High Country- Pigeon 12 Read Free Page B

do with Yosemite Valley. The park's rangers sat back complacently waiting for their enlightened offspring to lead the way. The consensus of the kids from Yosemite was that a Costco and an orthodontist should be added to the village's repertoire. The three-hour round-trip drive to these necessities was a very real burden to them.
     
    During her college days Anna and others had contemplated monkeywrenching the village infrastructure in hopes of driving out the urban blight. Thirty years later and now, at least temporarily, a resident, she was sympathetic with the children; she was was glad she didn't have to drive eighty miles every time she ran out of shampoo.
     
    Civilization was comfortable.
     
    Anna dearly hoped she'd never reach the point where the love of comfort outweighed her love of the natural world, but she wasn't about to make any rash promises even in the privacy of her own skull.
     
    As they left the store, passing the statuesque twin pines which graced the entrance, Anna decided to nudge.
     
    "Let's go down toward Yosemite Lodge. I'll buy you a drink." Mary would have hot chocolate, but the alcoholic phrasing flattered the girl's youth and fit with Anna's assumed role. Since Anna had picked Mary up she'd kept herself open, warm, fun and funny, winning the girl's trust. This was the first time she would use it.
     
    Set the hook before you reel her in, Anna thought sourly as Mary bobbed charmingly along at her elbow. Too good a catch to throw back, she told herself philosophically and began:
     
    "That Dixon guy, the one that got himself lost with those others, didn't he live in a camp somewhere down here?"
     
    "Yup. Camp 4. It's really famous. Climbers come from all over. They're a wild bunch. Sort of a force unto themselves. Wanna go see it? It's just past the lodge."
     
    Candy from a baby. "Sure. Did you know him? Dixon? That would be pretty creepy."
     
    "Not know him," Mary admitted reluctantly. Like most people, she wanted to be in the center of the excitement even if only by association. She was a longtime park-dweller, and Anna ostensibly in Yosemite for the first time. It would be tempting to anyone to embroider the truth to such a willing believer. Anna admired her for resisting.
     
    "I've seen him around to talk to," she went on quickly lest Anna be disappointed. "You pretty much see everybody around if you live here.
     
    "Dixon was cool. The other guys call him Spiderman. Once he climbed Half Dome in the morning-an unassisted climb, you know, just fingers and toes and a belay-then he ran down and over to El Cap and climbed it in the afternoon. Nobody'd ever done that before. He always looked kind of wild with all that hair and that smile. Kind of like Lawrence of Arabia but not so pale and faggoty. More like that other guy, the black-robed guy."
     
    "Omar Sharif?"
     
    "I guess. But taller. Oh, I'm screwing it up but Dix was a rock: real and hard and unfathomable."
     
    Dixon Crofter had been a resident on and off for three years. He would have come on the scene when Mary was fourteen. A good time for a man to steal a girl's heart without even being aware of it. At fourteen it was still acceptable to love pure and chaste from afar. Anna suspected Mary had yet to let go of this girlish habit where the lean and romantic climber dude was concerned.
     
    "Dix was always scruffy but backpacker scruffy. You know-fine."
     
    Anna knew. Even at her age there remained an attraction to scruffy young men, though in recent years, she'd been content to merely admire them from a distance, the way she did mountain lions and grizzly bear cubs.
     
    "This is it," Mary announced.
     
    They had passed the lodge and arrived at the notorious Camp 4. It was set in a field of boulders that dwarfed the tents and trees. Despite the inclement weather, men were out climbing. A new breed of climber had sprung up since Anna first visited Yosemite Valley back in college: sport climbers, people who eschewed the long