The Mountain Between Us

by Charles Martin

  “His what?”

  “Draw length. Each bow fits the person shooting it. Like shoes. To a point, you can wear the wrong size, but it’s not real comfortable.” I stared out at the dark clouds rolling in across the peaks opposite us. “Looks like snow today. And lots of it. I’d like to get through those trees before the worst of that drops on us.”

  She nodded. “I’m game.”

  We packed quickly, something we’d gotten good at, and I was back in the harness before I had time to dread it. I’d just strapped on my snowshoes and taken the first of several steps when she called from behind me. “Ben?”

  I stopped, not looking back. “Yeah.”

  She said it quieter this time. “Ben?”

  The tone of voice was different. I turned and walked back to the sled, tangling myself in the straps. “Yeah.”

  She stared up out of the bag. The scar above her eye would heal, but it was pink and needed antibiotic ointment. She reached out, grabbed my hand. The denim strips from Grover’s jacket were fraying and hung like dirty rags off my hands. My gloves had numerous holes, and my right index finger was sticking out. She grabbed my hand, rewrapping the denim strip around it. “You okay?”

  She was asking about more than just my feet or my stomach.

  I knelt and let out a deep breath. “I’m okay as long as I don’t think past the next step.” Shook my head. “Just one at a time.”

  She nodded and braced herself for the constant shifting and banging on the sled.

  THE SNOW DIDN’T HOLD OFF. It began dropping quarter-sized flakes in the first hour. Walking the mile through the trees took us more than three hours. We emerged where a steep slope fell off into a valley of sorts. ’Course, I was just guessing it was a valley, because given the total whiteout conditions, I had no real idea.

  We pulled up under the snow-weighted limbs of an evergreen, and I pulled out the sketch I’d made of the area. I guessed we were some eight miles from the crash site, on the edge of a valley. I’d knew we’d walked down a 125-degree line, but we were also dodging to the right and left to skirt around rocks, ledges, small peaks, downed trees. We were probably two to three miles off our original azimuth, or line. This was to be expected, and there was little I could do about it. Walking a straight line in the wilderness is seldom possible. Walking in a straight direction is. But there’s a big difference between straight line and straight direction. Both will take you in the same direction, but not to the same place.

  People experienced with reading compasses, and who take it seriously, who engage in what’s called orienteering, can overcome the side-to-side adjustments required by conditions and return to a straight line, allowing them to arrive at an actual predetermined point. I wasn’t that good.

  Think of it this way: When we started, I set out on a given degree, 125. I then quickly bumped into a small peak that I could not climb, so we walked around. Once we got to the other side, I continued on our original heading—although we were now over a mile from that original line. It’s something like walking on a grid. We can walk down one line, turn right, walk three squares, then turn back left and continue in our original direction. Only now we’re three squares off our original line. While we were now eight to nine miles from the crash site, we’d probably walked close to twice that, given the back-and-forth that the conditions forced upon us.

  My sketch suggested we were fifteen or twenty miles yet from the single line I’d seen on the GPS that might have been a logging road or hiker’s trail or something. We were fourteen days into this and moving at a snail’s pace. As much as I wanted to keep going, I needed to make a shelter and not move until we had more food. Without fuel, we wouldn’t make it another few days. After that, I’d be too tired to hunt for it.

  With the hatchet, I cut into the tree that hid us and pulled down some limbs, giving us an entry on the lee side, and then laid those limbs on the windward side to give us more protection. I cut more limbs from a nearby tree, stacking them like vertical boards against the others, and hand-shoveled snow against the base. I fed the tips inside the limbs of our tree to hold them up, then inserted more cut limbs inside the limbs of our tree, sort of like rafters in an attic. Within an hour, we had a fair shelter.

  Ashley nodded. “Not bad.”

  “I wouldn’t want to live here, but it’ll do in a pinch.”

