"I heard from one of the other guides before we set out that the slide was at about a level three when he went through it," Carmen went on. "But that was two days ago. I'm guessing it will be nearing a four if it hasn't gotten there already. The river's up from last night even. Not much, maybe two inches, but when the canyon starts squeezing the water it can go up fast. Before we hit the slide there's a good place to pull over and beach. We can talk more about it then and I can show you how we plan our run, depending on what the water is doing."

They breakfasted sumptuously-float and bloat, Carmen joked-broke camp and again took to the water, this time wearing life vests. The sc.r.a.p of blue that had struggled so mightily against the clouds lost the fight and the sky was marbled with silver-gray and black. Anna felt the boil of the thunderstorms in the air and reveled in it. Ozone levels were high and she enjoyed the tingling in her blood.

The raft rounded a bend in the river and floated into the view they had enjoyed from the groover. Anna found her breath being stolen by the sheer height of the cliffs they were heading into. They rose a thousand feet into the sky on either side of the turgid brown water, straight and true as if a cosmic force had cleaved them with one mighty blow of an ax.

"Wow," Anna heard someone breathe and realized it was her.

"Awesome," Lori said.

Anna had heard her use that word in reference to the chicken sandwiches and guacamole they had had for lunch, Brad Pitt and Carmen's straw hat. This time the word was apt, describing that which induces a sense of awe into the beholder, a sense that there is a greater force at work than human minds can conceive. There'd been a time Anna believed in a G.o.d or G.o.ds of some sort. Meeting Paul had reintroduced this illusive and intoxicating possibility into her soul. Recently, though, she had retreated to the loneliness of the unG.o.dly, the lights on, lights off logic of the atheist. When a light was turned off it didn't go elsewhere to light the rooms of others in worlds to come, it just ran out of fuel and was no more. Much as she wanted to believe it was otherwise for people, she could not. Less could she believe, if other places on other planes existed and were policed by supreme beings, that they would by choice let the rabble of the earth invade. Should there be a heaven it would probably have a border patrol that put Homeland Security to shame.

They slipped into Santa Elena Canyon and the subtle sounds of birdsong and wind in the reeds faded. Even the water lapping against the sides of the raft seemed hushed. Deep and channeled through a narrow gorge of stone, the river boiled beneath them, but its surface showed only the bulge and twist of enormous muscles under a gla.s.sy-smooth skin that gleamed where it powered around submerged rock and slipped sharp as knives undercutting the shale cliffs. Anna felt its tremendous strength beneath her and for a moment had a terrifying sense of riding the back of a mythical serpent, a sentient creature who knew parasites sat on its skin, took of its forces without asking.

The momentary fear brought with it a sudden desire to make an offering to the river G.o.ds. A libation of wine would be closer to tradition, but Anna hadn't the courage to ask for the stuff. Instead she uncapped her water bottle and poured half a cup over the side. Like to like. Surely a Tex-Mex river beast would appreciate bottled water from New Jersey.

"Are you okay?"

It was Paul. He turned just as she was dumping part of her drinking water into the Rio Grande.

"Just appeasing the nymphs," she said.

He smiled and returned to his paddling. Paul was good that way; he understood sacred duties.

Cameras were pulled from personal dry-bags and the canyon was reduced to digital images to be viewed once, if ever, then never again. Anna seldom carried a camera and only took pictures of dead bodies or other predations. Images of incredible beauty she lodged firmly in her brain, recorded only by her eyes. That way she knew she would revisit them more often.

A mile into Santa Elena, and deep into the internal silence with which the canyon graced her, Anna heard the broken cry of the desolate. A thin creeping moan that penetrated the bones beneath the ear, too low to vibrate the drum or move the air. She stopped paddling, resting the oar ac"> None of them had heard it.

Anna smiled at her husband and he blew her a kiss that hit warm and thrilling in various parts of her anatomy. Turning her face once more downriver she opened her senses, a prying apart of the gray walls that had risen up around her mind to stave off thoughts of what lay in the pit.

Nothing.

Hallucinations weren't alien to Anna, particularly aural hallucinations. A creative brain frolics in unreal playgrounds, sometimes the devil's, sometimes those of the angels. She returned to paddling, more a dipping of her blade to seem like a working member of the group than actually moving the raft along.

After several minutes it came again, a sound so sorrowful and hopeless it cut to the heart.

"Shhh," she hushed the others.

"What-" Cyril began.

"Shhh!"

They fell silent. Lori and Chrissie looked strangely afraid, like children out after dark, frightened by what might be waiting.

"There," Anna said. "Did you hear it?"

The cry had been louder as the raft floated nearer where desolation began.

"Easter," Carmen said. "She's just past where the canyon wall juts out. We'll be able to see her in a minute."

