The Burning Man - Ch. 2

II. The Slope

“Wait,” her father had told her, and so Brooke did. Watching with drawn eyes as he bobbed up and went down under the slope. There was no noise anywhere. Even the wind seemed to quiet in anticipation. He stopped to look back only once. She could still feel where his hand had pinched her shoulder.

The blizzard let up and they found their spirits uplifted. Her father steadied his pace so they could ride side-by-side. Neither spoke. They were too tired. But they could both feel the warmth of relief. For an hour they rode like this. Then they came to a large slope that folded into the sky and dove under the ground.

“How are we gonna get across, Daddy?” Brooke asked, intimidated by the sheer size of the thing.

Her father mulled it over. He knew that to go over it was dangerous, but that to go around was impossible. To course around the bluff meant many more miles to ride across and it would be near-dark soon. He could tell that Brooke was getting weak, even if she was too proud to let it show, and that their horses were being driven only by impulse. But still. His eyes surveyed the monolithic hill with a mounting hopelessness that he tried his best to hide.

“Daddy?” she repeated, her voice less sure than before.

“I'm thinking,” was his reply.

He paced the horse around in a circle and lowered the thin cloth around his face. Brooke observed him curiously.

“It's hard to tell what kind of terrain we're looking at,” he mused out-loud.

He gazed up at the treacherous white. So tranquil and innocent against the otherwise blue sky. Beautiful country. Goddamn beautiful. Some of the finest he's seen. But also dangerous. Deadly even, if you didn't treat it with the proper respect.

His concerns were lost on the child. Her face just registered a growing fear and an eager impatience. He slung the rifle that hung around his shoulders into his palms and stomped the butt of it into the soft snow beneath him.

“If the ground up there is soft like this then it's no good. We can't ride it.” he explained slowly. “There's no telling how deep it gets on the incline. If we were to lose our footing at any time we would certainly be stranded.”

“Can't we just go around?” she asked.

“We can,” he replied, “but we'd have to ride a lot further. Maybe even camp out here tonight. We can't ride after dark, you know that, and I'm not so sure that our horses would even make it through the night.”

The creature below Brooke felt weak in-between her thighs as if standing through sheer instinct and supporting her weight by only a stupid animal loyalty. She coursed her hand through it's fur. It was tangled and clotted with ice.

“I can ride ahead and scout the slope,” he then said, “but that means you're going to wait here alone. It could be half an hour.”

“Don't leave me alone, Daddy.”

“Or we can try our luck and ride around.”

“What do you think we should do?”

“It's your choice.”

She looked up at the slope and then to the boundless landscape to the left of it. Her father sat as quietly as a statue.

“I can wait,” she spoke at last.

He raised the cloth back up around his face and pinched Brooke sternly on the shoulder. ”Now, if you find yourself in danger before I return, fire a single shot into the sky and I'll come right back,” he said. “But only real danger, okay? I need you to be brave for me.”

She promised that she would be brave and not shoot unless it was absolutely necessary.

“You're going to come back for me, right?” she asked and grabbed her father's coat. She felt bad for thinking it and even worse for thinking it out-loud.

Her father didn't respond, or if he did, let the silence act as his reply. He pulled out of her fingers.

“It's going to be okay,” he said.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

By the time she thought to remove the Indian bead bracelet fastened around her wrist and give it to him for good luck he had already disappeared into the snow. Her ears followed the sound of the horse whinnies until they became inseparable from the yelling of the wind.

Brooke then found herself alone and frightened again. She took her rifle into her palms. The butt of the rifle sat thickly in-between her hands and she could feel that they were both shaking. She looked up at the sky. It seemed like such a small target. She then studied the rise of the slope and waited.