  I was dreading what came next. The bow drill. I gathered tinder, needles, and small twigs and even shaved some fuzz off one of my socks. I strung the bow and slowly began turning the spindle on the hearth board. Once I’d developed the hole and cut the notch, I gave myself to fully working the bow. At this altitude it took several minutes to get smoke, but once I got it, I kept tugging on the bow. Five minutes in, I had a lot of smoke and felt like I might have enough to make a coal. I set down the bow and spindle, picked up my hearth board, and studied my coal. It might work. I lifted it, blew gently, and a small red ember appeared. I blew again and blew too hard. It scattered like dust.

  I started over.

  This time I pulled on the bow for eight or nine minutes, making sure I had ample dust to create a coal. Anyone who’s ever done this will tell you that eight or nine minutes is a long time. Experienced bow drillers can do this whole thing from start to finish in two minutes or less. I was not that experienced.

  I set down the bow, lifted the hearth, blew gently, blew again, and this time smoke curled up. I blew some more, turning the coal red, then placed it gently inside my handful of tinder, needles, and sock fuzz while trying not to scatter the dust that was my coal. I blew some more. Blew some more. Blew some more.

  Finally, a small flame. I blew into it, the flame spread and grew, and I set the handful of coal inside my teepee of sticks and twigs.

  We had a fire.

  Ashley lay there shaking her head. “You’re better than Robinson Crusoe. You just made a fire without a match or gas or anything. How do you know how to do all this?”

  “When I was in my residency in Denver…”

  “Learning how to cut on people?”

  “Actually, I’d already learned that on cadavers, but I was doing a good bit of it.” A smile. “Rachel and I were spending more and more time in the mountains. Might call it cheap entertainment. Anyway, she had this wild idea that on one of our next trips, we weren’t taking anything with us that could make a fire. No matches, no lighter fluid, no gasoline, no camp stove. And certainly no Jetboil. She said we were doing this the old-fashioned way. If we couldn’t make it hot, we were staying cold. So I bought some books, read up on it, looked at the pictures, and tried it out a few times. Even called a local scoutmaster to give me some lessons. We went camping, and I figured out what did and didn’t work. In part, I learned how to make a fire.”

  “Remind me to thank her when I meet her.” Ashley pointed at me. “Where’d you learn to hold your mouth like that?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Whenever you’re concentrating on something, you make this face…” She flexed one side of her face. Looked like a string had been threaded through her right eyebrow down through her cheek and secured to the corner of her lip, then pulled up about three inches. “Like that.”

  “Does it look as painful as when you do it?”

  “I don’t know. Does it look painful?”

  “Very.”

  “Probably not. You make it look more…stupid looking.”

  “Thanks. I’ll remember that next time you need help with the necessaries.”

  She laughed. “Do your nurses make fun of you?”

  I turned up the right side of my face. “They can’t see it beneath the mask.”

  She lay back, closing her eyes. Quiet settled around us, and I realized that I had grown used to the sound of her voice. And for the first time, the silence caused me to wonder if I missed it when it wasn’t ringing through the air.

  SINCE OUR SHELTER was made entirely from evergreens, it smelled fresh, clean. “This is about the most eco-friendly house I’ve
ever stayed in.”

  She laughed. “Yep. Real green.”

  It was warm and comfortable, and the limbs above did a good job of providing shelter while also drawing the smoke out. It was late afternoon now, but with two hours of daylight left, I pulled on my jacket, tied on my snowshoes, and grabbed the bow. “I’m going to take a look about.”

  “Be gone long?”

  “An hour maybe.”

  I looked at Napoleon. “Be right back. Keep her company.” He turned in a circle and hid himself in her sleeping bag.

  One problem with a shelter like the one I’d just made is that the people who make them get inside, get comfortable, make a fire, and then set the whole thing aflame, bringing it down on top of themselves. Given her leg, Ashley wouldn’t be able to dig herself out, making a really bad situation.

