(Image)

“See,” Harry pointed, “It can’t be more than a couple hundred feet down.”

“I don’t know.”  Pete looked doubtful.  He leaned over the edge of the bank and looked down.  “It looks more like four or five hundred.  Pretty steep, too.”

“It’s nice and grassy, too.  Nothing to run into until you hit the creek at the bottom, and you’ve got plenty of room to stop before that.  Go on, try it.  Fold that tarp in half – there, like that.  Now set down on it.  Indian-style, cross your legs, yeah, there you go.  Get a hold of the front edge – get a good grip.  There you go.”

“This isn’t a good idea.”

“It’ll be great.  You got a good grip?”

“I suppose.”

Harry put his right boot in the middle of Pete’s back and shoved.

From up on the bank that overlooked Gristle Canyon, it hadn’t looked like there were that many rocks hidden in the grass.  Pete hit the first of them about twenty feet down the slope, a particularly large and hard rock that left a sore spot on the part of Pete’s anatomy that was placed on the canvas.  He knew he’d have a colorful bruise there later, but other things commanded his attention first.

About fifty feet down, at about thirty miles an hour, he hit a small bench.  He skidded across it, trying to brake with his behind, but it didn’t work.  As he shot across the small grassy bench, he had the fleeting image of a mound of dirt a flash of brown fur just before the tarp hit the edge and resumed the plummet downwards.

There was suddenly a feeling of weight in his lap.  He felt something move.  Pete looked down to see a terrified woodchuck in his lap.  The groundhog looked up at him, eyes wide in terror.

“Hang on,” he heard Harry’s voice, faintly, calling down from the top of the slope.  “You’re about to hit the steep part.”

The canvas folded up in the wind, plastering itself flat across Pete’s face.  There was a slight chirp of terror from the woodchuck, which dug its heavy, burrowing claws into Pete’s lap.

A series of rocks left a series of bruises in Pete’s already tender fundament as he skidded across them at forty miles an hour – maybe fifty.

“It can’t be much farther,” he shouted to the woodchuck.  He managed to fight the edge of the canvas down, just in time to see the one tree on the slope looking large.

Thwack.

The impact knocked Pete, the canvas and the woodchuck sideways. 

Now they were rolling, not sliding, down the slope.  The canvas wrapped itself around Pete and the woodchuck.  Bound together like two frightened peas in a pod, they rolled, bouncing over the rocks, down the slope to the creek at the bottom.

A large splash announced the end of the ride.

As Harry watched from the top of the slope, Pete dragged himself out of the water, the woodchuck under one arm, dragging the canvas behind.  He set the woodchuck down.  He patted it on the head.  The woodchuck looked up, staggered in a complete circle, and sat down.  Pete looked up the slope, frowned, and started climbing.

Finally, after about forty-five minutes, Pete made it back to the top.  He was dragging what was left of the tattered, sopping wet canvas tarp.

“Well?”

Harry looked at him thoughtfully.  “I’ll have to try that myself some day.”