Mountain time, p.23
Mountain Time, page 23
“Firewood for later,” Lexa recited. “Tents. Roll out the sleeping bags. Dig a potty place over there in the trees.”
“That’ll teach me to ask.” Mariah cast a look in a pertinent direction.
“I heard, I heard.” Mitch headed off into the timber. “I’ll do the woodsy stuff.”
Squatting to untie Lexa’s tent packet, Mariah grimaced. “My legs ache in every pore.”
“No shit, ridge runner.”
“Aren’t you tired at all?”
“Sure. But it’s a good tired.”
Mariah looked up at her sister standing there against the sky as she stretched, arms out and fists balled, at ease after earning this mountain.
• • •
The freshest of fresh air woke Mitch in the morning. Only inches of him were outside the sleeping bag, from his nose on up, but those were thermometer enough. He saw there was frost on the outside of the tent. He lay looking at it a minute, then reluctantly risked an arm outside the down bag and put a finger up to the tent fabric. The frost was on the inside of the tent, too.
There was scrabbling at his tent flap.
Lexa came scooting in. Shucking her unlaced boots, she slid inside the sleeping bag with him. “Came to check out the rumor on you—cold feet, warm heart?”
“Good morning, Nanook. You didn’t tell me this was going to be a polar experience.”
“Brisk, is all.” She puffed an experimental cloud of breath toward the frost motif on the tent ceiling. “Think of it as not snow.” She snuggled in on him some more. “Having any fun?”
“Through all these layers of clothes?”
“I meant the hike.” Nonetheless she kissed the place under his ear in incendiary fashion. Tempting as it was to continue on each other from there, murmurs between asleep and awake were emanating from the neighborhood of Mariah. Lexa gave him a promissory later, sailor wink and they stayed almost nose to nose to transmit warmth. From such close range she noticed Mitch’s face was starting to look seamed. As if Lyle’s generational markings were already shifting to him. The twinge that this gave her reminded her to ask: “How’s every little muscle this morning?”
“Letting me know they spent the night on the ground,” Mitch admitted. “Stiff, is all—nothing really shrieking.”
“Hey, then”—she sounded pleased—“you’re in not bad shape, considering. When’s the last night you slept in a tent? Boy Scouts?”
He went still.
Coldwater Ridge. One other fine bright conscienceless morning, amid mountains with lodes of time up their canyon sleeves. Juanita Trippe another relentlessly cheerful morning type, surely out there on the ridge smiling in Mount St. Helens’ direction when volcanic hell cut loose.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.” Nothing anything could be done about. “The tent and I? A big while ago,” he said huskily.
The current mountain, which had been so early to go into dusk, now made up for it by being the first to catch sunshine. The orange tent fabric began to give vivid light. “Looks like a sweetie of a day,” Lexa reported to Mitch, propping onto one elbow to check on the dawn’s progress. Moisture pearled on the ceiling of the tent, and she swiped away the worst of it with a bandanna. By now the frost on the outside was melting into plump globules, and she and he lay there watching the beads of water blip around on the grid of the tent pattern, like some outer space video game screen. Taking turns poking under a poised glob to make it run, they giggled and estimated that each one of these raindrop races knocked a point off their IQs.
“I better get to work on breakfast,” Lexa finally called this off. “What can the chef put you into ecstasy with this morning, the soup du jour or the bread of life?”
“I like either, so I’ll have both,” Mitch declaimed with a stretch and a grunt, coaxing his body into the day.
Mariah was fumbling a fire into being, and before long they were breakfasting on steaming pea soup and pumpernickel and hot chocolate.
• • •
This day’s hiking had a reward only an hour into it, the talus shoulder of the mountain and downhill ahead. Now they were in the Bob. Up here in the interior peaks and the supple valleys under them lay its million acres of designated wilderness. And up ahead, on the skyline, the Continental Divide the guarding rim of it all.
