The Maze (7 page)

Lon was stuffing the hang glider back in its tube as a white pickup appeared at the edge of the landing zone. The round emblem on its door set Rick's heart pounding. Panicky, he looked to Lon for reassurance.

“Maze ranger,” Lon explained. “Park Service. Don't worry. Just don't talk. Don't say anything unless you have to.”

The truck pulled to a stop. A man with neatly combed gray hair and a trim gray mustache got out from behind the wheel.

Rick couldn't see the man's eyes behind his sunglasses, but he felt them scrutinizing him. The park ranger looked from Rick to the eagle perched on the carrying bracket at the front of Lon's truck, then back to Rick. Rick tried to quiet his heart.

The nameplate over the man's chest pocket said
JOE
PHIPPS
. The ranger and the condor biologist shook hands. Rick sidled away and stood by the eagle.

The ranger asked if Lon had taken the eagle flying that morning; Lon said he had. The ranger shook his head, marveling. He glanced at Rick once more, but he didn't say anything.

The ranger started to talk about the weather. He said that the monsoon rains were long overdue. Lon said he expected they were still coming. The ranger asked about the condors. Lon reported that they were doing well.

With another glance in Rick's direction, the ranger said, “Good, I'm really happy to hear that.”

“You got my message?” Lon asked.

“Sure did…haven't wanted to radio you back on it. As we both know, there's a lot of people listening in on the airwaves. Your message—at least the way it was relayed to me—was mighty cryptic, Lon. I wasn't able to cover the situation myself, but the sheriff covered it for me. The only Humvee that came off the Maze road was driven by Nuke Carlile, and it turns out he's an old friend of the sheriff's.”

Lon flinched. “Great, just great. I suppose the sheriff didn't happen to see any artifacts sticking out of the Humvee.”

“I don't expect he nosed around much. What did you have to go on, Lon? You see something yourself?”

Lon shook his head. He looked disgusted. “Just a hunch,” he said. “A very strong hunch.”

At this the ranger's questioning eyes left the biologist and fastened on Rick. Rick was sure the man was guessing that Lon wasn't telling the full story on account of him.

The ranger glanced back at Lon. “I was about to come see you anyway. I wanted to tell you in person that I've been transferred. All the way up to Oregon.”

“I'm sorry to hear that.”

“Came up quick. A man in a crucial job at Crater Lake took sick. The position of Maze ranger is sort of in limbo until they build a new station or bring in a portable. It's true I can't patrol the Maze very well from the Island in the Sky. It might be fifteen air miles—”

Lon laughed. “And two hundred some in your truck.”

“My kidneys won't miss this excuse for a road. Over the last eleven years I've had my internal organs rearranged for life. I should donate my body to science.”

“I'll miss you, Joe. You were a big supporter for the Condor Project coming in here.”

The park ranger looked wistfully toward the Doll House. “I'm gonna miss this country. And to tell you the truth, I'm a little concerned about leaving you out here without anyone to check in on you besides your own people.”

“How's that, Joe?”

“If the sheriff mentioned your name to Carlile…”

“How could that have happened? Why would he do a thing like that?”

“I'm not saying he did, Lon. I just wish I'd known beforehand that they were friends. I could see he wasn't going to do a thing unless he had a name to attach to the accusation.”

“My fault. I should've seen this coming.”

“You've met Nuke, I take it?”

“He already wasn't very happy to see me in here.”

“To my mind—don't quote me on this—he's a classic government hater, and I wouldn't be surprised if he associates you with the government. You know, I tried once to reason with him about Canyonlands National Park belonging to all the people of the United States. About people agreeing that a few places should be left natural, and that's what the national parks are all about.”

“I don't suppose that went over too big.”

“Nuke said to me, ‘It's not the people we're talking about here, it's the
government
.' What can you say to a guy who's consumed by hatred for the government?”

Lon just shrugged.

“After a certain point, hate becomes a brain disease. It distorts a person's perception of reality.”

“What's his beef?”

