Tuesday - August 5, 1986 page 6
hobbles in the road. However, there was no sign that they had found Kee-a-wali. Taking
the broken hobbles, she wrote a message on a rock by scratching it with another rock, thus
Dena would know that some of the horses had been found. Then as she followed the tracks
back to camp she tried to count the sets of hoof prints. But she could not clearly
distinguish the number of tracks to satisfy her hopes that all the horses had been found,
so she continued to search for evidence of a horse leaving the road.
Dena made it to the end of the gravel road and found a single lane paved road. There she
flagged down a truck driver who said he ws from Texas; unfortunately, he didn’t
know where he was nor where the nearest ranger station was. Dena noticed an old broken
lead rope and hobbles, a similar episode had happened to some other unlucky persons. She
waited around for several minutes and when no more vehicles came she headed back towards
camp.
There hadn’t been any watering holes on the lower end of the gravel road. Debie
became worried about Dena, she didn’t know how long it would take for her to start
back and find the message on the rock. Nor did she feel that Snickers was in condition to
turn around and find her. Knowing that heat, loneliness, and disappointment can draw on the
inner strengths, Debie decided that she should leave Dena messages and wait for her at the
water hole that she could remember. So she dismounted and began breaking some of the smaller
limbs off of the young alder trees beside the road. She then placed them in the middle of
the roadway in the form of letters and words. The first limbs formed the word "HI",
then about every few hundred yards were the words "HOW", "ARE",
"U", "I", "WAIT", "AT", "NEXT",
"W", "A", "T", and then she ran out of alder trees but found
some sticks to make an "R".
Dena coming upon the piles of leaves in the road, didn’t recognize all of the words,
in fact she didn’t recognize the first pile of limbs as a word at all. April freaked
out at the first pile, but soon the messages were noticed and they served their purpose and
livened Dena’s spirits. she also admitted that she had looked for the letter "E"
in the word water, but never found it.
<< PAGE BACK
Tuesday - Aug 5 Page 6
PAGE FORWARD >>