David Dun - Necessary Evil

Jessie reached in the pocket of her coat, withdrawing a light that she used to explore the nearby walls and ceiling. They could barely make out a trail of soot above them, the remnants of a river of hot air that had picked its way over the rock, always rising, sucked by the draft until it found the mouth of the cave.

"Who comes here?"

"We bring the boys when they turn fourteen."

He told her to take off her snowsuit just as he was removing his. "We need to cover ourselves with charcoal," he told her.

"When they figure out the avalanche trick, and they can't follow us over the granite, they're gonna think about dogs- tracking dogs. Fire smell is common in the wild and will mask our scent, make our trail old fast and confuse a hound's nose. But we don't want to turn the snowsuits black."

With that he knelt and grabbed a sooty stick.

She snickered. "Oh, great. I'm already filthy."

Kier gave a concerned glance in response.

"I'm sorry. I've got an attitude. For a moment there I was really happy to have made it here."

"Your cynicism will weaken you."

"It's already kicked the stuffing out of me."

Kier examined her arm. A deep groan escaped her lips when he moved it.

"If we're lucky, all you did was bruise things."

As he helped her out of the snowsuit, he was sure that she was at ease with his touch. He had sensed it previously when she was sick and when she lay against his back, but he suspected that she could never acknowledge it. Discussing it seemed pointless, so he applied the ash in silence while enjoying the closeness.

Since he was a boy, Kier had been in these caverns many times. The first time he came with Grandfather they had used a little-known entry called witsu ka, or Worm's Way, a tiny hole with just enough room for a man to crawl in on his belly. It was much more difficult to undertake the long crawl through Worm's Way than to climb to the cave they had just entered- aptly named Tree Cave. When they brought the boys in summer, they would climb the mountain to the bottom of the chasm. One man would reach the cave using climbing gear. Once at the cave, he would drop a rope ladder.

Another entrance by way of a different cave opened onto a treacherous but passable rock ledge in the middle of a thousand-foot cliff. For as long as anyone could remember, this opening had been called Man Jumps, although there was no evidence that anyone had done so. Another cavern passageway led to a surface cave that was the fourth entrance, but a portion of this route was almost vertical, useless without climbing gear.

Two white men lost in the cavern for days had located a fifth tunnel into the caverns. For them it was an escape exit. Some months after their safe return, they had attempted to show the Tiloks the tiny hole in the rocks from which they had emerged, but were unable to retrace their route. Grandfather had found it, but Kier had never taken the time to learn it.

Because the cavern was sacred to the Tilok and on reservation land, no maps of its sprawling labyrinth existed. The only maps were in the men's heads. The Tilok had learned to traverse the interconnecting caverns from Tree Cave to Man Jumps. A few men, including Kier, could make passage from Tree Cave to Worm's Way, but those who made errors in navigation could pay a dear price. The caverns were fraught with drop-offs and confusing turns. Two Tilok men attempting to map the routes had disappeared when they either got permanently lost or, more likely, fell into a chasm. Some of the vertical shafts, which seemingly fell hundreds of feet, had never been explored.

Using the charred piece of wood he had picked from the fire pit, Kier began at Jessie's boots. He smeared charcoal and ash over her liberally. She seemed so exhausted, it did not even occur to him to let her do it herself. Trying to ignore the way he felt when he was near her, the desire he felt when steadying her, touching her, he sought to adopt a clinical air-to move with the precision of a good physician rather than the exquisite sensitivity of a lover. He dipped the blackened stick over and over in the pit so that when he was finished, her clothes would be impregnated with the fine powder. As he worked his way up to her thighs, she put her hand over his.

"I've got the idea," she said, taking the stick and beginning to apply the ash herself.

Embarrassed, he wondered whether his desire was too strong to remain undetected. Always things with women got this way-everything a nuance, every gesture a speech. He hated thinking about it, but he was drawn to her despite his vow never to be with another white woman.

Jessie seemed to be fighting her own feelings. He could feel it as surely as the spirit of the Tiloks in the mountains. But whatever monster gnawed at her, he knew that his was possessed of many more heads, and breathed a far hotter fire. There was a head for every member of his family-his mother, his sisters, his myriad cousins, the whole tribe. All were expecting him, the darling of the white community, to marry an Indian. To marry Willow.

Within minutes, they were covered with ash and soot. Next, to be even safer, they rubbed themselves with needles from the pine at the entrance, which took only a few minutes more. Then it was time to leave. Turning his light on Jessie, he used his free hand to hoist the pack and gave her a questioning look.

"Are you strong enough to hike?"

"I'd like to try."

"Stay directly behind me. Keep your light pointed at the ground."

"Do we have steep places in here too?"

"Stay close."

He put a hand gently on her shoulder, and was sure her head moved almost imperceptibly toward his fingers, as if she wanted to touch them with her cheek.

"I'll tell you when there's a bad edge. It'll be fine."

He squeezed her shoulder in reassurance, and surprisingly she covered his hand with hers.

The crackling of the radio made them both start. The garbled transmission continued as Kier swung his light to the source and retrieved Miller's unit. Jessie stood close while he fiddled with the squelch.

"Click twice if you hear me, Kier. The best triangulation equipment around won't locate you on a couple of clicks."

Tillman.

"Is it true?" she asked.

"Don't know. But two clicks would tell them we're alive. Right now that's a lot of information."

"Cat got your clicker, huh? Well, never mind." Tillman chuckled. "That was a gutsy bit of ridge-walking you did tonight. Especially lugging the lady around."

Kier's insides shrank.

"If you hadn't moved on that ledge when you did, I'd have shot you."

Kier's fist tightened involuntarily. The implications flooded him. So Tillman was the stalker, or at least he wanted Kier to think so. Knowing it as opposed to suspecting this finalized Kier's assessment of their predicament. Tillman, who had experimented on his tribe, the man who directed the search, could hunt and track like a Tilok.

There was no more chatter for a few moments. Then: "I'll be right behind you."

Tillman would likely be unaware of the caverns. He didn't know if his prey were dead or alive. The fact of their survival in the avalanche could only be gleaned on hands and knees, by studying every shred of evidence. Kier shut the radio off and put it away. Deeper in the caverns, it wouldn't work anyway.

Kier focused on the route to Man Jumps, the seldom-used exit that would eventually bring them to the cabin. It was a snarl of passageways until you came to a fork where the stone in the middle was covered with ancient pictographs. Kier supposed that his ancestors used the caves often on their migratory passages through the high country. They would have stayed in these caves during the summer months, when game and berries were plentiful, before the salmon runs and acorn crop.

Near the Tree Cave entrance, years of moccasined feet had rounded and worn smooth stone edges on the floor of the cavern. Missing, however, were the deep gullies in the rock, exactly the width of a human foot, which Kier had seen in places occupied steadily for hundreds of years. As they moved into a train-tunnel-size passageway that would lead them to the next chamber, fingerlike formations of dripping limestone appeared. "I tell the kids it feels like a ghost convention in here," he said.