ACT I: SCENE 1
Wouldn’t It Be Loverly [Not to Be Stuck on the Side of This Cliff]?
SOMEWHERE OFF THE BEATEN PATH, GRAND CANYON, ARIZONA, USA
In which our hero finds himself in a precarious predicament of his own making during a walkabout gone wrong.
It wasn’t like I’d planned to be stuck this high on the edge of a cliff, hanging on by my fingernails, dangling over the deepest canyon on God’s green earth—one visible from space, possibly even from the moon. Totally wasn’t on my to-do list for the morning.
“Hello? Anyone?”
Everybody else who came with me on that mangy Canyon Feel the Love Tour Bus had already made a beeline for the shuttle where the bottled water was waiting in a nice esky of ice cubes.
So, yeah, I probably should have alerted someone when I made the brilliant move of busting away from the group and taking a little detour to free-climb one of the walls of the Grand Canyon.
I’d gone free-climbing all my life in the nooks and crannies of the creeks back at Cherrington Downs Station. The Victorian Alps above Melbourne had some gorgeous climbing areas, none of them too far from Cherrington Downs, which is what mistakenly made me believe my whole life had prepared me for this breakaway opportunity to finally put my skills to the test—like the Olympics, or something.
How high could the canyon wall be, anyway? I’d scoffed. How long could one climb up and back down possibly take? I would be right back, I reasoned. Besides, when I’d eyed the veritable tortoises in the back of the Canyon Feel the Love Bus group slowing the rest of everybody on the whole hike to a grinding halt, I knew I’d be up this rock face and back before they got to that patch of sagebrush in the distance. All I had to do was keep an eye on them all the time and then jog to catch up.
Think again, genius.
“Hello? Mates? Anybody up there?” No voices, no snorts of exhaust from that polluter bus we’d loaded onto to get here in the first place. No friendly rangers like you always see coming along on the American TV shows to rescue a bloke in the final moments before he drops to his death. Talk about a complete come a gutser. And it was all on me, Henry Lyon, idiot abroad of the year. Congrats, mate. You blew away the competition with this ace move.
A glance down at the canyon floor below me shot an arrow of fear right through my chest where my heart should be—if I hadn’t swallowed it last time I took a gander at the blistering long way I’d climbed.
At first I’d been pretty impressed with myself. Good on me for making it this far. That was, until I managed to check my phone and see that I’d been on this little solo climb about fifteen minutes past the time the tour bus was scheduled to depart the Grand Canyon to head back to civilization—which trip should take about five hours from here to even reach woop woop at freeway speeds in that heap of a bus.
Maybe I could catch a ride on a ute back into town with a truckie if I could make it back to the road. Or did they call them lorries in the States? Maybe lorries were in the U.K., and trucks were in the states. My memory was starting to go awry in all this wind.
“Hello? Anyone lend me a hand here?”
When no response came, I had no choice but to keep on climbing. Judging from the distance I could see above and below, I was a little more than halfway now. Maybe nobody had ever been stupid enough to do this before. Maybe I was breaking some kind of record.
No, the only thing I was breaking was my precious neck. Back at Cherrington Downs, Jonno would be railing on me right now if he knew what I’d done, completely forgetting he was the foreman and I was the boss. If I thought there was a ghost of a chance of getting a cell signal, I’d call him and have him arrange for the national guard or whoever the Americans would send. But somewhere this remote there was no chance of a signal, at least there hadn’t been when The Canyon Feel the Love Tour Bus got two flat tires on the primitive road into this hiking spot.
I checked my phone’s clock again when I got a little higher and to a place where I could manage holding on with one hand. Aw, fizzer. It was more than an hour past departure time. They’d gone off without me for sure, and none of that crew was organized enough to be doing a head count before they took off. Even cattle got a head count before leaving on a long drive through the desert. Not us Canyon Feel the Love blokes.
This was what I got for booking my travel without doing any research, just picking the first bus company I saw in Vegas and handing over cash money. They hadn’t asked for any paperwork or waivers, and I’d thought I’d hit a hassle-saving jackpot. When they showed up with an actual mini-bus, I figured that alone was a win and everything would be hunky dory from there.
I shoved my phone back in my bum bag and made another rally.
With a little…more…effort I could hoist myself to the top.
Hand over hand, foothold after foothold.
At least it was winter here and not the blazing Arizona heat I’d heard about. Naturally, we had hot summers down our way, but even this time of year, December, we got nothing like the legendary temperatures of the American Southwest. If the cattle grazing schedule on Cherrington Downs Station would’ve allowed it, I’d far rather have made my visit here during that blister, just to see if I was man enough to take it.
Huah. I shoved a leg to another ledge. One wrong move and I was down there, broken on the rocks. Coyotes would eat my rotting carcass. Or they might not wait until it rotted. The big, nasty vultures would get the rotting part. I looked up to see one circling over me. He’d been watching me for the past hour, send him to the devil.
“Get away, bird. I’m not going to be your meal.”
I pushed again. The sun would be going down by the time I made it to the top, if I ever did. And then the vulture could snack on me at will, because I’d be dead from exhaustion.
