Free The Signal by Ron Carlson Page A

hadn’t been there two days, cigarette butts, still white, tobacco crumbs, footprints of running shoes.
    “Let’s not stay here,” Mack said. “That bear is going to want his litter.”
    “Okay. What?”
    He toured the lakes in his head: Double, Native, White, Chester, others. “Let’s go up to Spearpoint. You can fish from the glacier. Two miles.”
    “No trail,” she said.
    “Right, but we can find it; we did before.”
    “Wasn’t that an accident, though?”
    “I can find it.”
    It was sunny and early in the day, and Vonnie said, “Lead on.”
    They continued down the Wind trail, paralleling the stream where it rushed, crossing the tributaries that fed in from the west. At each one Mack stopped and surveyed the hill. There was no trail to Spearpoint, but a creek flowed out of it and came down this way. They hadn’t been up there for five years, and all he remembered was that the outflow was subterranean, flowing under a broken rock sheet most of the way down. At the third feeder Mack turned and led them uphill through the small pines and the scree, back and forth, crossing and recrossing the rivulet until it vanished into the hillside, and he knew they were going the right way. They came out of the trees onto a hill of rock lined with lichen above the treeline, the rocks looking smashed and fitted, and they ascended this shoulder for half a mile until they came to a barren plain before a rocky cirque that like the entire series along the mountain crest could have been called the Throne. The hidden stream still clucked below them, sounding like a muted conversation. They could see the glacier at the far end of the field and then walking up ten more feet, the blue sheet of Spearpoint Lake appeared like a forbidden secret, like it had been trying to hide. The whole world now was only sky, rock, and water. Small lichens grew like coral here and there between the rocks, but there wasn’t a tree or a bush bigger than a hand. Mack and Vonnie stood on the flat sandstone and listened to the creek gurgle through the rocks beneath their feet. They were both arrested by the place and they stood side by side, breathing. Vonnie stepped forward carefully onto the plates of rock, each one set like a puzzle piece in the mountain. There was no bank. Water lipped rocks in one seamless field.
    “I remember this,” she said. “We caught fish here and you said it felt funny taking them because you didn’t know how they got here.”
    “Look around,” he said, grinning at the remarkable place. “Do you?”
    She pointed down into the gray brown depths which were run with corridors of sunlight, and two brown trout went by at a depth they couldn’t measure.
    “This is good,” she said. “I do love these mountains.” She skirted the lake on the south side stepping easily onto the flattened rocky hillside. Mack turned his back to her and lifted the BlackBerry. He dialed Yarnell’s code and the screen opened: 2pm Wed Overflt. Will send.
    “What are you doing?” Vonnie called back.
    “Counting my cigarettes,” he said.
    “You don’t smoke.”
    “I smoke,” he said. “Dr. Diver said I could smoke. I just haven’t started.” He put the BlackBerry in his pocket and followed her toward the glacier. They had to walk up and around the huge ice block to get atop and from the rocky crest at the western edge Vonnie stopped again and looked into the newly revealed vista. It was impossible to say how far they could see, and so much of it was lost in layers of haze.
    “Where’s Jackson?” she said. “Can you feel the earth turning?”
    The wind in the saddle was steady, the heated air from its ascent up the sunny slopes suddenly at the summit and spilling into the high mountain valley, and the sun was warm on their shoulders. They walked up the ridge and onto the dirty glacier which was banked in the eastern lap of the rocky peak and curved an easy crescent like a half-moon from the rock face out in a frozen cantilever