by Todd Borg
There was no indication that she heard me. The deep cold combined with fear had made her withdraw to a place that I probably couldn’t access until I got her warmed up.
I let go of the edge of the sign and slid off Gertie’s legs, allowing my legs to drop down into the snow. Suspended from the sign at my waist, my feet didn’t touch ground. I shifted farther back off the sign and pushed off. I dropped up to my neck before my feet touched something solid.
As I tried to push off, the firmer layer under my boots crumbled, and I went in deeper. I wasn’t on ground. I was on snow crust that had formed before the last series of storms.
With my head at the level of the sign, I pushed up and forward on the sign and its 4 X 4 post. The sign, with Gertie on it, moved a few inches, and I sunk down a few more inches.
I spent some time doing chopping motions, cutting snow with the edge of my hands, pushing it down, and then marching and packing it beneath me. It took a few minutes to widen the hole I was standing in. With more snow beneath my boots, I was able to again move Gertie and the sign forward another few inches.
Moving a yard was going to take a long time.
I chop-cut more snow, marched my feet to move it beneath me. Stomped my feet to compress it. Pushed up and moved Gertie and the sign another few inches.
As I continued, another concern was that if I pushed her too far, she could take off down the mountain without me. So I kept one hand on the 4 X 4 post.
I repeated the process, huffing like a sprinter, until I believed that the sign was on the verge of tipping over the crest between meadow slope and steeper mountain slope. By continuously stepping more and more snow beneath my feet, I raised myself up. I pushed the sign with Gertie until it wanted to slide, but my grip prevented it from escaping and kept me from dropping back into my hole.
I pumped my feet and knees against loose snow until I had clambered out of my hole. As the sign began to move, I climbed on.
We accelerated fast, and soon I was once again dragging my feet to slow us down. The trees got very thick, and I had trouble choosing a line between them in the dark. Once, we were in a thick grove and went off what might have been a giant, submerged boulder. For a moment, we were airborne. Gertie made a gasp, which pleased me because it indicated that she was still aware. Then we landed with a soft thwump into deep powder.
Ten seconds later, we cruised into an open glade with the trees well-spaced. There was a sudden drop into a gully, and our speed increased as if in a downhill race. Then we shot up the other side, burning off speed. Our sign toboggan came over the sharp rise and nearly went into the air again as the slope pitched down.
Then in a moment the landscape got very dark. But it wasn’t a heavy forest cover. It was the lake, and we were about to shoot into the black water.
“Let go, Gertie,” I shouted as I grabbed her shoulders.
I took Gertie with me as I rolled off the shooting sign. We tumbled into snow at the shoreline. The sign hit the water and skimmed over the waves for five yards before it came to a stop and then sank.
THIRTY-EIGHT
The snow at Lake Tahoe’s shoreline was crusted, uneven, and slippery, the result of waves crashing and throwing freezing spray into the air. Because of its depth, Tahoe never freezes across. But the shore edges freeze into breaking sheets of ice, and the rocks become coated with layers of ice.
I pulled Gertie to her feet. “We’re okay, Gertie,” I said knowing that we were far from okay. “We made it. Those men will never find us. Now all we have to do is walk to one of the vacation homes near here. Then we can go in and warm up.
“We’ll walk next to the shore where the snow isn’t deep. It’s uneven and slippery, so we’ll have to be careful.”
I turned her north toward where I thought the closest vacation homes were, and I walked closest to the lake so that any splashing water would hit me more than her.
The walking was treacherous on the uneven ice. Gertie was uncoordinated, no doubt from hypothermia. Her Sacramento shoes and pants were much too thin for winter night in the mountains. I believed she’d be okay as long as I kept her moving, but I worried about frostbite on her fingers and toes.
I put my arm around Gertie’s shoulder, keeping a strong grip and holding her up when she slipped. The shore went in and out. Fallen trees forced us to bushwhack away from the shore and into deep snow. We stepped over many glistening ice-covered boulders and detoured around the larger ones.
