Part 3
Dana came down the path in her own boots and his coat, carrying two mugs. She saw his face before she saw the hole.
“What is it?”
“There’s no water.”
She crouched beside him and looked. “It froze?”
“It doesn’t freeze. It can’t.” He stood up, and his hip caught, and he let it. “This creek comes out of the drain tunnel at the Queen. They drove that tunnel in 1911 to drain the workings so they could mine deeper. Every bit of water that seeps into that mountain runs out through it. Forty-some degrees, winter and summer. That’s why it’s always open.”
“So where is it?”
He didn’t answer. He was thinking about the well tape coming up wet at two feet, and the rust in the kitchen tap.
“It’s been getting quieter,” he said finally. “Since Thanksgiving. I thought it was the dry fall.”
Dana handed him a mug. He held it without drinking.
“Your mother would’ve caught it,” he said. “She rode Juniper up to the portal every week. She’d come back and tell me the creek was up or down or muddy or smelling like eggs. I haven’t been up there since.”
“Since she died.”
“Since then.”
Dana looked up the gulch, where the snow lay smooth and gray between the lodgepoles. “Then we go look.”
“My hip won’t do three miles of snow.”
“It’s a mile and a half.”
“Each way.”
“Then I’ll go. You stay here and keep the coffee hot.”
“You don’t know what you’re looking at up there.”
“Then come with me and tell me.” She took the mug back out of his hand and dumped his coffee in the snow. “Mom’s snowshoes are on the porch. I’ll set the pace.”
She did. The snow on the old wagon road was deeper than either of them had guessed, and the climb took them most of the day. She stopped every fifteen minutes whether he needed it or not, standing a little way off and watching him breathe while pretending to look at the trees. Ruth’s snowshoes fit her exactly. Walt hadn’t known they would.
The road climbed along the north side of the gulch, above the creek bed. Below them the ice lay sunken and broken where the water had drained away beneath it, and the snow over those spots had collapsed into long gray troughs. Twice they crossed Agnes’s tracks coming down. She had taken her time.
The Queen’s waste dumps spilled down the hillside in gray fans, mostly buried. At the foot of the biggest one, a few yards from where the drain tunnel came out, Walt saw the den. He’d never been closer than the far side of the gulch. Its mouth was a dark hole in the side of the dump, maybe three feet across.
Dana got there first and stopped. “Dad.”
The den was full of ice. It had built up inside from below, rust-orange and glassy, filling the hole nearly to the top, as if water had risen into the bear’s bed from underneath and frozen there layer by layer. A few tufts of brown fur were frozen into its surface.
“That’s why she left,” Dana said.
Walt looked past it at the portal.
He remembered the portal as a square timber frame set into the hillside, with a little stream running out over a concrete sill and an iron grate across the opening so nobody could walk in. There was no frame now. Sometime in the fall the old timbers had rotted through and the hillside above had slumped down over the mouth of the tunnel, a fan of mud and rock with snow on top. Where the stream had run out, a mound of orange ice rose higher than his head, smooth and bulging, like candle wax that had dripped for weeks. Water still seeped from cracks along its base and froze before it went a yard.
The snow around it was stained the color of a rusted truck. The air smelled faintly of pennies.
Dana pulled off a glove and reached toward the ice. Walt caught her wrist. For once it was his hand on hers.
“Don’t stand on it,” he said. “Don’t stand on anything orange.”
He walked up beside the mound, testing each step, and laid his bare palm on the rock of the hillside next to it. Under his hand the mountain hummed, very faintly, like a pump running somewhere a long way off.
“Talk to me,” Dana said.
He took his hand away. “In ninety-four I drilled a well for the Bertelsens over on Dutchman Flat. Hit water under pressure at a hundred and forty feet, and it came up the pipe and ran over the top on its own. A flowing well. Old man Bertelsen wanted it capped tight because it was flooding his corral, so we capped it tight.” He looked at the ice. “Two weeks later the water came up through the gravel around the outside of the casing and blew a hole in his corral you could lose a calf in. You don’t stop water. You just choose where it comes out next.”
“And this is capped,” Dana said.
“This is capped. Everything that runs into that mountain since the fall has been backing up inside it. It’s been looking for another way out.” He thought of the bit dropping three feet through nothing in 1987. “It’s found my well. I don’t know where else.”
“And when the cap goes?”
He looked down the gulch. From here they could see the whole route the water would take: the creek bed, his barn on the low ground by the bend, the house on its bench a little above, the road running beside the creek all three miles down to the flat. At the bottom, where the gulch opened out toward the river, was the old Haugen place, where Tess and Marco Ruiz lived with a four-year-old and a baby.
Dana saw it the same moment he did. “Tess and the kids.”
“How old is the baby?”
“Seven weeks.” She was already pulling out her phone. She looked at the screen and put it away. “Nothing.”
“There won’t be,” Walt said. “Not till the knoll.”
The sun was already off the gulch when they started back. They came down faster than they had gone up. Walt fell once, and Dana didn’t help him up, because he told her not to, and she was already ahead of him, breaking trail. By the time they reached the yard, the cold was coming down out of the trees and the windows of the house had gone dark blue.
Walt picked up the kitchen phone. There was no dial tone, no hiss, nothing. Ice on the line had finally pulled it down somewhere between here and the county road.
Dana stood in the yard with her phone held over her head, turning slowly, though they both knew better. No bars.
They looked up the hill at the same time. Agnes was lying across the top of the knoll in the last red light, her pale shoulders against Ruth’s stone, on the only spot on the ranch where a phone could reach the world…
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