by Cadle, Lou
And constant, gnawing hunger. She winced at the thought of losing the container car of soup.
They had set aside a hundred cans of it as their emergency supply. That and the couple dozen they had inside the snow cave entrance were all the food they had now. It would feed them for maybe ten lean days. And it’d be damned heavy to haul at first. Not that she saw they had any other choice.
The cans had been such easy food. From now on, it would have to be ice fishing, hunting, and more hungry days.
That reminded her to check on her bow. She had dumped her pack off by the fire ring. She pulled out her bow and arrows, breathing a sigh of relief when she saw her good bow was still intact. It had been an arrow that had cracked when she had rolled on them—bad enough, but not a disaster. She still had her back-up bow, if the good one was ruined, but she could only shoot half the distance with it.
Both were utterly useless against a bunch of army guys with high-powered rifles.
“C’mon Benjamin,” she muttered. “Get back here!”
Once she had all the goods from the garage piled up, she crawled into the snow cave. First, she took the soup cans from the end of the tunnel and piled them next to the other supplies. Then she rolled up his sleeping bag, and hers, and tossed them both on the stack of soup cans. Finally she gathered the pots, utensils, and water bottles from around the fire. Rearranging the pile of goods to make packing the sled more efficient, she decided that was the end of what she could do.
He still wasn’t back, and there was nothing more she could think of to prepare for leaving. She grabbed her sleeping bag, and a can of the still-defrosted soup, and took them back into the snow cave. At least she could get warmer again while she was waiting. Her legs and arms were still numb enough to worry her. She crawled into her bag, ate cold soup, and spent a half hour rubbing her legs together and her arms against her sides, trying to create more heat through friction. Slowly, she began to warm up, until only her toes were numb.
She crawled into the patch of light near the tunnel entrance, pulled off her boots and socks and examined all her toes. They were awfully pale, but she didn’t think she’d lose any. The weather was getting colder all the time. She was going to have to be more careful about frostbite. So was Benjamin.
Damn. Where was he?
He walked up, appearing from the ashen air when there were only a couple hours of light left, pulling the sled. She was, irrationally, angry from worrying and knew it showed in her voice.
“Where have you been?” she demanded.
At nearly the same instant, he said, “What’s wrong?” He pointed to all the piled-up supplies.
“I’ve been so freaked,” she said. “There are guys.”
His eyes darted around.
“At the train, I mean. Army guys. They have a working vehicle. And really big guns.”
He processed this for a second. “Okay, tell it from the beginning.”
“I think we should pack the sled while I talk.”
“Did they see you? Know we’re here?”
“No. But they might find my trail.”
“Not at night they won’t,” he said.
“I think we should go now. Get as far away as possible.”
“How many?”
“Just two. But there are more somewhere else—and they were headed back to them. And they have prisoners. I don’t want to become another.”
“Okay. Let’s load ‘er up.” Unceremoniously, he twisted the sled and dumped off the ice he had spent the day collecting.
“I’m sorry.”
“You didn’t do anything wrong. You stayed out of sight, gave us a chance. That’s all we need.”
“Do you think I should have tried to make contact with them?”
He stopped what he was doing to look at her. “Do you think you should have?”
“No.” She told him what she had overheard. “It was more than the concept of them having prisoners, or whores, or prisoners used that way. More than the guns. I can’t tell you why, but I had a bad feeling from the start, and everything I heard them say made the feeling worse.”
“I’m glad you trusted it,” he said. “Hand me the tool box, would you?”
They loaded the sled, but it took too long. They were losing light by the time they were done. “Should we stay here until morning?” she said.
“No. You’re right about putting distance between us. We can make the stream bed tonight, at least.”
“You need food first,” she said.
“I can do without.”
“If the cans from the snow cave are still defrosted, you may as well fuel up now, while it’s edible. It might be a while before we can risk a fire.”
“Right. See if you can find them.” The cans were piled up, covered, and secured with the nylon rope, and she had to untie that to get to them. With her right glove off, she touched every one, found some less cold to the touch, and shook each it to see if it felt like liquid or solid ice. She tossed two cans to the side. Then she rebuilt the load. “These are still liquid, I think.” She opened the cans for him.
He finished getting the harness set up. “It’s going to be damn heavy.”
She handed him the soup. “I’ll pull.”
“Either way, doesn’t matter. It’ll take us both everything we have to get it going. But we can’t leave the last of the food behind.” He tilted his head back and upended the first can over his mouth.
“I know. I’m sorry we’ve lost the rest of it.”
“Eat.” He scraped out the first can with his fingers and tossed it aside. “And quit being sorry.”
“I ate, Benjamin. I feel like I brought it on us somehow. If I wouldn’t have noticed the engine sound, gone to see them, we could be blissfully unaware, eating hot food, settling down to sleep in our well-built cave.”
“You know you’re being absurd, right?”
“Yeah, I guess.” She stared at the loaded sled, feeling hopeless.
“Coral. Look at me. Did you do anything wrong?”
