Evidence of Life - By Barbara Taylor Sissel Page 0,63

to be somewhere settled in for the night.

When they reached the water’s edge, the man stood looking its length up and down, and he sighed. The cobble-filled channel was spring-fed and running at a good pace. Sometimes she flooded bad, like last spring. That flood had put water over damn near four counties, the worst in Hill Country history. Lives had been lost; some folks had never been found.

“An’ we think we got problems, huh, Blue?” The old man dropped the mule’s reins and patted his neck absently.

He lifted his battered ball cap and resettled it, walked a little way beside the water thinking how she’d never had a name that he ever heard of. Somehow that seemed a shame now. His granddaddy’d just called it “the crick”. He’d come haul him out of bed of a mornin’ and say, “Let’s go fishin’ down to the crick, kid.”

Man, those had been the days. He’d learnt to swim here, too, and spent many a night camping on this very bank. This was his place, his water. He knew every inch of this land and this stream as if it was his own skin.

He bent and picked up a flat pebble, examined the layers of reddish brown and soft yellow, and then side-armed it, watching it skip the water’s surface before it sank in a nest of ripples. The bank on the other side was a wall of limestone cut into cliffs that rose sharply from a litter of rock. Seemed to him as if the face was always shedding its skin, shooting off flakes, creating tables or bridges at its feet, the darker mystery of caves.

Somehow the look of the rock face, the way it cracked and buckled, put the old man in mind of himself, how age was breaking him. Rock or flesh or dirt, in the end, time would have its way. In the end everything breaks. Everything dies.

He squinted up at the sun perched in the high reach of the trees that capped the ridge to his left. Wouldn’t be long, time would have its way with the last of the daylight, too. He turned to Blue standing behind him and slid his bedroll and a leather satchel that held his gear off the mule’s back. Blue flicked his tail and gave a snort of pleasure, then ambled upstream a little way and a few yards inland to a small, protected cove where the grass grew thick and green.

“That’s right, old Blue,” the man said. And he knew they were both happy.

He gathered driftwood for a fire later, and pretty quick after that had his hook in the water and his back settled against a good-sized log. He dozed some, and when he came to, it was dark. He checked his line. The empty hook dangled. Some varmint had likely got his dinner, the old man thought. He rose stiffly and lit the fire, ate the apples and some of the cornbread he’d used for bait, and when Blue came begging, he fed him some of his meal, too.

“Worse’n a old bitch dog,” he said, petting the long mottled gray nose.

Before he turned in, he gathered a few more good-size pieces of driftwood. He’d be up again in the night. Couldn’t go ’til morning no more without needing to take a piss.

* * *

He woke with a start and for a moment had no idea what had wakened him or where he was. Then he heard the sound of the water running in the creek nearby and remembered. He turned his head until he caught sight of his campfire burned down to embers now, and there was Blue’s slumbering hulk asleep on the other side. Danged mule was twitching and snuffling as if he was having some kind of dream. Was it the mule’s racket that had wakened him?

He turned his face up, staring into the black bowl of the sky, and caught a flicker of light from the corner of his eye.

Flashlight?

He levered up on one elbow and peered out over the water, unmoving, unsure whether to be afraid. But his heart wasn’t waiting around for orders. He could feel it thumping in his chest like the hind leg of a jackrabbit. There it was again, coming from up in one of them caves on the other side of the stream. Two bright beams, bigger than from a flashlight. More like car headlights. Seemed as if they were pushed back pretty far, wedged at a slant in