III.  Dlune's grunt work

272.  Dlune’s trek to find her dreamer and get him down from the mountain

It is at such an hour in the late evening two whole days later, after two very long, clear, brilliantly sunlit days of watching from Wiwaxy, that Dlune still waits there, hoping to catch sight of mj emerging from the forest along the distant edge of the lake a thousand feet below. The shadow of Wiwaxy is about to overtake the other shore and mj is still nowhere in sight.

‘I’ll be back by dark’, he had said: or ‘two or three days’, when they had talked about it other times; but ‘one day’ when he stood right here on this spot and promised her.

Dlune begins her descent from Wiwaxy, down toward camp, alone in the dusky shadows, stumbling, cutting her feet, falling once, then slipping and nearly sliding off the ledge to drop straight down a thousand feet into the freezing-cold glacial lake.

She spends the shortest, most sunlight-affected night of the year alone and frightened in the tent near the lake.

Even before dawn (which at summer solstice is the earliest dawn of the year in any case, and is especially early when you are so far north), she rises without benefit of sleep, kicks frost off the sleeping bag, pulls on khaki pants, hiking boots and a bomber jacket and collects the black hair on her head into a straight unit which she ties with a white bow. Her face, a deeper dark brown than in winter because sunned, and pulled taut at the mouth corners a bit, pushed and rumpled in the middle-forehead, naturally tinted rose on the high-placed cheek bones and glowing even in the tent’s relative darkness, her face – her face reads: serious. Intent; worried. A little.

The frown intensifies as she laces the top holes of her left boot and pulls the string into a tight bow.

She straightens the tent, packs some food and water in a knapsack which she flings across her shoulders, and departs along the meadow path, bound for the near side of the lake, munching dry bread.

At the emerald lake she bypasses Lake O’Hara Lodge with its smoking chimney.

Precious time is passing. The sky is bright blue already. It is cloudless; crystal-sharp; pure.

She boards the lake on its right side then cuts away into the evergreen forest.

Two hours later she emerges from trees onto the very high alpine plateau called Opabin, looks back at the dazzling panorama for a few seconds; the Yoho peaks in all directions; the green lake still shaded way down and off to the right; the lodge and tent in their green meadow far below at center; and continues up the plateau along streams and around tiny lakes, trampling with determination but not malice upon Arnica, Labrador Tea, Valerian, Indian Paintbrush, Cinguefoil, Dryas and Snow Lily, and brushing past occasional feathery larch branches, oblivious to the inviting perfume of evergreen or the lure of dewy grass.

She stops once to drink from a crystalline brook and lets the water tug at her pony tail.

Her expression still is serious as she picks her way cautiously over the ancient glacier at the head of the valley, treading lightly around the crisply frozen edges of deep, tummy-sinking blue crevasses, climbing constantly higher toward the pass above, always planting her steps in any boot-holes bearing mj’s distinctive tread.

Just before the pass Dlune glances left and straight up at hulking Hungabee and flashes on her grandfather’s face. She slips and crashes scraping bottom loudly on hard ice, cries for a painful minute, then goes on.

At the top of Opabin Pass she must buck wind. She turns around one last time for a view, an even grander heavenly panorama, then faces forward to begin descending all the way down the scree,¹ rapidly like Loud Slap, slipping, sprawling, trying to balance herself in back of her sliding boots. And finally she steps out largely unscathed onto the next green valley.

Up to her left is Wenkchemna Pass now, and no mj can be seen. To the left of that again are the peaks of Wenkchemna and Hungabee, and her mj is not visible on those sheer rock faces either.

She follows a stream up to the foot of her ascent to Wenkchemna Pass and looks straight up over the full heartless mile of loose rock, the 45° slope that she will have to contend with in order to top the pass and the Divide. She compares herself with Loud Slap, looking up at his ‘gap’.

She sits down by the brook for a preparatory snack of bread and cheese and water and lets the noon solstice sun beat straight into her body through her skin, heating her up until she has to rid herself of anything hot. She ties her clothes to the top of the knapsack, throws the pack on her back and sets out this time in nothing but heavy boots and white hair-bow, to ascend a mile of ‘scree’ as steep as the roof of her grandfather’s cabin.

During the first trying hour Dlune scales what looks like half the distance. Her breasts bounce and droop earthward each time a rock gives way beneath her and she slides back. Several times she loses in thirty seconds of slide all that she just gained from five minutes of delicate climbing. Reddish scratches mark her legs and bottom already. Open bleeding cuts ruin the knees. Indian blood is left to dry on the rocks.

(Only: not quite as Indian as it might have been once back before white man ruined it. Real squaw blood would have been pumping in a teepee back at camp.)

(No Indian brave ever required or even allowed the kind of hand-holding, double-checking and rescue-mission-ing from a woman that this white man had to have from Dlune. Not back when there were real Indian men anyway.)

During the second hour she covers what she thinks is half the distance left and then finds a little rest on a medium-sized boulder. She believes she can see the top of the pass.

Toward the end of the third hour she thinks she is almost there because the scree is thinning out, yet the apparent distance to the ‘top’ has remained unchanged.

During the fourth hour she struggles less with rocks by finding long stretches of lichen, loose dirt and solid footing, but has to fight more wind. At the end of this hour the angle of ascent lessens to 35° then 25° then 10°, until it levels out abruptly and drops again rapidly eastward into ice-sculpted postcard-touted Moraine Lake and the Valley of the Ten Peaks.

Dlune is unconcerned with beautiful vistas, however. She is alone and miserable and wind is making her perspiration evaporate too quickly.

Mj is nowhere in sight. She coughs twice and searches for a remnant of him, convinced he must have descended the other side. In the cold she replaces her clothes and cowers from the wind, exposed unavoidably on Wenkchemna’s bare shoulder, the base for climbing both peaks, Wenkchemna and Hungabee.

Both peaks are links in a long chain, two critical vertebrae in a backbone called The Divide which stretches north to south, pole to pole, splitting east from west.

Mj has told her that ‘Wenkchemna’ was probably Hungabee’s squaw, the tribal chief’s wife: for the name has a ‘womanly sound’ to it. And even a chief needs a woman helping him at times, for all kinds of crazy things. A chief more, in fact, according to doctor mj. Because a chief, especially a medicine man chief, needs crazier things, the very craziest things any woman might have to do for a man on the planet. Because: she has to keep him from getting ‘infected by all that craziness’ he has to deal with. She has to watch like a hawk for any craziness getting too close to him.