Winter Study

Big game hunting, she remembered.

Big game hunters were not known for long, arduous treks carrying heavy loads. There were native peoples for that, and ATVs to carry the carcasses and the conquerors back to the lodge and the wet bar.

Uncharitable, she thought without caring.

She and Robin checked the camp area. As far as they could tell, the little meadow was devoid of hidden evils. Had it possessed a snake pit or hellmouth, A

They headed back to spark enough life in Bob and Katherine to get camp set up.

“Stop that,” Robin said as they crunched south shoulder to shoulder.

“Stop what?” Not only was A

“Stop touching your nose. You’ve been touching your nose all day. It’s not frozen.”

Sheepishly A

“You’re obsessing, aren’t you?” Robin asked. The question wasn’t judgmental. She asked it like a physician familiar with the symptoms of poison ivy might ask: “You itch, don’t you?”

“I guess,” A

“Mine’s here,” Robin said and tapped her mittened fingertips against her high cheekbones. “I can see them turning dead white out of the corners of my eyes and I picture myself with two holes in my face. Leave your nose alone. You touch it all the time like you’ve been doing and you’ll irritate the skin to where it’ll peel. Then you’ll really think your nose is falling off.”

A

Because it was lighter to pack in and their body heat would be consolidated, the four of them were sharing a single dome tent. While Bob and Robin went about pitching it – a task that in moderate weather would have been the work of fifteen minutes but was roughly doubled by the clumsy mandate of winter – A

A

“Drink this,” she said and handed a plastic insulated mug to Katherine. Metalware was useless when the cold got serious.

Katherine shook her head wearily. “No thank you. I just want to sit for a minute.”

“You need to drink it,” A

Katherine took the cup between her mittened hands, and A

“Hold it tighter than you think you should,” she cautioned.

Katherine began to sip.

A

The tent was up. Robin handed out hot drinks and candy and granola bars while A

They ate in silence as the light dimmed to nothing. The snow, mean and sparse all day, showed no sign of changing, and A

When it was too dark to see the cups in their hands, they put on headlamps and blinked at one another.

“The lights of Marfa,” A

Dishes were scraped and wiped. Washing was out of the question, but since no self-respecting bacteria could survive in such cold the health risks were minimal.

When they’d finished, Robin a

The jumping jacks were to warm them before they crawled into their sleeping bags; calories and layers alone would not suffice.

“Pee,” Robin suggested after they’d run around the tent and jumped like mad things for several minutes. “Your body has to work harder keeping extra fluid warm.”

They separated in four directions and bared various parts of their anatomies to Jack Frost’s kiss.

“No mosquitoes,” A

Then it was bedtime. It wasn’t yet seven p.m.

Retiring was a miserable process. Food for the following day’s lunch was retrieved from packs; full water bottles were dragged into the tent. To keep these precious items from freezing – or to thaw them out for the next day’s use – meant they would spend the night in sleeping bags with the campers. The bags’ stuff sacks were turned inside out and boots put in and stowed between the knees to keep from freezing overnight. Parkas and what outer garments wouldn’t fit into the bags were piled on top. Thus cocooned, neck scarf and balaclava still on, A

“Good night,” she said to the black nest filled with her fellow larvae. Even to her own ears, her voice sounded so gloomy that she laughed.

“It’ll be okay,” Robin whispered. “You’ll sleep.”

A

“Leave your nose alone,” Robin said.

The biotech was freakishly intuitive. A

“Don’t breathe in your sleeping bags.” Robin’s voice filled the cramped space though she spoke quietly. “It’ll make them damp and you’ll freeze to death.”

A

“Will it happen soon?” she asked hopefully.

8

As challenging as it was to play the Pollya

Darkness inside the tent was absolute, thick, pressing down on skin and mind the way it did underground: Carlsbad Caverns, Lechuguilla. A

Claustrophobia tightened her skin and squeezed on her lungs. People, flesh, crowded in on her: breathing and rebreathing the air, snuffling, wriggling, adjusting; a filthy monstrous womb and the four of them stillborn.

“Enough!” A

An elbow pressed into her side. Robin. Her feet were jostled. Bob. Bob Menechi