It's gonna be all right, I had told her, and it was more
or less. She ended up with a cast on her leg from the hip
down to her ankle, and I have to do two hours of physical therapy
each weekday for the next couple of months. My car was destroyed. My
wife only speaks to me when she absolutely has to, because she blames me
for every bit of what happened to our daughter and everything else on me,
and I guess she has the right too. But it's going to be all
right eventually, at least I hope it will. We've had a tradition in
our house ever since our daughter was two years old. Once a month we
have a family adventure where we go and do something that we've never done before.
It doesn't have to be big or an expensive thing, it just has
to be something new and different. You would think that would be easily accomplished
with so much being available to everyone these days. You can't turn on a
television or a radio that someone isn't shouting and blasting at you to go here
and do this, or go there and experience that. Those are the type
of things my wife and daughter tend to go after. They enjoy doing things
that their friends have done, so they can talk back and forth about it
and compare notes. I don't blame them. They get a real kick out
of doing that, and in all honesty, most of the time, the
weekends they have planned turn out to be a lot more fun than I would
have originally thought them to be. After hearing what we were going to be
doing, driving two hours to go ziplining for an hour is not something I
would have come up with, but it turned out to be fun. A
full day of picking blackberries and then making them into jelly wasn't, at least
not for me. But anytime an event has finished and I can look around
in the car and see my wife and daughter smiling and laughing and talking a
mile a minute about the fun they had, well, I'll take two out
of three is a win. Every single time. I could be having the
worst time in the world all day long, but if those two were happy,
then it was a complete win. On the other side of the coin,
though, is that they don't always see things the same way I do.
They don't feel so fortunate after some of the choices I've made for our
outings, so I've learned to let them make most of the selections and planning.
But now and again I will have an idea and I just know it
will be a home run. It usually isn't, but I keep on swinging.
You can't hit the ball out of the park if you never swing at
it right. An entire weekend panning for gold in a creek and spending the
nights in an authentic cabin that had no electricity, no running water, and
no indoor bathroom had been a huge swinging mists. The two days of hunkering
in bushes with paperback field guides and binoculars just to see how many different birds
we could identify, well, that had been another disaster. Me forgetting the
cans of bug repellent hadn't helped a bit. The worst was when I wrangled
us spots in a Pioneer village attraction for a fee. They will let you
dress up like pioneers and work in the village while other tourists walk around and
watch you work. Well. I was a blacksmith's apprentice and it was great.
Jan my wife was a candlemaker. I didn't stop hearing about the burns
from the hot wax on each of her fingertips for weeks and our daughter,
britt her name is Brittany, we call her Britt was allowed to swing a
long stick with a wire paddle attached to the end of it and beat the
dust out of rugs for two days. Well, that week end had been
a gigantic swing and a mess. But how they laughed and teased over what
a dufaus i was made the whole thing a great memory. There was a
lot of laughing going on about that trip and many of the ones that had
preceded it. But there isn't much laughing going on now. Two of us
are too busy trying to heal, and the other is still too frightened and
angry about what could have happened to find any reason to smile. Thinking about
what might have been still scares me nearly to death. How in an effort
to show someone a good time almost cost her her life. They are allowed
to break down and be terrified and cry, and it's good for them to
get that out of their system whenever they can. But I'm not allowed that.
I have to be strong for them, and I have to be the
one they can lean on. All of this was my fault. I have
this friend. Now that's not exactly right. I know a guy that I
work with. I have no idea why the son of a gun ever owns
a house, because he's never there, And when the clock hits five at
work on Fridays, he's running to his truck to go spend the weekends out
doing something hairbrain. He thinks that he's some sort of modern age Tarzan.
There's a trail in the woods or a hill somewhere that he hasn't wanted to
climb or height, and he lives on energy drinks and granola, and he's
built like a steel cable. He's all the time shooting off down some river
in his kayak with his fishing pole, or he's jumping off a cliff hanging
onto a hand glidder. Now he says he has a life wish rather than
a death wish, but I think he's about half out of his But he
always has great stories to tell on Monday, so I went and I hit
him up for some ideas that I thought a much lazier man and his wife
and thirteen year old daughter might enjoy. I didn't want to climb up the
sides of the Egyptian Pyramid or dodge anacondas in some South American river, but
nice, fun, easy things that weren't so likely to get us killed.
