In the Shadow of Bald Mountain

The old Ford pickup, having spent its entire life on its wheels, was now upside down at the bottom of Angel Creek.  Steam hissed slowly from the radiator and the frame was now a twisted mess of metal and rust, draped over mid-stream boulders.  

In the light of a full moon, Gerald McGraw groped for the driver side window frame, trying to pull himself out.  Broken glass glittered his hair and clothes, cutting into his elbows as he tried to wrench himself free.  

His right leg was still pinned between the dash and driver seat.  Blood had rushed to his head, partly from adrenaline and partly because he was hanging upside down.  A pounding headache had emerged. His left arm was gashed, but it was impossible to tell how deeply.    

He had always been a careful driver, so it seemed a strange situation in which he had found himself.  But something had crossed the road, very quickly in front of him, from treeline to treeline.  It was large, seemingly immense in the split second he had seen it–an animal of some sort with thick brown fur.  

He had managed to avoid hitting it, at least as far as he could tell.  But the old truck couldn’t handle any rash evasive steering, and it had lurched off the pavement into the gravel and dirt.  From there, the descent into the creek bed, some 30 feet below, had been just a flashing, grinding blur. 

“I can smell gas,” Gerald thought frantically to himself.  “I’ve got to get out of here, before this thing goes up.”  For a moment he thought to yell, but in this stretch of wilderness he knew he was almost certainly the only car for miles. 

Finally in desperation, he grabbed the back of his right knee, suspending himself temporarily in the air.  He pulled through the terrible pain, until finally his crushed leg twisted free and he dropped onto the crumpled roof below.   

It had just been a trip up into the mountains to check the progress on his new cabin. 

He bought the five acre lot for nearly $1 million, while being chased by other bidders.  After a life of careful money management, and work as a luxury boat salesman, he had accumulated a significant retirement fund.

Tucked into a shady slope of pines in the Teton Wilderness, the cabin would be a place where Gerald was to spend the last good years of his life, with his wife and two dogs.  

“My wife,” Gerald thought, as he pulled himself through what was left of the driver side window.  “She’ll be so worried.” 

After clearing the wreckage, he dragged himself across the rocks and shallow, frigid water of the creek.  It was too dark now, to appreciate any of the beauty around him.  

Now he saw only the ominous jagged treeline and felt the cooling, strangely sinister breeze, rushing down the creek bottom.  He didn’t know how badly he was actually wounded.  His right leg was obviously broken.  His breathing seemed ragged, but he was still getting enough air.  

Now he contemplated making the ascent up the rocky slope to the highway.  That would be his only chance of being discovered in the dark. He pulled himself across the shallow water to the edge of the slope.  A larger rock gave way and rolled over his left hand.

“Aarrrgh!”, he screamed in pain.  The frantic cry was quickly overwhelmed by the sound of the creek.  “Help me!”  He rolled onto his back and looked up.  “So here I am, in a living hell at the bottom of Angel Creek,” he thought.

Time began to stretch and become undefinable as the night deepened.  He thought of returning to the truck to try to find his cell phone.

But who knew where it was now.  Besides, it didn’t have any service in this remote area.  He could only hope that the GPS was still working, assuming it hadn’t fallen in the creek or been crushed by the truck.

He began to shiver as the initial shock began to wear off.  He wasn’t dressed warm enough for this.  A sunny day in the mountains, had quickly descended into life-threatening cold, especially now that he was getting wet.  Gerald began to drift off into dangerous sleep. 

It could have been minutes or hours before Gerald began to hear it.  The rumbling sound of an engine in the distance.  It seemed to be growing louder above the sound of the creek.  It was a larger vehicle, maybe a truck.  

“There’s no way I’m going to get to the road in time,” he thought.  I’ll just try to yell as it passes.”  He wondered if he had left any skid marks prior to going off road, but he didn’t remember having had any time to brake.  

The truck was getting closer now.  Gerald began to see the light of headlights filtering through the tops of the pines.  

“Help!” he began to yell, over and over.  

After a couple of minutes, and to his astonishment, the truck began to slow and pull over.  Gerald could see it was a larger, single unit, water tank truck.  It rumbled to a stop on the shoulder, almost exactly where he had gone off road.  Bewildered with this unlikely fortune, Gerald began to yell again.  “Help me, I’m down here.”  

The engine of the water truck shut down, but the headlights remained on.  There was an inexplicable delay before the passenger door creaked open. 

Dropping down from the passenger seat of the truck, Gerald could see the silhouette of what appeared to be a young boy.  He had a pronounced limp as he walked to the edge of the embankment.  

“Oh thank goodness,” Gerald cried out.  “Help, I’m down here.”  

There was no reply.  The boy just stood in the light of the headlights.  From around the front of the truck a man emerged, wearing a ball cap from what Gerald could tell.

“Help, I’m down here.  I crashed my truck and I’m hurt.” Gerald called.  

The silence that followed was the most disturbing thing Gerald had ever felt, and gave him a shudder that was completely independent of any cold. 

The pair–a nearly crippled looking boy and the strange driver–simply gazed down at him.  They had to know he was there.  Once at the edge of the road, the wrecked pickup loomed large in the creekbed, even in the dark.           

