Part 8
Owen lay in the snow, breathing hard. Elias suddenly laughed.
Owen turned his head. “What’s funny?”
The old man helped him sit up. “I was remembering when you were six and fell in a puddle up to your waist. You hollered that you were drowning.”
Owen stared at him for a few seconds, then let his breath out. “Perfect timing.”
“It just came to me.”
They got up. Owen’s pack stayed out on the ice.
On the far bank they had to stop. His right pant leg was soaked almost to the hip. Elias handed his nephew the dry spare clothes from his own pack. Owen changed, cursing his own shaking fingers the whole time, and then they went on.
They reached the camp almost three hours later. First they saw the floodlight, then they heard dogs.
Elias stopped. The dogs weren’t barking from their doghouses. They were higher up, on the slope. Three dark shapes stood by the road, looking down.
“See that?” Elias asked.
Owen nodded.
There were nine people at the camp. Mitch met them by the trailer. “You two walked?”
Owen waved back toward the dark. “Had to leave the snowmachine.”
“What happened?”
“Later.”
Elias looked around the yard. “Why are you still here?”
Mitch frowned. “Where are we supposed to go? I got everybody up, told them to pack. They’re looking at me like I’m an idiot. There’s snow, it’s freezing, the creek’s frozen solid. The wind on that slope will chill everybody through in half an hour.”
He wasn’t being stubborn. Taking nine people out of warm trailers onto a wind-scoured slope because of one radio call was a decision he’d have to answer for, too.
One of the road crew came out, zipping his jacket. “You saw this water yourself?”
“I did.”
The man looked at Elias more closely. “A lot of it?”
“Enough that you don’t want to find out the hard way.”
“How much is that?”
Elias shook his head. “I didn’t measure. It’s higher than the old marks.”
The man looked over at Mitch. Mitch still had his doubts.
Elias turned to him. “Where are your dogs?”
“What dogs?”
“The ones you had chained up.”
Mitch looked toward the doghouses. The chains lay on the snow. One had snapped; the other had been pulled out, stake and all. The dogs were standing above the camp on the rock road. One was whining softly.
Mitch stopped arguing. “Everybody up the hill!” he shouted. “Now!”
People started moving. Some tried to grab bags, and Mitch yelled at them to leave everything. Someone was already starting a truck.
Elias walked over and slapped the door with his palm. “No.”
The driver leaned out of the cab. “I’ll drive people up.”
Elias glanced at the slope. “It’s two hundred yards.”
“It’s faster.”
The engine idled evenly. Elias wanted to argue, then waved a hand. “Fine. Straight up, though.”
A few minutes later the camp was empty. People climbed onto a rock bench above the road, and the truck was left a little below it. The wind was stronger up there. Everyone stood hunched in their jackets, looking down.
Nothing happened. A minute went by. Then another.
Mitch looked at Elias. Elias kept his eyes on the draw.
After ten minutes someone in back said, “Maybe this was all for nothing?”
Nobody answered.
Fifteen minutes. Owen came over to his uncle. “What if the ice held?”
“Good.”
“And if nothing happens at all?”
The old man shrugged. “Even better.”
Owen glanced back at the people huddled behind the rocks out of the wind. “They’ll talk about us for the rest of their lives.”
“Let them.”
Owen grinned. Out of habit, Elias reached with his thumb for the crack in the stock and found only his pack strap. His rifle was hanging on a nail back at the cabin. He looked at his own hand and grunted quietly.
Owen saw him lower it. “Habit.”
Mitch came closer. “Eli, explain it to me again. Where does that much water come from in the middle of winter?”
The old man was about to brush him off when he remembered Sawyer. Not his face. His voice, by the trailer more than forty years ago, telling someone about the drainage in Adit No. 4 and about hard freezes that seized up the lower passage. Now it all fell into place.
“Looks like they cut into an underground stream,” Elias said. “Water runs through there even in winter. The lower outlet froze and sealed itself with ice, and the water kept pushing from below.” He looked toward the draw. “That’s why nobody went in there after a hard freeze.”
