The Mountain Between Us

by Charles Martin

“Come on…out with it. Why’re you separated?”

  I wanted out of this conversation.

  “Still not telling me, are you?”

  I didn’t respond.

  Her tone changed. “What if…”

  I knew it was coming. “Yes?”

  “What if we don’t make it out…what then?”

  “You mean, ‘what good is it?’ And given that possibility, why am I still talking into it?”

  “Something like that.”

  I turned around, walked back to face Ashley. The snow was thigh-deep. Blue skies were giving way to gray, heavy clouds threatening snow.

  I tapped my chest. “I’ve operated on thousands of people. Many were in bad shape. Much worse than us. Never once have I thought They’re not going to make it, they won’t get better. By design, doctors are some of the most optimistic people on the planet. We have to be. Can you imagine a doctor who wasn’t? You’d sit there and ask, ‘Doc, do you think I’ll make it?’ What if I shook my head and said, ‘I don’t think so.’ I wouldn’t make it in medicine very long because no one would come to see me.

  “We have to look at very bad situations and find ways to make them better. Every day is a chess match. Us against evil. Most days we win. Some days we don’t.” I swirled my hand in a large motion in front of me. “And we do all of this because of one word.” I tapped the recorder. “Hope. It circulates in our veins. It’s what fuels us.”

  I turned away. A single tear trickled down my face. I spoke softly. “I will play this for Rachel. I will play the sound of your voice.”

  Ashley nodded, closed her eyes, and lay back.

  I returned to the front, grabbed the handles, and began pulling. From behind me I heard “You still haven’t answered my question.”

  “I know.”

  WEATHER UP HERE IS FICKLE. Blink, and clouds will move in, cover you up, shower you in snow or ice. You can be cold all day, but come dark, you find your face and lips are sunburnt and peeling. Your cheeks are burned from the wind, your feet are blistered.

  If water is available, people can normally make it three weeks without food. But up here, where we’re burning twice as many calories just to breathe and shiver, not to mention pull a gurney through four feet of powder, that time is a bit less. This land is harsh and unforgiving, beautiful and magnificent yet unbending. Biting cold one second, hot the next, frigid the next.

  Five minutes passed, clouds blew in, mist covered the mountain. Pretty soon the snow was blowing sideways. Even circling. It stung my face and made walking nearly impossible. We wouldn’t last much longer in this storm. There was no place to hide. No shelter. I stared into that white darkness and made a tough decision.

  I turned us around.

  The walk back was disheartening. I hated giving up ground we’d already gained, but better to give it up and live than keep it and die. Four hours later, we were back at the crash. I could barely move. I got Ashley comfortable. Her face was riddled with pain. She said nothing. I forced my eyes open until she fell asleep.

  I WOKE UP FOUR HOURS LATER. Shivering. I’d never pulled off my wet clothes. A costly mistake. The sleeping bag is designed to insulate the temperature inside it. Be that cold or hot. I was cold and wet—two conditions that deteriorate the bag’s insulating ability, or R-value. I stripped, hung my clothes over a wing support, stoked the fire, and crawled back into my bag, shivering. It took me nearly an hour to get warm—which meant I wasn’t sleeping but rather spending energy I didn’t have and couldn’t spare. Not only costly, but stupid. Mistakes like that will kill you when you’re not looking.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  She did not look impressed. “So what’s today’s adventure?”

  Her voice rattled around my head. It took me a minute to remember where I was. I felt hungover. Disoriented.

  “Huh?”

  “You going to sleep all day? I’ve been trying to let you sleep ’cause I know you’re tired, but I’ve really got to go and it’s not like I can just cross my legs.”

  I sat up. “Sorry. You should wake me.”

  “You were sleeping really hard, so I tried without you, but I don’t have enough hands and didn’t want to soak my bag.”

  I nodded. Rubbed my eyes. “Good call.”

  “What day is this?”

  I raised my watch and couldn’t see anything on the face. I pressed the Indiglo button. Nothing happened. I pushed it again. Harder. Still nothing. I shook it and held it up to the daylight.

