Chapter 4

She heard the water before she saw it, bubbling up from a crack in gray rock, and burbling on downward, through a trough in that rock that it had cut over hundred, maybe thousands of years.

She filled her canteen, which had been almost emptied during the day’s ride. He had packed freeze-dried rations, and she had to make another trip to the spring to get enough water for everything. He built the fire, but stood back to let her heat things up. That’s really all it was - heating things up - but she still felt proud when she laid it all out on a horse blanket.

“Dinner is served,” she said formally.

They ate in silence, but it was a comfortable silence. Hot food was different than cold sandwiches, and she was ravenous. He brought out a mashed loaf of white bread, and she used three pieces to soak up all the juice left from the plate she’d eaten on.

When the dishes were cleaned and stacked to one side, he stood up. He went to his saddle bags and pulled out a gun belt, strapping it on.

“What’s that for?” she asked, nervously.

“Want to show you something,” he said. He pulled the pistol out of the holster and examined it. It looked huge to Brenda ... deadly in a flat, dead way. “This is just a precaution.” he said. “She should be gone, by now, but you never know.”

“She?” Brenda was confused. “Who?”

“There’s a cave not far from here. A bear uses it in the winter, but it’s late enough that she and her cubs should be gone by now ... out getting fat again. I want to show you what’s in the cave.”

“Bear?!” moaned Brenda. “There are bears out here!?”

“Of course there are bears out here,” said Bob, calmly. “And mountain lions, and elk ... all sorts of things live up here.”

“I did not come on this trip to be eaten by a bear!” said Brenda, looking around fearfully.

“She’s not that hungry,” said Bob, smiling. “I doubt you’ll even get to see her. We make too much noise. Besides, she’d smell Ranger long before we got close enough to see her.”

“Bears eat horses!” yelped Brenda.

“Not horses like Ranger,” said Bob. “Almost nothing will take on a stallion unless it’s starving, or wounded and enraged.”

“What about Buttercup?” asked Brenda, still looking fearful.

“Oh, I suppose she’d make a try for Buttercup, under the right circumstances,” said Bob even though he knew that was highly unlikely. He couldn’t resist needling a green horn. “But don’t worry. Buttercup would just run away. No bear could catch her after a hundred yards or so.”

“What if I fell off again while Buttercup was running away?” moaned the girl.

“Well, that’s what this is for,” said Bob, patting his holster.

Then he gave her a full course on what to do if she was afoot, and encountered a bear. He did it just because he’d teased her ... to make her feel better ... not because he thought they’d see a bear. He could show her half a dozen bears, if he wanted to, but that was a little more than he’d planned for this girl’s trip.

Bob showed Brenda how to make a torch by collecting drips of sap from pine trees, and smearing them onto the end of a short, dry branch. It took a while, but finally he was satisfied with the thickness of the coating. They left the horses in the glen, and she followed him as he strode off into the trees, heading upward. They had to climb some rocks, but then a black hole appeared in the face of rock before them. Bob had her stand back, and edged closer to the hole, sniffing the air. He seemed satisfied, but told her to stay there while he lit the torch with a lighter. Once it was burning, he disappeared into the hole. He was back almost immediately, telling her to come on.

She smelled something odd ... musty, yet sharp ... mixed with the smoke of the torch, making her nose scrunch up. She followed Bob closely and found herself in a smallish domed cavity that she could stand up in, but Bob had to stoop for. The torch flickered weakly, and it seemed very dark. He pointed, and stepped behind her so that the light came from over her shoulder.

She saw colors first - red and yellow - then the drawings. They were of stick-like figures, and she saw instantly that they told a story. One figure lay, bent and broken, as red flowed from it, while others, with spears, stood against what was obviously a bear. It had been drawn in exquisite detail, in some black substance that made tiny lines. Those lines had been used to create the bear, even to protruding fangs from the open mouth, and to long, sharp claws on the tips of the paws. To the right was another drawing. In this one the bear was lying down, red flowing from it, and the stick figures danced around it. The “dead” stick figure had been placed on a pile of sticks, and something red and yellow - obviously flames - shot from around it.

“Who were they?” she whispered.

“Nobody knows,” answered Bob. “I have a native American friend, who showed me this place when I was young. He says they’re older than his people.”

“And this person brought you all the way up here just to show you this?” she asked.

“We were traveling together, I suppose you’d call it. We slept here one night. I was much younger.”

“You slept in a bear den?” she gasped.