At the marker amid the rockfield on top, Mariah insisted on posing Lexa and Mitch like summit conquerors, their packs leaning nonchalantly against the tin yellow National Wilderness Area sign wired around it. While she fussed with her camera setting, Lexa telling her she would eventually get the hang of it, Mitch sneaked peeks back down at the Two Medicine National Forest land they had come through, ever since Agency Lake. Oil and gas pocketed in those geological folds. Just remember—Lyle Rozier’s memorial gravel handy for roads to them—you’re walking all on money. He faced around to Mariah’s camera with not his best expression.
• • •
When they set out again, the trail zigzagged down and then flattened across a broad scoop of valley, meadowed where it wasn’t forested, a stretch of miles they accepted with silent gratitude after yesterday’s more vertical ones.
It was only midafternoon when they came to the clear rush of water. Aspens pintoed the opposite bank, their leaves exquisitely trembling in the least whiff of breeze. From not far upstream poured the more industrious sound of a waterfall, twenty or thirty feet high, a toboggan of white water. The rocky sidehill around the waterfall broke up through the valley floor, like the mammoth root of a mountain surfacing, strewing the streambed and the slope down to it with stones the size of small flagstones. In the broken mosaic of it all, the water pooled and then tumbled down rapids like glass over marbles.
“Ledge Creek,” Lexa announced off her map. More than evidently she was on the ledge, a low smooth sedimentary span that led like a little dock to where the shallow stream could be crossed on other flat stones. She had close company there: a rough-mounded cairn, no taller than she was, had been built on the ledge near the water’s edge. Standing there absorbing the glorious surroundings, she clapped her hat on top of the monument and ran her hands through her hair.
The other two trailed up onto the vantage point next to her and the compact tower of rocks.
“Why one here, I wonder?” Mariah kicked at the cairn’s base a little, as if wanting it out of the way.
Absorbed elsewhere, Lexa simply gestured around. “Duh. Where the rocks are.”
“Thank you for sharing that, Ms. Einstein,” Mariah said none too mildly. “But you know what I mean. Up along the Divide or back at the Two boundary, sure, you expect these anywhere there. But not directing traffic at a creek crossing.” She squeezed past the cairn, still seeming to take its presence personally.
“What, are you allergic to monuments all of a sudden?” Lexa said absently, still gazing around at the waterfall, the chorusing creek, the nimble grove of aspens. “Probably it was one of our bored sheepherders.”
“Duh yourself. The old Primitive Area here, remember.”
“Jesus, Mariah, I don’t know how it got—”
“I believe, as an expert on the behavior of rocks”—Mitch stepped in to head off sisterdom’s sudden propensity toward civil disturbance over anything mineral, vegetable or animal—“that these, how do you say it in America, dogpiled onto each other.” He ran a hand over the uneven but effective dry-stone construction. “It’s standing up okay, but it doesn’t look like anybody put in all their time on it.”
“Well, it has some scenery,” Lexa said as if this spot on earth needed her defending. “Good-looking campsite.”
Mitch was watching her hopefully, and so was Mariah.
Lexa chewed her lip, calculating.
“It’ll make a humongous day tomorrow, but we seem to be ready for this.” She plucked her hat off the monument. “Okay, gang? Let’s go unload.”
As soon as they were on the other side of the creek, they saw they were not the first to think of it as a camping spot. A canvas tepee gray with age poked up not far downstream, on a nice high dry place handy to the water. No one around, though, when they approached it, and the campfire ashes were not recent. Inspecting, they whistled appreciatively at the amenities: dragged-up logs to sit on, a fire circle of blackened rocks, even a rusted but serviceable cooking grill that gladdened Lexa’s heart. Mitch zeroed in on the tepee, walking around it in admiration.
“A tent tall enough to stand up in? Wouldn’t that be too bad. Woop!” He nearly fell over a bundle in the grass at the rear of the tepee.
The others joined him and stared down at a rolled-up sleeping bag that had a foam mat wrapped around it for protection. The protection had not much worked; the foam had been vigorously gnawed through, shreds of bag fabric and tufts of down oozing out through the mauled mat.
Lexa shot a look toward the tepee, Mitch and Mariah an instant after her. Muddy pawprints at shoulder height showed where the animal, evidently up on its hind feet like somebody nearsighted feeling along a wall, had patted along the canvas of the tepee until deciding to rip its way in.
