by Pete Fromm
Sitting in a snowdrift, I watched the sun set, reddening the few clouds and the endless stretches of snowed-over peaks and ridges. I pictured my family warm at home, opening all their carefully wrapped gifts, and I grinned, imagining the looks on their faces as they passed my presents around. I hoped they’d realize they were jokes, just a way to show I hadn’t forgotten, but suddenly I wasn’t as sure as I’d been when I packed them. They really were some pretty stupid things.
But it felt good to be out in the open again and I stayed up there until nearly dusk, trying not to think of anything at all. I unwrapped my finger and found that the cut had closed nicely. Maybe things were looking up. Sitting in the snowdrift, I rebandaged my finger, making it pretty, then I hurried back down to get home before the night grew completely black.
For my Christmas celebration I cooked mashed potatoes, canned corn, and enough moose steak to completely fill a frying pan top to bottom, side to side. When I was done I pushed back from the table as grossly stuffed as I would be at home and I smiled, thinking how in Milwaukee they’d all be doing the same thing. But tomorrow Paul and Dad would be climbing into the station wagon, beginning their drive out to Montana. The drive would take two days, and by the twenty-eighth they should be starting their ski.
I spent those two days in a flurry of cleaning and cooking. I cooked and cooked until my little table was stacked with crisp brown loaves of bread and coffee cakes and rice puddings and everything else I’d learned to make and had grown to think was pretty deluxe. I filled the water buckets, having to chop through the new layer of ice the cold had coated over my watering hole in Indian Creek. I even mixed a jug full of the lemonade mix I hoarded jealously. The only thing I had to drink other than straight water, I hadn’t brought in nearly enough. It was a special occasion drink. I made an entire gallon.
That night I put my biggest pot on and stoked the stove until the sides glowed red. Though it was dropping down somewhere near zero outside, the temperature in my tent was pushing ninety when, an hour later, the water in the pot was hot enough to steam. For the first time since my near disastrous last drive to Magruder a month ago, I took off all my clothes.
I stepped into a galvanized wash tub and with a pitcher I began to scoop the hot water over my head. I washed my hair quickly, using the water draining down my body to clean the rest of me as best I could. I only had a couple gallons of hot water for my entire bath, and I wound up cutting it with cold, just to have enough to rinse with. The whole process was hurried and cramped, less than enjoyable.
But afterward, drying off naked and clean, finally free of the press of layer upon layer of wool, I giggled at just how good it felt. Even with the roaring stove though, ice still clung to the floor by the door, and drafts swirled through the tent. I put off dressing as long as I could, but eventually slipped on a clean union suit and crawled between the covers.
Finally, on the twenty-eighth, when I couldn’t do anything else to prepare for my first visitors, I decided to hike down to Magruder to meet them, knowing I wouldn’t be able just to sit in my tent and wait. The channel was completely frozen over now, the snow a blanket of insulation for the water running underneath, and after cleaning every hint of ice from the waterfall at the end, I was sure it would be all right for a night on its own. I threw on my pack, with its usual load of rough first-aid gear, clothes, food, and sleeping bag, and headed upriver.
At Raven Creek, two miles from my tent, the usual turning point of my nightly strolls, I had to put on the snowshoes I’d strapped to the pack. Once my well-packed trail gave out I was into four feet of snow, and I couldn’t go on without the shoes.
Halfway to Magruder I flushed a grouse from the brush beside the river and it launched across the Selway, landing in the thick woods on the other side. In just the week since I’d shot the moose the river had finished freezing over, had even been covered by a foot of snow, and I crossed after the grouse without having to think about breaking through. It was already a little hard to believe I’d been so concerned about it before.
The grouse played a game of hide-and-seek with me for nearly an hour, but I eventually caught it sneaking along a branch and shot off its head. Boone retrieved it for me perfectly, dropping it at my feet, and I grinned hugely. With everything going this smoothly I could nearly pretend the whole moose hide debacle had never happened. Without the blood-tinged bandage still wrapped around my finger, I might have tried.
