Buried Alive!

by Gloria Skurzynski

  “You shouldn’t have unclipped the whole line!” Jack told Nicky harshly. “We could have used the dogs to get back to Kantishna. Or at least we could have used them to stay warm. Now they’re gone.”

  “Never mind,” Ashley broke in. “Yelling doesn’t help anything, not now. If we’re going to look for Chaz, then you better dig.”

  But first they had to pull out the bodies of the three dead dogs, a disheartening job. Only minutes earlier, those beautiful animals had been racing along the tundra, bursting with energy. Now they lay limp on the surface of the snow, with the life that had surged through their agile bodies extinguished forever. The eyes that had glowed with the joy of running now saw nothing; those muscles that had strained to leap ahead had become immobile. Cold. Dead. Finished. How fragile life could become, Jack thought, and how easily it could end. As he turned away from the mournful sight of the dead dogs, he realized what a miracle it had been that he and Ashley and Nicky had survived. It could have turned out differently…but there was no time to think about that. He had to dig.

  The brush bow at the end of the sled protruded, just barely, from the pit, like the arc of a boomerang. Bend and dig, thrust away, dig again in snow that seemed to be congealing like concrete. “What time is it now?” Jack asked.

  Nicky read the face of his watch. “Two forty-six.”

  “That means Chaz has been under at least…28 minutes. He can’t survive more than an hour down there.”

  “A storm’s coming in. I say we take care of us.”

  “Yeah, well, we already know what you say, but Ashley and I think different, remember?” Jack’s fingers were stiff from digging, and yet they’d barely made a dent in the snow around the basket. What if they uncovered Chaz’s dead body? He shuddered at the thought. It had been harsh enough to deal with the three dead dogs. A deceased human would be infinitely worse. Jack had never seen a dead person, not ever, and he didn’t much want to start now.

  “If we’re going to keep digging, we all need to help,” Nicky told him. He immediately dropped to his knees and started clawing at the tip of the sled. “Ashley, can you dig with one hand?”

  “I could try, but my fingers are freezing!” She shook her bare hand like a rag. The skin on her right hand—the one that had no glove—was so red it looked scalded. Every few seconds she shoved it under her armpit.

  “No, forget it—don’t dig—just time us. Here, take my watch.”

  Nicky pulled off his glove and slid his watch from his arm. “Catch,” he said, tossing it to Ashley. If things had been different, Jack would have given his sister one of his gloves to wear, but he had to dig. With no shovel or pick, hands were their only tools.

  The snow that had felt like regular snow moments before was settling into the texture of cement. In his mind’s eye, Jack saw Chaz, gasping for air against a wall of snow and ice. He clawed faster. More of the sled emerged, but no Chaz.

  “Time!” Jack barked.

  “Two fifty-eight,” Ashley cried. She tucked her hand beneath her armpit again, squeezing it to get the blood circulating.

  “We’ve been at this at least ten minutes now, and we haven’t even uncovered half the sled,” Jack said, scooping a great armful away from the basket. “This isn’t working.”

  Nicky looked smug. “Just like I thought. You wanna give up?”

  “No. In Scouts I learned that after half an hour, the chances of getting out alive are fifty-fifty. After that—” He didn’t finish the sentence. Instead, he began digging even harder until his own hands felt like blocks of ice. One of the laminated runners had emerged, like an archer’s bow, then another. As more and more of the basket became exposed, Jack noticed a bag lashed down with straps. The bag might have survival stuff in it, and that was good. Still, no Chaz.

  Nicky straightened and rolled his shoulders all the way back, planting his hands on his hips. “Do you think he’s even close to the sled? So far we’ve come up with nada. No hat, no glove, no sign of him. Couldn’t he be, like, somewhere else around here?”

  “I—I don’t know.” The thought, although obvious, suddenly hit Jack squarely in the face. Of course Chaz didn’t have to be on the sled, or even near it. He hadn’t been belted to it. The wall of snow that had come crashing down certainly might have separated Chaz from the sled. The truth was, Chaz could be almost anywhere, dead or alive. Jack looked around at the empty field of snow that seemed to stretch for miles. Finding him would be like searching for a minnow in the ocean.