“Help me, please, come on!” Gerald cried.  “I think my leg’s broke and I can’t pull myself up these rocks.”  

But still there was no reply.  And then, incredibly, the boy returned to the truck and climbed back in.  And the man, to Gerald’s horror, followed.  The engine of the water truck fired back up, and it lurched forward.  

“No!, You can’t just leave me here!” Gerald shouted.  But the sound of the big engine and the sound of the creek were too much.  His cries could only be heard by angels now as the truck rumbled on, down the mountain.  

An hour later, Gerald jolted awake once again.  The boy, the stranger and the water truck.  He remembered them now.  He had seen them earlier that day at the trading post near the summit of the highway at the Crystal Lake turnoff.  Gerald had stopped there on the way to his property to buy licorice and a Coke.  

The man had been unloading water from the truck into a tank at the back of the store.  The boy had been limping around inside the store, browsing the candy bars, trinkets and postcards. 

The store owner seemed to know both of them well, but Gerald couldn’t remember any names being said or much conversation for that matter. 

He remembered that the boy had bright blue eyes and a scraggly mop of hair.  He was much like Gerald’s grandson, Grayson, he had thought.  Except for a crooked leg with a pronounced limp, the boy seemed content in the store, almost as if it was routine for him.  

The man had mumbled something to the clerk before calling to the boy.  They left together, northbound on the highway.  Gerald remembered the truck had some writing on the door, but didn’t remember what it said.  

“Maybe they were just driving off to get help,” Gerald hoped.  He scooped some cold water from the creek and sipped it from his hand.  Painfully, he wedged his broken leg between a couple of rocks in an attempt to steady it.  

To the west, Gerald could see Bald Mountain, now illuminated by the light of the full moon.  The mountain cast a shadow that minute by minute seemed to be moving toward the place where Gerald had now so unexpectedly found himself.   

“How could this be?” he thought.  “I should’ve just hit that big stupid animal.”         

He wondered now, in the darkness, and out of some strange sense of boredom, what the animal had really been.  It was big but had moved so quickly.  Its hair was dark brown and seemed longer than a bear’s.  

“Could it have been upright?” he wondered.   

Gerald blinked up at the stars.  He bemoaned the loss of his trusty old truck.  It had been good to him, and had seen him through many home projects and sunny Saturdays.  

It was nothing now.  Just a heap of metal, fluids and glass.  The moon shadow was almost over him.  It was time to think of fonder things, to conserve any positive energy.  These kinds of mental games are important in circumstances like this.  He knew it would be crucial to stay alert.  

Gerald was no stranger to difficulty.  He had spent time as a young man working at a lumber mill in the Cascades.  During those days, he had seen hard labor, and had injuries on the job, including a time when he nearly cut his thumb off on a saw blade.

His boss, Danny Jenkins, was a tall, broad shouldered man.  Always wearing flannel shirts, he was the quintessential looking lumberjack.  Danny didn’t appreciate any sign of weakness from his workers then.  Gerald knew what Danny would say to him now.  

“It’s just another night on Bald Mountain,son.  Just taking a nap in the creek.”     

Gerald winced as he touched his left arm.  His sleeve was covered in blood, but didn’t seem to be getting any worse.  Always appreciative of scenery and stars, he couldn’t bear to think of where he was now, in such a dichotomy, having the worst night of his life.  Sleep became irresistible and he began to fade into mixed dreams.  

The sun had just broken over the treetops as forest cop Tim Fuller rounded the bend on the Crystal Lake Highway.  His shift had started at 4 a.m., and the coffee was just starting to kick in.  ACDC was playing on his truck radio as he adjusted his side mirrors. 

Fuller had gotten a notification sometime before midnight about an overdue party.  A woman was calling from the valley saying her husband didn’t make it home last night and she was terribly concerned.  

Some family had left around 3 a.m. to go looking for him.  According to the report, the man was driving an older Ford truck and should have been home around 9 p.m.  Fuller wasn’t a rookie, and overdue people were just part of the job. 

The mountain passes glistened in the morning sunlight.  A few cars were now making their way uphill toward campsites and a myriad of high mountain fishing holes.  

Fuller spotted a pickup truck pulling a camp trailer.  As it passed he could see a tow chain dragging.  He turned on his red and blue lights, flipped a U-Turn and made a traffic stop.  After a brief conversation, and a corrected chain, Fuller continued back down the road.  

“The guy could be anywhere,” he thought.  “He probably got drunk and fell asleep with his mistress at some cabin nearby.”

For a moment, Fuller was a little bothered by this cynicism, but it came from several years of dealing with people and their unpredictable crap.  

He turned up the volume on the stereo.  ACDC in the forest.  It didn’t really get any better than this.  

Around another curve, Fuller could now see the sunlit slope of Bald Mountain.  As he passed a pullout, he noticed what looked like some dark brown fur in the road.  He slowed as he approached. 

And then he noticed it: two faint lines of disturbed gravel shot in an arc from the edge of the pavement down into Angel Creek.  Fuller had seen those lines before at the scenes of many crashes.  They only lasted for about a day or so.  They were fresh.

He activated his lights again and pulled to the side of the road.