Dan DeLong

“I’m just going to wing him.”

I figured he couldn’t have been more than a quarter mile distant, which still made it a long shot for a hand gun.

“…Er…what are you doing?”  Cameron asked as I withdrew my 9mm from it’s holster.

“I’m just going to wing him.”  I said, pulling back the slide. “Maybe one to the leg. That ought to slow him down, don’t you think?”

Johnny laughed.  “That’s probably the only thing that will slow him down.”

“I know.” I said, taking aim on the tiny figure in the distance. “It just isn’t fair. Bastard.”

And it wasn’t fair. Not at all. Greg, a skinny chain smoker who practically never ate and never exercised, could always out-hike us; and he seemed to do it without exerting any effort whatsoever.  Well, I’d had enough.  And despite the fact that a small part of me  felt justified in doing it simply on principle alone, I wasn’t really going to shoot him. Not today anyway.  Instead I just squeezed off about five rounds into the nearest hillside.  The gun shots echoed out across the large flat west of Cottonwood Canyon

Up ahead, Greg stopped hiking.  He turned to Edric who, along with Jack Dog, had been keeping pace with him.

“I guess they want us to stop,” he said.

They sat down in the wash.  Greg lit up a cigarette and then said, “Hey! What the..?” as dirt began to cascade over him.  In an effort to find a cool place to lay, Jack Dog had begun digging, and Greg happened to be sitting directly in the path of the flying dirt.  “Jack! C’mon. Do you have to aim that right at me?” Satisfied with his shallow hole, Jack spun around a few times and then flopped down in the cool earth. His panting grin seemed to say, “Yes Greg, I do in fact have to aim that at you.  And let’s face it: you deserve it.”

I love my dog.

This was Jack Dog’s first through-hike, and the first time he established himself as a premier trail finder.  As we moved north out of the sandy flat and into the brush and boulder choked canyons, finding an easy path became his primary job.

There were no real trails here. We’d left those miles behind us. All we had were the barely discernible paths the wildlife used.  “Find the trail Jack!  Good Boy.”  He’d sniff for a moment and then without hesitation take the only possible route through the tangle.

As for the wildlife, we passed the remains of one of them, a bighorn sheep, near the top of dry gorge we were descending. Only his skull and spine were left.  Earlier in the day as we crossed the flat, a braying wild burro had scolded us from a hill as ravens called from the air.  Much higher, fighter jets from China Lake had banked and twinkled as they caught the midday sun, just tiny glints, thousands of feet above the Earth.

But now the shadows were growing long in the canyon we were descending. Following the  gorge  roughly northeast, we had one ridge  to cross before we could turn west and begin winding up the valley that would bring us to Goldbelt where Mark and Skip had made camp and had beers on ice; theoretically anyway.  We still hadn’t been able to make radio contact.

When we reached an elevation equal to that of the saddle where we planned to cross the ridge, we left the gorge and began skirting the mountain to our left.  The gorge continued down to our right, but we edged along the same elevation for nearly a mile as though we were following the topo line on a map. This way we hit the saddle without ever having to descend and then re-ascend unnecessarily.

It was at the saddle we finally made contact with Mark.