Looking up and seeing that the mountain lion had disappeared was infinitely more panic-inducing than seeing it in the first place. The woman rolls over on the side of her good arm, face contorting in pain as the bad arm follows limply. She slowly and arduously climbs to her feet, eyes flicking up to the ledge every few seconds. After doing the equivalent of a diagnostic check to confirm it was only her wrist that was badly hurt, she turns her attention to her gear. She wrestles her backpack off with difficulty, and unceremoniously pours the contents out on the rocky ground.
I feel her curse silently.
The item in her bag which probably would have been the most immediate help is shattered. She gathers up the pieces of her smartphone and begins reassembling it as well as she can. The backplate has snapped, so she holds the battery in place as she tries turning it on, all one-handed. The device chimes its boot-up noises, and her face lights up with hope, however, the decimated screen remains black. She presses on the screen, and gets some haptic feedback every once in a while. It must just be the display that's borked.
As her focus narrows on trying to operate the phone with no display, the rest of the scene fades for me... I'm only aware of the frustrated blur of her attempts at pressing a sequence of button locations from memory, and the throbbing pain from her wrist. Until the sound of a displaced rock, bouncing down the walls of some chasm, echoes out from the crevice between the rock faces, diverting our collective attention.
New fear surges, and the phone is forgotten. She peers into the darkness of the open spaces there. At the level of the plateau she's standing on, the crevice is about five feet across. She hadn't paid it any attention before, since her goal had been up and not in. The two large granite formations lean against one another to form most of the anatomy of the crevice, but there are smaller, vertical chunks of rock that have settled haphazardly within it, creating a dark maze of smaller spaces.
And then, there they are. Those green eyes. As soon as she sees them, they're gone again, but where they had been there's a flash of an unmistakeable shadowy shape. It had been deep within the crevice, with many passages between that were too small for an animal so large. It was impossible to tell if there was a path from the wildcat to the woman's current spot. It's a grim situation.
I run through her options. Try to use the rope to climb up to a safe height? Not a chance with a route like this and her arm in that state. Try to rapelle down? The fall in that direction was much higher, one small mistake and she was done for. The phone works, she just needed the time to stumble through the invisible buttons required to make a call. This is the best place to try to call for rescue. She just needs it to be safe. Think, what does she have at her disposal? The backpack's contents had been:
-hooded zip-up sweatshirt
-utility tool
-a few energy bars and a plastic bag of trail mix
-compact reflective thermal camping blanket
-bottle of water
-zippered bag, contents unknown
-first aid kit, including athletic tape and a fist-sized bottle of rubbing alcohol
There's also her climbing gear, the two fixed ropes, and scattered rocks of all sizes. It's enough. I have an idea that might help her.
She had also turned her attention to the small pile of affects she had left near the spot she had fallen. She downs a couple of aspirin from her first aid kit, grabs the hoodie, grits her teeth, and wraps both sleeves tightly around her broken wrist. With a great amount of pain and difficulty, she wrestles the body of the sweatshirt over her head and around her back. It's an effective sling.
I'm impressed.
Turning back to the crevice, she's now at a loss. She fidgets with her good hand, but otherwise stands still.
Time to see if my idea will be of any use to her. When she was climbing, and I had been desperately wishing she had just clip on to the rope, I had felt something. A flicker of a change in her actions. She had been about to grab it. I had to try again. I begin to visualize what I have in mind as vividly as possible. The reflective blanket. The athletic tape. Her chalk bag. The ropes.
Her gaze diverts to her supplies.
The rope from the route below first. Pulled up a bit and wound around a rock. Then, the rope from the route above. There's plenty of slack at the bottom, slid around the first rope, it can be pulled tight and hard to fly up and away from the ground and the wall it's hanging against. While it's still slack, lay it across the edge of the blanket. Fold the edge over, secure with tape. Loose edge toward the crevice, pour chalk into blanket. Fold loose edge just a bit over the rope, creating a pocket of chalk. When/if a loud, bright surprise would come in handy, yank on the end of the rope, rope snaps up, blanket flutters, chalk goes flying, any giant cats present crap themselves and go running. In theory. I run through those steps mentally, over and over.
