Short Stories

Pipestone Canyon

The road was unpaved, but wide and smooth, at least until the last half-mile, when it turned into a rutted track, bitterbrush leaning in on one side to scratch the car’s bodywork, and a stony drop-off on the other. He cursed each time they touched bottom. She tried to close out his bad temper, concentrating on the serenity of the cloudless sky, the smooth sweep of hillside into valley. It was always thus: she picked the hike, and he complained about it: too hot, too cold, too short, too long, or, in this case, the access road.

She dawdled after they parked, stripping off her fleece, while he strode forward, the dog tugging on the leash. The breeze was cool on her arms, but she started to sweat as she climbed after them up the valley to the canyon. She was conscious of all the new life invisible under last year’s prairie dried to straw. A grouse womp-womped from a stand of bunch grass then exploded into the air, sending the dog into a delirium of jumping and yipping.

 

When the dog settled down, the woman could hear the birdsong again, wishing for the hundredth time that she could identify the singers. The only one she recognized was the woodpecker, its machine-gun rattle echoing across the valley.

She caught up by a large boulder. He was frowning back the way they had come.

“I’m not sure this is the right trail. Perhaps we should have taken the other one.”

“Well, I remember this view from last year,” she lied, her habit to answer his doubts with sunny certainty. She turned and looked towards the dense line of trees against the rock face ahead. “And that’s a canyon up there, if not the canyon. What a gorgeous day!”

“Hmm. We should have brought water. I didn’t think it could get so hot in March.”

After decades of marriage they had their patter down. Their routine: the yin and yang, the call-and-response. His negative, her positive; her passive, his aggressive.

Another half-hour brought them to the trees. In their shade, the temperature dropped ten degrees. The trail turned to mud, and the undergrowth smelt rich and humid. This was where rattlesnakes congregated in the summer. She wondered where they were hiding now, another thing to look up in the field guide when she got back to the house.

“Look,” she pointed up through the tree tops to rocky outcroppings at the canyon’s rim. Wind and weather had scoured the cliff top into towers, rough pipes of stone that gave the place its name. They glowed golden in the midday sun.

“Wow.” He put a hand on her shoulder – a peace offering? “Let’s go a little further.”

However, within a dozen yards, snow still covered the trail, and the icy crust was treacherous. They let the dog chomp down a few mouthfuls, then turned back. As they emerged into the sunlight again, a pair of magpies cut out from the trees, swerving over and around each other, before diving back into the shadows.

“I think I read somewhere that magpies mate for life.” She had already fallen a few feet behind. “Poor things,” she added in a lower tone. He heard her, however, and turned with a look of such distress that her heart leaped into her throat.

“Wait for me.” She hurried forward to take his free hand, and the dog pulled them both back down the trail together.

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