More dizzy, I used my right hand to search through the knapsack. Where is it? I thought. It isn’t like Kate not to have packed one.
Damn it, this time she hadn’t.
Desperate, I was about to dump everything out, when I noticed a bulge at the side of the knapsack. Struggling to clear my mind, I freed a zipper on a pouch and almost wept when I found a folded elastic bandage.
Working awkwardly with one hand, sometimes using my teeth to open packets, I cleaned the gash with antiseptic swabs, spread antibiotic ointment over it, and pressed several two—inch pads onto it. Blood soaked them. Hurrying, I wrapped the elastic bandage around my left forearm. Keeping it tight, circling layer upon layer, I saw blood tint each layer.
I urgently wrapped more layers, applying more pressure, worried about how little of the bandage remained. I prayed that the blood wouldn’t soak all the way through. Two more layers. One. I secured the end with two barbed clips that came with the bandage. Then I stared at the bandage, shivering, concentrating to see if blood would soak through. For a moment, I feared that the pale brown of the bandage would become pink, about to turn red. I held my breath, exhaling only when a small area of pink didn’t spread.
My watch’s crystal was shattered, the hands frozen at ten after two. I had no idea how long I’d been on the ledge, but when I peered up through the vapor from the stream, the sun seemed to have shifted farther west than I would have expected from the brief time since I’d fallen. Evidently I’d been unconscious longer than it seemed.
I stared up at the rim but still didn’t see Petey and Jason. Give them time, I thought.
The trouble was, if I didn’t get off the ledge soon, I was going to be in a lot worse trouble.
I wasn’t an outdoorsman—I’d certainly proven that. But it wasn’t possible to live in a mountain state like Colorado without seeing stories in the newspaper or on the TV news about the dangers of hypothermia. Hikers would go into the mountains, wearing only shorts and T—shirts. A sudden storm would soak them. If the temperature dropped, if the hikers were more than three hours from warm clothes and hot fluids to raise their rapidly dropping core temperature, they died from exposure.
Lying on the damp, chill ledge, I shivered. My hands and feet felt numb. If I don’t get off this ledge soon, I thought, it won’t matter that I stopped the bleeding. Hypothermia will kill me.
I tried to calculate how to climb up the almost sheer face to the next ledge and then up the slope of loose stones to the rim. I knew that my injured arm wouldn’t support me. The only other way to get off the ledge was …
I stared down, trying to judge how the cliff led to the stream. It was a steep slope of outcrops, the ledge below me five feet away, the one after that twice as far. I didn’t want to think about the obstacles farther down.
But the sun was already past the rim of the cliff. The bottom of the chasm was in shadow. Even though it was only late afternoon, darkness would come soon. The nearby mountains would block the sun earlier than I was used to. Once it was dark, I couldn’t hope to be rescued until morning.
By then, I’d be dead.
The pain of movement was excruciating as I eased the knapsack onto my back, lay on my stomach, and squirmed over the edge. I dangled as far as my good arm would allow, then dropped.
The shock of landing jolted me to the bone. I almost fainted. Crawling over the side of the next outcrop, I ripped my shirt and scraped my chest. My lacerated knees showed through my torn jeans. Straining to control my emotions, I kept struggling downward. A few spots that looked impossible from above turned out to be deceptive, boulders acting like steps. Other spots that looked easy were terrifyingly difficult.
Throughout, the light faded. As the stream’s roar grew closer, I descended with greater caution. Testing my footing, I almost fell when a boulder dislodged under my weight and rumbled to the bottom. While the dusk thickened, so did the vapor from the stream, beading my face, soaking my clothes, making me shiver harder. I remembered reading that victims of hypothermia become stupefied near the end, unaware of what’s around them. I fought to keep my thoughts clear.