  A deep, spiderwebbing crack spread across the glass from bottom left corner to top right. Condensation had gathered beneath.

  “I don’t know.”

  She noticed the watch. “That important?”

  “Rachel gave it to me. Years ago.”

  “Sorry.” She was quiet a minute. Her voice was softer. “How many days have we been doing this?”

  Napoleon was licking my ear. “Twelve…I think.”

  She nodded, calculating. “Florence. I think we’d be in Florence now. We reserved this suite in a hotel on the Arno River overlooking the Ponte Vecchio. The brochure said you could see the lights of the Duomo in the distance…. I’ve always wanted to see that.”

  When I sat up, the cold gripped my chest and reminded me I had stripped in the middle of the night. She studied the purple bruise on my rib cage. “How you doing?”

  “Okay. It’s not as tender.”

  She pointed to the key at the end of the wrist strap on my recorder. “You really need that out here?”

  “You’re kind of nosy, aren’t you?”

  “Well…if you’re cutting weight…” She shrugged. “What’s it fit?”

  “Rachel’s house.”

  “You mean the house you built her but don’t live in, where she keeps the kids and you rarely get to see them.”

  “My…aren’t we full of ourselves today.”

  “Just telling it like I see it.”

  I pulled my shirt down and began slipping into my cold, damp clothes. In doing so, I was able to see myself in the daylight. She did, too.

  “You’re skinny.”

  “It’s this crash weight loss diet I’ve been trying out.”

  She chuckled, then started laughing. It was contagious. A good way to start the day.

  I checked her leg, helped her take care of the necessities, and started melting snow in the Jetboil. I didn’t know how much fuel we had left, but it had to be running low. The tank has no gauge, and it’s designed to be portable, not endless in its supply. When I shook it, it did not sound promising. At sea level, it would boil water in about seventy-five seconds. Up here, it was taking three to four times that long. Requiring more fuel and depleting the tank four times faster than normal. The fuel in Grover’s lighter had nearly evaporated. While Zippo lighters look cool and sound cool, reminding me of the Rat Pack, James Dean, or Bruce Willis in Die Hard, they require filling. Often weekly. Again, it’s a portable fuel supply. Not endless. Big difference. Any matches I’d had when we started were long gone. Our options were low, and we needed fire. I’d have to keep my eyes peeled for wood that I could use to make a bow drill.

  It was midday. Given low clouds, an overcast sky, and dropping temperature, the snow had frozen on top. That created favorable walking conditions. Frozen snow meant that with my snowshoes I could spend more time on top of the snow rather than down in it. Requiring less energy. Allowing us, in theory, to travel farther.

  I laced up my boots, strapped on my gaiters, and slid into my jacket. One sleeve was torn around the elbow, and little down feathers were slipping out. My hands were starting to take a beating. I cut strips from the sleeves of Grover’s denim jacket and wrapped them round my hands.

  Given that we’d packed yesterday, it didn’t take us long to do it again. I loaded the “sled,” gave Ashley a few pieces of meat to chew on, along with some water, and pulled her to the opening—remembering the painful bump at the entrance. I slid her gently over it and out into the open air. The tempe
rature felt twenty degrees colder. I looked at the sled, studied my process of the day before, and realized I needed a harness. Something that kept my hands free, let me pull with my legs and chest, and yet kept me connected to the sled in case of a mishap. I crawled back inside, removed the seat belt harness from Grover’s seat using Grover’s Leatherman. I attached a cord from the harness to the sled and buckled myself in. It made an X across my chest, allowed me to pull my arms free, and, given the quick release buckle, let me pop out of it in a hurry if I started slipping and needed to disconnect so I didn’t drag Ashley down over the side of the mountain with me.

  Dubious, she tilted her head. She had a mouthful of meat and was moving it from one side to the other. I pulled off my jacket, picked up Napoleon, and slid both inside the bag with her. If I wore my jacket in the harness, I’d be sweating in a matter of minutes, soaking the inside of my jacket and reducing the R-value to almost nothing. This way, she kept it warm and dry, so that when we stopped, I could slip it on, keeping warm. A crucial decision. I strapped myself in, leaned into the weight, and began pulling.

