“Keep plugging, kid,” I said. He didn’t hear me. I picked up my ax and went out again. The wind was whipping the snow from the trees now, and sweeping it off the ground, to add to what was already in the air; it was clearly going to be one of those nights when man is just a bug clinging to a rock in a hostile universe. It occurred to me to wonder if Van Horn had had any men following me today. Well, they were his responsibility, not mine. I carried in several more loads of wood; fortunately there was plenty of down timber around. I dragged a couple of logs near the door where I could work on them in the morning. It was getting too dark to be wandering around out there; I almost missed the cabin on the last trip. I went back inside. It would have been a pleasant scene if it had not been for the boy lying on the floor. Nina was setting up the stand for my two-burner gasoline stove in the corner.
“There’s coffee on the fire,” she said. “The guns are over on the bunk.”
“Did you wipe them off?”
“No,” she said dryly, “I thought they’d look prettier rusty.”
“Sorry,” I said. “How’s he doing?”
“No change. Dr. Gregory, do you think he…” Her voice seemed to fade out for a minute. It was a queer sensation. “Dr. Gregory!” she said sharply. She was standing right in front of me now. I wasn’t quite sure how she had got there. “Sit down over here,” she said, taking my arm. “I’ll bring you some coffee. How about a little whisky in it?”
I nodded, sat down on the bunk, pulled off my cap and gloves and shook the snow off them.
“I’m all right,” I said when she came back to me.
“You’d better be,” she said, and put an aluminum cup in my hands. “Drink this. If you crack up, I’ll just shoot all three of us, Dr. Gregory. I don’t want to be a little heroine all by myself.”
The hot coffee laced with whisky tasted wonderful. I sipped it and looked up at her. She still looked like a teddy bear in the heavy jacket that she had unbuttoned but had not taken time to remove. Her hair was damp and spiky all over her head; it looked as if she had given it a quick rub with a towel and forgotten about it. Looking at her, I had the odd and rather disturbing feeling of recognition that you sometimes get with a girl. A little voice says: This one would do. It doesn’t have to mean anything; usually it doesn’t. You may be happily married to the woman of your choice. She may be happily married and have five perfect children. It’s just a little reminder that life is a series of random occurrences that could have occurred differently.
I said, “Most people call me Greg. Some call me Jim. Take your choice.”
She laughed. “Most people call me Nina. May I ask a question?”
“Ask ahead.”
“You said your wife was on her way to Reno to divorce you when she disappeared. You even gave the impression that… well, that some people think she might have disappeared of her own accord. Well, if that’s the case, why not let her go?”
I said, “Because I’ve got to be sure, Spanish… I mean, Nina. Don’t you see? If this is the way she wants it, okay. If she wants to go to Reno, I won’t stand in her way. If she wants to disappear, that’s her business. But no ringtailed monkey of a two-bit conspirator is going to take my wife anywhere she doesn’t want to go, or make her do anything she doesn’t want to do. Not as long as she’s my wife, he isn’t.”
“You’re a funny person,” she said. “You’re not at all what I would have expected from the work you do.”
I got up and went over to the corner where the food was piled, found the pint flask, and poured a little whisky into my empty cup. I found another cup, poured a little into that, too, and went back to where she was standing and put it into her hands. A gust of wind shook the cabin and blew snow through the crack beneath the door. It set up a low, roaring note in the stove-pipe that lasted for a second or two and died away. Nina tasted the liquor in the cup.
“It doesn’t taste like much without ice,” she said.
“If ice is what you want,” I said, “there’s plenty around.”
I sat down beside her. It was a very peculiar situation. If it had not been for the boy on the floor, I might have tried to take advantage of it in a polite and gentlemanly way. I certainly won’t ask anyone to believe that the idea never crossed my mind. That it had crossed hers, too, was apparent from the little look she gave me, clearly estimating just what she might have to contend with before the night was over.
