Crisscross Moon - 23. Chapter 23

23.

After lunch, we started looking for caves with water. "There's just one thing," I had to tell Cory first.

"What?"

"Some of the caves that have water also have animals in them. That's where they like to live... for the obvious reason."

"So they don't have to go far to piss?"

I just looked at him.

"To drink," he corrected himself.

I nodded. "Bears like the convenience... and so do mountain lions. So the closer we get to water, the more dangerous it gets."

"That's why you have the rifle."

"Yeah... but it's a little hard to shoot in the dark."

"I'll hold the light."

"That'll attract the animals..."

"Well, I'll hold the light, you shoot, and then we'll run like hell."

I laughed.. "That's perfect... except it's hard to do on your knees."

"Why would we be on our knees?"

"The caves don't exactly have headroom."

"Oh... I thought we'd be doing something more interesting."

Only in jokes. Bad, frat boy jokes. Though maybe, when Cory got tired, he regressed.

"I'm not giving up now," he simply went on.

"I'm not saying we should... I just wanted to warn you. Remember, I have this thing about killing friends."

"So now I've gone from family friend to friends..."

"You've just gone back."

"Then I'll be careful... about the animals. You take care of me... I'll trust you... And I'll follow wherever you lead."

Again, I didn't see Cory as the following kind, but I was glad he'd stay out of the way if I had to shoot. I absolutely didn't want him to think that he could take on even the smallest adult bear just because he was stronger than I was.

"Where's the rifle?" he asked.

"Back in your car. I didn't think we'd need it this morning."

But I'd packed it even though I thought we'd be out of the park by evening. You never knew when you were going to need a rifle. So we detoured, I picked up the rifle, and we headed for the larger of the two caves that I knew had water. Cory wasn't impressed with the first one.

"This isn't really water," he said.

"What else would you call it?"

"Well, you said it was a pool... Or is this the drip and not the pool?"

"This is the pool."

"It's not what I expected."

We were looking at a dark, shiny place that mostly reflected the beams from our flashlights. The surface was mainly smooth, but occasionally there were bumps. Sometimes, the bumps were rocks.

"At least, you didn't lie about the smell," Cory admitted when he realized the other bumps were rotting things.

"I didn't lie at all."

"Misled me then..." I knew he was kidding, and I didn't mind.

"The smell's not that bad," I said.

"No... it's more locker room than London sewer."

"Have you really been in those?"

"I've seen them in movies and can imagine the smell." He seemed to inhale. "And this is more boathouse than locker room... Old boathouse."

"I'll trust you."

I'm not sure he heard me. He was busy probing a lump. At least, that's what it looked like in my flashlight beam. It turned out he was testing something else.

"Not really deep," he told me.

"No."

"Are there any that are?"

"I'm sure there are some... but I'm not sure they're in this area. As I said, I don't really look for caves with animals in them. When I'm in the park, I like to be outside... With trees and flowers and birds..."

"Well, let's look for some spooky caves," he said. He didn't even want to see the one with the drip.

As with streams, there were plenty of caves. Something in the local rock seemed to let them develop. Though many of the caves were just indentations, no bigger than closets or storage sheds. You didn't need a light to see inside them because they were open and shallow. And they had nothing Cory wanted.

"Pretty," he admitted.

"Yep."

"What else have you got?"

It was like working down a menu. The hill that held my family cave was ringed with indentations, and a lot of them I'd poked into over the years. I tried to show Cory the ones that were most interesting, and, eventually, he found a cave he liked.

It started as one of those shallow indentations, and I'd never been very far past that. But there was a low passage off the back, and after we crouched and crawled through that, it got a bit wider. It was also blunt, and we were able to soon stand up.

"I'll bet there are animals here," I said.

"Can you smell them?"

"I'm not that good... I just think there are."

Some signs of them turned up in our flashlight beams. That's probably why I'd never explored very far into this cave. There was also water. It wasn't a pool, and it certainly wasn't a stream. It wasn't that deep. But you could feel the slightest current.

"Can you tell where it comes from?" Cory asked.

That was a problem, and it was also the reason the water seemed more like a pool than a stream. It started against a wall. We could see that with our lights. And it ended maybe ten feet away, at another wall. It was shallower at the first wall and only a few inches deep at the second. But in both places, the water just seemed to appear.

"I told you... magic," I reminded Cory. "Sometimes that happens."

"There isn't even a crack," he admitted. "Nothing I can get my fingers into."

"Water seeps... It goes through the smallest crevices."

"If there was anything I could reach into... or some sign that something had collapsed..."

"And would open again at a secret command?"

"I don't really believe that," he said, just a bit sharply. "I think the real stream was something like this... only with an opening big enough to fit into... Even swim through at times..."

"Maybe the princess was tiny..."

I was joking, and for a moment I thought only Cory was allowed to do that.

"We know people were smaller," he acknowledged, seeming slightly more relaxed. "Though I've never considered how small... But if they were living on what little they could catch..."

"And find... And grow... So they might not have been that small..."

"Smaller than we are anyway... maybe that's another reason it seemed like magic. A small woman could swim through a passage that a grown man couldn't."

"But there were children..."

"Who might've been scared... Or maybe the magic was more like knowing what to do... Instead of something you and I might consider magic..."

"If you put enough conditions on it," I warned, "You can justify anything..."

It was another joke, though this one, he ignored.

"The thing is," he went on, "the magic only had to work once... like the Red Sea or the loaves and fishes... And it only has to explain how one person escaped... not why everyone else couldn't... And maybe the princess was so happy to be alive that she simply forgot about the rest of the cliff dwellers... That's why she went off with the warrior..."

I thought for a moment. "Do you really believe that?" I asked.

"No," he had to admit.

"People have feelings... no matter when they lived..."

"But these were tougher times... maybe even harsh..."

"I still can't accept it."

"And when everything's a spirit... the spirit of the cave... the spirit of the water... maybe you just accept fate..."

"I'll give you that... But unless this passage has closed up in the last 700 years... or narrowed to the point where we can't even find it... I don't see how anyone could've squeezed through it..."

Cory couldn't argue that though I could see him still feeling around the wall, looking for an opening. "If there's one stream like this," he told me, "there's probably another. Maybe the next one's better. This is a good sign."

Which meant we had to keep looking. I didn't mind that, but it was beginning to get dark, and I suggested we think about heading home. Cory agreed but then started doing, "Just one more, Dad... Just 5 more minutes..." and I let him. I didn't want him to go to sleep that night disappointed.

Still, the caves weren't getting better. They were mainly holding even - all shallow indentations, increasingly hard to explore in the dim light. When we were outside again, Cory said, "I want to go back to that other cave... the one that seemed a little good..."

Nothing will have changed, I wanted to tell him. But he anticipated me.

"I don't expect anything different," he said. "But it's the best cave we've seen so far... And there might've been something we missed."

(continued)