Light on Golden Mountain

A strip of open sky, diamond studs on blue black, arcs from horizon-to-horizon. Dark clouds flash and roil along its perimeter and nip away at its narrowing flanks. Creek water lapping at his hooves and fetlocks, Lewis John bobs his head and whinnies. “Be right there, boy,” says Frank, his riding boots sinking in wet sand as he walks toward the horse. Plucking his hip boots from the branch he hung them on just one hour ago, Frank slips into them then mounts Lewis John. “Sorry, boy, I had no idea the creek was going to rise like this.” A burst of wind snatches the tent door and, waving it like a flag, holds it wide open. Clothed in her flannel nightgown, Mandy stares up at her father. “Dad,” she says, arms clasped tightly around her ribs, “why are you wearing your hip boots and --” Her father’s glaring eyes, stony and unfamiliar, stomp her words as swelling creek water, pushing closer and closer to her bare toes, answers her cut-short question. Lewis John trudges upslope through widening rivulets of mud and water. Seated on the saddle in front of her father, Mandy lay forward on Lewis John’s rain-soaked mane. As the horse side steps another flow of rolling gravel and stone, she peeks out the bottom of the tent-like cape that covers them. “Oh, Lewis John,” she says. “I wish we could fit all of you under here with us!” Sparking like the wheels of a run-away train, lightening cuts the sky. In its ominous glow, Mandy catches a glimpse of the tent, abandoned not thirty minutes ago. Small, distant, still lashed to a tree, it flounders in flooding creek water like the fallen sail of a ship. “Ah-ha!” says Frank, his eyes dashing frantically. Thunder cracking, he turns Lewis John sharply left toward a clearing. Ribs hollow and rattling as their horse rears up, Frank and Mandy slide helplessly over Lewis John’s hindquarters. As Frank’s back slams against rock-hard ground, he loses his grip on his daughter. Goaded and tossed in a torrent of water, he fights for air. “Mandy!” shouts Frank, wind and water stealing his words. Thrust into an eddy, he reaches out. “Mandy!!” Latching onto a boulder, he heaves himself out of the water and, gasping and stumbling, chases the coursing water downstream. Pressing the palms of his hands against his knees, he stops for a second. “Man-deeee! Man-deeee!” Ignoring stinging pain at the back of her left leg, Mandy cries out in the direction of her father’s voice. “Over here! Pops! I’m over here!” Water rushes down the bib of her dungarees and out through the legs. Belly down, boots long gone, she holds tight to a washed out tree root. Hand-over-hand, Mandy works her way up. Hiccupping, coughing, slipping back, she loses ground. Cheek pressed stubbornly against the root’s velvety surface, Mandy wraps it around her thigh and, knees clamped together, tenses her grip. Testing her hold with each hand slap forward, she feels the half-exposed roots of the tree, climbs them like a ladder and hoists herself up over a rocky ledge.