Free Graphic the Valley by Peter Brown Hoffmeister

been good, but never soft. And I’m not.”
    He hooks his thumbs in the sides of his shirt, pulling the edges out into triangles. He says, “I don’t ask much, but I’m asking now.”
    “What,” I say. “What are you asking?”
    • • •
    I moved the lion between my legs, like a huge dog. The waxy scent of its hide and new urine. It’d let go on my legs and shoes when I choked it, the smell of acrid wet on my wool socks.
    I made myself count to hold off panic, a trick I’d learned while climbing. Pause between each number. Count up slowly and count down.
    My heart was two pieces, ore-heavy, an echo knocking into itself
da-duh
,
da-duh
,
da-duh
. I could feel the metal at my lungs. And it was darker now. Night coming. The blond hair of the lion beginning to glow in the last light, glowing like one tent in a meadow.
    And she looked like that. Fifteen years ago. Her skin. Whiter on the riverbank, whiter against the gray rock. Pale-blue lips. She seemed to glow. I remembered the cold of her cheeks, the color of river stones.
    I opened my eyes. My heart still thumping but my head slower now, and I could think. I used the point of my left elbow and my body weight to force the lower jaw of the lion. I leaned until the jaw snapped under the point of my elbow, until the jaw broke like a beer bottle inside a towel. With the jaw broken, the lion’s mouth was not as tight, and I began to pry at the throat, pulling to retrieve my broken right hand.
    Sweat dripping. Pulling and slow progress now. Big drops of sweat off my nose down onto the glowing fur. Prying and pulling, my sweat wetting the lion’s head, and pulling still.
    Then the hand came out. My hand. I saw the turned claw, the broken fingers rounded down and in, like a black bear’s paw, my hand no longer human. All four bones behind the knuckles were fractured like the fingers in front of them, the fourth bone sticking out through the skin. I couldn’t feel the pinky, or the small bone coming out behind it. I couldn’t feel that side of my hand at all, and I used my left thumb to push the stick of bone back through the skin, back into place. Then I flattened my palm on the ground and straightened the other fingers against the dirt.
    I knew I would feel the hand soon enough, when everything came in, when my heart slowed. But my heart was still beating like stones, pounding and pounding. And I couldn’t stop that beat, even with my mind quiet.
    I knew the pain could rush like a spring. Turn the cracked block of ice in the river until it hit the sweep at the top of the falls, and wait, edge heavy.
    I couldn’t make North Wawona now. Not in the dark. But I could pull together a drag pile, a debris shelter. So I scavenged. Kicked at things with my feet until I found one big stick that I pulled over to a split rock. Then I found cross boughs of deadfall, and laid them as tight as I could with one hand. I couldn’t interlace them, so I covered them thick with whatever I could find, built up an insulation layer over the top. Then I scraped piles of needles with the insides of my feet, big piles of fresh needles, and smaller piles of loam, kicking them into the shelter before swimming in with my good arm.
    Lucy would be gone in the morning. She was off to Merced with her aunt and I wouldn’t catch her now. I tried to picture her face riding in a car.
    Then it was all the way dark and the pain seized. Pulsing. Pain from my fingertips to my shoulder, down the back of my neck, the muscles next to my spine cramping with the ache. I closed my eyes to shut out the throbbing. Then I waited. Pounding and waiting. Waiting through the dark with my eyes open, for the first hint of morning light, waiting until I could begin walking toward North Wawona again.
    At dawn, my hand was so swollen that I couldn’t open or close my fingers. I used my shirt for a sling, pulled the knot tight with my teeth, and hiked all morning to the tourist camp. The first-aid tent there was staffed by