The Shelter Cycle (18 page)

He tripped on a bush, caught himself on a sapling. Holding his breath, he thought he heard something, a mechanical noise, down below. Then it was silent once more, except for his breathing. The wind in the trees, the black sky pressing down close against their branches.

He kept on, descending, along the frozen creek bed. Dark water rushed past, visible through holes in the ice. Again he heard something, and paused. Traffic. He began to see glimpses of a road below, through the trees, a long curved black line against the snow.

The ground grew level after a time, and he emerged from the trees, crossed an empty field. He climbed through a rusted barbed wire fence, up an embankment, then slid down a snowdrift made by plows. He was standing on the narrow shoulder of Highway 191. If he caught a ride north, he'd be in Bozeman; south, in West Yellowstone.

Headlights approached, from the north. A van, its cab alight, slowed; two small, dark-haired girls waved wildly through the side windows, their faces smearing the glass as they slipped past.

Colville hurried, his snowshoes clattering on the blacktop until he reached the other side. He took off his pack and tossed it over the snowdrift, then climbed after it. He began to ascend the next slope, heading deeper into the mountains.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
it was still dark when Colville awakened, the air cold against his exposed face. He felt the fabric of the tent close around him, the sleeping bag straining to hold Kilo, as well. It startled Colville that the dog was back, but it did not exactly surprise him.

“Jeremy?” he said, and his voice faded away in the cold darkness around the tent.

Rolling over, he closed his eyes, began his decrees—“I AM the Violet Flame, in Action in me now, I AM the Violet Flame, to Light alone I bow.” His voice sped up, a low hum.

Soon, crimson shone through his eyelids. The sun was rising, clearing the ridge. He opened his eyes and the shadows above seemed strange, black lines all around on top of the tent like so many long fingers. Fighting his hands free, unzipping the bag and the tent fly, he crawled out into the freshly fallen snow, stood up in his stocking feet, and turned around.

Sticks, branches, and moss had been piled on his tent, woven into each other, a structure like an upside-down bird's nest, a kind of igloo. White snow and ice glistened on top of it, the sun now shining down. Colville had seen this in his father's survival books; the debris added insulation, kept things warm inside. Jeremy must have done it while Colville slept, before the snow fell; there were no footprints around the structure.

Colville's feet were freezing. He bent down, pulled on another pair of wool socks, found his boots; a few sticks fell from the shelter as he did so, and this rousted Kilo, who crawled out, his body low as if he feared being scratched from above. Once outside, he walked to the remains of last night's fire and turned a slow circle in every direction.

“He's not here,” Colville said. “No, don't try to get back in. I know it's cold.”

He pulled the tent free, and the structure of sticks and snow leaned but didn't fall; he'd leave this lopsided igloo standing for someone to find, to wonder at. If anyone ever passed through here, wherever this was.

He packed up, then ate breakfast as he walked, hiking up a slope, trying to stay in the sunlight. He held out a handful of dried fish for Kilo, then ate some himself.

They walked all morning, along snowy ridges, through pine forests. West, mostly, as that was the direction that Jeremy had started them in when they first left the shelter. Colville also followed his intuition, tried to sense the energy of a given path; sometimes he followed Kilo, let the dog make the decisions.

When he stopped to rest, he read the passages from
The Art of War
that he'd copied into his notebook:
Some terrain is easily passable, in some you get hung up, some makes for a standoff, some is narrow, some is steep, some is wide open. Appear where they cannot go. Head for where they least expect you. To travel hundreds of miles without fatigue, go over land where there are no people.

The Teachings said,
Where your thought is, there you are,
and yet all this walking was necessary, a physical demonstration of travel that was not physical. Looking up, Colville checked the cloudless sky for darker patches, bent rays of light. Two hawks hung suspended, inscribing long, smooth circles. One higher, one lower, riding the air currents, their sharp eyes everywhere around him.

