With infinite care, she pulled both shoulder straps free of their buckles and, holding them so the pack would not roll back and drag her with it, she undid the buckle of her hip belt. The instant it snapped free, she released the shoulder straps and dug her fingers into the ledge.
The pack fell back, bumped her legs, slid down the stone, and was gone.
Anna remained. For the first time she dared to think she was really going to make it. This hope of survival made the prospect of any mistake so terrifying that for a moment she couldn't move, not even to open her eyes.
From above, the sound of gravel grinding underfoot caught her up with sudden wild relief. "Help, help me," she called around the canvas straps between her teeth. The crunching changed tenor. It wasn't the footfall of a timely savior. The stone-on-stone ringing was caused by a rock the size of a cantaloupe rolling down the slope.
"Fuck!" Anna yelled and pressed her cheek tightly against the limestone. The rock struck her behind the ear; a fist punching her from conciousness, from life. As the blackness took her she felt her fingers slipping from the ledge, her feet from their pathetic supports. In the millisecond before she lost herself, Anna was aware of a great and futile anger.
Then that, too, was gone.
12
SOMEHOW Anna thought death wouldn't hurt this bad. She'd always pictured the Great Beyond as an unfathomable nothing; like trying to see from the tip of one's finger or smell with one's knees.
This was pain, the old familiar earthly variety.
Quite a lot of it.
For what seemed like a long while, less than quick but more than dead, Anna lived around this ache. Slowly it came to her that she could open her eyes. There was light, gray uniform light, but no shapes or colors. Vague images of a cloud-filled heaven taken from childhood Sunday-school books drifted in her mind; images incomplete and faded.
But heaven would be cool and it wouldn't hurt.
A shadow marred the cloudscape and Anna turned her face. Stone grated against her mouth. An ant, small and black and six-legged, crawled across the universe. Anna knew then that she lay facedown on the limestone and that she probably had to die all over again.
It had been too damned hard the first time.
She forced her mind clear. "Primary survey," she whispered. "I'm breathing. I'm conscious. I'm bleeding." There was a dark stain on her shoulder and her braid painted thin red lines on the pale rock. Her left arm wasn't working too well. The shoulder joint felt as if it was full of broken glass, but it did function. Collarbone cracked, she thought; tissues damaged from the dislocation.
Moving as little as possible, she looked around her. She had fallen to the bottom of the slope. No more than a yard, two at the most, separated her from the two-hundred-foot drop. She lay at a forty-five-degree angle on a natural lip, a meager flaring of stone, that marked the cliff's edge. A rock or root- something protruding from the limestone-had kept her from sliding over the edge when her heavy leather service belt caught on it. It felt as if the protrusion had pierced and ripped her abdomen, but she wasn't sure.
Pain and fatigue were calling her back into darkness but she refused to go. Focusing on the ant, making bets-if he reaches that shadow, I'll live; if he goes around that blade of grass I'll wake and find it was all a dream-Anna stayed conscious.
The ant went around the blade of grass and she didn't wake. A blade of grass. Grass had to have something to grow from: soil, a ledge, a crack. As her mind focused on that, she began to see more clearly.
The blade of grass was growing on a little flat space three or four feet wide. This step had been cut into the cliff when the rock above had fallen away. A crack ran upward from it forming a chimney of stone several feet deep and as many across.
The platform at the bottom of the chimney was less than a yard from where Anna hung. If she could reach it she could rest, safe on the floor of this tiny, three-sided, ceilingless room.
She stretched her right arm out. Her fingers just curled around the sharp edge of the broken rock, but it was a solid grip. The toe of her right boot reached to the crevice floor. Gingerly, she tried dragging herself toward safety but the belt that had saved her life now held her fast and the pain in her gut threatened to overwhelm her.
She lay still wanting to cry but unable to focus even on self-pity. Giving up was seductive: a moment of fear, then an end to fighting. Fleetingly, she wondered if death were a narcotic, if inside her death and adrenaline waged a small-scale chemical war, fighting for her will.
Involuntarily her left foot twitched and several pieces of gravel were sent down the mountain. An instant of sound; an eternity of silence. Anna was not yet ready for the eternal silence.
Adrenaline won.
Twisting her injured arm, almost welcoming the clean ache of grating bone, she crawled her fingers along the stone until she had worked her hand underneath her belly. She could feel the smooth metal of her belt buckle. It was hung up on what felt like a post. Once free of it, she would have one chance to jerk her body the two feet to the crack. If she slipped or her strength failed or her clothing snagged, she would slide off the edge.
Two hundred feet.
A cold rush of fear froze her as surely as an arctic wind and for a moment Anna could neither see nor breathe. When it passed, it left her weakened.
Now or never, she thought. Bucking away from the stone, she pushed at the buckle with cramped fingers. For an instant it remained caught. Then with awful suddenness she was free and slipping. Strength born of desperation, she dragged the weight of her body across the limestone. When her face cleared the vertical lip, she saw an upright slab within, a powerful hand hold. Seizing it, she tumbled into the crack in the rock.
"Oh God, oh God, oh God," she heard herself saying when she became cognizant and she laughed. "Oh God for a chamber pot." The inevitable adrenaline reaction was setting in.
Nausea was next, then trembling weakness. Then pain reasserted its dominion. Anna took stock of her situation. Looking out, back across the smooth limestone she could see the protrusion that had broken her slide: a knob of iron ore an inch and a half high. The natural ore, harder than limestone, remained like an upthrust thumb when the rock had eroded away. Anna's NPS belt had snagged on it.
Delicately, she unbuckled her belt and unzipped her hiking shorts. The iron had not broken the skin but a dark red welt ran up her abdomen. Where the iron had caught under the buckle her flesh was already turning dark purple. With torn fingers, she palpated her belly. There was pain but no rigidity. A good sign there was no internal bleeding. Training started to take over, Anna falling into the secondary survey pattern she'd been taught to use to assess for injury.
She stopped herself with a snort. No one would find her where she was, halfway down a mountain, hidden in a hole, her pack tumbled into the thickets a couple hundred feet below. Shouts would not carry up the cliff nor down to the canyon floor. What difference did it make if she were badly injured or not? Her belly hurt, her head hurt, her left shoulder was killing her and so what? She must climb.
Bracing one foot against each wall of the stone chimney, she began working her way up. Ten feet and she was singing "Itsy bitsy spider" to blank the pain from her mind. Fifteen and her legs began to tremble. Fear of falling slowed her inching progress. Thirty feet up there was a narrow shelf she could brace her butt on and, the weight off her legs, she rested.
Afraid to stop too long lest her strained muscles begin to cramp, Anna pushed herself on before many minutes had passed. Blood was dripping down her neck on the left side but the drip was slow. She had no idea how much was blood and how much sweat. Salt burned deep into the scrapes on her chest.