Slippery slope
- 43 minutes ago
- 11 min read
“Don’t sit there, Spud,” she gasped in a way that didn’t sound right at all. “If I slip, I don’t want to take you down with me.”
“Down where?” I peeked over my shoulder. From above, the slope looked a lot more like a cliff. It seemed impossible that we’d climbed so high moving so slowly. “I’ll go wherever you go. Please don’t leave me here alone.”
“Just stay next to me, okay? And don’t make any sudden moves.”
Mom tested the rocks under each of her paws before each step. Usually, she didn’t find the right balance on the first try, or the second, or the third. She grabbed each rock and shook it like a loose tooth, dropping the ones that came free by her side to trip and skip the rest of the way down the mountain until they finally settled with a crackle and a thump far, far below. Before long, it was taking Mom so long to find her next step that the three rocks she was standing on started to inch down the mountain before she found the fourth.
“Oscar! Get the duck out of the way!” she said in a strangled voice I’d never heard before.
I didn’t know what she meant since I was at her heels like a good boy, but I stepped aside anyway. When she finally moved her next foot uphill, the rock that it had been holding in place slipped loose. In no time, a herd of rocks was racing in a stampede down the mountain, taking the rock I’d just been standing on with them.
“Are you sure this is the trail?” I asked.
“I thought so at first,” Mom panted, “but now I think we’ve been following the path of a rockslide.”
“Why don’t we turn back? This seems like one of your bad ideas, and you’re no fun when you’re wrong.”
“I would love nothing more than to turn back, but when was the last time you looked down?”
I looked down again to see if there was something I was missing, but it looked just as get-me-outta-here scary on the second look as the first. This must be what the deer felt like right before they landed in the deer graveyard. Didn’t Mom, who’s so afraid of heights, see it too?
“It’s so loose, I don’t know how we’re gonna get down,” Mom choked. “I’m afraid if we put any downward momentum on these rocks, we’ll slip and fall.”
