The air is burdened with humidity, the breeze cold. What sun there was is gone for good now and though she’s never been a betting woman, she’d put everything she has on the prospect — no, the certainty — of rain. “That’s what I’m here for,” she tells him, shouldering her pack and grinning right back at him. “To get a little exercise.” (Unlike Annabelle, who begged off with a wide hypocritical smile, claiming she had too much going on at the main ranch to muddy her boots up in the hills, paperwork, accounts, maintenance issues—You know, dreary stuff. The worst.) And then, because of Tim, because Tim’s in her mind and she can’t get him out, she adds, “I’m not just a desk jockey, you know.”
Frazier doesn’t answer. He’s on the two-way radio he keeps snapped to his belt, chattering away in Kiwi with one of his hunters, part of a two-man team somewhere up ahead of them, apparently closing in on a target. “Royt,” he says, “royt,” already moving up the road, surprisingly quick for a man who always seems so sprawling and laid back, and how has she missed the rifle he’s somehow managed to sling over one shoulder? Her eyes jump to it, to the gleaming stock, the dark rubbed eye of the trigger, the lethal tube of the barrel. The realization comes to her then that this is the tool of his trade, that he’s as familiar with it as he is with his cell phone, the gearshift of the Toyota, the corkscrew he carries on his key chain. Why should this surprise her? Electrify her? Rivet her attention? Because she’s never fired a gun in her life, never even touched one, and here’s the rifle Frazier so casually and routinely employs, riding his back as if it were the most natural thing in the world, as if it weren’t for firing high-velocity copper-jacketed rounds into things, as if it weren’t for hunting, for killing.
“No,” he’s shouting, “just go after them if you think you’re going to have a shot. We’re right behind you.” A glance over his shoulder for her, and she’s scrambling now to keep up—“I don’t think Alma’s going to want to shoot them herself anyway.” Feet churning, mud kicking up at his heels, he depresses the button for the crackled response, a thin all but incomprehensible Kiwi affirmative snatched from the ether. She can hear him breathing, the air sucked down in quick bronchial gasps. They’re moving more rapidly now, leaping puddles, dodging rocks, what’s left of the road veering sharply around its hairpin turns and up, always up. “Right, Alma?”
She has neither time nor breath to answer. She grins to demonstrate how good a sport she is, concentrating on moving her legs, matching him stride for stride, though it’s an unequal contest because his legs are so much longer. Watching the gun, watching his hat and shoulders and the way his calf muscles ball and release beneath the ties of his gaiters, she follows him at a lively jog up the road to a point where a trail only he can see cuts sharply down through the chaparral to the right. She follows his lead, pitching headlong into the bush, snatching branches to keep her balance, all the while studying her feet so she doesn’t step in a hole or turn an ankle. They’re angling down — a hundred yards, two — before he cuts again to the right, bearing along the downside of the slope, and all at once she feels the weight lift from her, feeling good and alive and whole for the first time in weeks, taking in the views, the smells, the wet glorious creeping rejuvenation of the flora springing up underfoot and rising around her in a continuous weave of gray-green and bright flowering yellow that reaches to her waist and higher.
She’s moving as fast as she can — bushwhacking, that’s what this is called — when the rain starts in. It begins as a soft rustling in the chaparral, as if the leaves were coming to life one by one across the hillside, and then it quickens till she can hear the insistent tap of it at the bill of her cap and feel its cold touch on her hands, her bare knees, the back of her neck. Everything smells suddenly of sage, a sweet clean release of perfume wrung out of the careening wet hillside by the force of the downpour. Below them, the sight line to the far side of the canyon softens, thickens, blurs. She’s wondering why they call this ridge El Tigre, when certainly there were never any tigers here, not even saber-tooths during the time of the pygmy mammoth, or not that the fossil record shows anyway. There weren’t even bobcats — no cats of any kind. But maybe it’s a question of perception — maybe the rock formation, as seen from below, suggests a sleeping cat lying stretched out on its side. Or there might have been a vaquero from the old ranching days who hailed from deep in the south of Mexico where the jaguars came out at night to seize the village dogs and maybe he acquired the nickname El Tigre because he exacted vengeance on them before he came to Santa Cruz and ran sheep over this hill. Or died here. In an accident, a slide, in mud like this.
There is no sound but the soughing of the rain and the whisper of leaf and branch giving way as they wade through the chaparral, seeking the path of least resistance. Both her thighs are crisscrossed with abrasions and her forearms would be bleeding too if it weren’t for the sweatshirt, which grows heavier and denser by the moment. She’s sweating. Fighting for breath. Out of shape because she’s pregnant, because she’s put on weight, because she’s been tired in the evenings and spending her days at her desk instead of getting out for the hikes she used to take with Tim. She startles when a quail bursts out from underfoot, fans its wings and beats away downwind, and it costs her a step or two on Frazier, who’s already thirty feet ahead of her. She wants to call to him to slow down, but her pride won’t let her.
It is then, just as she’s about to give it up and fall back, that the canyon erupts with the frantic baying of the dogs. The sound, ratcheting up in a series of furious yelps till it planes off in a single full-throated ecstatic howl — seems to be coming from somewhere below them, where the ridge falls off into its turnings and declivities. Frazier snatches a look over his shoulder and then he’s gone, plunging straight down in the direction of the noise, and before she can think she’s following him. Suddenly the vegetation is coming at her in a blind rush, bushes springing up to slam her in the ribs, snatch at her feet, shove her aside, but there’s no stopping her. The frenzy of the dogs strikes fire in her and there’s no question now of keeping up, her balance flawless, her feet hitting the mark over and over again as she fends off one catapulting branch after another and springs from rock to rock like a gymnast, finally overtaking Frazier as he pauses, hands on hips, to gaze over a sheer drop of forty feet or more. The dogs bay, nearer now. Bending low in a hunter’s crouch, he scoots along the crest until he finds what he’s looking for — a debrided chute of rock running with discolored water — and without hesitation he braces himself with both hands, flings his legs out before him and careens down the slope on his buttocks. All at once she’s in the water too — forty feet down and a jump at the end, her palms bruised, calves aching — watching for his signal. “Where are they?” she gasps, tugging at his arm as she scrambles to her feet.