“They only use it in the winter time, to hibernate,” said Bob easily. “During the summer they’re out doing what bears do.”

The torch began flickering more wildly. Bob led her out and the slight wind outside the cave blew it out. She noticed he took it with him when they left, and asked him why he was doing that.

“If I leave it there, some poor bear will find it some day. It would make her nervous. Our scent will be long gone before winter, but this would smell like fire for years if we left it in here.” He took it all the way back to the campsite, and dropped it in the fire pit.

Bob had brought mountain tents. Each rolled into a bundle that was only ten inches long, and maybe five inches in diameter. He’d left the poles behind, and went into the woods to make poles from the branches of trees. As he set the first one up, Brenda saw that, basically, it was about enough nylon to cover a person and keep the rain off. There wasn’t enough room in it to put anything but herself. Brenda was still thinking about bears ... and mountain lions.

“We’re going to sleep ... alone?” she asked.

Bob looked at her. “Don’t tempt me,” he said.

Brenda blushed. “I didn’t mean that!“ She looked around. “It’s just that there are bears ... and things.”

“Nothing’s going to bother us up here. I just spent two months camping alone up in these mountains. The only time I saw any wildlife was when I tried to. Even way up here ... things ... stay shy of humans. We don’t have a very good reputation with the original inhabitants.”

“Okay,” she said, her voice tiny. “If you’re sure.”

“Besides,” he said offhandedly. “How would I explain to your parents that I bedded down with their only sexy daughter, while I was supposed to be showing her nature and taking good care of her?”

“I told you I didn’t mean that,” she said, frowning.

“And I told you, you look sexy,” said Bob. “If you think I’m going to sleep in one of those,” he pointed at the tiny tent, “with you crushed up next to me ... and try to forget that you’re sexy ... well ... let’s just say that’s unlikely in the extreme.”

Brenda, though she was young, and despite the travails she had been through with her illness, knew a compliment when she heard one. She hadn’t been paid any compliments like that before, and it brought a strange rush of warmth to her belly as this grown up man acknowledged her attractiveness. She did, in fact, feel attractive, at that moment.

She hadn’t felt attractive for a long, long time.

“Besides,” said Bob, off-handedly, “Ranger will be here. He’ll warn us of any trouble long before it gets here.”

By the time the tents were set up, and the fire had been built up for what Bob called “the evening confab”, Brenda looked at her watch and found it was only a little past six in the evening.

“So what do we do now?” she asked.

“We sit around and jaw,” said Bob. “That’s what the evening confab is all about. We talk to each other about all sorts of things and tell each other things ... mostly lies, of course.”

“Lies?” she asked.

“They’re much more interesting than the truth,” he said. “Most folks live pretty boring lives, and stories about that would just put us to sleep.”

“I don’t know any lies,” said Brenda.

“Make some up,” said Bob. “You’ll get the hang of it.”

To her amazement, that’s exactly what they did for the next two hours. They settled in, their feet almost touching, upwind of the fire - though the wind seemed to change regularly - and Bob told her stories that just had to be lies. They were stories about the ranch, mostly, and about the time he’d spent as a Marine. They were wildly entertaining, and she struggled to think up some crazy thing that she wished she’d done when she was younger. The best thing she could come up with was a story about how, when she was only ten, she’d saved an old woman from a burning building. It was true, in the sense that she’d seen the smoke coming from the roof, and banged on the door. The old lady had come to the door, angry at being disturbed, but when Brenda had taken her to the yard and she’d seen the smoke for herself, it had gotten pretty exciting. The fire department had come and firemen went up on the roof and cut a hole in it and squirted water everywhere. That was pretty much it. The poor woman had been so distraught at the damage to her home that she’d forgotten all about Brenda. In the end, Brenda went home and told her parents what had happened. Only the smell of smoke on her clothes had convinced them she was telling the truth.

Now, though, she spun the tale with leaping flames, and Brenda dragging the woman out, unconscious, and then saving her cat too! The Mayor had given her a medal, and her picture was in the paper. Bob was appropriately appreciative of her bravery, and said no bear would stand a chance against her if she set her mind to taming it.

He told ten stories to every one of hers, though. He said that was okay, seeing as how she was so young that she hadn’t had time to kick up her heels much. Eventually the wild talk wound down.

“Tell me about your boyfriend,” said Bob.

“There’s nothing to tell. Boys don’t ask bald girls out for dates.” She looked uncomfortable. “Well, they do, but they don’t know the girl is bald, so she doesn’t accept them.”

“You haven’t always been bald,” he commented.

