by Edward Lang
The tracks of the four skiris we had been trailing had been obliterated – or rather, they became indistinguishable from the ruts the trees had cut as they were dragged across the snow. The mountainside looked like a raggedy-ass ski slope that had been horribly groomed, with thousands of small branches and pine boughs littering the ground.
Whatever this logging operation was for, I doubted it was far away. It just wasn’t feasible to drag giant tree trunks very far, no matter how many abominable snowmen you had doing the lifting. And I didn’t like being this close just as darkness was falling.
I suggested we backtrack deeper into the woods and find cover for the night. Fieria agreed. We hiked almost an hour back down into the forest, found another hollow to hunker down in, and slept in shifts while the others kept guard.
The next morning we journeyed again to the timberline. From there, I suggested that I go scout things out alone.
“We all go,” Fieria protested.
“No – I can climb those cliffs and get a better look,” I said, pointing at the high, rocky peaks surrounding us on both sides. “If we all go up the center where they dragged the trees, there’s nowhere to hide. If the skiris see us, they’ll chase us and we’re dead. But nobody will be looking for me up there.”
That is, I hoped nobody would be looking for me up there.
“Let me go with you,” Lelia pleaded.
“I’m just going to look around,” I promised. “I can move quicker on my own. As soon as I see what we’re dealing with, I’ll come right back.”
Lelia wasn’t happy with that answer, but she knew that she would only slow me down if she went with me.
Fieria finally agreed, and I set out on my own.
“If you hear any skiris coming, RUN,” I ordered them as I set out. “I’ll meet you at the tall pointy mountain. Hide there.”
Lelia nodded sadly, and she and the other women watched as I set off for the cliff.
The right side of the gorge was really just the first slope in a series of mountain peaks that stretched far into the distance. The left side of the gorge looked like the end of the mountain range – like maybe there was a huge drop-off on the other side.
I chose to go up the right side of the gorge because it looked like it had better terrain, and because I thought the higher slopes would give me a better view.
Ten minutes into the climb reaffirmed the wisdom of doing it alone. Since I didn’t have to belay Lelia and tie her off at anchors to keep her safe, I could move quickly and efficiently with just my ice axes and crampons.
The mountainside was a fairly easy climb. It alternated between 70- and 80-degree slopes, with plenty of cracks and jagged surfaces.
Within two hours, I was over 600 feet from the bottom of the gorge, and I had a pretty good view of everything around me on the left side of the cliff.
What I saw astounded me.
The slope where the trees had been dragged from the timberline continued for another half mile up into the gorge.
The slope leveled off into a plateau… and atop the plateau was a fort.
Like, an honest-to-god fort straight out of the Wild West. Or at least an attempt at one.
The massive logs that had been felled back in the forest had been stacked in a crude rectangular shape, about 80 feet long by 60 feet wide.
Now, I was no expert on forts, but from what I’d seen in movies, they were generally made of logs standing upright, placed into holes that had been dug in the ground and then bound together with something – maybe tied together with ropes.
But if you don’t have ropes… and if you don’t have shovels… and if you’re can’t dig holes in frozen, rocky ground… you might have ended up with something like this: a lame-ass log cabin without a roof.
Since there were no saws to make the logs a uniform size, longer trees jutted out from the edges of the fort.
And since the trees tapered from wider to thinner, there were lots of gaps in the wood.
One of the short sides of the fort had a crude doorway, created by using much shorter logs on either side of the opening.
The whole thing had a very 10,000 BC feel to it. It looked like it could topple over like a house of cards, if you hit it right.
But it wasn’t the fort that blew my mind.
It was what was inside its walls.
There was a human.
A man, dressed in what looked like combat fatigues and a parka.
He had a heavy red beard underneath his knit ski cap, and a rifle slung over his shoulder. Looked like an AR-15, although I wasn’t sure. I never was much of a gun guy.
He was working on a small hut in one corner – basically a shitty lean-to made out of smaller logs and branches.
There was a fire roaring in a pit at the center of the fort. Other than that, there wasn’t much inside the walls.
But there was a hell of a lot outside.
For one, there were about thirty skiris milling around. A half dozen were picking at the bloody, ragged carcass of a deer. In fact, scraps of bone and skin littered the ground all around the fort, probably from meals past.
But what really made my blood run cold were the pens on the southern wall of the outside of the fort. They were crudely constructed, basically just a perimeter of dozens of straight tree limbs stuck upright in the snow.
Inside the pen were three women.
Blue-skinned women – Lelia’s people. Captured members of her tribe.
They were completely exposed to the elements, and huddled in misery close to one another.
They could have easily pushed through the walls of the pen and escaped – if it hadn’t been for the three skiris keeping watch just ten feet away.
I deduced what was going on almost immediately.
The guy in the center with the gun had somehow gotten the skiris to do what he wanted (probably through the threat of shooting them, though I had no proof of that).
