Then the claws caught. A bone or joint snapped in her shoulder and sudden pain almost loosed her fingers but she held on. A ledge, scarcely an inch wide where the limestone had cracked and the weather had heaved a part out ever so slightly, provided purchase for her fingers.

For a moment, Anna hung there, her bleeding chest and belly pressed against the sun-warmed stone, her torn finger-ends driven against the tiny ledge. Below her she heard the sweet simple call of the canyon wren. She was aware of the sun on the back of her legs and the sheer bliss of simply being still, suspended above death. Gradually she became conscious of the drag of the pack on her shoulders, the searing pain in her left arm socket.

It was dislocated. Soon, bone pressing against the soft tissue of nerves outside the socket, the arm would grow numb, she would lose control of her fingers, and she would fall.

Die from a dislocated shoulder, Anna thought and wondered how strangely a mind worked under pressure to think such things.

Carefully, not knowing how much her belabored grip would bear, she began to feel blindly across the rockface with the toe of her boot. Each small swipe of lug sole over the stone threatened to dislodge her precarious grasp. Her fingers began to uncurl, the strength draining out of them, turning to pain and pooling in her shoulder joint.

Then her foot found something: a root an inch or two high pushing out of a crack. Enough to hold her without breaking.

"Hang on, hang on, hang on," Anna chanted silently as she began to look for footing for her right boot. This time the search was not long. A narrow crevice ran vertically down through the stone eight or ten inches to her right. With a short stabbing kick she drove the toe of her boot between the jaws of stone. Slowly, pound by pound, she lowered her weight to her feet. Her right foot slipped then stopped, resting on a natural step within the crack.

Braced on her feet, Anna pressed herself into the rock and uncurled her fingers. They moved stiffly as if the joints had rusted in their clenched attitudes. Freed, her left arm fell and Anna screamed with the pain. Gripping tightly with her good hand, she prayed she wouldn't overbalance or faint.

Behind her eyelids red dots danced and she felt again as though she were falling. Squeezing against the rockface, she leaned to the left, letting her arm hang. If the dislocation weren't too severe the limb's own weight might pull it back into the socket. She tried to remember how long her Emergency Medicine instructor said it took, but her mind would not fix on the past.

With her arm lowered, Anna could see where she was. Above was the trail. Sixty feet below, the mountain dropped away. She could see the bright backs of violet-green swallows swooping high above the canyon floor. The crack she'd wedged her foot into ran from the trail to the drop. Near the top it was only an inch wide, widening as it descended until it was several feet across where it broke on the lip of the cliff.

Anna heard rather than felt her humerus bone go back into the socket, heard through her skeleton and not her ears. The pain subsided. "Thankyoubabyjesus," she murmured, and for once she wasn't being irreverent.

Awareness of the one pain was replaced by another. Blood was oozing from the scrapes on her belly and breasts. Fervently she hoped it would dry like glue, stick her fast to the rock. What chance, she wondered, was there to pluck herself from this rocky crucifix without losing her grip and falling?

Still, she was alive. That one fact made all the difference. Her mind started working again.

Fifty feet of nylon cord and a good long-bladed knife were in her pack. They made up part of the weight that was trying to drag her from her fragile fingernail grip on life. The cord would be just about behind her neck coiled neatly through the handle of her first-aid kit. The knife was in the kit. A half a dozen feet above and to the right a couple of yards a dwarfed gray-leaf oak had shoved roots deep into the crack in the rock. The tree was only three or four feet tall but if the spring winds and the summer rains had not dislodged it, Anna guessed it would hold her weight. With the knife and the cord she might, with luck, rig a safety line.

But the knife and cord, four inches behind her right ear, might as well have been at home on the top shelf of the closet. If she released the buckles of the pack it would fall away, down two hundred and forty feet and the kit with it. If she tried to manhandle it, both she and the pack would fall. Soon, she knew, she must cut the pack loose. Her own weight would be more than she could support in the not too distant future.

Mentally, Anna frisked herself, searching for other tools. All she came up with were lip balm, a watch, and her tiny pocketknife. The knife was less than two inches long, weighed nothing: no good for throwing, wedging, or clawing. If she had an envelope that needed opening it would be just the thing, Anna thought acidly. It occurred to her then that, in a way, that was just what she did have. The muscles of her calves were beginning to tremble. She must do something while she was still able.

Working her hand into her pocket, risking no movement that would shake her precarious foundations, Anna fished the little knife out and opened it with her teeth. The small blade, kept razor sharp, cut through the nylon of the pack just above the shoulder strap fairly easily. When the slash was half a foot long, Anna pocketed the knife and pushed her hand over her shoulder through the material. The kit was there. She worked it out though the hole and clamped its soft handles in her teeth.

With infinite care, she pulled both shoulder straps free of their buckles and, holding them so the pack would not roll back and drag her with it, she undid the buckle of her hip belt. The instant it snapped free, she released the shoulder straps and dug her fingers into the ledge.

The pack fell back, bumped her legs, slid down the stone, and was gone.

Anna remained. For the first time she dared to think she was really going to make it. This hope of survival made the prospect of any mistake so terrifying that for a moment she couldn't move, not even to open her eyes.

From above, the sound of gravel grinding underfoot caught her up with sudden wild relief. "Help, help me," she called around the canvas straps between her teeth. The crunching changed tenor. It wasn't the footfall of a timely savior. The stone-on-stone ringing was caused by a rock the size of a cantaloupe rolling down the slope.

"Fuck!" Anna yelled and pressed her cheek tightly against the limestone. The rock struck her behind the ear; a fist punching her from conciousness, from life. As the blackness took her she felt her fingers slipping from the ledge, her feet from their pathetic supports. In the millisecond before she lost herself, Anna was aware of a great and futile anger.

Then that, too, was gone.