by Hunt, Jack
“If that could have worked, it would have done so by now,” Kara shot back.
“Had we stayed with the plane, we might have been found by now,” Frank replied.
“Yes, and we might have been dead by now,” her father added.
There was a long pause. What a person should have done meant very little for them in light of the peculiar circumstances they were in. Kara stabbed a finger at her father.
“Frank, he’s not getting any better and I don’t want him to die up here.”
“And I don’t want to die down there. We were attacked. Paul was gored to death. Callaway torn apart. We are in the backside of hell, what part of that don’t you understand? But hey, why not, let’s go charge into the thick of it, freeze to death, lose our lives crossing through some passage in the mountains or hey, drown in the river, that would work well, wouldn’t it? Especially since you think I got us into this so I could kill you both.” He angrily poked the fire. “The reality is,” he poked the stick at her, “you got us into this. I wouldn’t even be here if it weren’t for you.”
“Frank,” her father said, a frown forming.
Kara shifted from one foot to the next. “For me. For me!?”
“Yeah, you asked me to tag along. Fly the plane because he couldn’t.”
“I can fly,” her father insisted.
“Yeah, but you shouldn’t. So damn stubborn,” Frank said. “All the time.”
Kara gave Frank an incredulous expression. “You agreed.”
“What was I supposed to say, no?”
“Someone else could have flown us in.”
“Yeah, I wish they had,” he muttered.
“You know what, Frank. I’m pretty sure it was you who reached out to me.”
“That’s because he wouldn’t listen. He never listens to anyone.”
“Would you both shut up? I got us into this,” her father said, angrily, making them both look at him. “Okay? I wanted to come out here.”
“Yeah, and look where it’s gotten us,” Frank said, poking the fire even harder. Embers sizzled as smoke rose.
Kara sighed and looked out toward the horizon, no plane in sight, no one to lift them out of this mess but them. “I’m just saying we should move on before it’s too late. Before the freeze-up. I think you misunderstood me.”
“Did I?”
“When I said I wanted to leave, I was thinking about my father.”
“No, no you weren’t. You were thinking about yourself. Admit it.”
“Sure. I don’t want to die here any more than you do,” she bellowed.
“Okay. How far do you expect to get dragging him by yourself?”
“As far as I can.”
“That confident? All right. Then maybe you should go alone. Maybe I should have let you all go in the beginning and stayed with the plane, taking my chances, at least that way I might not be here now.”
“Yeah, you probably would have ended up like Callaway,” her father said.
“Oh screw you, Henry. You and your damn pursuit of gold. You’re the reason we are in this mess.”
Kara drew a breath. She’d had enough.
“Frank. If you want to stay. Go ahead. Stay. But I’m continuing,” she said.
“Best of luck.” Frank poked the fire again. She nodded, took out mushrooms from her pocket, and offered some.
“Here.”
“Keep them.”
She gave a nod, and lifted the ropes, and slung them over her shoulders. She paused for a second, hoping he would change his mind, if only so that she wasn’t alone with her dad in the journey out. “If we make it, I’ll be sure to send them this way.”
Frank didn’t look at her nor did he make a parting gesture to her father.
She pressed on, now bearing the full weight and responsibility. The metal stretcher clattered across the stony terrain as she headed down. At first, traversing the landscape was slow and cumbersome without a second person to help. Then as they made their descent into the tree line, the stretcher slid too fast and got away from her several times, and once almost flipped as the back end arced outward on the snow.
She stopped, and held on to it with both hands, breathing hard, digging the tips of her boots into the blanket of white. Kara wanted to scream in frustration as she looked back and saw that they had hardly made any ground.
Keep one foot in front of the other, maintain a slow and steady pace, she told herself. Every time she stopped, the cold would torture her, stiffening her muscles and making her want to sit down and rest, but that would get them nowhere.
Push through it.
She drew strength from the thoughts of her mother, her words about working with nature instead of against it. Kara zigzagged her way down, heading diagonally, then turning and doing the same again, it was the only way to avoid losing control.
As the ground passed before her eyes and she made the descent on the steep slope, it was hard to see where to place her feet as snow covered the dark rocks in most areas. While it helped to slide her father over the uneven ground, it presented a greater challenge. Control. On the steepest areas, she had to turn and hold on to the stretcher and inch her way over to certain patches of rocks. For a brief while, she thought she was managing, until her foot sank into the snow and hit a patch of black ice.
The world went out beneath her and because she had the ropes around her shoulder, her father followed.
A shriek left her lips.
Landing on her stomach but still holding on, she slid backward, barreling her way toward an overhanging rock, a sheer drop. Her heart hammered in her chest at the sight as they picked up speed. Like riding a sled, her father’s body weight was being carried by the force of gravity. Desperately she tried to drive the tips of her boots into the snow to slow it, but it wasn’t working.
They’d picked up too much speed.
