Chapter 21
Coyote howls to awaken your fears.
Until she looked at her watch, Jessie had no idea that dawn was still two hours behind the mountains. The solid flat ground on which she lay was a balm to her frazzled nerves. Kier still had not come in.
"There may be a roar," he called.
"Okay," she muttered to herself. What now?
She didn't move as it started, first with some solid knocks of rock on rock, then a clattering, followed almost immediately by a rumble that sent vibrations through the stone under her fingertips. Thunder filled the cave. After a minute of what sounded like the mountain ripping open, the sound stopped.
"Throw down the rope," she heard Kier call out.
She wanted to sleep, not move. She felt as if she had been drugged. Forcing her eyes open, she crawled the few feet back to the cave entrance and the tree.
"The rope?" he called out again. He was at the bottom of the chasm, she realized.
"Just a minute," she said. The rope was hanging from the tree. "Kier."
"Yes."
"The rope's in the tree and I'm in the cave. It'll take me a minute." She knew how weary her voice sounded.
The next thing she knew, his hand was gently shaking her shoulder.
"What time is it?" she asked. "Did you get your rope?"
The roar had been an avalanche. It would look as though they had been sucked away in the flow of rock and ice, he explained as she stretched herself awake. He had lain beside her and let her sleep for sixty minutes or so, but now they needed to move deep inside the innumerable passageways of the cavern where it would be impossible to track them.
Near the opening a wide fire pit had been used many times by the youth groups that he took on wilderness excursions. In the circle of his light beam it appeared full with fine gray ash and the remnants of blackened wood chunks. Beside it was a small pile of rough-barked logs, neatly stacked and split and ready to burn. He could tell that no one had used the place since his last visit.
Jessie reached in the pocket of her coat, withdrawing a light that she used to explore the nearby walls and ceiling. They could barely make out a trail of soot above them, the remnants of a river of hot air that had picked its way over the rock, always rising, sucked by the draft until it found the mouth of the cave.
"Who comes here?"
"We bring the boys when they turn fourteen."
He told her to take off her snowsuit just as he was removing his. "We need to cover ourselves with charcoal," he told her.
"When they figure out the avalanche trick, and they can't follow us over the granite, they're gonna think about dogs- tracking dogs. Fire smell is common in the wild and will mask our scent, make our trail old fast and confuse a hound's nose. But we don't want to turn the snowsuits black."
With that he knelt and grabbed a sooty stick.
She snickered. "Oh, great. I'm already filthy."
Kier gave a concerned glance in response.
"I'm sorry. I've got an attitude. For a moment there I was really happy to have made it here."
"Your cynicism will weaken you."
"It's already kicked the stuffing out of me."
Kier examined her arm. A deep groan escaped her lips when he moved it.
"If we're lucky, all you did was bruise things."
As he helped her out of the snowsuit, he was sure that she was at ease with his touch. He had sensed it previously when she was sick and when she lay against his back, but he suspected that she could never acknowledge it. Discussing it seemed pointless, so he applied the ash in silence while enjoying the closeness.
Since he was a boy, Kier had been in these caverns many times. The first time he came with Grandfather they had used a little-known entry called witsu ka, or Worm's Way, a tiny hole with just enough room for a man to crawl in on his belly. It was much more difficult to undertake the long crawl through Worm's Way than to climb to the cave they had just entered- aptly named Tree Cave. When they brought the boys in summer, they would climb the mountain to the bottom of the chasm. One man would reach the cave using climbing gear. Once at the cave, he would drop a rope ladder.
Another entrance by way of a different cave opened onto a treacherous but passable rock ledge in the middle of a thousand-foot cliff. For as long as anyone could remember, this opening had been called Man Jumps, although there was no evidence that anyone had done so. Another cavern passageway led to a surface cave that was the fourth entrance, but a portion of this route was almost vertical, useless without climbing gear.
Two white men lost in the cavern for days had located a fifth tunnel into the caverns. For them it was an escape exit. Some months after their safe return, they had attempted to show the Tiloks the tiny hole in the rocks from which they had emerged, but were unable to retrace their route. Grandfather had found it, but Kier had never taken the time to learn it.
Because the cavern was sacred to the Tilok and on reservation land, no maps of its sprawling labyrinth existed. The only maps were in the men's heads. The Tilok had learned to traverse the interconnecting caverns from Tree Cave to Man Jumps. A few men, including Kier, could make passage from Tree Cave to Worm's Way, but those who made errors in navigation could pay a dear price. The caverns were fraught with drop-offs and confusing turns. Two Tilok men attempting to map the routes had disappeared when they either got permanently lost or, more likely, fell into a chasm. Some of the vertical shafts, which seemingly fell hundreds of feet, had never been explored.
Using the charred piece of wood he had picked from the fire pit, Kier began at Jessie's boots. He smeared charcoal and ash over her liberally. She seemed so exhausted, it did not even occur to him to let her do it herself. Trying to ignore the way he felt when he was near her, the desire he felt when steadying her, touching her, he sought to adopt a clinical air-to move with the precision of a good physician rather than the exquisite sensitivity of a lover. He dipped the blackened stick over and over in the pit so that when he was finished, her clothes would be impregnated with the fine powder. As he worked his way up to her thighs, she put her hand over his.
"I've got the idea," she said, taking the stick and beginning to apply the ash herself.
Embarrassed, he wondered whether his desire was too strong to remain undetected. Always things with women got this way-everything a nuance, every gesture a speech. He hated thinking about it, but he was drawn to her despite his vow never to be with another white woman.
Jessie seemed to be fighting her own feelings. He could feel it as surely as the spirit of the Tiloks in the mountains. But whatever monster gnawed at her, he knew that his was possessed of many more heads, and breathed a far hotter fire. There was a head for every member of his family-his mother, his sisters, his myriad cousins, the whole tribe. All were expecting him, the darling of the white community, to marry an Indian. To marry Willow.
Within minutes, they were covered with ash and soot. Next, to be even safer, they rubbed themselves with needles from the pine at the entrance, which took only a few minutes more. Then it was time to leave. Turning his light on Jessie, he used his free hand to hoist the pack and gave her a questioning look.
"Are you strong enough to hike?"
"I'd like to try."
"Stay directly behind me. Keep your light pointed at the ground."
"Do we have steep places in here too?"
"Stay close."
He put a hand gently on her shoulder, and was sure her head moved almost imperceptibly toward his fingers, as if she wanted to touch them with her cheek.
"I'll tell you when there's a bad edge. It'll be fine."