I picked up the grouse and tied it to my pack, wishing this had happened on the way back, when Paul and Dad could see it all. I hoped we’d bounce out another on our way to the tent, the three of us together, that I’d finally be able to share all of this with somebody.
At this moment, I thought, they were up somewhere near the pass, probably over it by now, shushing down the long drops toward the Selway. They couldn’t have had a better day for it. Low twenties, sunny, the world so bright it hurt.
The night before, during a quick run through the radio stations (a pretty much useless attempt with the clear skies), I’d caught a scrap of a Boise weather report saying they expected temperatures of ten below the next night. I’d learned it was usually ten or fifteen degrees colder here than in Boise. If that was really headed this way I hoped Paul and Dad had heard about it, that they’d make good time while the weather was good.
I crossed back over the thick ice and snow blanket on the Selway and headed on, deciding we’d spend the first night in the solid log house at Magruder. I’d cook them a true-blue grouse dinner while they told heroic tales of their trip.
I didn’t reach Magruder until nearly dark, cutting my safety rule about being wherever I was going while there was still light unusually close for the second time in just a few days. At the signboard pointing toward the station I left a note, written with the lead tip of one of my .22 rounds, letting Dad and Paul know I was at the ranger station. That’d cut ten miles off their trail and I was confident I would see them the next day.
I hurried the last half mile to Magruder and in the dark I found that someone—it must have been the wardens—had misplaced the key to the ranger station. Digging my headlamp out of my pack, I scrounged through the outbuildings until I found a bolt cutter and then cut my way in.
I built up the fire and opened the propane lines. I wasn’t sure how long we’d be here, so I left the water off. The last thing I wanted to do was break a water line. Once the fire had taken hold in the furnace and the house had begun to warm I cranked the handle around on the old phone. Two long, one short—the signal for West Fork Ranger Station, over the pass in Montana.
The ranger told me Dad and Paul had stopped by early that morning and were on their way in. He also said they expected it to drop down to fifteen below tonight. He asked what kind of skiers they were, what kind of experience they had with this kind of thing. I doubted they had any, but I told him they’d be all right. Until a few months ago I hadn’t had any experience with anything either, and I was all right.
After I hung up I got out my map and studied their route yet again. The ranger had told me the road was plowed farther than I’d guessed. They only had twenty-five miles to go—ten to the pass and fifteen down to here. I stepped out on the porch, and it didn’t seem that cold to me.
Stepping back into the toasty cabin, I made a quick meal of canned stew, saving the grouse for them tomorrow. I crawled into bed then, listening to the mice growing active in the sudden heat, thinking of Paul and Dad tented up out there somewhere in the blackness toward Montana. Maybe in the morning I’d walk on up that way. Maybe I could even get another grouse or two, so we could have a real welcome-in feed.
In the dark of the cabin I grinned, picturing it all.
11
I slept in a little the next morning, then got up in a hurry, imagining my father and Paul skiing in to find me snoozing away in this fancy lodge. Not a very mountain manly picture. I rushed through a quick breakfast—nothing more than a cup of coffee and a piece of bread—and started out to m
eet them.
In my rush, it took a few moments to realize how surprising the cold was. I stopped in the center of the cabin’s meadow and glanced up into the pale, ice-blue sky. Lifting my head let the air slip in around my throat and I quickly pulled myself deeper into my coat. I pushed hard up the hill to the main road and by the time I turned up it, following Deep Creek toward the pass, I’d begun to warm up.
There were no ski trails in the clean snow, only the old, snow-covered dent of the last snow machine track, and I followed that, sinking in less than I would in the powder. I hadn’t walked half an hour before I began craning my neck around the bends, to see them that much faster. A big grin hung on my mouth. They wouldn’t believe their eyes when I popped around the corner.
