by Edward Lang
She performed flawlessly.
She stayed put inside the cave until I climbed up 30 feet.
I set the anchor, then used the rope to help her climb.
She was actually really good at free climbing; her incredible grip strength was a huge help in ascending the cliff. She slipped several times, but I was fanatically taking up the slack, so the rope snapped taut and she never dropped farther than two inches.
The first time she fell, she screamed.
“Are you okay?” I called down, though I knew she’d just had a momentary scare and nothing more.
As she dangled there in the air and came back to rest against the cliffside, she realized that she was in no danger – and she beamed up at me.
“Yes! Fun!” she cried out, and immediately started back up the cliff as I pulled up the slack.
Within 30 minutes I reached the top of the cliff – or at least what I had initially thought was the top.
There was a short plateau of about two hundred feet, and then the cliff started up again.
Turns out that what I thought was a cliff was just the first stage of another mountain in the chain.
Which went up, and up, and up in a series of staircase-like rises, leading to a final peak that dwarfed the 500-foot mountain now off to my left. This new peak had to be 2000 feet at the very least.
I hadn’t been able to see this new mountain peak from inside the gorge because I was always at the bottom looking up.
It was like being in New York City and trying to see a 100-story building a quarter mile away when you’re standing at the base of a seven-story building. You can’t see over the top of the seven-story building for shit. In fact, you can’t see anything but the first couple of stories of the building right in front of you.
Now, for the first time, my view of what lay just above our homey little cave was unobstructed.
There was a LOT of real estate between me and that 2000-foot-peak.
And it was covered in snow…
A lot of snow.
Like… thousands of tons of snow.
On precarious cliffs all around me.
Hell, even the snow on top of the plateau was up around my waist.
My heart began to beat faster.
I imagined one of those high peaks suddenly sloughing off a wedge of ice and snow, which would hit a lower slope and knock loose more snow, which would tumble down, triggering…
An avalanche.
I remembered how it had felt to dangle at the end of my rope at Denali and see the world get blotted out by the white cloud above me.
A thin sheen of sweat broke out on my brow, and I began to have trouble breathing.
Slow down, Jack… breathe, motherfucker… BREATHE…
I struggled to regain control.
It was obviously a panic attack – standard-issue PTSD.
I mean, hell – I’d died in an avalanche. Made sense I’d be terrified of one now.
It actually pissed me off a little. You would think that if you died from something and came back, you would say, Oh – so THAT’S all you got?
I mean, there wasn’t any pain when I died. At least none that I remembered.
But the terror at the moment it happened was so visceral that it overwhelmed me all over again.
And there was something else.
If I’d just been standing here alone, one man by himself, I might not have cared so much about dying again.
But I wasn’t alone.
I’d found someone.
I’d fallen in love.
I had something to lose now.
And that changed everything.
Not only that, but add in the fact that I was terrified Lelia might die in the avalanche, too, and you have a huge clusterfuck of fear.
But I got ahold of myself.
The panic passed… the world stopped spinning… and I could breathe again.
“Jack?” Lelia’s voice shouted up from below me.
Shit.
“SHHHHH!” I whispered harshly.
I knew that there wasn’t much chance that her voice could trigger an avalanche. It was more of a myth from movies and overactive imaginations. They’d done scientific studies on it, and the physics just didn’t match up. The frequencies produced by the human voice weren’t enough to vibrate the pockets of air inside the snow to cause anything to dislodge and knock over the first domino.
That’s why ski resorts sometimes used explosives after big snowfalls to try to trigger avalanches – safely, while nobody was on the slopes.
A big, thundering vibration had exactly enough energy to knock over the first domino – and start what could otherwise be a deadly chain of events. A gunshot could do it, too.
In other words, you really needed an explosion to produce the kind of vibrations that would knock something loose.
Or – you know – just bad fuckin’ luck.
So my conscious mind knew that our voices probably wouldn’t start anything…
…but my lizard-brain was like, Shut the FUCK UP!
I dug through the snow around me until I found a small boulder I could attach a new anchor to. Then I belayed Lelia up to the top of the cliff. From there I locked hands with her and pulled her up.
Her eyes were wide with fear.
“Jack, what is wrong?” she whispered.
I pointed up at the slopes all around me.
“Avalanche, maybe.”
I’d explained to her about avalanches, and even told her that was how I had died in my previous life.
I didn’t bother to tell her that our voices couldn’t set them off – too much effort, and I didn’t care to get into it. Better just to be quiet and leave it at that.
She looked up at the slopes and nodded cautiously. “Okay,” she whispered.
I turned around. Though I was eminently aware of the potential threat at my back, I was here for the view.
And god damn the view was something.
Snow-covered mountain ranges stretched off in every direction. It appeared that we weren’t at the top of a range so much as were on one of many. Every direction you looked, it was like somebody had plunked down a miniature version of the Alps. In fact, the mountains we were standing on were only of middling size compared to some of the other beasts in the distance.
