Avalanche!

by Terry Lynn Johnson

  I talked about how Ryan was always winning something. How he never got into trouble at school. I was the one who did that. I reminded him how disappointed Dad had been when the school called after I got into the fight on Ryan’s behalf. I had shoved Debbie Martin the next day after the sprained ankle incident. I wasn’t sorry. I’d do it again.

  The stories got slower as the night went on. My neck kinked, so I laid it down on my arm and tucked the emergency blanket around it. My stomach gurgled in hunger. Morning had to arrive soon. What were we going to do then?

  Rescue was not coming for us. No one knew we were here. I glanced at how short the burning candle had become. We would never survive another night out here, I told myself. Not without at least a candle to cut the frost. We had to do something.

  There was a snowmobile trail near where we had skied. We’d heard them roaring by when we had lunch. If we got back to the main trail, someone would come along. But we needed to get out of this ravine, back up the mountain.

  How? Our skis were gone.

  The problem whirled and whirled in my head. I thought of the wolverine tracks we’d seen. Of how large they were. Ryan had said the size was so they could walk on snow. We needed to make our feet big. Could we make snowshoes? I blew out a breath in frustration. I didn’t know how to make snowshoes.

  That was my last thought before sleep claimed me.

  I jerked awake, confused by the cold blackness around me. My brain shut down. Pure terror charged through me. I was back in the hole after the avalanche! Buried alive! Wait. No, we had gotten out. I was here with Ryan. The candle had died.

  “Ryan?” I groped and accidentally hit him in the face.

  “Ow! What—?”

  “Are you okay?” I asked, lurching up. My eyes adjusted in the weak light filtering in from behind our packs.

  “Where are we?” Ryan jerked his head around in a frenzy. “Ash?”

  “Ryan,” I choked out, reaching for his hand. “We’re in a snow cave. You remember?”

  Ryan let out a sob. He grabbed at his boots, started tearing at the buckles. “My feet! I can’t feel my feet!”

  Chapter Eight

  “What?” I cried.

  I helped Ryan unbuckle his boots. With growing panic, I noticed that his right boot was broken and split open.

  Ryan ripped the boot off his foot, and my stomach rolled to see it was full of ice inside. Ryan’s socks were wet. He peeled off his socks and we both stared at his waxy white feet. The baby toe on his right foot looked fake, like a mannequin’s toe. The worst frostbite I’d ever seen.

  Why hadn’t I checked his feet instead of being so concerned with my knee? I should’ve had him dry out his socks! I should have at least noticed his ski boot was broken. Why didn’t I take care of my brother?

  “What happened?” Ryan cried. “Where are we? Where’s Mom?” He struggled to rise, his legs tangling in his blanket. When he leaped up, his head crashed into the snow ceiling and he collapsed. His bare feet skidded in the tree boughs.

  I took hold of him until he settled. The contact made me feel better too. Ryan was himself again. Tears of relief squeezed out of my eyes.

  He panted while I told him the story. I explained to him how we built the snow cave after the avalanche. He remembered having lunch on the trail the afternoon before, but nothing later. While we talked, I pulled off my socks and helped him put them on over his cold, hard feet. The lump on his head had gone down, leaving a bluish bruise.

  “I wish I had spare socks in my backpack, not just gloves,” I said.

  I ripped my backpack open with the knife and sliced two pieces of material from its sides to wrap my feet in before jamming them into my boots. Mine were warm and dry, but too small for Ryan’s feet.

  I busied myself opening the door of the cave and made sure I grabbed everything to take with us. I couldn’t quite look at Ryan yet. How could I have forgotten his feet?

  We had to get out of here. He needed to get his feet warm and have his head checked. Maybe the cold last night was good for his brain, but it was not good for the rest of him.

  Once we were outside, Ryan pulled out the map from his pocket and we both looked up the mountain. The sky was pink and getting lighter every moment. The air felt morning chilled. Everything was quiet and still in the forest around us, as if it was on Pause.

  “Do you know where the snowmobile trail is?” I asked Ryan.

