back before we leave,” Ethan said. “I have some stuff I’m sure the girl will trade for. When I leave the French embassy, the only thing I’m taking with me is my magic spoon.”
Alessia came out of her tent. “What is this talk about a magic spoon?”
“The spoon is magic,” Ethan insisted. “How else could it have crossed the river on its own?”
“It was stolen,” Alessia said. “Why is this spoon so important to you?”
Ethan’s normally cheerful face turned serious. “My mother gave me the spoon the day I left for the corps. I know, kind of a weird gift, but it had belonged to a set passed down from my great grandmother. Sterling silver, mahogany box, red velvet interior. A complete set. Nothing missing. Mom didn’t have much, but she had the silver. Just before I drove off for boot camp, she gave me the spoon and said, “Bring this back, son. Don’t break up my silver set.”
“Why did you not give it back to her?” Alessia asked.
“She died. Brain aneurysm while doing CrossFit. I was deployed overseas at the time.”
“I am so sorry,” Alessia said.
I felt really bad for him. I couldn’t imagine losing my mom. This was the first time he had opened up to me. When we talked, it was always gear, mountains, and climbing. I’d never given a thought to his family. He had never mentioned them.
“I’m sorry too,” I said, which seemed totally inadequate, as it always does.
“It’s fine,” Ethan said, waving us off. “It was a long time ago. I’m just trying to explain why I’m freaked out over the spoon.”
“What about your father? Did you not want to bring the spoon back to him?” Alessia asked.
“By the time I got back from the Mideast, my dad had remarried. His new wife decided to get rid of my mom’s stuff. The set was sold at a garage sale. I have a sister, two years younger than me. She said that the silver set sold for cheap because a spoon was missing.”
“Where does your sister live?” I asked.
“DC. Works for a senator.”
“Does she climb?”
“She’s afraid of heights, and a lot of other things. She got my dad’s genes. I got my mom’s—she always pushed herself to her personal limits, which I guess is what got her in the end. She couldn’t sit still.”
On cue, Ethan got up and started pacing as he drank his tea. When he finished, he dumped the dregs out and said, “I better find the girl before she trades my spoon to someone else. I bet there are fifty people here now. They’re always swapping stuff.”
I got up too. “Alessia and I will check on the rope makers.”
“No,” Alessia said. “I will talk to the girl. I doubt you have anything she will trade for your precious spoon.”
Ethan and I walked up to where they were making rope. They must have worked through the night because there were dozens of yards of thick rope coiled on the ground like enormous pythons. Another group of men had cut down a couple of giant trees and were trimming and sizing them for the platform.
“I want to get my hands on one of those axes and see what that feels like.”
While Ethan played lumberjack, I wandered around until I found Alessia. She was leaning against a tree near the ravine, holding Ethan’s spoon in her hand.
“A necklace for the older girl,” she said. “A bracelet for the younger girl.”
“I think they got the better end of the deal.”
“I think not. I have three sets of identical baubles, which I brought as gifts. All I had to do to make them look valuable was to wear them when I negotiated for the spoon.”
Ethan walked up to us. “My spoon!”
the planks snagged on the river rocks and make what repairs we could to the ropes holding the bridge together. It was hard and tedious work, made harder by being in harness, but the water running over the jagged boulder cooled the air to a tolerable temperature.
High above us, the men had already skidded two gigantic logs to the rim, positioned them so they were jutting out thirty feet over the river, and gotten busy lashing them together. Their next step was to brace the logs by building a scaffolding underneath.
“I’m going up to give them a hand!” I shouted above the roar of the rapids.
Alessia and Ethan gave me a wave. They were in the process of dislodging a very stubborn set of planks. I started jugging myself up to the zip with mechanical ascenders, or Jumars. The temperature seemed to rise every foot I gained. I had to rest and catch my breath every twenty feet. I was taking my final rest twenty feet from the zip when a rock hit me on the shoulder. It felt like a bullet. If I hadn’t been in harness, it would have knocked me from the rope. My right arm went completely numb. My hand dropped from the ascender. Instinctively I hooked the rope with my foot to relieve the strain on my left hand. I was in no danger of falling onto the sharp river rocks, but I was risking a fall the length of my safety rope—jarring and painful, to say nothing about dangling upside down trying to regrab my ascenders. Below, Alessia and Ethan were shifting rocks. Above, men were roping together the bamboo scaffold. No one was paying the slightest attention to me. I could have shouted out, but I wasn’t in enough trouble to warrant that kind of panic. Yet.
More debris fell from where they were building the scaffold, but none of it rained down as hard as the rock that had hit me. I tried to flex my right hand. I wasn’t able to make a fist, but could move it, which was a good sign. I hoped it would get better after a little more rest. The foot I had wrapped around the rope started to tingle. I was going to have to readjust before it fell asleep. I managed to pull myself up just enough to switch feet. I was getting more feeling in my arm. I was able to make a loose fist. Five more minutes, and I’ll be fine, I thought confidently, and that’s when a man above dropped a load of bamboo. The load missed me by an inch, but it was hurtling down like spears aimed directly at the unsuspecting Alessia and Ethan.
“Above!” I shouted. “Above!”
Ethan and Alessia swung out of the way half a second before the bamboo shafts splintered on the rocks where they’d been standing. They waved. I waved back, forgetting that my right arm was injured. I don’t think I screamed, but Alessia swears that I did. She was up her rope and next to me a full minute before Ethan, who may not have been the best climber I’d ever seen, but he was the fastest. I told Alessia about my shoulder. She told me I was a fool. When Ethan reached us, he said all three of us were fools for working directly beneath what amounted to the construction zone on an unstable wall. He climbed up to the zipline, clipped a rope to it, and with some effort, ratcheted me up.
Alessia scolded me the entire time she patched me up back at camp. I wasn’t sure what she was saying, because she was speaking in rapid French, but her tone was clear.
Ethan walked up. “How’s the wing?”
“Not broken, but it hurts.”
“He will not let me put it into a sling,” Alessia complained.
“Because he doesn’t want it to stiffen up,” Ethan said. “He’s going to need two arms when we get to the mountain, which is going to be sooner than we thought. They’re about ready to raise the bridge.”
“I won’t be much help with my bum arm.”
“As it turns out, neither will I,” Ethan said. “Come on.”
We followed him to the ravine. Everyone was lined up along the edge, including Yaza, his wife, and their little girls, proudly wearing their new bling. I looked across the ravine and saw that there were almost as many watching on the other side as there were on this side, including Nick, who was easy to spot, being a foot taller than everyone else.
I looked downriver, expecting to see a dozen men manning ropes, but there were only two men standing some distance away from the bridges and the ropes they had set to raise it. The log platform jutting out over the edge was jammed with men tying rope around two gargantuan logs. It took me a while to figure out that they had no intention of pulling the bridge up. They were going to use gravity to lift it. This was not in the plans I had copied for them.
As soon as they had the ropes around the logs secured, all but two men left the platform and grabbed the ropes wrapped around the anchor trees. The two men on the platform positioned themselves next to the logs and, roughly at the same time, levered them over the edge. As the huge logs fell, the bridge snapped up from the river with planks clattering louder than the rapids. The anchor men quickly took up the slack around the trees and tied the ropes off.
The bridge was up.