“Arghh!” she cried out as snow curled over her legs like a wave, and small stones beneath the surface broke away. With her arms outstretched holding on to the sides of the stretcher, her face looming over her father’s feet, she cast a glance back trying to judge the distance between where they were and the drop-off point.
Eighty, maybe ninety-five feet remained.
“Come on!” she bellowed, spreading her legs wide and hoping that her boots would eventually catch one of the boulders.
It did.
Her foot snagged a boulder.
The problem was as soon as the sole struck it, she pivoted like the hand of a clock and now instead of being in front of the stretcher she was behind it, still moving, still heading toward the drop. If she let go, there was a chance she could survive, hold on, stop herself, but he wouldn’t. No, she clung tight and with all her strength dug the inner sides of her boots into the ground as they got dangerously close.
Out the corner of her eye she suddenly saw a dark mass, black, she could have sworn it was the same wolf from earlier. Nothing but a blur.
Then as if by a strange twist of fate, as the stretcher was drawing near to the edge, one of her outstretched legs caught on a boulder and pivoted her, so that her body slammed into a nearby tree. The impact was hard and her hands released from the stretcher, but as the rope was still slung around her shoulders it couldn’t get away from her.
For but a second she slowed.
But that didn’t mean it couldn’t pull her around.
Her father’s body weight combined with the thin layer of snow beneath them was enough to pull her out, she felt it pulling her. Quickly, Kara wrapped one arm around the tree. Her body twisted into a new position, legs facing downward, her head upward. Her other arm came around and her hands latched on to the thin tree.
The stretcher was now behind her.
The pitch of the slope, with the weight of her father, strained at her hands like a boulder was attached to her back. Driving the tips of her boots into the snow, she felt the ground beneath, solid, firm enough to stop the trajectory they were on but not enough that it would ho
ld her forever.
Ten seconds.
Thirty.
A minute.
Time passed in the blink of an eye.
Her fingers were slipping, rocks beneath her boots giving way.
She gritted her teeth and held on for what felt like forever, and then…
Frank.
“Hold on, hold on,” he said, rushing down the steep slope above her, pitching sideways, trying his best not to slip and end up in the same predicament they were in. Within seconds, he’d reached them, and clamped on to the stretcher.
“I got yah,” he said. She felt the weight lessen as he pulled and assisted. Within a matter of minutes, they had the stretcher off the snow and onto a patch of exposed rock.
Kara laid back, out of breath, and more grateful than ever before.
26
It would get worse before it got better. The clock was ticking. Time was against them. Her father’s health was in a steady decline. His cough was worse. The weather wasn’t letting up. Although the freeze-up of larger lakes occurred in December to January in the southern part of Alaska, ice could form on most rivers and smaller lakes in the higher altitudes by late October to mid-November. Add to that an unrelenting fall storm sweeping in from the North Pacific and they could easily find themselves trapped.
While Kara shared Frank’s concerns about traveling through the mountains, her refusal to sit by idly and watch her father die kept her going.
Pressing on was non-negotiable.
“Kid, you are as stubborn as your old man.”
“I appreciate the compliment,” she said.
“We really could have used snowshoes, it will be deeper higher up.”
“Were they in the plane?”
“Were,” he replied. “They weren’t there when I searched.”
She shook her head. “That’s fine, we can make some using branches from the trees.”
“You are just full of surprises, aren’t you?”
“However, if this snow lets up we might not need them,” she said. “And, if my father is correct there is a narrow pass through the mountains at a lower altitude. If we take that we should be able to avoid the extreme cold, thick snow and climbing.”
“And if he isn’t correct?”
“We’ll find another way.”
Frank chuckled. “You really do see the glass half-full, don’t you?”
“Not always,” she muttered.
“Still. Maybe we should create those snowshoes. Even if we don’t have to use them. I’d feel better having them.”
They stopped, and she unshackled her father from her shoulder and scanned the black spruce trees while rubbing her neck. While most snowshoes were the shape of a tennis racket, emergency ones didn’t need to be exact, they just needed to work. To create some, it was fairly simple. All it required was some tree branches, and cord, string, or fabric strips. They had wire from the plane, and clothes from their luggage that they could tear. She’d learned various ways and the intricate V-shaped ones were the best but that required more time, instead, she opted for the quickest.
She eyeballed the thickness, length, and width of several tree branches, pulling them down and testing flexibility. Fir, spruce, and willow were perfect. She took out her Leatherman and sawed-off two pieces. They needed to be roughly three feet long and fifteen inches wide with a cluster of tiny branches on either side.
Kara laid them down beside one another with the widest end furthest away.
She placed her feet near the front of the branches just where the thicker part of the branch fissured off into smaller ones. She took some of the strips of cloth from the T-shirt she’d torn and threaded it through her laces, down and underneath her boot.
Keeping the cloth between the laces would keep it all in place.
“Well, what do you think?” she said, lifting her feet and taking a few experimental steps.
“I think I’m going to trip over.”
“Hey, it’s not ideal but it works if you remember to go sideways downhill, and lift your feet instead of shuffling forward.”