They rested their paddles and stared at the canyon walls ahead as the river carried them past the bulging shale formation to their left. The push of stone caught and slowed the waters of the Rio Grande, letting the sediment drop and forming a small beach. Bermuda gra.s.s, long and green and looking soft as gargantuan moss, laid claim to the high ground. Two Mexican tobacco plants, as big as small trees, lifted their broad leaves toward the sky.

"I don't see anything," Chrissie complained.

"Look up. There." Carmen pointed to a place high on the cliff.

"It's a cow!" Cyril exclaimed. "There's a cow in the middle of the cliff!"

Anna saw it then. Three hundred feet or more from the riverbed a cow, so starved its bones could be seen even at this distance, stood on a ledge, bleating forloandleatingrnly.

"It's a bull," Steve said. "Look at its horns."

"Mexican cows have horns," Carmen told him. "She's been up there a couple months."

"How did she get there?" Lori demanded. "This is nowhere and you can't get here from anywhere."

"We had a lot of high water in February and she must have fallen in the river and gotten carried into the canyon. We find cows in here once in a while," Carmen said.

"The water couldn't have been that high," Anna said, staring at the poor creature marooned halfway between heaven and earth.

"See the ledge? She keeps going up farther and farther to get food," Carmen said. "Every time I come through she's worked her way up a little more."

"Why doesn't it thirst to death?" Steve asked.

"She eats the cholla. There's enough water in the cactus to keep her alive."

"Why doesn't she just walk back down?" Chrissie asked, sounding slightly annoyed at the cow for making such a fuss of its predicament.

"No incentive, I guess," Carmen replied. "The food behind her has already been eaten."

"That and the fact she has cow brains for brains," Steve said.

"Pull in," Anna demanded suddenly. "Beach the raft." She began to paddle hard. The trip was a leisurely one, the outfitters making a three-day adventure out of a twenty-mile trip that a canoeist could easily do in a day, and Carmen was in no hurry. She helped steer the raft onto the rocky sh.o.r.e. Anna and Steve were out first, pulling it from the water.

Anna had no idea what she was doing, only that they couldn't float by, snapping pictures at the tormented soul on the cliff face. She couldn't stop the man she had killed from stalking her in nightmares. She could not stem the tide of evils flooding from man's cruelty. She couldn't save the women in the Sudan. Some days she despaired of saving herself from a darkness that seemed to be encroaching from all sides. But surely, G.o.d dammit, she could save one poor pathetic cow.

If she couldn't save it, she wouldn't pa.s.s it by, leave the poor thing to be pointed out to more tourists as it crept ever higher, grew ever thinner, cried ever more weakly until, finally, death came as a blessing and the guides in pa.s.sing canoes and rafts pointed out the vultures gathering on the high ledge where Easter was served as an alfresco luncheon.

"We have to get the cow down." Anna was not asking for permission or discussion. She was issuing an order.

"Yes!" Cyril said, pumping the air with her fist in an overused gesture, the origin of which was mostly forgotten.

"We become vaqueros, mis amigas," Steve said. "To the rescue. What a trip!"

"How?" Chrissie nearly whined.

Lori said nothing.

Paul looked alarmed and Anna knew it was not for the cow or for himself. He hated it when she put herself in danger. He was old school. When they walked together in the street, he walked on the outside so marauding automobiles would have to go through him before they could lay a b.u.mper on his wife.

"It's been done," Carmen said speculatively. "I don't know about getting cows off cliffs, but I know a few have been rafted out of the canyon. The river district ranger, Fred Martinez, took one out last spring."

"How much line have we got?" Anna asked the guide.

Paul groaned. "Oh Lord, there's two of you. You and Anna. You two are going to scale a cliff to rescue two hundred pounds of hamburger, aren't you?" He put both hands over his face.

"You can stay here," Anna offered.

He looked at her in exasperation. "Right. Like I would do that while you bull-wrestle on a cliff ledge."

"Three or four hundred feet," Carmen said. "We carry extra."

"For cows?" Lori asked, sounding both amazed and appalled.

"For whatever," Carmen said.

"Anna, did I not hear you say once that free climbing was a fool's sport?" Paul asked.

"We don't have to climb," Anna said. "We can walk up the way Easter walked up." For the first time in what seemed like forever, but was only since the previous winter, Anna knew what had to be done and how to do it. The rescue of the cow unfolded in her mind with complete clarity. The others, even Paul, were relegated to the status of tools, valuable, useful tools like the lines-become-ropes and the lettuce in the cooler designated to be salad for their supper.

"Paul, you and Steve will come with Carmen and me. You three stay down here and rearrange the gear so there's a level place to load Easter when we get her down."

"I'm going with you," Cyril said.