As it was, I struggled to the bottom before I realized it, nearly stepping into the raging current, so deadened by its thunder that I hadn’t been aware how close I was. Lurching back, I almost twisted my ankle. Unnerved by the surreal contrast between the blue sky above the chasm and the gathering dusk within it, I shifted along the roiling water with delicate care. Spray drenched me. As the chasm sloped toward its murky exit, I worried that I’d break a leg within sight of my escape. I made my way over slick rocks, gripping boulders for support, my mind and body so numbed that it took me a minute to understand that the object I leaned against was an aspen tree, not a boulder, that sunlight was angling toward me, that I’d left the chasm a while ago and now was stumbling through a forest.
It’s almost over, I told myself. All I need to do is follow the stream through the trees to the lake. As my steps quickened, I imagined unlocking the car. I anticipated the relief of crawling in and starting the engine, of turning on the heater and feeling hot air blow over me as I changed into warm clothes from my suitcase.
“Jason! Petey!”
I lurched from the aspens to the edge of the lake and squinted through dimming sunlight toward the opposite side.
My stomach sank when I saw that the car wasn’t there.
Easily explained. Petey and Jason went for help, I thought. They’ll be back soon. All I have to do is crawl into the tent and try to get warm.
The tent was also gone.
“No!” The veins in my neck threatened to burst, but I couldn’t stop screaming. “Noooo!”
16
Denial’s an amazing emotion. During my descent, suspicions had nagged at me, but I’d managed to suppress them, too preoccupied with staying alive. Now I still kept trying to tell myself that I was wrong. After all, six hours previously, the possibility that my brother would push me off a cliff would have been unthinkable, especially given the load of guilt that I’d been carrying around.
My God, what had Petey done with Jason?
Furious, shivering so hard that my teeth clicked together, I yanked off my wet shirt, pulled my denim jacket from the knapsack, and quickly put it over my bare skin. The jacket was damp from having been near the stream, but it felt luxurious compared to what I’d been wearing.
It wasn’t going to be enough. I had to get a fire started, had to dry my jeans and socks and shoes. After opening a pouch on my knapsack and confirming that a metal container of matchbooks was as waterproof as the camping equipment clerk had promised, I went to the aspens to get wood.
A breeze made my wet jeans cold and penetrated my jacket. I hugged myself, trying to generate warmth, but trembled worse than ever. Not knowing what I was doing, I imitated the campfire arrangement on the other side of the lake and put rocks in a circle in a clearing. I placed some twigs and dead leaves in the middle, set some broken sticks over them, and struck a match, but my hand shook so severely that as I brought the match toward the leaves, the flame went out. I tried again, desperate to keep my hand still, concentrating to control my arm muscles, and this time the flame touched the leaves, smoke rising, fire crackling.
A terrible thirst overtook me, but when I reached for the canteen on my belt, it wasn’t there. I was dismayed not only that I’d lost it but that I hadn’t noticed until now. My tongue was so pasty that it stuck to the roof of my mouth. The roar of the nearby stream tempted me to go to it and scoop water from my hands to my mouth, but I had no idea what kind of bacteria might be in it. I didn’t dare risk getting sick. Vomiting or diarrhea would dehydrate me more than I already was.
All the while, sunset dimmed. I needed to pile up all the branches I could. As the last of the sun dipped below the mountains, I worked with greater urgency, dragging back large fallen limbs. Too soon, darkness enveloped me.
But it wasn’t as black as my thoughts. Jason. Had Petey hurt him? Please, God, protect my son.
Please.
The word became my mantra as the night’s chill made me huddle closer to the fire. I was caught between the need to get warm and the fear of depleting my fuel supply before the night was over. I picked up the shirt I’d taken off. Holding it to the fire, turning it often, I feared that I’d burn it before I dried it. Although parts of it were in rags, it would provide an extra layer. Hating to expose my chest and back to the cold, I quickly removed my jacket and put on the shirt, then got into the jacket again. I took the rain slicker from my knapsack and put that on as well, pulling its hood over my head, anything to provide more insulation. My hands felt stung by the cold. Rubbing them over the fire, I blamed myself for not having been smart enough to bring gloves.
Hell, if I’d been smart, I never would have invited Petey into my home. But as hard as I tried to find some warning signs from the previous few days, I couldn’t think of any.
