C. Box - Nowhere to Run

“I called the sheriff down in Baggs. He didn’t help my state of mind, because he said there were all sorts of rumors about weird things happening in the mountains down there. He said ranchers had pulled their cattle from leases in the mountains because they thought there was something strange going on. And there’d been break-ins at cabins and trailheads.”

“The Sierra Madre,” Nate said. “Isn’t that where that runner vanished a while back?”

“Yes!”

“So the sheriff didn’t give you any help?”

“It’s not that he refused,” she said. “He just wasn’t sure what to do. Joe didn’t exactly file a flight plan, which sounds like Joe. The sheriff called me today and said he’d talked to some ranch hand who’d shuttled Joe’s pickup and horse trailer around the mountains. The truck is sitting there, I guess. But Joe hasn’t shown up. Nobody knows where he is.”

Nate said, “Fly, damn you. Kill something.”

“What?”

“I was talking to a bird. Never mind.” Then: “When is he supposed to be down?”

“Today. This morning. He said before he left that he’d call as soon as he got to his truck.”

Nate said, “I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, but shouldn’t you give him the chance to call before you conclude something’s wrong? Maybe his phone went bad up in the mountains and he just hasn’t been able to reach you.”

Silence.

Nate said, “Marybeth, are you there?”

She said, “Yes. Are you suggesting I’m hysterical? That I’d call you with no good reason?”

He thought about it. “No.”

“I told you, I have a bad feeling. Something’s happened.”

“Okay,” he said. “Call me again if you hear anything at all.”

“I will. And there’s something else. I know the situation you’re in. I’d never compromise you unless I thought we needed help. You know that, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve got to go now.”

He punched Disconnect.

Alisha Whiteplume, the reason he’d climbed out of the canyon, arrived within the hour, as planned. He saw her pickup a mile away through heat waves. He stood and walked down the two-track to meet her.

The truck stopped, and she leaped out. She was luminescent, he thought. Long dark hair with highlights that shined blue in the sun, smooth cappuccino complexion, sparkling dark eyes, rosebud mouth. She wore a starched white sleeveless shirt, tight Lady Wranglers, Ariat lace-up boots, her prized Idaho Falls Rodeo barrel-racing championship buckle. God, he loved her.

Alisha worked as a teacher on the Wind River Indian Reservation near Saddlestring. She’d traded her corporate career to come home.

She wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him. He kissed her back.

He said, “Where’s Megan Yellowcalf?”

“With my mom,” she said. Her two-year-old daughter was adopted from Alisha’s best friend, who’d died. “We’ve got the entire weekend before school starts.”

Nate said, “There’s been a development.”

She stepped back, eyeing him.

“We need to go to Saddlestring. And I may need to be gone.”

“Joe?” she said.

“Yes.”

“Not Marybeth?”

“Her, too. Joe may be in trouble.”

“Your thing,” she said.

“My thing.”

She put her hands on her hips and stepped back. “I’ll never understand this hold he has over you.”

Nate shrugged.

She noted the eagle that waddled toward Nate and stood a foot behind him. “What about the bird?” she asked.

“It’s not going anywhere,” he said.

“Kind of like our relationship.” She laughed. “What’s wrong with him?”

“Her,” he corrected. “She won’t fly. Her spirit is broken. I can’t get into her head and figure out what it is.”

“Maybe,” she said, “you have trouble with the female mind.”

Nate said, “Maybe.”

“Marybeth-Sheridan-Lucy-April, Marybeth-sheridan- Lucy-April, Marybeth-Sheridan-Lucy-April, Marybeth-Sheridan-Lucy-April. ” Joe muttered in a kind of hypnotic cadence as he walked, saying the names over and over again like a mantra, saying the names with his breath when his voice seemed too loud, “Marybeth-Sheridan-Lucy-April, Marybeth-Sheridan-Lucy-April. ”

The mantra gave him comfort and strength and a reason to keep going.

It was approaching dusk. He’d walked through the night and for the entire day, scared to stop and rest for more than a few minutes. Although it seemed vague and faraway now, he recalled dropping to his knees the night before alongside the creek to drink. After filling his belly with icy cold mountain water that tasted of pine needles, he’d rolled to his side and closed his eyes, thinking he could take a short nap, that he needed some sleep. But as his eyes closed-oh, it felt so good to close his eyes-a voice deep inside his brain shouted an alarm, saying, If you close your eyes, you’ll never open them again in this world . The voice was loud enough to resonate and stir him, and he’d painfully rolled over to his knees, gasped at the pain in his thigh, shoulder, and scalp, and rose again to his feet. He hadn’t stopped since because he’d become convinced that to stop was to die.

As he walked and chanted, he’d turn periodically, searching behind him for followers who weren’t there or so stealthy he couldn’t see them. He doubted he’d been followed because the Grim Brothers didn’t know he’d survived the shotgun blast. Still, though, he couldn’t be certain.

Tube, Joe’s dog, bounded through the buckbrush on the other side of the creek, just out of clear view. Tube was a strange dog, a Lab-corgi mix, with the head and stout body of a bird dog and the stunted drumstick legs of a corgi. That it was able to move so fluidly through the shadows of the brush seemed curious to Joe, and he was getting angry that his dog wouldn’t come closer even when he called to him. More curious was that Tube seemed to have picked up several friends, maybe half a dozen other dogs, and they paralleled Joe’s advance down the mountain but kept out of plain sight.

“Tube, darn you,” Joe shouted, his voice cracking. “Get over here.”

But Tube stayed with his friends in the shadows. Joe could hear them panting from time to time, as well as an occasional growl, snarl, or yip as one of them warned off another for some transgression. The dogs had been with him for at least an hour, maybe more. Joe vowed to sell Tube when he could find someone who wanted to buy an odd-looking dog who wouldn’t behave.

He tried not to pay attention to his injuries or to dwell on them. Despite his intention, he found his wounds strangely fascinating as well as alarming. He had no idea how much blood he’d lost, but he knew it was too much. He was light-headed and weak. His body was broken yet still functional, as if his muscles had a will of their own, and his skin was perforated in four places. That he might be able to heal from his wounds seemed like a miracle of the highest order. In the meantime, he kept his eyes on the game trail ahead of him and repeated his mantra.

Because the creek was the only source of fresh water in the area, animals congregated near it. That morning, he’d spooked a huge four-point mule deer buck who’d been drinking in the creek. At midmorning, a beaver slapped its tail on the surface of a pond in warning and scared him nearly to death. The beaver dived with a ploop sound, leaving ringlets on the surface of the pond he’d created by damming the stream. Joe had seen badgers, porcupines, rabbits, and a flock of mallards that, for a while, kept rising and flying a few hundred feet ahead of him to land again and again. They seemed put out that Joe kept coming. He felt sorry for ducks in Wyoming since there was so little water to be had.