Momentarily nonplussed by the mutiny, Anna stopped unlashing the cooler from which she intended to commandeer green, cow-tempting foodstuffs. She blinked twice, clearing her mind's eye of its single-minded pursuit. Fleetingly, she was aware that she was not General Petraeus and this was not the 10th Airborne Division. "Sure," she said. "Change your shoes. Everybody, change your shoes except Lori and Chrissie, you can keep your Tevas on."

Having liberated the lettuce and a bunch of celery, Anna dug her sneakers out of her dry-bag and swapped her river shoes for them. Carmen put the celery back in the cooler.

"Okay, right," Anna said. "One head of lettuce should do it."

"I take it you have a plan," Paul said.

"Yes. It should work if Easter is as weak as she looks. The ledge isn't all that narrow; it can't be or she'd never have gotten that far up."

"You'd be surprised," Carmen said.

Anna ignored her. "We go up the way Easter did. We turn her around with the lettuce lure and hobble her if we can so she won't bolt. She follows us and the lettuce down. Once we get her on the beach, we get her on her side and immobilize her. Carmen will tell us where best to lash her to the raft."

"Wow. Me, the guide, the paid leader of the expedition, will actually get to make a decision," Carmen said.

Sarcasm tinged the boatman's words, but only very faintly. Carmen was nearly as keen as Anna to get the cow down. What her motives for this altruism were, Anna didn't know and didn't care.

"Yes," Anna replied seriously, too focused for humor or working and playing well with others not of like mind. She would have shouldered the coils of rope but Paul had already picked them up. Anna took the lettuce and broke the head in two, giving half to Carmen. "This will keep her from getting it all in one bite and losing interest in us."

Anna trotted across the beach and began scrambling up rocks to where the ledge started about ten feet above water level. "Stop!" Paul called as she found the ledge and stood.

"What?"

"Wait there." His voice was harder than Anna had heard it before and penetrated the thickness of her determination. She waited.

When he got to the ledge, he stepped ahead of her, between her and the distant cow above. "I'm going first."

She opened her mouth to protest.

"Don't even try," he said. "I grew up on a dairy farm, remember? Cows are decent beasts but they are not that bright. If she bolts toward us instead of further up the cliff, there might not be room for everybody. If the choice comes up, she's going over, not you."

Anna didn't like it. Didn't like being slowed down. Didn't like being protected. Rebelliousness fired up in her belly and sparked in her eyes. Paul stared it down.

"Right," she said. "Let's go."

A breath of air wheezed softly from behind her left shoulder where Carmen had crowded onto the ledge. A veteran guide, she'iv n guided seen enough of marital discord to feel relief when the storms were averted.

The ledge was several feet wide at the bottom and had a floor of polished stone. Sediment was deposited in the holes and cracks from high water and blown dirt, and opportunistic desert plants took root in the shallow planters. The cholla cacti were grazed down to nubs and what little Bermuda gra.s.s had made it up to the ledge was eaten down to white roots.

Paul started up, Anna following. Behind her she heard Cyril and Steve clamber onto the ledge to trail behind Carmen. Five was too many, Anna thought. At Easter's elevation the ledge might not be wide enough for that many people and one cow. This quixotic quest could end in tragedy if the rescue went sour. Anna did not want that on her conscience, but doubted they'd go back if she told them to, so she shoved the thought into the back of her mind. Already crowded with the things she would not think about, the dim recesses of her skull must look like an overstuffed closet. Should the door fail, the flotsam and jetsam of her id would come tumbling out. That thought, too, she shoved in with the rest.

Distracted from her misery by the strange phenomenon of human beings creeping up her path, Easter quit crying and lowed soft questions at them.

"She sounds like she knows we're coming to save her," Cyril said.

"She sounds like she knows we're coming to feed her," her brother retorted.

"I wonder if animals hope," Cyril mused. "Can you hope if you live in the moment?"

"They live in the moment you open the cat food can," Steve said.

The climb was growing steeper and Anna could hear their breath coming harder between their words. She would remember not to count on them for brute force. Paul was powerful and Carmen was a rock. Along with her, they could do the heavy lifting if there was any to be done. The twins would be ideal for holding the offerings of lettuce, she decided.

"Poor old Easter will end up in a beef fajita," Paul said.

"No she won't!" Cyril declared.

"Are you going to lock it in a bathroom with you till the president of Mexico grants it amnesty?" her brother asked.

"I might."

Anna laughed. She hadn't laughed much in a while and it felt wonderful. She reminded herself to take it up again.

Paul laughed then and Anna knew he was happy because she was, and felt the rush she always did when she realized how much he loved her.

SIX.

The ledge they followed was rapidly narrowing and the river had grown ribbon-thin far below them. Lori an"