RIO KEPT THE RAFT in the fastest current, pushing hard for home. The sun was shining and the skies were blue. Eighteen miles below Lower Madison, we emerged from the towering Lower Canyons. The cliffs shrank to no more than a couple hundred feet high. There were cattle on both shores; this was ranching country. The ebbing river was already a couple feet down from the tops of the new sandbars it had created.
We counted up the days. It was hard to believe, but this was only our sixth. With just eight miles to go in our 116-mile journey, we had spent only five nights out. We had planned on nine. Ariel wasn’t scheduled to meet us at the Dryden takeout until noon on the tenth day.
Was there any chance she might come sooner?
Most likely she would, we figured. She knew our ten-day schedule was based on low water.
Might she be at the takeout already?
The chances of that were south of unlikely.
Even so, we wanted to get off the river in the worst way. According to Rio, there was a fish camp at the takeout. He’d waited there for his dad to come off the river a couple of times. There might even be people there.
“What kind of amenities does this fish camp have?” I wondered aloud.
Taking a break from the oars, Rio reached for his water bottle. “It’s got a ramada with a metal roof and no walls that makes shade for a bunch of picnic tables on a concrete slab. Off to the side, there’s a fish-cleaning station and a barbeque grill. It has good, clean water that arrives via gravity feed from a holding tank next to a windmill. Anything else you wanted to know?”
“If we have to kill the next three or four days there, do you think we could catch some fish?”
“I don’t see why not. We’ve got juglines and Zote Soap.”
I asked Diego if fried catfish sounded good to him. He said it did. Rio said he thought we could also scare up a snake. Diego didn’t think much of that idea. Rio said we could slow-roast a cow overnight, underground, if we could catch one. Diego smiled but he didn’t laugh. Good try, I thought. Rio was trying to distract Diego from succumbing to the grief he was feeling over his father.
We still had a few rapids to run, Sanderson Canyon Rapid and Agua Verde Rapid. Rio had me take the oars for both. I slopped through with zero style points.
In the bottom of Agua Verde Rapid, we spotted the trail to the Mexican village a mile south. Rio and I exchanged glances, picturing all too well what would have happened to us here had he not been able to shake Carlos.
Pretty quick, we had our sights on the river gauge pictured in the guidebook. Only six or seven feet of pipe were showing between the instrument box under the solar panel and the river below. In the photo, the flow gauge was closer to thirty feet above the river. Rio couldn’t wait to get home and find out how much water we’d been running on.
As we drifted by the gauge, our eyes went to the metal ramada downstream, the fish camp at the Dryden takeout. “You’re on your way home,” I said to Diego.
First thing, we walked up to the fish camp to see if Ariel might possibly be there. She wasn’t. The place was deserted. Even though we weren’t expecting any different, it was still a disappointment.
We returned to the raft for our gear. Rio said we wouldn’t break down the raft until Ariel drove in. We would need it for setting out our juglines when the river slowed down enough that we could fish it.
We made supper as the sun was setting. We still had some soup packets and a box of mac and cheese. After supper we played Hearts. From the picnic table where we sat, we watched the bats begin to work the river. They included mastiff bats with wingspans nearly two feet across.
It got so dark we had to break out the candles to keep playing. I asked Rio if he thought the twenty-mile road from the highway to the river would be dry enough the next day, if Ariel got the notion, for her to come in and pick us up. He remembered it as caliche clay—no gravel—and said it would take at least another full day before anybody could drive in. We might have to go on that snake hunt he was talking about.
When it came to our sleeping arrangements, I inflated our two ground pads and announced that it was my turn to go without. “Deal,” Rio agreed. I made do with a bed of cane tops, and arranged my sleeping sheet on top of that. At least I had something between me and the concrete.
It wasn’t the most restful night of my life. The other two slept like the dead while I relived the events of the last couple days. It was impossible to get my mind off of Carlos. He was out there, and maybe he wasn’t where we thought he was, stranded on the logjam and waiting for the river to go down. He might’ve swum off it, like Diego was thinking. Maybe he found another boat. He might be sneaking up on us in the dark.