The trio stared at the claw-cut slash, big enough for a grizzly to walk through.
“We can assume the griz isn’t in there anymore,” Lexa deduced.
Their combined six eyes frisked the low brush along the creek.
“So then, where is he. It.” Trying not to sound nervous, Mitch wanted to know with some urgency: “Don’t we want to clear out of here?”
“Minutes ago?” chimed Mariah, her head swiveling back and forth steadily as a radar dish.
“Probably not,” Lexa figured out loud. “The bear has been and gone. If we’re careful to make noise and build a fire, generally announce ourselves, it isn’t likely to bother back here again real soon. Zweborg used to say each grizzly bear has a hunting territory bigger than Rhode Island.”
“Lexa, Rhode Island is the most microscopic state.”
“Mitch, if a bear wants to come visiting, it could come visiting if we were camped out on the trail somewhere.”
“I’m not for that either,” he conceded.
“Okay, then,” Mariah voted, shucking off her backpack. “If we’re going to be eaten, let’s be eaten in comfort.”
They banged cooking pots together and whooped and hollered for some minutes, a racket that they felt would clear any self-respecting grizzly out of the valley. Then turned to the night’s hostelry, unsnugging the tepee flap and stooping in like cave explorers. Strewn in there were other sets of mat-encased bedrolls, tossed around by the bear after some sample bites.
“Fishing camp.” Mariah pointed to the rod tips sticking out of the ends of a few of the foam rolls.
“Hunter-gatherer time!” Lexa exulted.
“His clan’s tools of the trade, right here,” Mariah happily seconded.
They could form alliances quicker than he could turn around, Mitch too late realized. “Sexism,” he protested. “Fishermanism. How about if I spread doilies around in here while you two go kill fish?”
The McCaskill sisters only snickered. “What’s the use of having an alpha male along,” Mariah was asking Lexa rhetorically, “if he won’t get out there and alph?”
Lexa knew another formula. “Fried trout for supper,” she cooed in Mitch’s direction. “Golden brown. Just crisp enough you can eat them with your fingers, like corn on the cob. If only some big strong mansie would go catch them.”
“You are the Bobbsey Twins from hell,” Mitch observed.
A bit of soothing came from Mariah, who said she might as well come help slay trout after the tepee was kicked into shape, while Lexa said she wanted the leisure of setting up a camp kitchen in style for a change.
Armed with rod and pocket-size box of lures that had been tucked into the middle of a mat bundle and a few angleworms he’d scouted from under rocks, Mitch headed up the creek. Past the crossing and the cairn was water which he thought either should have fish in it or be impounded for false pretenses. It was a classic pool, dappled with shadow and blue, while an apprentice waterfall about two feet high spilled in over a terracelike ledge. Snags abounded in the brush roots and fallen trees along the faster water that riffled out of the lower end of the pool, but he thought he could do something with the shade-quiet eddy along the edge of all that. Knowing there was going to be a lot of rust in his casting, he decided to stick with tin fishing—lures—instead of trying to deposit worms or grasshoppers delicately across thirty feet of pool into skeptical fish.
Just when he had been at this long enough to get into the fishing mood, halfway between boredom and fascination, he heard willow branches thrashing.
The crashing in the brush had familiar red hair. “How’s fishin’?” Mariah called across the pool in more than passable Bacall huskiness.
“The fishing’s great. The catching isn’t worth a crap.”
Rod already at the ready, she glanced up and down the stream at the lay of the water. “Mind if I sneak in here and try the riffle?”
“Just don’t catch any of the ones I’m slowly hypnotizing.”
Mariah made a respectable but not great cast. “It’s been about forever,” she self-critiqued her technique. “Since my ex. Last person you’d expect to find up to his brisket in the Clark Fork, whipping the water with this stuff. But there he’d be, so I did some with him. Never got as good at it as he was,” she mused into another toss of her line, “so at least our marriage wasn’t done in by that.”
“Anything worth doing is worth doing so-so,” Mitch attested. He aimed, flicked the first cast yet that felt right, bounced the lure off a half-submerged tree trunk, and it plopped squarely into the eddy he wanted.
