The Mountain Story (6 page)

“On my neck,” Bridget answered, hyperventilating.

“Breathe,” Nola commanded.

That seemed a strange thing to tell a woman whose throat was closing from anaphylactic shock.

“Where on your neck?”

Bridget wheezed, pointing.

Nola searched. “No stinger. No sting mark.”

Bridget’s face darkened as she struggled for air. “There!” she rasped, pointing again.

“There’s no stinger,” Nola said. “Breathe.
Breathe
.”

Bridget pointed once more to her nape. “Right there!”

The girl in the green flip-flops looked too but did not find a sting mark either. I failed to see why it mattered
where
Bridget was stung. She didn’t have her EpiPen. Her throat was going to close up and the Mountain Station was at least a mile away.

“I do not see a thing,” Nola said. “Not a
thing
.”

Bridget wheezed dramatically. “In the middle!”

“Nothing.”

Bridget’s irritation seemed to be mitigating her allergic reaction. “Look under my hair!”

Nola took a moment to do so. “I don’t think you were stung.”

“I was stung,” Bridget insisted.

“You’re breathing pretty well though,” I pointed out.

“You are,” Nola agreed.

Bridget rubbed her neck, pouting.

The silent girl found my eyes. I took the briefest moment to wonder about her presence, and her peculiar manner.

“I was
stung
!” Bridget swore.

“We should head back,” I said, turning to Nola, “in case she has a delayed reaction.”

“That’s it,” Bridget said. “It’s a delayed reaction.”

The fog had become a viscous soup through which we could see neither earth nor sky.

“It’s thick as stew,” Nola said. I would quickly learn that Nola had a talent for stating the obvious.

“Are you sure you know the way?” Bridget asked.

Hubris, meet Wolf Truly. “I’m sure,” I said, and started walking.

Bridget’s voice rose as we inched through the clotted clouds. “I can’t see
anything
.”

Gnarled tree roots slithered back and forth between the slippery rocks. We were stubbing our toes and catching our heels. The teenager lagged in her green flip-flops but was remarkably sure-footed, considering. I caught her scent—red licorice and Dove soap.

“We appear to be in quite the pickle here,” Nola said, laughing to hide her worry.

“What’s your name again?” Bridget called to me through the haze. “Have I forgotten or did you not say?”

“Wolf,” I said.

“Beg pardon?”

“Wolf.”

“Wolf? I would have remembered that.
Wolf
.”

“Wolf?” Nola repeated. “Did you say your name is
Wolf
?”

“It’s short for Wilfred. Wilfred Truly.”

“Wouldn’t it be Wilf if it was short for Wilfred?”

“It’s just Wolf,” I said. “That’s what my mother called me. That’s the way everyone says it. Wolf.”

The girl in the green flip-flops did not tell us her name or attempt to communicate in any way. It occurred to me that she was mute.

“We need to find our way back,” Nola said, adding gratuitously, “before dark.”

When we came to a juncture of sorts, I sniffed the air, hoping to catch a scent of the trail home, but all I could distinguish was Nola’s lavender sachet, the ginger sweat of Bridget, and the soapy teenaged girl.

“Which way now?” Bridget asked.

“The lake’s this way,” I said, pointing.

We walked silently for nearly an hour, over the rocks, through the granite passes and the village of thick white firs. We carried on past the cluster of live oak. No acorns, just leftover shells from the rats and squirrels. I was sweating in spite of the dropping temperature. At some point I realized we’d begun making a gentle
descent
. I knew that the way back to Secret Lake should be a gradual
ascent
. I remember telling myself that it was just a different way, a shortcut that would eventually take us back up. And so I
led
them. That must be said.

Nola’s cheeks were pink from the cold. Bridget had zipped her hooded jacket all the way up over her tousled blond hair and pulled her second coat on too. The mute girl was shivering in spite of her peacoat, and I found myself twitching with empathetic pain when I lowered my eyes to her scarlet toes in the green flip-flops.

I found a rock, and leaning against it yanked off my boots, tore the sub-zero hiking socks—Byrd’s gift to me one Christmas—from my feet and passed them to the girl, stupidly mouthing,
take them
. She pressed the woollen socks back into my hands, shaking her head.

“We’ll be back before it gets too cold anyway,” Nola announced with conviction. “But that was a very nice gesture, Wolf. Does anyone call you Wilfred?”

I thought of my aunt Kriket. I thought of my father. I thought of my friend Byrd. “No.”

The wind danced in the trees, scolding the heckling jays as we trudged on. “Come on, everyone,” I said, “this way.”

Time on the mountain could be deceitful and disappointing, like the girl I once thought I loved. Time shifted and shrank, bounced and echoed, slept with college professors and rejected true love. We walked on in silence for what seemed like a very long time before we stopped to catch our breath and consider the course.

“I think we came around here,” Bridget said. “Remember you pointed out that tower? Shouldn’t it be right over there?”

We moved forward, unexpectedly knocked off balance by a patch of small, loose rocks when we started down a short slope. We only slid a few feet though, and none of us were toppled.

“That could have been
much
worse,” Nola said.

By accident, the mute girl and I locked eyes. She blanched, and gagged, and then turned to vomit in the bushes. I tried not to take it personally.

Together with Nola and Bridget, I watched the heaving arch of the girl’s spine. Nola moved toward her but Bridget held Nola back by grabbing the red poncho. I didn’t pretend then, or now, to understand the ways of women. I reckoned they knew best when one of their kind wanted to be left alone.