But I would be at the top. Oh, believe me, I’d be at the top.
When the howl of one of those nasty coyotes shot me a dose of adrenaline, I made a good rally, maybe another twenty feet, in a short amount of time.
Which were worse, coyotes or dingoes? The ones currently licking their chops at the sight of you when you were down, that’s who was worse.
Speaking of down, don’t look down.
I had to keep channeling all my energy upward. Think of all the work I’d put into the cattle business, and how it would all go to waste if I bought my ticket to heaven here today in the American desert. I’d never get to meet with Dr. David Smith, never get to find out whether Dad’s and my genetics research in Oz could work out here in America. I’d never take Cherrington Downs from a multi-million dollar operation into some serious money, because I’d be too busy serving as dinner for a wild dog.
Well, meeting my Maker wasn’t my plan. Not today. Today, I was going to beat this canyon wall.
Inch by inch upward.
A mental picture of Cherrington Downs motivated me. Images of the faces of the cows with their suckling calves flitted through my mind. Without me, the whole station would go to waste. The hands wouldn’t know what to do.
Another handhold, another stretch.
My brother Frank knew things and loved the place as much as Dad had, but he wasn’t the type to step up and lead. Jonno could take orders and put them into action among the hands, but he couldn’t give them.
I was the only guy who had the full vision of the operation at Cherrington Downs.
Move the foot, hoist my weight upward, despite gravity’s increasing power. Or was it my weakening muscles?
Gravity would not win today.
Lunge, hoist, press, up, go. Think of the reason I came to the States in the first place—make that reasons, because the cattle breeding business wasn’t the only reason, even though it was a strong one.
My fingers, toes, and every other muscle in my battered body cramped.
The other reason for my trip, though, I couldn’t yet bring myself to admit aloud, or even really articulate in my head, but it all started when Jonno got married last year. He’d been my last single mate. I was the last man standing.
“What’s your problem?” he’d asked me. “You can’t let any girl in Oz catch your attention? Melbourne’s a big place.”
“Plenty catch it, but none can seem to hold it once they open their mouths.” I chucked this out dripping with sarcasm, but he and I both knew the real reason: the girls in Melbourne weren’t up for the life I offered, whether or not it came complete with a plane and a helicopter and a huge spread in the mountains.
All they cared about was that I had Cherrington Downs and a plane and a little bit of education at uni from my golf scholarship. Money and status. And after they’d chased me for it for a few months, they’d gotten tired.
Because they’d never caught me, and they never would. Not girls like that. These girls didn’t even ride horses, which if you live in high country is pretty much imperative.
I needed a girl with a rugged heart and a good mind who wasn’t afraid to live a hard life even if my financial circumstances might not seem to require it on the surface.
Jonno had found that for himself. Not that he had a plane or a million head of cattle. But he had the girl, and the wee bub on the way, and that made him richer by far.
And I knew it. Sure, I would borrow one for a pash now and then, but none of them wanted to live on Cherrington Downs, once they realized I wasn’t living it up in the lush life with the station’s income.
Girls. Thoughts of frustration about them fueled my climb.
I was almost there. Just a few more inches, if my strength held.
So I’d come to America with more on my agenda than just the Dr. David Smith meeting to discuss cattle genetics. According to Jonno, and my brother, and everyone else, my own genetics were on the line, too.
Maybe there was an American girl for me, Jonno had said—about an infernal eight million times.
What if she was waiting at—the—top—of—this—cliff?
Booyah! I hoisted my weight up over the very last ledge just as the sun slid beneath the purple horizon in the west.
And then I collapsed on the flat earth, staring up at the broad purpling sky, not too different from the one I saw back home and thanked the good Lord above for letting me live to see another day.
I was so knackered I could have died.
I reached for my bag. Maybe I’d be able to get a signal here, now that I wasn’t down beneath the walls of the cliff. If Jonno was already awake, he could even figure out how to get a car sent to pick me up. GPS was a wonderful thing.
I patted my hip and reached into my bum bag, except—it wasn’t there. Strap of the bag neither. Aw, it must have fallen off as I flopped back on the ground. With great, grunting effort I peeled my spent body off the rough ground and turned over on all fours.
I patted around on the ground. No. No pack. Nothing. Just dust and some kind of spiky plant that embedded itself in my palm.
I crawled a ways, looking harder, adrenaline resurging as I scuttled around without success.
No! It wasn’t here. I scrambled the few feet to the edge of the canyon. It had to be here. I hadn’t gone wandering anywhere else. It had to be close by. I’d bought it specially for making international calls between here and home. My phone was gone. I was stranded in the remote desert with no communication—and all my contacts gone.
Worse, that type of phone could take weeks to replace.
I didn’t have weeks. I had a flight out of L.A. in just a few days.
Where was my phone and the rest of my pack?
I saw nothing as far down as I could look. I shut my eyes and collapsed. This? Was not good. Because it wasn’t just my phone I’d dropped. My bum bag also contained my wallet, my cash, my credit cards, my ID, my passport. My ticket back to Melbourne.