I crawled forward and saw some sort of fox hopping around the rocks below us. Snow white, it was one of the prettier things I’d ever seen. I held my breath, drew the bow, held on the fox, and released. The arrow flew over the fox, maybe two inches high.
The fox disappeared.
Through clenched teeth and a white-knuckled grip on the flare gun, Ashley whispered. “What happened?”
“Missed. Too close.”
“How do you miss something that’s too close? I thought you said you could shoot that thing.”
I shook my head. “Shot over it.”
“What was it?”
“Fox of some sort.”
Things had turned for the worse.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
It was weird owning the place that was the source of so many tough or bad memories, but you just shook your head and smiled. “Give me six months, let me remodel, paint, get some new furniture, and…I’ll give you new memories. Besides…” You put your hands on your hips. “Paid for and oceanfront are both really cool.”
So we gutted walls, repainted, retiled, re-did pretty much everything. Seemed like a totally different place. Dad liked closed blinds, dark colors, little lighting, no visitors. More like a cave. You went for cool blues, soft tans, open windows with the blinds rolled up, sliding glass doors cracked so the sound filtered through. Wave upon wave.
How many nights has the sea sung us to sleep?
You remember the night of that crash? I’d worked late because two Cadillacs, overflowing with people, had been hit by a tow truck. The ER was slammed. My shift ended at four the previous afternoon, but the first ambulance arrived just minutes before with promises of more to come. I’d stayed until we had everybody stable—at least those that could be stabilized. I was tired. Thinking about life and how short it is. How we’re always just a breath away from overturned in the ditch with a fireman cutting you out with the Jaws of Life. It was just one of those moments where I knew, really knew, that life is not guaranteed. That I take it for granted. I wake up each day thinking I’ll wake up tomorrow, too.
It’s not necessarily true.
It was early. Maybe three a.m. The ocean was angry ahead of a storm. Sideways wind. Stinging rain mixed with sand. Frothy churn. Choppy waves. Thunderous noise. A storm was coming in, and any idiot could tell the undertow would be severe.
Anyway, I was standing at the glass wrestling with life’s impermanence, staring out over the beach. You appeared, in a silk robe. Tired eyes.
You said, “You okay?”
I told you what happened. What I was thinking. You tucked your shoulder under mine, wrapped your arms around my waist. Minutes passed. Lightning spiderwebbed the sky.
“You owe me something, and I want to collect.”
Seemed a strange way to start a conversation when I was sharing my deepest thoughts. Sort of irritated me. I guess my voice betrayed this. “What?”
Admittedly, I’m a bit of an emotional blockhead. I’m still sorry.
I don’t know how long you’d been wanting to bring this up. Don’t know how long I’d missed the signals. Looking back, you’d been firing shots across my bow for months, and I was too wrapped up in work to pick up on them. But you’d been patient. I’d kept telling you, “Just let me get through medical school.”
I guess you figured it was time to ramp up your efforts. You stepped aside, untied your robe, let it slip to the floor, and started walking to our room. At the doorway, you turned. A candle in our bedroom lit one side of your face. “I want to make a baby. Right now.”
I remember watching you disappear into the warm glow of candlelight, the flash of a shadow across the small of your back. I remember staring back into the glass and shaking my head at the idiot in the reflection staring back at me. I remember walking into our bedroom, kneeling next to our bed, and saying, “Forgive me?” I remember you smiling, nodding, and pulling me toward you. A while later, I remember you lying on my stomach, your chest pressed to mine, your tears trickling onto my chest, a tired smile, trembling arms. And I remember that moment, when I knew. That you’d broken loose in me the stuff that only love breaks loose. That you’d given me all of you. Unselfishly. Unreservedly.
Something about that gift struck me. Something about the enormity of that touched me down where words don’t live. Where expression fails. Where there are no secrets. Where there’s just you and me and everything that’s us.
And I remember crying like a baby.
That’s when I knew. When I knew for the first time what love was. Not what it felt like. Not how it made me feel. Not what I hoped it was. But what it was. And what it was when I didn’t get in the way.
