by Jason Ross
Sage could think of a million ways the plan could go wrong. He could get arrested again, skulking around Wallowa, for starters. They probably wouldn’t give him a burger, this next time. But if he stayed under the heavy pines, he felt confident he wouldn’t be seen from the valley. He didn’t think people roamed around the mountains now that there was more snow.
“Okay, Captain. I’ll radio you from the cruiser when I get out, but it’ll probably take four days.”
The captain exhaled, and nodded his head. “It’ll probably take me that long to get a team figured out, anyway. I’ll train them and lead them myself. You get the recon and the snow machines lined up and I’ll handle the rest.”
Sage couldn’t think of any other questions, so he hitched up his pack and tightened the belly band. “I’ll see you in four or five days. Whoever comes with us next time will need to be in pretty good shape. I think it’s twenty-five miles to Lathrop’s ranch. We’ve only gone two miles.”
Chambers nodded. “War’s a young man’s game. We’ll get it figured out.” He turned his snowshoes around and plodded toward Reggie, who still hadn’t made it to the top of the hill. “Let’s go boys. That’s enough for today.”
Sage hung his hand on his rifle sling and charted a course up the mountain and into the trees.
War’s a young man’s game, the captain had said.
Sage hadn’t signed up for a war. But, he supposed he might’ve signed up for just about anything, that day coming down off the Blue Mountains with frost-nipped toes. War was better than a world of scavengers, psychopaths and cannibals.
Sage reached the back of Wallowa Valley two days later. By his calculations, he covered twenty-five miles, which in snowshoes on virgin trail was no small achievement. He was in the best shape of his life, and it felt good to do battle with the altitude, the cold and the snow. As the sun set on the second day—Friday, he figured—he could see the tiny airstrip from his vantage on the tree line. He backed up half-a-mile into the pines and laid out his low-profile bivouac shelter.
He’d modified his two-man camo tent so it functioned like a bivy sack. He’d never actually camped in a bivy sack, but his dad once showed him one and explained the concept. At this point, Sage probably had more practical knowledge about snow camping than anyone he’d ever met, including his dad.
He scraped out a flat in the snow with his glove, then stomped it down. He laid down a small tarp, then unrolled a fat, rectangle of egg-crate foam in the depression. The trampled snow might as well have been an ice slab, but the layer of foam would slow the sapping of his body heat.
He set the tent on top, but didn’t didn’t raise the full dome. Geometric lines in the forest stood out like a porno billboard. The tent would be harder to detect uneven and lumpy instead of tight and tidy. He repurposed two of the fiberglass rods to go between the stake pockets. The flexible rods would hold a hoop of open air over Sage’s head as he slept. He positioned the zippered door on the up-sloping side, so he could open or close the zipper to allow more airflow into the tent during the night. He knew from experience that he’d alternate between seething-hot and iceberg-cold all night long, and he’d adjust the zipper thirty times throughout the night. There was no other way. That was the nature of winter camping. The deflated tent added tremendous warmth to the rating on his sleeping bag—at least ten degrees with the zipper closed, by bottling up his warm, moist body heat. It also made his sleeping bag damp by degrees; a little more each night.
The bag his grandfather had given him was a zero degree bag, which had seemed like overkill back in October when Sage first used it to survive. Now in early December, he was forced to employ every trick in the book to keep from freezing at night; his tent, ground insulation, and full clothing. Sage didn’t wear his boots to bed, and he preferred to take his rain shell off, but otherwise, he slept with every stitch of clothing he owned. Insulation was insulation, and the more clothes he wore in his sleeping bag, the less often he’d wake up freezing.
There was no silver bullet to sleeping outside in the winter. It was a bitch. The vapor barrier trick would eventually come full circle and bite him in the ass. By the end of four nights, Sage’s warm sleeping bag would be wet with accumulated perspiration, and it would no longer be a “zero degree bag.” Not by a long shot. To make matters worse, the inside of the Franken-tent would be like a sauna—literally dripping with the moisture he exhaled in the night.