I also knew that he would give me a dozen or more, and I
was just hoping that one or two might be something that I could use.
He ratled off a couple of things off the top of his head, but
he promised that he would make me out a list by the next day,
and that's what he did. Some of the things he wrote down I would
have said were too dangerous for those airborne soldiers to try, but a couple
of suggestions didn't sound half bad. Now. I wish now that I had
wadded up his list and thrown it away before looking it over the second time,
but I didn't. About two hours driving from where we live, he
knew about a parcel of property that belonged to a corporation, but it was
overseen by a friend of his. There wasn't much to oversee because nothing was
going on on the property, so the man usually just did a drive by
once every so often. The property had been bought for a future development,
but so far there were no plans to start doing anything with it. It
was too costly and the risk were too high to start any real work on
the property at that time. But what made the development so risky was what
also made the property so interesting. He told me that he went there often
to just hike around and have a few looks. With a call, he
could probably get permission for me and my family to go and do the same.
I should have taken a pass right then, but I asked him to
make the call, and the next week ind we set out for an adventure
like we had never had, and I hope God forgives me for what I
took my family into. I didn't know. I swear I didn't know.
The drive turned out to be closer to three hours instead of two, mainly
because we started getting into the much less populated areas and the lack of state
maintained road and there weren't any signs anywhere. We had to guess and fumble
our way along through the directions that he had given me, which weren't exactly
precision filled. But because of the idea I had come up with for the
month's excursion being a pretty good one, or so I thought at the time,
I had taken a day off from work to make it a three day
weekend. My hope was that it would be so great that we would have
the greatest time for three days, and if it wasn't, we could ditch
it all early and Salvag's part of the weekend by doing something else. So
after a long and confusing drive that Friday morning, we finally found a oat
path that my guy had called the road we were supposed to take into the
property. Even though both my wife and my daughter were well aware of the
fact that we would be camping outdoors, they still managed to look surprised and
put out when they opened the car doors and there weren't any bathrooms visible.
They carried on for a bit and then darted behind trees and clumps of bushes
to commune with nature, and then we all pitched in and had a great
time of setting up our tent and chairs and all in all, I was
considering the week end off to a great start, and judging by all the
giggling between my gals as we were doing it, they were having a good
time. Things couldn't have started out much better. When the curious squirrel came
up and immediately befriended Brett, everything got perfect and Brett had a buddy now
and My wife was glad to admit that I had finally done good with a
plan, and spent the afternoon taking pictures and eating sandwiches and telling stories and
enjoying being with each other in the quiet where everything smelled fresh and pine scented.
My wife and I held hands as we laid in the tin in our
sleeping bags, and we listened to our daughter as she whistled lowly. She
doesn't snore, she whistles she always has, and we both fell asleep listening
to her. I was ready to head out as soon as I woke up,
but my wife insisted on me building up the fire so she could make
us all breakfast. It was when I saw their faces after I told them
why exactly that we had come to this particular place that my home run was
in serious jeopardy of turning into a game ending out caught on the warning track.
The reason for the delay in developing this property was twofold. Half of
the property was going to be terribly expensive to do anything with because it was
made up in large by swampy bog type areas that flooded in the spring rains
and then never drained like most ground dead had it been an acre or two,
well, that was one thing, but this property consisted of many more
times that amount of acreage. The other half of the property was dry because
it consisted of the hardwood uplands and ridges that surrounded the lower swampier areas.
