Nevada Barr - Track Of The Cat

IN the pines, pygmy nuthatches and mule deer for companions, the breezes blew away thought and Anna achieved the peace she'd come to depend on the wilderness for. In place of doubt and suspicion came yellow butterflies feeding incongruously at fox dung. Unselfconscious as a bird, she whistled, lending human notes to the sweet cacophony of the woods.

Perhaps planted there by Karl Johnson, maybe in her mind since childhood, Anna found tongue and lips forming the music from the score of Peter Pan. Haunted by the nursery melody, again and again she whistled the notes, the words floating through her mind as she walked the trails. "Tender shepherd, tender shepherd, let me help you count your sheep. One in the meadow, two in the garden, three in the nursery fast asleep." The song tickled some memory. Far from being nagged by it, Anna enjoyed a sense of elusive comfort.

On the third day the comfort was remembered.

The melody she had heard-or imagined she had-in Big Canyon when she was searching for the orphaned lion cubs, was the first four notes of "Tender Shepherd." If she didn't think but only felt, she could almost believe a kindly cosmic shepherd looked after the lost kittens.

On the third day, happier than she'd been for a while, she radioed in her itinerary and began the sixteen-mile hike out. She'd chosen the long way: across the Bowl on the Tejas then south on the McKittrick Ridge Trail.

McKittrick Ridge was a favorite walk of hers. The rugged trail wound for miles above the south fork of McKittrick Canyon. A mile to the north, hidden behind wooded hills, was Middle McKittrick, where Drury had died. And, once she began the long descent, she would catch glimpses of the white escarpment above North McKittrick, the third prong of the three-tined canyon fork.

Near four o'clock, she came out of the trees and looked down the three thousand feet into the bottom of McKittrick Canyon. The creek sparkled suddenly silver where it surfaced, left a white stone trail when it vanished underground. Big-tooth maple, ponderosa, gray-leaf oak, Texas madrona, and juniper veiled the canyon floor. Above, where North McKittrick forked off, she could see great ribs of the Permian Reef, pocked with sotol and yucca, pushing into this water-fed paradise. White bones at the oasis.

"I'm starting down the ridge," Anna radioed Cheryl Light, the ranger on duty in the canyon that day. "I should be at the Visitors Center at about six-thirty. I'll need a ride back to the housing area."

"Somebody will be there," Light returned.

"Thanks. Three-one-five clear." For a couple of minutes more Anna enjoyed the view. Then, shouldering her pack, she started down again to the battering badgering world of people.

The trail carved a descent in rocky switchbacks, dropping through biomes with delightful rapidity. The air grew perceptibly warmer. In places the trail was so steep a crew, now twenty years gone-probably pediatricians and ranch hands, mechanics and alcoholics by this time-had blasted steps from the living stone.

Moist and alive with grasses and succulents, the flank of the mountain protected Anna's right shoulder as she walked downhill. To her left a cliff dropped away for three hundred feet. Madrone and juniper, stunted dwarves of their highland selves, clung courageously to the few small ledges. Another thousand feet of scrub and brush then below that was water: the splendor of the desert.

Trees grew in the creekbed and up ravines that would pour their floodwaters into McKittrick come the monsoons. By the end of October the maples-rare but for this water-blessed enclave-would turn crimson. The ravines would be as red as if they ran with blood. Then, for two brief weeks, the Guadalupe Mountains would be overrun with Texans starved for fall colors.

Periwinkle blue sky, sparkling white thunderheads beginning to form, heat and insect buzz, formed a dream around Anna as she walked down the rocky incline, boots sure and flat on the stone.

Then the stone was gone, sky and cliff face reeling. She had stepped from the trail into nothing. Her left boot had struck sky instead of earth and she was pitching sideways. With a sickening sense of the world gone awry, she fell as if in a nightmare. "Damn," she whispered, her mind not yet grasping the hideous reality.

For ninety feet or so the cliff was not sheer but sloped steeply away in a limestone slide. From there it dropped two hundred feet to another wooded section. Anna twisted in air, tried to regain the safety of the path but the thirty-five pounds on her back threw her over the edge. She flung her arms out but the pack kept her on her back like an overturned beetle. All she could do was flail.

The slick nylon on the limestone reduced friction to almost nothing and Anna slid down toward the drop. Pressing hands and heels into the stone, she slowed her skid. Rock tore the flesh from her palms. On some level she was aware of the damage but not the pain.

Below, over the toes of her boots, she could see a gray horizon. The end of the slope. The end of the world.

With an effort that tore a scream from her lungs, she shoved out with left leg and arm. Fueled by adrenaline, it seemed as if every muscle in her body contracted and the sudden spasm flipped her over onto her belly. Spread-eagled, the pockmarked limestone ripping her clothes, Anna tried to stop her slide. Her shirt was dragged up, her flesh caught and burned. Screaming now, her fingers were stiff as claws scrabbling at the rock.

Then the claws caught. A bone or joint snapped in her shoulder and sudden pain almost loosed her fingers but she held on. A ledge, scarcely an inch wide where the limestone had cracked and the weather had heaved a part out ever so slightly, provided purchase for her fingers.

For a moment, Anna hung there, her bleeding chest and belly pressed against the sun-warmed stone, her torn finger-ends driven against the tiny ledge. Below her she heard the sweet simple call of the canyon wren. She was aware of the sun on the back of her legs and the sheer bliss of simply being still, suspended above death. Gradually she became conscious of the drag of the pack on her shoulders, the searing pain in her left arm socket.

It was dislocated. Soon, bone pressing against the soft tissue of nerves outside the socket, the arm would grow numb, she would lose control of her fingers, and she would fall.

Die from a dislocated shoulder, Anna thought and wondered how strangely a mind worked under pressure to think such things.

Carefully, not knowing how much her belabored grip would bear, she began to feel blindly across the rockface with the toe of her boot. Each small swipe of lug sole over the stone threatened to dislodge her precarious grasp. Her fingers began to uncurl, the strength draining out of them, turning to pain and pooling in her shoulder joint.

Then her foot found something: a root an inch or two high pushing out of a crack. Enough to hold her without breaking.

"Hang on, hang on, hang on," Anna chanted silently as she began to look for footing for her right boot. This time the search was not long. A narrow crevice ran vertically down through the stone eight or ten inches to her right. With a short stabbing kick she drove the toe of her boot between the jaws of stone. Slowly, pound by pound, she lowered her weight to her feet. Her right foot slipped then stopped, resting on a natural step within the crack.

Braced on her feet, Anna pressed herself into the rock and uncurled her fingers. They moved stiffly as if the joints had rusted in their clenched attitudes. Freed, her left arm fell and Anna screamed with the pain. Gripping tightly with her good hand, she prayed she wouldn't overbalance or faint.

Behind her eyelids red dots danced and she felt again as though she were falling. Squeezing against the rockface, she leaned to the left, letting her arm hang. If the dislocation weren't too severe the limb's own weight might pull it back into the socket. She tried to remember how long her Emergency Medicine instructor said it took, but her mind would not fix on the past.