He waved her off. “Looks more hassle than it’s worth.”
“So is having your toes amputated.” She sighed. “All right, wait up.”
She then created the V-shaped ones. It relied on using branches that were roughly one-and-a-half-inch thick, three, and creating a triangle. From there, she used the plane wire to tie the corners together before adding a few more branches across the V section that would act as a support for the bottom of their boots. Once secure, all that was required was to fill out the open spaces by either stretching material across the V or taking a branch that had lots of pine needles and threading it through. By the time it was done it looked like a small, flat Christmas tree where the top would go toward the back of the boot and the wider area toward the front. She then used some of the cloth to create loops that could be used to keep her boot connected and that was it.
“So?” she asked. “Better?”
“I might not break my neck with those.” His lip curled. “And what if we didn’t have that cloth?”
“Roots, anything durable and bendable.”
She bent and untied her boots. There was no need to use them right now as the snow wasn’t deep enough yet but when it was, at least they had something. She created another set for him and laid the lightweight snowshoes across the stretcher, having her father hold on to them.
“I thought you’d forgotten how to do that,” her father said.
“I thought I had. Maybe we store all this information in the back, and it comes to the surface when we need it.”
“Maybe for you,” he said, referring to his failing memory.
Frank collected some more straight branches and used wire from the plane to bundle them together. He was convinced they would reach an area where there were no trees and what would they do then for fire?
They used a couple of T-shirts removed from their bodies and plane wire to attach them to all four sides of the stretcher.
“There,” he said stepping back.
“It will make it heavier to drag.”
“Hardly. You’ll thank me for it,” he said.
They continued, banging trees with their walking sticks every twenty to thirty seconds to alert wildlife. They consumed their cache of mushrooms and berries at different hours and collected more when they stopped at streams to refill the single water bottle. Once they were close to the river that washed out the valley, it was warmer, warmer than it had been higher up the slope. It was the small things, incremental achievements that kept their spirits up — an appreciation for what most overlooked when surrounded by the comforts of a modern world. Out here in the vast expanse of untouched, unforgiving land, there were different rules and to survive them it required as much mental strength as physical endurance.
Bundled up in their gear they were dry, but a fine layer of snow had settled on her father. Kara would stop and clear it so it didn’t melt and make him wet. As she was doing it for the umpteenth time, Frank picked up a loose stone and tossed it ahead. The hope was that as long as they continued to make noise — bears, moose, wolves would stay clear. She hadn’t told him about the encounter with the black wolf, she hardly believed it herself. Its timing and its color made her think about what her mother had said.
“If I died, I would want to come back as a wolf. Huge. Black.”
Of course, she didn’t think it was her. That kind of logic was for children but nonetheless the way it had stared through her, almost like it knew her.
“So this interview. Your father mentioned you had a job offer?” Frank asked.
“Oh that,” she said, forging forward, every breath more difficult than the last. “It’s tomorrow morning.”
That got a chuckle out of him. “Then I guess we really should get a move on.” The stretcher scraped over the hard surface. “I’ve never been to California. Though I think if I make it through this, I might go,” he said, out of breath. “Do you like
it?”
“Uh. I’m not sure,” she said, distracted.
“You’ve been there eleven years, shouldn’t you know by now?”
“You’d think so. No, look, when I wasn’t meant to be working, I was working,” she replied. “So I didn’t get to see much of it.”
“Why?”
“I didn’t get a lot of downtime. Busy.”
He stuck his tongue into the lower half of his cheek. “That can’t be good.”
“Tell that to those I worked for.”
He snorted. “So how did you lose the job?”
“By having some downtime,” she replied. Both of them laughed before Kara brought him up to speed on getting stuck in traffic, and her series of unfortunate events. Kara wondered how much of the conversation her father had heard. While they traveled his eyes were closed so she wasn’t sure if he was asleep or not.
“Sounds like you had your hands full. Why didn’t you come back?”
“To what?”
“You could have worked in the business.”
“Flying planes?” she asked. “Could you see me doing that?”
“We have female pilots.”
“No, I meant working alongside my father.”
He laughed. “Oh, I see your point but there are other jobs you could have done. At least we wouldn’t have worked you till you were exhausted. Too many people chasing after invisible goals.”
“You call a nice home and a career an invisible goal?”
“I call it just one more thing. Trust me, once you get it, you want the next and the next, when does it end? We’re not here long, Kara. You should be enjoying life, getting out…”
“In nature. Was that what you were about to say?”
They both laughed, seeing the irony.
She shrugged. “Ah. I don’t know what I want.”
“Will you head back to California after this?”
“I have a job waiting back there. I mean, I had a job. I worked so hard to get where I wanted to be and when I arrived…”
“You realized you didn’t want to be there?”
She smiled. “No. I guess the view wasn’t what I thought it would be. Anyway, enough about me. What about you?” she asked, throwing the question back to him. She didn’t like talking about herself. It only reminded her of her failings.
