Pathways (9780307822208)

by Bergren, Lisa T.

  Bryn came to and dimly realized that they had come to a stop. The seat belt was digging into her hips, and the throbbing in her head made her feel as if she’d been hanging upside down for hours. She could hear the rush of liquid and looked around to see water rising in the fuselage. Painfully she turned her head to the window, trying to make sense of it all. Her thoughts were fuzzy, as if she were drunk. They were in shallow water. Eli had been hoping to reach water. Almost made it, she thought ruefully.

  “Eli,” she said, turning toward him. He was out of his seat belt and crumpled into an odd curl at the control panel. Clearly, he was still unconscious. His skin had a deadly pallor to it. “Eli!” she yelled.

  There was no response.

  Bryn struggled with her seat belt, and with a click it finally released her. “Eli,” she said urgently, studying the curve of his spine for signs of a broken neck. There was blood everywhere, but his spine seemed intact.

  Her thoughts were clearing now. Did Talkeetna have a way of tracking their last known position? Would there be a helicopter coming for them any minute? The Civil Air Patrol? With teeth that already chattered from being in the glacial temperatures, she righted Eli and dragged him between the seats and to the side door. At least the water was working for her that way—it would be difficult to manage his two-hundred-plus pounds on shore.

  Most of the blood seemed to be coming from a cut on his face and another on his head. From the way the bone in front near his chest caved in, it was obvious that his shoulder was dislocated. And his arm was broken, maybe the clavicle, too. But right now, Bryn focused on getting them outside and to shore. He needed to be covered, sheltered. The rain was beginning again, and Bryn groaned. With a swift kick she opened the door, and more water rushed in. Once it had leveled off, Bryn dragged Eli out and to shore.

  It was difficult to see in the pounding rain, but Bryn headed toward the biggest tree she could find, with the branches lowest to the ground. As she suspected, it was rough going on the beach, and she could only drag him about ten feet at a time. Whenever she stopped to rest, she would check his pupils, his breathing, and then shout, “Eli! Eli! Talk to me!”

  But there was no response.

  With a last heave she made it the remaining fifteen feet to the towering white spruce and lifted a low-hanging branch. She pulled Eli to the covered place, blessedly out of the rain. Then she ran back to the plane. She needed her Housecalls bag, the emergency kit, anything she could lay her hands on that might be of use. She had heard enough stories about these woods to know that they could be as deadly as they were beautiful, especially if one was caught unawares.

  She waded into the silver waters again, rain pelting the lake with a million little splashes. If she kept at it too long, she knew she would be suffering hypothermia herself. She had to get what she needed quickly, build a fire, get them both dry, review Eli’s wounds to make sure she wasn’t missing anything critical, get his shoulder back in the socket, set the broken bone. Her teeth chattered as she entered the fuselage of the clowned de Havilland and searched through the floating debris.

  Her Housecalls bag was within easy reach. Then she took their rain slickers and the soaked blanket that Eli had placed between her and the control panel, and, giving up on the emergency kit as lost, she returned to shore. She was shaking violently and fell several times en route back to their tree. Everything in her longed to lie down beside Eli, to try to seek some warmth next to him, just for a moment, but she knew that if she lay down, they both would die there.

  She struggled to keep her hands steady enough to grab the zipper and open her bag. The rain was still pouring and the temperature was descending. Soon it would be night. There would be no rescue party until morning. If they were to survive, it was up to Bryn.

  Dear God, she prayed, give me the strength to do this. Help me! Help us! She fought the urge to weep in her frustration with the zipper, and then her fingers found the metal clasp and worked it downward. Inside, it was surprisingly dry. She turned to Eli, checked his pulse and breathing—they were faint but consistent. He was trembling now too.

  Briefly she did an assessment on herself. She knew she would do neither of them good if she ignored something critical about herself and in her shock lost consciousness. She felt bruised around her hips and abdomen where the seat belt had cut into her, and there was a laceration on her forehead. The blood seeped down her face and into her eye. But otherwise she believed she was all right. She’d check for blood in her urine later to be sure the seat belt hadn’t caused any kidney damage. But for now she’d focus on Eli. He was the crucial concern.

