“We’re awfully low on wood.” Thea frowned at the last remaining stack in the corner by the door. “If this keeps on much longer we’ll be like everything else out there—waiting to thaw.”
“We can break up the chairs,” Evan said shortly as he worked with his file on new quarrels. His regenerated hand ached abominably and his muscles were taut against the hurt.
“And then?” she demanded, waiting for an answer. “We break up the chairs and…” When the silence grew heavy she slammed down the whetstone she was using on their hunting knife. “And then!”
His eyes were clouded as he looked at her. “Then we freeze.”
She was about to make a sharp retort, but kept it to herself, returning her attention to honing the knife. They both worked in silence; only the muffled howl of the wind whispered to the fire that crackled in the larger of the two stoves. Only the occasional whick of their tools ventured against the sound of the storm.
As the early darkness closed in, Thea moved closer to Evan, who had the only candle—and that was sputtering now, nearly used up, guttered—and jealously guarded the little light.
“Maybe we could save the wax; use it to make more,” she said, seeing the puddle at the bottom of the dying candle.
“Do you want me to get another candle?” he asked as the one they had winked out, leaving only the ruddy glow from the stove for light.
“How many do we have left?”
“Eight or nine,” he said after touching the box. In the muted lambency from the stove, he counted out the remaining candles and reluctantly set up another for burning. “It will take us through tonight, and part of tomorrow night. If we’re careful, maybe we can get a whole week out of what we have left.” He sounded almost confident, but it went no further than the force he gave his voice.
“Maybe we can make up torches. There’s enough of the old kind of pines around. We’d have to tap them for sap,” Thea said, her eyes fixed on the piles of cut wood which had shrunk quickly during the blizzard. “We have to get more wood, anyway. We might as well get enough to make torches.”
“Sure,” he agreed, believing none of it. The very thought of torches in a wooden building brought back memories of towns in flames, always the aftermath of a Pirate battle. Burning towns had a special smell, a smell he had come to hate. “It isn’t a good idea to use torches in here, though. Too easy to catch fire, and then where would we be?” Very deliberately he kept his tone flat, emotionless.
Reluctantly she accepted that, her hands going white at the knuckles to show the strain she felt. They worked silently once more, each shutting out the other as they battled private worry. The night deepened, spreading cold like a deadly frosting over the mountains, sending a numbing chill into the little office of the stamp mill, a subtle, damp cold that defied the fire Evan kept burning in the big-bellied stove.
Thea put her scissors down, the last of the items she had set out for sharpening. Her hands moved stiffly now, and when she tried to speak she found that her face ached. “Does your arm hurt?” she asked Evan in order to ask him something.
“Some.”
“I’m sorry.” She moved slowly to her mattress on the far side of the stove and there she sank tentatively to her knees, shivering. She fingered the blankets, lost in thought. Then, quite suddenly, she said, “Oh, Evan, let’s get out of here. We’ll die if we don’t; I know we will.”
“In the dead of winter?” It was an automatic response, one he didn’t bother to think about.
“It’s better than sitting here waiting.”
Startled by the urgency in her words, Evan looked up, his irritation forgotten.
“We can start for Gold Lake as soon as the blizzard is over. It’s southeast of here, and we’ve got a compass. Hobart told us the trails we should take. We can find them, if we look. Evan, please, please, I don’t want to die here—I can’t.”
“Thea,” he began as calmly as he could. “If we start before the thaw comes, it will be worse out there than it is in here. Believe me. You think it over.”
“It’s not worse, dying outside!” she shouted with venom as she tore at the old blankets. “Anything is better than this. My hands are swollen. My teeth hurt. I bruise all the time. And when the thaw comes then it will be worse. We’ve just about fished the lake out now. We’ve scavenged everything we can reach that’s halfway edible. What do you think it will be like when the bear come out of hibernation? There aren’t going to be enough rabbits to go around. There aren’t going to be enough mice. Are you up to fighting a bear, Evan? Right now? It’ll be worse then. We’ll have run out of strength. Could you fight a hungry puma? Or coyote?”