She met his eyes. “Not that I can think of. But I probably did screw up somehow.”
“I doubt it, but let’s try and figure out if you did. Tell me again everything that happened, in detail, while we pull.”
“Where are we going? Tomorrow, I mean.”
“Due north. I want to aim toward the edge of the mountains. If we have hills and big boulders, we have more places to hide. If we’re crazy lucky, we might find a cave. Easier to defend that.”
“We can’t move as quickly in that kind of terrain.”
“Right now, hiding is the priority.”
“And water.”
“And water,” he agreed. “We need to find a lake. The bigger, the better. More chance there’ll be liquid water under the surface of ice, so we won’t have to stop to build a fire to melt drinking water.”
“You know where any lakes are?”
“Not exactly. But there are some up there, among the foothills. Reservoirs and natural lakes, both.”
He tossed the last empty can aside and kicked some snow over it. “I’m ready.”
“Then let’s do it.”
She stood behind the sled and threw her body weight into getting it started. She heard Benjamin grunt with the effort of pulling, and at first, she was afraid they weren’t going to get it to budge. It had never been this heavy before. After another few minutes of digging in and pushing, she felt the sled finally give under her pressure, and they began to move off.
*
By the end of the first full day, they were exhausted, hungry, and still afraid of what might be coming up behind them. When they came across a patch of downed big trees, they stopped. While he dug another snow cave, she set a small fire and melted drinking water and soup, six cans each, eaten straight out of the cans. She then slept like the dead.
Snow fell the following day. They pulled almost without rest, not bothering to eat mid-day. At the end of the day, they dug another snow cave and were so exh
austed they fell to sleep without bothering to hunt for fuel. The next day, they packed soup cans in their pockets, defrosting them with body heat, and ate as they moved.
The third day after fleeing their camp, soon after midday, the wind picked up until it hurt to be in it, swirling snow around that quickly turned her cheeks and exposed forehead raw. They dug a snow cave immediately to protect themselves from the biting wind. Both of them were so exhausted, they dozed off and on for the rest of the day and still slept the night through. The sled was barely visible behind a snow drift.
The good news was, the wind had erased all signs of their passage, as well. There had never been any sign of pursuit, but now it seemed unlikely that the army guys could find them.
They found fuel and stayed in place that day and a second night, resting from the hard work of pulling so much weight so quickly, on so little food.
In the morning, the wind had died down to nothing. They ate, they drank, and Coral put on the harness to start the day’s pull.
Moving through the increasingly rocky terrain was harder, and slower, just as she’d predicted. They came upon a frozen stream and stopped there for two nights, taking time to gather wood, eat their way through half of their soup cans, and drink their fill of water. By the time they were ready to move on, Coral had lost all track of time, but Benjamin said they should call it Halloween, “for shits and giggles.”
She said, “Days are getting shorter. When I think about how cold it is already, giggling isn’t what I feel like doing.”
“No,” he agreed, “it’s not funny at all.”
They were not lucking into finding game, nor any sign of a lake or reservoir. Benjamin promised that the next stream they found, they’d follow downhill, for it might lead to one. They both felt sure they’d eluded the Army guys, but if they only had done so to freeze or starve to death, it didn’t feel like much of a victory.
All in all, though, she thought starving to death in the snow might be a better end than being systematically raped by a bunch of strange men.
*
One long and tiring day, with only a few cans of food left, they climbed to the slopes of the next ridge, hoping to see water, but when they descended they found themselves struggling down a dangerously steep slope, studded with giant towers of sculptured rock, some with tiny wasp waists above which were balanced boulders that must have weighed well over a ton. One the size of a compact car was balanced on a point no bigger round than her fist. Coral split her attention between the challenge of braking the sled on the slope so it didn’t run over Benjamin, and keeping her eye on the precarious stone pillar as she passed it, hoping that the weight of snow would not send it tumbling onto both of them.
They clambered over a crest in the rocks and camped on a narrow ledge eight feet below it. The next day, climbing on down, they found themselves in a deep ravine, hunting for the creek they hoped would be here.
“I hope this isn’t a box canyon,” said Benjamin. He was at the front of the sled and in harness. He insisted on taking more than his share of time in harness now that his ribs were healed.
“Maybe we should leave the supplies right here and hunt for water on foot,” she said. Her arms were bruised from wrestling the sled around the rocks, and every muscle burned. She could do without fighting the sled’s weight for a time.
But Benjamin shook his head. “This is a deceptive landscape,” he said, “and there’s a chance of avalanche. We’d be in real trouble if the sled got buried while we were away from it. I don’t think we should move far away from it—or from each other.”
So it’d be better if the two of them were buried along with the sled? She kept herself from saying that aloud, knowing her exhaustion was making her short-tempered. “I’m done in,” she confessed. “I don’t know how long I can work like this on so little food.”
“Then we’d better move now, rather than in two days, when the soup runs out and we have no energy left at all.” He faced forward and began pulling again.
