Feeling faintly ridiculous, like the ruck-faced general in an old World War II flick, Dave hears himself say, “All right then, follow me,” and then he’s down in the water and making for the embankment to the left. It’s like trout fishing, that’s what he’s thinking, like fighting the current in a pair of waders only without the encumbrance of a fly rod and creel, and the water actually gets deeper before they reach the first obstacle — the embankment, which on closer inspection proves to be a thirty-foot-high wall of rock left intact as the stream chewed away the softer strata below it. He makes an attempt to round the corner, pulling himself along with both hands, but the current goes chest deep and he gives it up after a minute and begins to climb.
The cliff — hump, mound — is composed of some sort of volcanic rock, basalt, he supposes, gouged and fissured all the way to the top. The problem is, the stuff is loosely put together and it keeps fragmenting in his hands, bits and pieces sifting down behind him as he flattens his pelvis to the rock and moves from one handhold to the next. “Sorry,” he says, peering down at the pale wet melons of their faces, “we’re just going to have to get up and over this and then I’m sure it’ll be easier. .”
It’s nothing for Cammy — she launches herself at the rock face in a goatish scramble, but the other two girls are a little slower on the uptake. And Toni Walsh, fumbling with the purse, manages to pull herself up as far as the first solid foothold, but then loses impetus. “Josh,” he shouts down, “can you give her a boost there?” He knows he should drop back and help her himself, but he’s nearly at the top now and he’s anxious to see what’s on the other side, to see what they’re up against.
Though Josh is no woodsman, though he’s clumsy and shivering in the wet sack of his clothes and a good three inches shorter than Toni Walsh, he surprises him. He’s already given a hand up to the other two girls (Kelly and Suzanne, and it’s hard to tell them apart except that Suzanne — or is it Kelly? — sports a blood-red PETA patch on her right sleeve), and he lowers himself, digs his boots in and stretches his full length to hold out a hand for Toni Walsh — and Toni, game at least for now, takes hold of it and pulls herself up to the next handhold and the next one after that, and before long they’re all on top and looking down into the brown roil of the canyon.
From this vantage, he can see that the flats are a vast muddy lake fed by a spigot in the distance, a series of spigots that climb up and into the low belly of the clouds — waterfalls, each mounting on the shoulders of the next. When he was here to release the raccoons, there were no waterfalls. The sun illuminated thin threads of water as far as he could see back into the hills, dragonflies danced and hovered, the stream rolled lazily into its shallow pools and trickled through the yellow grasping roots of the willows that were like fingers, like claws. He’s angry suddenly. Angry at himself. How could he have been so stupid as to fail to appreciate what canyons were, how they’d come to exist, what rain meant in a state of nature? But then, if they’d waited for a day struck with sunshine when everybody afloat was out cluttering the channel, they might as well have radioed ahead to tell the Park Service goons to come and arrest them. They had to slip out in the rain, no choice. And no choice now but to start down the other side and get this done.
“So, look,” he says, “the plan is we’re going to have to work our way around on the slope there, just above where the water is, because the water’s up now and it’s washed out the trail we were going to take. .”
They all look out across the valley to where the water races through the distant gap in discolored streaks and chutes. Nobody says anything. The rain is steady, a straight fall, beating at their caps and shoulders, setting the ground at their feet in motion.
“It’s going to be steep, it’s going to be hell on your ankles, maybe, but it’s doable.” He turns to Toni Walsh. “You okay with this? Because whenever it gets too much, you just tell me, okay?”
Hunched, pale, a streak of yellowish mud painted across her cheek like a tribal cicatrice, she just shrugs. “I don’t know,” she says after a moment, and here’s that stab at a smile again — a good sign, a very good sign—“I’m afraid I’m more of a city girl. But anything for a story, right?”
And now Kelly speaks up — Kelly, definitely Kelly, with her PETA patch and her moon face and pinched disapproving lips. It comes to him that she looks nothing like Suzanne, at least not facially. “What about mudslides,” she says. “I mean, the possibility of a mudslide? You see that depression there, that bowl?” She points to the long scooped-out incline they’ll have to traverse to get up-canyon. “That was a massive slide at one time, you can see it.”
“Yeah, well, we’re just going to have to take that chance, because I’ve been out in weather like this a thousand times — I mean, haven’t you? Haven’t we all? And it might put the pig killers off for a day or two, but you know they’re sitting back oiling their rifles. Just waiting.”
The rain chooses that moment to intensify, a sudden ratcheting up of the ante. His hair hangs limp beneath the sodden cap, drip, drip, drip. He wants to be reasonable, wants to control these people by controlling himself, but that isn’t an option, not anymore. “Fuck it. I’m not going to stand around debating. You want to stay here, stay, be my guest. But I’m out of here, right now, right this minute.” And he’s moving suddenly, dropping down the slope on the other side, riding a sludge of loose stone and mud in exaggerated steps, so worked up he never even bothers to see if they’re following him — but they are, he knows they are. They have to be.
Half an hour later, the rain still coming down and the churning dark water in the ravine rising by the minute, he begins to have second thoughts. He’s feeling the strain in the long muscles of his thighs, the sleeves of his sweatshirt are mud to the elbow because there’s no way to do this without using your hands, and his ankles throb from the effort of maintaining balance on a forty-five-degree slope. And he’s in shape. Which is more than he can say for Toni Walsh or the two pear-shaped girls or even Josh. They’re all strung out behind him in single file, fifty feet above the waterline, grasping at whatever fixed object they can — whether it has thorns or not — to keep themselves upright, and nobody’s saying anything. Cammy’s right behind him, pushing him even, followed by the two girls, then Toni Walsh (gray-faced, wet to the bone, looking like one of the risen dead), and Josh bringing up the rear so he can keep an eye on her. They must have gone half a mile — they’re almost to the first of the waterfalls, where at least they’ll be able to get out of the mud — and they haven’t seen any sign of pigs, hunters, foxes, ravens or anything else. They might as well be on the backside of the moon. Except it doesn’t rain on the moon. And there’s no mud.
The surprise has been Toni Walsh. He’s been expecting her to give out ever since they began to work their way down the first hill, but every time he glances back, there she is, head down, plodding along. Still, he’s thinking, how much more of this can she take? They need to get up out of the canyon — and soon. Or find a place where she can lie up while he and Josh or Cammy scout ahead, looking for anything that’ll make it worth her while to go on. He’s scanning the terrain where the canyon begins to narrow three or four hundred yards ahead of them — rock and more rock, everything trenched and gouged and spilling with water — when he spots an overhang projecting from the side of the hill like an outsized awning. Encouraged—Finally, he’s thinking — he swings round on Cammy and points emphatically before calling out to the others. “Up there,” he shouts, watching their eyes lift from the vacancy of their faces. “We’ll take a break.”