“They don’t usually attack people,” Evan said reasonably.
“Would you like to make a bet? They’ve had a lot of lean years, these animals. I don’t imagine they’re too particular about the meat they get, so long as it doesn’t have too many maggots.” She had hugged the blanket to her and now was rocking back and forth. “Puma, hears, foxes, there’re a lot of them with teeth that are hungry. When the thaw comes, there’ll be more of them. They’ll be hungry, hungry.”
“Stop it. Thea,” he said, putting his work aside.
“Bones and bones and bones,” she murmured, ignoring him. “Blood first, for fertilizer, and then the bones. They’ll grow a bumper crop: bones, all over bones. Bones grow in poison where nothing else grows. And there’s enough poison to go around, everywhere—” Her crooning was cut short. Evan dragged her to her feet, shaking her with a fear that made him rough.
“Stop it!” His shout brought no response to her glazed, unseeing eyes. “Thea! STOP IT!”
Recognition came back into her face. “Evan? Evan…I didn’t…I never meant…” She began to tremble, the strength gone out of her. Shamed, she knelt on the mattress, her face white. At last the trembling passed, and she said in a still voice, “I’ve never had to wait like this. There was always something I could do before. It’s killing me, this waiting. When I sleep, all I dream about is getting away. I wake up, and there’s no way out. I can’t escape. But I’ve got to do something, Evan. I can’t just wait any longer: I’m going crazy waiting.”
Standing beside her, Evan longed to comfort her, but knew that he didn’t have the words for it. Gently he touched her shoulder, and for once she did not draw back from him.
“You don’t have to leave with me,” she said reasonably. “There’s no reason you should. But I’ve got to get out of here as soon as the blizzard stops. Really. I must.” She plucked aimlessly at the blanket, unable to look at him. “I used to think that it was only those people who couldn’t deal with the world the way it is who went crazy. But that’s not so, is it?”
“We’re all vulnerable, Thea.” For a moment memories of the Pirates were vivid in his mind. How had he ever consented to such barbarity? What had made him think that he could salvage civilization through rapine? Why did he think the Pirates would agree with his goals, and give up raids for a defended community. “And there more ways than one way to he crazy. I know. I know.”
The next day the blizzard began to abate, but the snow still fell and the winds pawed at the stamp mill, like some wild creature hunting food. Where the winds had sculpted crests and hollows the snow now came there, smoothing away the roughness, wrapping safety and danger alike in white swaddling.
In the stamp mill, Thea and Evan at first made feeble jokes about their last candle, hut when it had burned down and winked out, they did not speak to each other. Shortly after that they ran out of cut wood for their stove, and ended by breaking up the heavy desk in the inner office, feeding it bit by carefully rationed bit into the dying fire. Eventually that, too, was gone and they were left to the dark and the cold.
Then, through the stillness there came light. It touched the snow and made rainbows there. The brightness seeped into the stamp mill, making it glow softly as if the rooms were under water. And although the cold was no less intense than it had been through the night, the
morning made it more bearable.
“There’s a shovel in the infirmary.” Thea made this announcement through stiff, chapped lips. “I think we can dig out if we try.”
Evan pulled himself uncertainly to his feet. “The door will he snowed in,” he said, thinking of the lower level door, which by now was under six feet of snow.
“There’s that porch off the infirmary. We can go out that way.” To say those words, words that meant her release from this frozen prison, lightened Thea’s mood, giving her a burst of new strength. She started gathering up her few belongings to arrange them in her pack. “I’ll be ready to go in a bit,” she said as she worked.
“Do you want to do that now or later?” Evan asked, growing impatient with himself. “It’s going to take time to dig out. We can do that today, get some wood, do our packing tonight, and be underway just after sun-up.”
