indented with small but numerous hand- and footholds. A large branch just above her looked to be the best bet. Then she saw another branch, less stout but closer, that would take her nearer to firm footing. She tested it and it seemed to hold her weight. With one step on the branch and a hop she could make it to a man-size, two-foot-deep pockmark in the rock wall, then climb to the cave. Feeling confined in the rope harness, she decided to remove it. After a brief straggle she was free of the lines.
She placed her foot on the branch and reached for the rock. The snap was so abrupt she had no time to react. She dropped as if through a trapdoor. Her gloved hand caught a branch as she went. The spindly wood slowed her, then strained downward. As it broke, she got an arm over the bend in the tree where the trunk made its L-turn at the cleft in the rock. Twisting wildly, she eventually wrapped both arms around the base of the trunk and hung there.
She heard the sounds of a child crying, then realized it was she who was crying in ragged breaths. Air sucked into her lungs in great gulps. Her head spun. Something was terribly wrong.
'Don't breathe so hard!'
Kier was shouting at the top of his lungs. Why was he doing that? She took a deep, slow breath.
'Get your feet on the rock.'
She felt with her left toes and found a small ledge. It seemed too narrow to support her weight.
The tree is solid, the trunk thick and strong, she told herself. She could count on it. It was her muscles and mind that were jelly. She would use her legs, the strongest part of her. She searched around with her right foot. In seconds, she found a secure shelf. After her right toe was well placed, she lifted her body with both arms and the strength of her right leg.
Gripping branches in her hands like the rungs of a ladder, she worked her way above the base of the trunk and climbed up the tree, regaining the dozen or so feet that she had fallen.
The cave beckoned, only a couple body lengths higher than her head. 'Have you no suggestions?' she called out.
'Love the mountain. Remember the stars and the feeling you had.'
Was he out of his mind? She would never love this cold son-of-a-bitch rock.
'This mountain is killing us. It's freezing. It has cliffs. It hates all civilized people.' She risked letting go with one hand to lift her middle finger and aim it at Kier. ''I suppose I could be more one with the sucker if I let go and went splat.'
She hung her head, too tired to shout anymore, and regarded the dim outline of the rock. Okay, you solid son of a bitch. She crouched down on a stout branch. Crawling forward, she reached out a hand and touched the rock. She concentrated on the granite, putting her other hand out.
Now her knees were on the branch and her hands firmly clinging to the mountain. She would need to drop a foot and find a ledge on which to park her toe. As she reached out, she glanced down. Cold blackness greeted her. To put a foot down into the unknown, to teeter on that branch, seemed a thing too hard to do. Yet if she could do this one last thing, she could rest. In a cave. On a flat spot.
'I love you, you solid son of a bitch,' she whispered.
Her boot shot down in a smooth motion and found a foothold. In less than two minutes, she clambered up into the cave, where she knelt and kissed the rock. Grateful.
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