You showed me. It’d been there all along, but something about that night, those people, the sense of gain, loss, heartbreak, and joy, all those things swirled into that moment and…I’d lived my whole life wanting to love but never able to do so apart from the pain I’d carried. The pain of my dad. Of my mom’s absence. Of running but never being fast enough. Of never measuring up.
But there…that night…that moment, it was the first time I’d ever been cut free. When I took a breath deep enough to fill me. All of my life, I’d struggled in the waves, tossed, turned, thrown about like a rag doll, forever trying to surface, screaming for air, but somewhere some unseen hand held me beneath the foam and froth. But in that moment, you held back the waves, lifted me above the surface, and filled me.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Grover was stiff when I tried to move him. Frozen in a sitting position. His head tilted a bit to one side. One hand still holding the stick. His eyes were closed.
Ashley turned her head.
I popped off a section of the wing, laid him on top of it, and slid-pushed him out the entrance. I pulled him across the snow to a boulder covered in lion tracks. I brushed the snow off, sat him on the rock, and leaned him backward.
I backtracked, counting. Eighteen steps.
I nocked an arrow, aimed at the snowdrift a few feet away from Grover, and released. This time I didn’t shoot over. The distance was far enough to allow the arrow to flatten out while not so far away that I couldn’t hit what I was aiming at.
Napoleon kept running back and forth between Grover and me. He’d started limping, and his circles had developed a hitch. He looked up at me.
“I won’t let anything happen to him.”
Napoleon walked back into our disintegrating cave. Everything about this location was bad. I needed to get us out of here, but I had two problems. First was my energy level. I’d have less tomorrow and even less the next day. Secondly, having spent part of my residency on the West Coast where mountain lions thrive and having seen what they can do to unsuspecting people, and having seen how often they do it, I had no intention of spending the next few days looking over my shoulder.
I crawled in.
Ashley’s face was wet. She was breaking down. “What’re you doing?”
“Hunting.”
“Are you using Grover as bait?”
“Yes.”
She didn’t say anything.
“But, if it works the way I’m thinking, then nothing will happen to him.”
“Not to point out the obvious, but nothing has worked out the way you’d hoped since we met in Salt Lake.”
She was right. I had no response. I nodded. I just knew I wasn’t going to sit in our cave and wait for that thing to come back. Using Grover helped tilt the odds. Maybe not in my favor, but not in that thing’s either.
If it went my way, then Grover would never know it and would be no worse for it. If it didn’t, well, he was dead already, and I’d bury him before Ashley had a chance to see what had happened.
We didn’t say much the rest of the day. Or that night. Or the next day. By the time the second night came around, I hadn’t slept soundly in forty-eight hours and was running on fumes. So was Ashley.
The cold had intensified. I couldn’t say for sure, but it was crisp and painful, suggesting tha
t it had fallen into the negatives. Clouds moved in, blocking out the moon, and that was bad. I needed the moon. Without it, I couldn’t see the sight pin.
Midnight came and brought snow. I was sleepy. Fading in and out. I could see the outline of Grover just across the snow. Based on the layer covering him, we’d had another three inches of snow.
I must have fallen hard asleep, because I jerked when I woke. Napoleon lay next to me. Crouched. His eyes were focused on Grover.
Something was leaning on Grover. And the thing was big. Six plus feet in length. My hands were nearly frozen, but I drew the bow and tried to find the pin. There was no way to see it in the dark. “Come on. Just a glimmer of light.”
Still nothing. I swung the bow, knowing I only had another second or two. My arms were cramping and my chest felt like somebody had stuck me with a spike. I coughed, tasting blood. I was weakening. I needed light. My arms were shaking.
Next to me, something brushed my leg, then I heard a click and somebody shot a Roman candle out the entrance to the cave. The flare gun exited in a long space-shuttle arc and then hovered a metallic orange maybe a hundred feet above us. The light showered down, casting shadows. The cat had both his paws on Grover’s shirt, like they were dancing. It looked up, arched its neck, I found the pin, leveled it on the cat’s shoulder, and pressed the release.
