a trout taking his fly
Suddenly, Joe was being pulled forward, hard, toward the edge of the canyon. The rope burned through his hands, flaying his palms open, before he managed to dally it around his forearm where it held tight. It made no sense that Britney's weight could cause this. Then he realized that Stewie was climbing the rope, scrambling to get to the top.
'Stewie, I've got to let out the slack!' Joe yelled, letting the rope hiss through his hands until it pulled tight, straining the knot he had tied on the tree.
Another shot ripped through the canyon, but the rope didn't jerk.
'Stewie, are you okay?'
Stewie's terror-filled face and wild hair appeared at ground level above the rim, and Joe held out a bloody rope-burned hand to help him over the edge.
The two of them stumbled back away from the rim and fell into a gaping depression in the dirt made by the upturned root pan of a spruce tree.
'Britney'' Joe asked, still trying to get his breath.
Stewie emphatically shook his head no.
'The son of a bitch practically cut her in half,' Stewie spat, enraged. 'Then he shot her again to keep her spinning.' He reached over and grasped Joe's arm, his eyes wild. 'Don't let her hang there and get blown apart.'
Joe unsheathed his knife. Reaching through the vee of two gnarled roots, he sawed through the rope, letting Britney's body drop. The pounding of his heart in his ears drowned out the sound of her body hitting the surface of the Middle Fork of the Twelve Sleep River.
'Poor Britney,' Stewie seethed. 'That poor girl.'
As a bullet slammed into the tree trunk, shaking pine needles and pinecones to the ground, Joe realized that cutting Britney loose had pinpointed where they were for Charlie Tibbs.
With his chin in the mud of the depression, Joe peered through the roots to the opposite rim. Thunder rolled across the mountains, reverberating through the canyon. There was a stand of thick juniper on the other side of the canyon, bordered on both sides by spruce. The juniper would be the only place, Joe thought, for Tibbs to hide. The distance was 150 yards--out of range for Joe to aim accurately Nevertheless, he fitted the thick barrel of his .357 Magnum through the roots and held the weapon with both hands. He sighted on the top of the juniper bushes, aiming high, hoping to lob bullets across the canyon and into the brush.
Joe fired five shots in rapid succession, squeezing the double action until it clicked twice on empty chambers. The concussions seemed especially loud, and they echoed back and forth against the canyon walls until they dissipated and all Joe heard was a ringing in his ears.
He rolled onto his back, ejected the spent cartridges, and reloaded, keeping one cylinder empty for the firing pin to rest.
'Did you hit him?' Stewie asked.
'I doubt it,' Joe said. 'But at least he knows we'll fight back.'
'You bet we fucking will,' Stewie said.
They lay in the root pan depression for what seemed like an hour waiting for more rifle shots that never came. To Joe, the images and sensations of the last two days played back in his mind. He could not believe what he had seen and been through. His entire life had been reduced to one thing: getting away.
The first few raindrops smacked into pine boughs above their heads, sounding like gravel on a tarp. Thunder boomed. The sky -was close and dark, the bank of thunderheads pushing out what little blue remained. Any possibility of a rescue by air was now remote.
Joe lay on his back with his .357 Magnum on his chest. The first drops on his face made him flinch. He closed his eyes.
The rain came.
35
'YOU KNOW, JOE, I learned a lot during that thirty days I spent crawling across the country after I got blown up by that cow,' Stewie said as they -walked. 'This is bringing it all back--the hunger, the elements, the cloud of absolute terror hanging over us.'
They were walking through the night in a steady but thin rain. Joe was soaked through, and rivulets of water streamed down from his hat when he cocked his head. The heavy clouds obscured the moon and stars, but there was enough ambient light for them to see by. Both Stewie and Joe lost their footing from time to time on rain-slick pine needles, and they had tripped over branches hidden in dark low cover. But they kept going, they kept bearing south. They stayed close together, within reach, so they wouldn't run the risk of losing each other in the darkness. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, Joe thought, they were descending the mountain toward the river valley The terrain on this side of the mountains was easier to cover.
'So what does it bring back? One might ask if one were interested in the question posed,' Stewie said sarcastically since Joe hadn't spoken. 'Well, I'll tell you. What it brings back are feelings and theories I got when I was huddled up under a tree for the night or crawling beside a road hoping to find a particular residence I knew about. You see, Joe, I knew where a certain gentleman--one of the biggest contributors to environmental causes in the country--had a second home. I had been there once for a meeting. It had a helipad so the gentleman could get back and forth from San Francisco when he needed to. Anyway, this gentleman owns thousands of acres and a multimillion-dollar gated palace on an old ranch homestead. And I crawled all the way to his land.'
Stewie had conducted a series of monologues through the night as they walked. Joe didn't mind, because they kept his mind off of his hunger and exhaustion. He likened it to listening to talk radio while he drove down the highway
'But you know what happened when I got to his land, Joe?'
'What?'
