Си Бокс - Dark Sky

—

Almost there,” Boedecker said with a voice hoarse from exertion. “I can see the top of the ridge.”

“It’s about time,” Price said.

Joe wasn’t sure how much longer he could go on without a breather. His lungs ached and his knees screamed with sharp pain. He was getting to the point where his hands were trembling and his climbing technique was getting sloppy and imprecise. It was like the end of a long day of fly-fishing, he thought, when he would cast with tired arms and the line would bunch up in the air and fall around his head and shoulders. When that happened, it was time to quit.

But he couldn’t quit now.

Ahead of him, Boedecker cursed.

“What is it?” Joe asked.

“False summit,” Boedecker groused. “I thought we were there, but there’s another fifty yards to go.”

Joe took a deep breath and kept climbing. As he did so, he looked over his shoulder to see that Price had stopped. The man was pressed against the rough granite wall with his eyes closed and his mouth agape. He was heaving in an attempt to get more air.

“Steve-2?” Joe said.

Price waved at him to indicate he was still alive. Barely.

“You’ve got to keep climbing,” Joe said. “It isn’t far now.”

He noted that Boedecker had scrambled ahead. Maybe, Joe thought, the rancher would get to the top and take off running on his own and they wouldn’t see him again. Joe could deal with that, and it might even make the situation more manageable. But the rancher could also choose to use his advantage of being on higher ground to make a stand. He could prevent Joe from getting on top of the ridge or kick Price in the head and send him falling down the mountain. All of those scenarios seemed possible. Boedecker was a wild card in every regard.

A moment later, Boedecker appeared above them. He’d reached the top and stood facing them on the lip of the rim, his hands on his knees to recover.

“What’s going on?” the rancher called down to Joe.

“Giving him a minute,” Joe said.

“Fuck him,” Boedecker advised as he shook his head with disgust. Suddenly, he locked in place, his gaze hard on the huge aspen grove below them.

“They’re coming ,” he whispered. Then he backed out of view.

As hard as it was, as much as it hurt, Joe shinnied back down the ridge until Price was within reach. He extended his hand and said, “Grab it. Let’s go. Now .”

When Price reached up, his hand was shaking. Joe grasped it. “Come on.”

Joe half climbed and half pulled Price along with him. He gave it so much effort that his vision blurred and blood pounded within his ears until he couldn’t hear anything else. Price’s weight threatened to pull Joe’s shoulder out of its socket.

He crawled up over the lip of the ridge and pulled Price along behind him. Then he rolled onto his back and lay there until he could breathe again and his heart slowed back to almost normal. Price gasped for air next to him. Their shoulders touched. Joe thought it uncomfortably intimate.

Finally, Joe opened his eyes and turned his head. They were on the very top of the barren ridge and the wind was cold and strong. He’d sweated so much on the climb up that as he dried out, he felt even colder.

Boedecker was nowhere to be seen. Where the man should have been was a tremendous vista leading down to the adjacent drainage. The way down looked to be a much gentler grade than on the way up. Between where they were on top and where thick black timber carpeted the slope, the rest of the way to the bottom of the drainage was a vast gray scree field of broken rock plates.

As he watched, snow clouds like white smoke rolled over the top of the opposite ridge and rushed across the valley. The storm came fast, softening the sharp views of timber and granite. Within a minute, snowflakes swirled around them.

Joe had recovered enough that he could move again, although he grunted when he rolled from his back to his belly. He crawled back toward the lip of the ridge and slowly raised his head so he could see where they’d come from before the snow obscured everything.

“Where did your friend go?” Price asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Is he leading the way or running from us?”

“I don’t know.”

—

In the distance on the floor of the drainage where the rocky creek bed halved the meadow, four distant horsemen emerged from the aspen. Three rode parallel to the stream, one on the south side and two on the north. Trailing them was the last rider, whom Joe could identify as Brad by his size and the bulk of his horse. Brad led a long string of packhorses behind him. The pack animals were loaded with bulging panniers and gear bags and Joe guessed they were a combination of Thomas and Boedecker stock.

The riders, Earl, Kirby, Joannides, and Brad, grouped up in the middle of the meadow not far from where Joe and Boedecker had squared off an hour before. They seemed to be having a discussion.

Joe lowered his head, even though he was a long way from them. He didn’t want his silhouette to be skylighted against the snow clouds.

Why did they stop at that particular spot? he wondered. Could the Thomases, who were legendary trackers, see signs in the grass? Or, Joe thought with a chill, had Boedecker secretly dropped an item there to be found by them?

Joe expected the riders to all turn in unison in their saddles and look up at him. But they didn’t.

The last thing he saw, before swirling snow blocked out everything, was the four riders continue down the drainage adjacent to the creek bed.

His plan to cut away from the trail and confuse the pursuers had worked, he thought. At least for now.

—

What happened back there this morning at the top of the dry wash?” Joe asked Price after they’d scrambled over and through the sharp edges of the snow-slicked scree and had finally entered the spruce forest. The canopy was thick and oppressive and it allowed only a few stray snowflakes to filter through to the pine needle floor.

“We’d been there about twenty minutes,” Price said. “Zsolt had to get up to piss, which made me kind of angry. I thought he should have taken care of that before we left to go hunting. But he went and did it anyway.

“When he came back and got down into the brush with me, he said he thought he’d heard something out there. My first thought was the elk were coming, just like you said they might. So I strung an arrow and got ready. I hoped it would get light really fast so I could see better. Zsolt was right behind me looking over my shoulder to help me spot a bull. It was a pretty cool moment. It was like when you’re coding and you start to realize something huge—a breakthrough—is about to happen.”

Price cursed as he tripped on a rock and pirouetted into a nice recovery, Joe thought. It barely broke his concentration, though.

“That big one, Brad, snuck up on us and was standing right over the top of me before I even realized he was there,” Price said. “He scared the shit out of me and he took Zsolt by complete surprise, which until that second I didn’t think possible. It’s like he was transported right on top of us.”

“They know how to walk quietly in the woods,” Joe said. “They were watching us set up the whole time. I found their tracks, but I didn’t know who it was.”

Price said, “No shit about walking quietly. He was just there and I saw he was holding a shotgun on us. Since he was only a few feet away, I didn’t think there was much we could do. Then I realized the smaller one, Kirby, had also come up behind us. He had a gun in one hand, a pistol, and a big knife in the other. For some reason, I was more scared of the knife.”

Joe grunted. He understood.