The Serpents Trail Page 7

  “Good,” said Ed. “Then we’re off. How was your afternoon?”

  I was about to tell him of my discovery in Sarah’s secret bookcase space, but hesitated, something telling me to wait until I knew more about that letter and the envelopes; remembering my thought that the letter might have been meant for someone other than Alan—even possibly, Ed. The idea seemed a little ridiculous. What could he have to do with it? But I held my tongue and told him instead about the second break-in.

  “You didn’t call the police?” he asked, when I had finished relating the tale of my search of the house with Tomas. “Why not?”

  “Everything had been thoroughly searched, so I doubt whoever it was will be back,” I told him, wondering if I had been remiss in not making that phone call and to excite neighborhood gossip by bringing officers swooping in again on Chipeta Avenue. “I’d be willing to bet that if he didn’t find what he was looking for, by now he must think it isn’t there to be found.”

  “So, you think he was looking for something specific?”

  “I got that impression from the way it was searched.”

  Ed was silent for a few minutes, thinking as he turned off Seventh and we were shortly starting up Horizon.

  “What if he comes back?” he asked, frowning in concern. “Are you planning to move into the house? Or will you stay in that motor home of yours?”

  “Stay in the Winnebago, I think. I’m very fond of this new rig and I like sleeping in my own bed. Stretch will be more comfortable there, too—in a place he’s used to.”

  Ed was silent and thoughtful for a minute or two longer, then his scowl was replaced by a grin as he glanced over his shoulder at my dachshund, who was standing with both front feet on the narrow windowsill so he could watch what we were passing. “Tell me about this ferocious beast of yours,” he said. “Seems like good company.”

  So I told him about Stretch being Daniel’s dog to begin with and how it had taken him a few weeks to totally accept me as part of the immediate family when Dan and I married. “When he stopped barking every time I came in the door, I knew we were on the right track.”

  “How old is he?”

  “He’ll be seven in May and will probably be around for another five or six years, maybe more. That’s about average for the breed.”

  “He must have missed Daniel, when he died.”

  “We both did.” I thought back to that sad time and how Stretch and I had been comfort for each other.

  “For weeks, he would start out the night sleeping in his basket. Then, sometime after midnight, I would wake to hear him whining beside my bed. I’d reach down and lift him up so he could crawl under a blanket I kept for him there and cuddle up next to me.”

  That warmth in the dark had been more than welcome and cemented our relationship as we both worked our way through the grief of losing Dan. I recalled how Stretch had seemed to know things were not right in my world, either, and was often solicitous during that time. He still was at times, if I was sick or sad for some reason. But now he usually slept in his own bed.

  “Too high for him to jump up?” Ed asked.

  “Yes, with those short legs he needs a lift. I’m particularly careful to lift him down. It’s not good for a dachshund’s back to jump down from any height. They tend to have disc problems—that long shape doesn’t provide as much support for the spine as other kinds of dogs have. He’s very quick, though. I wasn’t prompt enough when he decided to launch himself a couple of feet from my porch into a wading pool, but it never seemed to hurt him and he finds it irresistible, don’t you lovie?” I addressed Stretch, who, instinctively knowing he was the subject of conversation, had determined to be the physical focus of it as well and come clambering forward between the front seats. I lifted him into my lap, where he gave my nose a lick of thanks and, paws on the armrest of the passenger door, resumed his out-the-window watching.

  Ed reached across to give him a pat. “Good dog.”

  The disdainful glance Stretch cast back at him said clearly, “You expected anything else?”

  Partway along Horizon Drive, Ed turned onto Highway I-70 and picked up speed, so it took us only a few minutes to arrive at Fruita, a smaller community a few miles northwest of Grand Junction. There, we turned off and headed toward the west entrance to the Colorado National Monument. Most locals simply refer to it as the Monument, and I agree that it’s less of a mouthful.

