The Wall

After hours of ru

“No. We have to keep moving.”

“Please?” I begged, releasing his shirt and bracing myself over my knees, desperately trying to drag in another breath.

He hadn’t ignored me. I couldn’t hear his footfalls moving away. He raised the screen to his face and tried to ascertain how far we’d traveled by tracing his finger along the path we’d followed.

“One more hour. Then we’ll stop and find shelter,” he said, gripping my wrist and squeezing it uncharacteristically gently.

I couldn’t do one more hour. Careen was puffing and panting behind me but she didn’t back me up. She was probably feeling too guilty for forcing us to set this ridiculous pace.

He didn’t wait for me to answer but I saw the handheld floating further away from me. Then I felt the drag of someone pulling me along like a donkey. I had no choice. I put my head down and thought of my mother.

The blinking arrow brought us closer to the rock formations and sometimes when I stuck out my hand, it grazed the natural wall. The rock was sharp and cold, but reassuring. If wolves were chasing us, we could scramble up there quickly if we had to.

I was desperately trying to keep up but I was so much smaller than the two of them. One of their steps was two of mine. My legs pulled up out of the three-foot deep ditches of snow and slammed down hard against the earth, begging me to slow. Trying to keep myself motivated, I imagined the wolves were right on our heels and the adrenaline caused by my fear spurred me on. All I could hear was our breathless pants and our chorus of crunching boots. We sounded like twenty men, not three.

A wolf howled.

I heard a shuffle of fabric as something caught and nylon ripped open with a neat shriek.

Then, a sickening snap.

I reacted quickly, stumbling over to the glowing screen of the handheld. I kneeled down and found his face. I clamped my hand over his mouth but not before he let out one hollow scream.

He pulled himself to sitting, my hand still over his mouth, his hot breath on my palm. In the half-light, I caught him nod and I released my hand. I risked the torch in my pack and turned it on, shining it on his face and down his body.

His expression was painful, his jaw tight, but to his credit he didn’t scream again. His face was greenish white and beads of sweat were forming on his brow, despite the cold.

Several wolves howling broke my concentration. They’d heard him. They were coming.

Careen was standing over us, her hand covering her mouth in shock, her body trembling slightly.

I tried to think. What should I do? What would Joseph do?

Pietre spoke before I could make any decisions. “My leg is broken. You’ll have to leave me.” He clenched his jaw and tried to find a more comfortable position but found none.

I was stu

“It’s ok; at least I’ll slow them down. Give me the stu

Careen fumbled around in her bag and handed him two stu

“No, you won’t. The mission is too important. Besides, they’ll catch up to us and then we’ll all die. Just stay out of it, Rosa. This is my decision.”

I stood there, exasperated. This wasn’t going to happen. I wouldn’t let it. There had to be another way. Think. Think.

I took a few steps towards him and smacked the side of his head with my torch. His eyes went blank and he slumped forward. The stu

“Rosa, what the hell did you do that for?” Careen whispered angrily. I ignored her and set to cutting down a straight branch with my knife. I lined it up, cut it down to size, and used the set of bandages we had to splint Pietre’s broken leg. I unrolled a sleeping bag, unzipped it, and tried to roll him inside. He was so heavy, a dead weight.

“Careen, help me.” The clueless redhead squatted down with me and we rolled him into the bag, zipping it up. I shone the torch up at the rock formation, searching for a cave entrance, a hole, anything. My heart fell when the only opening I could see was three meters off the ground.

One mournful, long note sounded off, not far away.

“We have to get him up there,” I said, pointing with my torch, tracking the seam of rock where snow had settled. It zigzagged upwards to the entrance, showing us a way up. It was only a foot and a half wide but it would have to do. Careen nodded and we started to drag him towards the base of the cliff.

Pietre wasn’t a huge man but unconscious, and not giving us any help at all, it was like he weighed three-hundred kilos. We pushed, pulled, and heaved until we’d dragged him halfway up the cliff. Resting on the ledge for a second, I thought my arms might actually twist and fall off if I tugged on them hard enough. My lungs burned from the cold, my legs strained as we tried to roll him up and over the next ledge, his whole dead weight crushing us both.

He woke up and started cursing and wriggling, his unaware antics sending him sliding down the ledge and on top of us. My heart buckled at the idea we would have to start all over again. Without thinking, I grabbed his broken leg to stop him from slipping all the way back down. I clamped down on it hard, wrapping both my arms around him while pi

I don’t know how we did it. It was a blur of pain and pressure. The wolves were approaching—the air was stripping my lungs. But we got him up there. We pushed him up over the ledge and into the cave like a sack of potatoes. We watched as he rolled over a few times, deep into the cave like a loose one, and came to a stop, nestled awkwardly around a boulder. I stood at the edge, shining my torch down over the side of the rock, shaking my head in disbelief. What we just did was impossible. The rocks petered down towards the ground with barely a foot of outcropping to cling to. I’ll never understand how we did it.

Careen rolled and then arranged Pietre at the back of the cave. She laid out some food, one stu

“If we can do that, we can do anything,” I cried. Tears streamed down my face. It was so hard, more physically testing than anything I’d ever done. And the worst was yet to come. How would we survive this? Especially without Pietre.

“That’s good,” she said into my hair, her hand resting on my shoulder, “because now we have to outrun wolves.”

The new plan. Well, the only plan, was to leave Pietre in the cave and run all the way to the edge of the town. We’d left our sleeping bags with Pietre and removed anything inessential so we weren’t weighed down. We didn’t even take water bottles—we would rely on snow. Careen was going to run east a kilometer or so and kill something, hopefully something big, to distract the wolves. Then she would run back to the cave and we would set out together.