Ahead, a wall of listing trees rose above the others. He would have to go around them. Standing on trunks, he picked his way along, pushing canopy foliage out of his way. The branches pushed back, so he went down on his knees and scrambled under the brush. As he did, he grabbed a squared timber. The dimension lumber felt wonderful to the touch. He pulled himself up to the timber and recognized the porch of his cabin.
The tiny building was standing. It had been punctured with heavy tree limbs and its south wall had been crushed, yet the interior space was largely intact. His bed was where it should be, with blankets folded neatly at the foot of the mattress. He could spend the night and continue in the morning.
White Elk rummaged through the simple kitchen along the ruptured south wall. Canned goods littered the deformed counter and floor. He scratched about the splintered counter for utensils and found a can opener. Now for a fire. He turned to the wood stove on the adjoining wall. It was undamaged, but he wanted to be certain the metal chimney pipe outside had not been stripped off the cabin. It was nowhere to be seen, probably crushed under the fallen trees. No matter, he would kindle a small fire on the ground at the foot of the porch.
Darkness enveloped the buried camp. White Elk harvested many small dry lower limbs of the evergreens and set the wood ablaze. Shattered timber and siding from the south wall went into the flames, too. In minutes, the infant campfire pushed the night and the chill back. Smoke curled and massed in the tangle of foliage above the cabin. White Elk placed an open can of corned beef hash harvested from the cabin floor next to the embers so the tin would soak up the heat of the little blaze and warm the food.
Weary, the elder sat quietly before the fire, his mind empty, his bones chafing in their sockets. The pop and spit of the open flames were a timeless and welcome comfort to the old man. He closed his eyes to listen to the familiar sounds. As he sat quietly, another noise infiltrated. Dry sleet pellets began falling on the evergreen tangle, he thought. Good thing to be seated under the porch roof.
The sound continued, hissing like steam issuing from an old steam radiator valve. In the firelight, small flakes sifted down from the shattered limbs above. The flakes looked like fine cold temperature snow to White Elk, but it was not cold enough for snow. The motes did not float, but fell straight to the earth and fell steadily. Within a few minutes, wherever the material filtered down through the vegetation above, the ground became covered with a fine layer. It glowed orange in the firelight, but it did not reflect the light well like fresh snow always did. White Elk reached out and dabbed a finger into the material and brought it up to his face. He rubbed it between his fingers. It was not cold. It didn’t melt away. It simply compressed to a gritty powder.
After consuming the contents of the hash can, fatigue overcame the man. His eyelids grew heavy as flickers of campfire light played over the structure. As he had always been taught, he extinguished the flames, covering the embers with the odd dry matter that was still falling. It smothered the fire readily. Satisfied the fire would go cold, he took to the cabin bed and pulled every one of the blankets over his weary frame.
Chapter Forty-Seven
Montana Governor Randall Seifert strode out onto a half-acre helipad atop the thirty-story Freeman Energy Corporation headquarters tower high above the streets of Denver. In town for several days, Seifert had reviewed the firm’s preliminary plans to open a pit mine in Montana’s Paradise Valley twenty miles north of the northern boundary of Yellowstone National Park. Part of his morning he had spent on the phone, boxing ears and rattling sabers, trying to force someone, anyone, in an official capacity to lift the damn volcano alert and call off the Yellowstone evacuation order.
A black corporate helicopter slumped on the pad, its blades drooping. The corporate pilot walked about the chopper doing his preflight check. He climbed in and ran through his checklist while others clambered aboard for a flight over the continental divide and north from the rooftop of the Rockies several long hours to the Yellowstone country.
As the pilot reached for the ignition to power up the craft’s powerful engine, a strong sensation of motion startled the aviator. He cocked his head up quickly to scan the helipad.
“What the hell?”
“Earthquake!” a company geologist shouted from the left rear seat of the chopper.
Only a narrow city block wide and pencil-thin tall, the Freeman building was designed to flex and twist in heavy winds without its outer sheathing and glass facade losing its integrity. A rolling tremor raced under the city, sending the upper floors of the tower into a slow whipping motion. At the roof level, the deck rocked a dozen feet to the southeast, then pulled back and teetered twelve feet to the northwest.
The chopper pilot sat frozen as the horizon shifted slowly to and fro. Governor Seifert flailed for something of substance, his hands grasping the interior door latch, knuckles white. Seated behind the pilot, Colorado Senator Carson Black glanced wide-eyed at the firm’s geologist, John Hasselman, for some reassurance. Hasselman, who understood the physics of what was happening to the skyscraper, smiled in the senator’s direction. “Don’t worry. The building’s just rocking a little. Just give it a minute.”
As the geologist expected, the rooftop swaying quieted down and stopped altogether. Hasselman laughed. “It’s a damn good thing this building isn’t a mile high. If it were, we’d have been in for one wild ride.”
“That was a hell of a ride anyway,” the governor shouted.
“That’s typical of tall buildings caught in the throes of a quake.”
The pilot spun around in his seat and looked at Hasselman. “We’ve never had anything like that happen here before.”
“That was quite a jolt,” offered the geologist. “Up here, it’s ten times worse than at street level. The building acts like fishing rod. Jerk the handle of the rod quickly and the tip of the rod whips back and forth. That’s what was going on. I wouldn’t worry about it. This building can withstand a quake of that modest magnitude easily enough.”
The pilot started the engine of the machine and the drooping blades began to turn, whir and lift. He checked his gauges again, flipped levers and gave a thumbs-up. In a moment the whirlybird popped off the roof tarmac vertically eighty feet before pitching nose down and sweeping out over the city toward the great wall of the Front Range of the Rockies.
The machine whirled north above the suburbs of Denver, drifting toward Boulder. The dry land prairie at the foot of the mountains looked no different than the Los Angeles basin from the air. Several booming waves of sound greeted the craft over Boulder, but the roar of the machine’s powerful turbine masked the brute noises.
West of Boulder, the helicopter ascended to 10,000 feet and followed the canyon road west beyond the Flatirons to the mountain village of Nederland. The metallic bird ascended past the two-mile elevation mark, racing for the very backbone of the nation itself at Rocky Mountain National Park.
The peaks were choked with snow. The snowcap was, for the second year in a row, at near-record levels. There would be plenty of water for the sprawling cities at the foot of the Rockies and for the thirsty towns of the Southwest this summer. There was sure to be a copious amount of the precious liquid for another blockbuster agricultural season.
The vista from the helicopter windows was awash in brilliant white, mountain crag gray and dark evergreen. As the machine climbed below and east of 14,255-foot Longs Peak and toward the roofline of the continent, the high country shimmered under an electric blue sky, filled with not so much as a single cloud.