by Nancy Warren
“What, now?”
“Why not?”
She barely knew where to begin. “Because my hair is hanging in my face like wet laundry. My clothes are hanging over on that rock like, well, wet laundry. I’m chilled, hungry and a little bit scared.”
“First, you look great. To me, you always look great.” He considered the rest of her statement. “I don’t care what you’re wearing. You should be warming up by now. I’ll get a fire on. Hungry? We’ll have tons of fish for dinner. So long as we stay near this lake there will be food. As for scared, yeah, I get that. But we made it to the ground alive and unharmed. That is a freakin’ miracle. Now it’s simply a matter of getting to a place where we can be picked up.” He grinned at her. “Think of it as a wilderness adventure. People pay big bucks to fly into remote areas and hike.”
She groaned. “If I had to be stranded in the middle of nowhere, did I have to get Mr. Optimist as a companion?”
“What do you want? Somebody who’s going to remind you of how bad things are? Hey, I’m not suggesting this is the greatest day of my life, but compared to how I thought it was going to end a few hours ago? I’m pretty damned happy to be right here.”
“You’re right, of course.”
“And you were smart enough to grab your grandpa’s tackle box.”
“And, even though it scared the hell out of me at the time, I’m glad you managed to snag that emergency pack.”
“So we’re good then. And we can go back to talking about sex.”
“We weren’t talking about sex!”
“See? That’s exactly what I mean about women. If you’re describing the body lotion you put on when you want to entice a man into your bed then I think we’re talking about sex. What do you think we’re talking about?”
“I think I’m so happy to still be alive that I don’t really know what I’m talking about.”
He nodded. “I get that. And as much as I’d like to sit around talking about sex all day, I think somebody better go catch dinner.”
“Sure. Can you fish?”
“I’m not bad. Not as good as my buddy Adam. We call him the fish whisperer. It’s like they want to come to him.”
“I’d like to meet your friends sometime.”
“I once took a wilderness course, one of those ones where they leave you out in the middle of nowhere for a couple of days and you have to live off the land. It was an amazing experience.”
“Kind of like now,” she said.
“Except now, we have fishing tackle.” Deftly, he put together a line, baiting it with a piece of an energy bar from the emergency stash.
* * *
“NOT A BAD CATCH,” he said sometime later, surveying three fish, freshly caught and glistening in the late-afternoon sun.
“Not bad at all,” she agreed.
They gathered firewood together, searching for small dry twigs and grass to get the flames started and then some larger pieces to sustain the blaze.
“You want to clean the fish or start the fire?” he asked.
“I’ll start the fire.”
He grinned at her, but didn’t say anything, simply hauled out a knife from the bag of fishing gear and went to work. He used the same knife to whittle a spearlike end onto a thin alder branch, threaded the cleaned fish onto it and roasted the filets over the coals.
They ate their fish sitting by the fire. It was tasty and she was grateful to have hot food. Still, she found herself saying, “A squeeze of fresh lemon would be nice.”
“Oh, yeah,” he said, pushing a piece of fish into his mouth with his fingertips. Somehow he even managed to make eating with his hands look elegant. “And a nice crisp white wine.”
“Maybe with some seasoned rice.”
“And lightly steamed asparagus.”
“Oh, and bread,” she sighed, pushing more fish into her own mouth. “I love bread. I wish the whole world wasn’t on some diet or other that shuns the stuff. Wheat Belly, Atkins, they all go after poor, humble bread.”
“I agree. I love bread. My mom used to make her own. I love it hot, fresh out of the oven and dripping with butter.”
“Oh,” she moaned. “I want to meet your mom. I might want to move in with her.”
His eyes glinted as he stared at her across the fire. “Who knows? Maybe one day you will meet her.”
“I hope so.” And she realized, as she said the words, that she didn’t mean them in an “if we get out of here alive” sort of way. She really did want to meet his mother. A woman who made bread from scratch. Imagine.
“My mother died when I was a teenager but I still remember her pretty well. She wasn’t very domestic. And of course Grandma was too busy flying planes and running a business. We ate a lot of simple meals. Barbecues in the summer. Pasta and one-dish casseroles in the winter.” She shrugged. “I turned out to be like her. I hate wasting time in the kitchen. I’d rather be outside.”
“I am a great cook,” Max informed her with simple pride. “My mother insisted my sister and I both learn. I loved it.”
“Really?” It wasn’t that hard to imagine Max in a stainless-steel kitchen concocting complicated recipes. He almost looked like one of those cute young chefs who get their own TV shows. “What are your specialties?”
“When we get home, I am going to cook you a South American feast. We begin with seviche. My special recipe. Then for the main course, I think lomo asado, which is basically steak but, as you know, there is an art to everything. For dessert, there will be—” He stopped himself. “No. I think dessert will be a surprise.”
He was always surprising her, she thought. “You know, I don’t normally date people I work with.”
“I believe you’ve mentioned it.”
She bit into a fish bone and removed it as delicately as she could. “I think when you’ve been in a crash with someone, you can make an exception.”