I said abruptly, “People expect us to live up to our publicity as cold, objective, unemotional men of science, dedicated exclusively to the advancement of human knowledge. It’s that way with any art or profession; the guy usually doesn’t look at all the way he does in the movies. I had the biggest shock of my life the first time I met an opera singer. I expected some kind of a pansy. He turned out to be a big tough guy who used to work as deckhand on a freighter. His pet parlor trick after he’d had a couple of drinks—and he was a guy who might just take a couple of drinks if you coaxed him—was to lie down on the floor and ask you to jump on his stomach with both feet. Then there’s the sensitive artist type we know in Albuquerque, who likes to paint deserts. He strolls around Death Valley in the middle of summer with all his paraphernalia on his back, having a whale of a good time at a hundred and ten in the shade. One day he decided he was just packing too damn much stuff around, and the only thing he didn’t need to paint with was the canteen. So now he’s trained himself to go all day without water. Just a creampuff, like us highbrow intellectuals.” I shook my head. “I was born on a farm in Wisconsin. Nobody thought I was particularly bright until I got to high school; and that it was just a math teacher who helped me get a scholarship to Chicago because I could do cute tricks with numbers in my head, even though I was hard to catch during hunting season and still am. I used to like fishing, too, but not as much, so when my time got limited and I had to choose between them, I kept the guns and let the tackle go.”
“I know,” she said, smiling. “You told me that, driving up here.”
I got to my feet. “Well, it’s bad enough to tell a girl the story of your life; but when you start repeating yourself it’s really time to quit… Nina.”
“Yes,” she said, looking up.
“Don’t worry about it. I’m lousy with self-control. I even quit smoking once and never went back. You’re just as safe as you want to be.”
She laughed and rose to face me. “That sounds as if I might not be safe at all.”
I said, “Well, you wouldn’t want to think there wasn’t a little risk, Spanish. That would take all the fun out of life. Besides, you wouldn’t deprive me of the male privilege of acting virile and dangerous, even though I’m so bushed that five minutes from now you’re going to have drag me out the door if the place catches fire, since I’ll be too sound asleep to wake up for anything.”
“I’ll do it, too,” she promised. “Good night, Jim.”
SIXTEEN
IN THE MORNING we had scrambled eggs and bacon washed down with strong coffee, so you would hardly classify it as a hardship case as far as two of us were concerned; and the boy was still with us. Afterwards I went down to the creek for water. The wind was still blowing and the snow was still falling, but weather never looks quite so bad when you know you’ve got seven or eight hours of daylight ahead of you. The temperature wasn’t anything to complain about, either; probably around fifteen or twenty above zero, which in that dry air is no cold at all. You never get really cold weather out there with a cloudy sky. When it clears off is when the mercury can hit twenty below without half trying. But it was late in the season for a real cold snap; and there was hope that this storm might be followed directly by a thaw.
When I returned to the cabin, Nina had the sleeping bags draped over the bunk to air. She had disposed of the rotten straw mattress, probably in the stove, and was sweeping out the place with a little hand whiskbroom I keep in the car, that had got brought in with the rest of the paraphernalia.
“He was awake for a minute,” sh
e said. “He recognized me.”
“Good,” I said.
“If… if he lives, I’ll be grateful all the rest of my life,” she said.
“Sure,” I said. “Where the hell’s the detergent?” I found the bottle and dumped a capful into the pail I had brought in, set it on the stove to heat and began to scrape the dishes. I heard her laugh. “What’s so funny?” I asked.
“Why is it that the easiest way to make a man squirm is to start talking about gratitude? Leave those dishes alone; I’ll do them. Come over here and take your shirt off; I’ll bet those dressings on your back are a mess by this time.” I dropped the dishes into the pail to soak, and went over and peeled to the waist, which took a little doing, what with the stuff I had on. She said, “You’re just a big hero, aren’t you? Why didn’t you say something?”
I asked, “Just what the hell were you going to do about it, kiss it and make it well?”
“Well, hang on now. This is going to hurt.”