I never saw the arrow.
I dropped the bow, fell back, clutching my side and trying to breathe. I coughed, tasted more blood, and spat on the snow next to me.
Ashley lay to my right, staring out. “It’s gone.”
“Did I hit it?” I had hunched over. Nursing my rib cage. The spasm was traveling around my back, further shortening my breathing.
“Don’t know. It left in a hurry.”
Somewhere in the darkness my hand found hers.
We lay there, catching our breath. I was too tired to carry her back down to her bag, so I pulled her to my chest, wrapped us in my bag with my arms around her waist and chest. Within minutes, her head fell to one side and her pulse slowed.
MORNING WOKE US. Napoleon lay curled between us. I climbed out of my bag and saw what Ashley had done last night. Drag marks in the snow told the story.
I needed to check her leg, so I lifted the bag and ran my hand gently along the skin. The skin was dark, and the swelling had returned. The hair on her leg was stubbly. Ten days overgrown. The pulse in her ankle was good. The problem was the swelling. The skin was taut. Moving last night had been traumatic. Not good. She’d set herself back. The pain would be intense, but we were out of Percocet.
I tilted her head, placed two Advil on her tongue, and she sipped and swallowed.
I propped her head on my bag, dressed, tied up my boots, nocked an arrow, and stepped toward Grover. He’d fallen over. Or been pushed. And looked like he was asleep on his side. A trail of blood led away up the rocks. A constant trail.
It’d been several hours, which was either real good or real bad. If the mountain lion was mortally wounded, then those several hours would have given it time to die. If it was just sort of wounded, those several hours would have given it plenty of time to regather its strength and get angry.
I turned to Napoleon and held out my palm like a stop sign. “Stay. Take care of Ashley.” He climbed inside her bag, only his nose sticking out. My breath was a thick cloud of smoke and bit at my nose. The cold was painful.
I climbed the rocks and followed the blood. It thinned, which was bad. A thin blood trail means a bad hit and probably an angry, injured lion. After a hundred yards I was down to following a drop here and a drop there. I stopped to think things over. The wind blew, cut through me, and blew snow dust into my eyes.
At a large outcropping, the drops increased in number, finally becoming a stream. After another hundred yards, it grew into a large puddle—suggesting that the thing had stopped there. A good sign. I dug at the snow with my toe. It was several inches deep in red.
That was good. At least for us.
The trail continued another two hundred yards up through some smaller rocks and toward some squatty trees. I saw the tail first, the black tip lying flat across the snow, sticking out from beneath the lowest limbs of the trees. I took a deep breath, drew the bow, and walked slowly toward the cat. Eight feet away, I set the front pin on its head, lowered it to account for the distance, and released the arrow. The arrow sliced through the neck. Only the fletching was visible. The cat never moved.
I retrieved the arrow, hung it in the quiver, and sat on the rock, staring at the cat. She was not big. Probably five feet from head to rump and maybe weighed a hundred pounds. I held her paw in my hand.
Small or not, she’d have ripped me to shreds. I checked her teeth. They were worn, which would explain why she’d started hunting easy targets.
I knew Ashley would be worried.
I retraced my steps and found her in a good bit of pain. She was shivering and on the verge of going back into shock. I stripped to my underwear, unzipped her bag, and pulled mine up alongside hers. I climbed in, pressed my chest to hers, and wrapped my arms around her. She lay shaking for close to an hour.
When she was asleep, I climbed out, wrapped both bags around her, stoked the good fire, fed it a little fuel, and returned to the cat. I caped it, which means I cut off the hide, and then gutted it. That left me with a mountain lion carcass of muscle and bone that weighed closed to fifty pounds. Giving us maybe fifteen pounds of eatable meat. I dragged it through the snow, cut several green limbs, built a frame around the fire, and began hanging strips of meat.
The smell woke her.