  After an hour we’d gone maybe 500 meters, dropping maybe a hundred feet in elevation. Every three steps was followed by several seconds of rest. Then three more steps. Then more rest. It was painfully slow progress. But it was progress.

  She was not impressed. “Seriously…” She took a sip of water. “How long do you think you can do this?” The good news was that she’d been eating and drinking at a slow, easily digestible pace nearly all day.

  “Don’t know.” I watched her out of the corner of my eye.

  “We can’t do this. You can’t.” She pointed at the skyline with a piece of jerky. “Look around you. We are in the middle of BFE.”

  “BFE?”

  “Bum-you-know-what-Egypt.”

  I stopped, sweat dripping off my face, breathing deeply.

  “Ashley?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Ashley?”

  She crossed her arms.

  “We can’t stay up there. If we do, we’ll die. And I can’t leave you. If I do, you’ll die. So we’re walking out.”

  Her frustration at being helpless bubbled over. She screamed. “It’s been twelve damn days and not a soul has come looking and we’re maybe a mile from where we started. At this rate, it’ll be Christmas before we get out of here.”

  “They don’t know to look.”

  “Okay, then…what’s your plan? How do you plan to get us out of here?”

  This was fear talking. Not logic. No amount of talking would satisfy it. “One step at a time.”

  “And how long do you think you can keep that up?”

  “As long as it takes.”

  “And what if you can’t.”

  “I can.”

  “But how do you know?”

  “What’s my choice?”

  She closed her eyes, pulled Napoleon in close, and stared at the sky. I pulled out the compass, took a reading of 125 degrees, picked a small ridgeline in the distance as a marker, and started putting one foot in front of the other. Last night’s snow had completely covered yesterday’s tracks. There was no evidence we’d ever left the crash site.

  We didn’t speak for several hours.

  My course took me slightly downhill and through the trees. The snow was heavy, as were the drifts. The ten to fourteen feet of snow beneath us meant we were walking through limbs that, come summertime, would be well above our heads. Evergreen limbs hold a lot of snow, although when you walk by and brush them, they don’t try and keep it all to themselves. They dump as much as possible on you. I was constantly shaking out the snow from around my neck. I took my time, gauging my breathing and my energy level. I took plenty of rest between steps. If I started to get overheated, I’d slow down, take a few more breaths between steps. We were moving at a snail’s pace. In a little over six hours, we’d come what I judged to be a little more than a mile.

  It was nearly dark when I stopped.

  I was soaking wet with sweat and exhausted, but I knew if I didn’t start making my fire bow, I’d regret it. I slid Ashley beneath the limbs of an evergreen and up alongside a rock. The ground beneath her had been protected from the snow so it was actually dirt and dried evergreen needles. A squirrel had been here eating a pinecone. I pulled off my sweaty shirt, hung it on a limb, gathered several handfuls of dead pine needles along with some small twigs, and made a small fire next to Ashley. It lit quickly. And I was right about the Jetboil. When I clicked it to start the fire, it hiccupped. We had maybe a day left in the tank. I gathered more sticks, laid them in a pile next to her, and said, “Tend this. Don’t let it die. I’ll be within shouting distance.”

  “What’re you doing?”

  “Making a bow.”

  She stared at Grover’s bow strapped to the end of the sled. “I thought we had one of those.”

  “I’m not making that kind.”

  I started making wide circles, looking for two pieces of wood. One piece, maybe three feet long with a bit of an arc, across which I could thread a shoestring or piece of cord and then a second straight piece out of which I could cut the spindle—something that would end up being about the size of the handle of a hammer. Maybe a bit shorter. Took me about thirty minutes to find both.

  I slipped through the trees, the snow crunching under my makeshift snowshoes. Walking was a constant struggle. I stopped at a distance. Catching my breath. Maybe spying is a better word. She was sitting up, tending the fire. The glow of the fire on her face. Even there, even then, she was beautiful. There was no denying that.