You bastard! I inwardly screamed, then regretted the word, hating myself for insulting my parents. Every curse I could think of somehow involved them, but what had happened wasn’t their fault. It was mine.
The weather forecaster had predicted a low of forty degrees Fahrenheit. If I fell asleep and the flames died, my body might get so cold that I’d never wake up. I thought of the warm sleeping bags that had been in the car. I imagined zipping into one of them and …
Awakening with a start, I found myself lying on the cold grass next to the barely glowing embers of the fire. Terrified, I tried to make my right hand work, groped for a handful of twigs, used a stick to poke them into the ash—covered coals, and watched the twigs burst into flame. Clumsy, I added larger pieces, my numbness slowly leaving me, but not the terror of dying from exposure. Drymouthed, I tried to chew peanuts and raisins. Praying for Jason helped energize my mind. Guarding the fire, I brooded about Petey.
Hated him.
And stayed awake.
17
At first, the feeling was so soft that I thought I imagined it, an invisible cool feather tickling my face in the darkness. Then I heard a subtle hissing on the hot rocks around the fire. In my confusion, it reminded me of the hiss from our coffeemaker whenever a few drops fell from the unit’s spout and landed on the burner. At once, the flurries became a little stronger, the breeze that brought them turning colder.
I straightened from the stupor I’d been in, the gray of false dawn hinting at what swirled around me. My first alarmed instinct was to pile more wood on the fire, but as snow sizzled louder on the hot stones, the sun tried to struggle above the eastern peak, providing sufficient light for me to see the white on the grass around me. Dark clouds hung low. Despite the extra wood I’d thrown on the fire, the flames lessened. Smoke rose.
Panicked, I put on my knapsack. As Petey had told Jason when we’d left the highway, early June wasn’t too late for snow in the mountains. On T V, the forecasters sometimes cautioned people that at high altitude, the weather could change for the worse without warning. But that hadn’t been predicted, and I’d figured that with the car and the tent, there wasn’t anything to worry about. Now I cursed myself for not making better plans.
The highway was a half hour away by car. Frowning at the thickening, angrier clouds, I tried to calculate how far I’d have to go on foot. The road into the mountains had been so bad, the terrain so rough, that most of the time I hadn’t been able to drive more than twenty miles an hour. That meant the highway was about ten miles off. But with my ankle hurting, ten miles might take me five or six hours on foot. In clothes too flimsy for the cold. Besides, as the flurries intensified, preventing me from seeing the lake, I realized that I probably wouldn’t be able to find my way to the highway, that I’d risk wandering in circles until I dropped. Of course, if I’d known how to use the compass the camping—equipment clerk had sold me, my chances might have been different. But regret wasn’t a survival emotion. Fear for Jason was. Rage at Petey was.
Thinking of Jason, I was suddenly reminded of the last time I’d seen him. The shelf of rock. “Where’s that cave you mentioned?” he’d asked.
The cave.
If I could find it before the storm got worse …
Fighting for strength, I lurched into the trees. Abruptly, visibility lessened, and I stumbled to the right toward the stream, not to drink from it but to use it as a guide. A white veil enveloped me as I followed the churning water up through the trees. The flakes became thicker. The snow on the ground covered my tennis shoes.
My tennis shoes. I’d bought a compass, which I didn’t know how to use, and yet I hadn’t taken the camping—equipment clerk’s advice to buy sturdy hiking boots. They weren’t necessary, I’d told him. We weren’t going to be doing anything heavy—duty.
My feet started to lose sensation. Limping, I worked my way along a slope, worrying that a rock beneath the snow would shift and cause me to fall. Could I rely on my memory of where the cave was? For all I knew, it was on the opposite side of the stream, and it was merely a crevice in a cliff, which, as a thirteen—year—old boy, I had thought was huge.
The slope reached a steep ridge that went to the left. While I plodded along it, the aspens became pine trees. Branches jabbed at my arms and scratched my face. As the snow gusted thicker, I feared that I’d stumble past the cave and never see it. In the summer, hikers would find my body, or what was left of it after the forest scavengers had feasted on it.
