Part 7
“Up the slope! Leave the bags!”
Curtis went from door to door, striking each with his fist. People emerged half awake, carrying gloves, trying to ask questions while pulling on coats.
One worker started a truck.
Gordon crossed to it and tapped the door.
“Walk. It’s a short climb.”
The driver leaned out.
“I can haul the ones that need it. Road’s clear to the ledge.”
Gordon looked uphill. He wanted everyone moving immediately, but the truck was already running, and two people were climbing in.
“Straight up. Don’t stop for anything.”
Within minutes, the trailers were empty.
They gathered on a rocky shelf above the quarry road. The truck stopped a little below them. Wind drove snow across the ledge, and people crowded behind the larger rocks, wrapping their arms around themselves.
Below, the floodlight still shone on the camp.
Nothing changed.
Curtis stood beside Gordon, his face turned away from the wind. After several minutes, he checked his watch.
Someone behind them muttered that they could have stayed inside.
Nathan came to Gordon’s side. He was favoring the cold foot, though he tried not to show it.
“Maybe the blockage holds.”
“I’d welcome that.”
“Could hold all night.”
“Hope it does.”
Nathan glanced at the huddled workers.
“They’ll have plenty to say about us tomorrow.”
“I can hear it from a warm room.”
His nephew smiled and pulled his scarf higher.
Gordon’s thumb moved toward the place where the shotgun stock ordinarily rested against his coat. His hand closed on nothing.
Nathan noticed.
“Missing it?”
“Hand is.”
Gordon tucked it inside his mitten.
Curtis stepped nearer.
“Explain this so I can explain it to them. How’s water building up in a freeze?”
Gordon looked at the basin and, at last, heard more of Orson’s old conversation.
The lower drainage sealing in severe cold. Water continuing to enter behind it. Seven being a place to stay away from after a hard freeze.
He took the protected plan from his pack and held it against a rock while Curtis shielded the light.
“Here’s a stream underground. The workings cut across it. These natural chambers connect with the tunnels.” Gordon followed the line with one finger. “Water keeps coming in. The lower outlet freezes shut.”
Nathan leaned closer.
“And the chambers fill.”
“That could push air out through the higher openings. Water and failing ground could account for what we heard.”
“The holes under the snow?” Curtis asked.
“Old workings giving way, maybe. We saw cracks and trees moving with the slope. I can’t tell you more than that.”
Curtis stared down at the little diagram.
“But if the ice lets go—”
The dogs raised their heads.
Buck stepped away from Gordon. One of the camp dogs backed farther uphill, whining through closed teeth.
Gordon folded the plan.
The sound that followed lasted longer than any they’d heard before. It began deep in the basin and broadened until the rock beneath their boots seemed to carry it.
Gordon caught Nathan’s sleeve.
“Here it comes.”
At first, the timber below concealed everything. Then dark movement appeared between the trees, spreading and gathering as it descended.
Water carried slabs of ice, broken stone, snow, and entire trunks down the channel.
A worker took two backward steps. Someone else called for everyone to climb higher. They moved together toward the upper edge of the shelf as the noise reached them in full.
The flow struck the lower road and rolled across it.
At the bridge, debris piled against the upstream side. The span held for several seconds. Then one end lifted and turned, and the camp floodlight went dark.
A pale trailer wall showed briefly in the moving water. An empty drum spun through the yard. Timber struck something solid below them with a crash they felt through the wind.
Then snow and darkness hid the rest.
Gordon turned toward the outpost, though no part of it was visible from the ledge. The old creek channel ran close beside the cabin before dropping toward the bridge.
Nathan stood against his shoulder. He said nothing.
The main roar moved downstream. Water continued to rush through the low ground long after the first surge had passed.
Curtis called each worker’s name. Nine answered. Nathan answered when Curtis pointed at him, and Gordon raised a hand.
All the dogs remained above the road.
They stayed clear of the flooded ground until daylight. By morning, ice and rock covered the lower road. The bridge had lost its usable alignment, and water had reached two of the trailers, though the strongest part of the surge had passed beside the camp rather than through its center.
Everyone was alive.
Gordon and Nathan reached the outpost after noon, following higher ground where they could.
The cabin still stood.
For a few moments, that was all Gordon allowed himself to see.
Then he saw the broken wall, the porch twisted away from its supports, the place where the woodshed should have been. Firewood lay scattered among the trees and lodged in piles of dirty ice.
Nathan stopped behind him.
“Gord—”
“Leave it.”
His nephew stayed where he was.
Gordon crossed the clearing. The door was gone. Inside, the table lay on its side, and water dripped from the lower shelves. Silt covered the floorboards.
The desk drawer had been torn out. There was no box of letters. The pegs above the shelf were empty where his father’s shotgun had hung.
He stood in the room until Nathan’s boots creaked on the porch outside.
Neither spoke through the opening.
When Gordon finally came out, Nathan looked at the front of his coat.
“The picture?”
Gordon pressed his palm against his inside pocket.
Nathan nodded.
Across the creek, beyond the worst of the debris, fresh tracks marked a patch of clean snow.
Gordon walked to the bank.
Highback had come down by way of the rocky ridge, above the flood’s reach. His prints stopped opposite the outpost. Several overlapped there, pressed deep where he’d stood or shifted his feet. Then they turned back toward the upper basin.
Nathan came beside him.
“He checked the place.”
Gordon studied the slope. No concussion followed. There was only the ordinary noise of the creek working around the new debris.
“He’ll use it again,” he said.
“The basin?”
Gordon nodded toward the tracks climbing away.
“Nothing driving him out now.”
A small piece of ice broke loose beneath the bank and turned in the current.
When spring allowed them to work, Nathan came back with lumber and tools. Much of the cabin had to be replaced, and Gordon spent long days pulling sound boards from what remained.
Nathan argued for a site nearer the road.
Gordon refused.
He also refused to set the new foundation where the old one had stood. Instead, he marked a place nearly eighty yards farther uphill, beyond the reach of the debris left among the trees.
Nathan found him there one morning checking the corners with a length of cord.
“View improve up here?”
Gordon kept the cord taut.
“Considerably.”
“Especially the view of water staying downhill.”
“Hold that end still.”
Nathan grinned and moved his boot off the line.
Later, while they nailed up the new wall, he nodded toward the basin.
“Your bear saved us a lot of trouble.”
Gordon drove the nail flush.
“He was getting himself out. We were slow catching on.”
Nathan took another board from the stack and held it in place.
Gordon checked the edge before reaching for a nail.
By early May, the snow had gone from the sun-facing slopes. The new cabin smelled of cut lumber, and the photograph stood on a shelf Gordon had fixed well above the floor.
One morning, he stepped outside and saw large tracks beside the creek.
He went down far enough to examine them. The prints followed the timber’s edge before turning toward the upper basin, where the bear’s route disappeared beneath the trees.
Gordon stood with his hands in his coat pockets.
For years, he’d known which places belonged to which creatures and which paths he could trust. That winter had sent the grizzly to his porch and carried his own household through a missing wall. He looked from the creek to the higher ground beneath the new cabin, then back at the tracks.
He left them untroubled.
At the steps, he stopped to listen to the mountain before going inside.