“No fair,” she protested. “You didn’t warn me you’ve got coordination.”
“It’s all in the—yow!” The hit of the fish dipped the end of his fishing pole.
“Don’t horse him!” she shouted as he instinctively yanked the pole back. “You’ll lose him. Play him in slow!”
“Right right right. Okay, I’m playing him, no, not under the log, you bastard, there, right this way—”
Mariah was so busy laughing she let her line drift into a snag. “Oh, horseshit.”
“What’s this I hear, nasty talk in the vicinity of my meal?” He had the trout, about a twelve-inch rainbow, on the bank.
Mariah eyed toward her branch-snarled line, which was on Mitch’s side of the creek, and then at Mitch.
He smiled vengefully. “Don’t even think it, lady.”
She puckered and blew a raspberry at him, then surged into the water. To reach the riffle she had to wade along the side of the pool, in almost up to her waist, and then clamber among the submerged rocks until she could bend down and get hold of the snag to snap it off. Mitch watched every moment of it, not least because of how interestingly her wet Levi’s were plastered on her. Finally holding up the soggy black branch with her hook and line still tangled in it, she turned and gave Mitch a baleful little grin. Then outfished him six to three.
• • •
They came rolling back into camp like old whaling chums, showing off their catch on a willow stringer apiece, the trout lovely as jewel-dusted jade.
Lexa got busy on supper. The campfire smoke behaved beautifully, twining straight up like a mystic rope trick. In daylight’s last act at this spot, aspen shadows danced on the creek water. The waterfall drew silver from the air. She kept marveling around over her shoulder as she pottered the meal together.
She was frying the trout when she heard the sound of a keyboard in use.
Mitch was hunched on a jack pine log, tapping away at the laptop across his knees.
“You packed that?” Lexa stormed. Skreek of the frying pan’s bottom as she yanked it across the campfire grill to inspect the golden-brown fish. “No wonder I got stuck with carrying all the cooking gear and most of the food, too.”
“I had to. Any of my Bob Marshall stuff is on disk.” Looking caught, he chucked back into his pack the extra batteries he’d brought, away from her counting eye. “The guy was a hiking machine,” he alibied lightly. “I thought I’d pick up some tips.”
Silence met that.
“Habit, Lex, okay?” he came clean. “Even if I don’t have anyplace to write for anymore.”
• • •
Supper in them and the fire pleasant, they sat watching a placid sunset, the last light raying like golden spokes through the treetops on the rim of the valley. The minute the sun went down, Mitch dug out his laptop again with a wary glance at Lexa.
“Play ‘April in Paris,’ ” Mariah requested dreamily.
He vamped a run along a piano keyboard, and even Lexa broke up.
“All right, techie gear freak,” she said in resignation. “What’s with our man Bob?”
“He was a strange one.” Mitch shook his head. “Maybe saints in any trade are. Marshall was a kind of bean-counting poet.” He hit a few keys and peered close to read off the small screen: “ ‘First snow on the Lolo Trail, September 6, 1928. The path was too muddy to show white so soon, but the grass along the sides and the surrounding trees were already blanketed. Under this cover flowers, berries, mosses, highly pigmented rocks, everything that made the forest warm and colorful, had vanished. In a few hours the season had jumped from late summer completely over autumn, and had landed frigidly in January.’ ”
Mitch bopped the side of his head with the flat of his hand in admiration.
“You get that from him one minute, next he’s geeking around counting every sonofabitching thing. Literally. ‘Conversation between lumberjacks today: God 38, damn 33, Jesus 16, Christ 13,’ on down through bastard, hell, ass, fart . . . you get the picture.” He joined the others’ laughter at the Hallelujah Chorus of swearing.
“How was he on ‘Sightings of bears’?” Mariah went facetiously wide eyed. “Like, how many guh-guh-guh—”
“Don’t start with that.” Mitch glanced into the coming dark.
“Nobody in the history of Rhode Island,” Lexa pitched in with a lecturing tone, “has ever ended up as a hide on the floor of a grizzly’s den.”