As soon as we found a house, we’d be fine. I could call Santiago and Diamond and have them send out a rescue party. I reached for my phone in its cargo pocket, and then remembered that the men had taken my phone when they carried me off to drown me. But there was something hard in my pocket. The phone I took from the man in the van.
I turned it on. The screen asked for the passcode. The phone would do us no good. I put it back in my pocket.
We kept trudging through the crusted shore snow.
There were no vacation homes. No boat houses. No boarded-up cabins. We were alone on a frozen, desolate stretch of Lake Tahoe, getting colder and weaker with every step.
I tried to talk to Gertie, but she didn’t respond. Her steps became more wobbly. Mine did as well. At times, the snow at the water’s edge was deep, and I had to help Gertie as she struggled to raise her legs high enough to march through.
Her shivering was violent, a good sign when one is concerned about hypothermia, because shivering keeps the body’s heat up. But after we’d gone maybe a half mile, her shivering lessened and then stopped. That was a major step on the descent into hypothermia. I tried to speed up her walk to generate more heat, but she could barely walk.
If it got much worse, I’d need to find a place to dig a snow cave and crawl with her underground until morning. But I wasn’t convinced that would save her. I had no idea how much she’d eaten in the previous 24 hours. She may have had little if any food stores in her system. And I was cold enough that I doubted that I’d be able to dig a snow cave. I had no shovel, no extra gloves or jacket, and my own body heat was fading. It would be difficult or impossible to warm up Gertie by crawling next to her in a snow cave.
I decided to keep going, even if I had to carry Gertie.
After what seemed like an hours-long death march, the wind had come up and was blowing snow into our faces. The fatigue was greater than any I’d ever known. Like Gertie, my shivering grew and then faded as I began my own descent into hypothermia.
As my brain grew foggy, I decided it would be best for us to sit and rest. Just a short rest. Maybe we could take a little nap. It would be so pleasant. Gertie would be glad to stop, too. Up ahead was a nice mound of cushy snow. It would be comfy to curl up in it. Winter explorers in the dark forest.
I stopped. Gertie collapsed to the snow and flopped over sideways. Her movement startled me.
Hypothermia had taken my common sense just as it had taken my body warmth.
We were both on the verge of no return.
I gritted my teeth, visualized Street urging me on. ‘Just a little farther,’ she would say. ‘You can’t let Gertie down,’ she would say. ‘That girl is depending on you,’ she would say.
I bent over, grabbed one of Gertie’s arms, and hauled upward.
“C’mon, Geree,” I said, my lips frozen, brain numb, words slurred. “We ga’a kee wahing. Wah, Geree, wah.”
I held her, and we stumbled ahead.
Twenty yards, I thought. If we could just make it twenty more yards. Then another twenty. Just another twenty yards. But the forest got too thick, too dark. There was a huge tree near the lake, and we walked right into it. My cheek bounced off rough bark. I turned to go around, but I couldn’t even get past it.
A vague thought danced just out of reach. I tried to focus on it. It was like being drunk to the point of unconsciousness. Then I captured the thought. I was brilliant. My brain was a magnificent calculator of complex equations, stunning insights, ruthless conclusions.
It wasn’t a t
ree.
It was a cabin. A very old cabin with tree-bark siding.
THIRTY-NINE
I don’t remember how I found the window. I don’t remember breaking the glass.
I do remember boosting Gertie up, poking her through the window head first. She fell through to the floor on the inside.
Like an Olympic gymnast, I climbed in head first and fell next to her.
We lay in the dark for a time. The cabin had no heat, but we were out of the wind.
In time, I rolled to my hands and knees, pushed up and stood, wobbling. I walked like a zombie with my hands out in front of me, feeling my way through the cave-dark cabin.