I started out with a full pack of stuff I didn’t need and the more I thought about it the heavier it seemed. It was full of the same things it held yesterday, things that would only be necessary if something bad happened. Walking along, waiting to see them any second, I wondered why I bothered bringing it all, and I stopped just long enough to leave my pack at the side of the road. I left my big down coat there too. Going uphill I’d be plenty warm without it.
I pushed on alone, my grin growing bigger at each turn, picturing the surprise on their faces, but at each turn I only saw yet another barren stretch of snow-covered road and snow-covered creek and snow-covered trees. My grin faded each time, but never quite went away. I’d need it at the next turn.
I walked for quite a while before I felt the cold. I started walking faster, waiting for the warmth to come, waiting to see the skiers moving darkly against the white world before me. Then I walked faster still, without touching the cold.
Finally, after only three miles or so, I had to turn around. I’d never felt anything like this cold. My pack and coat were a couple of miles away and suddenly that distance was frightening. I took just enough time to make a sign in the snow out of sticks, telling them I was at Magruder. Then I stood a moment more, arms wrapped around my chest, looking up the road, trying to will them to turn the corner before I had to walk away from them.
But they didn’t turn that corner and when I started back toward Magruder I walked as fast as possible, clumsy in the snowshoes. Even that pace didn’t help me warm up.
Shuffling through the powdery snow, I suddenly wondered if I’d make it to my coat. My chest was cold now, not just my hands and feet and face. Cold under my shirts and long johns, cold like iron. I knew enough about hypothermia to know I’d made a serious mistake leaving my coat and I stumbled back down my trail, trying to hurry, now looking around each bend for my pack and coat, rather than for my dad and brother. I could not quite recall where I’d left them.
Then, when I was running more from panic than sense, I turned a corner and saw the pack. I squirmed into the coat, which was even colder than I was, and continued to run until I felt heat under the heavy down. When I reached the ranger station I was exhausted. I’d covered all of six miles.
I fired up the wood furnace and, after warming through and through and getting my breath back, I thought of how much less exciting it would be to sit here and wait for them to show up, rather than meeting them up there someplace in the snow. But the thought of the cold still made me shiver and I snowshoed out to the weather station in the meadow and read the maximum and minimum thermometers. Maximum had been six below, minimum, last night, thirty-two below.
Instead of thinking grand thoughts of the reunion I began to think just of my father and brother, up there somewhere toward the pass, the cold stiffening their fingers, their legs, their very thoughts, the same way it had mine. It had to be even colder up there. I wondered what it was doing to them.
I sat in the ranger station, looking out the windows, stoking the furnace to have the house crackling hot when they arrived. But they did not show up all that day or evening. After dark I cranked up the phone to West Fork. The ranger whose dinner I interrupted told me this weather must have caught them halfway. It had been in the twenties when they left. He guessed they were holed up at Blondie’s, the old trapper’s cabin, waiting for the weather to break.
Blondie’s was a crumbling cabin built fifty years before. Blondie himself had frozen to death in a blizzard that caught him trying to hike out to the Bitterroot Valley for Thanksgiving. I checked my map again and found that the cabin was only a few miles from the top of the pass, about twelve or thirteen miles from Magruder. If that’s as far as they were they hadn’t got far. And I knew they wouldn’t stop, wouldn’t hole up. They’d keep crushing on. Movement would seem the only option in cold like this. Sitting still would just seem to make the misery last longer.
After hanging up the phone, I went straight to bed. In the morning I wasn’t going to stop until I found them.
It was still pitch black in the ranger station when I woke and went to the door to check the weather. The sky was close enough and clear enough it seemed as if the stars were within reach. But I didn’t reach. The stars looked like the very heart of ice—as if they could steal the last trace of heat left in anything alive.
I had not left the porch and my nose had already stuck together and the skin all across my face had tightened and shrunk away from the cold. I wondered what in the world it could be like up at the pass, three thousand feet closer to those stars.
