Mesa Trail ch. 18
Draft 2

"Unaware that she was alone, Signe dreamed in the haint blue house. A familiar dream, a memory dream. There she was, tugging at Meggie Marie's arm, begging her to get out of the water, to come back to shore, tugging at her as hard as she could." from Keeper











As though directed by the hand of an invisible conductor, after three days the rain had left. Just as quickly as it came to this arid land, it was replaced, as if in an hour's time, to the bright lights and sounds of the birds in the brush scooting in among the newfound moist vittles of the forest.  Hannah's mother had returned from Fort Collins a day ago carefully by road. Father was in data research mode, "what was this event? How was it different from the great flood of '013?' Hannah knew all about saturation points, that the arid earth does not absorb unexpected blasts of 10 inches of precipitation easily, and that the earth cracks and craters and takes out roads if it must.  A mud wall, shaped like a rolling wave off a great lake, had taken the utility shack of the Garner's just down the street.  The slight tragedy of it all had put her explorations in place.  Wishful thinking can get you far but when it is against the possible loss of others or the earth itself, it seems like nothing more than silliness.  She had reached the Royal Arch for a full panorama after school. It takes two hours, up along the Bluebell Trail, past the Flatirons, all the way up to elevation 7,130, and there it stood, the very symbol of permanance against all else, the great arched stone that looked like any of its segments might cave in and fall at any moment, and as you reached its summit, most of the people scooted quickly underneath it, just in case this was the time.  The rocks themselves, the boulders and the outcroppings, didn't seem affected in the least by the great rain, but she noticed many rivulets had formed in and around the smaller rocks, forming little scouring lines under the lips of rocks and that patterns of smaller rocks had spread out over the ground in dried rivers downward.  She looked out over the western horizon where the continental divide stood like an old man, gray headed, sleeping, still, quiet, but quite alive.  To the east, once again, the city, and here, the Arch but a sort of monument, or a doorway between the two worlds of old magic and people going about their modern lives.  She had wondered what might have happened to the old sluice box against the rising volume of the Bear Creak, so she quietly apprehended the Mesa Trail downward to get a better look, expecting shards of old wood, crooked gadgets, littered rocks tumbling down to bury some of their standing ground.  From the perch of an overhanging boulder, maybe three hundred feet up from the creek, the sun had placed itself directly onto the crease of the valley which usually, they found day by day, only received an hour or two a day, when everyone celebrated, took a rest, got a drink.  The sluice box was still there, like a long chute, steady, just barely submerged at its bottom by cool slow moving water.  As the sun rose across the scene, it penetrated that cold cold water at the bottom, and unless she was completely mistaken, it also glimmered like the kind of twinkle you get off of jewels in the right sunlight.  A quick shock overtook her and shot down into her abdomen.  There was nobody else around.  It was silent. A box of supplies stood tilted across the bank, and it looked open.