And what he wanted was to build a fort… and capture a bunch of women. What he wanted the women for, I could pretty much guess, since they weren’t doing any manual work.
But he didn’t dare keep them inside the fort. Probably worried they would murder him in his sleep.
So he kept them outside, guarded by monsters, until he wanted them. Then he went out and fetched one, brought her inside, did what he wanted, and then threw her back in the pen with the others.
My blood went from ice-cold to boiling.
What kind of lowlife, piece-of-shit psychopath would enslave women?
Even if he wasn’t raping them, what kind of fucking monster would leave them in a pen built for pigs, exposed to the cold like that?
I wanted to kill the motherfucker.
But I knew better than to just go back, get Lelia and the other women, and charge in without a plan.
For one, he had a small army surrounding him. Lelia and her friends and I had been able to take down four skiris when they invaded our camp – but 30? Not in this world possible.
And the murdering rapist at the center of it all had a rifle. With my bow and arrows, I could reliably hit my target at 40 feet out. Beyond that, it was a crapshoot.
I was guessing the rifle’s range was more like 500 to 1500 feet, depending on how good a shot he was and if he had a scope.
If we were going to rescue those women, we were going to have to be goddamn strategic about it.
My mind raced through the possibilities.
A night attack?
No – wake one monster up and the rest of them would follow.
Set the fort on fire?
I was guessing it was green wood, so it wouldn’t burn easily. Not to mention we would be endangering the women in the pens, which I wasn’t willing to do.
Somehow trigger an avalanche that could take all the skiris out?
Number one, it would endanger the women again. And number two, though there was plenty of potential to trigger one on the peaks I was climbing, any avalanche that hit that plateau would just
slow down and peter out. The area was too flat and too wide to sustain the speed and power needed for an avalanche to wipe them all out.
I decided to get closer in order to scout out the terrain a little more.
After another hour of climbing, I reached a spot where I had a better view.
Far below me was a roughly 60-degree slope that extended down to the plateau. Massive snowdrifts had built up along the slope. I had no idea how deep it got, but because the plateau was so flat and the snow had nothing to do but build up over time, I was guessing all those snowdrifts were pretty deep.
It would be a real bitch for a skiris to wade up through all that snow… but much easier for a bunch of people with snowshoes to go down.
If we could reach the top of the slope, we could snowshoe down to the plateau and attack the fort, which was about 200 feet away.
But there was still the problem of the 30 skiris standing in our way.
I could figure that part out later, once I worked out if I could get the women in place.
If I had to bring them the way I had come, then no, it was impossible. They would all have to be excellent climbers with their own crampons and ice axes. I didn’t have the ropes or the time to belay them all up the mountainside.
But there might be another way.
I climbed over the cliffs for the next two hours until I reached the top of the slope. Then I started looking around for another way up there.
As luck would have it, there was a sort of goat path through the mountains – difficult to climb without tools, but not impossible.
I took off my crampons and put up my ice axes, then worked my way back down the goat path. I wanted to make sure that Lelia and the others could reach the slope down to the fort without using any rock-climbing equipment whatsoever.
Everything was fine and dandy until I reached a massive overhang above the timberline. Literally everything was doable until that point.
But the overhang was impassable on the left and right without climbing gear – and it was a 60-foot drop to the ground below.
I could get them up here, no problem – but for them to get back down to the ground safely and quickly, they would need a 60-foot rope to slide down. And even that would be dangerous.
The problem was, the plan that was slowly forming in my head required that I keep every single bit of rope for myself. Because I wasn’t going to be with them when they came back this way.
But then I realized something: who said they had to return back this way after they had rescued their fellow tribeswomen?
The plan suddenly came together all at once. It was a thing of beauty.
Could it actually work? Who the hell knew. But there was a chance, and it was the only feasible option I saw.
I anchored one of the ropes in my backpack to the cliff and let it drop. It dangled down almost all the way to the ground below.
Good…
I pulled the rope back up, tried my knotted rope with the stone on it to the end, and let it drop again.
The stone disappeared into the deep snow 60 feet below.
Perfect.
I used the first section of rope to rappel down the cliff. Then I climbed down the last 20 feet of knotted rope and dropped into waist-high snow.
Then, after putting on my snowshoes, I padded into the forest in search of Lelia and the others, leaving the rope still fastened to the cliff behind me.
29
I found the women after about an hour – or rather, Lelia found me. One minute I was snowshoeing through the forest; the next, I heard Lelia whispering, “Jack!” from behind a snow-covered fir.
We kissed, and then she took me back to the others.
“I found them,” I said to the women. “Three of your people.”
“They are alive?!” Fieria asked, her voice rising in pitch. The others looked both relieved and overcome with emotion.
“Yes.”
“But… only three? Not five?”
I could hear the grief in her voice.
“No. There could have been other women I didn’t see, but… I think there’s probably only three.”
The women looked at each other, tears in their eyes.
Two of their friends were most likely dead. It was a dark moment.