It was Night Two and Sage could already feel the slick on the inside of the tent, even before sleep time. By the next morning, it’d be a serious issue. He dug out the chamois rag, and painstakingly wiped down every inch of the tent wall. He wrung out the chamois outside over the snow, and draped it over his pack. It’d be frozen solid in an hour.
Sage looked up through the pine boughs at the stars overhead. He couldn’t see a cloud in the sky. The half-moon would rise in five hours, and there would be a four hour window of working moonlight.
He could either skip sleep and make it a night mission, or he could recon the ranches for snow machines the next morning with binoculars. If the snowmobiles were stored inside barns, which seemed likely, he’d be shit-out-of-luck. With the clear sky came the biting cold, and he figured the ranch dogs would be hiding inside tonight.
Night would be his best play if he wanted to get close to the snow machines. He didn’t want Captain Chambers to rely on his intel only to find out he’d been guessing based on thousand-yard spotting. He preferred to see the machines, and the keys, firsthand.
Sage squirmed all the way inside his bag, reached over and laid two pine branches across the hoop of the tent. He scooted to where the moonlight would strike his face when it rose. That’d wake him for sure—that and the damned cold.
When the moonlight splashed over his eyes, Sage was dozing restlessly. He wasn’t sure troubled sleep counted for much, but his aching leg muscles from the twenty-five mile trek felt a lot better. He was fully dressed already, so he slid out of the tent, popped on his boots and swished some snow around in his mouth to wash out the worst of the morning breath. He figured it was about two a.m..
He stuffed his backpack inside the tent and opened the zipper all the way in an attempt to let the humidity vent a little. In the bitter cold, it’d probably freeze before it evaporated. He remembered that much from high school science: water didn’t both freeze and evaporate. It did one or the other.
Sage set off in the light of the half-moon, just now peeking over Sacajawea Mountain. The valley sparkled below in the light of Mother Moon. Not a single electric light burned in the valley. Like everywhere else, they’d lost electricity when the grid went down in early October. Unlike everyone else, the Wallowa Valley didn’t seem to care. They’d switched over to oil lamps and solar camping lights, and carried on. At two in the morning, even those lights were extinguished. The valley probably didn’t look much different than it had a hundred years before.
The moon painted the fields of snow-dappled prairie in sapphire blues, interrupted only by the black speckles of thousands of cattle, motionless in the cold night. Sage breathed in the cleanness of the scene.
He’d asked Aimee Butterton a lot of questions about Wallowa. It’d become an obsession with him—a romantic affection for them after having a burger with Commissioner Pete. It was likely three parts personal uneasiness over the mission, and one part hope for the future.
The people of Wallowa lived in quiet balance with their mountain home, Sage had learned from Aimee. They raised cattle amidst a tremendous herd of elk, trading range lands, hunting and beef harvest in a careful dance that preserved the prairie, their livelihood and the elk herd. Under the winter moon, Sage sensed the people and the land, linked together through generations like star-crossed lovers.
His mission felt like the opposite of that. He came as a thief in the night, seeking to take—to reap where they hadn’t sown. Yet, he’d made a promise to his father: he would do everything necessary to survive, and this reconnaissance fell neatly
on the list. It was survival—serving a police captain and a county that had its share of corruption; Sage couldn’t deny it, not in the honest moonlight and not standing in this valley, cloaked in its naked grandeur. The city of La Grande had side-stepped chaos, but it echoed the brokenness of Seattle.
La Grande P.D. walked the same paths of old government. Reaping where a man hadn’t sown had been the disease, and someday, honesty might be the cure. Sage knew Mother Earth well enough now to say for certain, she would not stop her onslaught until men won back their souls. For him, that meant keeping his word to his father, whatever the discomfort.
With that thought, he trudged down out of the foothills, toward the ranch he thought belonged to Commissioner Pete. If he could locate the family snow machines, it’d make for a lightning-fast getaway when they came to ambush the Commissioner.
The next nearest ranch was a quarter mile away. It’d be lots easier if they could just take Commissioner Pete’s snowmobiles.