It was not as easy to work with because of the way that the land
laid, and dangerous and expensive to try anything because parts of it was littered
with caves fourteen that my guy was aware of. He was sure that there
were more that he had not yet discovered. Whoever had bought the property had
been likes in doing their homework first, but my guy had done his,
and now I had him out to every cave that he knew about. I
thought a bit of speed lunking for a couple of days might roll their socks
up and down. The looks on their faces when I made the announcement assured
me that I was mistaken. It took me thirty minutes to convince them to
trust me and give this at least a genuine try, And seeing that I
was losing the battle in the war, I resorted to something that I was
highly effective, but that I'm in no way proud of. I began listing
the monthly adventures that we had taken, but that they had planned that were
heavily centered around the fairer sex having the most enjoyment. I had gone along
and said nothing, and even paid for the experiences, and even though men
were a distant second place on the scale of making sure that the visitor had
a swell time. The wreathmaking from wild or grape vines and flower arranging trip
had been the first one that I brought up, and that started them to
staring at their shoes. But by the time I got to the weekend of
painting on old bits of wood and rocks with brushes made from broomed sage and
tufts of hand spun wool, they were in complete agreement that it was time
that old Dad had a chance to grin. And they promised me that they
would dodge the bats and the mole crickets and never protest, and all that
mattered was that I had a good time looking around in dirty and damp old
caves. Well, I knew it was a promise they would not keep,
but they had finally agreed to go, and so we set off. The
first one that we finally discovered did not help my case. In the least,
instead of the underground wonders that I had promised, we found an alcove
in the side of a hill that wasn't much larger than my daughter's walk in
closet. Someone taking a chunk of rock heavy and limestone and scratching the words
Frampton comes Alive on the wall only caused them to roll their eyes at each
other, and the fact that it had been so long ago when Frampton was
actually a thing went right over their heads, and I scored no points for
pointing it out to them, so I put on my most optimistic face and
led the way to the next one. I never could tell exactly what they
were whispering to each other as they both talked behind me, but I'm sure
that I had heard my wife tell Britt just to humor me, and this
time tomorrow that we would be on our way back home and we could probably
stop for pizza along the way. Well, I walked just that much faster
after hearing that exchange. Over the course of the next hour, we found
three more of the caves on the map that I had been given, and
one was no bigger than the first one that we had found. If it
was even that big, and the other two you could actually walk inside and
look around. You couldn't do much more than that, but we were finally
all three in a cave, and I could see the interest beginning to grow,
at least on Brett's face. I did. My wife is definitely not
a fan of caves, but she gotted it out and came inside and did
rather well so long as she could be near the entrance. Thankfully, we
found no graffiti on the walls and no litter aside from a shed snakeskin on
the floor. The fourth had been almost exactly what I had been hoping to
see and show them. The path was steep. It was steep going down,
and it would be that way going back up again, but it was
worth all the sweating and grunting, and the cave when we finally reached it
was nearly the size of our home. Little alleyways had jutted off here and
there that never went so far for a person to become lost in, but
deeply enough that you could explore them and be filled with wonder at what might
be just around the next corner. We traced indensions on the walls our fingers,
and we listened to the echoes of our voices. We took photos,
and I pretended to be a caveman, complete with all the grunting and fist
thumping on my chest. Well, they laughed and laughed at that until I
grabbed my wife by the hair and tried to drag her across the room like
a caveman theoretically might drag his woman. She didn't dig it, not at
all. She also didn't dig the blisters she was getting on the backs of
her ankles from her tennis shoes instead of her more supportive footwear that I had
suggested she wear. And when she was back at the top of the ridge
and obvious discomfort, I knew enough to know that it was not the time
for an old I told you so. I suggested that we pack it in
for the day and try to find one or two more caves, and next
morning before we headed back home, she had a different plan in mine.
I should have gone with my plan, but her plan turned out to be
another I told you so, but I will never bring up for as long
as I live. My wife's plan was to go back to where we were
camped and sit for a couple of hours with their shoes off before starting to
throw things together for our supper, while Britta and I went on and had
our fill of cave discovering, and when we returned, we would all have
a great meal and enjoy each other's company before turning in, and we could
get an early start back the next morning. Britta and I watched her walk
away, favoring her steps as she took them, and we agreed that we
would only explore one more cave. The other eight or so on the map
could wait until another time for a part two of this experience. She was
almost out of sight when she turned and blew us both a kiss. It
turned out to be nearly half a mile long walk to get to where we
should start looking for the next and our final cave of the trip. We
had given the cave that we had searched for a thorough looking at, and
when we emerged finally, I noticed that the sun was lower than I had
expected it to be, and I told Brett that we needed to hurry and
not take any chances with her mother's mood, and she agreed, and we
both moved the march up to double time. We were hustling, We were
having fun together still, but we were definitely hustling through and around the trees.
