SEPTEMBER 7TH BROUGHT a sallow light and a hundred or so yards of visibility. Between coughing fits they told each other the smoke had lessened. They knew it was a lie, but their food supply was down to its last day. In the windless calm of a Rocky Mountain Indian summer, wildfire smoke can remain dense for weeks. They needed Sam’s canister. To reach it, the Fallout Bardo had to be traversed.

  Grady reckoned them to be less than two miles from Pipsissewa. All landmarks were erased, but he told Lore he’d find the lake by compass. They set out, and he kept up a slow trudge despite his hacking cough. Lore’s faith in his trudge lasted for four hours before she said, “We’ve walked far too long not to have arrived. Tell me we’re lost so the bardo turns our lostness into a lie.”

  “It’s already a lie,” Grady wheezed, and he pointed. Fifty yards ahead was water’s edge. “I’ve slid many a trout onto that triangular rock. Unless the Fallout Bardo has the power to rearrange the world’s furniture, a hundred yards to the left we’ll find three gnarled old white pines and a perfect campsite beneath them.”

  They traversed the yards. There were the pines, with massive boles and bark like dragon scales, near a fire ring and plenty of wood that Grady had stashed in June. But the smoke turned the charismatic camp into a lie. Their sole, sorely insufficient shelter was the tiny tent. Setting it up and helping Lore inside, Grady handed her a can of bear spray. “Sorry to leave you, but we need the contents of Sam’s canister desperately. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  “I won’t say ‘Stay safe’ so the bardo can’t make my words a lie.”

  “Thanks,” Grady said, and vanished.

  Who knew how long later, Lore woke to the tent door unzipping.

  Grady shoved his heavily loaded day pack through and followed it, smiling. Sam Rock had been prescient. He’d left cough drops, eye drops, four of the filtration masks used by firefighters, antibiotic ointment, arnica cream, more Tylenol, two ACE bandages, adhesive moleskin for Grady’s ravaged feet, and enough high-calorie food to last an easy five days.

  Grady refueled. Meds and masks eased their coughing. They slept like the dead.

  INHABITANTS OF THE twenty-first-century West know this brand of story too well, so I’ll speed it up: on the 8th they woke to a mere fifty yards of visibility. Depression rendered them speechless. Their planning session was Grady wheezing, “I can get us to Boundary in this shit,” and Lore rasping, “Let’s go.” The lake was eight miles due east. Grady’s straining under his load forced him to breathe so hard that his cough turned into paroxysms that stopped him cold. Three miles took four hours. Well short of Boundary, Lore pleaded with him to put up the tent. Once inside they collapsed in their clothes, and for seventeen hours stirred just enough to inadequately address thirst, pain, hunger, and bladders in need of emptying.

  They woke on the 9th as half-paralyzed pieces of human wreckage, but Grady found a desperation gear of small but unceasing steps that got them to Boundary. He pitched camp on an unfamiliar stretch of lakeshore. After settling Lore in the tent, he donned his headlamp and was stepping down to the lake to refill water bottles when he tripped on a root nub, fell forward on the steep slant of the shore, and slammed the batholith hard, bone-bruising both knees, the heels of his hands, and his forehead. Pain kept him awake half the night.

  On the 10th, still smoke-smothered, Lore bandaged Grady’s hands and knees enough to let him grip his larch forelegs and dodder the level mile to Gateway Pass. Reaching the brink of the 30 percent grade down to the West Fork footbridge, one of the most beautiful views in the world resembled a back alley leading into hell. “What do you think?” Lore asked.

  “No resting places between here and the footbridge, or on the long climb up the canyon’s far side. My grip is weak. My knees barely bend. I need food, meds, and rest. Sorry.”

  She stroked his cheek. “No apologies. Your efforts have amazed me.”

  As Grady tottered along the canyon rim seeking level ground for a camp, a small good thing happened: they came upon a single ancient five-needle white pine with a massive, sun-spiraled bole. Its enormous roots gripped boulders they’d broken to pieces centuries ago. Walled in by these roots was a bed of white sand identical to the sand near the foot of Daniel’s Bridge and in the marble tub at Moondial. “A Lûmi bed!” Lore whispered.

