Few people take this trail, the purpose of most park visitors being to cross the suspension bridge and thereafter, at a loss on how to proceed, visit the Ninety/ Thirty Foot Pool.
Karen prefers this side of the canyon, the west, because it has less litter, fewer tourists, and fewer cliff jumpers. Unfortunately, this summer the odds evened a little in the last department; the western banks successfully claimed the life of a thirteen-year-old boy who tried to impress his buddies by diving off a precipice. Even now, rain-shrivelled cards and mildewing flowers mark the spot mourners designated as a shrine to his memory.
The sight of the withered bouquets sheathed in tattered plastic and piled up like so much garbage disturbs Karen. Every day she passes those sad cards and dead flowers and wonders when the park ranger will throw them out. It isn’t that she doesn’t feel for the parents of the dead child; it is just that the two-month-old shrine now looks like an abandoned grave. The boy’s spirit needs to be freed from that tether.
The stairs lead Karen down a narrow path cut between bulging, mossy rock. The rumble of the canyon to her right increases as the trail drops to creek level. Dilly remains motionless on her shoulders, bilious green eyes fully dilated in the gloom.
“How have I ever made anything worse?” Karen woefully asks the cat. In response Dilly sneezes out a strand of Karen’s frizzled red locks.
“I admit his last birthday party was a mistake. I’ve apologized for that. I knew it was a mistake from the start and I should have stood up to Morris on the issue. But damn it, Andy didn’t raise a fuss, did he?”
But, of course, he didn’t. Andy worships the ground his father walks upon.
No, the responsibility to prevent the birthday disaster fell upon Karen and Karen alone. But she stood by and did nothing, and then it was too late and all the kids in Andy’s school began snickering behind his back. Her subsequent attempt to fix things resulted in Andy being expelled.
Karen blames her father, Sandy Woodruff. Throughout her Anglican childhood he stertorously repeated, “You must trust all things unto God, pudding face. Trust all things unto God.”
“God!” Karen says scornfully, and immediately shoots a guilty look skyward. Just like her stepmom, Mei-ling, she feels the Almighty needs protection from the harsh facts of life. God, in Karen’s experience, couldn’t tie a shoelace correctly if He tried. But she would sooner be barbecued in Hell than let Him discover this awful truth.
This disparity between what she’s been taught by her father and what she herself believes has created within her a tendency not to act on a situation until it’s too late, and then to overcompensate wildly and futilely when God’s will proves disastrously different from what she hoped. Alas.
At a fork in the path Karen turns right and begins goat-hopping over the rock-strewn creek bank. The autumn chill carries the green smell of slime, pine needles, and moss. Up ahead at the Ninety/Thirty Foot Pool something plops into the water.
Karen barely glances up from her hopscotch progress along the creek bank; here in the canyon things always plop into the water. Bambi-cute squirrels shake loose hemlock seeds into the pool. Small fish that have survived the urine and beer cans of summer frequently flip from the surface to smack their gums around hapless water skeeters. Crows defecate into the pool with similar plops. Pebbles jarred loose from scrounging raccoons likewise plop into the pool. The surface of the pool is always going plop.
But this time Dilly doesn’t like it. It takes Karen a moment to realize that the nails of her feline companion are now painfully embedded in her flesh.
She immediately stops. Always dreading that her luck might run out and a pervert will catch her in the deserted canyon, Karen trusts Dilly to warn her of the existence of such deviants much as most women trust their overweight, arthritic Labradors to protect them should such a hazard appear.
Her eyes promptly fall upon the white hart.
That’s what she thinks as soon as she sees it. Not stag or reindeer or wapiti, but hart. Not albino or grey or silver, but white. White hart.
And there is no question, from its gently heaving flanks to its muscled hindquarters, from its majestic antlers to its water-submerged hooves, that this is a white hart. It swings a dripping, bearded muzzle in her direction and languorously blinks. Steam fogs its nostrils.
Dilly stiffens, her thorny grip hooking another half inch through Karen’s skin. Karen stands rooted to the spot. The birthmarks between her thighs start to tingle.
And that’s when she knows: this hart, this flesh-and-blood impossibility from fantasia, is a sign from the benevolent, world-weary God she so recently scoffed. It is a sign that He knows she is avoiding her Destiny, that it pains Him deeply. A sign that it is high time she begins doing something about it.
With a choked cry, Karen spins around to flee. She promptly slips on a rock, twists her ankle, and crumples to the ground.
As soon as the woman appears, ginger hair puffed from her head like quills from an enraged porcupine, neck engulfed by a fluffy white muff, Moey expects the stag to run. Instead, it merely lowers its head to the pool and sucks in a huge draft of water.
Oblivious to the stag’s presence, the woman continues to rock-hop along the creek bank across from Moey, drawing steadily closer. In an attempt to get her attention without startling the stag, Moey tosses another, then another stick into the water.
Plop! Plop!
She stops and looks up. Stiffens. Even in the gloom, Moey can see the shock on her pale face as she stares at the stag.
The stag slowly lifts its head from the pool and lazily swings its great neck in her direction. Steam puffs from its nostrils. With a raven-like croak, the woman turns around, hurls her neck muff towards the nearest bush, and flings herself upon the rocky ground.
A second of silence passes.
“Dilly!” the woman cries, and one of her pale hands rises from the rock bed and waves frantically at the muff. “Dilly, come back!”
Moey gawks at the woman as she flounders on the creek bank, trying to get to her feet. An anguished cry brings her to her knees again, a cry Moey knows all too well from the boxing ring: a broken bone given a voice. Leaping to his feet, he clambers to the creek’s edge and splashes towards the opposite bank.
Had it been winter or spring or even later in the fall, fording the creek would have been as safe as a blind man crossing a freeway during rush hour. However, it is early autumn, when, thirsted into submission after a dry summer and not yet replenished by the rains of late fall, the creek is at its lowest and most fordable. Moey reaches the woman’s side in minutes.
“My cat,” she moans, clutching her ankle. “My cat.”
A foreign tourist, Moey thinks.
“No, that’s your ankle,” he corrects gently, kneeling beside her. “Let me see if it’s broken. Broken, you know?” He pantomimes breaking a stick in two. “Crack!”
Groaning, she permits him to remove the sandal and sock on her left foot. The swelling there and her squeal of pain at his prodding tell Moey all he needs to know.
“Broken,” he says smugly. “Thought so.”
“Broken? But what about my cat?”
“Your ...?”
She stabs a finger towards the bushes. “My cat. She took off in that direction. She can’t be out here at night. The coyotes will get her.”