Breaking the Ice (22 page)

“It’s not that far,” she said aloud to reassure herself.
Just keep calm and go slow.

The words were scarcely out of her mouth when the boat slammed against a rock, mostly submerged in the river. A loud crunch of metal sounded as she lost her footing and hit the deck, hard. The engine died, and the boat began to slip sideways to the current.

“Damn it.” She grabbed the nearest bench and hauled herself up. The boat was spinning out of control, just a few feet from the shore. She dove for the controls, but before she could restart the engine, the skiff bounced off another rock and tossed her back onto the deck. She tried to catch herself but took the brunt of the impact in her right wrist. Momentarily stunned by the pain, she gritted her teeth and clutched her wrist as the boat whirled around, caught in the current, and grounded itself on the next gravel bar.

“Great. Just great.” As the pain began to subside, she wiggled her fingers, relieved to discover it was a bad sprain and not a break. Her circumstances, however, were less than ideal. The boat wouldn’t start, and the gravel bar she was stranded on was in the middle of the river, the temperature below freezing. She’d have to get wet to hike out, and she was probably about midway between the two cabins.

She climbed out and inspected the boat. Though the bow was dented, it seemed watertight. She secured the vessel to a large rock so it wouldn’t drift away if the water rose, then slung her duffel bag over her shoulder and peered through the snow at the distance between her and the nearest shore. It seemed only fifteen feet or so, but she couldn’t judge the water’s depth. As tempted as she was to cross as quickly as possible, she had to keep her footing, so she resigned herself to take it slow and easy.

The icy water flooded her boots on her second step, piercing her wool socks like a thousand tiny needles. She continued, cautiously, the water soon up to her calves, numbing her. Turning slightly upstream against the current, she fought every inch to keep from being swept away. Halfway there, the water was up to mid-thigh, the current exerting its full force and Karla more powerless by the moment. She almost succumbed to the rapidly rising panic that had sucked all the air out of her lungs and started her heart hammering.

By the time she reached the shore, she was gasping from the cold and had lost nearly all feeling in her legs. With trembling hands and chattering teeth, she stripped off her boots and her clothing from the waist down and pulled on long underwear, dry jeans, and fresh wool socks from her bag. She rubbed her feet vigorously to try to warm them, wincing at the pain in her wrist when she did, but her boots were the only footwear she’d packed, so when she put them on again, her new socks were almost immediately saturated as well.

She had at least three or four miles to go to get anywhere, but she was determined to tough it out. Rising to survey the shoreline in either direction, she decided to head to Bryson’s rather than return to the Rasmussen cabin. She’d doused the fire in the woodstove before she’d left, and Bryson’s home would provide the immediate warmth her feet desperately needed.

She stayed near the river for the first several hundred yards, but the snow completely covered the rocky bank, which made for treacherously slow going. Her feet felt half frozen and she had difficulty maintaining her balance. A twisted ankle was something she couldn’t afford.

Hoping for smoother footing, she entered the woods and paralleled the river, threading through the dense spruce trees. The wind began to pick up, and the snow showed no sign of diminishing. Now and then, a whiteout would temporarily obscure her view of the water, but she wasn’t afraid of getting lost. The river was on one side of her, and the mountains on the other, some half mile or more distant. As long as she kept moving downstream along the shoreline, she should find Bryson’s cabin.

*

Bryson peered north, listening for the skiff’s engine, cursing the fact that the thick snow muffled all sound. It was a little after three. Only an hour of daylight left, and Karla was so overdue she was edgy with worry. She debated whether to strike out on foot or take to the air. Hiking would be slower, but conditions were awful for flying. Even keeping the Cub low, she might miss seeing the skiff in the blizzard.

Frustrated, she hurried back to the cabin and threw a few essentials into a backpack, pulled on an extra layer of clothes, and set off to find Karla, working her way slowly upstream along the rocky bank of the river. She’d brought along a rescue whistle, which carried farther than her voice, and every quarter mile or so she would pause and blow it, then strain for an answer, but none came.

Something had happened. Something bad. She could feel it in her gut
.
It had been a mistake to let Karla set out by herself, after promising Lars and Maggie she’d take care of her. She’d covered less than two miles when dusk fell. She clicked on her flashlight and kept moving forward, sweeping the terrain ahead and the river to her right. The only answer to her repeated whistle blows was a lone wolf howl, far off in the woods to her left.

*

She was lost.
Karla had been trying to deceive herself, but she accepted now that she had no idea where she was in relation to Bryson’s cabin. Not that it mattered, because it was pitch-black, and her feet were almost incapable of supporting her.

She felt like she had walked a great distance, but only because each step was so difficult. From the start, her feet were so numb from the river she had difficulty maintaining her balance. She’d fallen several times, twice on her sprained wrist. And the heavily laden trees around her had dumped their cargo of snow directly onto her head, sending icy pellets deep into the collar of her jacket. She was miserably cold. The biting wind had penetrated every available orifice and frozen the top of her wet socks into ice.

At some point, she realized she hadn’t spotted the river through the trees for quite some time. She headed in the direction she thought was right, but the shoreline wasn’t where she thought it was, and the forest and blowing snow were too thick for her to see the mountains to get her bearings.