That was when, in a bit of an out of breath voice,
she told me to stop growling at her. She didn't think it was funny
and it made me seem immature to try to scare her. Well, I
didn't know what she was talking about. I just assumed that she had heard
something she didn't recognize, and she blamed it on me. Well, she
was tearful when she demanded that I stopped making the noises. The next time
she spoke, I swore to her that I had done nothing, and was
just before giving her one of those hugs that only fathers know how to give
daughters to make everything okay again. When we both heard the growling, it
came from behind us. She had called it growling, but that really wasn't
what it was, wasn't to my ears anyway. It came again, like
thunder from a building storm, rolling across the valley and heading our way.
But unlike thunder, this sound had an urgency or an intensity to it.
But it was not a growling. It was a roar or a bellow as
a primal scream. It was an announcing of a presence and an awareness that
it knew where we were, that we were somewhere we should not be,
and we were interlopers in a place that tolerated no interlopers. Brit looked at
me, and the few freckles she had across the bridge of her nose had
all but disappeared because her face had grown so pale. She was looking to
me for an answer, for reassurance, for confidence that everything was going to
be just fine. I looked her in the eyes and I lied to her.
I told her that we had probably gotten attention of a wandering bear or
perhaps a bobecat. I didn't know what was making those terrible sounds, but
I was sure that it wasn't what I had suggested. My only thought at
the time was calming my daughter, and I would have told her anything at
the time. So I took her by the hand and I told her that
we needed to hurry. It was going to start getting dart soon, and
animals tended to hunt and roam around more at night. The light seemed to
work, and we took off, not in a panic run, but much
faster than a walk. We didn't hear more roaring as we moved through the
darkening woods, and we felt better. We didn't start running until after the
section of tree limb as big as my leg came flying through the air and
caught me flush in the back. She kept asking me what had happened and
what was wrong and was I all right? And I wanted to answer,
but I wanted to breathe more, and every ounce of air had been driven
out of my lungs. We needed to move, but I needed to breathe
first. I knew I should be calm and the breath would return, but
I was in a panic mode, and the harder I struggled to breathe,
the farther away the air seemed. We could hear crashing of tree limbs snapping,
and I was holding Bret tight against me so she wouldn't look around.
I couldn't see anything. I didn't want her to see anything if something appeared.
I held her tightly and stared into the dusky trees while my chest slowly
fill the air again like a lifelong chain smoker. I could hear its heavy
breathing. I needed her to run now. I pushed her away from my
chest and I took off, running with her hand in mine, and she
understood, and she didn't argue. We ran and we stumbled, and we
skidded and slipped, and we straddled small applings, and we took I don't
know how many limbs to our faces, but we never stopped running. We
might have slowed down once we thought we had put enough distance between us and
whatever was behind us, But the roaring began again, and somehow it didn't
sound like it did earlier. Now it sounded enraged, like running from it
had been an insult. It was angry, and I didn't want to see
it. When it was angry. We ran even faster, with no idea
where we were going. We only knew that we had to get away.
She was crying and her free hand pressed against her side where the stitch was
clutching her insides, but she kept up with me. And then a rock
the size of a cantalope missiled through the air, just over our heads and
crashed loudly against a tree, and whatever was behind us roared the loudest that
had had up until that point, probably angry that it had missed us with
it's thrown. And we ran even harder, and then I fell and dragged
my daughter right along with I didn't know that I had been unconscious. My
daughter was slapping my cheek and crying and screaming at all the same time.
I tried to make the fall clear from my mind, but I couldn't.
I had no idea where I was or what was going on. All I
knew was that there seemed to be noise everywhere, and I needed everything to
just be quiet for a few minutes so that I could think and come back
to my senses. At least, when I opened my eyes, my daughter
stopped smacking me. It felt better when she stopped, and everything else hurt,
but at least my cheek wasn't stinging any longer. Dirt and leaves and
small sticks and tiny rocks kept falling onto us. They were annoying when they
landed on my face, and I wanted to brush them away, but I
knew better than to turn loose some brit She wasn't ready to let go of
me yet. And my eyesight had cleared and my head had stopped spinning around
and around, but I still couldn't see very much. It was so dang
dark. The noise of the roaring was louder than ever before, and it
seemed to be falling down on us. Now twisted my head a little and
I looked straight up, and then I saw it. It was the most
massive thing I had ever seen. Massive as in a collection of muscles and
power, and all attached to a gigantic hair or fur covered frame, long
arms that flexed and bulged, and that had enormous leathery looking hands at the
ends, hands that kept clinching and unclenching, as if they were imagining how
it wanted to grab each of us. Its chest was covered with long,
coarse looking hair, but when it turned in certain ways, I could see
scars on its chest where the hair wouldn't grow. This was a creature that
was used to fighting and probably winning. Maybe because I was lying flat on
my back, but the thing towered to what looked to me to be eight,
maybe even ten feet high. No matter the measurement, it was enormous,
a giant, bellowing, hair covered thing from a scary children's story,
except this actually existed, and it was standing there looking down at me and
my daughter. It would raise one or the other of its legs and stump
a foot down against the ground when it roared and bellowed. The thighs on
whatever this thing was that loomed over our heads were huge and thick. They
would quiver and ripple each time it thundered one of those great, long,
grotesque feet against the ground. It had a head as big as a cow's
head, or so it seemed to me. It was brutish and ugly,
and deep hate filled its eyes a too close to the bridge of its blunt,
almost non existent nose. But the teeth they were what frightened me.
