The Challenge(16)
Peter looked confident when he spoke, which reassured her. “That water can’t be coming from the peak. It’s some kind of spring that surfaced. All we have to do is get above it, cross back over and come down the other side, and then get back to where we left the horses.” It sounded sensible, and his theory presumed that the flood hadn’t come from too far above them. Maybe some deep subterranean well had become unblocked. The water in the riverbed was getting rapidly deeper, and the rushing currents made the river too treacherous to cross.
They couldn’t get across the riverbed where they were standing, and it was easy to guess that it would be even more dangerous as the water raced downhill, so the only choice they had was to continue up the mountain and get above the source of the flash flood which had filled the riverbed so quickly and turned it into a raging body of water.
They had their hiking boots on, and were dry from standing under the trees, and they continued to head up Granite Peak on the trail that began to narrow and get rougher as they got higher and it got harder to breathe. Noel was the first who said he needed to sit down for a minute, and his brother was quick to tell him to take it easy. There were more claps of thunder and more flashes of lightning, followed by another deluge, which drenched them as they continued up the steep trail.
They could no longer see the patch of blue sky in the distance, or the smoke hovering far away. The trees obscured their vision. The water fell periodically, and they saw fallen trees and debris rushing past them in the river. Peter thought of the horses and was relieved that they were tethered on high ground.
None of them were talking as they climbed. They needed the air for their lungs. It was getting chilly, their clothes were damp, and none of them wanted to admit that they were frightened. It seemed best to say nothing. None of them had the answers to their unspoken questions. They saw a dead deer float down the river. Justin thought it had been struck by lightning or perhaps by a fallen tree. They saw a mangy-looking wolf clinging to a log being swept downstream, and a family of otters clumped together. The logs disappeared quickly, and Peter doubted they would make it to safety if the logs were pulled under by the rapidly swirling currents. One thing was for sure: None of them could have made it across back where they had come from, near the waterfall. They had been hiking for nearly two hours by then, and had come a long way up the mountain. The flash flood continued on its path and the skies opened from time to time. The foliage got thicker around them. There was no sign of where the flash flood had come from, so they couldn’t figure out how to get around it. They didn’t say a word to each other as they climbed and kept their fears to themselves. They were wet, scared, and cold.
It was almost dark when they finally stopped walking. They sat down on a cluster of rocks to figure out a plan.
“It’s going to be dark soon,” Peter said in the calmest voice he could muster. “I’m not sure we should head up any farther. The flood must have started higher than we thought.” The others nodded agreement, somewhat stunned by the situation. They hadn’t meant to climb that high. “Maybe we should head back down the way we came,” he suggested, but they had seen the river overflow the banks farther down and cover the trail, so they’d be trapped if they went that way.
“I don’t want to scare my parents,” Peter said, feeling both foolish and worried. It had been a rugged few hours on the trail, which ran parallel to the riverbank they’d been on earlier and could no longer reach. “But maybe we should call and let them know where we are.” Justin thought it was the wisest course, before nightfall, and pulled out his cellphone, to find that the battery had gone dead. Noel had one too, and had carried it for years due to his diabetes, but he discovered he had no service. Juliet didn’t have service either. When they checked, none of them did, and then Peter remembered hearing that there was no service on the mountain because of the altitude, so they were on their own. Suddenly, they realized that they had been cut off from the world, with no possible communication.
Benjie started to cry. “I’m hungry…and thirsty….” He started to wail.
“Stop crying!” his brother said harshly because he wanted to cry himself and was afraid he would. Juliet put an arm around Benjie to calm him.
“I thought that might happen,” Juliet said in a gentle voice about the lack of cellphone service. No one had paid attention to the fact that she had worn her backpack when they crossed the riverbed. She had brought some sandwiches for him in case he got tired. And some bottles of water. She passed around one of the bottles, and each of them took a small, conservative swallow, not wanting to be greedy or waste a drop, and then gave it back to her. She had suddenly become the keeper of their sustenance, like Wendy with the Lost Boys in Peter Pan, which was what they had become. She had a plastic knife in her backpack and cut a small wedge from a sandwich for Benjie and handed it to him, and then she wrapped the sandwich carefully again. She had brought four sandwiches, two apples, and two bananas in her bag, just in case. It would keep them going for a while, and surely they wouldn’t be there long.
“Even if we can’t call them,” Peter said, “once they figure out that we haven’t come back, they’ll come looking for us,” he reassured the others. They knew that what he said was true. Their parents would send out a search party. Peter just hoped that they’d come looking for them before dark. Matt nodded agreement, and Tim and Noel exchanged a look, with fathers who couldn’t rescue them, with one in a foreign country and the other too ill.