  As he pulled up at the kiosk at the west entrance to this national park, Ed reached for the wallet he had tossed onto the dashboard and I noticed that the card he removed and handed to the attendant was not an annual pass to all the national parks, as is the one I’ve renewed and carried every year since I began my travels. It was annual, all right, and current, but specific to the Colorado National Monument. I wondered why, considering that he wasn’t a resident who might like frequent access to this local park.

  “How long has it been since you saw Sarah, Ed?” I asked him, as we drove away from the kiosk.

  There was a hesitation before he answered and it seemed to me that his attention to the gentle curves in the road as it began to climb upward was just a shade too vigilant. He cleared his throat, and said in a carefully casual voice, “I saw her once last spring on my way through from a meeting in Denver.”

  The sidelong glance he cast in my direction told me he was gauging my reaction to this statement.

  “Cost you less to buy a temporary pass,” I suggested. “Only five bucks a week.”

  “Oh, I just like to support the national parks,” he told me, still paying more than required attention to the road ahead, as it began to wind its way up. “This annual pass for the Monument was only fifteen dollars for a year.”

  To me it seemed another indication that he had, perhaps, been here to see Sarah more often than he was willing to admit, but I kept my questions to myself, assuming he would say more if he wanted me to know.

  Sarah’s husband, Bill Nunamaker, had died several years before I lost my Daniel, and she had been alone since. Perhaps sometime in that interim she and Ed had found each other again and been, as the old term says, “keeping company.” It could have happened, especially considering the history of his affection for Sarah during those college years. Though back then she and I had made little of my temporary crush on Ed, the memory of that somewhat awkward fascination might have made her reticent to mention to me that they were seeing each other again. It might even be making Ed uncomfortable now. Even graying and bearing the documentation of our years in form and face, somewhere inside we are all twenty years old, I thought, amused, and decided once again to let it go. Instead of asking questions, I turned to consider the scenery as we began to drive by some of the colorful sandstone and shale that forms the cliffs and ledges of the Monument.

  The twenty-three-mile Rim Rock Drive we were about to travel climbs more than 1,700 feet—from approximately 4,200 feet above sea level in the Colorado River’s Grand Valley to about 5,800 feet as it snakes along the edge of the plateau, with the highest point on the drive at 6,640 feet. Sagebrush abundantly populates the lower elevations with puffs of silvery gray-green, interspersed with stiffer and more irregular branches of ragged saltbush. Rolling my window all the way down, I caught a hint of the pungent scent of sage warmed by the sun, which I have always loved. In a sudden flash of motion, a cottontail rabbit ran across the pavement in front of us. As it bounced out of sight through the brush, it exposed the white tail that gave it its name.

  The road at first rose gradually between buttes on both sides, slipping in and out of the late afternoon shadows on the curves until we reached a loop to the right that headed almost back the direction from which we had come. Looking up, I was able to get a view of a huge, almost oval piece of pink sandstone that had once been a part of a cliff behind it. Erosion had worn away the connection between the two and finally left this rock improbably balanced atop its base, looking as if it would topple at the slightest whisper of a breeze. Another loop, to the
left this time, and the road climbed more steeply as we passed through two short tunnels before reaching a pullout with space for parking, beyond which a path led to the edge of the high plateau we had now reached.

  Ed pulled in and the three of us got out to follow the path to an area where we could look down into the canyon. Though it had cooled off appreciably, the sun was still warm on my back as I stood leaning against a chest-high barrier and found myself looking over the face of a cliff that dropped straight off practically under my feet, giving me a slightly dizzy feeling.

  I’m not acrophobic, but it would have been a long vertical fall to the road we had recently traveled below. We were so high that I found myself looking down at a raven that was soaring in circles near the cliff face, much to the displeasure of a number of smaller birds. White-throated swifts, well-named for their speed in the air, spun and twisted in aerial acrobatics around the larger, darker bird, and the air was full of their shrill twittering cries as they joined forces in an attempt to chase it away. Slightly smaller swallows had joined the seemingly frantic effort, their plumage flashing a metallic green as they flitted out of the shadow of the cliff into the sunshine.

