Sushil and I plodded along the trail in single file. We had a lifetime of experience climbing jagged snow-covered peaks in the Sierra Mountains. Now we were coming home from another trip, hiking in familiar fields covered with wildflowers. Just around the next bend, we’d start moving faster on our last downhill trek through the valley to our campsite. Usually, we climbed as a threesome, but Christian was dead, and after leaving his ashes at the summit, it was just the two of us, for the first time in years.
I noticed that Sushil had picked up the pace.
“You’ve dragged your feet all day,” I shouted. “What’s the sudden rush?” For a man who spent more than twenty years in the special forces and the rest of his life rescuing victims of child trafficking, he was in great form. Sushil had just turned seventy and told his girlfriend he felt in the best shape ever.
Yet he cried like a baby when I tossed our friend’s ashes into the wind.
“I was just remembering how Christian always wanted to run the last mile back to our tents.” Sushil broke into a slow jog.
I adjusted my waistbelt and felt my pack tighten against my back. I realized he wasn’t going to give me time to readjust the position of the empty urn I had stuffed under the top flap, so I heard it banging against the tent poles with each rise of my accelerating steps. I wanted to leave the urn on the summit, but Sushil thought we should give it to Christian’s daughter, even though she hadn’t spoken with her father in weeks and never made it to the funeral.
Christian’s wife and her mother were there and said we should do whatever we wished with it. He had never been attached to material things and probably wouldn’t have cared, but I poured a handful of ashes into a freezer bag that I put in my pocket, to give her with the urn just in case.
The man went downhill fast. He was a former investment banker turned philanthropist whose interests spanned everything from mountaineering to hang-gliding, with lots of photography in between. He had been healthy his entire life, never smoked, and drank only when he was climbing or camping with us somewhere in the back country. After he was diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia, the doctors told him he might have only six months to live. A stem cell transplant and chemotherapy didn’t help, and he was gone in five.
The three of us had known each other since grade school.
“Do you think you’ll cry when I die?” I shouted, wondering if Sushil could hear me over the thuds of our boots hitting solid ground. Either he could not, or I never heard his answer. It’s probably better that way, I thought, checking the heart rate monitor on my watch, but I wasn’t sure.
For an instant, I slowed my pace on the trail, trying to catch my breath and letting Sushil get far ahead of me. I paused to do what I felt Christian would have done. I looked to the sky and turned in place to take in everything wonderful and beautiful around me. The windswept clouds stretching to become wispy long white cushions, a dozen ravens cackling from those branches in a nearby tree, a small mound of scat, probably from that roving coyote I saw earlier, the deliciously orange poppy field on the other side of the creek, and memories which seemed to have blossomed out of nowhere after each kick of dirt under my feet. I checked my heart rate as my breathing steadied. As much as I thought I knew him, perhaps I didn’t really, and I wondered whether Christian ever felt as fearful about his future as I did that very moment. Whether he had ever spent any of his precious waking hours searching, as I so often do, for the drive to recapture the drive.
Down the trail, Sushil had stopped, his large frame silhouetted against the forest of pines behind him. He wasn’t looking at the view. He was waiting for me. I readjusted the urn in the top of my pack and broke into a light jog. When I reached him, he turned, and we walked on.
Bio:
Henri Colt is a physician-writer and mountaineer who marvels at beauty wherever it may be. His short stories have appeared in CaféLit, Rock and Ice Magazine, Flash Fiction Magazine, and others. His biography of Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani, Becoming Modigliani was published in 2025.
Did you enjoy the story? Would you like to shout us a coffee? Half of what you pay goes to the writers and half towards supporting the project (web site maintenance, preparing the next Best of book etc.)
No comments:
Post a Comment