  In the misery of the Fallout Bardo, this kindness to unmet wayfarers made Grady cry. Stunned by his tears, Lore defied her smoke-wrecked voice and, for the first time ever, sang to him, ad-libbing lyrics to a classic the way she’d once done for Walt Steitz:

  If from the Fallout Bardo you and I make our escape

  I’ll carry in my heart this tree that gives our bed its shape

  Though Earth can’t help but share with us the awful wounds she’s borne

  Come in, the white pine sings, I’ll give you shelter from the storm.

  Early morning, September 11th, Grady woke to shaking tent walls and Lore’s face smiling at him from inches away. “It’s been blowing for hours,” she said. “The air smells fresh. Peek outside and see if it’s a lie.”

  Unzipping his salamander exit, Grady peeked. “The Fallout Bardo is gone!” he cried.

  Pulling on his boots, he defied knee and hand pain, maneuvered Lore outside, scooped her up in his arms, carried her to the rim of the canyon, and not till he set her on a sun-warmed rock did he see that they were still dressed in dirty underwear. Eye bags, haggard faces, filthy hair, and all, they laughed and cried.

  As Lore basked in clean air, early sunlight, and vistas to the horizon, a rush of energy exploded the helplessness that had weakened Grady for days. He delivered her trekker chair and clothes, then hot water and washcloths to bathe, then coffee and breakfast. After eating, he washed their dishes with sand, broke camp, loaded Lore, manned his larch forelegs despite his wounds, and made heavy use of the crab walk to saddle-pack her the four miles down to the West Fork footbridge.

  He had just seated her on a low streamside rock to soak her ankle in a plunge pool when Lore gasped, “Good God! Look up the trail!”

  Grady turned. Not three hundred yards up the steep slope leading to Halfway, two shirtless men in running shorts were approaching at breakneck speed. To avoid a fatal fall into the canyon their concentration was total. They weren’t forty yards off when they finally glanced up, gaped, slammed to a halt, grinned, and approached at a walk.

  Their names were Garrett and Coy. They offered handshakes till they saw Grady’s bandages, then smiled down at Lore but saw her ankle, bandaged and splinted. When she asked if the wilderness wasn’t closed due to fire after all, Garrett said, “We’re poaching it.”

  Confused by her fever, Lore said, “In a wilderness area? What are you poaching?”

  “Just access,” Coy said with a grin. “The Wilderness is closed. We’re long-distance trail runners. When the smoke cleared, we drove up and lit out for Boundary for our first run in an awful week. But what the hell’s happened to you two? You’ve been through a war! Congrats on the ingenious pack alteration, but how serious is that ankle injury?”

  “Can you answer?” Lore asked Grady. “I feel queasy.”

  “It’s bad,” he told them. “Happened in the storm that started the fires. We were thirty miles into backcountry and nine thousand feet up, and yes, getting here has been a war. We’ll head to a hospital soon as we make it down.”

  Coy’s expression took on authority. “I’m an ex-paramedic and still treat athletic injuries at the college where Garrett and I teach. May I have a look?”

  When Lore nodded, Grady and Garrett lifted her in the trekker chair, carried her up to a level stone slab by the trail, and Grady removed her bandage and splint. When Coy saw the ankle, he blurted, “Christ!” As he examined the injury closely he grilled Grady about its cause, Lore’s levels of pain, fever symptoms, queasiness, then didn’t mince words. “I hate to reward your courage with this, Lore, but your ankle isn’t sprained. It’s totally dislocated, and cutting off so much circulation that the foot is dying. I advise a Life Flight to Missoula and we’re here to serve. We’ll break records getting to the nearest cell coverage to call the flight in. Any advice on where to find that coverage, Grady?”

  “There’s none in the mountains or on the upper Elkmoon. But if Elsewhere didn’t burn there’s a landline in the tiny store and post office. It’s ten miles downriver from the trailhead.”

  “Elsewhere survived,” Coy said. “I’m guessing a Life Flight could be here in four to five hours. Can you make it to the big meadow at Halfway inside of that, Grady?”

  “I’ll get us there in three hours,” Grady said.

  “If for some reason a chopper can’t come,” Garrett said, “Coy and I will be at Halfway in five to six hours with a stretcher to carry Lore to a bed in the back of my van, and drive you to Missoula ourselves. That’s a promise.”

  “The two most underdressed saints I ever met,” Lore managed to say.

  “Need energy bars? Chocolate? Gas money? A couple of dirty shirts?” Grady asked.

  They patted their fanny packs. “We’re set,” Garrett said. “A pleasure to help.”

