Jen's Legacy.

Early in the afternoon, after they'd covered only a few miles, it became obvious that the weather would not cooperate with them for much longer.

They walked, holding hands where they could.

Where they could not walk together, she walked ahead of him, conscious that he watched her constantly, admiring the occasional glimpses he caught of her exposed body as she turned to see where he was.

If he walked ahead of her, it was the same. He constantly looked back at her, checking her progress, seeing her shirt fluttering around her, glimpsing her breasts in the open front of it as the freshening wind moved it on her, and seeing that she had unfastened her shorts, loosening them to be less snug on her and with the zip mostly open, revealing enough to cause him to stumble. He thought he might die at those moments.

She smiled at the shocked look on his face which he did not try to hide, knowing how he was affected by those visions of her. He had difficulty tearing his eyes away from her, sending his mouth dry, and other things changing at what he saw and responded to.

From what he could see with the clouds moving in, they would not make it to Badger’s Crossing before that storm was on them. They picked up their pace to get to the secondary place he’d been aiming for, rather than head on to Badger’s, still a few miles ahead of them.

She was much more comfortable today, not wearing that swimsuit, though her feet were still tender, and he could see her favoring them more, as the day advanced. He’d stopped her so that he could check on them.

She was developing blisters. Damn!

Where they were now aiming for, was a wooded gully that he knew about. If the weather turned worse, as it looked to do, with one of those lightning storms they’d watched last night, he wasn’t going to risk getting caught out on that open descent to the river again at this altitude, even though it was a gradual descent, falling steadily over a couple of miles, and was a relatively easy walk, but that slope was too open. Better not rush it. They’d get there sometime tomorrow. He and Jen had been faced with that same decision for the same reason, years earlier, and they’d spent their first night after being at the river, where they were now headed for.

A few minutes after that decision, and an hour short of where they were aiming for, the heavens opened up, wetting them through to the skin in minutes.

He dug out his jacket from the top of his pack, and swapped it for her lifejacket, fastening both her shirt and his jacket around her, not wanting to hide any of her away, but having to, leaning in to kiss her, wanting to hold and touch her breasts, but resisting doing so with the way the rain-- flecked with snow-flakes and with hard ice pellets-- blew into them. He shielded her from the wind as he fastened her up. His jacket would soon get wet too, but would protect her from the wind and from getting cold too fast with the temperature dropping as it was, and with her so lightly dressed and her legs exposed. He was used to it, and could tolerate it better than she could.

It was either one extreme or the other out here.

Her muscles were not used to this kind of exercise, and he knew that if they stopped early, and short of where he was aiming for, that she might not easily get going again. If that happened, they would be fixed for the night, caught out in this and with too few places to shelter.

It was a cold rain, and each time it cleared before the next storm swept over them, he could see the increasing buildup of snow over the higher elevations all around them. It did not look good, but each day brought something different out here, and it was getting close to the time when the season could close in unexpectedly, and might never reverse itself in time to get back to the better weather before winter swooped in early.

He could have tolerated such adverse weather had he been alone, but he hadn’t expected that he would have such a vulnerable and fragile companion to look after too, and who needed his help as much as she did.

He stayed close to her, knowing that cold was a major problem out here, and that neither of them was dressed for it. Where they were headed was well-sheltered from the wind and weather generally, and with wood for a fire.

If this continued, as it seemed that it would, there would be no problem with water.

The downpour didn’t let up, so they were both soaked through to the skin by the time they got where they needed to be.

It was a sharply-incised gully, eroded out along a small swarm of fault-lines cutting through the overlying basalt layer. The weather had taken it from there, eroding down through the overlying basalt into the softer sandstone below, so there were quite a few small overhangs, but one large one that he knew about.

The gully was only about ten feet deep, and almost fifty feet wide at the upper end of it where they needed to be to take advantage of that overhang.

The gully was home to a growth of scrubby, deciduous trees at the limit of their range, though the hardy species were the evergreens, Ponderosa, and other species, whose seeds had been brought up from the canyon below by the many birds that foraged here in their springtime trek to the twenty-four-hour daylight of the Arctic, and by squirrels, always searching for seeds.

There were clumps of more sturdy stands of pine and other evergreens and vegetation that could get a toehold in the rocky crevices and continue their work of prying the gully ever wider and deeper, nurtured by the occasional freshets that came from the rare rainstorms that swept the area.

Growth of all vegetation and the grasses and wildflowers was assisted by the fine dust carried across the rim to settle into the gully as the air swirled and dropped whatever load it carried. Whenever it rained heavily on the plateau, an intermittent stream developed and fell over the edge, to provide water for everything growing there.

They would take shelter here, earlier than they'd planned, with the weather turning colder, and where they could spend the night, as it blew over, which it would by morning, though it might leave a layer of snow in its wake.

Royce clambered down into the gully, down a well-worn natural stairway of rocks, leading the way, helping Claire, lifting her down in stages with her being relatively stiff after that unfamiliar exercise, so that she wouldn’t slip and fall on the wet rocks, then picked her up and carried her to the overhang he clearly remembered from the time he’d been here with Jen.

It was just as he’d remembered it from five years earlier, as though no one else had been near it in that time. That was not so surprising, as where they were was generally inaccessible to the usual tourists and was far enough back from the canyon. In previous times it had been a shelter for others, indicated by the smoke-blackened rocks above, where hundreds of fires had been lit over the millennia by the Indians and then by other explorers and sightseers.

There was a small pile of wood at the back of part of the shelter from five years earlier, and even the outline of where he’d made their fire, back from the drip line from above.

He’d need to bring in more wood, which would not be a problem. They’d passed several dead stumps and other trunks and branches that had fallen to the gully floor, unable to survive the winter up here, with winds and the weight of snow, but having hung on for enough years in better times, to get started into a healthy growth.