Finally Fieria broke the silence.
“Tell us what you saw,” she said somberly.
I built up a model on the ground, creating a fort and holding pen out of sticks, and mountains out of snow.
“The bad guy is in here,” I said, pointing at the fort.
“Bad guy?”
“The bad vaklik. Your friends are in here,” I said, pointing at the holding pen. “And there are 30 skiris all around.”
The women looked shell-shocked – like How the hell are we supposed to fight that many?!
“I have a plan,” I explained, and walked them through what I had in mind.
At the end, they were all semi-enthusiastic – except for Lelia.
“No,” she said grumpily.
“Babe, it’s the only way.”
“We will not let you go away from us!”
“We’ll meet up again, I promise. But I’m going to have to distract them and draw off the skiris and the vaklik. There’s no other way.”
“No,” she said, shaking her head, on the verge of tears.
I took her by the arms and looked deep into her eyes. “You have to trust me, okay? We can rescue your friends and stop the skiris from coming after you – but to do that, I have to do my part, too. And if I don’t do it, there’s no way to rescue your friends, and the skiris will just keep coming and coming until they either kill us or capture us. This is the only way.”
Lelia sobbed as I took her into my arms.
Fieria said something to her in their own language. Lelia wiped away the tears from her cheeks and nodded reluctantly.
“What did you say?” I asked Fieria.
“I…” Fieria said, but strained to find the words.
“She said you were sent here to help us,” Lelia murmured. “And that you are being brave and not selfish. And that it would be bad if I do not trust you and believe you.”
Wow.
That was a hell of a ‘Come to Jesus’ speech on Fieria’s part.
“I’m coming back to you, okay?” I said with a smile as I put my finger under her chin. “I promise.”
She looked at me sadly through teary eyes. “I’m scared.”
“Don’t be. I’ve got this. It’ll be okay.”
I sounded a lot more confident than I was. Actually, I was way more nervous about their part of the plan than mine. If I didn’t draw away the skiris and the guy with the red beard, the plan was fucked.
As I held Lelia to me, Fieria asked, “What do we need to do?”
“First I need to take you there,” I answered.
We set off for the cliff where I’d left the rope dangling from the cliff. Once we got there, the women handily climbed the rope up to the overhang – apparently, they all had that amazing grip strength.
Me, I used my ice axes and crampons.
Once I got to the top, I pulled the rope back up, took out the anchor, and put everything in my backpack. Like the ancient Greeks on the shore of Troy, I was burning the boats. No turning back now.
Then I led them down the goat path (or whatever passed for a goat in their world) until we reached the giant snowdrifts overlooking the fort.
By that time, the sun was going down, and it was harder to see – but the women in the pens were still easily visible. As were all the skiris.
Hala cried out, and started to move forward – a purely unthinking reaction to seeing her friends so horribly abused.
Fieria caught her and held her back.
“No,” she cautioned, and said something in their language.
I looked at Lelia, who translated: “It would be death to go down there now.”
“Suicide,” I agreed.
Lelia frowned. “Suicide?”
; “Where a person kills himself.”
Lelia looked horrified. “Why would he do that?!”
Why indeed.
I didn’t want to get into depression and all the reasons that might lead someone to go down that road, so I simply said, “Exactly. There’s not a good reason to go down there right now.”
Lelia nodded, then murmured to herself, “Suicide…”
Then I started telling them the plan.
Since they could see the fort and the terrain firsthand, they could see exactly what I had in mind, and what they would have to do in order to fulfill their part of the plan.
“But what happens if we escape with our friends?” Lelia asked.
“WHEN,” I said. “Not ‘if.’ When you escape with your friends.”
“When,” Lelia said dully, not buying into my optimism.
“You’re going to take them back to the cave,” I said.
Lelia frowned. “What ca– ”
Then she realized exactly what cave I meant.
“Where I found you?!” she said, her eyes bugged out in disbelief.
“Yes, exactly,” I said.
“But that is over two days away from here!”
“No, it’s two days if you sleep at night, but you won’t be able to,” I cautioned her. “As soon as you free your friends, you’ll need to get back to the cave as fast as possible. You’ll have to keep moving all night long. The skiris won’t stop chasing you, so you can’t stop. But you’ll have the snowshoes. You’ll be able to move faster than they can. And the snowshoes you have now are better than the snowshoes you and I used when we came down from the cave, so you might be able to get back in less than one day and night.”
Lelia looked supremely unhappy. “What about you?”
“I’ll be right behind you, just in a different part of the forest. Don’t worry about me – just get back to the cave. The only problem is, I can’t spare any ropes for you to use. Do you think you can get up the cliff to the cave without any ropes?”
She looked doubtful. “I don’t know.”
I pulled out a twig I’d brought from the forest specifically for this purpose, and leaned it against a rock at 45 degrees. “Do you think you could find a thin, fallen tree in the forest, and all of you could carry it to the cave and climb up it?”