She's looking from item to item of her dumped out pack, wheels turning. Her good hand is twitching around a bit, as if it's restless to do something. She kneels down near her stuff, reaching out to touch each item in turn, and as she's moving from one to the next, her fingers come to rest on the rope. She lifts it, furrowing her brow, her pensive expression that of someone who has remembered something, or is experiencing deja vu. She looks back at the rope from the route below.
Yes!
Like someone who has just realized the solution to a puzzle, she starts putting the pieces together. Even one handed, the contraption isn't hard for her to set up. She's clever with the use of her feet and teeth.
I wonder briefly if she's had a broken arm before.
The tape fights her a little, clinging a little too easily to the shiny surface of the blanket. She gives the rope a careful experimental tug. The blanket crackles noisily and spreads with the momentum of the rope.
I can hardly believe it. She's pulled it off, just like I had pictured it.
She has a little less chalk left than I was hoping, but it'll have to do. She pours it all in and tucks a tiny amount of the other end of the blanket over the rope. It's done. She was industrious about the task, and it seems to have not taken very much time, not that I have a very good sense of that sort of thing. There haven't been any more noises from the crevice.
I seriously hope that the most good this invention will have done is to give her piece of mind. As cool as it is, I do not want to see her use it.
She takes the end of the rope and returns to grab her phone. She also picks up the bottle of alcohol and the utility tool. A small boulder pushed up against the upper wall gives her a good place with an amount of cover from the crevice, but not so much that it obstructs her view. She posts herself just behind it, opening the bottle of alcohol, flipping the tool's knife out, and setting them both carefully down next to her. The rope lies in her lap just under her good hand, and she gets to work figuring out the phone. She never goes more than a few seconds without glancing toward the crevice.
Everything blends again into a pattern of invisible button pushing and expectant examinations of the crevice.
She's trying a listen at the phone's earpiece, like she has a few dozen times already, when she hears it. A dial tone! She lets out a yell of excitement before quickly quieting herself and checking the crevice once more. Nothing there. The phone rings, once, twice. She's biting her lip, probably praying to every god she knows that this person picks up the phone. It rings a third time, and halfway through the fourth a woman's voice answers. The climber wastes no time.
"Hello! Oh thank you, please - please, I need you to call emergency services - " The woman on the other end responds, bewildered, but eager to help. The voice is enough for the climber to recognize the person, it must have been one of her phone contacts. "Rebecca? I'm so glad you answered. I hurt my arm and I'm stuck on a climb, and I really, really need EMS to get me out of here as fast as possible..." She gives the woman her location and a few brief details before hanging up to let her make the emergency call. She lets her head fall back against the wall, and breathes a sigh of relief. "It's gonna be ok." She whispers to herself.
I've felt the suspense and elation and relief all with her. But something doesn't feel right. All the noise she was making, it's nagging at me -
She whips her head in the direction of the crevice, and there it is, the big cat, bounding out of the shadows.
She drops her phone to pull and yank hard on the rope. It pulls tight, snapping up and dragging the blanket with it.
The reflective material catches the rays of the now-setting sun, shining blindingly. The loose end slips away from the rope and the chalk poofs out in a white cloud.
The mountain lion skitters sideways, looking, for all his size and might, like a startled housecat.
The climber has already dropped the rope, grabbed the bottle of alcohol, and is up and running at the predator she has just spent several hours living in fear of. She's screaming a battle cry at the top of her lungs, and flinging the liquid as best she can in the direction of the beast.
Bewildered, it scrambles back, turns, and hightails it the way it came.
The climber comes to a halt, breathless. She drops the empty bottle. After her second monumental adrenaline rush of the day, she's completely drained. Her free hand is shaking. She brings it up to her face and rubs her eyes.
Deep breaths.
She walks back and slides back down to her previous position, grabs the knife, trembling.
I don't see any more details. She calms, eventually, and nibbles at the snacks she has brought. I see it all in a blur. A bird lights on the edge of the plateau and startles her. Far below, the trees are rustling in an evening wind. As the sun slips below the horizon, and the moon reaches toward the stars, she sees a red and white helicopter flying straight in her direction.
-------
I wake up.
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