Canyons Page 10

  Good.

  Even with one bad leg no bluebelly on foot could catch him. No two bluebellies could catch him.

  I am, he thought.

  I am Apache!

  He fought the pain down, made his mind think of other things. His mother. See his mother bending down to pick up wood. See his mother how she works. See how she builds the fire and moves the pot onto the flame. See …

  Brennan shook his head.

  Can’t, he thought. Can’t remember things that never happened to me. How can that be?

  He looked back. The men had fallen still farther behind. His leg was on fire but he was moving well. Sweat poured down his face and he wiped it away with the back of his wrist.

  Where?

  Where am I going?

  He recognized parts of the canyon from the camping trip. Even limping he was making good time.

  But where?

  The canyon rose above him, around him. But the canyon would come to an end. He remembered that as well.

  Back up there it ended, he thought, looking to the cliffs that marked the rear of the canyon. And then what?

  They’d have him.

  Take me, spirit.

  There it was again. The voice. The whispers.

  But I can’t, Brennan thought. I can’t go where I can’t go, can’t go, can’t go …

  Still he climbed the trail until he was moving across the flat, grassy meadow; moving now without purpose because he was sure he would not be able to get out of the cliffs that ringed the back of the canyon.

  The sun cooked now, directly over the canyon. Even running—more jogging with a limp than running—he could not help but see the beauty of the canyon. The cliffs had looked red in the morning light but were now showing bars of gold and purple in the rock strata.

  He saw the boulder now up ahead, where he had found the skull, and for a moment he thought that was it—where he was supposed to go.

  He thought that perhaps the skull wanted only that—to return to the place by the boulder to be with the rest of the skeleton, which must still be there.

  But he knew he was wrong—something felt wrong about it.

  What?

  Not the boulder …

  It was here—just so it was here. I ran, even with one leg I ran to reach the sky, reach the blue sky and freedom; ran to reach the medicine place but it was here, here that I ended.…

  Brennan drew closer to the boulder. He had not known how it had been, and did not know it now. But he could feel something of it.

  How the soldiers must have followed him—as the rescue men followed him now. Brennan hesitated as he neared the overhanging boulder, almost stopped and as he did the men gained on him, grew close enough so he could hear their feet.

  No. Go on, go on and up and on to the place of medicine, to the ancient ones.…

  There was great urgency in it, in the voice, in the feeling and he started to run again, past the boulder.

  The sudden jump into a run twisted his sore leg and the limp grew temporarily worse and it slowed him. He could hear the men gaining again, their feet slamming into the dirt.

  Ahead there was a ledge and a drop ten feet down into the streambed.

  Brennan went off at a full trot and tumbled head over heels into the streambed in a cloud of dirt and loose rocks near the spring and pool of water. It looked cool, and inviting, but the streambed moved still farther up the canyon and he knew he had to continue.

  The fall had knocked the wind out of him but he scrambled to his feet and started moving again, always up.

  It looked worse all the time. The sides of the creek-bed grew steeper and higher and he could see no way to get out.

  “You have taken me the wrong way,” he said aloud between breaths.

  But he kept moving. The streambed drew narrower still and began to wind sharply left and right and tighter and Brennan slowed, finally, thought it would end here.

  Watch for a sign, the line of fire.

  Ahh, he thought—sure. Watch for a sign. Fire? The line of fire?

  And there it was, up and to the left.

  In the wall of the streambed on the left side, about even with his forehead, there were several lines gouged in the rock. They were jagged and very old, faded and nearly gone and had he not been watching for them he would have missed them.

  But he saw them and even as blurred as they were he knew they represented a bolt of lightning.

  The line of fire.

  Next to the blurred lightning bolt there was a fissure in the rock. It was narrow, went straight up the rock wall, and Brennan would have passed it, the way it lay back and partially out of sight, had he not been looking for the sign.

  He looked back in the fissure—large crack in the cliff face, really—and saw two handholds just above his head, one on each side.

  Up.

  One word. He put his hands in the handholds and pulled himself up.

  And there were two more.

  And up, and two more, and still more and in twenty feet the fissure—which had been just wide enough for his body—began to widen and he saw that the handholds went on up the split in the rock all the way to the top of the canyon wall.

  Three, four hundred feet.

  Up.

  Did he do this? Brennan felt the ridges with his fingers as he climbed, felt the edges where a tool had carved and chipped. They were weathered, old—very old. Ancient. Coyote Runs had not done this—the handholds had been there for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years.

  But he had used them. Coyote Runs had used them. His hands and feet in the same place, pulling up.

  Up.

  Brennan kept climbing and when he was nearly fifty feet up he paused and heard the two men come running up the rocky streambed. He held his breath—though they could never have heard him breathing—and the men ran past the fissure without pausing. Brennan smiled.

  And it is so that I would have been free, been safe, if I had beaten them to the medicine steps.…

  Brennan did some mental calculating. Maybe a quarter of a mile to the end of the canyon, perhaps a bit more.