  “Have faith, Lore,” Coy added. “Surgeons work miracles on injuries like yours.”

  And they were off up the slope at an improbable rate of speed.

  ENERGIZED BY HOPE, Grady covered the four miles to Halfway in under three hours. En route, Lore told him their time was short and she needed to speak of things that required complete calm and quiet. “There’s a place,” Grady said, and struck out for a stand of lodgepoles in the meadow’s very center. “My hidden camp for years,” he said.

  The pines enclosed a quiet oxbow, and the instant Grady seated Lore in the mottled shade, her face shone with pure solace. The streambank was grassy, its edges dense with forget-me-nots. Brook trout lazed in the slow, deep flow. Grady fetched Lore the raisins and almonds she always managed to nibble despite lack of appetite. “To say what needs saying,” she said, “I need to lie down.”

  Grady spread their bedroll, helped her settle, and lay down beside her.

  “When I saw Gladys ten days ago,” she began, “she told me that if I was able to reach Jade, immerse, and speak the rite said to open the waters, I must use a voice as close as possible to silent. ‘Half the breath of the softest whisper,’ Volkmann says in the Singings. For that softest of voices to be heard”—she sent Grady an unexpected smile—“I need intimate access to your ear.”

  Grady sighed happily, rolled onto his back, and lay still.

  Lore moved every part of her body but her right leg and ankle against him, placed her lips at the entrance to his ear, and began putting so little breath into her words that the main sounds were just her lips, tongue, and inner walls of her mouth breaking tiny bonds of saliva. Yet her barely audible words held Grady spellbound. This was not the helpless woman with whom he’d staggered through the Fallout Bardo. This was, once again, the Lore who struck him as a tahk-nehk-wakhul (no outward sign) Lûmi of the Dark Time.

  That resemblance makes what I, the Holy Goat, don’t say more important than what I say: Lore’s half-whispers swam them through deep secrets of the Lûmi. Those secrets must be kept. I realize that, in our strife-torn world, secrecy is distrusted due to association with wars, espionage, criminality, betrayals, hacking, identity theft, and so on. But knee-jerk broadcasts of what should remain secret have turned countless world wonders into lost mobs of clueless tourists. The truth is, we’ve never left an ancient world in which, to be fully human, we must enter a sanctuary in which it’s possible to surpass the merely human. When Lore’s lips moved to Grady’s ear, they both entered such a sanctuary. Until the Life Flight arrived her lucidity never faltered as she brought Jade’s gift to life in him. If what she shared were to reach a website and Lûmi locations went viral it would destroy what makes these people and places who and what they are—and don’t think I haven’t protected all that in these chronicles: the Inner Elkmoons and Boundary Lake aren’t so easy to find.

  After Lore departed in the Life Flight, Grady stayed on by the oxbow that night and half the next day, writing out every fragment of her outpouring that he could recall. True to the Lûmi need for secrecy, he shared those fragments with Lorilee alone, and she created a handmade booklet of them that she carried with her everywhere for the rest of her life. The forthcoming chapter, “The Queendom-Come Shards,” are the words in that small booklet.

  As for my own account of Lore and Grady’s descent from Jade, I’ll end with a letter Lore sent shortly after we concluded our 2012 interviews:

  Dear HG,

  After reading your account of our descent, I was moved to add this personal aside. Please consider including it in your chronicles:

  I know a few people who speak of the spiritual path as if it’s an app on a handheld device that enables them to take recreational Spiritual Path Hikes whenever the urge strikes. While I try not to judge such talk, I don’t hurt my head trying to believe it either. It’s simply the truth that, for me, no such path has ever existed. What I’ve experienced, so far as I can describe it, are effacements of self that allow something vast and merciful to envelop me in a Now outside of time. Some of these disappearances arrive via practices: meditating at Blue Empty; performing music in bluish venues; being seized by the cries of avocets; holding the antiquity of a fossil named Bivalve in my hand; surrendering to a once-in-a-lifetime ability to translate Two Medicine Peak’s emanations into five songs in one night.

  These visitations are so unlike a walk down any kind of path that I had written that metaphor off completely, when fate arranged that I spend eight days with my arms and legs wrapped around the straining body of a man creating a path in exactly the way Antonio Machado and Gautama Buddha describe. Machado: “Wayfarer, the only way / is your footsteps, there is no other. / Wayfarer, there is no way, / you make the way by walking.” The Buddha: “No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path.”