  Stretch suddenly interrupted our concentration by deciding to yap at a green and yellow collared lizard that skittered from atop a boulder into a crack in the rock. I shushed his barking, and we went back to watching the drama below as the raven stubbornly continued to fly loops and circles in the air, evading concerted attacks. Finally, enough of the smaller birds gathered to drive the bigger bird off, and it glided away to some other part of the Monument.

  “I know people like that,” Ed commented with a grin from where he was leaning both forearms on the barrier to watch. “Coast along, refusing to give up until they’re given what-for by an overwhelming majority.”

  I turned to find that inveterate explorer Stretch had wandered away again, off the path this time, and was growling at something I couldn’t see in the brush. Stepping over to see what he was harassing, I froze at a sudden buzz from a flat piece of pink sandstone near a yucca plant. The sinister rattle revealed the coiled snake that Stretch had interrupted as it was catching the last warmth of the afternoon sun. Its forked tongue darted from the mouth of a triangular head to taste the enemy threat and the tail was a blur of motion. It was not large—uncoiled, would probably have been less than two feet—and did not exhibit what I remembered from pictures as dark diamond-shaped patterns on western rattlers. Instead the blotches on its back were a faded reddish color.

  This was an unfamiliar confrontation for Stretch and, not inclined to retreat, especially when an opponent is close to his size, he was standing his ground almost within striking distance. Dachshunds were originally bred for hunting small game and are tenacious in pursuit. True to his breed, Stretch was stubbornly, fearlessly challenging the serpent.

  Before my heart stopped completely, or he could attack, I snatched him up and out of danger, which he let me know he resented by struggling to be put down again as I stepped back to watch the snake uncoil and slither away. Returning to the path, I held Stretch so tightly he whined.

  The whole drama had taken only a minute or two.

  “Did I hear a rattler?” Ed asked, catching up.

  I nodded and kept a firm hold on Stretch until we were back in the car. “Dumb! I never even thought about snakes,” I said, when I had caught my breath. “We don’t have snakes in Alaska, but I should have remembered that down here they do and put him on his leash.”

  I have no phobia about snakes; just a healthy respect and caution, not always knowing which ones may be poisonous. Spiders and creeping bugs, however—especially those with hard carapaces and scratchy feet—make my skin crawl, as I told Ed.

  “Good,” he said, with a shiver that hunched his shoulders. “I can’t stand snakes. I’ll take care of the spiders and bugs. You’re in charge of snakes.”

  I realized that, typically, I had been more frightened after than during the incident. Thinking how quickly I could have lost Stretch made me feel a little sick. For the rest of the day I kept him close on his leash. Though I stayed on the paths, I saw the potential for snakes everywhere—crooked sticks appeared to slither, I imagined that I saw serpents coiled in shadows and shied away from cracks in rocks.

  We drove on, soon coming to a place where, without leaving the car, we could look out across the width of the Grand Valley to the Book Cliffs I had seen on my way into the airport terminal that morning. Not limited to framing the eastern side of the valley, I knew that they extended in a huge, sweeping, sinuous S curve for two hundred and fifty miles—all the way to Price, Utah—for I had driven those miles on my way into Grand Junction, with their folds in the distance. In the brightness of the setting sun, the broad layers of different types of stone that formed the cliffs and lined the horizon were a spectacular rainbow from the warm side of the color spectrum—reds, golds, magentas—separated by vertical folds of deep purple-blue shadow.

  In September, most of the crush of tourists that crowd the Monument during the summer months has gone, especially families who need to tuck their children back into school for another year. Though the road along the rim is open around the clock, at that late afternoon hour there were fewer people enjoying its views and we had not encountered a great deal of traffic. So we were both unpleasantly surprised when, as Ed was about to pull back onto Rim Rock Drive, a horn suddenly blared a warning from the right and a small dark car sped past, going much faster than was allowed on this winding, thirty-five-mile-an-hour road with its many blind corners and pullouts busy with people paying more attention to the views than to oncoming vehicles. Jamming on the brake, Ed tossed us both abruptly forward against our seat belts. “Where the hell did he come from?” he demanded angrily. “Are you okay?”