The ranger grinned. “You just said the word. Decades ago Nuke was the rancher who had the grazing permit on this whole district. He's the one who scratched the
road in here, for cattle. It was always worse than marginal grazing, but he had a permit on a hundred square miles in here, including the Maze. Of course it was public land even back then, administered by the federal government, but once it became part of the national park, his grazing permit was revoked.”

“Amazing to think anyone could've grazed cattle in the Maze.”

“There were just enough pockets of grass, especially on the canyon bottoms. Nuke drove cattle into nearly every canyon in the Maze.”

“I've seen a few stone staircases…knew they were overbuilt for foot traffic.”

“Nuke built those stone by stone. Jasper Canyon was the only one he could never manage to drive his cattle into, which is partly why we closed it a few years ago.”

“I hadn't heard about that. You mean Jasper is closed to hikers even?”

Jasper
, Rick thought. Did Carlile name his pit bull after that canyon?

“That's right. We posted a sign at the trailhead—there's only one path to the bottom, so it was easy to post. We want to have one canyon—for study—that has never been grazed and won't get the hiking traffic in the future that the rest will. Jasper's the closest thing we have to a pristine canyon ecosystem. The idea is to be able to compare all those other canyons with Jasper in order to monitor their recovery from the old grazing
damage and the impacts of the new recreational use. If you need to go into Jasper on account of your birds, though, don't worry about it. I'll put a memo to that effect in the file before I leave. Anyway, now you know the story on Carlile.”

Lon shook his head. “Still nursing his wounds over that revoked permit, sounds like.”

“You and I know that cattle are awfully hard on these arid lands out here, but this didn't make a bit of sense to Carlile. You could tell he'd started thinking of all this country out here as his own property rather than the public's. I'm sure he felt like he was being robbed of what was rightfully his.”

“Somehow I can picture him harboring a grudge for a quarter of a century.”

“He was offered a permit on higher-quality grazing land of greater acreage, but he wouldn't take it. National Park people bent over backward trying to accommodate him, but for Nuke it was the Maze district or nothing, so it turned out to be nothing. He moved into Moab after that, went to work at the uranium mill. Then just a few years ago he moved back to Hanksville, bought the gas station, and you know the rest.”

“It sure would all fit together, him pothunting in here, if I'm right about that. He probably thinks he's just evening up the score, making money on the Maze without working a single cow.”

“Just between you and me and the fencepost, I'm
standing here rethinking that fire that burned down the ranger station last spring. They never found what caused it. In addition to despising the federal government, Nuke would've had an immediate motive for arson: nobody on the road to take note of his pothunting trips. If that's what happened, it worked. Got me out of his way. All of this is wild conjecture, though, unless you've actually got something on him.”

“No, I don't. Just some suspicious behavior. At any rate, I have reason to believe he'll lay off this area now. He was in here night before last, and I'm assuming he pulled out everything he had hidden away. He's too exposed now with me so close. I don't think he'll be back.”

“All the same, keep a watchful eye out—” Suddenly the park ranger nodded in Rick's direction. “So who's your shy friend over here?”

“My nephew. My nephew Rick.”

“Happy to meet you, Rick. Where you from?”

“California,” he answered slowly.

“Oh, whereabouts?”

“Fort Bragg.”

“Sure, on the Mendocino coast. My, that's beautiful country. So what do you think of this out here? Couldn't be more different, eh?”

“That's for sure.” Rick breathed easier. He was going to get through this. He was surprised that Lon had lied for him.

A minute later the park ranger's 4×4 was disappearing up the road. Lon said, “So now we get a bit of autobiography. You're from Fort Bragg?”

“I'm from a lot of places.”

For a moment it looked as if Lon would ask him to tell more. Rick might have been willing, but the moment passed. “I'm hungry,” Lon said. “How about you?”

It was midmorning when they got back to camp. Rick ate cold cereal with strawberries, a cup of yogurt, two bagels with cream cheese. Lon nibbled his three cold hot dogs as he made observations through the spotting scope and jotted down notes. Rick said, “Have you ever tried cooking those?”

“More trouble than it's worth,” came the gruff response.