It was exhaustion, finally, that shut down my overworked imagination. I woke to the rising sun warm against my eyelids. Rio and Diego were still asleep. I got up and walked down to the river. It looked like it had dropped by half. I wondered if it might be fishable already. A beaver, of all things, was swimming upstream along the Mexican shore.
Two hours later Rio and Diego still weren’t up, and I was bored out of my skull. I was about to start making some coffee when I heard something. One second it wasn’t there and the next second it was. “Chopper!” I yelled. Rio leaped to his feet and so did Diego. All three of us went running from the ramada into the open. I was expecting a Black Hawk.
The sound was coming from upriver. Here came the chopper. It wasn’t black, and it wasn’t military. It was red and white. I grabbed a life jacket off the gear pile and waved it wildly around my head. “That’s Big Bend’s chopper,” Rio said. “Big Bend National Park.”
The helicopter landed in the parking lot off to the side of the fish camp. When the rotors stopped turning, two men stepped out. Rio identified them for me before running to shake hands. The pilot, in a flight suit, was Tony Medina. The one in the Park Service uniform was Rob Baker, the Big Bend River Ranger.
I looked around for Diego. He had retreated to the shade of the ramada, where he was sort of hiding. I caught up with Rio, and I got huge handshakes, too.
“You guys,” the pilot said. “You have no idea how good this feels.”
“Oh yes, we do,” Rio assured him.
“I flat-out don’t believe that you’re here!” exclaimed Rob, the River Ranger. “The takeout is the last place we expected to find you! You ran the river at the height of the storm?”
“I’m afraid so,” Rio said. “How big did the water get?”
“It came close to topping the ’58 flood. The Dryden gauge peaked yesterday at forty-seven thousand six hundred cubic feet per second. The upper half of the Big Bend didn’t get nearly the rain. The storm passed us by to the east, heading north—Terlingua got only an inch. It was the Lower Canyons that got hammered. You should’ve seen the satellite photo.”
“Plumb ugly,” the pilot chimed in. “This morning was the first time we could fly. The National Weather Service is estimating that the Lower Canyons got fifteen inches.”
“I believe it,” I chimed in. “It was something to see.”
The River Ranger suddenly got all serious. “Here’s what we need to know right now. Below San Rosendo, just past the cliff, we spotted a red canoe at the shoreline. Figured it must be your Mad River, Rio. When we got to Upper Madison, we saw a man in a life jacket sitting on top of the huge logjam in the middle of the rapid, and started wondering if the canoe was his. We have no idea who he is. He didn’t fill out a permit. Did you guys run into him? We’ve called for a rescue chopper—do you have any idea who that is?”
“A murderer, a kidnapper,” Rio replied, and pointed their attention to Diego, who had retreated to the farthest, darkest corner of the ramada.
Rio was only beginning to bring them up to speed when the pilot, who’d heard enough, ran to the chopper to get on the radio. Earlier, he had called for a search-and-rescue chopper. Now he had a warning to get out: The man on the logjam was an armed and dangerous Mexican national, the suspected kidnapper in the abduction of the judge’s son at the lodge in the Sierra del Carmen.
We asked the River Ranger if he knew of the fate of Diego’s father. “He was the only one of the three judges who survived,” Rob said. “That’s what the newspapers and TV and radio are reporting. His clerk sitting next to him got killed, but the judge was only wounded, and not critically. He was evacuated to a hospital in Mexico City, and is doing well. The other three hit men, by the way, were killed in a running gun battle, with the help of our Army Rangers. The manhunt for the fourth is still on. This is going to be big news, guys, huge news!”
Rio and I headed over toward Diego. “You’ve been like a big brother to him,” Rio said. “You should be the one to tell him.”
Diego was in the farthest corner of the ramada, where he sat at a picnic table with his head down. He lifted his head as we approached. Tears welling, he said, “Do they know anything about my father? Did they say anything?”
I sat down, put my arm around his trembling shoulders, and gave Diego the best news he could have imagined, so much more than he had dared to hope. “Your father is alive. He’s in the hospital in Mexico City. He was hurt, but he’s going to be fine.”
It must have sounded too good to be true. I saw him fighting to shake off his disbelief. “Really,” I said. “He’s with your mother, and they’re waiting for you.”
Diego couldn’t hold back the tears any longer. When they broke loose, they were tears of joy.