The first time he had been to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, Jim Chee had thought of the Colorado River system as a sort of reverse copy of a human vascular arrangement, with the Colorado being the artery and the scores of smaller canyons leading down into it the capillaries. Gravity made it all work backward, of course. The little gullies and arroyos collected water from all over the Kaibab and Coconino plateaus to feed their area streams across the immense Colorado Plateau. Then these creeks and rivers poured it down into the Colorado a mile or more below. Having seen the velocity that gravity gave the torrents coming off the lava mesas in northern New Mexico, he guessed he’d find runoff into the Grand Canyon (with ten times more gravity behind it) absolutely spectacular.
He was right.
Chee was huddled into a modest overhang at the cliff where the canyon he’d followed from the big river was joined by runoff pouring out of a small slot. He was wet to the skin from the pounding rain—mixed now and then with bits of hail. He was also scratched and bruised from a futile attempt to buck the runoff from the smaller stream. The racing water had knocked him out of the way and deposited him, half drowned, beside the cliff where he now stood. And that stream was puny compared to the roaring runoff it was joining.
He was as certain as the situation allowed that the slot he’d tried to enter was the one into which Bernie had disappeared. She and whoever she was with must be in that slot now. Maybe they were already drowning. If they drowned, they would wash out here. He had already seen part of a wooden bucket flash by on the flood.
Now came what looked like some sort of cloth and what might have been a soggy hat. Behind that, bobbing and turning, came what seemed to be a dried and terribly emaciated corpse. It was clad in a torn blue shirt and ragged denim pants. The hair plastered to the skull was white and the body was so wasted that the bones pressed against the skin. The torrent quickly swept it past to disappear in the foam where the stream pouring out of the slot joined the much larger main canyon flood.
“Skeleton Man,” Chee said. Well, they had finally found him. Or Bernie had found him. And all he could do about her being up there in the slot, and in danger, was wait and worry until the flood subsided.
The water pouring out of the slot, and the flood racing down the canyon, produced a roaring bedlam made even more deafening by the echoes bouncing off the cliffs. But suddenly Chee heard what seemed to be a yell. Brief, and suddenly choked off.
A moment later a man shot out of the slot, head out of the water, trying to swim.
Chee jumped to his feet, scrambled away from the wall and down the slope toward the flood.
The man grabbed at the branches of cat’s claw acacia he was being swept past, managed to catch a branch, held on. The force of the water swept his legs downstream. He was on his back now, seeing Chee.
“Help!” he screamed. “Help me!”
“Coming,” Chee shouted. “Hold on.”
The man was holding on only with his left hand, clutching what seemed to be a sort of rope in the other.
“Use both hands!” Chee yelled. “I’ll wade in as far as I can. When I get close enough, you push off and I’ll try to catch you.”
The man looked at Chee, expression desperate, tried to say something, couldn’t. Then he swung his right arm, trying for a hold on another limb. The rope he was holding swung upward, caught in the brambles. The man grabbed at it.
Trying to pull himself up, Chee thought. Impossible. The brush wouldn’t hold his weight. Chee took another step into the water, almost to his knees now, struggling to keep a foothold on the rock below, leaning against the pressure of the water.
The man was frantically jerking at the rope.
“For God’s sake, don’t jerk it loose,” Chee told him, “Just get yourself braced and push off and try to swim toward me. Hey, stop jerking!”
The rope tore free, bringing a piece of cat’s claw limb with it. The man went under, bobbed up, turned sideways to the force of the flow. It swept him past Chee’s hands, beyond any hope of Chee’s reaching him.
Chee staggered back into shallow water, turned to look.
The torrent was rolling the man now. He disappeared under it for a second or two, then bobbed up with his hand still clutching the rope. Then the torrent from the slot reached the flood roaring down the canyon. In the foam and confusion, the man disappeared.
Chee leaned against the cliff, regaining his breath. No sign of the man now. He imagined what would be happening to him. The big flood in the canyon was rolling boulders along with it. He could hear the crashing and banging they produced as they knocked away impediments. He might be floating high enough to escape that kind of death. At least for a while. Chee remembered the big dropoff a mile or so down the canyon. That would be a violent waterfall by now. The current would sweep the man to its bottom there, churn him around with those rolling boulders, and spit out what was left of him to continue the trip down to the next waterfall, and the next one, and through the various rapids, and on to the canyon’s confluence with the Colorado. Unless some rafters saw what was left of him caught in the flotsam at the foot of a rapids somewhere, he’d make it all the way down to Boulder Dam.
But the rain had almost finished drenching this part of the Grand Canyon and was drifting northeastward, leaving the Coconino Plateau to dump its tons of water across the Colorado on the Kaibab Plateau. Now the canyons draining the other rim of the great river would be roaring with flood.
Chee took a hard look at the torrent pouring out of the slot. In a few minutes he could buck it. In a few hours it would be a mere trickle. In a few days the stone floor of the slot would be dry again, collecting dust, waiting for the next male rain to flush it clean.
Ten minutes later, Chee was splashing wearily upstream against the diminishing flow. Calling for Bernie.
28