“So long? I thought…” She realized then that she hadn’t thought, and she considered his suggestion. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe we’ll get something to eat. Then we won’t have to walk hungry.” She nodded at her own resolution. Now that she knew her stay in the stamp mill was almost over, she was not frightened by it. “We’ll dig out now, to hunt. You can get the wood. You’re right about leaving, we can’t do it today. We wouldn’t get more than a couple miles by dark. Tomorrow morning, then. Early.”
Even with her enthusiasm it took them over three hours to clear a trough through the snow into the day. After the dark of the cramped office in the stamp mill, the sun off the snow dazzled them and made the expanses around them disorienting. It was as if they had stepped into an entirely different world from the one they had left, so changed were the mountains after a mere four days.
Shading his eyes, Evan blinked back the glare. The prospect of traveling in this shattering brightness did not please him. He had a fleeting recollection of skiing holidays in his youth, and the expensive dark glasses that kept out the brilliance—he wished he had them now. Everywhere lay the flawless, treacherous snow. “When I was a kid,” he said as he tested the surface, “we’d go skiing: Colorado, Switzerland, New Zealand. Bolivia. All the skiers talked about powder and packed base and slush.” He felt the white stuff turn to water in his hand, running through his fingers leaving only cold behind. He wondered what those long-ago skiers would have made of this waste. Snow then had been a recreation, an escape from the organized tedium of winter cities. Skiing snow was not at all like the snow that clogged traffic and turned city streets to slippery, hazardous trials to be negotiated in the wakes of snow-plows. This snow was of another sort—vast and dangerous, like the sea; beautiful, like the sea, deadly, waiting for that one mistake to wrap them in its unending frigid embrace.
“It’s awfully bright,” Thea said, thinking of the long days’ walks they would make through the mountains. This light would be like shards of glass in their eyes. She knew enough about snow blindness to fear it.
Evan sensed her worry and shared it. “Yes. It’s going to be difficult.”
“I don’t see any tracks, do you?” There was an anxious note in her voice.
“No.” He hoped this wasn’t important. “We’d better get our snowshoes.”
Several hours later they found a couple of frozen rabbits trapped under a small heap of freshly fallen snow where they had suffocated, and when Evan cleaned and gutted them, trimming away the worst of the flesh, precious little was left to go into the stewpot. While Evan worked on this unpromising meal, Thea gathered up the boughs which the weight of snow had pulled off the trees. This took her longer than she had anticipated and it was almost dusk when she returned to the stamp mill.
“I was getting worried,” Evan said lightly as Thea lugged two large branches in through the infirmary.
“So was I.” She swung the branches into the room. “I’ve got another three of these. That should take care of tonight.”
He looked at the boughs. “I’ll use the hatchet on these. Do you need help with the rest?”
She rubbed her hands briskly. “No. But I could use a fire. We’ve got a couple boxes of matches left, haven’t we?”
“More or less.” He had taken the hatchet from its place on the wall, and now, going onto one knee, he began to chop the boughs into manageable sections. “One last night,” he said when she came back with the other branches. “Tomorrow, off to Gold Lake.”
Thea finished securing the doors as he said this, and coming back into the room, she said, “It’ll be better there, Evan. You’ll see. It won’t be like this.”
Out of his doubts, Evan asked, “What will it be like, Thea?”
She thought this over before answering him. “It will be different.”
Packing was painful, for they had to leave some of their things behind: they took food and eating utensils, a pot or two, one box of matches, a few small knives, part of their dwindling supply of first aid equipment, all were sorted and sifted, then packed carefully in order of need.
“Too bad we can’t take one of the stoves,” Thea said with an attempt at humor. “It was sure nice to have them. I’ll miss them.”
“There’ll be other stoves at Gold Lake,” Evan assured her, as much to quiet his uncertainty as hers. “Better stoves, probably.”
Thea looked up from the last of her packing, her face flushed with optimistic anticipation. “Everything will be better there,” she announced. “You’ll see.”
