TWENTY-EIGHT

 

 

May 24th, 1887

Central Idaho Mountains

 

SOPHIE TRIED TO keep up a cheerful attitude as they made themselves breakfast in the cold, morning air. The sun was still hours from finding the steep valley floor, but it shone bright on the snow on the mountain tops above them.

She found it funny that neither of them talked about the sheer terror of being alone she knew they were both feeling. Her attitude was that if humans could survive in this country hundreds of years before them, then she and Wade could as well.

She just didn’t say that out loud, and the thought honestly didn’t help much at all. Her problem was too much research into this time in history. She knew how really hard it was on the people of this time. That very difficulty was what had fascinated her and how women had dealt with it.

Now she was dealing with it.

She just never expected to be one of the people from her own research.

They repacked their saddlebags, saddled their horses and the two packhorses. Both of them double-checked everything.

Then both got saddled and he said, “Here we go.”

“I love you,” she said to Wade.

He smiled at her, even though she could see the worry in his eyes.

“I love you as well.”

“Together,” she said.

“Together,” he said, nodding.

At first the going was easy.

Wade led the way, followed by one of the packhorses. Sophie followed a safe distance back as Duster had taught them to do, letting her packhorse follow without much effort.

The pine trees around them seemed to tower into the sky, often blocking most of the sunlight off the mountains and making it feel almost gloomy in the bottom of the valley.

The rushing sound of the high, angry water of Shannon Creek seemed to fill every sense she had as the sound was often trapped under the trees with them. It was far, far too loud for them to talk.

There was very little underbrush since no sun seemed to reach much of the steep valley floor and Sophie only caught glimpse of the snowcapped peaks above them through the branches.

The path they picked along the river seemed to constantly climb upward and at times they had to dismount and lead the horses around rough areas or up steep slopes.

There was also still a lot of mud and some snow hadn’t melted yet under a lot of the trees. Twice she had slipped in the mud, but otherwise she had done fine.

They rested after an hour in a very gloomy small rock shelf above the raging stream, each snacking on some nuts and getting a good drink of water.

Duster had warned them that at this attitude, they needed to make sure they were drinking regularly and taking in salt. He had laughed and said, “The last thing you two need on your first time out would be altitude sickness.”

The next two hours just repeated the first and it wasn’t until starting the fourth hour, after a short lunch break, that they broke into the daylight. The sun was now almost high enough in the sky to hit the bottom of the valley and it had warmed up enough that Sophie had shed her heavy coat.

She couldn’t believe how good the warmth felt after being hours in those dark, damp trees.

The game trail they were on went up away from the edge of the stream and through some lower brush. It was easy going until they broke out of the other side of the brush.

Ahead of them was a talus slope.

The game trail sort of vanished out into the small rocks and nothing at all grew on the slope. The slope seemed to start at rock cliffs a good thousand feet above them and ended only in the angry water.

To Sophie the slope looked like an impossible river of rock wider than any football field. She couldn’t even believe that rocks could stay on that steep slope without just tumbling on down into the water.

They both dismounted and just stared.

“How are we supposed to get across that?” she asked, knowing Wade had no more idea than she had. They were about fifty yards above the fast-moving water. One slip and they would be in the water faster than they could react, of that she had no doubt.

“Duster said to just go slow across it,” Wade said. “Or we could stop and just camp and spend a week digging a trail and securing the trail across.”

“He suggested that?” Sophie asked, glancing at Wade, then back at the slope blocking them. She had no idea how they would even begin to build a trail across that. But she had a hunch if she had asked Duster, he would have said, “One rock at a time.”

He often had answers like that.

And she knew that the people who lived in this time period had the attitude of “You did what you had to do.” Especially the pioneers into the west, which was, in essence what she and Wade were at the moment.

“He said that’s what many do on slopes like this,” Wade said nodding. “But he said he made it across and back without a trail and it is possible if we go slowly.”

Possible?

She looked down at the raging water of the creek below. Going into that snow-melt water wouldn’t be survivable.

She just couldn’t believe that literally on their first morning alone, they were facing death.

Very, very clear death.