I had to admit it sure looked that way. Nor for the life of me could I imagine what might prevent it. Even if I could get to one end of the heavy rope stretched across the river and free it to toss as a lifeline, I was sure it wouldn’t be long enough to reach that far downstream. We watched in horror as the ghastly scene unfolded before us: three men and a crystal iceberg all drawn by the dark, glassy waters inexorably toward the cliff. I couldn’t breathe.
Bambi shifted her gun to her right hand, her cellist’s bowing hand, and took mine in her left as we saw the pile of crystalline tubes containing Pandora’s deadly manuscripts moving in slow motion to the brink of the abyss, where they twisted gracefully once, like a ballet dancer, then slipped silently over the edge. A moment later, Wolfgang’s dark head followed just as silently after.
We saw Sam, with swift strokes, catch up to Olivier’s possibly already lifeless body—too late for either of them to be extricated from the terrible undertow. Bambi and I, with the water’s roar in our ears, watched in silence as we saw the rest of our generation, except us two, slip swiftly over the edge of the abyss into oblivion.
As I stood there in those cold, rushing waters I had no tears, either of forgiveness or remorse. I felt nothing at all for those who’d created or perpetuated this swamp of treachery—most of whom, as it turned out, were members of my own horrid family. But I did have something I still clung to, as I’d clung to that lifeline of rope, something that might keep me alive in the face of such overwhelming odds. It was the one thing that remained at the bottom of Pandora’s box when all else had flown the coop: that thing called hope.
I turned to leave the river, but Bambi was clutching my hand.
“What shall we do now?” she asked over the sound of the rushing waters—the waters I had just watched carry away everything I’d ever cared for in my life.
“The first thing we have to do,” I told her just as loudly, “is to find my cat!”
Bambi tied our cylinders together and floated them back to the shore, while I dragged the body of the dreadful Pod on his back through the waters and deposited him unceremoniously on the riverbank. She held the gun on him as I went to untie Sam’s grandfather Dark Bear, who helped us lash Pastor Dart to the tree in his place: tit for tat, asshole. Then the three of us hiked downstream to hunt for Jason.
I’ll never understand exactly how I knew Jason was the key to the solution, or that he might still be alive and afloat. But I knew Jason’s psyche as well as one could grasp the psyche of a cat. His natural instincts, naturally, were those of the mythological hero he was named for: he took like an argonaut to water.
Even if he’d never before gone over a waterfall the height and breadth of this one—maybe forty feet high by a hundred feet wide—still, you couldn’t keep him out of the water chute rides at amusement parks that were higher than that, and he was well used to swimming in fast water along the Snake. The water below the falls here would be slower and far more tranquil, so if Jason had indeed made the drop without breaking any bones, I was pretty sure we’d find him down there alive.
And Jason loved retrieving things, whether a rubber ball in the stream or a yellow post office slip in the snow. So why not locate an iceberg of lucite tubes containing valuable manuscripts? Not to mention the bodies of Olivier, Sam, or Wolfgang, whether dead or alive.
We found Jason first, “happy as a clam at high tide,” as Olivier might say, paddling in a calm pool just below the falls. The object he was paddling around with a certain pride was the floating pile of plastic tubes, their rope snagged on a rock. A few tubes had broken loose and were floating nearby in the pool looking little the worse for wear.
Since Bambi and I were already soaked to the skin, we climbed down the bank to the pool and pulled them out—along with Jason—while Dark Bear went on along the riverbank as far as he found it still passable on foot. By the time we’d hauled the cylinders up to a ledge, he had returned.
“I could go no farther—the bank drops off in the underbrush,” he told me. “But I’ve spotted them from above. They’re downstream not far from here. I saw three heads, all floating in a small inlet that projects slightly from the river.”
“Alive?” I asked him.
“I believe so,” said Dark Bear. “But the walls are sheer and slick. We can’t get them out that way. They must be brought back up here by way of the water.”
The dropoff to the river was steeper here, the water far deeper than above. Though Dark Bear, Bambi, and I were all pretty strong swimmers, we still tied a few loose containers around each of our chests as flotation devices. She hid her gun in a bush. Then, one by one, we slipped into the dark river.
We found them less than a mile downstream, and were in for quite a surprise. Sam, treading water, was supporting not Olivier but Wolfgang, whose eyes were shut. Sam was holding him under the chin in a lifeguard’s grip while Olivier was bobbing around nearby, cheerful as a Hallowe’en apple in a tub!
“Men overboard!” Olivier cried when he spied our swimming flotilla’s approach. “And women and natives to the rescue!”
When we reached Olivier, I said, “Thank God you’re all alive—but I thought you couldn’t swim!”
“So did I!” he said. “Your backpack saved me. It kept me afloat, though I got swept over the