  He looked at the map sulkily. “Here,” he said, pointing. “Obviously. But look where we are!” He gestured around us, trying to move in the deep snow. “We’ll never make it up the mountain. Without our skis we’ll just sink into the snow. I can’t even walk.”

  Ryan slumped onto his knees, still grasping the map.

  “You can’t give up,” I said. “Come on, we can make snowshoes and walk on the snow like wolverines.”

  Ryan sniffed. “Mmmm . . .” He looked around at the trees. “Maybe if we made a frame, then use the tree boughs from the cave.”

  “That’s it! Yes, let’s figure it out. How do we make them, Ry?” A sense of gratitude washed over me at his interest. I couldn’t do this alone.

  Ryan pocketed the map and got up. He began to totter around in the deep snow, pulling at branches. I had thought his mind was back to normal, but now I saw he still wasn’t himself—he was easily guided. My hands shook as I made another fire. I set the bottle by the fire to melt more water. We’d need to drink enough if we were going to make it out of here today. We needed food, too. I felt weak and empty.

  Ryan sat beside me with two pieces of straight branches. He used the duct tape from the pack to tape the ends together. They formed a V, about as long as the distance from my waist to the top of my head. He muttered to himself as he studied what he’d made, then taped a shorter branch to join the two pieces across to form what looked like a triangle.

  He bent over his project with full concentration. It made me feel calmer to see him focused. He cut two smaller branches to reach across the V in the middle like an equals sign.

  “That’s where your boot rests,” he explained, pointing to the equals sign. “We’ll fill in the empty space with tree boughs to keep us up, just like a wolverine paw, see? We’ll use my rope to tie it on.”

  His face was determined. He looked for the moment as if he’d forgotten about his frozen feet and where we were. I was glad. It made me afraid when he was afraid, because his emotions always photocopied to me.

  We sat by the fire side by side, weaving tree boughs into the frames. Once I’d sat down, I could hear my belly. Gnawing hunger made my stomach so hollow, I felt sick. I couldn’t remember ever feeling this hungry. I rubbed my belly and shivered, wishing for a big bowl of Cheerios with hot buttered toast and gobs of raspberry jam. But I needed to forget that and think about getting up the mountain. How was I going to walk with my knee injury?

  “I’m starving,” Ryan said.

  “I don’t have anything to eat,” I said softly. “But when we make it up to the trail, we can eat whatever we want.”

  “Donuts?” Ryan asked.

  “With cream inside,” I said.

  We tied our boots to the crosspieces so that the triangle was upside down with the pointy part behind the boot. The snowshoes looked like fuzzy slippers the way the pine needles stuck out all shaggy around my feet. I took a faltering step. Pain stabbed my knee but I tried not to let Ryan see. He shuffled behind.

  I gathered our equipment and stuffed it in the one remaining backpack that I hadn’t torn up. Ryan grabbed his ski pole, and we started up the mountain.

  Chapter Nine

  My boots punched through the top layer of snow, but the bushy branches I wore stopped them from sinking further. “The snowshoes are working!” I said.

  They weren’t easy to walk in, and they looked funny. My ski boots were also awkward, but they flexed. Slender branches of needles bounced with each step. The V of the snowshoes trailed behind me.

  My feet were cold. They rubbed in
the hard backpack material, but at least they weren’t bare in my ski boots. Worse was my knee. It felt like it was on fire. I wondered if I should use more tape and make the brace stronger, but I didn’t want to cut off the circulation. Plus there was no time to stop. I focused on putting one foot in front of the other.

  “Ash,” Ryan said quietly.

  I turned to see his face drained of color. He pointed. That’s when I saw the bear.

  We watched it, a large brown hulk against the snow far above us.

  “Is it looking at us?” I asked. “Did it see us? Why is it on the mountain? Aren’t bears supposed to be hibernating?”

  “They come out of their dens by April,” Ryan said. “Is it April?”

  “It will be next week,” I said, disheartened that Ryan was still not okay. I needed him to be okay.

  “Look,” I said, pointing to the bear making its way into the distant trees with an unmistakable grizzly saunter. “It’s gone now.”

