The Maze (17 page)

The idea for
The Maze
came as I trained a spotting scope on a juvenile condor soaring above the majestic Vermilion Cliffs near the Grand Canyon. My wife, Jean, and I were huddled there with three hardy bird biologists on a bitterly cold, windy day in late December 1996.

We'd driven from our home in southwestern Colorado hoping to catch a glimpse of this largest and rarest land bird in North America, after having read about the historic release of six fledgling condors less than two weeks before. Biologist Mark Vekasy from The Peregrine Fund explained why one of the condors was back in the release pen rather than in the air with the others. The day before, he'd had to capture the bird after a remarkable yet premature flight that ended on the flats ten miles away. There was drama here, I realized. I
started thinking about putting fledgling condors together with a “fledgling boy” in a story.

The Peregrine Fund's field notes from the Vermilion Cliffs, updated several times a month on the Internet, proved invaluable as I wrote the novel. Interested readers can follow the condors' ongoing adventures via computer (http://www.peregrinefund.org). There's also an excellent National Audubon Video narrated by Robert Redford entitled
California Condor
. I'd like to extend my appreciation to all the dedicated people in the field and in the zoos who are helping bring the condor back from the brink of extinction.

I'd also like to thank three hang glider pilots from my hometown of Durango, Colorado, who gave generously of their expertise: Dennis Haley, Keith Ystesund, and Debrek Baskins. It was a thrill to watch them fly.

For the Blue Canyon section of the novel I am indebted to John Haueisen, who was a librarian for more than a decade at a juvenile detention facility. His willingness to share anecdotes and background material with me provided the true-to-life details I needed for authenticity. All the characters in my story, as well as the facility itself, are entirely fictional.

Researching the Maze on foot was pure pleasure—I've been a canyon hiker for years. For the purposes of the story I have slightly fictionalized the area. In real life the primitive road descends the cliffs five miles away from where I've placed Lon's camp. I've added
the spring behind his camp and the sand dunes Rick used for a training hill. Their landing zone near the Doll House, as well as the rest of the topography of the Maze district, is as described.

I chose the edge of the Maze for the condor reintroduction base in my story for thematic purposes and for its stunning beauty. There is not an actual condor project in this location. Tantalizingly, however, one of the original six condors released in December 1996 overflew the Maze in July 1997 during an epic flight of 180 miles, soaring all the way from Vermilion Cliffs, Arizona, to the vicinity of Moab, Utah.

 

Durango, Colorado

December 1997

Award-winning author Will Hobbs knows firsthand the thrills, excitement, and survival skills that bring his novels to life. His travels have taken him from the frozen mountains of Colorado to the vast wilderness of Canada and Alaska. He has rafted down raging rivers, snowshoed deep into the backcountry, camped at high altitudes, and survived in 20 degrees below zero weather.

“I get letters from kids saying it felt just like they were swimming with sea turtles or riding through the Window high on the Continental Divide,” the author has written. “That's just what I'm hoping for….”

Will Hobbs has lived the adventure of the great outdoors, and his novels come alive with breathtaking realism that sweeps readers along on a thrill-a-minute ride.

The Big Wander

Fourteen-year-old Clay Lancaster and his older brother Mike are off on a trip they'll never forget as they strike out into the red rock country of the Southwest in search of their missing uncle. But soon Mike gives up, and Clay is even more determined to go on. He follows a lead on his uncle's whereabouts that
takes him deep into the canyons of Navajo country, where he learns the ways of the people and the dangers of the wilderness, and discovers, just in time, the secret of what became of his long-lost uncle.

Bearstone

After finding himself in trouble, Cloyd Atcitty, a Ute boy, is forced to spend a summer with an elderly rancher. Cloyd longs to return to the remote canyon where he grew up, and he thinks there could never be true understanding between the rancher and him. But when the old man takes him up into the majestic mountains of Colorado, the two of them discover the illegal killing of a grizzly bear, and the crisis brings them together in a dramatic story of friendship, bears, and gold.

Beardance

In this exciting sequel to
Bearstone
, while riding in search of the lost gold mine, Cloyd hears a report that a mother grizzly with cubs has been sighted. With the help of a grizzly expert, Cloyd finds the bears. Then the cubs are orphaned, and it's up to Cloyd, staying up in the mountains alone, to keep them alive. To do so, he must protect them from both nature and man, living among them and becoming one of them—dancing himself into the power of an ancient heritage to spare the
magnificent creatures that could be the last of the Colorado grizzlies.