  I assured him I was, scooped Stretch from where he had tumbled to the floor at my feet, and, after a moment or two to regroup, Ed cautiously resumed our drive—grumbling under his breath about inconsiderate idiots and reckless drivers.

  We passed an attractive visitor center, now closed for the day, and continued on along the winding road, our attention drawn back to the fantastic effects of wind and water and ice on sandstone.

  Throughout the Monument are magnificent standing stones carved over measureless eons of time from solid walls between the canyons. Many of these monoliths have been given descriptive names: Organ Pipe, Kissing Couple, Coke Ovens, and Independence Monument, for instance. The area is also a geologist’s dream in terms of fossils and, in the very shadow of the Monument, rich yields of the bones of dinosaurs and smaller early mammals have been found. Looking down on the canyons and monoliths it was the rock itself that inspired my awe in the variety of its colors and textures. In the glow of the late afternoon sun, the brilliant reds seemed to have an inner light, contrasted against the buffs, purplish grays, and creams that were once the mud and sand deposits of streams, left behind when the water vanished to be transformed over time into the present metamorphic state.

  As the day lengthened, we drove on around the long curve of the Monument, stopping a couple of times—once to gaze into the enormous sweeping reaches of Ute Canyon, named for people who once inhabited large areas of what would become Utah and Colorado. Though we saw none, deep in the canyons these people left evidence of their presence in the artwork they inscribed or painted on the rock, often scenes of hunters on horseback shooting bison. An earlier Fremont people had also depicted human figures, but these are distinctively elongated with broad shoulders, some holding shields and wearing jewelry or sashes. Some of the artwork is scratched or pecked into a dark coating on the rock known as desert varnish, a phenomenon of arid regions formed by minerals that over time leach out of the sandstone and run slowly down over stable rock surfaces in a red to black coating that makes the rock look wet or varnished. When mostly manganese is present, the varnish is black, but it grows redder when more iron oxide is part of the mixture.

  From one of the highest walls a golde
n eagle, larger than any of the hawks, launched itself and dove into the bottom of the canyon in a quest for dinner—perhaps a cottontail, like the one I had seen earlier. I could imagine some poor bunny dashing frantically for cover in the brush, or under an overhanging stone.

  We had seen many small rodents in the shelter of rocks, where they prefer to make their dens, shelter from predators, raise their young, and hibernate in the winter. Several varieties of chipmunks and ground squirrels were much in evidence and drove Stretch frantic with the desire to abandon his leash and chase after them. Yanking at the end of his tether, he barked ferociously at one saucy squirrel that hesitated briefly atop the low wall of a pullout, seeming to taunt him with an awareness of his limitation.

  It was good to get away from Grand Junction and into an unpopulated area. Though with cars passing and parking in the pullouts where people came and went frequently, it was not the same kind of wilderness I am used to in Alaska, but there were no houses, or traffic lights, or the congestion and hum of collective humanity. And there were wild animals, birds, and plants in their natural habitat.

  A mule deer stepped out of cover as we passed and, startled by our moving vehicle, bounded back into hiding. Juniper, which grows in twisted, complex shapes, exuded its sharp scent into the air when I crushed one of its dusty-blue berries between my fingers. The pinion pines were full of dull-blue jays the size of robins, busily collecting the late-summer cones for their seeds.

  The sun went down and traffic thinned as other visitors departed and we progressed along the drive toward the east exit near Grand Junction. We passed the East Glade Park Road turnoff on the right, the pullout for Cold Shivers Point on the left, and there was a short semistraight stretch just ahead before a curve to the left that began a series of sharp turns that would take us down from the plateau. I could see that the right-hand side of that stretch was protected from a drop-off by a neatly built stone wall about eighteen inches high, when something bumped us hard from behind.