yanked on his boots, snatched the flashlight and scrambled out the cook tent grabbing at his hip holster but the Ruger was gone.
He checked his pockets, the cook tent floor.
The Ruger was truly gone.
Maybe he’d lost it in the corral, trying to quiet the horses.
Head down, ears back, with a deep grunting growl the grizzly shuffled toward him out of the forest.
THE PLANE BLEW in a tall orange ball turning the night incandescent and driving them back with its heat. Snow swirled down on it in great hissing clouds that the flames steamed and drove upwards. They watched till the coffins were cinders at the bottom of the bare black fuselage. The snow fell harder, dampening the blaze, obscuring it as they trudged away, till the plane was a glimmer on the horizon, then gone.
The blizzard wailed across the valley, erased the line between earth and sky and hid the tracks they’d made coming from camp. They could see nothing but stinging snow in their eyes, snow and ice packed to their bodies and swirling past their feet. Zack went first, probing with his boots for their old tracks under the new drifts, a gloved hand like a visor over his eyes to keep them from freezing.
Soon he could no longer find their tracks under the snow. He wandered side to side, feeling with his toes, finding nothing. The blizzard hailing down had hidden Steve; Zack yelled for him but the answer seemed to come from everywhere.
“I am not going to lose you,” Zack said aloud, crawling through the snow looking for his back tracks till there was a fudge of gray in the whiteness ahead, a blur that became Steve bent over, hiding his face from the wind. “Where the fuck were you?” he yelled.
They wandered on, in circles, lost before the beginning of time, in howling snow and deadly cold. Zack imagined them dying here, to be found in the spring, half-gnawed by animals. He thought of all the people down through time who’d died in frozen wildernesses.
He thought of his sleeping bag, the Jack Daniels in his morning coffee. Live for that.
Behind him Steve followed with the dumb obedience of the dying. One foot in front of the other, in the same holes. Easy, humans had been doing it for millions of years.
WHEN THE GRIZ kept coming Curt had grabbed a plastic tarp, twisted it round a pole, lit it on the propane cooktop and run yelling at him. Surprised, the great bear had risen up on rear legs, taller than the low trees, monstrous in the dark. Expecting to be slapped dead Curt shoved the blazing tarp against the grizzly’s chest and the bear gave a high grunt and scrambled into the woods.
Curt still couldn’t find the Ruger. He kicked at the snow leading to the corral, then in the corral among the nervous agitated horses, but it had vanished.
He heard a distant thud, straightened up to listen but it didn’t come again. From up where the dudes had said the plane was. Maybe he’d imagined it.
Didn’t matter. Whatever those two idiots were doing out there in this frigid night he would find them. Because if they died he’d never get another guide job. Blacklisted.
Nobody hired guys who let their clients die.
Unless the griz got them. Even then.
But when he tried to follow Steve’s and Zack’s tracks uphill they vanished under the blinding new snow, and finally he turned back.
“Steve!” he yelled till he couldn’t yell any longer, “Zack! Where are you?”
When he got back to camp his watch said 02:41. Five hours till dawn.
THE SNOW CAME AT THEM horizontally, then down, then sideways. It ate into their iced-up faces, froze their eyes shut and their ears numb. Each breath was a knife down the throat.
“Maybe here,” Steve called, his words snatched by the wind.
“This ridge, has to be the one above camp.”
“If he’d only shoot again –”
So much seemed familiar, the sloping snow, the firs nestled close, a tall pine, the tinkle of a stream under its ice. “Here,” Zack called. “We’ve found it.”
But it led to a waterfall off a cliff that would have killed them had they gone five more steps.
Snowing so hard Zack couldn’t tell up or down, wished he’d brought a compass, realized he could use his phone, stepped back to reach in his pocket and slipped off the cliff down into the crown of a tree and grabbed a bough that snapped but slowed him enough to grab another and clamp his legs around the tree’s trunk as it teetered over the void.
NOT TO WORRY
HE WAS SHAKING so hard he could barely hold, realized he was biting a branch but didn’t dare let go, hugged the tree to his chest till the teetering slowed. He could hear Steve’s yells but couldn’t tell from where, could see only this cage of boughs encasing him in howling snow, realized he was in the top of a fir tree that stood on a tiny ledge with a cliff beneath it.
“Steve!” he screamed, “Help!”
“Zack!” Steve’s voice wavered. “Zack! Zack!”
He tried to climb higher but the tree grew thin and tipped him out over the cliff. The snowstorm cleared for an instant and he could see gut-wrenching black rock and vertical ice below the tree. Somehow he had to climb down the tree then up the cliff. And not slip and fall into the dark emptiness below.
The terror was like a deer’s in a tiger’s jaws. When there’s no hope.
You will do this. One step at a time.
And if a step seems dangerous you pull back, find another way.
Till you get to the top.
It wasn’t so bad going down the fir tree, stepping from limb to limb, sometimes slipping on icy bark but always able to hold on to the limbs above.
“Zack!” Steve’s voice, tiny on the wind.
“I’m coming!” Zack yelled, but Steve kept calling.
The rock face he had to climb was vertical and icy. Black granite ribs stuck from it, too slick to grip.
He’d always hated heights. Since he was a kid stuck on a ladder and his Dad called, “You big sissy get down from there.”
It was Death, this aching vertical rock. This fir tree like a monastic companion, saving your soul. But you can’t leave it: there’s no way up or down this cliff.
Maybe there was. One point at a time.
One point was ice that he hammered from the rock with his fist, another a slim frozen ledge his foot kept skidding off, then a vertical slit he could jam his fingers into. Once he looked down, the trunk of the fir tree descending below him into darkness, into death, and the looking down nearly made him slip off the cliff.
Twenty feet from the top there was no way to climb further. A pure sheet of black rock, tilted past vertical.
A headlamp flashed down.
