Dennis Yates - Red Mountain

I’ll still take my chances, she thought. Anything was better than being gassed to death inside a crummy trailer.

CHAPTER 34

Before Jared Horn was welcomed back to Wrath Butte, and before his carvings sent the town into a brief period of madness, only a handful of local hunters had known about his frequent visits to the mountain.

At the time Horn tried to keep to himself if he encountered others on the trail, but the hunters would rarely let him be without inflicting some form of abuse. Whether it was destroying his camp, threatening to hang him from the nearest tree they could find, or stealing what game he’d killed, Horn was unable to find any sanctuary from Brandon Duke’s wicked lies.

When the town finally had a change of heart toward Horn and welcomed him back in the community, no one suspected he’d been planning his revenge all along. By all appearances, the now broken and nervous man seemed forgiving to all those who’d caused him harm. The town embraced with opened arms what they saw as an authentic Christian attitude, and those who felt particularly guilty about how they’d treated Horn in the past became extremely generous with their purses.

Wrath Butte, in fact, became obsessed with paying off their sins, the same as when the town’s founders tried to compensate the local Indians they’d once terrorized and slaughtered. Hence was the origin for the town’s name, after a mortally wounded medicine man climbed to the top of the prominent rock that overlooked the town and laid down his curse.

Brandon Dukes remained unrepentant. He jeered at his fellow townsfolk for their stupidity, warned them to beware of Horn’s trickery. His drunken behavior often landed him in jail, and those who passed his cell window at night reported hearing him mutter his same old lies.

During the period of reconciliation, Horn’s visits to town almost always included an invitation to dinner, and on the occasions he accepted he was known to present the hostess with a gift carved by his own hands. Soon all the households in Wrath Butte had something special to boast about, a figurine or a scene carving that was guaranteed to be one of a kind.

People continually asked Horn where he drew inspiration for his fine work. As always, he would politely smile and stroke his beard and tell them about how after several days of not eating and trying desperately to hunt game for his family, God suddenly revealed to him an aspect of nature he’d never witnessed before.

“It was like a giant candelabrum of burning wicks had lit up inside my mind,” he’d say to the mesmerized crowd sitting at dinner. “And as I observed these hidden wonders, my hands sought my knife and a piece of wood in which to capture it.”

This was the version the townsfolk were anxious to believe, for although they had treated Horn so poorly, God had stepped in and made things right again. The truth, however, would have shaken them to the very core. Horn held his tongue and waited...

****

In late summer two years earlier, Horn began roaming higher and higher into the mountains. He began taking camping supplies with him so he wouldn’t have to make the return trip home in the evening. Being around his family had become difficult for him. It broke his heart to see his wife’s declining health, his children losing teeth for lack of food. If he’d been able to afford to repair the wagon he would have moved the family to Portland where they might start over.

On a cloudless afternoon he followed a wide stream up to timberline where it met with a glacier, and was immediately awestruck by the grand scale of the place. Something spoke to him at some point, a voice on the puffs of wind that came down from the mountain and showered his face with cool kisses. Overcome with a variety of new emotions, he ran up the glacier, screaming and laughing and shoving handfuls of the pure ice into his mouth.

He was hooked from that moment on.

The next morning he went up again, bringing his miner’s pick and some other tools he’d fashioned next to his campfire the night before. He was obsessed with climbing as far as he could up the river of ice, of gazing down into its deep furrows. Being from Kansas, Horn hadn’t grown up around mountains. No one had ever taught him about the deadly tricks they can play on naive visitors.

Snow had fallen on the glacier the night before, and had helped to hide the brittle ice bridge that covered the width of a deep crevasse. Horn hadn’t seen the signs, and when he crossed the ice bridge the ground below him gave way and he fell as far as his waist before he shot out his arms and caught himself from going any deeper. His legs swinging freely below him, Horn had tried digging in his boots but the inner surface of the crevasse was as smooth as glass. Soon his thin arms began to spasm with the stress of holding himself up. He thought he heard distant laughter and when he glanced up at the mountain’s peak he screamed in despair.

He’d been betrayed. The mountain had been lying to him all along, had seduced him.

The fall was quick.

Horn felt his body slip down between giant molars of carved blue ice. Down he went, feeling it tear at his back and batter his face again and again until he expected to be nothing but a gory pile of flesh by the time he hit bottom.

****

It was the sheer cold that finally woke him up, shivering and numb all over. And although it was a hot August day, he hardly felt any warmth at all. He felt like he’d fallen to the bottom of a blue bottle made of ice, and the sun he saw above was nothing more than a watery point of silver light.

Suicide had crossed Horn’s mind many times before but now death seemed like an inevitably. He’s always known in his heart that he’d never have the nerve, but now nature and his own stupidity had managed to push him up against that very wall. To be able to climb out alive would be a miracle. To suffer a cruel death seemed more than likely.

Fortunately he still had his pickaxe and some food and water. But he quickly found he didn’t have the strength left to climb up through the gaping mouth directly above him, and after the third time that he fell back with hands and face bleeding, he saw the narrow opening of a tunnel and followed it until it emptied into a large cavern at the bottom of a crevasse further up the mountain.

The clear walls of ice stunned him. It appeared as if he were looking through miles of glacial ice, at a hidden world no mortal was supposed to ever see. He forgot about his predicament then, about death marching toward him with his bloody scythe.

He didn’t see Maynard at first, thought that what he was looking at had been only a fracture-shadow in the ice. After wiping away some grit with his arm, Horn couldn’t believe what he saw. Less than a couple feet deep into the ice he saw Charlie Maynard suspended in front of him, perfectly preserved from the day of his final showdown with the vigilantes. Except now there was one very important difference. The great layers of ice had sheered apart at one time, neatly slicing Maynard’s upper torso from the rest of his body.

Poor son of a bitch, Horn thought. But I guess it no longer matters to you much anymore. It’s not like it’s going to make any difference to you if the ice ever melts. You’re still as dead as a fish at market.

And what’s this?

What Horn had initially thought were reflections in the ice finally dawned on him. Surrounding the man in equal stillness were saddlebags bursting with coins. Gold coins. One hung suspended close to Horn’s face, and after a few minutes work he dug it out with his pickaxe.

Excited now, he sought out other coins he could retrieve easily. While the sun passed overhead, he managed to get quite a few. He told himself he would return home and buy food for the family table as soon as he could. The trip into town might be dangerous, but he still knew a few people in Wrath Butte who might be persuaded to help him.