They were yellow and thick and blunted and strong looking, and difficult to chip
or break, was my guess. And the drool ran in streams out of
that mouth as it stared down at us, and it roared. Maybe we
were safe for the minute. There was a distance between us, and the
creature didn't seem to want to close that distance, at least not for the
moment. We had fallen into one of those caves. I don't remember if
this one had been on the map, or if we had happened to discover
a new one. That didn't matter, it was here and we had fallen
into it. Now, I reached for the flashlight that was zipped into one
of my pockets of my cargo pants. The pain nearly caused me to pass
out again. Something was terribly wrong with my shoulder or my upper back to
have fallen and landed more or less on my back on a rock surface.
And it's no wonder I saw stars before. I saw nothing for a while,
and I managed to get my flash light out and on, and then
I breathed deeply and slowly for a few breaths while the pain came down again.
And as long as I didn't move, wasn't so bad, But moving
made it awful. The cave we had fallen into was not like the others
we had visited earlier in the day, and this one was shaped more like
a well, a giant round hole in the earth that happened to have ledges
here and there. And fortunately the one we had fallen into was large enough
to hold both brit and me. I shined the light below us, and
I could see the floor of the cave, but it was at least as
far away from us as the top was from us. We were pretty well
in the middle. What I couldn't see where anymore ledges below us, and
I could see no openings down below where an escape from the cave might be
possible, and as far as I could tell, the only way out was
up, and that thing up there, screaming its bloody head off, couldn't
wait for us to try that. But all of that was nothing compared to
the problem I saw next. Brent had been quiet ever since she had roused
me back awake. I figured she was trying to shut herself off from all
that was endangering us. But I saw that she was very pale, and
that she was unconscious. I started to jiggle her to wake her up from
where she had fainted. I saw a couple of scuffs on her cheek and
hand, but nothing serious. And then I shined the light further down.
The bottom of her shorts leg was bloody, and so was the rest of
her leg. Her leg was bent at an unnatural angle below the knee,
and further up, I felt the bone of her thigh where it had pierced
through after it had broken. I had no idea how badly I had been
hurt, but I knew that at the very least, my daughter had broken
her leg in two places, and one of those brakes was causing her to
lose blood. Every move I made felt like getting hit in the back with
a pillow. Case full of door knobs, but it could have been ten
times worse, and it still wasn't going to stop me from helping my daughter
if I could. I ended up using my shirt as a bandage around her
leg and my shoelaces to keep it tied down tight. Thankfully, the scratched
and upper brake were close enough together so that the bandage I made covered both
of them. Now fastened my belt around the lower brake to try to keep
it as immobile as I could. I know very little about first aid,
and even less when it comes to dealing with trauma, so I didn't know
if I was doing right or not, but I did all that I could
think to do. That was when I was trying the last of my shoelaces
around her leg that she woke up. She didn't scream or asked what I
was doing. She just cried. The more that thing up above us roared,
the more she cried, and I didn't blame her. I shined my
light on the creature's face. Now that did two things that I was not
expecting. I saw that it was even uglier and more terrifying than I had
originally believed it to be, and it made the creature furious, and it
screamed louder, and it stomped harder, and finally it darted back from the
opening, only to return with sticks and chunks of wood to throw down at
us. I took several cuts and gashes to my hands and wrists, but
I managed to keep any of the debris from hitting brit All I could do
was cover her body with my own as best as I could. When the
thing threw a log, or at least a long section of one, at
us, it threw it like it was a spear, even though it was
as big around as my leg, and it went wayward on the way down
and began bouncing off the cave wall, And when it finally landed, it
was wedged or bouncing between the opposite wall of the cave and the ledge that
we were stranded on. In its effort to kill us, the thing up
above us had given us away to escape. The problem was that it was
still up there waiting. We didn't have the time to wait on it to
grow bored and walk away. I had to do something. I told my
daughter that she was to lie still and not make any noises, no matter
what the size of her eyes told me that she was scared to death,
but she nodded an understanding of what I had told her. I needed to
get the log that the thing had thrown at us off the opposite wall and
propped up on the ledge that we were on, so I could lean it
against the top of the cave and use it as a ladder. It was
going to be a hard climb, but the walls of the cave were going
to be impossible, so I was going to take what I could get.