5
They went east into the sun with the morning, following the line of what they hoped was Haskins Valley, where once there had been a trail, and perhaps still was, deep under the snow. They went slowly, their path spreading out behind them, tracks huge from their snowshoes, looking like some long-fossilized monster had returned to haunt the mountains.
At the end of the first day they were exhausted, their legs leaden and deeply sore, their eyes shot with red from the fierce light off the snow. They made camp for the night not far from the ruins of an old mine, the most protected location they had seen all day. Their makeshift tent sprawled over the snow, suddenly rickety and uncertain shelter against the night.
“It’ll be fine,” Thea said, her conviction sounding forced, even to her. She barricaded one end of the tent with her pack, and strapped her crossbow to her arm.
“I don’t know if we can get a fire going,” Evan said after a moment. There were small bits of kindling at his feet, and they sat on the snow like an abandoned bird’s nest, giving no promise of warmth.
“Then we can eat the meat cold. It’s cooked enough,” Thea said, struggling not to be discouraged.
So they ate their cold food, huddling near the tent as the sun sank below the jagged horizon. Wind sliced at them as night fell. The trees, with their burden of snow, sang to one another in eerie harmony.
When they had finished their sparse meal, Evan buried the bones in the snow, feeling both foolish and frightened as he worked.
In the tent they lay near each other, wrapped like cocoons in heavy blankets, each trying to forget the aches in stiff muscles which were magnets to the cold. They had a long way to go, and the next day would be no warmer.
“Evan?” Thea’s voice sounded far away in the little tent.
“Yes?”
“Remember when you were talking to Rudy Zinimermann about music and your father? Is this the kind of music you meant?” And she sang the few words in her small, quavering voice, words about love and betrayal: “Sola, perduta e abbandonata In landa desolata…” She stopped. “I don’t know if the words are right, but is that what you were talking about?”
He was genuinely surprised. “That’s from Puccini’s Manon Lescaut. Where did you hear it?”
“I don’t remember very well. I think my father used to play it, when we were still in Davis and had a big system to play disks. Sometimes my mom sang it, at Camminsky Creek. It always upset people when she did. It’s been running around in my head all day.” She made an apologetic sound, “I just wanted to know: what does it mean?”
Reluctantly, he told her. “It says, ‘Alone, lost, and abandoned in a desolate place.’”
“Oh.” She took an unsteady breath. “I guess that’s why people didn’t like it. I just wanted to know.” Then, after a moment she said, “There was another one, about a father asking his son to come home. It was pretty. Jack Thompson would sing it, sometimes.”
“Do you remember any of it?”
“Not really.” She pulled her blankets more tightly about her so that almost all of her face was covered. In a while she was asleep. But beside her Evan lay awake for long hours, listening to his memories.
The next day found them farther along their path. They knew they would have to find Sawmill Tom Trail if they were to get through the mountains quickly. Hobart had told them where it lay, but all the landmarks described were under the snow now. They struggled through the brightness, their eyes burning as the day wore on and the sun swung over their right shoulders. Once or twice they saw shapes moving through the trees, animals without features or definition going silently over the snows, anonymous as shadows.
“Do you think they’re stalking us?” Thea asked when two more shapes had melted away in the dark under the trees. The wind was sighing mournfully, touching the forest with wisps of low-flying clouds which Thea watched anxiously. “It’s piling up in the east. I think it will snow again tonight,” she said when the clouds grew denser.
“I’ll cover the tent with boughs. It will give us some insulation.” Evan glanced at the compass as he spoke. “We should find a ghost town a few miles on. Oddle Bar, or something like that.”
A cry from a cold, wild thing rose in the woods. “Maybe we can get there tonight? It would be good to sleep indoors again,” Thea said, feeling gooseflesh rise on her arms as a grue touched her spine.
“That sounds like dogs: the wolves were killed off a long time ago, and I don’t think there are coyotes up here,” Evan said calmly as the sound came again.
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