Hurrying back into the cabin, I put as much wood into the furnace as possible, kicking the last piece in until I could shut the door. I made pancakes for breakfast, feeding them to Boone until she lost interest, then cooking an extra twenty for road food, stuffing them into the front pockets of my down coat. I strapped my snowshoes on in the living room rather than outside, where the cold would numb my fingers long before I could cinch the buckles.
I threw on my pack, full of emergency gear, and closed the cabin door behind me. The flattened snow on the porch squeaked outrageously in the frozen air. By the time I reached the main road the sky toward the pass was beginning to pale, and I climbed toward that lightness.
The snow crunched and squeaked under my snowshoes and in the frigid, empty air I could hear every swish of wool, every creak of leather from my boots and snowshoe bindings. The snowshoeing was not hard. For the first three miles I was in yesterday’s trail. After that I was in the old snowmobile trail, which had about a half a foot of fresh snow in it. While staring down at my feet I kicked four moose out of the creekbottom. Their crashing run through the willows startled me.
It was fully light by the time I was breaking new trail, the sky the pale, washed-out blue of winter. I passed the landmarks I knew on the bottom from when I’d driven through here in the early desperate weeks—creeks mostly: Cache Creek, Cactus, Gabe, and Scimitar.
Until then I’d been climbing slowly, but after passing the land line phone box at Hell’s Half Acre, I began the real climb to the pass. It was late, pushing noon, and though in the morning I’d forced myself not to expect them at every bend, I couldn’t keep myself from it now. I was only four or five miles from Blondie’s and they’d have to have been up and moving for quite some time by now, easily skiing those five miles down while I’d showshoed eight miles up. I began to peek around every corner again, holding my breath until another empty section of frozen road stretched out before me.
It had been thirty-six below when I left Magruder and I couldn’t imagine where they were or what had happened to them. I tried to picture spending last night in a stoveless backpacking tent, or a collapsing log cabin, but I couldn’t do it. For me the day’s cold wasn’t anything like yesterday’s, not with my coat. My beard and the front of my hat and scarf were all caked with ice, but the going was just hard enough to keep me fairly comfortable. I had no idea what kind of clothing they had on, and I knew they had never been in cold like this before. Neither had I.
I passed Halfway Creek and Pete Creek. The sun on the snow was dazzling. The entire world sparkled silently. Occasional breezes sent glistening cascades from the tree branches, but it was mostly still. I made the only nois
e out here. Up this high there weren’t even any animal tracks.
At one o’clock it was time to turn around to ensure getting back before dark. But there was still no trace of them. I looked up the trail, at the untracked snow, and back down my snowshoe track, where I should be going. I held a few pancakes under my coat until they’d thawed partially and then ate them. They were less than delicious. I dropped more to Boone and she broke them up and swallowed them frozen.
I couldn’t imagine them not getting this far, not unless something bad had happened, and I decided to keep going a little farther, keep going until I found some sort of sign.
Around the next bend, not two hundred yards from where I had rested, I saw ski tracks. I ran up the hill and shouted, thinking they must be right here someplace. But the tracks only came this far and turned silently around, back up the hill. I kept running up the tracks, shouting now and then. I had to be right on top of them now.
That they’d turned around where they did didn’t make me feel too good. It didn’t make sense. I remembered a couple of shacks at Slow Gulch, a half a mile or so up the road. Maybe they’d holed up there. But why would they ski down a half mile and turn around? I was wondering about frostbite or twisted ankles or about my fifty-three-year-old dad’s infamous back going out on him. Or of Paul, who could turn the simplest descent of a staircase into a leg fracture.
And about hypothermia, what they used to call exposure. That was worst of all. Why would they come here and turn around, after two nights out? It didn’t make any sense. That’s how hypothermic people acted toward the end, when the cold chilled their brains. I made time getting up to those cabins, the snow flying away from my snowshoes, covering the tracks of their skis, the rhythm of my breathing falling into time with the chugging pump of my legs.