What I was going to do at the top with that thing still up there
was beyond me. But going while it was there was sure death. But
I couldn't keep waiting while my daughter needed medical attention. At first, nothing
happened when I pulled against the log, nothing except the pain that made a
million white stars appear before my eyes. I pulled again, and I felt
the log twist free from the wall. I was pulling as hard as I
could to get it to stand upright. I was sweating and wanting to scream
because of the fire burning in my back from the pain, but I kept
pulling and eventually saw it coming up and getting straighter. But I had not
propped the bottom of the log against the wall as I should have, and
it twisted and began to fall off the ledge that we were suspended on,
and I screamed as it slid through my hands toward the bottom of the cave,
and the creature screamed because it was still angry, and Britt screamed in
spite of herself because she had never heard her father's scream from terror and pain
before. The log kept sliding through my hands, and I kept trying to
hold it tighter, and then it stopped so suddenly that I very nearly went
over the edge. I was on my knees and holding on to the final
two feet of the log. I couldn't let go to look, but I
felt blood running through my knuckles from where the wood had burned, and scraped
some of the flesh from my palms away as it slid. I held onto
the log and allowed it to swing slowly back and forth like an immense pendulum.
While I held to it, and I caught my breath. Dirt kept
falling on us from where the reacher was stomping around on the edge, and
then it kept roaring at us. Slowly, inch by valuable inch, I
pulled the log up from the darkness below until I could rest it against the
wall and slide it upward. It took everything I had, more pain than
I knew I could endure, but finally the log was upright. In all
hours, I would not be easy, but I would be able to use
it to climb out of this pit and then rescue my daughter. As soon
as I figured out what to do with the monster above that was waiting for
us, we needed to make something happen. I don't think the creature had
the brain power to understand what I was going to attempt. I think it
was just beside itself with rage and lashing out at anything it could. But
as soon as I started to try shimmying up that log, it tried to
reach down into the cave and started swatting at the log. It was too
far away in too deep for the creature to touch it, but it kept
flailing at the log. It swatted with every ounce of energy it had,
and that energy, along with its blind rage and hatred, caused the creature
to swing too hard, and it tried to reach too far. It lost
its balance and began to tumble off the crumbling edge of the cave entrance and
It clawed and scrambled and howled, but it kept falling. It was reaching
out at us as it went past us, and it plunged to be trapped
at the bottom of the cave, and it still tried its very best to
take one or both of us with it as it went. The cave trembled
from the outrage and the desperate roars coming from below us, and we never
looked down at the creature. Once. Britt begged me to allow her to
wrap her arms around my neck so that she could ride on my back as
I climbed my way up the log and out of the Climbing out was going
to be near impossible for me as it was, and I would not be
able to do it carrying her weight as well. I would get to the
top, and with luck that we surely would do, I would get out,
and then I would pull the log out while she held onto it.