  With the clock ticking and no clue as to where Chaz might be, Jack knew he should give up. But that was exactly what Nicky was hoping for, and that fact alone kept him going. Hoisting himself to his knees, then his feet, Jack picked up one of the broken branches from the ground and snapped off the remaining twigs. While Nicky watched incredulously, Jack pushed the branch into the snow the way he’d seen rescuers shove poles when they searched for avalanche victims on TV. Prodding all around the sled, thrusting hard to get the branch into the thickening snow, he felt nothing. Poke, poke, poke. The stick left behind a pattern of holes.

  “Oh come on, that’s not going to work,” Nicky chided. “It’d take you all day just to hit a tenth of the avalanche field. Another waste of time.”

  “Do you have a better idea?”

  Nicky frowned, but didn’t answer.

  “Ashley, what time is it now?” Jack asked.

  “Three o seven,” she whispered. Her eyes were wide, so wide Jack could see the whites all around them. “He’s been buried in the snow 49 minutes. What should we do?”

  Shielding his eyes with one hand, Nicky made a full turn, searching the snowfield as Jack had done. “OK, I’m going to call it. If he’s buried, he’s gone. If he isn’t buried, he could be anywhere out there, and poking the snow with a stick is worthless. We did it your way, Jack, but now we have our own problems. Look at the sky.”

  Jack’s eyes snapped up. He hadn’t really noticed the dark clouds descending like a sheet, but they were rolling in ominously.

  “Face it,” Nicky went on, “this whole idea was boneheaded from the start, which I tried to tell you! But you can’t admit it when you’re wrong, can you, Boy Scout? Listen to me, Ashley. I say we should start walking back along the creek bed. We can follow the sled tracks right back to Kantishna.”

  “That’s suicide! We’ll never make it there before dark,” Jack fired back. “Walking off unprepared is the worst thing we can do. The three of us should pull that duffel bag out of the sled, then make a shelter and stay put. That storm’s moving in fast.”

  “So you admit we wasted good time looking for Chaz. We could have been on our way.”

  “I’m not wrong about this! And my sister isn’t going anywhere with you!”

  “Stop it!” Ashley’s voice rang across the snow, clear and loud. The fear had melted from her face, and her eyes looked hot. Lifting her chin, she said, “You guys have been at it since we got to Denali, and I’m so tired of it. Stop! Do you hear me? Just stop!” She stood tall, and Jack suddenly realized she wasn’t a little kid anymore—she looked like a real person to be reckoned with. “We can’t do this. Not now. You have to quit being so stupid! OK, Jack?”

  “OK, Jack?” Once again, he felt the equation between himself and his sister shifting, like snow crumbling off the mountainside. So Ashley was siding with Nicky—again! A feeling Jack couldn’t name surged through him—it wasn’t jealousy, exactly. No, it was like water slipping though your fingers when you wanted to hold on, to keep life exactly where it had always been. Jack still wasn’t ready to share his sister, especially not with Nicky Milano.

  Ashley turned. “OK, Nicky?”

  Nicky looked startled. Jack felt a surge of satisfaction.

  “What is wrong with you two?” she went on. “You’re at each other when a human being that was alive an hour ago is trapped under a wall of snow. That’s the kind of stuff that’s important. Life. Death. The rest is stupid. You’re both stupid.” Turning away from the
m, she muttered, “Guys can be so dumb.”

  For a moment neither one of them said a word. Nicky bowed his head, frowning a little, his hands clasped in front of him while Jack shifted uneasily. She was right, and both of them knew it. It was embarrassing to be brought up short by his little sister. Nicky seemed to feel the same way.

  “Nicky, do you think—” Jack began. He cleared his throat. “We should get that duffel bag out of the basket. It has supplies in it.”

  “You’re right,” Nicky answered slowly. “Only one of us can fit in the hole. I’ll do it. Unless—you know—if you want to.”

  “You go ahead.”

  “No, I’ll do it,” Ashley declared. “I’ll fit in there better than either of you.”

  “All right. You go, girl,” Nicky replied.

  The wind kicked up, ruffling tufts of Nicky’s hair. A truce had been called. This time it was real, because they’d suddenly realized that survival in Denali wasn’t a game. They’d need each other just to stay alive.

