, she packed up her things, stringing up her large backpack from a tree limb out of reach of bears. She only needed her daypack with her while she hiked around the area to talk to other campers and see if they had encountered the animal. If there were other reports of such aggressive, atypical behavior, she’d need to talk to Scott about the possibility of relocation for the animal.

She’d been on the trail about a half hour, stopping to question the campers along the way, when she heard thunderous hoofbeats approaching. She couldn’t remember hearing an animal moving on the trail so quickly and stepped off it to avoid a collision. The rider, one of the men from the team that packed the group from hell out that morning, slid to a stop in front of her.

“Gloria?” he asked.

“Yes,” she answered, confused.

“We’ve got a situation on the switchback below Shadow. Some riders went down. They sent someone up saying they need first aid. Teeny thought you might have a first-aid kit.”

“How serious is it?”

“Don’t know. The guy said a kid took a tumble, and his dad’s got a nasty fracture.”

Gloria quickly shrugged out of her pack and pulled out her radio. “Glad I’ve been lugging this around,” she said, hoping Scott was right about the radio being able to bounce off a repeater and reach the office in Mammoth. “Scott, it’s Gloria,” she said, relieved when he answered. “There’s an accident on the switchbacks below Shadow. All I’ve got right now is possible concussion and a fractured leg.”

“Any idea how bad the break is?” he asked.

“No. The rider from the Lodge who found me was already relaying a message.”

“How long until you can assess yourself?”

“I’m probably…” She directed her question to the rider. “How long till we can get to them?”

“Twenty, thirty minutes.”

“I’m a half hour from the scene,” Gloria said.

“I’m going to go ahead and radio for a chopper, but update me once you’re there.”

“Absolutely.”

“I’m Judd,” the cowboy said. “Hop aboard. I’ll get you down there in no time.”

Gloria stared at him. “It sounds like that’s the thinking that got everyone into this mess.”

“Look, ma’am. I’m a professional. I can get you there safely and in half the time.”

She would have trusted Kristine’s word more, but Kristine wasn’t in front of her. Judd was. She stowed the radio back into her daypack. Judd hung the backpack from the horn of his saddle, gave her his left stirrup and showed her how to link her elbow through his to swing aboard. As soon as she had her arms around his waist, they were moving down the trail.

Her mind jumped back four years, hearing her father’s voice full of fear, urging her to come home as soon as possible. Her mother was in the hospital with complications from her last treatment. He’d called Gloria in Tennessee where she had picked up a research opportunity in the Smoky Mountains. Hours had already passed when she returned to her camper to find the message. All of the unknowns had crunched her stomach into a knot as she put herself into motion to get home. She’d worried the entire time that she wouldn’t make it. The drive to the airport, the flight, getting a car to make it home…she was suspended in time, as she was now on the trail, at the mercy of the transportation to deliver her but void of control of the situation, at the mercy of what she would find when she arrived. That trip had indirectly brought her here to the High Sierras. The thought of arriving home to find her mother already gone drove her to select her next projects more conservatively.

Judd let her off at the crest of the waterfall. Running down the switchback stairs, she quickly spotted the fallen riders. Her brain tried to unscramble the words she heard them hollering. Then she realized they were not calling her. They were letting Kristine know she’d arrived.

Gloria reached the boy first. He sat in another rider’s lap resting against the man’s chest.

“I hope it’s okay that we moved him. He seems mostly scared. I couldn’t let him sit on the rocks any longer.”

“Should be fine. What’s your name?” She asked the shaggy-haired boy. He grimaced, and his recently-cut adult teeth that pinched his lower lip accentuated how small his face was.

“Sammy. I want to see my dad. They won’t let me go see my dad.”

“It’s important we know you’re okay first. Can you follow my finger?” she asked, moving it from side to side in front of him. His eyes tracked her finger, and his pupils dilated. She felt his hands and asked the man holding him to lift the shirt that he held to the boy’s head. Blood matted the boy’s head but the pressure seemed to have stopped active bleeding. “Looks like they’ve taken really good care of you. Now let me check on your dad, okay? Sit tight for just a minute longer.”

She found Kristine standing on the trail. Those eyes catching her off guard again. No matter what her expression, Kristine always managed to give Gloria pause. Gone were the indifference, anger and hesitation. The woman looking at her was fully in her element, calm and in control.

“We did okay by him?” Kristine’s eyes darted to the boy.

“Yes, he’ll be fine. His father’s in worse shape?”

“That’s where we need your help. He was bleeding pretty badly out of his thigh. I’ve got his buddy applying pressure up in his groin. I’m so glad you got here as fast as you did.” Kristine cut the switchback, and Gloria did the same.

“Good chance he’s in shock,” Gloria said, settling next to him, taking in his pale coloring. “Smart to cover up the wound. What did it look like before you started applying pressure?”

“Like I said, he was bleeding. I saw bone but still figured we needed to try to stop the blood loss.”