I’m an architect, not a survival expert, I thought. I could hardly feel my hands. Why the hell hadn’t I put gloves in my knapsack? I was so stupid, I deserved to die.
Trying to avoid a pine branch, I lost my footing, fell, and almost banged my head against a boulder on my right. Stupid. Deserve to …
18
Architect.
The vague thought nudged my dimming consciousness.
Know how to …
Slowly, the thought insisted, making me turn toward the boulder my head had nearly struck.
Build things.
When I struggled to my feet, I discovered that the boulder was as high as my chest. A second boulder, five feet to the left, was slightly less high. The boulders lay against a cliff, which formed a rear wall.
Build things, I repeated.
I stumbled to the pine branch I’d tried to avoid, put all my weight into it, and felt a surge of hope when a snap intruded on the smothering stillness. Working as hard as I could, I dragged the branch through the snow to the boulders and hefted it on top, bracing it across them. Staggering, I repeated the process several times, overlaying the needles, trying to form a roof.
The cold made my hands ache so much that tears streamed from my eyes, freezing on my cheeks, but I didn’t have time to stick my hands, raw and bloody, under my rain slicker to try to warm them against my chest. There was too much to do. I used football—size rocks to weigh down the edges of the branches.
Delirious, I kicked the snow from the ground between the boulders, adding it to the drift outside the shelter. I stuck two needled branches at the shelter’s entrance, forming a further windbreak. No matter how pained my hands were, I couldn’t stop. I had to get dead twigs, leaves, and sticks, piling them at the back of the shelter.
I’d left a small hole at the back, where the boulders touched the cliff, hoping that smoke would escape through it. Away from the wind and the falling snow, I felt less assaulted by the cold. But my hands were like paws as I clumsily made a small pile of leaves and twigs, then fumbled to open the container of matches and pull out a book of them. I could hardly peel off one of the matches. My fingers didn’t seem to belong to me. The match kept falling. It was finally so damaged that I had to peel off a second match, and this one, blessedly, caught fire when I struck it. It fell from my hands onto the clump of leaves and twigs, remained burning, and started a small fire. Smoke rose. I held my breath to keep from coughing. Pushed by heat, the smoke drifted toward the hole in the back.
My throat was so dry that it swelled shut, restricting the passage of air to my lungs. Desperate for somet
hing to drink, I reached my unfeeling right hand outside and fumbled to raise snow to my mouth. Instantly, I regretted it. The melting snow made my lips and tongue more numb than they already were. Shivering, I felt a deeper cold. I dimly remembered TV news reports that warned hikers caught in a blizzard not to eat snow as a way of getting moisture. They’d use so much body heat melting the snow in their mouths that they had a greater risk of dying from hypothermia.
The small amount of water from the melted snow hadn’t done any good. Almost instantly, my lips became dry again. My swollen tongue seemed to fill my mouth. It was a measure of how dazed I’d become that I stared blearily down at the metal container of matches for a long time before my muddled thoughts cleared and I realized what I had to do. Shaking, I put the matches in the first—aid kit. I picked up their metal container, reached outside into the wind, packed the container with snow, and set it near the fire.
Slowly, the crystals melted. Worried about burning my hand, I put my shirtsleeve over my fingers before I gripped the hot container and pulled it away from the fire. It was only half an inch thick and two inches square, but it might as well have been a sixteen—ounce glass, so irresistible was the tiny amount of water in it. I forced myself to let it cool.
Finally, I couldn’t be patient any longer. I used my sleeve to raise the container. I brought it close to my lips, blew on it, then gulped the warm, bitter water. My parched mouth absorbed it before I could swallow. I reached greedily outside and packed it with more snow. The lingering heat in the metal reduced the snow to water without my needing to set the container near the fire. Again, I gulped it. Again, the water never got near my throat. I refilled the container, placed it near the fire, and put a few more sticks on the flames.
That became my pattern. When my mouth and throat were moist enough, I pulled a plastic bag of peanuts and raisins from my knapsack, chewing each mouthful thoroughly, making them last. Worrying about Jason, hating Petey, I stared at the fire.
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