Sometimes Lon could look so tough. It wasn't just the scar, it was his entire body language. He wasn't someone you'd want to have for an enemy. “Aren't those tube steaks supposed to be bad for you? I mean, all those preservatives?”

“I figure I'll be so well preserved I'll live forever.”

“Condiments? Ever try condiments? You know, like mustard?”

“No point in gilding the lily. Less is more.”

Lon's philosophy, Rick thought. He wondered if Lon had ever owned a house, or how long it had been since he'd even lived in one.

Lon never looked away from his scope while he was
talking, which made it easier to ask him questions. “What would you think if I took a hike in the Maze sometime?”

The biologist turned from the scope, speared him with those penetrating blue eyes. “What am I all of a sudden, your parent? Your guardian or something?”

“I didn't—”

“Hey, I'm just a guy out here doing his job. If you want to hang out here awhile, that's okay. I thought you had that figured out.”

“Got it,” Rick said, squaring his shoulders.

He nursed his wounds in his tent. Lon just wanted to be left alone with his condors.

Rick couldn't help it, he'd started to care about the condors himself. Maybe because they were outcasts and the odds were all against them.

Rick couldn't help that he'd started to care about the man too, whatever his real name was—even if he
was
damaged somehow and more than a little strange. The man and the birds and Rick Walker, they were all damaged goods.

And why
had
he asked Lon's permission to hike in the Maze?

Rick nodded off and slept until the tent canvas, whipping with the wind, woke him up. He went back outside, not knowing what to expect.

Lon was still seated on his lawn chair facing the cliffs. The clouds had grown tall and dark, and the wind
was starting to blow hard. Rick wondered what rain would look like in these canyonlands of solid rock.

Two of the condors were hanging in the sky a hundred feet or so above the rim, like kites. Lon reached for his binoculars.

A third condor took to the air, joined them, then shot away from the red cliffs in the direction of the camp. The condor was passing directly overhead. Rick noticed the flat, stable plane of its wings. Unlike the turkey vultures he remembered from California, the condor flew without rocking or tilting. A supreme flier, that's what it was. He could see the long individual feathers extending from the wing tips like fingers. As the huge bird soared by, a musical whistling sound took Rick completely by surprise.

“M4,” Lon muttered. “Turn back, you goof, turn back.”

The condor flapped its wings once and kept soaring over the open country in the direction of Lizard Rock.

“Come down, come down!”

The condor soared high over the squatting monumental butte. It kept on flying past the spire of Chimney Rock, where it disappeared from view.

“What's the deal?” Rick asked.

There was a mix of admiration and disappointment on Lon's face. “Maverick's just made it tough on himself.”

Maverick? Rick thought. Lon just called one of his condors by a nickname. My nickname.

Rick thought better of mentioning it. Instead he said, “The sound that his wings made…”

“I call that condor music.”

The mercurial biologist was unmistakably trying to be friendly.

“So what do you do now?”

“We track him with the radio. This is all in the game. This is what makes it interesting.”

Past the Standing Rocks they jumped out of the truck. Lon held up the small tracking antenna while tuning in the condor's frequency on the radio fastened to his belt. He pointed the antenna north, toward the Maze, then rotated it gradually to the east.

Four rapid beeps started to come in, then grew stronger and stronger as the antenna pointed straight down the road. “That's good,” Lon said. “He's landed. If we're lucky, he won't have landed somewhere real tricky.”

They drove another half mile, took another reading. Lon scanned ahead with his powerful binoculars but couldn't see Maverick. “How much do we have on the odometer?”

“Four and a half miles.”

“The dope.”

“You have to hand it to him, though. From what you're saying, that's a pretty amazing flight for his age.”

“An epic flight. But there's a reason we pick a line of cliffs for our reintroduction sites. There are thermal upcurrents along the cliffs that provide tremendous lift. Fledglings can fly back and forth along the rim for weeks as they improve their flying skills. Even without parents to teach them, fledgling condors tend to be canny enough to stick with the good flying air and all those safe perches that the cliffs provide. It's real different down on the flats. Even an adult condor has to work like crazy to get airborne off level ground.”