 

Another day passed, a night. They walked along a frozen streambed; tall, dried reeds stretched overhead, rain drifted down. Colville could hear Kilo ahead, rustling through the dead reeds, could catch glimpses of his wet, black shape. The yellow stalks shifted the light, made all movement stutter and jerk.

The rain let up just as they reached the cover of trees, thick pines above and tangled ivy below them, a kind of path cutting deeper into the shadows. Kilo paused, shook himself, water spinning away in all directions. Colville tore the plastic bag from his body.

They started up the slope, into a thick forest. Birds called back and forth above; squirrels chittered along low branches. Kilo ran with his nose to the ground, curling away, returning. Colville closed his eyes; he slowed his breath as a wind suddenly rushed at him, the air beating around him. He listened. Something in the grass, smooth along the forest floor, close to him now. When he opened his eyes, it took a moment to see the snake: long and thin, it slid around him, its head down, tongue going, circling, not coming closer. A rattlesnake, its markings pale. Kilo growled; Colville reached down, settled him. Another snake trailed the first, he saw—this one black, a yellow stripe running its length, its head almost touching the tail of the first. Both circled, five feet away, slowly widening their curves and then straightening, heading out under the trees.

Colville followed, one hand on Kilo's neck.

The snakes, still stretched end to end, moved calmly over the roots and stones, around trees and plants, always returning to their course. And then the rattlesnake slipped into a dark round hole in the ground; its body seemed to shorten on itself, its tail going last. The other snake followed, the yellow stripe slipping away, a bright string pulled into the darkness.

Colville's pack caught on a bush, a branch snapping back, a leaf gently slapping him in the face. He held the branch still, his eyes adjusting, focusing close. There, on the leaf's surface, someone had scratched words into the green with a stick or a fingernail:
Hello Friend.
He twisted its stem, broke it loose, folded it away in his pocket. As he did, he glimpsed something above. A flash of white, a movement in the trees. Gone for a moment, there again, too pale and bright to be a leaf—

The white shape seemed to slide along, to climb, high in the branches of the tree. Colville stumbled, his gaze in the trees—there it was again, whatever it was, winking at him, leading him along. He stumbled, looked down, looked up again. Now he saw nothing. Only more branches, the green bushes far below, the soft sound of wind in the pine needles all around him.

A shift, a slight movement, and it all came into focus. Thirty feet above him, fifty feet away. A girl. A girl with long black hair, sitting on a branch, staring straight up through the trees at the sky.

She seemed different from the picture he'd seen—older, thinner—but he knew who she was, recognized her from the poster. She was the girl who had disappeared, the same girl he'd searched for in the foothills of Boise.

Here she was, wherever they were, and he had found her. Barefoot, in jeans and a dark green sweatshirt. Now writing in a notebook; the white page was what he'd seen flashing.

And then the trees swayed. The girl shifted, as if on purpose, testing to see if the air would hold her. She hardly seemed to reach out, to try to catch herself, and she was slipping down through the branches, so slow and smooth, her arms at her sides and her body relaxed, silent as she fell, clattering through the high branches and then out from the low ones, the last ten feet with nothing around her. She landed with a heavy, solid sound. Dust smacked into the air; sticks fell rattling around her.

She was up already, crawling and then running away between the trees, into the bushes and underbrush.

He tried to move quickly, silently, not to lose sight of the way she had gone. Could he see anything ahead, any movement? He wasn't certain.

Kilo led as they crossed a carpet of moss that was every color of green. The ground grew steeper; Colville had to hold on to bushes and tree limbs to keep from falling; he tried not to rustle the branches, to snap any sticks. He leaned his pack against a tree, hardly slowing to set it down as they approached a small clearing.

He crawled forward and lay flat on his stomach, hidden by the bushes. Only twenty feet away, less than that, was the girl.

She was walking in the air, across the air. Five feet off the ground, her arms held out straight from her sides. She stared up into the green trees as she raised one foot, then the other, knees high. It was when she looked down to her feet that she began to sway—slowly at first, then one hand loose and circling around, slapping her leg; she bent at the waist, then hopped down, landing on her feet on the ground. The dark rope she'd been standing on snapped over her head, visible now, swinging and settling, hanging slack where it was stretched between two trees.