The snowshoe down from Sage’s camp seemed like a couple miles, but snowshoeing downhill was almost like skiing. He closed the distance to the ranch in less than twenty minutes.
The snow didn’t thin out until Sage reached the prairie flats. He found a prominent pine, shucked off his snowshoes and stabbed them into the snow that’d tumbled off the boughs. He walked the rest of the way to the cluster of barns in his boots.
Sage passed by the tall barn and headed straight for the low barn he took as the motor pool. The big, sliding doors were open, and nothing stirred as he slipped inside. He stopped and waited, just inside the doors for his eyes to adjust. He carried a head lamp in his pocket, but he dare not use it, now just a hundred feet from the ranch house.
A dozen snow machines sat in rows along both walls of the motor pool. He retrieved his headlamp and cupped his hand over the bulb, then turned it on. With the thin light shining between his fingers, he looked over each machine, checking for a key and examining the gas gauges. They all had keys in the ignition and none had less than half a tank of gas. Sage had no idea how much gas it’d require for a snow machine to run twenty-five miles back to the county line.
He noticed many of the machines appeared to be old, the vinyl on the seats cracked and brittle, with the rotting, yellow foam poking through. There were eight, though, that looked like later models—maybe no more than a couple years old. Sage recounted the machines, and re-checked the keys on each of the newer machines. He clicked off his light. Mission accomplished.
The screen door of the ranch house banged shut. Sage froze. A dog woofed, then a man mumbled.
Sage picked his way to the edge of the sliding doors and peered around the rolling door toward the house. The figure of a man stood at the edge of the porch, staring out at the half moon.
The dog woofed again, and a stream of piss pattered off the porch into a pile of snow. The man mumbled again to the dog and chuckled, low and quiet. He finished peeing, zipped up his pants, and sat down on a wooden bench. The dog thrust his head onto the man’s lap and the man chuckled again, lavishly scratching the dog’s furry head. The dog whined, pulled away, then looked directly at Sage and the motor pool.
The wind blew down-slope and would carry his scent away at a ninety-degree angle from the ranch house. But breezes swirled and did funky things around buildings and stands of trees. The dog must’ve caught puffs of Sage’s scent on the wind’s unpredictable dance.
Sage could tell from the voice that it was Commissioner Pete, but the man obviously thought himself alone and safe. He ruffled the dog’s head and spoke nonsense to it.
It wasn’t much of a dog—one of the breeds his own dad called “useless, old lady dogs.” Maybe a Maltese. Sage imagined that the dog belonged to the Commissioner’s daughter. The more useful dogs would be inside, sleeping off the cold. Sage could see that Pete had a secret adoration of the tiny dog, expressed only during TV commercials and the middle of the night when his bladder woke him up to watch the prairie moon.
“Daddy’s boy...my happy baby...you know who loves you the most...” the words waxed and waned on the breeze, drifting from the porch, then dribbling away with the Commissioner’s open-hearted chuckle.
Sage’s face warmed with shame. He was a villain to intrude on the rancher’s private moment with the stars, the moon and the puppy. Sage despised the world and his place in it. He wondered if his own father’s heart ever paused to lavish affection on a silly dog. Sage had never seen it happen.
Who was his father, anyway? He couldn’t say he really knew. Would his father have survived all that Sage had survived? He assumed his father was a survivor, but he’d learned that the mountain and the snow revealed a man in a way nothing else could. What did he really know about the man who had locked him into a promise—a promise that led to this moment of ignobility?
The rancher got up from the bench, took a last look at the moon-stroked prairie, and went back inside. The screen door clicked shut, then the main door thunked closed.
Sage took inventory of himself and his surroundings, waited five minutes, then picked his way back to the hills. He didn’t bother covering his tracks. There were so many animal tracks criss-crossing the patchy snow that he hoped it wouldn’t matter. He collected his snowshoes and raced the coming dawn up the mountainside.
By the time he reached his bivouac, the sun colored the eastern horizon a milky gray. Exhausted by emotions and the climb, he let his moist skin dry in the cold as long as he could stand, then climbed back into his sleeping bag. It wouldn’t be long before the stark light of day.
