C. Box - Savage Run

Looking at Stewie and Britney, he saw that they had brought even less with them from the cabin.

Stewie painfully untangled himself and sat up, his arms around his knees. He looked up at Joe.

“Thanks for helping me up the mountain.”

“Sure.”

Britney rolled her eyes.

“What do you think our plan should be?” Stewie asked. “How long should we hide out before we head back?”

Joe had been thinking about this on their long march up the mountainside.

“I don’t know.”

Britney huffed, blowing her bangs up off her forehead. The Valley Girl speech pattern was back. “What do you mean you don’t know? Why did you lead us up that freaking mountain, then?”

Joe grimaced. This was not where he wanted to be, he thought, and these were not people he wanted to be there with.

“We don’t know if Charlie Tibbs is tracking us,” Joe explained patiently. “If he is coming after us, he has a horse and he seems to know what he’s doing. Even I could follow our sloppy tracks up this mountain.”

“I didn’t know we were supposed to tiptoe,” Britney whined.

“John Coble said that Tibbs was the best tracker he had ever seen,” Stewie said.

Joe addressed Stewie. “If he turns away and goes back to where he came from, we’ll know it tonight, I think. He might even follow our tracks down to the stream, where I hope he’ll get confused about where we came out and turn back. I can’t imagine him trying to run us down at night. If he leaves, we can sneak back to the cabin tomorrow. You’ve got a cell phone and a radio in there, right?”

Stewie nodded yes. How do you think I called your wife? was what Joe expected him to say. But Stewie wisely kept his mouth shut.

“The phone only works at certain times,” Britney said. “Like when the weather is just perfect or the sunspots are lined up or something. Most of the time we can’t reach anybody and nobody can call us.”

Joe nodded. “I’ve got a phone and a radio in my truck, if we can get to it. Provided Charlie Tibbs doesn’t get there first.” He thought of Tibbs’s methodical work on the SUV and imagined him doing the same to his pickup. “Plus they’ll be looking for us by tomorrow, is my guess.”

“At least when I was in the tree I had electricity and could use my cell phone to call my friends,” Britney said, speaking as much to herself as to Stewie or Joe. “I had food, at least. But I guess that was California and this isn’t. ”

Stewie’s misshapen mouth exaggerated his frown. “And if he comes after us?”

“Then we die,” Britney offered.

In a thick pocket of aspen trees below where Stewie and Britney were resting, Joe found a spring that burbled out of a granite shelf into a small shallow pool that had been eroded into the rock. From the shelf, trickles of water dribbled down the rock face and, with the help of other spring-fed trickles further down the mountain, worked their way in unison toward the valley floor to birth the next stream. Joe drank from the pool, pressing his cheek against the cool lip of it, sucking the water in through his teeth to catch the pine needles that floated on the surface. If there was bacteria in the water, he didn’t care. Giardiasis was the last thing he was worried about right now.

He put his hat in the water, crown down, and filled it as much as he could. Holding it in his hands like a newborn puppy, he walked back up the mountain to give Stewie and Britney a drink.

Stewie accepted the hatful of water and Britney crinkled her nose at the very idea. She left to find the spring for herself.

After drinking, Stewie wiped his mouth with his sleeve.

“I’ll bet you ten thousand dollars that he’s already coming after us,” Stewie said.

“No bet.”

“A thousand?”

“No bet.”

“Can you hit anything with that pistol?” Stewie asked, gesturing with his head toward Joe’s holster.

“Nope.”

“How well do you know this country?”

“Not as well as I wish I did,” Joe confessed, sitting back down on the log.

Stewie cursed the fact that they didn’t have a map.

He looked beyond Joe to the jagged peaks of the mountains, which were brilliant blue and snow-capped. “Unless I’m completely wrong, it seems to me if we keep going west we will hit a big canyon that will stop us cold.”

Joe nodded. “Savage Run.”

“I always wanted to see that canyon.” Stewie’s face screwed up in a clownish, pathetic grimace. “But not like this.”

The sun ballooned and settled into a notch between massive and distant peaks, as if it were being put away for the night. There was a spectacular farewell on the westward sides of the mountains and bellies of the cumulus clouds as they lit up in brilliant fuchsia.

They were still in the tall trees below the rim, and Joe had searched in vain for a natural shelter of some kind. But he had not located a cave, or a protected wash, or even an exposed root pan large enough for the three of them. As the evening sky darkened, there were no signs of thunderheads, so he hoped there wouldn’t be rain. The temperature had dropped quickly as the sun had gone down. At this elevation, there were wide swings of temperature every day. Joe had estimated that it had been about eighty degrees that afternoon, and he expected it to drop to forty by the predawn hours.

They were, by Joe’s guess, only five miles from the cabin. That was all the progress they had made, despite an entire afternoon of climbing, hiking, and crawling over exceedingly rough terrain.

The place they had chosen to stop had its advantages. It was close enough to the top of the ridge that they could peer over it into the valley. Because they were on the other side of the second mountain, their camp could not be seen if Tibbs was glassing the country with his spotting scope. There was water nearby, and the grade of the slope behind them was not nearly as difficult as the two they had already come across. If Tibbs suddenly appeared, they could move into the trees and down the mountain fairly quickly. And if a helicopter arrived, on the remote chance that one had been called out, they could scramble out into the open areas and be seen from above.

Joe lay on the still-warm shale at the top of the ridge and looked through his binoculars at the first mountain and the valley below them. As it got darker, the forest appeared to soften. There was no way, looking at the country now, to know how rough and ragged it was beneath the darkening velvet green cover of treetops.

Joe looked for movement, and listened for sounds in a vast silence so awesome it was intimidating. Although he didn’t expect to see Charlie Tibbs riding brazenly through an open meadow, there was the chance that Tibbs might spook deer or grouse and give away his location. That is, Joe thought, if he were out there at all.

Joe didn’t turn when he heard the crunching of heavy steps as Stewie joined him on the top of the ridge.

“See anything?” Stewie asked, settling into the shale with a grunt.

“Trees.”

“Britney’s not in a very good mood, so I thought I would join you,” Stewie said. “She tried to wash John Coble’s blood out of her shirt but she couldn’t get it all out.”

“Mmm.”

“Damn, it’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

“Yup.”

“Do you ever actually talk?”

Joe lowered the binoculars for a moment. “I talk with my wife.” Then he cautioned Stewie: “But I don’t talk about my wife.”

Stewie nodded, smiled, and looked away.

“Have you wondered how it is I came to be?” Stewie spoke in hushed tones, barely above a whisper. “I mean, now. After getting blown up by a cow?”