Operating by feel alone, I thought there were three rooms. The one we were in had a bed. Another was very small and had a door and a rack of hooks on the wall nearby. The third was bigger and had a counter with a sink in the middle. I felt along the counter. Something metallic clattered to the floor. Nothing else. I raised my hands. Found a shelf. It had cups and some plates that were curved. Shallow bowls. Some cans.
Above was another shelf. I came to a small box. Cardboard. Lightweight.
Wooden matches.
It took nine tries to light one.
The match flared bright, blinding me for a moment. I turned and looked around the room. Eventually, the match went dim. An acrid odor burned my nose. I looked at the match. It was burning the flesh of my fingers. I hadn’t felt it because my fingers were so numb.
I dropped the match to the floor. It went out.
I struck another. Up on the shelf where I found the match were little candle jars. I lit one. It took a moment to get bright. I tried to blow out the match but I couldn’t form the right shape with my lips. I dropped it to the floor, and it went out.
After a few more tries, I had eight candles lit. They illuminated the main part of the cabin, a rustic space with a plank wood floor, an old wood stove in the corner, a kitchen area with a counter, table, and two wooden chairs. Near the wood stove was an upholstered chair and a small couch. I pulled the upholstered chair over in front of the wood stove, then took a candle into the room where Gertie still lay on the floor and set the candle on a small table next to the bed. I picked Gertie up. She was not responsive.
I carried her into the bigger room and sat her down on the upholstered chair.
“Stay ’ere, Geree,” I slurred, unable to make my lips move. “I’ll geh to ’erk on a ’ire.”
Gertie was clearly in trouble.
Near the wood stove was a box of kindling and a metal rack holding split logs. I found some paper, added kindling, and lit a fire.
The stove drafted well, and in a few minutes I had a good fire going. I held my hands in front of the fire, flexing my fingers to get them to thaw out.
After a couple minutes, I began to feel the intense prickling as sensation returned.
I fetched a blanket off the bed in the bedroom. I didn’t want it over Gertie’s front, as that would insulate her from the fire’s warmth. So I got it behind her back and draped it over her head and around her shoulders.
As the fire began to warm the room, a freezing draft from the broken window in the bedroom became more obvious.
I looked around for some cardboard and found nothing. But the kindling was sitting vertically in a cardboard box. I took the kindling out and stacked it on the floor.
I took a candle and the box into the bedroom. The broken window was bigger than the box. I set the box on the floor and used my feet to break one of the box seams and then crush the box this way and that. When it was the right shape, I held it up to the broken window opening. It wasn’t great, but with something to prop it in place, it might work.
Back at the kitchen counter I found a small tool box. Inside was a tack hammer. I dug through the detritus at the bottom of the box and found five finishing nails.
Hammering with frozen muscles was like when you give a two-year-old a hammer and nail. I missed nine times out of ten. And half of the times that I hit a nail, my blow was off-center enough that the nail flew across the room.
Fifteen minutes later, I finally had the cardboard nailed in place. My efforts had warmed me up enough that the skin pricks in my fingers were gone and the finger I’d burned with the match felt like it was stuck on red-hot metal.
On one of the kitchen shelves were some pans. I took two of them out the cabin’s door and scooped them full of snow. I expected the kitchen area to feature a propane camp stove of some kind, but there was nothing. The wood stove would do.
I set the pans of snow on top of the stove. They sizzled and crackled as snow melted and water ran down the outside of the pans. While they warmed, I took the third and final pan outside to collect more snow and added it to the two cooking pans as the snow melted into very little water.
I searched the kitchen for something to add to the water and found two boxes of tea. I put tea bags into mugs. Five minutes later, I poured boiling water into the mugs.
After they cooled a bit, I sat on the arm of Gertie’s chair and held a mug to her mouth so she could sip it. She dribbled and drooled and demonstrated just how close she’d come to dying from cold.
After she’d consumed most of a cup, she began to shiver, a sign that she was emerging from hypothermia. Her spasms were so violent that I could no longer feed her tea without risk of her choking.