  I pointed my finger at her. “Mind the fire. Don’t let it get too big. You do, and you’ll set our Christmas tree on fire, which would include you because I doubt you could dig yourself out. You’re pretty well barricaded in here. And keep that snow close at hand. If the fire gets too big, throw a few handfuls on top. Not too much. Don’t want to kill it. Just scale it back a bit. Agreed?”

  She nodded, made a snowball, and threw it at me.

  I climbed up a small ridge. The lee side was sheltered from the wind, so the snow cover was less. Sprigs of dead grass and ice-covered rock spotted the snow like bubblegum on a sidewalk. Maybe bird droppings was more like it.

  My lungs told me we were still above 10,000 feet. The air was thin, and even though we’d been at this for two weeks, I wasn’t used to it. Still caught myself taking deep breaths when sitting still. I guess that comes from living at sea level. It was easier, but it wasn’t easy.

  The snow had quit and clouds had flown through. The sky was gray, but the ceiling was high and I could see the whole valley stretched out before us. The ridgeline I was on made a half moon, which circled a larger valley below. Maybe ten to fifteen square miles in total. Frozen creeks and small streams creased between the trees, making wrinkles in the earth’s face. Except for the occasional rise or roll and pitch of a hill, it was mostly flat. “Flat” around here was a relative term, but it was certainly better than where we’d been.

  A couple hundred yards from our shelter, I reached a small ledge, sat down, zipped up my jacket against the wind, and studied the landscape. I cupped my hands around my eyes to help me focus and scanned every square acre, asking myself if anything I saw hinted at the possibility that it might be man-made. I did this until I grew cold and the light start growing dim.

  Just as the last light was fading, I caught a flash of something brown. It looked like the trunk of a tall tree except it was horizontal near the treetops. I squinted, even stared out of the sides of my vision trying to get a better view. It was hard to make out, but worth a second look. I opened my compass, took a reading of ninety-seven degrees, and turned the plastic marker on the face of the compass to ninety-seven degrees. It paid to be redundant.

  I started back to camp as darkness was falling. Twenty yards in front of me, something white flashed across my trail. I nocked an arrow and waited for any sign of movement. Five minutes I waited. Then a small hop. Followed by another. There, a small white rabbit. Big ears, big feet, hunched over and hopping beneath the trees.

  I drew, settled the first pin in the middle of the rabbit, let out half a breath, and squeezed the release. Just as the arrow left the bow, the rabbit hopped maybe six inches. My arrow sailed by harmlessly and buried itself in the snow. The rabbit bounced twice and disappeared.

  I searched for my arrow, but digging in the snow was painful to my blistered and cracking hands. I decided to leave it until tomorrow.

  ASHLEY HAD THE FIRE warm and crackling when I returned. She’d even managed to boil some water and heat up what was getting close to the last of our meat. Maybe a day left. She eyed the bow and the single arrow missing. “What happened?”

  “It hopped.”

  “And if it hadn’t?”

  “I’m pretty sure we’d be eating rabbit tonight.”

  “Maybe from now on you should let me hold them still while you shoot them.”

  “If you can catch them, I’m game for anything.”

  She laughed.

  “Say, do you feel like taking a walk?”

  She raised both eyebrows. “Seriously?”

  “Yeah. If you can lean on me, I think we could make our way up to this ridge. I need your eyes.”

  “See something?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. Hard to say. I’m not willing to risk it without both of us looking at it.”

  “What are we risking?”

  “I had thought we’d keep trying to lose elevation, but this thing I’m looking at would keep us up on the plateau for a few miles. It’s a two- or three-day change in direction, followed by another three or four to make up for lost ground. Seven days out of the way if I’m wrong.”

  I didn’t need to tell her that we were flirting with the edge as it was. Another week could kill us. We might be dead already and not know it.

  “What is it?”

  “Not sure. Looks something like a tree, only it’s lying flat at the level of the treetops. It’s a horizontal line in a sea of verticals.”

  “Is it safe for me to walk?”

