I glanced, idly at the stream, which trickled beneath a thin ice roof. A water ouzel was playing there. I watched him. Funny little bird, the ouzel, gray and round as a tumbled stone. He bobbed up and down on a rock with a game eye on the water — insects for breakfast. Or not, for the ouzel suddenly took flight and shot over my head and disappeared into the rockfall.
That was odd.
The ouzel is a water bird. He nests above streams and waterfalls. Even his nickname, the dipper, comes from his habit of bobbing as if preparing to cannonball into the water. What was so attractive to a water bird in that pile of rock?
I went over for a look.
In the flat morning light, chinks and crevices threw no shadows so that I had to inch my way along the wall to find the ruptures. One drew me close: a vertical cleft that flared at the base, like a door opening. The door was sealed along most of its length but there were cracks through which the dipper might have fit. Lower down, the cracks widened. The door became a Dutch door, with the bottom half ajar. A wedge of snow filled the space. I kicked it free. I got my flashlight, sank to my knees, and peered inside. One slab had come to rest against another, leaving a shallow cavity.
I’m not a spelunker. I like my enclosed spaces tall and wide, with a healthy structural integrity. I sat back on my heels. There was no reason in the world to go in. There was every reason not to.
Walter called out, “Success!”
I called, “High five!”
“What are you doing?”
I called, “Come on over.”
He joined me, on his knees. I explained the dipper. He said, “Let’s have a look.”
We stuck our heads into the cavity and I shined my flashlight around. The soil was the red cinder of Gold Dust, with a flouring of decomposed granite. I would have backed out then, and gladly, but for the sound that caught my ear — running water. Soil was dry, yet I heard water.
As did Walter.
We looked at each other.
I said, “This is worth some speculation.”
Walter lifted a hand to me.
“Suppose,” I said, “way back when the guys came to Gold Dust to test their powder, this exfoliation hadn’t yet occurred. Meaning, the rockfall didn’t block access — suppose that’s where their spring was. Back there, about twenty yards from the tunnel. About where Eric said the spring would be.” I listened to the sound of water. Sounded like snowmelt over rock. “And we got lucky. Thanks to the ouzel.”
“And Georgia?” Walter said.
I shrugged. She sure didn’t get lucky. Not in the end. I said, “Turns out she’d seen this place. So she remembered the spring. So she probably poked around until she found this break in the rockwall.”
“Which begs the question of why she came here looking for the spring.”
“I have a theory.” I swallowed. I told Walter what Eric had told me about Georgia finding Mike and Krom together, another sordid Hot Creek story.
I’ll give him this — he didn’t look shocked. He did shake his head.
“So,” I said, “once Georgia gets over the shock of seeing her lover with Mike, how about she decides to win back her lover? And get even with Mike in the process. And a fitting place to do that is bring Krom here, to the spring the guys used to soak in — that Mike used to soak in.”
“Which begs the question of who was with her here when she died.”
Neither one of us speculated further.
I said, “Let’s go see what she found.”
We went into the cavity, me first.
I had to go on hands and knees. It took me no more than half a minute to crawl the length, flashlight clamped in my teeth. At the far end, where I had thought the slabs joined in a seam, there was in fact another crack. The sound of water was quite definite, and another sound now mixed in: birdsong. I bellied around the corner, my heart in my ribs.
And finally there was light, and space, and I could stand.
Walter followed, and grunted to his feet.
Here, the exfoliated slabs had fallen like open leaves of a stiff old artichoke. We were in a small grotto, bounded by the outer leaves. Through the leaves I saw that the rockfall backed against the steep lava western slope of Gold Dust. The water we’d heard was indeed snowmelt, running down the slope. The dipper’s song was just outside.
Something was melting a lot of snow.
We wove through the rock leaves and came out into a pocket of land wedged between the lava slope and the granite dome.
And we saw what Georgia must have found.
We saw the outcrop where the dipper played in snowmelt, and saw that the melt was indeed a consequence of steam lifting from a blue hot spring to the slope above. Water so hot I felt heat from where I stood shivering. The boys’ spring, the plum Georgia sought, my long-sought holy grail, my nightmare.
Not dead after all.
Walter gasped.
But not at the spring. And surely it was not this spring that Georgia had written about in her notes because the spring in all its three-alarm heat was merely peripheral. What was central — what made it inconsequential, what was stopping my heart like it must have stopped hers — was the rip in the earth.
The little pocket of land was split nearly in two. Steam rose from the fissure and laid bare the reddish soil of the banks so that it looked like an open wound.
An old nightmare rose, in which I’m running through the caldera as the ground beneath me rots.
And now, up here in this hidden place on the outermost lip of the caldera, where the crazy dipper bathed in snowmelt and sang its happy demented song, the ground was, it seemed to me, rotting away.
Walter gripped my arm.
I could not move. I had the urge to run but, unlike in my nightmare, my feet were rooted. I told myself I should measure the fissure but I could not move.
If you made a list of the phenomena that raise a volcanologist’s blood pressure, ground cracking is right up there along with quake swarms. When magma rises it forces rocks apart and deforms the ground and if the magma gets close enough to the surface the crust cracks open. And the question then becomes, is it an old crack wherein the magma subsided and there is only residual heat? Not too old — it wasn’t here back when the boys were soaking in a hot spring. It’s more recent. How recent? Is there seismicity? Because, then, we have a new worry. We have activity where there has not been activity detected before. All the activity that has been detected, that spooked us and brought Adrian Krom to town, has been in the caldera’s south moat.
Georgia came in search of a hot spring but what she found was truly new.
“No way out?” Walter said.
“From here?” I said. “For her? For us?”
“Lord knows.”
Get Lindsay, I thought. Get her now. I said, “We need to get Lindsay.”
And it was speaking her name — like cold water in my face — that got me moving. Got Walter moving.
We paced the fissure, keeping clear of the steaming mud, measuring the displacement across the crack. This thing was measurable in meters.
I wanted Lindsay. I wanted a temperature probe; I knew it was hot down there but was it volcanically feverish? I wanted a tape measure and a gas collector and a camera but most of all I wanted Lindsay.
The dipper gave a fluting cry and funneled back into the rockfall.
We followed, pausing just long enough to scoop handfuls of the soil near the spring and dump it in our pockets. Then we bolted. I was burrowing back through the rockfall in the dark when I had a moment of clammy fear that someone would be waiting when we crawled out.
We emerged to find ourselves alone in the sunstruck draw. We geared up and pushed off, filled with the imperative to get Lindsay.