She picked up her head, sniffed the air, and managed a hoarse whisper. “I want some.”
I tore off a piece, tossed it between my hands like a hot potato, blew on it, and held it to her lips.
She chewed slowly, eating the entire thing. After a few minutes, she lifted her head, and I propped it up with part of her sleeping bag. Dark circles shrouded her eyes. I tore off another piece and held it while she took small bites. She laid her head back, chewing. “I just had the worst dream. You would never believe.”
“Try me.”
“I dreamed my flight out of Salt Lake was canceled, but then this stranger, a nice man, kind of homely looking but still nice, invited me to ride this charter flight with him on a short hop to Denver. So I agreed, and somewhere over this interminable forest, the pilot had a heart attack and crashed our plane. I broke my leg, and after nearly a week, all we’d had to eat was some trail mix, coffee grounds, and a mountain lion that had tried to eat us.”
“Homely? Nice? ‘Nice’ was how we described girls in high school with good personalities.”
“You’re unlike any doctor I’ve ever met.” She chewed slowly. “The strange part of the dream was that I agreed to get on a charter with a total stranger. Two, actually. What was I thinking?” She shook her head. “I need to re-examine my decision-making paradigm.”
I laughed. “Let me know how that works out.”
In the daylight I rechecked her leg. She was afraid to look. Which was a good call, because it wasn’t pretty.
“You’re lucky you didn’t rebreak it. The bone ends are just now getting tacky enough to hold it in place, and there you go pulling some stunt with a flare gun. I don’t think you moved the bone, but the swelling came back with a vengeance.”
Her skin was pale, and she looked clammy. I repacked snow around the leg, adjusted and moved the braces to help circulation, then pressed her foot to my stomach to draw the warmth to it.
For the rest of the day we ate barbecued mountain lion and sipped warm water. I kept the snow packed around and under her leg and monitored the amount of fluid she was both drinking and expelling. She’d been lying still for ten days, breathing less than half the oxygen she was used to. I was worried about atrophy and infection. If she got one, I wasn’t sure her body could fight it.
Once the protein hit my system, I rubbed down her right leg, her good leg, forcing the blood
flow through it and stretching it as much as I could without jolting her broken leg. A delicate balance. Throughout the day, I continued cutting long strips of meat off the cat, feeding them through green bows from an evergreen and suspending them above the fire. Several times throughout the day I gathered fuel, taking me farther and farther from the cave, to keep the fire hot. By nightfall I’d carved off every available strip of meat I could find on the cat carcass and cooked it above the fire. It wasn’t much, wasn’t even all that good, but it would fill us, give us some protein, some energy, and, maybe just as important, it would travel. Which meant I wouldn’t have to find food every day.
When I’d finished, late in the afternoon, the color had returned to Ashley’s face and cheeks. Maybe more important, her eyes were moist and healthy.
With two hours of daylight remaining, I looked out the entrance, and my eyes fell on Grover, lying on his side. He looked like a toppled statue. I strapped up my boots. “I’ll be right outside.”
She nodded. As I passed by she reached out, grabbed me by the coat, and pulled me toward her. She stared up at me, then pulled my forehead to her lips. They were warm, wet, and trembling. “Thank you.”
I nodded. This close to her face, I noticed how thin her cheeks had become. Even drawn. I guess shivering for a week mixed with prolonged periods of shock and the absence of much food would contribute to a hollow, gaunt look.
“I don’t know how you managed what you did last night. It’s a deep-down kind of strength”—I looked away—“I’ve only seen one other time.” I pressed my palm to her forehead, checking for fever. “Tomorrow morning we’re getting out of here. I’m not sure where we’re going, but we’re leaving this place.”
She let go of my hand and smiled. “First flight out?”
“Yeah. First-class, too.”
I crawled out. My stomach was full, and for the first time in ten days I was neither hungry nor cold. I looked around and scratched my head. Something was strange. Something I’d not noticed in a long time. Like something had crept up behind me that I’d not seen. I scratched my chin and it hit me.