  The bear had moved on. I hoped that was the last we’d see of it. We put our heads down and began the ascent back up toward the trail.

  Ryan struggled behind me, using his pole for balance. We had no energy to speak. We needed every bit of it to keep moving upward. He let out a soft cry with each step. A large bird soared in lazy circles above us.

  We could see the peak of Colt Summit clearly today without the falling snow. Jagged brown cliffs topped with heaps of pure white. My foot slipped, and I focused my gaze back onto what was in front of me. Stepping, then flicking the snow off the snowshoe with a jerk of my ankle.

  Step, flick. Step, flick.

  After nearly an hour of work, we were only halfway up the path the avalanche had carried us down. Ryan collapsed in a heap.

  “It’s no use. I can’t walk,” he wailed.

  I’d never seen Ryan give up. It scared me more than anything. I looked around desperately. We were in the midst of the avalanche debris. Trees and rocks and chunks of ice stuck out all over the snow. My knee throbbed hotly. Ryan sat in the snow crying and shivering.

  “Get up,” I said. “Come on, you can do it.”

  I grabbed the back of his jacket and tried dragging him. I slipped and fell on my hip. Then I held on to the ski pole, balanced myself, and grabbed him again. I hauled on his dead weight as hard as I could. He didn’t budge.

  How were we going to make it? My legs folded and I sank into a heap next to him. I couldn’t do this anymore. I wanted my parents here. I wanted Ryan to tell me it was okay, and to get up and carry me the rest of the way. I wanted to be home, wrapped in a blanket on the couch with my cat, Tiger. Have her purr on my lap and stretch her claws rhythmically.

  The wind brought a cold draft down the mountain. The sky was clear blue now, sun shining. It bounced off the snow, making me squint with watery eyes. After all we’d been through, surviving an avalanche and a night in the ravine, we were going to die anyway trying to climb back up. No one would know what happened to us.

  I rubbed my knee. Ryan wouldn’t walk and I couldn’t drag him.

  I glanced up and saw the bear again. Still up the mountain, but closer. “Ryan! That grizzly is back,” I whispered.

  My heart pounded. It was stalking us. We were being stalked by a hungry grizzly bear that had just come out of its den. Even if I could run, there was nowhere to go. My eyes darted around. And then I saw something else.

  A dark, shaggy animal was digging in the debris field behind us. Its head was broad, with short round ears. A thick yellowish stripe ran along its side from its shoulders all the way to its bushy tail. As I watched, it dug down with long claws and began to pull something out from beneath the snow.

  I got Ryan’s attention and gestured to the animal.

  “Wolverine!” he whispered hoarsely.

  We watched it fiercely tug at the back end of some dead animal with hooves and light brown hair. I couldn’t tell what it was, but the carcass was bigger than the wolverine.

  We were so focused on the wolverine that we didn’t see the bear until it was nearly on top of us.

  Chapter Ten

  “Ryan!” I screamed.

  The bear charged toward us. All I had time to do was clutch Ryan and close my eyes. Wait for the teeth.

  When I heard the growl come from behind us, I twisted around to see. The bear had charged at the wolverine! Ryan and I sat where we were in the snow, holding each other. We gaped. The bear wanted the carcass, not us.

  The noises coming from the wolverine made goose flesh rip up my arms. Savage growling that sounded like a Velociraptor from a dinosaur movie. A musky smell hung in the air like skunk.

  The grizzly shook its head and hunched its muscled shoulders. It lunged at the wolverine but stopped short. A fake lunge. Adrenaline coursed through my body.

  They circled each other warily. The bear swatted its huge paw at the ground. The paw was the size of my head. I stared at the long claws. Ryan’s grip on my arm tightened as we heard the wolverine’s growl grow more furious. The wolverine was clearly saying, “This is mine!”

  It stood its ground in front of the bear with an attitude of a much bigger animal.

  Didn’t the wolverine notice the bear was twenty times its size? The wolverine did not back down. It didn’t seem to consider how small it was in comparison to the enormous bear.

