We left the trucks at dawn. By noon, the weather turned the way I knew it would, and Tanner’s camera was dead, and that’s when he stopped talking.
A man stops talking about two things. Either he has finally started listening, or he is getting cold in a way he does not have the words for yet. With Tanner it was the second one.
He had on eleven hundred dollars of technical layering, all of it wet, because he had sweated through it climbing at a pace I had already told him twice not to keep. Cotton socks under merino boots, which is a joke a store clerk plays on a man who does not ask questions. And that three-thousand-dollar rifle across his back that had never been sighted in, which mattered not at all, because we were not going to be shooting anything.
The snow came sideways at about half past twelve. Visibility went to maybe forty feet. Tanner said, and I will give him credit for saying it plain, “Hank, I don’t know which way the trucks are.”
“No,” I said. “You wouldn’t.”
I have a canvas mail satchel that the Postal Service would like back, and inside it there is a case, and inside the case there are four maps I drew myself between 1981 and 1996 on the backs of dead route cards. USGS does not mark which springs run in a dry September. USGS does not mark the old Forest Service line shack up the north fork of that drainage that a fellow named Emmet Ross kept a stove in, and USGS certainly does not mark that the stovepipe wants a rag stuffed in the elbow or it will smoke you out.
We were in that shack in fifty minutes. I had him out of the wet layers and into a wool blanket that has been in that shack since the Ford administration, and I fed him sugar and hot water and did not say one word to him about Thanksgiving.
Around four o’clock he found his voice and used it to apologize, which took him a long while and cost him something, and I let it cost him. Then he asked me how I knew about the shack.
So I opened the case and showed him the maps. And in the back sleeve of that case is an envelope with my grandson’s name on it, because I had already decided two years ago that the maps go to the boy, and I had written him a note to go with them.
Cody — these are not secrets, they are chores. Somebody walked every one of these lines so that somebody after them would come home. Now that is you. Add to them. The mountain does not care what you do for a living.
Tanner read it twice. He asked if the boy could learn it. I said the boy already knows where two of the springs are.
We walked out Sunday morning under a clear sky. He carried his own rifle and none of my gear, which I insisted on, because a man needs to come off a mountain with something.
He calls now. Asks about boots, mostly. He has not once used the word cosplay, and I have not once used the word Costco, and I would call that a fair trade between men.