  The three of them turned toward the basket. Ashley dropped inside the hole, unlashed the duffel bag, and yanked it free. It took a minute to unknot the ropes. Then she looked inside. “There’s some stuff, but no food. I’m already hungry.”

  “We can go a long time without eating. But we’re going to need a shelter.” Jack studied the darkness rolling in from the mountains. They were facing freezing temperatures, no food, and no shelter, and there was not another human for tens of square miles. If the three of them didn’t use every bit of ingenuity they had, it would become their grave as well.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Nicky took a turn rummaging through the duffel bag. Throwing out things left and right, he said, “Chaz sure didn’t carry that much on his sled. I thought he told your mom he was prepared with food and everything. What a liar. No food, no first-aid supplies—nothing good. We’re in trouble, aren’t we?”

  “Don’t get rid of anything,” Jack ordered. “You don’t know what we might need. Are you sure there isn’t anything to eat in there?”

  “Just these, and I’m drawing the line at the fat bars,” Nicky exclaimed, holding up one as though he were posing it for a camera. “Yo, read the label. Even if we were stranded out here for a week, you wouldn’t catch me touching them. They’re for dogs.”

  Silently, Ashley picked up everything Nicky had thrown onto the snow: the fat bars, a tin bucket, a tin cup, candles, dog booties, and a metal box she pried open to reveal matches.

  “Wait, here’s something,” Nicky yelled, pulling a small camp stove out of the depths of the bag. “We can light the stove to keep warm. I mean, we could if we just had some matches. Oh!” Noticing the open box in Ashley’s hand, he added, “All right, Ashley! You’ve got matches. Now we’re cookin’!”

  Nicky burrowed into the bag once again. “Great. After all the time we’ve been digging through the snow with our hands—look what was in the duffel.” He held up a shovel and waved it like a flag.

  It was a short-handled shovel with a square blade only six inches wide, but it would have made things a whole lot easier if they’d found it earlier. Jack’s fingers were still stiff from digging. No one asked if they should keep on shoveling to find Chaz—or Chaz’s body—and Jack didn’t bring it up, either. Nicky was right; they had to focus on their own survival. A storm was moving in, which meant the three of them were in more trouble than either Nicky or Ashley realized. But Jack understood. He knew the perils of hypothermia, which could easily overtake them all. Darkness was approaching, a storm loomed, and as of now they were completely unprepared. A different kind of clock was ticking.

  “Jack, I’m getting cold. The wind’s really kicking up.” Ashley’s nylon hood sparkled with frost, and her eyelashes, too, were frosted white. Jack supposed his own eyelashes looked the same, but Nicky’s didn’t. Even though the temperature had plunged somewhere around zero, the exertion of digging had flushed Nicky’s cheeks.

  “So how are we supposed to make ourselves a shelter?” he asked. “There’s no hammer or nails in that bag. You got a plan?”

  “We’ll build with the only thing we’ve got,” Jack told him. “Snow. We’ll have to make a snow cave, and we need to get started right away. I don’t like the looks of that sky.”

  Raising his eyebrows, which had started to grow a thin skim of frost, Nicky said, “Tell me what to do.”

  “Yeah,” Ashley echoed. “Tell us.”

  “First we have to find the right place. Even with the shovel it will take us a long time to dig. We need to make a chamber big enough to stay in.”

  “But what about the rangers?” Ashley objected. “They won’t be able to see us in a snow cave, and I know they’ll be out looking for us. When we don’t come back on time, Mom and Dad’ll get the park people to send a plane.”

  “Think for a minute, Ashley. We’re not where we’re supposed to be. Chaz said he was taking us to Wonder Lake, remember? That’s where they’ll send the planes. Who knows where we are right now?”

  “So…you think we’ll stay here more than one night?”

  Jack dodged the question. How could he know that? “Bottom line is we’ll freeze out here without shelter. I mean freeze—to death! Like I said, we’re going to have to work together.”

  “Go for it, Eagle Scout,” Nicky said. Jack whipped his head around to see if Nicky was being smart-mouthed, but his face looked serious. “You can be the boss man. Tell me what to do.”