She pried the tape loose and yanked it off in a nice, brutal, professional way; it takes somebody with hospital training to really get the most out of a hunk of adhesive tape. Then she cleaned things up and taped me again; and went over to throw the old bandages into the stove while I got my clothes back on.
“How does it look out there?” she asked.
“Still coming down. I wouldn’t say it had slacked off very much.” I glanced at my watch, remembered that I hadn’t wound it this morning, and repaired the oversight. “Remind me in about fifteen minutes and I’ll go out and try to pick up a nine o’clock weather report on the car radio, although I don’t know how much reception I’m going to get down among all this rock…”
I broke off as the boy on the floor began to moan in a distressed way, squirming in his blankets. He spoke the first comprehensible words I had heard out of him since we found him.
“Hurts!” he gasped. “Ah, it hurts…”
“Where, Tony?” she cried, kneeling beside him. “What hurts?”
“My chest…”
There was more, but you couldn’t read it. He thrashed around weakly; then curled up in a tight ball, hugging himself. He seemed suddenly to be shaking all over. You could actually hear his teeth chattering. I went over to the bunk and got my sleeping bag, which contains six pounds of Dacron—not quite as warm or as light as down, but a lot less expensive. She had already zipped it fully open to air it. I spread it over the kid like a blanket. She tucked it around him tightly. Presently she rose and looked at me; we moved off together a little distance, the way you do when you are going to talk about a sick person.
“Jim, we’ve got to get him to a doctor,” she said. “I’m not much of a nurse, but my mother died of pneumonia and this looks like the same thing.”
I said, “It can’t be done, Spanish.”
“It’s got to be done. He’ll die if he doesn’t get the proper treatment.”
I said, “We’d have to take the car, to keep him warm. Making a toboggan of sorts and hauling him would probably be easier, but he couldn’t stand it. And we’ve got six solid miles of snow down the canyon; and there’s no assurance they’ll have put a blade over the state road when we get there—if we get there. They don’t usually plow those little roads until they’ve got the main highways clear, and that’ll probably keep them busy all of today. So it adds up to a possible twenty-five miles of shoveling to reach the highway. And I simply haven’t got the strength for it. Not even six miles of it. There’s no use kidding ourselves. I couldn’t do it. I’m sorry.”
She said, “I can use a shovel.”
I said, “Sure. You’re a big husky girl and you can carry the damn car through the drifts on your back.” I shook my head. “Let’s face the facts. If we get a couple of miles down the road and poop out, we’re worse off than if we’d never started. He’s worse off.” After a moment I said, “Even if it is pneumonia, people have lived through it.”
“Not in a place like this. Not after being poisoned by exhaust gas.”
I said, “We aren’t taking him out, Spanish. Not the two of us, by ourselves. Because we couldn’t make it. There’s an alternative, however. If you can hold the fort, I’ll go out on foot and get some help.”
She hesitated, and studied my face. “It’s a long way. If the storm should get worse again you might… might have trouble.”
I said, “Hell, legally it’s spring even if the weather doesn’t seem to have heard about it. This thing won’t last much longer. But it’s apt to take me a little time. If there’s nobody on the road, I’ll have to hoof it to that ranch we passed about fourteen miles back. Say I do two miles per hour; that’s seven hours. Then I’ll have to round up some equipment and get back here. There’s not much chance of my making it before dark. Think you’ll be all right?”
She nodded. “I’ll be all right. But maybe I should go. I haven’t been sick like you. I’m in good shape.”
I grinned. “You certainly are, Spanish. I’ve been admiring your shape for quite a while.” I stopped grinning, and said, “No. You know more about taking care of him than I do. Well, make me up a couple of sandwiches, will you, while I get some stuff together?”
I got my compass, hunting knife, waterproof match safe, drinking cup, and a small flashlight out of my hunting kit; then I picked up the .270 and shoved five shells into the magazine, closed the bolt on the empty chamber, and adjusted the sling so the gun would hang easily from my shoulder. I dropped a handful of extra cartridges into my pocket.