  “No, and the sled would never make it. We’ll take it slow. One step at a time.”

  “I trust you. If you think we ought to.”

  “It’s not about trust. It’s about four eyes are better than two.”

  “When you want to go?”

  “First light. The rising sun may be our best chance.”

  Taking Ashley to the ledge was risky, but so was deciding our direction. When we first left the crash site, it was anybody’s guess. But now, now that we were committed and too far from the site to backtrack, we needed to make this together. Because I could see where the next week of walking would take us, our living or our dying rested to a great extent on which direction we headed.

  I also knew we needed a break.

  WE CLIMBED INTO OUR BAGS and watched the flame light the underside of the tree limbs. It was the first time I’d been overly warm and had to unzip my bag. Once I got some food in me I moved my attention to Ashley’s leg. Swelling was down and knotting and scar tissue were discernible around the break. All good signs.

  I sat opposite her, placed her good foot on my lap, and began rubbing deep into her arch, then her calf, and finally her hamstring and quadriceps to force the circulation.

  She looked up at me. “You sure you didn’t study massage?”

  “You’ve been lying prostrate for two weeks. We need to get the blood flowing. You try to stand up on these things, and you’re liable to look like a Weeble.”

  “A what?”

  “A Weeble. You know, ‘Weebles wobble, but they don’t fall down.’” I worked my thumb into the side of her right buttock. It was painful, and she winced, finally letting out a deep breath, and the muscle relaxed. You can look at someone and think one thing, but you put your hands on them and you really get to know what they’re made of. Ashley was all muscle. Long, lean, limber muscle. Which probably saved her life. A normal person would have folded in the fuselage.

  I gently moved to her left foot, careful not to torque her leg. I just needed to get into the muscle of her foot and calf, forcing blood flow. “I’d hate for you to get angry and kick me when your leg heals. You’re nothing but one big muscle.”

  “Don’t feel like much of one lying here.”

  “It’ll come back. A few weeks and you’ll be good as new.”

  “Your wife a good runner?”

  “First time I saw her in high school, I thought it was the most fluid thing I’d ever seen. Like watching water walk. Just floated across the infield. Her toes barely touched the ground.”

  She flinched as I worked deep into her calf. “When we get back, you’ve got to teach Vince how to do this.” She tossed her head back and hel
d her breath. Letting it out, she said, “Seriously, how’d you learn to do this?”

  “Rachel and I continued to run races through med school. By default, we became each other’s trainer. Which she needed, because she inherited some funny feet from her mom.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I touched the outside of her foot, just below her big toe. “Bunions.”

  “You actually rub that woman’s bunions?”

  I drove my thumb hard into her arch, curling her toes. “You find that hard to believe?”

  She shook her head. “That’s some seriously sick love right there.”

  “Vince doesn’t rub your feet?”

  “Not even if I gave him rubber gloves.”

  “I better talk to that man.”

  She snapped her fingers. “That’s a good idea. And while you’re making a list, add that little thing you did with the stick and making the fire.”

  I shook my head and smiled. “Nope.”

  “Why not?”

  I slid her sock back on and placed her foot inside the bag. “Because I think I’d convince him to do something else first.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Buy a satellite phone.”

  I’m not sure which was better, the fire or the sound of her giggling.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Warmed by the fire, I lay awake, staring at the ironic sight of another jetliner at 30,000 feet. Ashley was out. Slightly snoring. A gentle breeze filtered through our tree, pulled on the limbs above us, and added extra twinkle to a sky lit by ten billion stars. Tomorrow’s decision was worrying me. Had I really seen something or, after fifteen days, had I wanted to so badly that my mind convinced my eyes that I had?

  The sound woke me. Feet crunching snow. Sounded like two people standing outside our tree, grunting. Smacking their lips. Whatever it was had to be heavy, too, because when it crunched snow, it really crunched the snow. Packing it hard. I reached out to touch Ashley, but her hand met mine in the middle.