  The first thing she needed to do was try to warm him. She stripped off his soggy boots and dumped the water from them. Then she took off his wet jacket and shirt to examine his arm. She could clearly see the dislocated shoulder, and after administering some muscle relaxants, she knelt above him and popped it back into place. She set the broken ulna—a clean break, thankfully, that hadn’t pierced the skin—using three wooden slats from her bag and adhesive tape.

  The wood and tape would suffice until they got to town and could cast it. Then she wrapped him up in the rain slicker, peeled off his jeans, and, with nothing else dry, tucked his legs into her Housecalls bag, which she had emptied beside him. The bag and slicker weren’t exactly warm, but at least they weren’t wet. With shaking hands, she unraveled the space blanket that looked like tinfoil folded into a tiny three-inch square, but happily unfurled to cover three by eight feet. It was flimsy, meant for a one-time use, but it would do the job. She covered Eli with it.

  She looked through the remaining contents of the duffel and pulled out more wooden slats, and she grinned at the sight of the lighter she carried for quick sterilization. She grinned and in doing so, again noticed her own chattering teeth. “Thank you, Lord,” she whispered toward the tree branches. She gathered up pine needles, old dead branches from among the larger ones above, then braved the rain to rummage for more fuel. She pulled up dead logs to reach drier, dead wood beneath and returned in a hurry. It was a start.

  The needles crumbled and bent in a feeble black-and-red attempt, then suddenly caught fire, making the pitch-rich twigs crack as soon as the heat engulfed them. The wooden slats were excellent as kindling and kept the fire going long enough to catch the larger twigs and logs above, set in a tepee fashion, and spread into a smoldering fire. In another minute the fire was safely rolling, allowing Bryn to leave it for a moment to gather more fuel.

  She used a large, serrated surgery blade to cut through the branch directly above Eli, sacrificing the increased shelter from the rain in order to keep the growing fire from consuming their shelter at large. The tree was so wet that there really was little danger, but she would keep an eye on it anyway.

  Bryn laid the branch on the ground and cut several more, remembering from the pioneer book at Summit Lake that many had slept on beds of pine boughs and used the same for blankets. They would keep the cold from seeping up and into Eli from the earthen floor. When she had created a sufficient bed, Bryn dragged him onto it, even nearer the fire, and covered him again. To protect his bed from catching fire, she poured a line of gravel around him.

  When she had wrung out the wet wool blanket as best she could and hung it from the tree branches—next to their coats to dry near the fire and using it at the same time as a kind of ceiling to hold in some of the heat—she sat back on her haunches and gnawed on a hunk of moose-meat jerky she had found in Eli’s pocket. She had to keep her strength up. She was actually warm from all her working, but she knew as soon as she stopped the cold would return. She placed another log on the fire, watched grimly as the damp wood smoked until it finally caught, then stripped to her silk undershirt, wrapped up in her own slicker, hung her sweater and turtleneck up to dry, and climbed under the blanket with Eli.

  “Eli,” she whispered, cuddling up to him. Two were better than one when it came to warding off a chill, and another’s body heat was the best way possible to c
ombat hypothermia. If only he would come to, tell her it was all right, joke that he had gotten her that alone time on a deserted lake … tell her the date, the president’s name. “Eli?”

  But still he didn’t answer. She peeked over his chest to the water. The rain had stopped as night had descended, but something different was in the air, something odd on the wind, just now picking up.

  Bryn swallowed past the lump in her throat. It was snowing, blowing hard across the water in a diagonal slant. Snowing.

  She began to cry.

  Eli winced in the dim light as consciousness claimed him. He relived the last harrowing moments of the crash, the panic and pain, the realization that they were somersaulting, the lost sensation of going under, and then the rising sensation of coming to. He awakened with a start, wondering where Bryn was, if she was dead.

  “Eli? Eli!” she moaned, right beside him then, in his arms. It was a miracle! She was alive, and nestled right here, with him, not locked far away, trapped in an airplane as she had been in his dreams.