“I agree. There should be.”
“Okay, then.”
“Okay, you’ll agree to date me?”
“Okay, I’ll agree to let you cook me a wonderful dinner. The rest might depend on how good your dessert is.”
He chuckled softly. “Oh, I promise you’ll enjoy it,” he said in a way that suggested he wasn’t talking about food anymore.
She felt a quiver of response deep in her belly. Perhaps it was the adrenaline still affecting her, but something about the near-death experience had sure reminded her that she was a woman in her prime. That she was a vital, sexual being who had needs.
And Max seemed like the kind of man who could meet her needs extremely well.
She shifted.
He noticed immediately. “Are you cold?”
“No. Just trying to get comfortable.”
He put more wood on the fire and the flames danced up against the deepening twilight surrounding them. She kept her focus on the fire and on Max and tried not to notice that they were surrounded by seemingly impenetrable forest. A few stars were out above them, but the moon was nothing but a sliver. She was ridiculously glad to have company. It was only at the last minute she’d asked him to come along. Normally, she’d do this trip alone. She believed she was strong enough and resourceful enough that she could have survived a few days and hiked out alone if necessary. But she was glad she didn’t have to.
“I was thinking,” he said, “that we should take turns sleeping. There’s only one bag and the other can keep watch.”
She nodded. She’d been thinking the same thing. There were plenty of bears in the area, both black bears and grizzlies, wolves—though in her experience the timber wolves were shy creatures who mainly kept to themselves—and mountain lions. It was probably a good idea to keep the fire going and an ear cocked.
“Shall I take the first watch?”
“Sure.”
They stoked up the fire. He went to the lake’s edge and she heard water splashing. He was clearly washing himself, probably doing his best to keep up his level of fastidious cleanliness.
“I will.”
She could see the dark sausage shape of the bag with Max inside it. He didn’t thrash or turn and seemed to be asleep in minutes.
She kept herself awake by stoking the fire and by trying to imagine what could have gone wrong with the plane. The August night grew cool, even though she was sitting as near the fire as she dared.
She heard the scurrying of nocturnal creatures, the whisper of bats passing, the quiet lap of the lake when the breeze picked up. But other than that, the night was quiet and still.
She never did wake him up. As she gazed into the fire, wishing Max had never put thoughts of sabotage into her head, even though she realized that he had reason for his suspicion, Max spoke.
“Are you cold?”
“Not really. Go back to sleep. You’ve got some time yet.”
But he was already crawling out of the sleeping bag. “I feel wide-awake. I’ll start my watch now. You get some sleep.”
“But—”
“If you argue, the warmth will dissipate from the bag. Get in now while it’s still holding my body heat.”
Knowing it was stupid to argue, and realizing that the shock and trauma of the day had taken their toll, she rose. Stretched out her cramped back and headed to the sleeping area.
He held the bag open for her, as though he were holding the door open as he escorted her to a restaurant.
“Thank you,” she said, slipping into the bag that was, as he’d promised, still warm. She snuggled down into the softness, hardly noticing the hard ground beneath her.
“Sleep well,” he said, stroking her hair. The gesture was both comforting and somehow sexy.
She was thinking how glad she was that he was here when it suddenly dawned on her that it was because of him they’d altered course and crashed, not into dense forest and mountain, but into a relatively small lake.
The detour had saved them.
Which meant that in a strange way, Max had saved her life.
10
WHEN SHE AWOKE, the sun was already up. She blinked and stretched, realizing that she was stiff and bruised from the aftereffects of the crash.
Max was fishing.
As she approached him he put a finger to his lips and pointed. To their right, partway up the shore, she saw a shadowy figure that she thought at first was a dog. Then realized how foolish she was being. Where would a dog come from?
It was a wolf. Rangy and long-limbed. Not a lone wolf, either. Behind it she saw more soft canine shadows ambling along the waterfront. She sensed they were fully alert to her and Max’s presence, watching the two humans as carefully as they were being watched.
There were six wolves in the pack. They tracked the shoreline and then disappeared into the bush. “Must be their regular route,” she said softly when the last wolf had melted into the trees.
“Or we scared them out of their usual routine,” Max suggested.
“I bet they don’t see many humans.” She yawned. “Oh, I would kill for coffee.”
“I can’t do coffee, but I boiled some water. Think dark thoughts while you drink it.”
She’d never paid as much attention to the emergency pack as she should have, but she was unbelievably grateful to have it now. There was a one-burner wilderness camping stove, a single pot, a few nutrition bars and water purification drops. Waterproof matches, some rope, a compass and flares. Which they would shoot off if they heard a plane approaching.
She laughed. “That’s not difficult to do. If the signal from the ELT was getting picked up we’d be out of here by now. We’ve got to hike two full days to get to the road.”
“Maybe a rescue plane will spot us.”
“Maybe.”
She drank a little water. Disappeared behind a rock and discreetly washed herself. Feeling much more human, she put her clothes back on and filled the makeshift pot with bright orange salmon berries from a patch she found growing.
