|
Up the Mountain
The trail vanished shortly after the first flakes began to fall. They’d been three days up the mountain, separated by about twelve hours, though Cole had gotten close enough once to smell the remnants of Vic Jasper’s campfire. His eyes near shut from the frigid wind, the left foot maybe dead in its fur-lined boot, and a small, hard, tight ball of hate in his belly drove him forward and upward.
“Why you gotta do this?” Somewhere mixed into the roar of the wind in his ears he could hear Betsy’s voice calling after him. He wasn’t sure if he was remembering it or hearing it now as he climbed. Ignoring it, as he had since this whole thing started, he stretched his good arm up, feeling around in the snow for a bit of rock to grasp hold of. The climb was easier, now that he’d gotten rid of his pack. A few hours back, just as the snow started falling, he’d stood at the end of the trail that once had passed between the jagged peaks. In the night, Cole realized, while he had eaten a salty strip of pork and broke a tooth on his last biscuit, Jasper must have figured out some way to cause a rockslide. No way through this time of year for any sane man, he thought. You ain’t been sane since he did what he done. Cole had nodded quietly in agreement with her, then. He left everything there but his rifle, his gun, and his hate, and began climbing up and after him.
Cole kept seeing apparitions in the snow and only some instinct kept him from firing off shots, thinking they were Jasper, even when they looked like him. Like the swirling, drifting snow, the visions rose up around him, and though he kept putting one foot in front of the other, and kept pulling himself up higher and higher, he no longer saw the frozen night sky above. Instead, he saw the warm, orange haze of a fire just beyond the hill on the edge of his land. Saw himself spurring his horse faster, then, racing toward something he hoped he wouldn’t see. The rest is a dissonance of images. Flames all around him and on him as he burst through the door of his home. The sticky black trail of blood stained into the floor. The broken, blistering body of Betsy lying naked on a bed of fire. He’d grabbed her and carried her out into the snow, eyes stinging as his body shook from the grief and rage and cold. Collapsing next to her, his own dead eyes staring into hers, he’d remembered the way Jasper had looked at her when he thought Cole wasn’t watching. That was more than half why Cole had sent the ranch hand packing. More than half why he was dead certain who’d done this. He’d took one last look back as he rode off in pursuit, then headed up the mountain.
Twelve hours, now, since he’d left the pack and started climbing. Up the mountain, but, he knew, not back down it.
_________________
Daily art blog Very Short Drawings
Pay a visit to The Writers' Block, where writers, uh...write stuff!
Read my comic strip A Boy Called Monk
Read my comic book Town of Shadows
|