  She lifted her head and smiled in the dim light of dawn. Her breath clouded before her face. “You’re all right,” she said.

  “You’re all right—,” he tried to reply, but in the effort to rise, realized he was injured. “Ou-ouch,” he managed to add.

  “You have a broken arm and a dislocated shoulder. By the bruising, I’m guessing your collarbone is broken too.”

  “Anything else?” he asked, closing his eyes. He hadn’t ached like this since the high-school football championships. Or the time he was moose hunting and a bull charged, sending him scrambling down the river and over a few too many boulders.

  “You were out for some time. Probably a concussion. Thank God you didn’t go into a coma. The cold would have claimed you for sure then.” She rustled through the medical supplies on the ground and pulled out her stethoscope and her blood-pressure cuff. “What day is it?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Who’s the president?”

  “Bush. By a hair.”

  “What’s my full name?”

  “Bryn Skye Bailey. The love of my life.”

  She smiled then, finally, apparently appeased. “Head must be okay if you remember that. I’m tired of your having concussions,” she groused. “How ’bout we quit this cycle?”

  “I’m game. Are you all right? Other than freezing?”

  “Nothing broken, by some miracle.”

  “You have a nasty cut here,” he said, gesturing above her eye.

  “Guess it will be my souvenir.”

  “You’re still beautiful, Bryn.” He shook his head. “I’m so glad you’re okay.” The thought of losing her brought tears to his eyes.

  For the first time, Eli chanced a look about. They were under a giant old white spruce, their clothing and a blanket stiffly hung from the branches—frozen, maybe—and there was a pitiful fire smoldering to his left, giving off a little heat, but not much. “How, how’d you do all this? What happened?”

  Bryn recounted her memories of the night before, of getting him to shelter, returning to the plane for supplies, of attempting to build a fire and keep them both warm. “They’ll come for us now, right?” she asked, nodding toward the edge of the tree where light was warming a solid blanket of glistening, unbroken snow.

  “I would imagine,” he said, trying not to scare her. With the low cloud ceiling, it would be difficult for anyone to fly. “I don’t … Bryn, before we crashed, did I get a location out with my Mayday?”

  “I don’t know. It’s all kind of a blur.”

  “For me too. I think I had to give up on the radio transmission to keep the plane aloft. The thing is, with this snow, we might be in for a wait.”

  “Just our luck that we’d get snow in August.”

  “It won’t last long. We must be at a higher elevation. And conditions must’ve been right last night. The plane?”

  “Went down in the lake. The trees ripped off the pontoons and wings, but they are still hanging on by their rigging, it looks like.”

  “So it can be salvaged?”

  “I guess. If you can salvage a partially submerged fuselage.” Clearly, getting back in the plane was the last thing on her mind.

  “What about the radio?”

  “Under water.”

  “Emergency kit?”

  “I couldn’t find it. But I was getting so cold, and you were under this tree in wet clothes—”

  “Shoot. There was a flare in there. And some decent fire starters. Maybe I can—” Heavy footfalls through the brush caught his attention then, making him wonder if a search party was almost upon them. Eli craned his neck to see, hoping that they would soon be in a litter, covered in blessed wool blankets, being carried to safety. But a giant black bear snuffled into view. Eli’s eyes widened. The bear was maybe forty yards away, lifting his nose and grunting. The blood. He smells our blood.

  Eli tried to swallow, his mouth suddenly dry, and whispered to Bryn, “You have your gun?”

  “I do.” He heard the safety release, saw out of the corner of his eye as she aimed at the bear. It was at that moment that the bear spotted them. He was about to charge. Eli could sense it. The bear stared them down for an impossibly long time and then rushed.

  “Shoot it,” he whispered hoarsely, the bear thirty yards away. The shot echoed across the lake as the bear roared, fell, rolled to its feet, and ran toward them again, closing the distance impossibly fast.

  Bryn shot again from twenty yards. The bear tripped and then rose again, nipping at its wound.

