Canyon Sacrifice. Scott Graham
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over to the canyon rim for sunset.
Chuck sat in a folding chair in front of the campsite’s ash-filled fire pit with a bottle of beer in hand, absorbed in his thoughts. Janelle sat next to him, her fingers tapping on the tiny keyboard attached to the Internet-enabled tablet computer balanced in her lap.
The fifteen-year age difference between Chuck and Janelle made for a gaping divide between them in any number of aspects—including their comfort levels with all things high tech. Chuck used plenty of technology in the course of his work, of course, relying on a digital transit, fluxgate magnetometer, and wheeled spectrometer to perform initial site assessments and determine how best to string grids and proceed with digs. He cataloged finds in spreadsheets on his laptop at the end of each field day, prepared reports and bids with the aid of ArchLogical software, and kept in close contact with contract administrators via text and email. His personal life, on the other hand, was decidedly low tech. Prior to meeting Janelle, his days away from work had revolved primarily around fly fishing the waters of the Animas River flowing through Durango, his nights around weekly poker games with a small circle of friends from his high-school days, and shooting pool an additional night or two a week with the same handful of buddies.
As his work grew more technological, Chuck had gone the opposite direction when it came to the one pastime he was truly passionate about: elk hunting. Each autumn he scheduled the timing of his contracts to give himself a two-week break, which he spent hiking through the high country north of Durango dawn to dusk in search of the elusive ungulates. He’d hunted with a high-powered rifle and scope for a number of years, until he’d grown uncomfortable with how easy it became to spot the movement of animals as far as half a mile away using his peripheral vision, a critical hunting skill, then close in and drop an unsuspecting elk with a five-hundred-yard shot. He took to hunting only with open sights, which required him to stalk within two hundred yards of an elk to make a reliable kill. After several more seasons, he increased the degree of difficulty of his fall hunts even more by switching from his 30.06 to a Civil War-era muzzle loader, which had a reliable firing range of only a hundred yards.
As he upped the challenge of his hunts over the years, Chuck remained committed to never wounding and losing an animal. Never again, anyway.
The first year he hunted elk, Chuck saw few tracks and not a single animal. He spotted elk his second year, but none were within range. During his third October hunt, he lined up a three-hundred-yard shot on a good-sized bull standing just below the top of a steep ridge.
Chuck steadied himself against the trunk of a tree and squeezed the trigger. He planned for the shot to drop several inches over the three-football-field distance to its target, but he didn’t account for the added bullet drop resulting from the shot’s uphill trajectory from his location at the foot of the ridge. That additional drop turned what should have been a clean kill into a shot that only wounded the bull. When the bullet clipped its ribcage below its heart and lungs, the elk stumbled, regained its footing, and charged up and over the ridge and out of sight.
Chuck tracked the bull until dark and resumed the search at dawn, following drops of blood, broken branches where the wounded animal had pushed blindly through thickets, and an occasional hoof print in dirt. Nearly eighteen hours after being wounded, the elk’s meat by then was unsalvageable. Still, Chuck kept tracking the animal, unable to bear the thought of leaving the bull to a lingering death. Late in the morning, he broke from a stand of trees into an open meadow. A flock of magpies rose, squawking, from knee-high grass thirty yards ahead. At the spot where the birds had risen, he came upon all that was left of the bull: a shredded ribcage, a few stray bits of hide, and the animal’s skull with a line of vertebrae attached to its base. The tines of the bull’s antlers, protruding from the skull, pointed accusingly up at him from the grass. Scat from the pack of coyotes that had ended the bull’s misery was scattered thickly around what was left of the animal.
Never again, Chuck swore that day. Never again, when presented with a shot, would he squeeze the trigger unless he knew with absolute certainty he would instantly end the animal’s life. In the years since, by sticking to his pledge, Chuck had become an expert woodsman, capable of moving in complete silence across any terrain, alert to the slightest changes in wind direction, able to recognize the barest outlines of animals more than a mile away. He’d learned that the way to rise to the challenge of hunting ghost-like elk was to become ghost-like himself, and he’d never lost an animal since.
Chuck took a swallow of beer as Janelle tapped away at her computer beside him. Janelle’s highly interactive social life was hardly ghost-like. She updated her Facebook page every few hours, and gossiped online and on the phone with her girlfriends all day, every day. Right now, with her daily, dinner-hour phone call to her parents still to come, she no doubt was divulging personal details of her first-ever visit to the Grand Canyon for all the world to see. She didn’t hide from Chuck the leading role he played in her various communication streams these days, though when she tried to let him in on everything she posted about him online, he politely begged off having to listen.
His heart sank as his thoughts turned to Janelle’s comments in the museum corridor. Was their marriage destined to end before it had a chance to begin? If so, Janelle would go back to Albuquerque. She would pick up where she’d left off, surrounded by family and friends. She’d be fine. So, too, would the girls. But what of him?
Suddenly he understood what it was that had driven Donald to drink in the years following his divorce.
Janelle must have felt Chuck’s eyes on her. “Need something?” she asked, without looking up.
“Just enjoying looking at you.”
She smiled and continued typing.
Chuck drained his beer. At least the hatchet had been a success. A piece of himself he’d shared with Janelle and the girls. And they’d liked it, hadn’t they? That proved there was at least some sort of overlap between him and the three of them. He just had to dedicate himself to finding more of those points of crossover, that was all.
He pushed himself from his chair. “I’m gonna hit the john.”
Janelle nodded without looking up, her fingers flying.
After visiting the bathroom, Chuck made his way through the campground row by row. Donald had said the woman from Maricopa Point was here at Mather somewhere. Chuck checked car license plates as he approached each campsite. Within a few minutes, he passed vehicles from Arkansas, Washington, D.C., Maine, and North Dakota. He passed two campsites with cars bearing New Mexico plates, but did not catch sight of the woman at either one. At a campsite at the far end of the campground, he spotted a ranger sedan parked in front of a large black SUV with gleaming chrome wheels.
Chuck scanned the site from behind a thin screen of brush. The patrol car blocked his view of the SUV’s license plate. A uniformed ranger stood beside the park vehicle. Chuck recognized the trim athletic figure and blaze-orange hair of Rachel Severin, Grand Canyon National Park ranger and adventure-race fanatic. And there, facing Rachel, was the woman from Maricopa Point, speaking angrily and jabbing the air with a pudgy, red-nailed finger. Behind her, a discount-store dome tent stood on the site’s gravel tent pad. No other camping gear was in evidence.
The woman looked in Chuck’s direction. Their eyes met through the brush, causing her to stop her rant in mid-sentence. Chuck froze, waiting for the woman to point him out to Rachel. Instead, the woman turned back to the ranger and resumed her diatribe.
Spooked, Chuck made for the nearest bathroom building. He ducked behind it and peeked back around the corner of the building in time to see Rachel climb behind the wheel of her ranger sedan while the woman kept right on with her tirade. Rachel pulled away from the campsite with a courteous wave to the woman, who glared after her, finally silent.
Chuck hurried across the campground as Rachel headed around the one-way loop leading to the exit. He reached the exit just ahead of Rachel and flagged her down. She stopped in the middle of the drive and looked up at him from her car window.
“Rachel,” Chuck greeted her. Butterflies fluttered unexpectedly in his stomach.
“Donald said you were here.”