Owen got it first. “The pressure was building inside.”
“Looks like it. That’s where the hollows came from, the cracks, the booms. The slope was settling. Air was getting forced out of the tunnels.”
Mitch went pale. “And the ice?”
Elias didn’t get to answer. Both dogs raised their heads at once. One growled; the other backed farther uphill. Elias stopped smiling.
From the draw came the sound. The same one. Boom. Deeper now, and longer, as if something inside the mountain had finally given way.
Elias looked at Owen. “Now.”
At first there was nothing to see. Then something moved between the trees below. What came down the draw was worse than a wave: a heavy dark mass of ice, snow, water, rock, and whole trees. It looked slow only from a distance. When it reached the lower road, they could hear the force behind it.
People backed even higher. Someone swore. Someone just stood in silence.
The flood hit the bridge. For a few seconds the structure held, then one span swung around, and the lights at the camp went out. Water spread across the low ground. It caught the edge of the yard, rolled an empty drum over, dragged logs along. Then everything vanished into blowing snow and darkness.
Elias was looking toward the station. He couldn’t see it from here, but he already understood: if the flood followed the old channel, it would hit the cabin.
Owen stood beside him and said nothing.
After a while the main roar began to move off down the valley. What remained was the sound of water and a strange emptiness behind it.
No one died.
In the morning they went down. The bridge was damaged. The road had disappeared under a jumble of ice and rock. At the camp the water had reached two trailers, but the main flood had passed to one side. The truck they’d left below the bench sat in gray ice up to its doors. The driver walked around it twice and didn’t say a word.
They didn’t make it to the station until after noon. Elias saw it from a distance. The house was standing, but one wall was damaged. The shed was gone entirely. The woodpile was scattered, the porch knocked crooked.
Owen stopped behind him. “Uncle Eli…”
Elias raised a hand. “Don’t.”
He walked to the house. The door had been torn off. Inside, everything was wet. The table was overturned, and the drawer hung open and empty. June’s letters were gone. Both rifles were gone from the wall.
Elias stood in the middle of the room for a long time. Owen waited outside.
When Elias came out, his face showed nothing.
“Have you got the photo?” Owen asked.
The old man touched his inside pocket. “Right here.”
“So not everything’s gone.”
Elias was about to answer when he saw tracks. On the far side of the creek were huge prints, fresh ones. Hump. The bear had walked the rocky ridge above the water, then come down and stopped directly across from the station. The prints there were deeper, as if the animal had stood still for some time. Then the line of them went back up into the draw.
Owen came over. “He came back.”
Elias looked at the slope. For the first time in days, nothing came from up there. No booms, no rumble.
“Back to his own place,” he said.
“How do you know?”
“Because it’s quiet up there again.”
In the spring the cabin had to be rebuilt almost from scratch. Owen suggested putting the house closer to the road. Elias refused, but he didn’t build on the old spot either. He chose a site a couple hundred feet higher up the slope.
When Owen noticed, he grinned. “So you did learn something.”
Elias was driving a nail and didn’t look up. “You can just see better from here.”
“Sure. And it’s drier, of course.”
“You talk too much.”
Owen laughed and went for more boards.
In early May the snow finally melted off the south slope. One morning Elias stepped out of the new house, June’s photograph on the sill behind him, and saw prints by the creek. Big, familiar ones. The track ran along the edge of the woods, then turned uphill into the upper draw.
Elias stood there awhile. He didn’t follow. He no longer needed to know where Hump had stopped. It was enough that the animal had gone back up and the man had stayed below. Like before.
For nearly seventy years he had believed he knew this place: where you could go, when to turn back, where the animals kept, where it was safe to build a house. Hump hadn’t warned anyone. He had simply heard the mountain first, and an old man had been willing, for once, to say “I don’t know” and keep listening.
After that winter, Elias never again wrote off a change like that as chance.