  Eli grabbed for the gun, knowing the next shot would be their last chance, but his shoulder and arm screamed in pain. “Make it count,” he groaned, almost losing consciousness.

  Bryn grabbed the gun back and shot again. The bear was maybe ten yards away now. Eli feared Bryn had missed. But the bear stopped suddenly, and then curled into a collapse, like a waning whirlwind. He huffed a few times with labored breaths, and then his chest ceased rising.

  The gun was still pointed at him, and Eli noticed Bryn’s trembling hand. Gently this time, he reached out to take it from her. “You did it,” he whispered.

  “I did it,” she repeated, as if to convince herself. She laid down beside him, reminding Eli of the bear’s collapse. “I had to go and fall in love with a bear magnet,” she muttered. She gasped for breath as if she had been holding it for the last thirty seconds.

  “A bear magnet that smells like fresh moose meat,” he added.

  Bryn just groaned. She was trembling again, her teeth chattering.

  “We gotta find some heat.”

  “My fire,” Bryn defended.

  “Ain’t doing much. How ’bout that blanket? And our clothes? Are they dry?”

  Bryn struggled to rise and felt them. They were as hard as sheets of ice. “Fr-frozen,” she said.

  “It was a good thought. Just not warm enough to dry them. Come back here. I’m already colder without you.”

  She snuggled up against him.

  “Are we going to die out here?” she whispered.

  “I hope not. Pray with me, would ya?”

  She nodded against his chest.

  “Father God, we’re in serious need of a miracle here. Please, Lord, we pray that you will guide searchers to us, as soon as possible. In Jesus’ name. Amen.”

  “Amen.”

  Bryn awakened, trembling so hard her head hit the ground. She stared over Eli’s chest to the bear she had shot. A thin layer of frost covered each hair of his fur, leaving him looking as if he had bleached the ends of his hair. Unbelievable. It was still amazing to her that she had shot it. She had been ready to shoot Ben’s bear when he broke into her cabin. But he had been more of a rummager than a hunter. This one had been so close, so clearly intent on killing them for a meal. She shivered, double-time.

  Her movement roused Eli from his slumber, and he looked at her, then to the tree limbs above them. “Shh. Listen. Hear that?”

  �
�What?” All she could hear was the faint breeze sweeping through the stands of alder and the tree above them. But then, a faint whine …

  “C-130,” he said with a grin.

  Her eyes widened in delight, and she returned the smile. Pushing herself up on all fours, she rose. On shaking legs, she exited the tree foliage to look upon the lake for the first time that day. There was still a solid cloud ceiling, but it was high enough now for planes to be out and searching.

  “Two de Havillands, coming behind her!” Eli called, too wounded and weary to join her. “Quick, come get a rain slicker, something to wave at them!”

  She hurried over to him as the C-130 loomed closer, the churning of its giant engines reverberating in her chest. It was coming fast and low. She scrambled under the tree and grabbed the slicker, then hurried back to the beach, panicked that she might fall and blow their chance at being discovered. Their downed plane was covered with snow, so it would look like a jetty from that distance, not a fallen aircraft.

  The large plane burst over the treetops, not a thousand feet above ground. And trailing behind, a half-mile distant on either side, were the Beavers, painted orange and white. The Anchorage Civil Air Patrol. They passed in a vivid display of air power, like planes at the Air Force Academy’s stadium on game day. “We’re here!” Bryn screamed, waving her slicker. “We’re here!” she yelled after them, as if her cry could pierce the metal sheathing of their fuselages and bypass the engine noise.

  “I missed them, Eli!” she cried in despair, wanting to kneel and weep. “I missed them! They didn’t see us! I was too late!”

  “They’ll be back,” he said calmly from his perch beneath the branches. How could he be so calm?

  Bryn moved five feet to the left in order to see the planes until they disappeared. It was cold, so cold. How could they survive here? None of the planes turned; they continued to canvass the landscape beneath them as they flew northward. “Oh, God,” she cried. “Please, Lord, I can’t take another night. Please, Father, lead someone to us!” Tears ran down her face. “Please, Lord,” she begged, falling to her knees and bowing. “Please.”