He knew better than to make decisions in the middle of the night, muddle-headed and full of worry. He hoped that a couple days’ sleep would bring him back from his emotions to the cold reality of his mission. He worked for a man, who served a county, who fought for survival. Maybe it was just that simple.
The next day, after a sleepless night, Sage stumbled twelve miles back toward Union County. The next night, he slept like the dead in his ever-more-humid sleeping bag. The clouds filled in over Wallowa Valley, and nighttime temperatures warmed under the floating cover of fluff. He slept a good night, woke with the sun, and faced the rest of the long hike out.
It was Sunday morning and Sage felt fueled by a singular cause: to make it back in time for the Sunday visit to the Butterton home. As hammered as his body felt from traversing fifty miles of snow, his yearning for Aimee’s soft hips, candy lips and lilting, country-girl voice drove him hard. He had thirteen miles to cover—half the length of the valley—if he was going to reach the police cruiser and have a roll in the hay with Aimee Butterton, he’d have to haul ass.
He pounded mercilessly up the inclines, then glissaded down at a jog. He was making good time, snowshoeing smoothly along, weaving through the pine trees, and following his trail back.
Snowshoeing was like jogging, but without the impact. He drifted along in a mind-numbing cadence of exertion. Swish, swish. Swish, swish. The cold was a forgotten uncle, and the brisk wind on his face whisked away the sweat with only a slight crust of salt left behind.
Sage flounced into a canyon when he heard a branch crack like a rifle shot. He slammed to a stop and flopped sideways behind a big pine. He rolled his rifle from his back and into his hands. He racked a shell and listened.
Another crack. A thunk, and the thud of snow falling from a tree. A huge, dark form burst from the tree line. Then a dozen more.
Elk.
They skittered in circles, unsure where his scent and sound had originated. Sage watched them whip left and right, confused at the interruption to their midday nap. They must’ve been dozing in a copse of dark pine when the swish-swish-swishing of the snowshoes startled them. The wind whistled down-canyon. They probably couldn’t smell him well, and they’d likely barely heard him over the rustling of the pines. The elk settled, then returned to their bedding area in the black pines. Sage eased the cartridge out of the chamber, reloaded the bullet into the tubular magazine, then returned the rifle to his
back without a round in the chamber.
He wasn’t in Wallowa Valley to fight. He didn’t like running overland with a round chambered. It was an artifact from the combat rifle course he’d taken as a teenager. Maximum safety.
With the wild vision of the elk, his world had brightened. The clouds from the night before had drawn back without dropping snow, and the morning sun cast across the snowfields, making the cold-hardened flakes glitter like stardust.
The rifle was slung over his backpack, which tightened the sling and minimized the bouncing as he, once again, flew over his old trail. He probably shouldn’t have brought the gun in the first place. There was no turn of events in Wallowa Valley that he could imagine, where he’d defend himself with a rifle. If they caught him, he’d let himself be arrested. As it was, he had a hard time stomaching the thought of reporting back to Captain Chambers. His promise to his dad had grown thin in the clean air of the Wallowa Valley. From the snowy crags of Sacajawea Mountain to the rising prairies that skirted the Zumwalt, it was a beautiful, open range, as though God made it to shelter a favored breed of bright ones. The people acted as though they knew they were blessed. It seemed to humble them; make them kinder and slower to anger. He’d only been with them for a few hours, but their grace and generosity had stunned him. The land, it seemed, had leaked into their souls.
As he made the last climb back to Union County, Sage thought about Commissioner Pete and the little dog. It was a sacred thing, to see a man before God on his porch. The commissioner had worn his flannel pajamas, but his soul was naked in the moonlit hours before dawn. The man, lavishing affection on a ridiculous dog, had been the same person who arrested Sage and fed him a burger. There’d been no difference between the two—no fakery, no pretension, no phony friendship. Commissioner Pete—the man he would help capture or maybe even kill —was undeniably good. The truth made Sage a villain in this story. Could he live with himself, knowing that he’d brought down a good man?
