Winter Study

32

For a while, there was nothing but the blinding pain and the knowledge that she could not save herself; that she couldn’t walk out. Had the thought of losing to an idiot like Bob not been anathema, A

Put ice on it, A

The glove she’d removed, the better to bust Bob’s balls, was still in her coat pocket. Wriggling her fingers like so many eels, she worked her hand into it. Then she sat, exhausted by the pain, wishing she believed in God that she might convince Him to get back into the smiting business. Without a radio, there was no one else she could call upon.

For what seemed an eternity, she sat in her broken bones and cooling blood and thought about Paul. It had been so good to talk with him.

On Katherine’s satellite phone.

“Thank you, Paul,” she said. The phone was in her pocket. She’d been carrying the wretched thing since she’d found it. Fumbling, twice dropping it, she got it out and again exposed her fingers to the cold. In CONTACTS, Katherine had the number for the Park Service offices in Houghton, Michigan. A

“Our offices are open from eight-thirty to five, Monday through Friday.”

It was Saturday. A

A scratchy muttering startled her, till she realized it was her radio, and Adam’s bleating from the bottom of the cliff. Three more times, they bleated.

“He’s not answering,” the dispatcher said. “I’ll keep trying.”

A

She could call Bob, tell him all was forgiven, she was in a serious smirking mood and would he come fetch her home.

That thought festered for a minute.

“Bob, you bastard, you are coming back for me,” she muttered suddenly. Action gave her hope and hope gave her courage and courage gave her the strength to lift her crippled leg and lay the damaged ankle on top of the sound ankle. Using her own body as a Sked, she inched herself backward with her good arm till she’d reached the side of the outcropping where the Greenstone descended into the trees. A dead branch provided her with twigs she could break free with one hand. Having snapped them into suitable lengths, she shoved them into her boot between the sock and the thick felt lining.

The ankle stabilized, A

Whimpering and grinding her teeth because she couldn’t seem to stop herself, she dragged the longest, sturdiest part of the branch across the Greenstone Trail where it came into the open on the basalt ridge. Wind, carving up over the escarpment, had taken much of the snow from the rock. Where A

It was a lousy job. She moved with tedious slowness; her tools were crude and wielded with one weakening arm. A Boy Scout, a rank green Cub Scout, could see the branch and the attempts to cover it, if they were paying attention. A

The blueprint of her plan was simple and finished in five minutes: the branch lay across the head of the trail, its tip buried in the snow, the end where the smaller branch grew out at a right angle from the main branch, resting on a flat stone a foot and a half high. The bough she’d used for a broom leaned against the wood where it angled up out of the snow.

“It’s good to have a plan,” she said and wondered if she was getting hypothermic. One of the first symptoms was mental confusion. She remembered that from her white-water rescue training in the Russian River in California. It had been winter; the water rushing down from the Sierra was cold. The instructor had also said a person with hypothermia could not raise their arms over their head.

A

“Hope you weren’t full of shit,” she said to the bygone instructor. Straddling the main part of the branch that crossed the path, she sat on the rock. She rotated the L-shaped offshoot upward till it was vertical and ru

Having gotten as comfortable as she could with broken bones and a four-inch branch under her behind, A

A

She stopped, just stopped. She didn’t move or replace her glove or close the phone or pray or curse or plan. She barely even hurt. At best, the plan had been frail, absurd; she’d known that when she blew the last of her reserves on it. Like Adam’s hate, it was something to do when the alternative was unthinkable.

There wasn’t another plan.

Try and stay alive till Ridley decided to answer his radio. That could qualify as a plan, but to stay alive till the cavalry came one had to keep one’s body temperature above eighty-six degrees so the organs didn’t start shutting down. To do that, one had to move, and A

Coward. A

This one was going to suck for everyone concerned.

It was time to call Paul.

A

A wolf howled.

Maybe I’ll get eaten, she thought and was somewhat cheered by the prospect of not dying alone.