Borderline by Nevada Barr Page A

sharp as knives undercutting the shale cliffs. Anna felt its tremendous strength beneath her and for a moment had a terrifying sense of riding the back of a mythical serpent, a sentient creature who knew parasites sat on its skin, took of its forces without asking.
    The momentary fear brought with it a sudden desire to make an offering to the river gods. A libation of wine would be closer to tradition, but Anna hadn’t the courage to ask for the stuff. Instead she uncapped her water bottle and poured half a cup over the side. Like to like. Surely a Tex-Mex river beast would appreciate bottled water from New Jersey.
    “Are you okay?”
    It was Paul. He turned just as she was dumping part of her drinking water into the Rio Grande.
    “Just appeasing the nymphs,” she said.
    He smiled and returned to his paddling. Paul was good that way; he understood sacred duties.
    Cameras were pulled from personal dry-bags and the canyon was reduced to digital images to be viewed once, if ever, then never again. Anna seldom carried a camera and only took pictures of dead bodies or other predations. Images of incredible beauty she lodged firmly in her brain, recorded only by her eyes. That way she knew she would revisit them more often.
    A mile into Santa Elena, and deep into the internal silence with which the canyon graced her, Anna heard the broken cry of the desolate. A thin creeping moan that penetrated the bones beneath the ear, too low to vibrate the drum or move the air. She stopped paddling, resting the oar across her knees, the cool river water running from the blade down the shaft to insinuate itself beneath her hand. Steve was telling a story about Cyril and a stray cat destined for the pound and the needle who barricaded themselves in the family bathroom for three days. Chrissie was taking pictures, the camera held in front of her as if its two-by-three-inch screen was all she could take in of the canyon. Lori was telling Carmen about a river in New York that was “awesome,” and Paul was watching Anna.
    None of them had heard it.
    Anna smiled at her husband and he blew her a kiss that hit warm and thrilling in various parts of her anatomy. Turning her face once more downriver she opened her senses, a prying apart of the gray walls that had risen up around her mind to stave off thoughts of what lay in the pit.
    Nothing.
    Hallucinations weren’t alien to Anna, particularly aural hallucinations. A creative brain frolics in unreal playgrounds, sometimes the devil’s, sometimes those of the angels. She returned to paddling, more a dipping of her blade to seem like a working member of the group than actually moving the raft along.
    After several minutes it came again, a sound so sorrowful and hopeless it cut to the heart.
    “Shhh,” she hushed the others.
    “What—” Cyril began.
    “Shhh!”
    They fell silent. Lori and Chrissie looked strangely afraid, like children out after dark, frightened by what might be waiting.
    “There,” Anna said. “Did you hear it?”
    The cry had been louder as the raft floated nearer where desolation began.
    “Easter,” Carmen said. “She’s just past where the canyon wall juts out. We’ll be able to see her in a minute.”
    They rested their paddles and stared at the canyon walls ahead as the river carried them past the bulging shale formation to their left. The push of stone caught and slowed the waters of the Rio Grande, letting the sediment drop and forming a small beach. Bermuda grass, long and green and looking soft as gargantuan moss, laid claim to the high ground. Two Mexican tobacco plants, as big as small trees, lifted their broad leaves toward the sky.
    “I don’t see anything,” Chrissie complained.
    “Look up. There.” Carmen pointed to a place high on the cliff.
    “It’s a cow!” Cyril exclaimed. “There’s a cow in the middle of the cliff!”
    Anna saw it then. Three hundred feet or more from the riverbed a cow, so starved its bones could be seen even at this