No, Mac thought, closing his eyes. Not much at all. But Rebecca was only forty miles away. So close…so close…
REBECCA OPENED HER EYES on a strange world. She felt odd, as though something was lying on top of her, pressing down on her, smothering her. She moved cautiously and a bolt of pain shot through her right arm. The pain was bad enough to make her ears ring and her stomach turn over. The object that was smothering her was the sled. Somehow she’d gotten underneath her sled, but why would she have done that?
A jolt of adrenaline rushed through her as she remembered what had happened. Her sled and her team had been blown off the summit! She moved abruptly, shoving with her left arm and twisting out from beneath the heavily loaded sled. Daylight! Relief helped her deal with the incredible pain of moving. At least she could see, although darkness was approaching.
She was on her knees and moving through the deep snow, holding her bad arm against her side. “Raven! Thor!” At her shouts there was movement all around her, and where before there had been only snow, she now saw heads poking up. She counted them. They were all over the place, no semblance of a team, but all the heads were there. All her dogs were alive and looking back at her. Relief weakened her muscles, and she slumped against the overturned sled. Tears flooded her eyes and froze on her cheeks. Her dogs were okay. Nothing else mattered.
She’d been underneath her sled long enough for her team to curl up and be covered by the snowfall. They’d be hungry. She’d better get them sorted out and snack them. She looked around—it was still snowing hard. Had Wilton and Beech seen her sled go over the side? Did anyone even know she was down here?
She tried to shift the sled but couldn’t with just one arm, and so she reached underneath to grab the snack bag. It took her a long time to get to each dog, untangle the lines and harness, unsnap the tug line and deliver a snack. They all seemed fine, but she couldn’t be sure because they were standing chest-deep in snow. She didn’t know exactly where she was, but at least the wind in this gully wasn’t nearly as bad as it had been on top; they were protected from the brunt of the storm. Rebecca unhooked Raven, and her little black leader followed her to the sled. She made a place to sit in the lee of the wind. She leaned her back against her sled, and Raven curled close beside her. Rebecca closed her eyes. Her head ached terribly and her arm throbbed with pain. She tried to move her fingers but couldn’t. The entire appendage hung uselessly at her side like the arm of a stranger, but the pain definitely belonged to her. If she’d had the energy and the ambition, she might have felt sorry for herself. Instead, she sat with her good arm around Raven, her bad arm hanging by her side, and watched the stormy sky grow darker.
“HERE’S THE SCOOP, Merlin. Rebecca’s out in that mess somewhere and we’re going to find her. Not only are we going to find her, but we’re going to beat Beech and Wilton across the finish line. Got that? Okay, let’s do it.” Mac stood up from a private consultation with his lead dog and shook Kanemoto’s hand. “Quit worrying,” he said. “She’ll be fine. Get the truck to Mile 101 as soon as you can and wait for her there if she hasn’t already passed through. If she has, head down to Angel Creek.”
Kanemoto nodded. Anxiety and sleeplessness made the prosperous Japanese businessman look much older than his forty-five years. He watched while Mac walked back to the sled, giving each dog a brisk rub and a cheerful word. He stepped onto the runners as Merlin’s blue eyes watched from the head of the team. “All right,” he said, untying the snub line. The team surged forward into the darkness.
Anxiety had a firm hold on Mac, as well, but he didn’t want to make Kanemoto any more concerned than he already was. The storm was predicted to blow itself out by morning, but that still left another twelve hours of pure misery to deal with. “All right, good dogs,” he crooned, coaxing them along at a solid trot. They plowed ahead as the trail began to ascend Eagle Summit. Forty miles wasn’t far, but Mac had already learned that a mile can be traveled so many ways, not all of them swift. Not by a long shot.
His headlamp beam focused on a narrow vortex of swirling snow. Watching it made him dizzy, so he switched the lamp off, only using it periodically to check for trail markers. He didn’t have to worry about Merlin losing the trail. The grand old leader could probably run it blindfolded.