  You already know that Grady saved my life at terrible cost to his own. You know he was my sole means of being doctored, warmed or cooled, nourished, encouraged, dressed, able to answer the call of nature, helped outside or in, be put to bed. But what no one but me will ever know is how it felt to ride on his back over the seven days he served as our sole means of locomotion, our only functioning pair of stone-bruised feet, our much more ingenious second pair of hands, our far stronger arms, legs, lungs, pulse, giving my body agency when it had none of its own. This man who rued his exhaustion-dulled wit was carrying a hundred-eighty insane pounds over twenty-eight brutal mountain miles through smoke so crippling it’s given him chronic asthma for life. This man and I absorbed so much smoke that our skin kept releasing the reek of it for three days and nights after the skies cleared. This man who’d never heard the Gospel of Thomas promise that “When the inner and the outer are one, and the above is like the below…then you will enter the kingdom,” carried a gift from the Above of a lake the Lûmi consider the beating heart of their cosmos to the Below of our impending Elkmoon Valley home. This man, upon reaching that home, set about doing such excellent starfish work alongside my dearest friends and son in a place “the Corporate Person” wanted cremated that our descendants may one day grow back an entire living star.

  On our white sand bed among the white pine’s roots, that last night at Gateway, this same man, knowing nothing of the good to come, had used himself up so completely that, as I was kissing him my thanks, he passed out into a sleep so deathlike that, until I lay my ear upon his heart, I feared he’d fallen into something worse than a coma.

  To quell the tears that rose to feel him so gone, I kept on kissing him.

  VII. The Queendom-Come Shards

  (Inner Elkmoons, mid-September, continued)

  Anyone who has swum through Love’s depths

  Now with deep hunger, now with full satiety

  Neither withering nor blossoming can harm

  And no season can help:

  In the deepest waters, on the highest gradients,

  Love’s being remains unalterable.

  —Hadewijch of Brabant

  THE CREATION OF the Queendom-Come Shards came about primarily because Lore’s departure from Halfway turned out to be horrific. Lying by the oxbow with Grady, lowering her voice to the half-whisper the Lûmi recommend when speaking the unspeakable, she poured out her Jade experience for nearly an hour. Her account left them moved beyond words—with no way of knowing an eight-thousand-foot ridge and sharp bend in the West Fork canyon formed a total acoustic blockade just downstream of them.

  With little more warning than a lightning strike, the silence at Halfway exploded in a roar of engine and whammering of blades as the Life Flight approached like a Cobra gunship. The blast of sound hurled Lore into PTSD. Reliving the lightning bolt and fall that nearly killed her, she began hyperventilating, her skin went clammy, her lips turned blue. Trying to protect her, Grady lifted her into the trekker chair and wrapped her in his arms, but the chopper dropped onto the meadow so close to them that rotor downwash blasted their faces with flying debris. When a male nurse and female paramedic immediately descended from a bi-fold side door, pulled down a bright red stretcher, and turned Lore’s way, her long courage at last collapsed. “DON’T LET THEM TAKE ME!” she cried. “I WANT TO STAY WITH YOU!” “SORRY I’M YELLING!” Grady hollered, “BUT I’LL SEE YOU SOON! YOU NEED THIS SURGERY! THIS IS SO YOU CAN WALK!” “WHAT!?” she shouted. “WHAT!?” And the medics were upon her. “I’M JAKE! THIS IS ARDITH! WE’LL LEAVE THE SAM SPLINT ON TILL WE GET YOU IN THE FLYING HOSPITAL!” Lifting her out of Grady’s arms, they lay her on the stretcher. “I DON’T WANT THIS, GRADY! AT LEAST COME WITH ME! PLEASE!” she cried as Ardith rubbed her shoulder—to soothe her, Grady thought. “HE CAN’T! CABIN’S FULL!” Jake bellowed. “BUT HE’S HURT! HE’S JUST HIDING IT!” Lore cried. “I’LL BE FINE, LORE. YOUR ABILITY TO WALK IS AT STAKE! WE’LL MEET UP SOON!” Grady hollered. “THAT’LL TAKE THE EDGE OFF!” Ardith yelled and Lore turned to see she’d given her an injection she hadn’t felt. The “friendly” shoulder rub had numbed her with lidocaine. “I DIDN’T WANT THAT! WHAT WAS THAT?” she cried. “FENTANYL!” Ardith hollered.