Kokopelli's Flute

Fascinated by the magic of the ancient Anasazi cliff dwelling called “Picture House,” Tepary Jones knows it is the perfect place to view his first total eclipse of the moon. In the dark silence, Tep and his dog Dusty wait for the lunar show. Instead of the eclipse, Tep witnesses robbers with shovels chipping into the red sandstone, destroying the ancient pictures, and stealing the priceless treasures. He finds an ancient bone flute that's been left behind, and something tells Tep that he shouldn't put the flute to his lips…but he just can't resist. And then the magic begins….

Far North

From the window of the small floatplane, fifteen-year-old Gabe Rogers is getting his first look at Canada's magnificent Northwest territories with Raymond Providence, his roommate from boarding school. Below is the Nahanni River—wall-to-wall whitewater racing between sheer cliffs and plunging over Virginia Falls. When the pilot sets the plane down on the lakelike surface of the upper river for a closer look, the engine quits, and the plane drifts helplessly toward the falls…. Can the two
boys survive alone in the Canadian wilderness in temperatures so cold that even getting their feet wet could mean death?

Ghost Cause

After a sailing ship breaks up on the rocks of Washington's storm-tossed Cape Flattery, Nathan MacAllister, the son of the lighthouse keeper, refuses to believe there are no survivors. Unexplained footprints on a desolate beach, a theft at the trading post, and glimpses of a wild “hairy man” convince Nathan that someone is hiding in the remote sea caves. With his new friend, a fisherman from the famed Makah whaling tribe, Nathan paddles the Pacific in search of clues. Alone in the forest, he discovers a ghostly canoe and a skeleton that may unlock the mystery of ancient treasure, betrayal…and murder.

The Maze

Just fourteen, Rick Walker is alone, on the run, and desperate. Stowing away in the back of a truck, he suddenly finds himself at a dead end, out in the middle of nowhere. The Maze. Rick stumbles into the remote camp of Lon Peregrino, a bird biologist who is releasing fledgling California condors back into the wild. Intrigued, Rick decides to stay on. When two men with a
vicious dog drive up, Rick discovers that Lon and his birds are in grave danger. Will he be able to save them?

 

Look for
Jason's Gold
,
coming in hardcover from Morrow Jr. Books
in Fall 1999
and in paperback from Avon Camelot
in Fall 2000.

With Miles Canyon and the White Horse Rapids behind him, Jason paddled furiously north down the Yukon. The sun had lost its power, its arc now ominously low in the sky. No more calls from geese or cranes, only from ravens, and the word they were croaking was “winter.”

It was do or die.

His canoe was fast, but still, he had fifty miles of river before Lake Leberge, where the current would die on him for thirty miles.

“Pull!” he yelled. “Pull!”

Confused, the husky turned around in the bow of the canoe, seeming to ask what he wanted.

“Sorry, King! I meant me, not you!”

Suddenly King pricked up his wolf-like ears and stud
ied the shore. Jason stopped paddling, then heard a
chirrup
repeated several times.

There on the left, in the willows was a cow moose, the first moose he'd ever seen.

From the shore downstream came deep grunts. A bull moose was attacking a small spruce tree and utterly demolishing it with his massive antlers. Suddenly the bull left off the attack, flared his nostrils, and proceeded upriver toward the female.

A second bull, hidden in the willows near the cow, charged out onto the river gravel to challenge the intruder. The bulls paused twenty feet from each other, pawed the ground, and lowered their antlers, grunting battle cries. The giants were equally matched, and it was apparent there was going to be a fight. The current took the canoe around the bend before the bulls charged one another, but a moment later Jason heard the ringing collision of bone on bone.

The pale green Yukon was joined by the Takhini from the west, which briefly clouded it with silt. The valley opened up, and the cut banks disappeared as he entered a slow and swampy alder flat. Then, at the end of his second day below White Horse Rapids, the current died out altogether as he paddled into the head of windblown Lake Leberge.

The wind blew so fiercely that night, it seemed like the spruces in his camp would surely snap. At last it died out in the hours before dawn. Jason awoke to a sheet of ice stretching all the way to the barren highlands across the lake, and the fearful realization that he was trapped.

At dawn the trees were bending again, and, to his amazement, the ice broke into panes of glass that drifted and shattered before the wind. He didn't dare to take the time to warm himself with a fire, or to cook. The wind was blowing hard out of the northwest, and he had to get through this dead water and into the current before the ice returned to lock up the lake for good.