  He wished he were as sure about all this as he was pretending to be. “First we have to pick a place where the snow’s not so hard to dig,” he answered. “Avalanche snow hardens to cement. If we get to the lee side of the creek, we ought to be OK.” Oh Lord, I hope that’s right, he thought. When he’d gone winter camping with his troop, they’d hiked into a perfectly safe snow basin with no avalanche danger at all. “We need a slope with snow at least six feet deep. Let’s go.” After they hiked to a slope that looked perfect, Jack began to thrust at the snowbank with the shovel.

  “Want me to dig?” Nicky asked.

  “No, I want you to remove the snow that I shovel out. First I have to tunnel in about two feet straight back, then angle up for another foot. That’s just to make the entrance. I’ll dig first while you move the snow away.”

  “What about me?” Ashley asked.

  “You move snow. Shove it away from the entrance.”

  As Jack dug, Nicky started pulling away the snow so energetically that Jack had to warn him, “Take it easy. You don’t want to sweat. If you sweat too much your clothes will get damp, then freeze later. You could get hypothermia, and I don’t even want to think about that.”

  “What’s hypothermia?”

  “It’s when your body temperature gets real low. Too low! It can kill.”

  “Yeah? Well, so can that storm. We’d better get moving, Jack. Flakes are already coming down.”

  With the three of them working, it went faster than Jack had hoped, although Ashley was hampered by the loss of one glove. She scraped snow awkwardly with her left hand, keeping her bare right hand pulled up inside her sleeve.

  After Jack had dug two feet straight back, he began to tunnel upward.

  “Let me do some digging,” Nicky urged.

  “OK. Let me get out first,” Jack answered, backing out, then letting Nicky crawl into the hole. “See how it’s angling up?” he asked, feeling kind of foolish as he talked to Nicky’s backside. “After we make the main room of the cave and light the camp stove and candles, the warm air will stay trapped in there and not escape through the entrance. It’s like a—like a split-level house where you go up half a flight of stairs to the main floor.”

  “Real cool,” Nicky grunted, his words swallowed by the tunnel of snow he’d crawled into. One after another, he dropped shovelfuls of snow into the entry hole for Jack and Ashley to scoop out. This snow didn’t have anywhere near the mortar-like texture of the avalanche, although it wasn’t the powdery kind that skiers like, either. It was
somewhere in the middle.

  Nicky dug like a Roto-Rooter as more flakes fell from the sky, whipping Jack’s cheeks with tiny razor-sharp crystals. “Hold it,” Jack called to him. “Let me get in there and take a look.”

  Nicky backed out. The entrance was so narrow that only one of them at a time could fit inside. When Jack crawled in to check their progress, he had to admit he was impressed. In another hour they should be able to finish carving a room about the area of a pup tent, not big enough for them to stand in, but high enough that they could sit comfortably and maybe curl up together to catch a little sleep. Most important, they could stay warm in there. They could survive.

  Jack had estimated the time pretty closely. In an hour and 12 minutes, they completed the snow cave, just after the sun had dipped all the way behind the highest mountain peak. The long-lasting twilight had already tinted the snow to pale amber. Snow pelted them now, and Ashley hugged herself, shivering like a rabbit.

  “Ashley, you go first,” Nicky told her.

  “Th-th-thanks,” she replied. One by one, the three of them crawled into the cave. The area turned out to be smaller than Jack had hoped. Roughly four feet square and only three and a half feet high, it gave them barely enough room to sit upright, and not quite enough for them to stretch their legs straight out in front of them.

  “It’s what I call cozy,” Nicky commented. “Very cozy. And dark. Where are the candles, Ashley?”

  “Right here.” She pulled out the items from the duffel bag one by one: the tin cup, the bucket, the camp stove, the fat bars. Then she reached for Nicky’s hand in the darkness to give him the candles and matches.

  After Nicky lit a candle and stuck it into the snow floor, he picked up the camp stove to examine it. It looked something like a lamp, with a circular plastic base where a metal cylinder of propane fit snugly. At the top sat a burner similar to one on a gas range, with three metal prongs that would hold a pot or pan. “Let’s light this sucker,” Nicky said.