She took a minute to examine the cliff walls on each side of the pit. Both were tall, nearly vertical, and looked dangerously unstable.

C’mon, brain. Kick in. There had to be a trick to this. She looked around on the ground for a rope or a ladder or something that would make an obvious tool for crossing the chasm.

She had to backtrack a way, but she spied a stout, long tree branch of some kind tucked along the base of the cliff on her left, barely visible.

It was too narrow to walk across if she laid it across the pit. Was she supposed to go hand-over-hand underneath the pole? It looked strong enough to hold her weight, but she dreaded the idea of trusting her arms to support her weight and that of the rucksack at this juncture.

She picked the pole up and planted one end on the ground, then hung from the other end. It bent a little, but would hold her weight.

She eyed the pit. Eyed the pole, which was a good twelve feet long and relatively straight, almost the diameter of her wrist.

If she planted it in the bottom of the pit, the top five feet or so of it would stick up out of the pit. She’d pole-vaulted in college and understood the physics of it. Instead of using the pole’s bend-and-snap to go up vertically, she could use it to fling herself forward horizontally.

Oh yeah. She could do this. And vaulting would be a whole lot easier than asking her exhausted arms to hold her body weight for several minutes.

Grabbing the pole, she backed up thirty feet or so. Gathering what little energy she had left, she held the pole out in front of her and took off running with all the speed she could muster.

It felt exceedingly weird to plant the pole in the bottom of the pit against the base of the far wall, but the principal was the same. Instead of sailing high up into the air, she sailed forward, flinging her legs out in front of her and riding the flex and snap of the pole across the chasm to the far side.

She landed on her knees and pitched forward onto her belly, grunting as the weight of the rucksack squashed her. She had the presence of mind to hang on to the pole and dragged it out of the pit beside her while she lay there for a minute, catching her breath.

“Pass me the pole!” someone called out from behind her.

Grundy. She was half-tempted not to. After all the crap he’d given her these past few months, it would be sweet revenge to leave him stranded and force him to take a long, strenuous detour up the steep gully walls to get around the pit.