However, there were plenty of valleys between the mountains that were filled with trees. Our own little stretch of woods started right near the cave, then continued downwards for miles and miles, growing larger and thicker the further they went.
The sky was overcast and grey, but it just made everything feel like it was in one giant bubble – like we were tiny figurines in a massive glass snow globe that nobody had shaken up yet.
“Oh,” Lelia said, and I could tell by the tone of her voice that she was just as taken by the majesty and beauty of our surroundings.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” I said in a quiet voice.
“Beautiful,” she agreed.
Well, now that the sight-seeing portion was over, it was down to business.
“Where did you come from?” I asked her.
“My mother.”
I looked at her in surprise, wondering if she hadn’t understood – and then I saw her sly grin.
She was doing callback humor to our conversation before, and she’d totally gotten me.
Sexy little minx.
She laughed as I chuckled, then grew serious. She studied the various mountains off to what I was calling the north (seeing as we were on the south cliff of our gorge). Finally she pointed at a far-off range. “There.”
“How do you know that’s it?”
“See that? Mountain goes like that?” she said, drawing a sharp spike in the air.
Her gesture matched a lone spire of rock in the distance, tall and sharp, that looked like God had planted an upside-down railroad spike amongst all the interconnected mountain ranges.
“Yes.”
“I saw it. I was close to it.”
She nodded.
“Do you know where you were when the skiris attacked your people?”
She pointed at the absolute tallest mountain range to be seen, off to the northwest. It looked to be roughly ten miles away from the sharp spire of rock. “There.”
“Your people, the women – they wouldn’t have gone back there to save the other women, would they?”
Lelia shook her head. “No… the skiris killed our men. They would kill us, too.”
Alright, that at least gave me a general lay of the land.
Her tribe wouldn’t have headed back into danger, so that blocked out the northwest valley.
It was surrounded by steep mountains on both sides, so those were probably out.
They hadn’t stumbled up into my gorge, or they might have seen the smoke from our fire and checked us out.
And Lelia and I had been hunting around here over the last several weeks. We had definitely not been shy; had anyone been around long enough, they would have heard us. So Lelia’s fellow tribeswomen probably weren’t in our immediate vicinity.
My guess was they had headed further east into the depths of the woods, in what made up the bowl of the valley… or they had continued northward towards other mountain ranges.
We would head for that sharp spire of rock, see what we saw as we got closer to it, and then make our decision.
But at least it gave us our first destination.
“Go down now?” Lelia asked.
I thought about making a dirty joke, but I hadn’t taught her the expression ‘going down’ yet, so I figured it would take too long to explain afterwards. There’s nothing unfunnier than having to explain why a joke is funny.
Instead I looked around at the plateau we were standing on. It was surrounded on three sides by mountains. The only exceptions were our northern-facing side, the top of the cliff overlooking the gorge –
And a narrow passageway directly across from us.
The passageway was a smaller gorge – a ravine, really – running perpendicular to the gorge I’d been living in with Lelia.
Because our view to the south was entirely blocked by the massive mountain behind us, going down into that ravine might be our only chance to see what lay to the south.
I doubted we would be coming back up here, so this was our one chance. Who the hell knew – maybe Shangri-La was down there. Fabled cities and shit.
I was still pretty nervous about the possibility of an avalanche occurring, but I convinced myself that if it hadn’t happened in all the time we’d been living in the cave, it probably wasn’t going to happen suddenly in the next several hours. Not if we didn’t go climbing up the mountain and disturbing the snow.
It was all a matter of probability. And the probability was fairly low.
But I still was fuckin’ nervous.
However, we were in one of the most hostile environments imaginable that still happened to be livable. We couldn’t not do things just because there was a small chance that something bad might happen – not when there might be valuable intel to be gained by going down that ravine.
If we kept quiet and didn’t take chances and an avalanche still happened, so be it.
When your number’s up, it’s up.
I was living proof of that fact.
If not living proof, then dead proof…
Or afterlife proof…
Whatever the fuck.
I wanted to know where the ravine led.
“Let’s go over there and see,” I said in a low voice as I pointed.
Lelia nodded, and we set off through the snow, plowing bodily through the three-foot-deep snowdrifts.
When we reached the ravine, the going got a lot easier. The narrowness of the passageway had shielded it from the heaviest of snowfalls, so there was a lot more exposed rock. Placing your next footstep wasn’t nearly as treacherous as trying to feel around blindly through three feet of snow.
“Keep going?” I asked her.
She shrugged. “Okay.”
We kept walking down the ravine, which was littered with boulders. It wound its way down the mountain for nearly a mile until it finally emptied out into the woods.
We were probably just a mile and a half or so from our cave if we circled around and followed the curve of the mountain.
