Nevada Barr: Blind Descent

Holden Tillman opened the tailgate, and the three of them divided up the gear. As they started the hike to the mouth of Lechuguilla, Oscar filled Anna in on the team briefing. Holden Tillman was officially titled Underground Rescue Coordinator. He was in charge of all activities subterranean. The NPS had borrowed him from the local Bureau of Land Management office because of his expertise in caves and cave rescues. Oscar assured Anna he was, in caving circles, known as the Holden Tillman.

A quiet person with an aw-shucks drawl, Tillman seemed half embarrassed and half amused by Oscar's effusions. "Oscar's going to write my eulogy," he told Anna, a slow smile blooming beneath a brown brush of mustache. "He just wants to get some practicing in before I'm dead."

Anna liked Holden right off. She hoped nothing happened to change that. Experience taught her, her first impression of people was dead wrong as often as not. This time she had a gut feeling it wasn't. Tillman was of an age with Iverson-in his forties-but there the resemblance ended. He was a small man, maybe five-foot-eight and a hundred thirty pounds with skin that looked shrunk to fit a wiry, muscled frame. Crow's-feet radiated from the corners of his eyes to curve down in unbroken lines along the sides of his face. His forehead, wide and slightly sloping, was cut by horizontal lines as sharp as old scars. The effect of this network of time was a wizened soul, blessed with wisdom and, possibly, "the sight." At least that was the fanciful image that floated up from an old fairy-tale illustration buried in Anna's memory.

Despite narrow shoulders and small frame, Holden carried a prodigious amount of equipment. Though half a foot shorter than Oscar, arms and shoulders were corded with muscle where Iverson's were mapped in bone. Anna guessed his pack was seventy or eighty pounds but it didn't bow his back or take the spring from his step. As he walked ahead of her along the trail Anna heard sotto-voce, snatches of song. She laughed. Holden sang the digging song Snow White's Seven Dwarfs sang on their way down into the mine.

Anna saw the cavern sparkling with a million lights and peopled with benevolent spirits. Despite herself she felt better than she had since Iverson had brought her the news of Frieda's head injury.

Holden and Oscar, along with CACA's superintendent and the chief of resource management for the caverns, had organized a four person team that would follow the two men Anna was with. The second team would carry a stretcher for the evacuation, medical supplies Dr. McCarty had requested, and a Korean War-vintage field phone with spools of wire so Holden would have telephone communications with the surface during the carry-out. The logistics were staggering, and Anna was duly impressed that the details had been hammered out in such a short time. There were people for every aspect of the rescue: cavers who would do nothing but rig the drops for hauling Frieda up the long vertical and near-vertical ascents; cavers to schlep water, packs, garbage, batteries, and food.

Anna listened to the plans being rehashed by Holden and Oscar as they walked single file along a ridge above a dry creek bed, and she began to wonder what would undo her first: her fear of enclosed spaces or her fear of crowds. The sheer absurdity freed her mind, and for a time she was able to shut out the human murmurings and enjoy the hike.

They were on a plateau to the north of the gypsum plains that spread down into Texas. What vegetation managed to eke out a livelihood from the parched soil kept a low profile. Little had grown to greater than knee height, and there were barren spaces between plants. With the lifting of the clouds and the dazzling clarity of the rain-washed air, Anna could see to the edge of the world, or so it seemed, and the world was all high, clean desert, burnished with gold.

Even knowing she walked over limestone honeycombed with passages, she couldn't imagine a less likely place to find the entrance to a world-class cave. She pictured the plateau cut into thin sections and placed between sheets of glass like the ant farms she'd seen as a child. Beneath her feet, creeping through those twisting tunnels, were human beings.

"There it is." Oscar interrupted her musings. They'd walked down a slope and crossed the stone bottom of a wash to climb again. Ahead of them was more of the same: low hills dotted with desert shrubs and cactus. "See that green spot?" Iverson pointed to a cluster of stunted trees poking from a fold in the hills. "That's it."

Anna took his word for it.

Within a few minutes they'd reached the trees, and still she was none the wiser. Not until they climbed down four or five feet to where the oak trees had found soil to root could she see the entrance. Back in the rocks an opening maybe twenty feet wide, thirty long, and ringed by heavy overhanging brows of rock, showed darkly.

Over the years Anna had made any number of rappels from ten to two hundred ten feet. After the first step, she'd thoroughly enjoyed the trip. Suspended like a cliff swallow over lakes in the Absaroka Beartooth, dangling above a sea of dusty live oaks in northern California. There was an above and a below. Here, she noted with an unpleasant tingle, there was neither. In the theatrical light of coming evening, the entrance to Lechuguilla looked like a portal, one lacking the standard three dimensions agreed upon by the real world.

She'd read of holes described as yawning, gaping, hungry-words that suggested an orifice, an appetite. The sixty-foot drop leading into Lech didn't fit any of those adjectives. Rather than sentience, it suggested a departure from life. The last rays of the sun skimmed its surface, lighting the stone for fifteen feet or so. Below that, nothing. Night took all.

"Hi ho," Holden said happily.

Iverson began checking ropes secured to bolts near a tree that showed scarring from when it had been used as an anchor in previous descents. "The climbs are all rigged. We leave them that way along the main trade routes-established routes through the cave. We've found it does a lot less damage to the resource to leave the rigging in place than having every expedition rerig each time."

"Me first, you last?" he said to Holden as he threaded the rope through his rappel rack.

Holden nodded. Oscar leaned back and walked, spiderlike, from sight. The sun slid below the horizon, and Anna felt suddenly cold. "It's getting dark," she said, and hoped Tillman hadn't heard the faint whine beneath her words.

"So?"

"Off-rope," drifted up from the black hole.

"Good point," Anna said, threaded the rope through her rack, pulled on her leather gloves, and unhooked the safety. "On-rope," she shouted down, and stepped back into the darkness.

As she rappelled down, Anna closed her mind to all but the task at hand. Peripherally she was aware of the change in temperature, of the quick coming of night as she fell from the last vestiges of the sun. Mostly she concentrated on the play of the rope through her gloved hands, the pressure of the web gear holding her up. Below, in an inkwell of stone, she could see Oscar Iverson's lonely light winking as he moved his head. Peter Pan's whimsical directions came to mind: first star to the right and straight on till morning.

Having touched down, she freed herself and called "Off-rope" to let Holden know he was clear to descend. Moments later, sixty feet above, she saw his silhouette in the small triangle of gray that was all that remained of the world.

Switching on her headlamp, she studied the bottom of the shaft, absorbing each detail in hopes of crowding out unnecessary thoughts. The area was small and everything she expected from a cave: irregular, colorless, and dirty. The air smelled of things long buried, of damp and basements, of rotting cardboard and stale bat guano. The floor was uneven, and there were signs of the guano mining that had taken place around 1914. Piles of loose dirt attested to more recent digs.