I got her up as carefully as I could, and I made sure that
she had firm grips on the log. I told her to allow the log
to support her weight, and she didn't need to worry about doing that,
and then I took her belt off of her and I draped it around my
neck. I was glad that she could not see the tears in my eyes
from the pain that I was in. I felt like several knives had been
stabbed into my upper back. But I kept climbing and I didn't stop,
and with each pull, I knew I was getting us that much closer to
help and away from that thing that continued to roar below us. It was
tedious and beyond painful, but at last I began to feel fresh air from
the slight breeze blowing through the trees. I groaned a lot, and I
cursed a little as I made the last of the climb, and then I
rolled myself over the lip of the cave and I lay there in the leaves,
trying to breathe. I told Brett that I was okay, or would
be in just a minute, and that she would be out of there in
no time. The belt was wrapped around my hand and I began to pull
once I had gotten back onto my knees. It was a harder pull than
I had anticipated, but the log was moving and that was all I cared
about. And the air smelled foul from where the creature had raged and rand
it, and so I breathed through my mouth and I pulled as hard as
I could. I've been fortunate to see many beautiful things in my life,
but my daughter's face as she neared the entrance to the cursed cave was almost
the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. It hurt her to be jostled
round, but she didn't complain. As I pulled her free from the dark
hole that was nearly a grave as well as a cave. I still had
the map I had been carrying in my pocket. That took me a bit
to try to do some mental backtracking so I could at least have an idea
where we were. We had been running with no direction in mind when we
fell, so it was just a guess as to where we ended up.
And like I had supposed earlier, the cave we had fallen into was not
one that my guy knew about. I felt pretty good about where we needed
to head toward, and everything else felt terrible, but I scooped it up
in my arms and started walking. The roar from the bottom of that well
shaped cave began to fade, and when I could no longer hear it,
it was the best sound I could not hear. It took more than two
hours and several stops for rest before we saw the flickers from the campfire jam
had built hours earlier. When we called out to her, she came running
with that famous rage of her own, but that went away immediately after she
saw how damaged we were. I told her that I had Brett under control,
but she should go and start making a place for our daughter to lay
down in the back seat while we pack everything in a rush and made sure
that the fire was out. I explained our daughter's condition to the extent that
I knew it. Only after seeing me double over in pain and fall into
a knee did she realize that our daughter was not the only one who had
been injured, and that was when she wanted to know exactly what had happened
to us out there. I promised her that I would tell her everything,
but I wasn't going to go into it at all until I knew that Brett
was safe and being taken care of. She offered to drive, but I
knew she wanted to sit in the back seat with her arms from around Brett,
so I told her that I would be fine. After I was sitting
down. It was a bowl faced lie, but she believed me and we
started the car. The road out was rougher than I remembered it being,
or maybe I couldn't see to dodge the holes and ruts so well on the
dark, but either way, it was hard on me getting out of there.
I didn't say anything, but I was sweating a cold sweat from the
pain and was keeping a white knuckle grip on a steering wheel, and my
vision was blurred with fatigue and sweat. I knew everything would be better once
we were on a maintained road. I just had to make it that far,
and I didn't. I took the last turn too sharp and didn't straighten
out in time to miss the ditch. The car kept going just like a
trooper, but it ran into the highway mark or sign across the road and
stopped. I had not seen or felt it do that the last big jolt
had caused me to lose consciousness again. In the hospital, Jan told me
that I had blacked out for about ten minutes before a couple of men stopped
in their pickup truck to be of help. They had called a friend of
theirs to come with his roll back. After they had called an ambulance.
The ambulance took me and my wife and our daughter to the nearest hospital while
the men loaded our wounded car on the roll back to take to a shop.
Jan called a friend of hers the next day who stopped by our house
and brought some clothing and other things. And when the friend arrived, I
was in traction, my daughter was in a cast the length of her leg,
and my wife was the angriest I had ever known her to be.
She wasn't mad about the car, not really, and she wasn't mad at
me for what had befallen me and our daughter. Well maybe she was angry
at me some, but being angry as Jan's way of night showing when she's
terrified about something. It had been the middle of the morning before we had
some quiet time where I could tell her what had happened, and it made
her so angry, also because I wouldn't tell her the truth. But she
was a bit nicer after she came back to my room. She had been
talking with Brett and heard that all I had said had not been made up.
We're back home now after several days under constant physician care, and Brett
has become quite the hot rod in her wheelchair that she'll have to use for
another few weeks. I don't think the girls will allow me to plan anymore
the monthly adventures, and sometimes I wonder if that creature is still roaring at
the bottom of that cave. As bad as it was to us and as
close as it came to killing my daughter and me, a part of me
hopes that it somehow found a way out of that cave. I don't ever
want to be within ten miles of that thing again, but I don't think
I wanted to have died either. We're safe now, so I guess let
bygones be bygones as far as I'm concerned.