Within moments, they were hauling the sled by force over another jagged patch of rock. When they were done, they both sat, catching their breath. Coral glared at the sled and, for a moment, hated the thing. “Maybe we should have stayed at the house, took our chances there,” she said. “Or found a place in American Falls. Or surrendered to the Army.”
“Maybe we should have. But we didn’t, and this is where we are now.”
“But—”
“Don’t. I hate that.”
“Hate what?”
“That should-have, could-have, would-have shit. If only I would have done that other thing, then life would have turned out like this, whine whine whine. I played poker for a while with a guy who talked like that, would count a dozen cards backwards after a hand was over, ask for the deck, look at the next five cards, then he’d announce, ‘if you two would have dropped out and I would have stayed and drawn to the inside straight, then I would have won.’ It was all I could do not to smack him. What a bunch of bullshit.”
She stood again, trying not to feel hurt by his words, and prepared to push the sled. She looked up, only to see him watching her, making no effort to move on. She waited, knowing more was coming.
“Listen,” he said, his voice gentler now. “I try to think of it this way. There is no past. There is no future. There is only this moment. It doesn’t matter how we got to this moment. We’re here now. We’ve made the best decisions we could, and we made them together. Now we deal with today, and with whatever shit today brings us, the best we can.”
The words made her feel no better, but she knew she had to stop dumping her worries and regrets on him. He was just as tired and hungry as she, and pulling more than his share. She had to quit speaking her every thought aloud. She had learned a lot from Benjamin over the past few months. It wouldn’t hurt her to learn how to shut up more often from him, too.
Back in the old world, she had learned that venting emotions was a good thing. Maybe, but even if it had been true back then, things were different now. It did no good to natter on about hunger or exhaustion. It just made her notice them more.
It took them nearly a full day to climb back out of the canyon, without finding a source of water, and when they were up to the next ridge, they were too exhausted to do any more that day. They set up camp early and hunted for fuel for a fire. That night, they finished the soup.
The next morning, they woke to no new snow. Skies were still gray with ash, but they agreed it might be a bit clearer than it had been a month ago—or maybe he was humoring her when he agreed. Benjamin left her and the sled in the overhang of a cliff while he searched for signs of game, promising to come back by midday. Unwilling to wait uselessly, Coral unpacked her bow and arrows and headed the opposite direction, stopping every so often to make sure that she could still see her own footprints. They would guide her back to the sled.
She recited to herself everything Benjamin had taught her about hunting. The first problem was to find any sign of an animal, few of which had survived the fire, the long heat, or the weeks since without green stuff to eat. Hunting, he had told her, was a game of patience. You walked quietly when you had to move, you stayed relaxed but alert, and you stood still until fate granted you your rare chance at a shot. When it did, you tried not to mess it up.
No sign of animals showed in the snow around her, neither track nor scat. She decided to turn back at a large boulder she could see up ahead. But when she reached it, she spied, filled in part way with a dusting of snow, tracks.
Human tracks. And not hers or Benjamin’s.
Chapter 6
The snow softening the edges of the tracks told her it had been at least a day since someone had walked here. Yet she remained quiet for a long time, straining to listen for voices or movement. She heard nothing.
As she looked more closely at the prints, she realized that she was seeing more than one set. And one of them was small—a very small woman’s or a child’s, and she thought the latt
er.
So not the military guys. And they were so many miles distant from the train now, she couldn’t imagine that it was them anyway. If they had figured out the existence of Benjamin and Coral, and even if they had tracked them for a while, what was the point of chasing them this far? The train car of soup was theirs now. They had won, and without a fight. It made no sense to spend a week hunting her down.
She could think of one reason they might, though. She’d die fighting before she’d let herself be used that way.
She retraced her own steps, moving quickly but quietly and returning to the sled in a fraction of the time it had taken her to come this far. She wanted to get back to Benjamin and tell him. She debated following his tracks out, but decided against it, in case he was having luck on the hunt. They needed food as much as they needed to follow up on the signs of people. This time, she wasn’t going scouting herself and risk having to hide without sufficient warmth again. She’d wait for him…and for the rifle.
As the light began to dim, he returned, his lack of success written on his face.
She waited until he was a dozen yards away to speak in a low voice. “I found tracks. People tracks.”
He stopped. “Where? How many?”
“Two or three, one maybe a kid’s. They’re a day old at least.” She pointed in the direction. “We should check it out. Together.”
He looked toward her but his eyes lost focus. She could see him working it through. “It’s a risk,” he finally said.
“And a risk to stay in the area tonight if there are others around.”
He rubbed his beard, frosted now with a thin coating of ice. “Track them? Or go on? What do you think? Any chance at all it was the guys you saw at the train?”
“No. I don’t know they ever discovered there was someone spying on them.” She considered their options. “You find any food?”
“No,” he said.
“These people might have food.”
His eyebrow twitched. “Which they would defend. Or they might see us as food.”
“I’d be damned stringy at this point,” she said.
