“But what about you?” she said finally. “You seemed pretty friendly with your groupie there, what was her name — the one with the nails and face job and the hair dyed the color of a brick wall? What is she, a cosmetologist or something?”
He just smiled. “Beats me.”
“But she’s hot for something, isn’t she?”
“Yeah,” he agreed, smiling wider. “Aren’t they all?”
It had begun to rain, a light pattering in the dust that had people rising to their feet and briskly stuffing things back into their packs. Mal had already shrugged into his poncho and was making his way toward them, so he pushed himself up and clapped his hands to get everyone’s attention. “All right, everybody,” he said, raising his voice to be heard over the scrape and shuffle of activity, “gather round a minute. I don’t think the rain’s going to amount to much—”
“Scattered showers,” the old man put in, cutting him off. “That’s what the TV said.”
“Right, well, we can head down now or go on up to the summit — what do you think, show of hands?”
The majority, Mal and Syl included, raised their hands, while the remainder just stood there watching him. “Good,” he said finally. “I’d hate for a little weather to spoil the fun, so let’s go on as planned and see what it’s like up top — anybody has a problem, don’t be shy. Just let me know and we’ll head back down anytime you say. But really, I agree with”—gesturing to the old man—“what was your name?”
“Louis.”
“With Louis here. The forecast, I mean. A little rain never hurt anybody, right?”
—
They were up at eight thousand feet, moving along easily, the rain sucked back up into the clouds, the trail barely slick and the black sheared-off face of Slate Mountain looming over the treetops as if it had just dropped down out of the sky, when the cries of what must have been a whole flock of ravens broke the silence. The trees held fast. There was the scrape of hiking boots. Then a pair of the birds appeared from below, beating upslope, their wings creaking to gain purchase on the air, and everybody stopped to watch them go. “What’s that all about, you think?” Beverly asked, and there she was, right behind him, her hair clamped beneath a floppy pink hat now as a concession to the damp. “Something dead up there?”
“Probably a deer,” he said, “or the offal anyway. The stuff the hunters leave behind.”
“For a raven party.”
“Yeah, I guess so,” he said, moving on, talking over his shoulder while keeping one eye on the snaking line behind him. He was thinking of the way a carcass disappears up here, beetles coming up out of the ground, flies laying their eggs, vultures and ravens at it, rot, bacteria, coyotes, even the mice sneaking out under cover of darkness to gnaw calcium from the bones. He wanted to say, Everything dies to give life to something else, but he didn’t want to come off sounding pompous — or morbid, especially with a group like this, when they were all out here to deny the proposition or at least forget about it for the time it took them to get to the summit of a mountain and back down again — and so he left it at that.
He turned his head and kept moving on up the trail, Beverly doing her best to keep pace, to show him she was fit, a fit widow, if that was what she was, as if he were in the market and this was some kind of test. Which, he supposed, it was. Why should there be limits? If you felt good, what did age matter? It was only a number. He didn’t feel any different than he had at fifty — or forty, even. His blood pressure was in the acceptable range, he and Syl had sex once a week and he slept through the night and woke each morning with the sense that there was something new out there in the world, something reserved for him and him alone if only he had the strength to go out and find it. His feet dug at the trail. He wasn’t even breathing hard.
When they got close, he could see that the ravens were squabbling over something just off the trail. They hung in the trees like ornaments, fought along the ground in a black flap of wings, their voices harsh and constricted. He sliced away from the trail then, dodging through waist-high brush until he was there and the ravens lifted off silently and he saw what it was they’d been disputing: a bear. The carcass of a bear, its paws removed and its gut slit open, but otherwise intact. Before he had time to think (Rule #2: Never leave the trail), Beverly was there at his elbow and he could hear the others following behind, their voices muted, legs scissoring through the brush. He hadn’t wanted this: these people were old, they could misstep, break a leg, break everything.
“What is it,” Beverly said, breathless, “—a bear? Is that a bear?”
There was an anger churning in him — poachers, and they’d got the gallbladder and the paws to sell on the black market and left the rest to rot. What was wrong with the world? Christ, you couldn’t even take a hike anymore, not without this, this obscenity, this shit. Suddenly he was shouting. “Get back, all of you! Back on the trail!” But it was too late. Half of them were already gathered round, gaping at the swollen dead thing before them, its eyes gone, tongue discolored, the stumps of the legs rigid as poles, and the rest picking their way toward him. Beverly had her cell phone out, taking pictures. And here came Syl and Mal and then the old man, high-stepping his way through the bushes as if they were about to come to life and take him down.
“We ought to report this,” Beverly said. “What number do we call? You know what number?”
He would have told her it was useless, useless because there was nothing anybody could do about it, nothing that would put the animal together again and breathe the life back into it or eliminate the superstition and ignorance that drove the market for animal parts, for degradation, for destruction, but instead he just said, “There’s no signal up here.”
It was then that the trees began to stir, a breeze there, a sound like distant freight. When the rain came, it came in earnest, a heavy pounding that slicked everything even as they struggled back to the trail and fumbled with their rain gear, and then it was sleet, and then it was snow.
—
This time there was no debate, no show of hands, no further pretense: if they wanted to make the summit it would have to be another day because he was in charge here — he was the captain of this ship — and they were turning back. “We’re calling it a day,” he said, and he wanted to tail it with a joke, a quip about the weather or maybe the weatherwoman on the radio and how she’d been right after all, but all the lightness had gone out of him. It was always rougher on the way down than the way up — people never seemed to realize that — and with the wet snow the footing would be worse than usual. He’d have to keep an eye on the old guy — Louis — and on Beverly, who’d already slipped twice, the rear of her shorts sporting a long dark vertical smear that ran down the back of her right leg as if she’d just stepped out of the mineral bath at the spa. They hadn’t gone a hundred yards before he almost lost it himself, looking back over his shoulder to keep everyone in sight when he should have been watching his own two feet, but he managed to catch himself at the last minute. That would have been something, the group leader taking a muddy pratfall, and whether he’d have wound up hurting himself or not, he could imagine the sort of multi-faceted joke Mal would have made of it — and you didn’t see him slipping. Not Mal. He had the agility of a surfer, all out-flung arms and flapping lips.