LITMIR.BIZ

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though we warned her not to come up here without checking with us first.”

      “Because we told her not to come up here without letting us know.” Janelle paused and circled her mouth with her hands. “Rosie!” she hollered up the angled ridge. “Rooooo-sie!”

      The wind muffled her voice and tossed her words back at her.

      “Rosie!” Chuck bellowed. “Rosalita mía!”

      They waited. No reply.

      Janelle set off again up the stone ramp. Chuck climbed after her, huffing.

      He’d been a runner all his adult life, putting in countless miles on the backcountry trails around Durango, his mountainous hometown in the southwest corner of Colorado. Janelle had taken up running after her move with the girls to Durango from Albuquerque, New Mexico, upon marrying Chuck four years ago. She’d run with him for a few weeks, until, as her fitness level increased, the decade-and-a-half age difference between them grew increasingly apparent, and she sped ahead of him on her own. Carmelita had taken up the sport a few months ago on the advice of her rock-climbing coach. Her runs added an aerobic element to the strength workouts provided by the competitive climbing she practiced with her teammates after school at the local indoor climbing gym three afternoons a week.

      Janelle crested the ridge. Wind coursed over the spine of rock, spinning long strands of her hair around her neck. She pulled the strands past her shoulder and into place with both hands.

      Chuck reached the top of the ridge and glanced past Janelle, his eyes darting. As forecast by the weather report he’d checked on his phone last night, sleet no longer fell from the clouds surging by close overhead. A lone patch of blue sky showed between broken cloud banks to the north.

      The ridge was a quarter-mile long, sloping to the campground on one side and to the two-lane park road on the other. The road extended north fifteen miles from the park entrance to the campground and, immediately outside the campground entrance, the parking lot at the Devil’s Garden Trailhead.

      An immense flat of sage and rabbitbrush spread beyond the road, running up against distant red sandstone bluffs and towers that rose to the scudding clouds. Light green patches in the flat denoted the rabbitbrush plants, also known as chamisa, among the darker sage. Swatches of brown at the ends of the rabbitbrush branches were the last seed hulls still clinging to the plants as winter approached.

      Shallow arroyos cut across the high-desert flat, gathering what little moisture fell in the park and delivering it to the primary drainage through the southern half of the national park, Courthouse Wash. From Chuck’s viewpoint atop the ridge, piñons and junipers were distant spots of dark green. The trees grew in the arroyos and close against sandstone bluffs to take advantage of precipitation trickling off the walls of rock and gathering in the drainages on rare stormy days like today. Far to the north, the sandstone monolith known as Island in the Sky loomed half a vertical mile above Arches, its sheer rock prow piercing the clouds.

      At the base of the ridge opposite the park road, the elderly campers’ motor homes lined the campground drive, the coaches’ rooftop air conditioners and television satellite dishes plainly visible from the ridgetop. Beyond the line of RVs, three matching sandstone bluffs stood like frozen ocean waves, bounding the campground to the north. Each of the three bluffs ended in a vertical west-facing wall fifty feet high.

      Other than the campground and deserted road, the only sign of civilization visible from the ridgetop was the line of rangers and first responders snaking across the mile-wide flat north of the trailhead. The front-end loader bounced across the flat a hundred feet behind the emergency workers, the deep rumble of its engine just reaching Chuck’s ears.

      Janelle cupped her mouth and hollered, “Rosie!”

      Only the whistling wind greeted her cry.

      “Rosie!” she screeched again.

      Over countless centuries, wind and rain had created a series of shallow depressions and stubby stone projections along the spine of the ridge. Rosie’s head popped up from behind a short plug of stone fifty feet down the ridgetop.

      “¡Mamá!” she cried. Her sandpapery voice, filled with joy, rode the gusting wind. “Look what I found!”

      5

      Rosie rounded the stone projection as Chuck and Janelle ran to her. She cradled a gray house cat with bright yellow eyes in her arms.

      “Her name is Pasta Alfredo,” she announced. “I made it up all by myself.”

      Janelle hugged Rosie, cat and all.

      “Careful,” Chuck warned. “It’s feral.”

      Janelle stepped back, eyeing the creature.

      A black collar encircled the cat’s neck, resting deep in its matted fur. The feline, decidedly chubby, purred in Rosie’s arms, making no attempt to flee.

      “It doesn’t look very wild to me,” Janelle said.

      “It does seem pretty content,” Chuck conceded.

      “She’s not an it,” Rosie corrected them. “She’s a she.”

      Janelle traced the cat’s collar with her fingers. “No identification tags.” She lifted Rosie’s chin. “You shouldn’t have come up here without telling us.”

      Rosie pressed Janelle’s fingers downward with her chin and gazed at the cat. “I know.” She looked up at her mother. “But you were gone for sooo long.”

      Chuck rested his hand on the back of Rosie’s neck, his fingers in her curly hair. “It’s good you didn’t go far.”

      He, Janelle, Carmelita, and Rosie had spent the day before last, their first day in the park, settling into the trailer and hiking to Landscape Arch. He’d made his way to the contract site yesterday, based on directions supplied by Sanford. After putting in a solid day of work at the secret site, he’d returned in the evening to the campground and a buoyant Rosie.

      “Guess what, guess what, guess what!” she had announced breathlessly, grabbing his hand and swinging in a circle around him before he had a chance to take off his gear pack. “We found a cat. Cats. Kitty cats. More than one. Maybe three. Up in the rocks above the campground. Can I have one? Can we keep them?”

      “Hold on just a minute there,” Chuck had said, loosing himself from Rosie’s grip. He shucked his pack from his shoulders and dropped it in the bed of the truck. “Cats? As in house cats? That’s not exactly what we came here for.”

      Rosie again took his hand in hers and dragged him toward the trailer. “You made me come here. I didn’t want to. You’re making me miss a whole week of school with my friends, plus all of Thanksgiving week, where I don’t get to be with my friends either. That’s mean. You’re mean.” She looked up at him with pleading eyes. “You should give me a cat to make up for it.”

      Chuck laughed. “You’ve got it all figured out, haven’t you?”

      “I already asked Mamá.”

      “What’d she say?”

      “That she’d have to talk to you.”

      “I wouldn’t get your hopes up.”

      “But they’re so cute, cute, cutie cute cute.”

      Janelle met them at the trailer door.

      Chuck asked her, “Rosie found some cats up on the ridge?”

      At his side, Rosie nodded vehemently, her entire body rocking back and forth along with her head.

      “I surfed the Net about it,” Janelle said. “Turns out pets are abandoned in national parks all the time, as if people think they’ll return to the wild or something.”

      “That’s right,” Chuck said. “It’s a pain for

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