“You mean he might not be able to get back up?”

“Might not. He won't be the only one to go through this lesson; he's just the first. Let's drive a little farther, see if we can spot him.”

They did spot him, out in the middle of Lon's landing zone.

Lon passed the binoculars to Rick. The condor was looking all around like a lost kid in the big city. “He looks clueless,” Rick said.

“He may be an orphan, but he's got some instincts. He's been looking at this landscape for six weeks. He knows that those cliffs back there are home base.”

They waited for the condor's next move. They waited all afternoon through the building of the clouds, through thunder and lightning and rain lashing the windshield.
Maverick, standing in the rain, was a murky and forlorn figure.

“Won't he catch sick?” Rick worried.

“Condors are tough, tough birds. They're going to be out here in the winter, in the cold and snow. Sometimes they'll move to a protected spot, but a lot of times they won't.”

“It snows out here?”

“Not a lot, but it does.”

“You'll be here in the winter?”

“Sure. If this first year is successful, I might be here year-round for the next twenty. More birds twice a year, same as at Vermilion Cliffs, in Arizona, and our California sites.”

“Vermilion Cliffs—is that where Josh comes from?”

Lon nodded. “North of the Grand Canyon and southwest of Page, Arizona. Josh and Andrea and David work there; I used to. It's our third year down there—fledged twenty-eight birds so far.”

Rick thought about the big net in the back of the truck. “It's five-thirty. What if it gets dark? Aren't you going to try to catch him?”

“Not today. Let's hope he gets anxious with the dark coming on and flies to his familiar roosts. It's best if he does it on his own. My chances of netting him in the open on the LZ are about zip anyway. I don't want to spook him into some worse spot than he is now. Better to wait, let him rest, see if he can possibly take
off cleanly, gain some altitude, head home. I wouldn't put it past him. He's the most precocious flier of any condor fledgling I've ever seen.”

“Sounds like you think he can do it.”

“I think he's got it in him. He's got some serious flaws, but he's also got great potential if he just survives the next couple months.”

They watched until dark. Maverick never flew. “What now?”

“We hope for the best,” Lon said grimly. “We'll be back at first light. Hope the coyotes don't get him.”

“He's awful big. Can't he fight 'em off with his talons, like that eagle did to M1 and M3?”

“Condors aren't raptors—aren't designed to kill. Their feet are different. They can hiss and grunt and put up a good bluff beating their wings, but when it comes down to it, their safety depends on flying. That's why they need to roost every night in a place predators can't reach, where they'll be able to lift off easily too.”

They returned to camp. Lon verified that the rest of the condors were accounted for. They'd perched close to one another as usual, in a draw below the Needle carcass, named after a nearby pinnacle. “Let's have a real meal,” Lon announced. “We've got a lot of fresh food, and that's not going to be the case much longer. All this salad stuff, some steaks…”

“You're kidding.”

“All wrapped up nice in the bottom drawer of the
fridge. Last time I fed 'em to the condors, when the birds were still in the pen. Made a nice treat.”

“How do they like their steaks?”

“On the raw side. Yourself?”

“Medium rare.”

“If you think about it, humans are vultures too. We locate our carrion at the supermarket.”

“If you're trying to gross me out of my steak, forget it.”

“I'll warm up some beans. You're on for salad.”

“How should we cook the steaks?”

“I always hold mine over an open fire with my hands. That's why I don't eat steak very often. If you've got a better idea, you're in charge.”

“Let's just kind of sear 'em in the frying pan.” Rick found a pan, lit the burner. “Hey,” he called. “What about Sky? Maybe she'd like to join us. I bet she'd appreciate a big, bloody steak. What do you say?”

That caught Lon's fancy. “I usually feed her out behind the tents, but sure, let's invite her to dinner.” Lon got his glove, went out back, and returned with the eagle on his arm. “I think she'd like hers rare,” he said, setting Sky down on the slickrock.

Soon the three of them were gnashing at their bloody steaks by the light of a propane lantern. There was no more talk of Maverick. Tomorrow would be here soon enough.