“Are you all right?” Nola called.

The girl wiped her mouth with her coat sleeve and nodded in response—so, not deaf. She rose to her feet and stepped up to join me in the lead.

Bridget shared a look with Nola and we walked on, until we came to another fork in the overgrowth.

“I wonder what time it is,” Bridget mused, crossing her arms over her chest. I judged it to be somewhat later than four in the afternoon. In an hour or so the mountain would be dipped in night and Nola and I were the only ones properly dressed for the cold. I hadn’t bothered to check the mountain weather forecast back at the tram station but I knew, at this time of year, we’d be lucky if there was no rain—or snow. “Let’s keep moving,” I said.

We plodded on a little farther, up the striated granite and frozen flecked quartz, serenaded by Bridget’s chorus of complaints. “I’m so cold. Can we hurry up? The rocks are so loose.”

It was clear to me that the silent girl in the green flip-flops was moving as quickly as she could, and Nola faster than I’d have expected, given her age. We continued on over the rocks for another ten or fifteen minutes, which should have brought us to Secret Lake but nothing looked familiar anymore, or rather everything did—the same spiny pines peering out at us from the fog in all directions. The same ragged rocks.

“Hear it?” Bridget said. “Sounds like a waterfall.”

We could all hear the sound of a roaring falls, an auditory illusion that the mountain is famous for. “The wind,” I said. “It’s the wind.”

“Sounds like it’s this way,” Bridget said, pointing left.

“It’s the wind,” I repeated.

“It does sound like a waterfall,” Nola said.

“It does.”

“Isn’t that where the tourists would be?” Bridget asked. “At the waterfall? Shouldn’t we try to find it?”

“The only waterfall is Corazon Falls,” I said. “That’s six miles away from here—down in the canyon. There’s no trail to Corazon Falls. Come on. We need to get back to the Mountain Station.”

An owl began to hoot in the trees overhead, stopping us in our tracks. It was later than I thought. When we paused in a small clearing to catch our breath I tried to remain calm but I knew we were lost. I’d never been lost before. At least not in a mountain wilderness.

The owl hooted once more. I was sure it was a sign—from Byrd? God?—a warning. “We can’t go on,” I said. “It’s suicide to walk in the dark. We need to find a spot to settle in.”

“You’re not serious.” Bridget stiffened. “Are you saying we’re stuck here for the night?”

“We’ll be good. We’ll be fine.”

“Oh my God. Oh my God.”

Nola reached out to squeeze her arm. “One night. You can make it through one night.”

The girl in the green flip-flops said nothing but I could see she was afraid. Bridget sniffled, but I couldn’t find words to comfort her. Mostly I was irritated that she’d gone running off from the bees in the first place.

We looked around, sifting through the fog for a suitable shelter. Finding no overhangs or caves, we quickly agreed that the site of a large fallen log seemed as good a place as any to wait out the cold night.

Leaning down to clear a spot before she sat, Bridget was startled by a skittering cadre of black beetles moving in and out of a tunnel in the dirt, and let out a blood-curdling scream. Backing away from the clattering insects, she caused a cluster of rocks to loosen at her feet and roll down the nearby incline, which was deeper and steeper than I’d first imagined.

None of us wanted to sleep with the beetles so we decided to roll the log away from their burrow. Nola suggested a flat spot up the hill near some manzanita, which would help block the wind. Agreed, we four leaned down to roll the log away from the offending insects, but we were pushing against gravity and the rocks were unstable beneath our feet. With much grunting and huffing we managed to move the big log only a few yards up the incline. Bridget complained that the beetles were still too close, so we four bore down once more.

It all happened so fast. (How many times has a sorry man said those words?)

We were moving that damn log up the hill—and then we were falling, lost in the kaleidoscope of rocks and ochre dust and manzanita and sage, conveyed by round, rushing boulders, and silt, and brush, hitting the ground with a thud.

It all happened so fast.

Battered and stunned, we rose, and gathering our wits tried to find one another amidst the rocks and soil and the bare-rooted scraps of the bushes that had concealed the cliff’s edge.

Nola, having been delivered the farthest afield, coughed, and shouted, “Everyone okay?”

I called back in the affirmative and so did Bridget. The girl said nothing, but I could see that she’d landed on the far side of a snowberry bush and didn’t appear to be seriously injured.

Bridget cried, from some place unseen, “Oh my God. Oh my God,” but she didn’t scream, which I took to be a good sign.

“What about you, Nola? You all right?” I shouted.

“Fine!” she called out. “I just hurt my wrist!”

I stared up into the gloaming at the height from which
we’d tumbled. It was a miracle that one of us hadn’t been killed. A miracle.

I turned to find the girl shuffling toward me around a large boulder and was shocked to see that she hadn’t lost her green flip-flops. She had a small cut on her cheek and a new tear in her old peacoat but seemed otherwise fine. “Okay?”

She nodded, as Bridget emerged from between two large rocks. Her Lycra was torn on her knees and she had some scrapes on her hands, and her cheek. “I lost my sports bag,” she said. “It had the granola bars, and water.”

“We’ll find it in the morning,” I promised. I raised my hand to adjust my ball cap and discovered it was gone. My Detroit Tigers cap. I hoped I could find that too.

“I have my knapsack!” Nola said triumphantly when she appeared, finally, through some thick brush. “I lost my binoculars. They were around my neck.”

“We’ll find everything in the morning,” I said.