“Yeah, but I was too young to date then. When I got old enough to date, I was too sick from chemo, or radiation treatments.”

“That’s too bad,” he commiserated with her.

“Yeah,” she sighed.

“Do you feel it?” he asked. “What’s in your head, I mean.”

She turned to stare at him. Nobody had ever asked her that before. Most people tried not to talk about her disease at all, much less ask her what it felt like.

“Not really,” she said. “At least I don’t think so. Sometimes I get headaches, or dizzy or something, but I can’t ... you know... feel the tumor or anything.”

It was quiet for a while.

Brenda looked over at him, curious, now that she had thought of him as a ... man.

“What about you? Don’t you have a girlfriend?”

She saw the shadow stain his face, and knew, somehow, she’d made a horrible mistake. Then she saw him shake it off.

“I was married. She and our little boy were killed in an avalanche nine months ago.”

“Ohhh!” moaned Brenda. “I’m sorry ... I didn’t know.”

“Not your fault,” said Bob. “I’m going to have to talk about it again, I suspect.”

“You don’t have to talk about it to me,” said Brenda, feeling like she’d broken something precious.

“Dannie and Kyle are part of my past now,” said Bob heavily. “I’ll never forget them, of course, but that’s the past. I spent the last two months riding these mountains, trying to deal with it. But I can’t ride the mountains forever. I’ll just have to learn how to move on.”

“I’m so sorry,” she said.

“I’m kind of glad you came along, in one way,” he said. “I didn’t think much of the idea when I first heard it. I guess I thought you’d be a sickly little girl, who I’d have to coddle and all that. I was sure wrong about that, though. You’ve kept my mind off things right nicely until...”

“Until now,” said Brenda miserably.

“Like I said,” Bob sighed. “Others will ask about it too, sooner or later.”

He poked the fire with a stick, and then looked up at her.

“Like I said, I’m glad you came along. I hope you’re having a good time. I think this is a good thing you’re doing.” He grinned. “How’s your butt?”

Brenda jerked as she realized she hadn’t paid any attention to her aches and pains for quite a while now. She rolled and prodded her behind. It was sore.

“It hurts,” she said.

“Tomorrow morning, use some more of that stuff on it,” he said. “In another day or two you’ll be fine.”

“All this will be over in two more days,” she said. “I am having fun. I wish it didn’t have to end.”

“You just keep having fun as long as you can,” said Bob. He felt foolish for reminding her that she was dying. “We probably ought to turn in now,” he said.

“It’s still light out,” she objected.

“We got a long ride tomorrow, and more climbing. You need your rest.”

He got up and went to the saddle bags. He lifted them and took a rope from them, which he tied around both sets of bags. Throwing a rope over a branch, he hauled them up next to the limb.

“What are you doing that for?” she asked.

“Never mind,” he said. “It’s just an old habit.” He didn’t tell her that the smell of food in the bags might draw the attention of bears, who could smell it literally miles away. He didn’t particularly want any visitors this night, and if there were any, he wanted their attention up in the tree limbs, and not on the ground.

Brenda Jean Ronson crawled into her sleeping bag fully clothed. She had been camping before, with her Girl Scout Troop. She’d only been twelve, and they’d only gone camping three times, but those camping trips had fueled her imagination and she’d loved them. Then they found the tumor, and things like that stopped. Almost everything had stopped. Everyone started treating her like an invalid, even though she felt fine. She wiggled into the bag that had been way too big for her when she was twelve, but wasn’t any more.

She thought back to those times when she had shared a big tent with seven or eight other girls, and the adults who went with them. Now she was alone. The bag seemed much smaller, and not nearly as warm and comfortable as she remembered. Of course she knew that she’d grown a lot since the last time she crawled into this bag, but she felt very alone somehow. She heard Bob moving around, dousing the fire they’d sat beside for so long. He began talking and she realized he was making the nightly radio report, telling people they were alive, and maybe where they were. Then she heard noises that she decided meant he was getting into his own tent. His footsteps, and the little noises he made were comforting. Still, she felt very alone.

She couldn’t help but see the mental image of herself, inside the tiny tent, on top of the tall mountain, with wild animals all around her, and she had a hard time falling asleep. The wig scratched her scalp, and she took it off, shoving it up and out of the bag, which she had pulled over her head. That was a little better, but she wished she’d brought a pillow. Her clothes felt heavy and tight around her body, and her shirt was bunched up. She wiggled uncomfortably, pulling to get her clothing smooth.

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