Abandon

She looked back up the mountain.

The slide had carried her a few hundred yards downhill, the debris path littered with forest carnage—curdled snow and spruce and splintered aspen.

She got up and listened for a long time, the key she’d taken from Stephen Cole still clutched in her left hand, watching for any sign of movement.

She thought about the child, buried somewhere nearby.

The cold rushed back.

She lifted an uprooted aspen sapling and began to stab it through the snow, slowly working her way up toward the glade, probing for the little girl.

But unto Thee have I cried, O Lord. And in the morning shall my prayer prevent Thee.

Stephen Cole lay cemented in snow and darkness.

Lord, why castest Thou off my soul?

He thought his arm wouldn’t work because he’d been packed under several hundred pounds of snow and trees. This was true, but the reason he couldn’t move a single appendage owed to the shattering of the bones in his arms and legs, the severing of his spine in four places.

Why hidest Thou Thy face from me?

He tried to call out for Harriet, but the snow had crammed into his mouth, gagging him.

I am afflicted and ready to die from my youth up. While I suffer Thy terrors I am distracted. Thy fierce wrath goeth over me.

It became difficult and then painful and then impossible to breathe.

He saw colors—violet and brown, columns of scalding light.

Thy terrors have cut me off. They came round about me daily like water. They compassed me about together.

He tried to pray for Harriet, for an end to any suffering, but his mind wandered to a windy South Carolina beach.

Lover and friend hast Thou put far from me, and mine acquaintance into darkness.

He was buried deep in sand, lost, running out of air, but he could hear her voice shouting his name.

And then the miracle happened: Something punched through, jabbing his chest, and he smiled now, because Eleanor had found him. She was digging him out, a shot of cold, fresh air streaming into his lungs, and he saw the sky and Eleanor staring down at him.

But she wasn’t smiling. She looked angry.

He spit the sand out of his mouth and said, “Help me. Please, Eleanor. Please.”

She began to bury him back.

2009

EIGHTY-FOUR

Abigail descended into a forest of ponderosa and Gambel oak, passed through curtains of mist between the trees, rain falling cold and steady, the air scented with wet pine. She’d been going for an hour when she came to the stream, fell to its muddy bank, and shoveled into her mouth handfuls of water so cold, her eyes ached.

Early afternoon, she walked out of the valley. The rain had let up, and what lay ahead looked familiar—a broad piece of open country surrounded by wooded mountains. Where the low dark clouds collided into the upper slopes, the conifers shone white with snow.

She spotted a ridge a mile away across the field. The map her father had drawn for her indicated that she needed to climb over it.

Though she didn’t like the prospect of venturing out into the open, she caught her breath and went on anyway, running hard as she could through the knee-high grasses, praying a wall of fog would sweep through and keep her hidden. After a half mile, she ducked behind a boulder, sat down, panting and thirsty, the soles of her feet raw, warm blood pooling in her boots. She peeked over the top of the rock, looked back across the boulder-strewn field toward the opening of the ten-mile valley that climbed up to the Sawblade. Thunder boomed. She thought she heard a rifle report. Abigail prostrated herself, her heart beating against the saturated ground.

Out of fear and because of the mounting pain in her blistered feet, Abigail crawled the rest of the way through the field. It rained again, her knees and palms rubbing raw.

It took an hour to cover half a mile, but she finally arrived at the foot of the long ridge.

The moment she started walking again, she knew she should never have gotten off her feet. With every step, she reached a new level of agony, forced to trade off between walking on her heels and the sides and the balls of her feet, wishing she’d put some moleskin on her blisters last night when she’d had the chance.

Climbing up the mountainside, she fell into a rhythm—two steps, rest, deep breath, two steps, rest, deep breath, on and on. She thought that when they’d descended this slope during the hike in, they’d followed a path, but she figured it would be safer now to stay off-trail.

She came into a glade, saw that open country far below, boulders reduced to pebbles in a sea of dead grass. Something moved down there—the size of an ant from five hundred feet above, but clearly the figure of a man, halfway across the field, progressing at a tireless jog.

She hurried on. The mountainside became steep—snow on the trees and on the ground. She climbed into the clouds, colder and darker here, with intermittent bursts of snow. Fog enveloped the woods, thick as smoke, Abigail on her hands and knees now, the slope so steep, she wondered how the trees stood upright.

At last, she reached the summit of the ridge, socked in and snowing, clouds streaming through the treetops. She ran, moaning every time her feet hit the ground. Then she was heading down, digging her heels into the snow to slow her descent, a kind of controlled fall.

What had been a soft whisper that she mistook for wind grew louder. She came out of the clouds and the snow had disappeared and she recognized that whispering as a swollen stream. She could see it, a thousand feet below, winding through the canyon—chocolate milk streaked with white water.

She ran again, the noise of the rapids getting louder, her ears popping.

When she finally saw them, she felt for the first time in days that she might survive.

A quarter of a mile down-canyon, Jerrod’s Bronco, the llama trailer, and the faded blue speck of Scott’s Suburban stood parked where they’d been left four days ago, in a meadow by the road.

It was getting dark when Abigail picked up the trail two hundred feet above the road to Silverton. She followed it down five switchbacks before it straightened out, leveled off, and emerged from the spruce forest into a meadow.

She broke into a run, tears streaming down her face, and not only from the pain of her tenderized feet but from relief, too.

She collapsed in the grass on the driver’s side of the Suburban, gulping lungfuls of air, every cell in her body screaming out in riotous protest at the last seventeen miles of abuse.

She looked across the meadow to where the trail entered the forest, her eyes slanting up through the spruce to the first switchback, then following it to the next bend.

Just before the third turn, she saw movement—a man jogging down through the trees.