Jason hugged the west shore and paddled north, bundled like a polar bear from fur hat to sealskin mukluks, but without the clumsy mittens. His fingers felt like frozen claws. The windlashed surface of the lake was wild with waves and whitecaps, but as long as he hugged the shore, he could keep the canoe under control. Even so, the spray turned to ice in midair and fell tinkling into the canoe.

On his second day on the lake there were skiffs behind. On his third day, still hugging the shore, he couldn't see the skiffs over his shoulder anymore. He could guess the reason. With all their surface for the wind to catch, they'd be kites. They'd end up wrecked on the far shore of the lake.

With each dawn the ice covering the lake was thicker than before, and each day it took longer for the wind to shatter and disperse it.

His fourth day on the lake, the squalls became so severe that he couldn't make any progress, and had to go to shore. He was in a quandary. If he couldn't get off this lake, there would come the day, very soon, when
the morning ice covering Lake Leberge wouldn't break up at all, and that day would spell disaster.

Out of desperation, he tried to see if King could line the canoe from shore. Where the shoreline would allow it, it worked. With the dog pulling his utmost and Jason paddling like a berserker, they were able to keep going.

The sixth day dawned a dead calm. The ice on Leberge was an inch thick. What now? Wait until the ice was thick enough to walk on, then drag the canoe the rest of the way?

If he waited that long, the Yukon River after it flows out of the lake would freeze up, and he'd be stranded with three hundred miles remaining.

Checkmate?

His antagonist, the wind, finally came to his aid. Late in the morning it blew hard enough to create a channel of open water along the western shore, and then it died out as suddenly as it had begun.

Here was his chance. Jason put the husky back in the bow and paddled north with all the strength he could muster. By twilight he was entering the narrowing outlet of the lake, and he felt the revival of the current. Before long it was rushing beneath him like floodwaters. There was just enough daylight left to allow him to see the illusion of the boulder-strewn river bottom rising up beneath him, as the canoe poured with the slush ice into the reborn Yukon.

On the left shore, people. Behind them, cabins with sod roofs. An Indian village. He paddled for shore, half dead from cold.

Arms motioned him in. “Plenty
muck-a-muck
,” a man told him.

He was being invited to eat, he realized. All around the village, racks were full of drying salmon, but it was moose steaks they were roasting around their cookfires.

The Indians' dogs, all tied, were in an uproar at the sight of King, but no one paid any attention to their barking and leaping. People let him know he was fortunate to come off the lake. “Tomolla, no.”

The next morning the Yukon narrowed into a winding, steep-walled canyon. He had to be careful not to hug the turns, where sweepers—trees undermined by the river but still clinging by their roots to the banks—sawed up and down in the current. In the tightest turn of all, he passed over an enormous submerged boulder that produced a vicious boil downstream. The boil caught the canoe, spun it suddenly, and King went flying into the river. It was all Jason could do to brace with his paddle and keep from capsizing.

“King!” he shouted, but the dog was having no trouble keeping his head above the water. Jason made for a gravel beach as fast as he could and the husky paddled close behind. King dragged himself to shore and shook himself out. They were back on the river minutes later.

It was a gray October day, with no help from the sun. The canoe passed the mouth of the Teslin River and a native village there. Now the Yukon was nearly twice as big as before. It snowed that night—three inches of snow as fine and dry as sugar.

The next day he passed the mouth of the Big Salmon River and another village.

On all sides, ice cakes were hissing in the Yukon. Shelves of ice were forming along the shore, extending ten and twenty feet out. As freeze-up lowered the level of the river, the ice shelves cracked noisily under their own weight and splashed into the water, adding even more ice to the rest jostling downstream.

He passed two more villages the following day at the mouth of the Little Salmon and the mouth of the Nordenskjold. The drying racks were full of salmon.

From around a bend in the river came the roar of rapids. Jason pulled the canoe onto the beach and walked above the sheer bank on the right side to take a look at what was making all the noise. Four stony islands scattered in a row across the Yukon divided its flow into five rushing channels. This had to be the Five Fingers, which his map noted as
LAST RAPID
.

The big waves in the central slots would surely spill him, but he could picture himself paddling the raceway closest to the eastern bank where he stood.

Before he got back into the canoe he calmed himself by sitting for a few minutes with his companion.
The best friend I ever hope to have
, he mused. With the husky's winter coat fully grown in, including a creamy underfur, King looked more splendid and solid than ever.

“These Five Fingers can't stop us,” Jason said to the husky. “Don't let anything stump you, King. That's what my father always said.”

The husky, with a quick dart of his tongue, licked Jason's cheek.