Finishing Echo’s improvised lifting harness with one-hand, I detangled my arm from the maze of roots and slowly backed out of the shallow crevice, then hung in the air, trying to rub some feeling back into my legs.
Most of the truck’s cargo line had been secured above, where a fifty-foot bridle was stretched between two trees, allowing me to choose the pick point of my descent.
Thanks to decades of working aloft, I had nothing more than a healthy respect for high places, and was completely in my element on that eighty-degree slope, fifty feet above the rocks below, or I would have been, if I had remembered to put my fucking climbing harness back in the truck…
… and had about two hundred more feet of line… a million dollars… and a pony…
… and Echo wasn’t shaking so hard…
… and her breath wasn’t so uneven…
… and it wasn’t Saturday morning…
… and Brooks would pick up the damn phone…
… but most of all, I wished that I was the sailor I had once been: a man who could walk in the sky, breath fire, and was ten-feet-tall, but that was years ago,, and now I had been hanging by one hand for what, fifteen minutes? Climbing back to the rim was at least twenty feet up… and with Echo’s weight over my shoulders… could I still do it?
My voice of doubt was screaming, “Mark, you just ran half-a-mile, half in sand, the other half uphill, packing your rescue kit, then bushwhacked along the top of the cliff until you could see down to where your quarterstaff pointed to where Echo had fallen.
Everything you have done up to this moment has been reactive.
Stop.
Echo is dying. It will do no good if you die trying to help.
Stop. Think. Save Echo. Do the impossible thing she already has…
… fall with style.
And she had, sliding over the edge, caching hold of exposed roots with her teeth and claws slowing her freefall, digging wildly, until the furrow she plowed became a narrow shelf… and still she dug… until the seemingly inevitable thud was only a clatter of gravel, and Echo was tangled in a self-made hollow of roots, fifty feet up.
If I no longer had the strength, but did I have her style? Was there still part of me that was ten feet tall?
I was time to find out.
My phone number hadn’t changed since the invention of the analog cell network. Every time I bought a phone my contacts were copied into a new contact list. “Please still be there,” I whispered, speed dialing.
It didn’t even ring before a young man answered crisply, “What’s your situation, Sir?”
(My God, was that giggling in the background?) “Sorry,” I said, confused, “I was trying for 911 NAVMAG dispatch. Must be an old number.”
“I… I think we can lend a hand… Mr. Olson,” the voice answered, obviously trying to remain serious. “We’ll send a team right over.” The voices in the background had given up on subtlety and switched to gales of laughter. I heard dispatch muffle his mic and yell, “Zip it!” before coming back on, “Will it be just the dog, Sir, or do you think you can make it back up?”
I hung up, stowed my phone, flipped off the sky, told Echo to stay, and started to climb.
Morning over the Portage.
Drone’s-eye-view. Cliffs are just south in Brooks’ photo.
The lagoon spit, where Echo and Stick Hunter first became Robin Hood and Little John
Photo by Brooks