In an hour he had passed two more teams, both of them bogged down in the wicked wind. One of them tried to get his team to follow but soon gave up, and Mac was alone again on the steepening trail. He didn’t stop the team to snack. He broke all his own rules in that run up Eagle Summit. He worked harder than he ever had before, running beside the sled in the deep, soft snow, pushing the sled to help the dogs up the steeper sections, righting the sled when the wind blew it over.
Had there ever been such a wind as this? He’d already seen one of his dogs swept right off its feet. The others were creeping on their bellies, each making itself as small a target as possible for the fierce gusts. The darkness was both a curse and a blessing, a curse because he couldn’t see a damned thing, and a blessing because if he could, he might have become discouraged at his slow progress. “Good dogs!” he praised frequently. “Good boy, Merlin!”
A strange feeling began to build inside him, pressing upward against his diaphragm. As he slogged ahead into the stormy darkness, the pressure continued to build until it became difficult to breathe. He pushed his team harder, and his voice carried an edge that he’d never used before, a curt, demanding sharpness that left no doubt as to what he wanted. Merlin gave his all, head down, eyes closed against the sting of the wind and the ice and the snow, feeling out the trail with his paws and pulling for all he was worth. His teammates followed suit.
Rebecca was in trouble. Mac was as sure of this as he’d ever been sure of anything. She was in terrible trouble somewhere up ahead. The minutes stretched like hours and each step only brought him twelve inches closer to her. Sled-dog racing! he fumed. Whoever thought up such a ridiculous sport! Who in their right mind would ever willingly indulge in such torture? He had, true, but only because he hadn’t known any better. Never again would he race a team of dogs. He was finished with it. When this race was over, he was going to turn his back on all of this craziness. “All right!” he bellowed angrily. “Get up!” The team struggled valiantly on his behalf.
Where the hell was the summit? They must be getting close! They were nearly seven hours out of Central. The summit must be just up ahead, had to be! “Merlin! Get up!”
When Merlin stopped, unbidden, a mindless rage filled Mac. He struggled up to the head of the team, cursing the loyal dogs who had pulled so hard for him. He reached Merlin and raised his mittened hand to swat the dog’s rump in angry retribution, and all of a sudden his arm froze. He looked ahead into the swirling darkness. Was that a sled right in front of them? Mac took one step forward and reached out his hand. It connected with the solid wood of a driver’s bow. “Hey!” he shouted. “Rebecca!”
The top line of the sled bag ripped open in the wind, and a man sat up. It was Wilton. His face had the blank expression of a man who had reached the limits of his endurance.
“Where’s Rebecca!” Mac roared.
Wilton shook his head and pointed. “Down below! She and her team got blown off the summit. It was quite a while ago, just past noon.”
Mac turned to look where Wilton pointed. The slope dropped steeply away into the darkness. He pushed past Wilton’s sled, and sure enough at the head of Wilton’s team was another sled. “Hey, hey! Get up!” He was so full of rage and fear that he nearly jerked Beech up and out of the sanctuary of his sled bag. “Where’s Rebecca!”
“Down below! We couldn’t see her, the snow was too thick. We saw her sled get blown over, and her team got dragged down with it. We couldn’t see how far down they fell.”
“Where was her sled when it went over?”
“Just ahead of me, in front of my leaders,” Beech shouted.
Mac stared down into the bottomless void. How in God’s name would he ever f
ind her in this whiteout? She could be anywhere along this slope. Or she might have tumbled clear to the bottom, wherever that was.
He turned and plunged back through the deep snow, falling several times as the wind knocked him over. His team was lying down, trying their best to get out of the wind. Mac rummaged in his sled bag for the first-aid kit Rebecca had given him for Christmas. He shoved four spare batteries and a flare into his parka pocket, threw each of his dogs a chunk of meat, tipped his sled over to reduce the wind’s effect, and walked back to the front of the team, where he unhooked Merlin from the gang line.
“Merlin, come!” he shouted to the dog over the howl of the wind. Merlin rose to his feet, his blue eyes somber in the light of the headlamp. “Come, Merlin,” Mac repeated, then turned his back on the husky and began a careful, step-by-step descent of the slope, panning the beam of his headlamp back and forth as he went.
