Part 7
“Everybody uphill!” he shouted. “Now!”
People began moving. Someone tried to take bags. Mike yelled to leave them. Someone else had started a truck.
Walter walked over and slapped the door with his palm.
“No need.”
The driver leaned out.
“I’ll take people up.”
Walter looked toward the slope.
“It’s only six hundred and fifty feet.”
“Faster this way.”
The engine idled steadily. Walter wanted to argue, then waved a hand.
“All right. Straight up.”
Within a few minutes, the camp was empty. They gathered on a rocky ledge above the road. The truck stayed a little below them.
The wind was stronger here. Everyone stood wrapped in their jackets, looking down. Nothing happened.
A minute passed. Then another. Mike looked at Walter. Walter said nothing.
After ten minutes, someone behind them spoke.
“Maybe this was all for nothing.”
No one answered. Fifteen minutes. Eli came over to his uncle.
“What if the ice held?”
Walter kept watching the hollow. “Good.”
“What if nothing happens at all?”
Walter shrugged. “Better yet.”
Eli glanced at the people huddled behind the rocks, trying to get out of the wind.
“They’ll never let us forget this.”
“Let them.”
Eli smiled.
Walter’s thumb moved toward the place where the cracked gunstock usually rested against his coat. There was nothing to touch. The shotgun was back at the cabin. He looked at his hand and gave a quiet grunt.
Eli noticed.
“What?”
Walter lowered his hand.
“Habit.”
Mike approached. “Walt, explain it to me again. Where’s all that water coming from in winter?”
Walter almost brushed the question aside. Then he remembered Sawyer’s voice beside the trailer nearly fifty years earlier. The geologist had been telling someone about drainage in Tunnel No. 4, and the hard freezes that sealed the lower passage.
That might be it.
“There’s a stream marked on those plans,” Walter said slowly. “Looks like the tunnels cut into it. Water could keep feeding the workings even in a freeze. If the lower outlet iced over, it couldn’t drain.”
He looked toward the hollow.
“Could be why they stayed away after a deep freeze.”
Eli understood first.
“Pressure was building inside.”
“Looks that way. The plans showed cavities connected to the tunnels. If water’s filling those, it could be forcing air out. And the ground’s been shifting around the old workings. Might explain the cracks and the hollow spots.”
Mike went pale.
“What about the ice?”
Walter didn’t get a chance to answer. The dogs lifted their heads together. One growled. Another backed farther uphill.
Walter turned toward the hollow.
The sound came from the hollow. The same boom. But this time, it was different: deeper, longer, as though something inside the mountain had finally given way.
Walter looked at Eli. “Now.”
At first, they saw nothing. Then movement appeared between the trees below. A heavy, dark mass came down the hollow: ice, snow, water, rocks, tree trunks. It looked slow only because they were seeing it from a distance.
When it reached the lower road, they heard the force of it. People retreated higher. Someone swore. Others said nothing.
The flow struck the bridge. For several seconds, the structure held. Then one span twisted sideways, and the lights at the camp went out.
Water spread across the low ground. It caught the edge of the yard, overturned an empty barrel, and carried logs away. Then everything disappeared in blowing snow and darkness. Walter looked toward the outpost.
He couldn’t see it from here. The old channel ran past the cabin above the bridge. If the water had followed it, his house had already been hit. Eli stood beside him without speaking.
After a while, the main roar receded down the valley. What remained was the sound of water and a strange emptiness in its wake.
No one died.
In the morning, they went down. The bridge was damaged. The road had disappeared beneath a mixture of ice and rock. Water had reached two trailers at the camp, though the main flow had passed to one side.
They didn’t reach the outpost until after noon. Walter saw it from a distance.
The house still stood, but one wall was damaged. The shed was gone. The woodpile had scattered, and the porch leaned crookedly. Eli stopped behind him.
“Uncle Walt—”
Walter raised a hand.
“Don’t.”
He walked to the house. The door had been torn away. Everything inside was wet.
The table lay overturned. The drawer with the letters was gone. His father’s shotgun no longer hung on the wall. Walter stood in the middle of the room for a long while.
Eli waited outside. When Walter came out, his face showed nothing.
“You’ve got the photograph?” Eli asked.
Walter touched his inside pocket.
“Here.”
“Then you haven’t lost everything.”
Walter was about to answer when he saw the tracks. On the opposite bank of the creek lay enormous, fresh paw prints. Old Hump. The bear had followed a rocky ridge above the water, then come down and stopped opposite the outpost.
The prints there were deeper, as though he had stood in one place for a while. After that, the trail climbed back into the hollow. Eli came closer.
“He came back.”
Walter looked at the slope. For the first time in days, nothing sounded from it. No blows. No rumbling.
“He’ll be back,” Walter said.
“How do you know?”
Walter was quiet for a moment.
“Because it’s quiet up there again.”
In spring, they had to rebuild almost the entire cabin. Eli suggested moving it closer to the road. Walter refused.
But he didn’t build on the old site, either. He chose a spot roughly two hundred and thirty feet farther up the slope. When Eli noticed, he smiled.
“So you did learn something.”
Walter kept hammering a nail without looking up. “Better view from here.”
“Of course. Drier, too.”
“Of course.”
“You—”
“Talk too much.”
Eli laughed and went to get more boards.
In early May, the last snow melted from the south slope. One morning, Walter stepped out of the new cabin and noticed tracks beside the creek. Big ones. Familiar ones.
They followed the edge of the woods, then turned uphill toward the upper hollow. Walter stood there for a moment.
He didn’t follow.
It was enough that the bear had gone back up and the man had stayed below.
Walter was nearly seventy, and he had been sure he knew this place: where he could go, when he should turn back, where the animals lived, where it was safe to build a house. He had mistaken a familiar balance for something permanent. That winter, it had changed before he understood why.
Old Hump hadn’t predicted the flood or come to warn anyone. He had reacted to the rumbling, the tremors, and the moving ground sooner than the people did.
Walter had learned to admit he didn’t know and listen more carefully. After that winter, he never again dismissed changes like those as coincidence.