And then she turned her head, as if she had heard something.

In a moment a tall, thick man with a black beard stepped into the clearing. He wore a green jacket with black marker scribbled across it, a kind of homemade camouflage. Smiling, he laughed and stepped close to the girl, put his large hand on her shoulder. She said something, reaching up for the rope in the air, and he nodded, took off his jacket, bent to unlace his heavy boots. The girl helped pull them off; she helped unroll his dark socks from his feet.

When the man walked on the rope, it stretched under his weight, only a foot or so above the ground. He was graceful despite his size, smoothly stepping all the way across to the base of one tree, his bare toes on the knot where the rope was tied, then balancing on one foot as he spun around and came back the other way.

Colville could hear his own faint breathing. Kilo, just behind him, hadn't moved at all, as if he understood that they must not be discovered.

Now the man knelt and pulled out a bag, then a backpack, from the bushes. Rummaging inside, he held something—books—in one large hand. He opened one and laid it on a foam mattress in front of the girl, then handed her a pencil. Colville could hear the softness of their voices as they spoke but could not make out the words.

Once the girl began writing in the book—she seemed to be answering a series of questions, or working through equations, or even doing a crossword puzzle—the man crawled around to sit on the mattress also, so their backs leaned against each other. He began to read his own book, holding it open in one hand, close to his face, catching the light. He scratched in his beard with a pencil, underlined a passage, then opened a spiral notebook and wrote something inside.

The girl looked up. She glanced around as if she had heard or smelled something; then, after a moment, she returned to what she'd been writing. Her arms were bare, her sweatshirt sleeves pushed to her elbows. She wore a large watch, a man's watch, on her thin wrist. She turned a page; he wrote something in his notebook.

As the girl read, holding the book open with her toe, she braided her black hair, then pulled out the braid, said something, and the man turned and carefully braided it for her. A French braid, close against her round head. Colville could not hear her, but he could read her lips:
Thank you.

Squirrels ran past, chasing each other. Gnats hung in the air. Sparrows settled amid the ferns and ivy and sumac, darted away.

And then Colville saw the face. A pale face, in the bushes, across the clearing from him. Forty feet away, another person, also watching the girl. A man's face. Kilo's tail slapped the ground once, twice, went silent as Colville glanced back. He looked across the clearing again and the face was gone.

The girl said something else, then pointed away into the trees, where the face had been. The man turned quickly, his voice sharp and low; he closed his book, and the girl closed hers as well. Without any more words she leapt up, untied the black rope from between the trees, coiled it. The man rolled the mattress, strapped it to a pack, pulled the other bags together. It took less than five minutes for them to pack it all up, to slip out of the clearing, away through the trees.

Colville crawled backward, struggled to his feet. Kilo followed him to his pack, and then they hurried back up the slope, around the clearing and then into it, across it, trying to figure which way the man and girl had gone. Colville looked at the bushes, uncertain even where he had been hidden. He examined the ground, kneeling, not sure what he was looking for. He would follow them; he would wait until she was alone again, talk to her. But which way had they gone? Between which trees?

“Colville.”

Kilo gave a muffled, high-pitched bark at the sound of the voice. Jeremy stepped out of the trees. He had strips of birch bark coiled around his legs and arms, a square of it affixed to his chest so he blended into the stand of trees behind him. It had been him, his face watching from across the clearing—he'd shaved off his beard, and without it he seemed so young, his face more slender and his eyes bigger, bluer. His hair, cropped close to his head, seemed darker.

“This way?” Colville said, trying to walk around him. “Tell me. The girl—”

Jeremy put his hand on Colville's chest, stopping him. “I know,” he said. Bending down, he pulled the bark free; it curled upon itself and rolled away, blown by the wind. Now he wore a puffy down jacket, dark purple, and had traded in his moon boots for shiny brown hiking boots with white gaiters.