Looking for Rebecca.
REBECCA OPENED HER EYES on the darkness. She didn’t know how long she’d been sleeping, but something had woken her. What? The wind was howling at the same demonic pitch and the snowfall was just as heavy. What had changed? Raven stirred beside her, lifted her head from Rebecca’s lap. Rebecca turned on her headlamp and panned the area around the sled. Nothing. Her dogs were invisible again, buried in their snowy beds. She switched her headlamp back off and leaned back against the sled. Raven sat up, and in the dark Rebecca could feel the rigidity of the animal’s small muscular body as she strained to see or hear something in the night. “What is it?” Rebecca murmured. “What do you hear?”
Something came at them out of the darkness. Raven let out a rumbling growl, and Rebecca flashed her headlamp back on. Two eyes glowed bright red in the glare of it. Her first thought was wolves, but then the eyes moved and she saw the black-and-white of the furry coat and the familiar handsome mask. “Merlin?” She stared, incredulous. “Merlin, come here! Good boy! Come here!”
Mac’s lead dog closed the distance between them. His cold nose brushed against Rebecca’s cheek and then he whirled and disappeared back into the darkness. “Merlin!” she called after him.
A moment later she heard a faint shout and she answered it. She left her headlamp on, and before too long she spotted the dim glow of another headlamp working its way toward her. She knew it was the man who belonged to the dog. His calm, low voice was a balm to her, his presence an intoxicating elixir. Mac! He was here! He was beside her now, kneeling down, talking to her, saying something she couldn’t quite make out. “Mac?” she said, reaching to touch him, her mittened fingers grasping. “Mac, is that really you?”
“Rebecca!” His voice was right in her ear. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” she said. “But I think my right arm is broken.”
She heard him swear. “You’re not fine if your arm is broken!”
“I can’t believe you’re really here!” she said. She felt as though she were floating, as if she were looking at Mac from some distance above him, watching as he bent over her and very carefully manipulated her right arm. The intense pain cleared her head and brought her back down to earth with a jarring crash. “Hurts!” she gasped. “Don’t touch!”
“Can you move your fingers at all?” he asked.
“No.”
“I have a splint and a sling in my first-aid kit,” he said clearly into her ear. “I’m going to put it on your arm, right over your parka. Can you tell me where it hurts the most?”
“My forearm. Glad you came. Wind blew us off the trail.”
“I know. Wilton and Beech told me. They’re still up there.”
“You can still win this race, Mac. Get going. You could still win!”
Mac rummaged in the first-aid kit. “I don’t give a damn about the race. I don’t care if I ever race again! This is going to hurt, Rebecca, but I have to move your arm. Lean forward just a little. Good girl.” He wrapped the splint around her forearm. She bit her lip hard to keep from crying out. In spite of the cold, her forehead was slick with sweat, which iced almost instantly. She closed her eyes against the pain when Mac adjusted the sling around her neck and moved her arm into it. There was a loud ringing in her ears, and Mac’s voice seemed to come from very far away. “Dammit, don’t you pass out on me! I need you to stay awake. You hear me?”
“You owe me a lot of money. If you don’t leave right now, you’ll never be able to pay me back.”
He ignored her words, holding her until her head cleared and she was able to sit up on her own. “I’m going to get you back up to the trail,” he said. “We can’t be that far from Mile 101. I’ll load you in my sled and take you there. Your dogs’ll be fine right where they are until I can get back and get them out. Can you stand up?”
He helped her to her feet. Her head spun and she was afraid she was going to be sick. “I don’t think I can walk that far. Maybe in a minute or two…”
“I don’t intend for you to walk,” he said, scooping her gently into his arms. “Merlin, you come,” he said unnecessarily to the dog who hadn’t left his side.
“Put me down,” she protested weakly. “You can’t carry me. The slope’s too steep and I’m too heavy.”
“Heavy? When I first met you, Rebecca Reed, I thought to myself, ‘I bet a strong gust of wind could blow that little lady clean away.’ And I’ll be damned if it didn’t,” Mac said as he began the painstakingly slow process of climbing back up the steep incline with Rebecca in his arms. He dug one booted toe into the slope to make a step, then the other. “If that little bit of wind was strong enough to blow you down this hill, I guess I’m strong enough to carry you back up it. Hell, you don’t weigh much more than one of your scrawny sled dogs.”