  With a horrible growl, the wolverine flung itself onto the bear. The grizzly lurched up onto its back legs in surprise, and then came down. It shook, then pawed at the insane devil on its neck, and the wolverine let go.

  Ryan and I kept clutching each other, our shoulders leaning in. We watched the bear spin, take a few steps toward the ravine where we had just been, and then look over its shoulder. For a charged moment, no one moved. And then the bear loped away, down the mountain.

  My breath puffed out in a cloud. I couldn’t believe we had been able to witness this fight. We were just two specks on the middle of a mountain. Nothing out here cared whether we lived or died. Avalanches still happened, animals still hunted and fought and struggled to survive. Just like we were struggling to survive.

  The wolverine turned to us then. Its shrewd gaze appraised us. I froze. Do wolverines attack people?

  For one intense second, the wolverine and I locked eyes. We studied each other. I saw the fearlessness in its face.

  I wanted to feel that way.

  The wolverine turned back to the carcass and the spell was broken.

  “Whoa,” Ryan whispered.

  “It’s so beautiful,” I breathed. “And wild.”

  The wolverine stood on its back feet with its shaggy fur hanging. It grabbed a leg of the dead animal. We kept very still and watched the wolverine tug the carcass. It made a grating sound as it slid over the snow. As we stared, the determined animal slowly dragged the entire frozen carcass into the trees behind. There was absolute silence in its wake.

  Ryan and I looked at each other, not sure that what we had just seen was real.

  “Did you see that?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “We’ll have something to tell the biologists,” I said. “You wanted to get our names in the study.”

  I looked up the mountain with renewed determination. If a thirty-five-pound wolverine could face off with a thousand-pound bear and win, I could get us up this mountain. No matter if Ryan couldn’t walk and my knee couldn’t hold me. No matter how small I was in comparison to this enormous mountain. I wasn’t going to quit.

  But how was I going to get us there?

  Chapter Eleven

  I scanned the debris field, racking my brain to come up with an idea. Before the fight, I had been wishing Ryan could carry me. Peering up the mountain, I tried to imagine how I would be able to carry him.

  “Climb on, Ryan,” I said. I crouched next to him and offered my back. We used to give each other piggybacks all the time, though in the last few years, he ’d gotten heavy. But that wasn’t the biggest problem.

  “In this snow?” Ryan asked. “Up a
mountain? Are you sure?”

  I didn’t tell him about my knee. There was no other way. I had to do this. “Of course I’m sure,” I said.

  He wrapped his arms around me and slid onto my back. I gripped his legs, his feet dangling in the snow.

  “One, two, THREE!” I strained to stand. “Agh!”

  Everything in me pulled taut. My neck bulged. I stood up for a moment, wobbling. I would do this!

  I took one step. My knee screamed in agony, and we both toppled forward into the snow.

  We lay there gasping, sprawled on the mountain. What was I going to do? What I needed was a sled to haul my brother. I brushed at the branches of my snowshoe. Could we make a sled like we had made the snowshoes? I shook my head. I didn’t know how to make a sled, even if all the materials were to drop in front of me out of a gigantic cereal box.

  “It’s no use,” Ryan cried.

  I hugged him. “Don’t do that, Ry. Help me figure it out.” He pushed me away.

  I rolled away from him and pounded the snow in frustration. My glove hit something sharp. When I brushed the snow aside, I saw it was the side of a metal sign. Was it a caution sign from the highway? What was any kind of sign doing here in the middle of the wilderness?

  I grabbed the shovel from the pack and began to dig. My arms were sore from all my digging yesterday, but I kept going. Finally, I brushed away enough snow to reveal a sign partially bolted to a torn post.

  “Ryan! This is big enough for you to lie on.”

  He lifted his head with interest.

  I wondered briefly: If the wolverine hadn’t distracted us, what would’ve happened? If we hadn’t stopped where we did, I never would have found this sign. We had the wolverine to thank.

  “Could you hold on to the edge if I pulled you like on a toboggan?” I asked.

  Ryan studied it. “You could tie what’s left of my rope to the post and then loop it around your waist.”