  Then they would start back. Ten, fifteen minutes. They would have to move slowly, looking for tracks, some sign of him in the rock streambed.

  Maybe another ten, fifteen minutes. It was hard to estimate. Perhaps a total of twenty or thirty minutes until they found the fissure.

  Then they would start up. They were expert climbers and would have no trouble.

  Twenty minutes would have to be enough for whatever it was he was supposed to do.

  He held for a moment, catching his breath and resting his legs, then he climbed again, looking up the fissure. The handholds were closer together now, made for a shorter body and it made the climbing faster, easier.

  Above was the sky.

  Blue sky. Not a cloud showed above in the narrow slot of the fissure. He climbed with his back to one side of the opening and his feet on the other, using the hand- and footholds on each side, and concentrated so hard on the climb that he didn’t seem to notice how high he was getting until he nearly fell.

  His hand slipped from one of the cutouts in his haste and had his foot not caught a hole on the other side and jammed him he would have dropped.

  It was then, near the top, that he first looked outside the fissure and saw below him.

  The canyon fell away beneath him in a drop that seemed to go forever. He could see out, past the mouth of the canyon, see the police and rescue cars there—they looked like toys—see the small specks that he knew to be his mother and the rest of them and his heart nearly froze.

  He had never been this high, never climbed this way, and fear held him and he thought he would not be able to go on, to climb the short distance to the top.

  Take me, spirit …

  And his hand moved. He moved his eyes away from the view out of the fissure and looked only up. His hand found a new hole, then his feet and he skitched his back up, then a new handhold, then a foot, and up, and up
and slowly he kept moving, kept climbing until he was at the top, until he could pull himself out on the flat rock of the top of the bluff where he lay for a moment, breathing deeply.

  Then he stood.

  And saw the world.

  That was the only way he could think of it—he saw the world. The desert lay below him. He stood on a flat almost-table of rock that jutted out, formed one side of the canyon, and below and away lay all the world he knew. To his left, a haze in the south, lay El Paso, and across the great basin of desert he saw the Organ Mountains, gray and jagged, like broken teeth, and to his right, white and brilliant, lay the white sands, shining in the midday sun so bright it seemed the desert had been washed and bleached and painted.

  And he saw this, Brennan thought.

  He saw this same thing.

  Coyote Runs was here, came up here, saw all this when he was still alive.

  When he’d started the climb up the fissure he’d looped the handles of the knapsack around his neck so the pack with the skull would ride in front and be out of the way. He took it off now, let it hang in his hand.

  To his right and perhaps twenty feet out on the flat rock was a squarish rock that seemed out of place. It was about a foot high and roughly two feet square, rounded by wind and weather at the edges, but Brennan’s eyes were drawn to it.

  The medicine place …

  Of course, Brennan thought. Of course it is.…

  He walked to the rock. In a small depression near it the limestone of the butte was a blackened color where there had obviously been fires.

  Here it was, Brennan thought, here it was that he came to sit and learn things and know things. This was how he lived. How he was. Until they killed him.

  The ancient ones are here, are always here in the medicine place.…

  I understand, Brennan thought. He looked across the desert, stood by the rock and the small fire place and looked across the desert and understood why Coyote Runs had tried to get here, tried to be here, had brought him here finally in all the craziness of the run and the climb and the skull.

  It was how he was, Brennan thought. It was the way of Coyote Runs to be here, to come here, to have his spirit set free here to go back to the ancient ones and he had been stopped, held back all these years, all this time.

  Leave me, spirit …

  Brennan nodded, smiled. He took the skull carefully from the knapsack and put it on the square rock, set it gently so the eyes were looking out at the desert and sky and moved away, stood away.

  Be free, he thought, be the sun and wind and desert and stone and plant and the dust, be free and all the things there are to be.

  He whispered, “Be free …”

  And for a time there was nothing, for minutes or seconds or years there was nothing but the skull sitting on the rock and the world below.

  Then a warm wind, a short, warm wind brushed his cheek and caught some dust from the rock around the skull and took the dust in a swirling column up, up over the bluff, over the canyon, over Brennan and into the sky and gone, gone where the dream of the eagle had flown, gone for all of time, gone and the skull was just that, a skull, a bone, nothing more, empty, as Brennan was empty.

  He sighed, tears on his cheeks, missing something he did not understand, feeling that he had lost a friend somehow, and turned to meet the rescue men.

  Gary Paulsen takes readers along on his maiden voyage, proving that ignorance can be bliss. Also really stupid and incredibly dangerous. He shows us how he learned to sail the hard way, by learning from his own hilarious and hair-raising mistakes. He tells of boats that have owned him, good, bad, and beloved, and how they got him through terrifying storms that he survived by sheer luck.

  His spare prose conjures up shark surprises and killer waves, and makes readers feel what it’s like to sail under the stars or to lie at anchor in a tropical lagoon where dolphins leap, bathed in silver. Falling in love with the ocean set Gary Paulsen on a lifelong learning curve, and readers will understand why his passion has lasted to this day.

  Available at bookstores everywhere