“Fruit for breakfast,” she announced when she returned to where Max was once more grilling fish.
“That’s a lot of fish,” she said when she saw that he had four hanging from a stick and four more cleaned and ready for cooking.
“I don’t know when we’ll next find a food source. We can bring the extra fish along with us for later.”
“Good thinking.”
She shared out the berries and they ate quickly. The sun was up and the day would soon grow hot. They needed to get moving.
It didn’t take long to pack up their camp, since they didn’t have much of anything with them. After they both covered any exposed skin with liberal amounts of insect repellent, Max insisted on taking the pack.
There weren’t many options as far as which direction they would hike in. She knew the area pretty well and if they went due west they’d come to a logging road. “We can follow that down to the main highway.”
The difficulty was going to be getting to the logging road. The forest was dense. They’d have to follow animal trails which were notoriously random. And, of course, they were likely to come across the animals that used those trails. The area was rich with black bears and, as Claire often told the tourists she transported, Alaska was home to one of the largest populations of grizzly bears, numbering around 30,000. The average male grew seven feet tall and weighed in at around 500 pounds. It was great patter when you were looking down at their habitat from the sky. Now she wished she didn’t know quite so much about bears. She did not want to bump into a hungry grizzly.
They set out due west and the going was tough. Branches, vines and thorns scratched at their skin and hair. The path was lumpy with roots and rocks and patches of mud.
They equipped themselves with sturdy branches that functioned both as walking sticks and as protection in case they encountered dangerous wildlife, though the most aggressive creatures seemed to be airborne. In spite of the bug repellent, the mosquitoes were a torment.
Grimly, they pressed on. Mile after mile of twisting trail that sometimes petered out or branched into several paths, any one of which might lead somewhere or nowhere.
Although they both wore sturdy boots, they weren’t properly equipped for hiking and they knew it. They shared the water in the emergency pack, trying to eke it out until they found another water source.
Trees that had fallen across the trails had to be clambered over or squeezed under. It was strenuous going.
They snacked on berries along the way and stopped around noon to eat some of their fish.
At one point in the early afternoon, they emerged from the deep woods to an open patch of ground and startled a sleeping snake so it slithered away.
Two hours later, they stumbled upon a bear. It was a big black bear. A full-grown male. Fortunately, not a female with cubs to protect, but a black bear is a beast to be treated with respect.
The animal was happily munching on a patch of wild blackberries, reaching up on its hind legs to reach the big juicy ones high up.
If she’d been watching the berry feast on a documentary program, Claire would have been charmed. But the problem was, the big bear was blocking the path. She didn’t think pushing past him and saying “excuse me” was going to work.
Going back the way they’d come was futile.
In the end, they simply waited. He showed no interest in them. He wanted his berries.
For more than an hour they waited while the bear munched his food and the mosquitoes and the odd bee buzzed. At least they could rest from their relentless walking, but they had no idea when he’d stop eating. And even then, what would they do if he turned their way?
Finally, the bear dropped back to his four paws, swung his head their way for a heart-stopping ten seconds and then ambled away in the opposite direction. They heard crashing of undergrowth and waited five more minutes before venturing along the same path.
“At least he left a few for us,” Max said chee
rfully as he popped a plump blackberry into her mouth. It was warm from the sun and bursting with flavor.
She was tired, her feet hurt, she itched all over from mosquito bites, and worry that some catastrophe would befall them before they reached the logging road plagued her. But Max had a way of making things seem better than they were. So, she munched her berry and was thankful for the burst of sweetness on her tongue.
* * *
BY LATE AFTERNOON, she felt as though she couldn’t walk one more step.
Max never asked her how she felt.
He didn’t offer her sympathy or urge her on.
Instead, he told her stories.
Stories about his childhood. Silly pranks he and his sister had played on each other. Stories about him and his two best friends, Dylan and Adam.
“We did everything together. Little League, Boy Scouts, team sports when we got older.
“We still play hockey together,” he said. “You’ll have to meet them one of these days.”
“I’d like to.” She wondered if word had leaked out that they were missing. If his friends knew. But Max didn’t bring that up.
He told her about his friend Adam. “Adam has the first birthday out of the three of us. When he turned thirty-five, his parents threw a party for him. And June, his mom, surprised the hell out of him when she showed a video of his fifth birthday.” He grinned at the memory, whacking some low-growing branches out of the way so they could pass, as though his sturdy stick was a machete. It was exhausting work but he didn’t seem to notice.
“She asked the three of us what we were going to be when we grew up. The amazing thing is, we all ended up doing what we said we would.” He whacked another patch of heavy green. “Or pretty close, anyway.”
They were aiming for a river tributary that would cross their path. That, she calculated, would be close to halfway to the road.
“Then she asked us who we were going to marry.” A dark line of sweat down his back was the only evidence he was putting any effort into this hike. “We were five. But we all had answers. Adam was going to marry Princess Diana. Remember, this was 1983. And Dylan planned to marry Xena, the comic book character.” He shook his head. “Boys. Knowing Dylan he still wants to marry Xena.”