The pain of being moved one jolting step at a time was so intense that Rebecca could not always stifle her gasping moans. The climb lasted forever. She kept her left arm curled tightly around Mac’s neck, her head tucked beneath his chin, and tried to make herself as light as possible for him. The slope was very nearly steep enough to require ropes and belays, and with the wind screaming across the face of it, she couldn’t imagine where he found the strength or the balance to stay on his feet.
For the most part he did. He stumbled twice, but Rebecca only remembered the first time. The second time he went to his knees, the impact sent such an explosion of pain through her arm and shoulder that she could no longer keep herself from falling into the black abyss. She no longer wanted to try.
“REBECCA?” A STRANGE VOICE summoned her from a faraway place. “Can you hear me? I’m Dr. Stamm, your admitting physician. Can you squeeze my thumb, Rebecca? Squeeze my thumb if you can hear me.”
Rebecca opened her eyes, blinked them into focus and saw a young doctor gazing down at her, a nurse standing to one side with a look of pleased surprise on her kindly face.
“Well, now, that’s a pretty sight,” Dr. Stamm said. “Her eyes are blue and they’re lookin’ right at me. Pupils equal and very reactive. And best of all, she’s just about breaking my thumb. Let go, Rebecca. I know you’re a strong lady. You don’t have to prove it to me.”
“Mac,” Rebecca said. “Where’s Mac? Where am I?”
“You’re in the emergency room at Fairbanks Memorial. You had an accident on Eagle Summit. You have a fractured radius, a mild concussion and numerous bruises that shouldn’t have any lasting ill effects. You arrived here approximately two hours ago, pretty incoherent, in and out of consciousness. We’ve done all the X rays and put a cast on your arm, so the hard part’s over with. All you have to do now is behave yourself. I’m keeping you overnight as a precautionary measure. We’re going to give you another unit of fluids, because you were pretty dehydrated when we admitted you.”
“How did I get here? Where’s Mac?”
“How much do you remember?” Dr. Stamm asked.
Rebecca’s forehead furrowed as she thought. “I remember the sled blowing over and starting to fall, and Mac finding me. He carried me back up that slope. I don’t know how
he did it. It was so steep.” She moved her head on the pillow. “I don’t remember much of anything else.”
“Well, from what I understand, you were brought into Mile 101 riding inside someone’s sled bag at approximately 4 a.m. Someone with a ham radio called for emergency ambulance service. By then the storm had pretty much blown itself out, so they sent a chopper after you. You’ve been here since five-thirty. It’s almost nine o’clock now.”
“Where’s Mac?”
“I take it Mac is the guy who rescued you?” Dr. Stamm shook his head. “I don’t know, but there’s another guy out in the waiting room. Japanese. I believe his name is Kimono.”
“Kanemoto,” Rebecca corrected. “Can I see him?”
Relief flooded through her when Kanemoto walked into the room. His face was drawn and somber, but he tried to smile when he saw her. Rebecca propped herself up on her good arm. “I’m sorry, Kanemoto. I can’t finish the race. My arm is broken and the doctor says I have to stay here overnight. Where are my dogs? Are they okay?”
Kanemoto stood beside the gurney and touched her cast very gently with his fingertips. “The dogs are fine. You are fine. Don’t think I am disappointed. I think next year you will win and I am very proud! Mac brought you to Mile 101. He left his team there and went back to get your dogs. I’m going to drive back out with the truck and meet him at Mile 101. It will take him a long time to get your dogs. The trail is still very bad. A race volunteer went to help him. He sent me here to check on you and told me to come back as soon as I knew, so I will go back now and wait for Mac at Mile 101.”
“Take good care of my dogs,” Rebecca said. “And, Kanemoto, stay with Mac. Stay with Mac the same way you would have stayed with me. Okay?”
Kanemoto nodded. “Okay.”
Across a Thousand Miles Page 22