Rescuing Riley, Saving Myself Read Free Page B

Utah and Northern Arizona are evidence of erosion as rainwater sought the shortest path to the sea after the final continental uplift. The most dramatic and most developed is, of course, the Grand Canyon, which is hardly a slot anymore, but at some point in time, around twenty million years ago, it started as one. Walking down into a canyon, big or small, feels like walking backward through time, as marked by the striations on the contoured canyon walls distinguishing different periods of sediment deposits.
    Biologically, a slot canyon is a niche most plant and animal species find inhospitable. Very little sunlight reaches the bottom of slot canyons, and when it does, it doesn’t stay long. In the canyons that are the most popular with tourists, the best time to go if you want to take pictures is an hour either side of noon, when you can capture rays of sunlight striking the canyon floor, but it’s also the worst time to go because that’s when everybody goes. At that point, you can’t take a picture without taking a picture of somebody else taking a picture. Early morning or late afternoon, you can have the place all to yourself.
    Without sunlight, little grows in a slot canyon, maybe a bit of moss somewhere below a shelf where it stays damp and shaded. You might see snakes, scorpions, stink beetles, black flies, and you can see quite a number of birds that build homes on the walls where predators cannot reach them, marked by smears of white bird guano striping the walls below their nests. You can estimate the high water mark in a slot canyon by where the birds build their nests. I’ve hiked in slot canyons where I’ve passed under logjam thirty and forty feet overhead, left by flash floods.
    I walked and scrambled over fallen rocks for a quarter mile along a winding corridor, descending another fifty feet of elevation, until I reached what I knew would be my final rappel, a fifteen-foot drop over a ledge and down a chute leading to what appeared to be a somewhat deep pothole. Beyond the pothole, a rise of about five feet. What was on the other side of that, I couldn’t tell. I pulled myself up to the top of the ledge and looked down into the hole.
    I saw something, and my heartbeat quickened. The astonishment I felt went beyond mere surprise. There was an immediate surreality, the way you feel when you wake up in the morning and you can’t tell where the dream you were having ends and the day begins.
    I saw, unless I was hallucinating, a dog.
    But that was crazy.
    I tried to think of what else it could be. The creature had exaggerated pelvic and shoulder bones protruding from beneath matted black fur. Maybe a baby calf , I thought. Maybe it had somehow wandered far from the herd and had gotten trapped. I tried to think of where it might have come from. The closest town of Page, just south of the Utah–Arizona state line and the Glen Canyon Dam, was too far away. The landscape where I entered the canyon was more high desert than cattle or range land, but perhaps there was a ranch nearby, a fence down somewhere.
    It felt utterly strange to look at an animal and not know for certain what kind of animal it was. Clearly the thing in the bottom of the hole was suffering from extreme malnutrition and starvation, so emaciated that it didn’t look like a dog any more—if that’s, in fact, what it was.
    “Hey!” I called out softly. I wanted to be gentle to it, and I didn’t want to frighten it.
    I needn’t have worried. It didn’t look up or show any sign that it heard me. It only paced back and forth, head down because it didn’t have the strength to lift it. It was weakened, desperate, looking for a way out, walking back and forth, as if hoping the rock walls would open up somehow. The pothole was perhaps fifteen feet deep from where I crouched and eight feet across. The rim opposite me was maybe ten feet from the bottom, the hole shaped more like a ladle than a bowl.
    The animal’s fur was black and caked with