  The difficulty of our situation was always on my mind. Always tugging at me. What faced us was nearing the impossible. But I hadn’t really seen us through her eyes. Her sleeping bag. Her sitting there with nothing to do but tend the fire and scratch Napoleon’s head. She was dependent on me for everything. Eating. Movement. Food. Water. Going to the bathroom. She couldn’t do a thing, other than sleep, without me. If I’d had to be as dependent on someone else for the last twelve days as she was on me, I’d have been much more difficult to live with.

  Doctors are used to sweeping into the midst of a problem, swooshing down like Zeus from on high, fixing it, and then getting out before the aftermath sets in. Nurses and RNAs do all the dirty work. Much of the true “doctoring.” Ashley needed both a doctor and a “doctor.” Being one was easy. Being the other was not. I didn’t know how to make that any better. I just knew I wanted to.

  I returned to the fire, slid into my bag, chewed on some meat, and made myself drink water. While the Jetboil was failing, I could still use the upper piece that we cooked in. Sort of a small coffee can sort of thing. At any rate, it was aluminum and would stand up to heat. So I filled it with snow and leaned it against the coals.

  We drank and ate for the next hour while I worked on my bow. When I’d buried Grover, I unlaced his boots and stored the laces in my pocket. They were about to come in handy. I pulled out a lace, tied a knot in one end, threaded it through the groove on one end of the bow, pulled it tight, and slid it through the groove on the other end, securing it with a few loops and a knot. Not too snug, but tight enough so that when I twisted the spindle into it, there would be enough tension on the string to spin the spindle. It’s sort of a touch thing and takes a few stringings of the bow to get it right. I cut the spindle to about ten inches, carved both ends into points—with one end wider for more friction—and then cut a groove in the middle that would help hold the shoelace in place.

  That finished, I set it aside, drank the last of my water, and looked up for the first time in a long time.

  Ashley was staring at me. “You can be intense when you want to,” she said.

  “I have a feeling we’re going to need that tomorrow.”

  She crossed her arms. “I need an update. What you think. Where are we? That sort of thing.”

  “I think we made it about a mile from the crash site. Tomorrow morning I’m going to climb that small r
ise over there and see if I can tell what’s in the other plateau on the other side. We’ll stay on our current heading, as much as the mountain will allow, and we’ve probably got enough meat for several more days. So I think we just keep going. It’ll help you to stay as hydrated as you can. Eat as much of the food as you like, and tell me when I jar you too much.” I shrugged. “I’m sorry when I do. I know today was rough on you.”

  She let out a deep breath. “I’m sorry I jumped at you this morning.”

  I shook my head. “You’re in a tough place. You can’t do much of anything without my help. That’d be difficult for anyone.”

  I placed more wood on the fire, slid close enough to be warm but not set myself aflame, and closed my eyes. Sleep was falling on me fast. Then I thought of Ashley. I forced my eyes open. She was staring at me. “You need anything?”

  She shook her head. Tried to smile.

  “You sure?”

  “No.”

  She was asleep in seconds.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  It was difficult to wake up knowing we’d been doing this for thirteen days. I shook off the sleep and was dressed before daylight. The fire was out, but a few coals remained. I fed it, blew on it, and fanned a flame in minutes. I fed it again, scratched Napoleon, and then headed up the small rise above us to get a view of our surroundings.

  I took my time. Studying every indentation. Every seam in the mountain. I kept asking myself, does anything look man-made?

  The answer was a resounding no. Everything was pristine and untouched. A nature lover’s paradise. I loved nature as much as the next guy, but this was ridiculous.

  I steadied the compass, let the needle settle, and took a reading. I stared across the face of the compass at the mountains in the distance. To get to them we’d have to travel all day, maybe two, through tall trees and deep snow. Wouldn’t be easy, and once in them, I’d lose all sense of bearing. Never make it without the compass. In the trees, I’d lose all sense of perspective. Direction. Maybe life is like that.

  My bearings would take us through a gap and hopefully to a lower elevation. Staring out at the immense wilderness reminded me. I could lose most everything and still have a chance. But not without the compass. I tied it to a piece of nylon cord and tethered it around my neck.