The Wall Read Free

and probably faster, and clear of the poison ivy and oak woven among the underbrush. For that matter, he didn’t need to be here at all, slaving this load through the forest on his final afternoon on the ground. His partner Lewis had said the extra water was overkill. He’d insisted they had plenty to last them on the wall. Hugh could have been back at the cabins resting right now.
    But what if we aren’t who we were? They had been young once, and now they were not. And El Cap was no longer necessary to him.
    The pear. He returned to it. Keep it tight. Simple. Small thoughts for grand designs.
    It was an eighty-nine-cent Bosch pear, the type Annie used to love. He imagined the blade of his Swiss Army knife cutting neat sections. He would eat it at their cache at the base of El Cap. He would have it in slices, resting on his back. That kept him in motion, casting himself at this thing that did not need him.
    For the moment, he could pretend to be a pilgrim lost in a dark wood at the foot of the mountain, though the woods were not so much dark as the walls above were so bright. And climbers never called El Cap a mountain.
    The forest thickened. It had been a drought summer. The leaves were dry as old newspaper. Twigs scratched against his pack. Acorn shells lay scattered, emptied far ahead of winter by hungry animals. Deprived of rain, the dusty rhododendrons looked unwashed. The locals were all quoting the Farmers’ Almanac to each other, predicting an early winter and tons of snow.
    Not much more now, a few hundred yards at most. There is a way to rest while walking that he’d learned by watching porters in Nepal. With each step, you trade the whole weight of your burden from one leg to the other…then lock and pause…then step again. Done right, a person can go all day with it.
    He stopped abruptly, on instinct.
    The water rocked on his back like ten tiny seas. One foot forward, the other knee locked, he stood in place. Something had changed. But what?
    He waited with his head and body pitched against the pack weight. He let his senses roam. The forest had quit moving. There was no scurry of squirrels. The jays had fallen silent. The air was still.
    Whatever the animals had sensed, he was sensing it last. It made him feel dull and vulnerable. A moment before, he’d been synched into the forest’s flow. Now, suddenly, he was alone. And yet not alone.
    It might be a predator. There were bears, though the decades of tourism had turned them into garbage mutts. Or a coyote gone rabid. Or a mountain lion. During his long absence from the States, they’d migrated throughout the Sierras. Joggers and mountain bikers were getting dragged down on the outskirts of L.A.
    Something was watching him.
    He waited patiently. Not a motion broke the jungly screen. No birds sailed through the trees. Hugh turned heavily, and there was nothing downslope either.
    With a glance up at El Cap, he decided it was all inside his head. He had doubts about the climb, and so now his doubts were prowling the forest.
    He shrugged the pack higher and continued on. The little seas sloshed by his ears. Sweat hit the rocks in polka dots. The pear.
    The air took on a smell. It reminded him of a hunter’s camp. But this was Yosemite, and there were no hunters.
    A kill, he guessed. That would explain the stillness and this scent of fresh meat. One animal had taken another.
    He reached the edge of a small clearing. A woman was in there. The red bark glistened. It didn’t register at first. He almost went around.
    She was taking a nap, obviously. This was her privacy. But with a second glance, a guilty one, a widower’s glance, he realized this was the crux of the forest’s sudden hush.
    She rested on her back on a flat talus slab, face up to the wall of golden light. He took it in. Small breasts. A jut of pelvis. Brown hair braided with beads the color of a rainbow. Her chin was tucked just slightly.
    For a moment, his mind refused the awful truth. She