“What’s that for?” Nina asked, coming up with a paper bag in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. “The gun, I mean.”
“I wouldn’t feel natural, walking around the mountains without a gun.”
“That’s silly,” she said. “It’s seven or eight pounds more weight to carry. There’s nothing in these mountains that’ll hurt you.”
I glanced at the sick boy, and said, “You’ve got a short memory, Spanish. I might meet a jeep. I always wanted a nice stuffed jeep head over the mantelpiece. You’d better load up that thirty-thirty when I’m gone.” I pocketed the sandwiches, drank the coffee, and gave the cup back. “Well, be good,” I said, and went out.
The wind was still blowing, but it was coming down the canyon so I had it with me. The visibility wasn’t as bad as it had been the day before. I passed the cars; snow had drifted up against them until you could hardly see them from windward. I was glad I had plenty of anti-freeze in the Pontiac. Then I was in the timber again and there was nothing to remind me of the place except a whiff of wood-smoke carried by the wind.
It took me an hour to reach the first bridge, which was no better than par for the course. The hour entitled me to five minutes’ rest—if you don’t put yourself on some kind of schedule, you’ll find yourself sitting on every stump along the road—so I set the gun against a tree and went down to the creek for water. It was hard to get at for the ice along the bank, but I managed to crack this without getting wet. The water was too cold to drink fast. I squatted on the bank, sipping it cautiously and listening to the noise of the creek and thinking about nothing in particular except the various aches that were developing in my thighs from lifting each foot out of one hole in the snow and setting it down in another a small distance ahead. Then I heard a sound. It was no more than a break in the rippling sound of the creek; I could not identify it. I got up slowly; after you’ve hunted a while, you get out of the habit of making quick motions. I emptied the cup, collapsed it, put it back into its case, and dropped it into my pocket, listening all the while. I moved deliberately back to the rifle and picked it up, but did not sling it on my shoulder. I listened some more. Then I pulled the bolt out of the gun and looked down the bore to make sure no snow had blocked the muzzle. I replaced the bolt, feeding the top cartridge from the magazine to the chamber. I set the safety and put my gloves back on.
I waited a while longer. Nothing happened. My heart started beating normally again. I shrugged, and started down the road; and
stopped abruptly, hearing, from ahead, three faint shots in rapid succession, the universal wilderness cry for help.
SEVENTEEN
THERE WERE TWO of them. Their scoutmaster would have been proud of them; they had managed to build a fire in the lee of a big granite boulder. They weren’t dressed for the country or the weather. They seemed to be wearing ordinary low shoes, and pants that had probably been nicely creased yesterday but were frozen shapeless about their legs today. The taller of the two was wearing one of those green waist-length airforce jackets that are warm enough as far as they go but leave the seat of your pants hanging out to freeze. He had either come out without a hat or it had blown away; he had a white handkerchief tied about his head like a bandage, covering his ears.
The shorter man was wearing a light topcoat, and a Stetson that I thought looked familiar. As I came closer, I recognized the amiable features of Paul Edward Van Horn, bearded, and blue with cold. Both men were cold and tired enough to have little interest in looking around them, particularly if it involved facing the wind, and the snow that had ceased falling in big flakes and was now coming down in small, hard grains that, windborne, seemed to have a cutting edge. I was almost on top of them before they saw me.
“Hi, Van,” I said, stopping by the fire.
He said, “Well, I’m glad to see you alive, Dr. Gregory. We’ve been looking for you.”
“Who’s shooting at what?” I asked.
“We weren’t quite sure you’d come this way; the tracks were pretty well drifted over when we started up in here last night. As a matter of fact we were about to turn back, but decided to stop and thaw out a little first. I just fired a few shots in case you might be somewhere within hearing.”
“Where’s your car?”
“About three miles back, stuck tight. We didn’t have chains, only snow tires. We spent the night there. The engine quit around three this morning. It got a little chilly after that.”
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