Read The Signal for Free Online Page B

said.
    “We’re invaders,” Vonnie said. “They’re scared. Are they pikas?”
    Mack piped back at the rocks, squeaking an imitation of their call.
    “I thought they only lived in Utah,” Vonnie said, picking up the old argument about the creatures.
    “These two are following us, hope in their hearts,” Mack said. “I’ll leave them some trail mix.”
    “Leave them your knife and your flashlight, you woodsman.”
    They drank from their canteens and started walking again. This hill gave onto a gradual rise, and the forest grew thicker and darker.
    Half an hour later in the deep shade, breathing, Vonnie stopped on the clay stairway of the trail and said, “This is your ptarmigan farm.”
    He looked up and knew the place. “It is. I’ll get them someday. They’ll be delicious.”
    “Don’t go through it again.”
    One year they had come upon a dozen of the big white mountain birds walking up the trail ahead of them, almost tame it seemed, and Mack had tried to kill one by throwing shale. He could get ten feet and throw, missing by inches. The birds didn’t panic but walked ahead. Dodos he called them, throwing and missing.
    “There is a dodo here,” she had said. As he hurled the stones at the unhurried assemblage, he described how he would cook the bird, how good it would be to have this savory fowl turning on a spit over a campfire. Then he described how he would fashion the elaborate spit out of green willows. Then after half an hour he gave up and the birds dispersed into the woods and let them pass.
    “I’m grateful their extinction won’t be pinned to me,” he had said. “But I would have so happily made that spit.”
    Now they came to Broad Meadow, a huge open circle through which ran Cold Creek, a jewel. They could see snow in patches in the far shade. The trail went right to the creek, which was a pretty amber flow as wide as a road, a foot or two deep and glistening in the rocky sunlight.
    “Don’t even think about it, Mack.”
    “It’s our trip,” he said.
    “It’s a trip, but we’re not doing any of that stuff. We’re going to fish Clark and hike out, like we said. I’m glad you’re feeling better,” she said. “But no way.”
    He had always carried her across, from the first year when it had been a surprise to both of them. He had suddenly picked her over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry, his hands clasped under her butt, and as he splashed through, she had laughed.
    “Then you carry me,” he said now. She walked upstream to the place where the stepping-stones were set and she walked carefully across and continued up the trail. He watched her for a moment. Then he knelt and washed his face in the cold water. He stood and took a deep breath and blew it out, and he followed her, keeping his old boots dry for the first time as he crossed Cold Creek.
    They had married in the dooryard of the home place, before fifty friends and Vonnie’s family and the three horses standing witness at the corral fence. A half hour before the ceremony his buddy Chester Hance had carried Vonnie off as the bridesmaids were having their pictures taken on hay bales in the barn. He’d lifted her sidesaddle onto Rusty as if for a photo, and then he’d mounted behind her and trotted up the famous horse trail into the aspens, waving his hat and hollering, “This lady has been abducted! She is too good for this horrid fate.”
    The young women hurried out of the barn, and they could hear Vonnie’s laughter as she struggled to say help and just laughed. Chester was a good rider. His colorful ransom note was discovered nailed to the barn door on a shirt cardboard. Half the letters were backward, and it occasioned another round of drinks. The entire scenario required Mack to ride up the trail backward on Copper Bob singing “Home on the Range.” The horse knew what to do even with the man on wrong. The wedding party stood below as he disappeared still facing them, singing and happy into the trees. A