Son of a bitch… we hadn’t had to climb the cliff after all…
“Let’s go back to camp this way,” I suggested, pointing at the woods.
She frowned. “But… the rope and things…”
I was fairly sure she meant the rope and pitons I’d used to make anchors up the wall of the cliff. I’d also left the belaying rope back there, as well.
“I can get them when we get back to the cave,” I said as I pointed north. “We should be close.”
“What if wolves come?” she pointed out. “No spear, no arrows, no rope.”
She had a point, dammit. We had no weapons. I had climbed the cliff with the intent of going up there to take a look, not taking a sightseeing tour. And I hadn’t brought any extra supplies with us.
I would have preferred Lelia not go down the cliff, though, in case something went wrong. I didn’t think it would, but it was still 150 feet up. Any fall from too high would be fatal.
On the other hand, I was way better equipped to handle going down the cliff face than I would be if we encountered a bunch of wolves out in the forest.
So – what were the odds that we would encounter a pack?
I’d only seen them twice – my first night here, and when they had chased Lelia towards my cave. We’d heard them since, but never seen them again, not even when we were out in the forest hunting.
But every time we’d gone out, we’d had weapons – and lots of rope for scaling trees to get away from them.
Not to mention that I’m a big fucking believer in Murphy’s Law: ‘If anything can go wrong, it will.’ That was my Gospel truth.
I knew that the surest way in the world for us to encounter a ravenous pack of wolves was to go hiking through the woods with nothing to help us escape.
“You’re right,” I said. “It’s safer to go back the way we came. We can walk back here later, once we have your spear and ropes.”
She smiled, happy that I’d listened to her.
We started back up the ravine. It took a good hour to hike back up it, going at a slow pace.
Once at the cliff, we went back down in the reverse direction we’d gone up: me climbing down first to the previous anchor point, then belaying Lelia down to me.
The only thing I did differently was that I created a new anchor at the edge of the cliff, so that she had something to let herself down with safely.
I would have to go back up by myself later to retrieve all the pitons and climbing equipment. I sure as hell didn’t want to leave them behind, especially when the nearest REI was probably a couple of billion light years (or dimensions) away.
But retrieval could be saved for later. The priority right now was getting her down in one piece.
We safely reached the cave less than 30 minutes later. After that, we called it a day, roasted some more venison, and did some baby-making to celebrate.
I was going to have to figure out how to do that on the road, too… no way I was leaving the safety of this cave if our love life was going to suffer.
That was a joke.
…kind of.
The next day, I climbed back up the cliff to retrieve my pitons and anchors. Never knew when we might need them.
Then I did my sight-seeing tour down the ravine again, and walked all the way back to the cave – but this time I took my telephone lineman tree-climbing belt, my bow, and a quiver full of arrows.
Didn’t see nor hear a wolf the entire damn time.
Murphy’s Law.
I didn’t gain a whole lot from the trip, but it was good to know I could get back up to the plateau without having to climb the cliff.
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br /> Just in case.
17
After I returned to the cave, we started our preparations.
There were three areas that were of huge importance:
We needed to be able to protect ourselves…
We needed supplies…
And we needed to be able to travel as fast as possible.
So I devised a plan, and we began to work on all three.
As far as protection, the number one threat we would face was wolves. So we began to practice getting up into trees as fast as possible.
It wouldn’t be practical to assume we would always find a tree with branches low enough to climb, so we began practicing with a rope.
The process went something like this:
I found a rock that weighed several pounds and tied it to the end of a 40-foot rope. The rock was purely for weight. It allowed me to swing the rope around and throw it as high as possible – basically like a hammer throw in track and field.
I had to crisscross the rope over the stone many times and tie over a dozen knots to keep it in place – but in the end, I was sure the stone wasn’t slipping out.
Once I swung the rock and got up a good speed, I would throw it over a limb about 20 feet up.
The stone would fall back to the ground, trailing the rope with it. Of course, I kept the other end in my hand so the whole rope didn’t end up flying over the branch.
Once we retrieved the stone end, I attached the rope to Lelia’s climbing harness (actually my climbing harness, still on loan to her), which she wore over her furs.
I would use my weight and strength to pull her up. In reality, it was more like I was counterbalancing her weight, effectively making her as light as possible so she could scramble up the tree using my ice axes. She would spike them into the bark and use them as handholds to pull herself up.
Once she was up on a high enough branch, she would detach the rope from her climbing harness and tie it off to the tree limb – theoretically. And at that point, I would climb it – theoretically.
The problem was, the rope was too small for me to grip effectively. I didn’t have the same freakish grip strength that Lelia had, nor her light weight. I needed knots in the rope for it to work.
But having knots in the rope would make it way more difficult to pull over the tree limb, and would make it useless (or at least a lot less useful) for other purposes, like mountain climbing and belaying.