Fifteen minutes of wracking spasms later, Gertie’s shivering slowed. She still hadn’t said a word. Her eyes began to dart toward the door and the windows, fear returning as she warmed.
On one end of the shelf above the counter were a dozen cans of soup, all minestrone. I found a can opener and emptied two cans into one of the pans. It heated fast on the wood stove, which was now very hot. We ate it without speaking. I asked Gertie if she wanted more tea. She shook her head.
I got Gertie to stand up. Then I switched the chair out for the couch, but positioned the couch a bit back from the stove.
“You sleep on the couch in front of the fire,” I said.
The kid who almost wouldn’t stop talking in Sacramento made a vague nod but said nothing. I found a pillow and another blanket. Gertie sat down on the couch. I got her to lie down, spread the blanket, and tucked her in.
I pulled the mattress out of the bedroom and laid it on the floor, not far from the couch and the wood stove. Then I blew out all the candles but one and, out of excessive desire for safety, set it in the kitchen sink. It would make a night light with no danger of burning the cabin down.
When I turned back toward the wood stove, Gertie was already asleep. I quietly added two more logs to the fire, shut the stove door and dialed down the air intake to the lowest setting so the fire would burn slow and long. I lay down on the mattress.
I didn’t know the time. My best guess was somewhere around four or five in the morning. Two or three hours to daylight.
My last thought before I fell asleep was how glad I was to have gotten Gertie to a safe, snow-bound location where the men couldn’t drive in to find us.
Sometime later, another thought jerked me awake. I realized that it would be easy for the men in the van to find a toboggan and, come dawn, follow our tracks down the mountain. In addition to our tracks, the smoke from the wood stove was like waving a flag to get attention. I turned away from the wood stove to look at the cabin window. It was beginning to get light outside. If the men had found a toboggan in the last hours of the night, they would probably be at our cabin in less than an hour.
FORTY
Gertie was taking long, deep breaths. It was a relief to see that she was, for the moment, not freezing or terrified. The fire was still burning with a low, wavering, yellow flame. The logs had turned to mounds of coals. I stood up and, tip-toeing, added two more splits to the fire.
With light in the cabin, I took another look around.
It was a classic, small summer cabin, probably built 70 or 80 years ago and never updated. No electricity. And no phone line. The small, removable water tank over the sink
and the collection bucket under the sink were the only plumbing. In a small closet by the door was a porta potty of the type that people take in their RVs for camping.
I stepped outside and saw that a weather system was building. Light, tiny snowflakes peppered my face. I hoped a good storm would bury our stop-sign toboggan tracks, even though I knew that the men in the cargo van would either be coming down the mountain on a toboggan at that moment, or they’d be studying Google maps and satellite photos, figuring out where the closest plowed road would be in relation to our probable location. They could drive to that spot, wherever it was, and with snowshoes, winter clothing, and weapons, come through the forest to find us.
Either method of finding us could happen fast.
It was likely that Spot would still be in the Jeep. He’d be cold, but I thought he would be able to last a day or more. Hopefully, someone would come along and find him. I was worried, but there was nothing I could do.
I studied the landscape outside the cabin door, where the forest was thicker and thinner, where it rose and fell, how the slope came down to the lake, how the land would direct the route of anyone making their way toward the cabin. Somewhere near the cabin was the road or lane that I knew had to be there to bring people to the cabin in the summer. It might be the easiest path on which to go from the cabin. But it was hidden under the thick blanket of snow and the tangle of numerous trees and brush. The snow was so deep that no one could walk through it. Without snowshoes, skis, or a plowed path, we were trapped.
The best emergency snowshoes were made from thick boughs of fir trees. There was a smallish one ten yards from the cabin. Away from the lake. In the deep snow. So close, but I had no idea how to get there through six feet of soft snow. Maybe it was just as well, because the road would also direct the men into the woods. I went back inside.