Could I have done it? I had known exactly what to do—even the weird crossover undercling— my hands going left, right, right, right left, while my feet did an intense, slow-motion rhumba beneath me. And it wasn’t just from having seen Dade do it, either, because I was too consumed ‘helping’ him up the rope and had no real idea what moves he’d made. It's true, I'd had the rope above me, but on the sharp end I'd have had a little more incentive.

Of course, I might have just panicked, gotten dizzy with vertigo, and fainted myself right off the rock to splatter on one of those washing machine-sized boulders­­—or pill bug sized people. Now I'd never know.

While I thought about this the wind, made up of fingers of different temperatures, pulled at the rope and then my shirt, finally deciding on a wrapper from one of the fruit roll-ups, which it snatched and pulled straight out from the Tower.

As I watched it flutter downwards I felt something whip past my head. I jerked back, thinking it was a rock, just in time to see the blurry trail of a second something rocket past.

Swallows.

We both leaned out to watch them go, crying to each other as they ripped mad patterns through the air, arcing out of sight but returning immediately to shoot straight up to the top of the tower—an ascent that would take us another half hour. Way up in the sky they seemed to disappear into each other but then they grew larger until they spun past us like a pair of wind-tossed oak seeds, chirring wildly for the several seconds of their mate. Just as they reached the height of where we'd started Spanish Prisoner, they burst apart and shot back up past us again, still screaming with their anger or lust or whatever they scream about.

"Noisy little bugger-ers," I said, trying to make a joke as another swallow whistled past, gliding sideways over vertical rock as if they were flying horizontally over the earth.

"My glasses are killing me," Dade said then, ignoring me, "If you want to top this out, we'd better get moving."

I re-racked the gear and set off, quickly putting the final, easy pitch behind me, and Dade followed, passing me at the anchor chains to disappear over the edge.

 Up on the rough top, at the altitude at which small planes fly, the wind came gusting from the southwest, filled with the sweet smells of sage and scrub-brush and gravel. I followed the rope over a hillock and past some small boulders to find Dade splayed out on his back on a big, flat, spot, untied from the rope with his shoes off.

I sat down next to him, unclipped the water bottle from his harness and took a sip, then brushed some gravel out of the way and lay back with my hands over my head. But as soon as I lay back, Dade stood up and said, “Let’s sign the register and get out of here."

As he walked away, I groaned and picked up the other end and started to coil it, my exhausted arms spread out cruciform again as I made each loop, counting them off to myself. As I neared the end of the coil–24, 25, 26–I saw my first vulture of the day float up above the Tower near where our route had topped out, its wingspan almost as wide as mine, rising over and then behind me to briefly blot out the sun. It eyed me over its long beak, and then turned away to fight a confluence of winds at the corner of the Tower. Its primary feathers, translucent at their tips, bent and shifted like cattails down in the Belle Fourche over a thousand feet below us, and then it angled its wings slightly and peeled out of sight.

When I caught up to Dade he was sitting cross-legged next to the summit cairn with the register pulled out of its heavy steel canister.

“Did you see the turkey vulture?” I asked, squatting down beside him.

He had just finished writing in the register and handed it to me, standing up and shaking his head "no" at the same time. I had to turn the book around to read what he’d written: “'Devil’s Workshop, Spanish Prisoner'— FREE. Dade and Atlas, the Monsters from Minnesota.”

I crossed out “Devil’s” and wrote in “Dade’s” and added, "On-sight 'Spanish Prisoner'” and then I wrote down the coordinates for the Tower that I’d read in the rangers’ station that morning:

44º 35’ N/104º 42’ W

5,117 ASL

As I started to shut the book I noticed the last entry from the day before, from "Collin from Fort Collins" who topped out on McCarthy West Face and wrote, “The thought is one thing, the deed another, the image of the deed yet another still; the wheel of causality does not roll between them. F.N.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean? And who's F.N.?” I asked Dade but he was already out of earshot, walking to the rap station. Over to the west there were a dozen more vultures riding early thermals, and I yelled to Dade, pointing at them and wishing I could just spread some wings and float back down to the campground. I said as much to him at the rap anchors, just as he tossed one coiled rope out into space, but when he held his hand out for the second rope it was as if he were looking right through me.

Sean Toren is a writer living in Minneapolis with, to roughly quote Zorba the Greek, “ … wife, child, house — everything. The full catastrophe." He can be reached at sean_toren@yahoo.com.