She panicked and wanted to run. But she decided she better try to warm her feet. She sat on a downed tree and stripped off her boots, then her ice-crusted socks, with difficulty. She had two dry wool pairs left in her duffel and put them both on, then wrapped her feet in two thick sweaters and prayed for a letup in the blizzard so she could see.

She couldn’t have passed the cabin, she tried to reassure herself. It had to be just a short distance ahead. But her sense of direction was too unreliable to give her any confidence. The river valley was very wide at Bryson’s cabin. If she’d been traveling close to the mountains instead of the river, she might have passed by without seeing it.

And if she had, thirty miles of wilderness stretched between her and Bettles.

Indecisive, she froze, and soon it was getting dark. No flashlight. No matches. No weapon. Nothing but a few extra clothes, which didn’t seem to be doing much to warm her feet.

She tried not to be afraid, but she’d heard the wolves howl too often. Most of the time, they came from the right of the Rasmussen cabin and were a long way off.
A few miles downriver,
Lars often estimated. In other words, right about where she was sitting.

She pulled out the tigereye necklace and shoved it into her right glove, comforted by the smooth stone against her palm. She didn’t have many options. Try to keep walking, risking further injury and possibly getting even more lost. Or she could sit tight and hope someone found her before she froze or some predator got too interested. She was long overdue, so Bryson would already be out looking for her. She was that kind of woman.

But if Karla had already passed Bryson’s cabin in the storm before she started searching…or if they had been too far apart to see each other when they passed…then Bryson was heading away from her.

Karla couldn’t erase the image from her mind. A homeless man who refused to give his name had been admitted to the ER one bitterly cold February night, suffering from hypothermia and severe frostbite. Thousands of homeless lived in the city, many in the downtown area, and Grady Memorial got the bulk of them when they required care. So she had seen her share of cases like this, but they’d never been bad enough to warrant amputation.

When the man regained consciousness after the surgery and saw that both his feet and several of his fingers were gone, shock and horror, then tears, then anger crossed his face. “Why did you do this? Why not just let me die? I can’t survive like this!”

Karla had lost all feeling in her feet and couldn’t stand. And though she’d pulled her hands inside her sleeves to warm them beneath her armpits, she only felt colder. Worse, she yearned to close her eyes and sleep. But if she did, she would probably never wake up again.

*

Bryson gave herself another hour to find Karla. If she didn’t succeed by then, she would go home and call in reinforcements from Bettles to expand the search. The conditions couldn’t have been worse: full dark and sub-freezing temperatures. The strong winds and heavy snowfall were muting her whistles, and it would be even more difficult to hear shouts. Unless she was relatively close to Karla, they might miss each other.

She swept the flashlight back and forth, from the woods to the river, hoping Karla might spot the beacon. And she paused frequently to listen, but so far all she’d heard were wolves and the howl of the wind in the trees. She prayed that Karla was all right.

Of all the search-and-rescue operations she’d participated in, none but the search for her father had ever affected her so personally. And it wasn’t because of her sense of responsibility to Lars and Maggie. She’d come to care about Karla, too, more than she’d allowed herself to admit.

She blew her whistle long and loud, turned ninety degrees and did it again, then froze to listen.

Her heart raced when she thought she heard an answering call, too indistinct to be sure. Had it been just the wind? She blew the whistle again and followed up with a shout. “Kaaaaarlaaaaaaaa!”

She listened again and caught that same distant hint of reply. More certain now that she was not imagining it, she hurried in the direction she thought the sound had originated from as fast as possible, skirting trees and sweeping the ground in front of her with her flashlight to avoid logs and rocks. It seemed to come from deep in the woods. “I’m coming, Karla! Hang on,” she hollered as she crashed through a thicket of willows.

When she’d gone a few hundred yards, she paused to shout again and this time clearly heard the reply. “Bryson! Over here. To your left.”

She followed the voice and found Karla sitting on a downed tree, her expression in the glare of her flashlight a mixture of worry and relief.

“I’ve never been happier to see anyone in my life,” Karla said as Bryson hunched down in front of her.

“Are you all right?”

“Freezing.” Her teeth chattered. “I crashed the boat and got my boots wet getting to shore. I think my feet are frostbitten, which means I can’t and shouldn’t walk.”

“Shit.” Bryson’s mind raced, trying to think of the best way to move Karla. There might be enough snow on the ground to use the snowmobile, but she’d waste a lot of time getting back home to retrieve it, and it would be difficult to negotiate the machine over the uneven, densely forested terrain.

“How far is it to your place?” Karla asked.

“Three or four miles.” Bryson took off her backpack and set her flashlight beside Karla so she could see what she was doing. “I have some disposable hand warmers with me, and a survival blanket. Let’s see if we can get you warmed up some.” She opened four of the packets, which began to heat up as soon as they were exposed to air.

She could see that Karla had her hands inside her clothing. “Gonna open your coat for a second to give these to you.” Bryson unzipped the jacket halfway. Karla wore a crew-neck navy sweater beneath it.

Karla reached one hand up shakily through the neck of the sweater to retrieve the packets. “Thanks.”

She zipped her jacket back up and shone the flashlight down Karla’s legs. Her feet were encased in the duffel bag. Beside the bag, covered with snow, were her boots and gloves.

“I guess you don’t want me to put any warmers on your feet? You want to wait for warm water?”

“Right. I might be bad enough that those would damage the tissue.” Karla wasn’t surprised Bryson knew a lot about frostbite. What Alaskan wouldn’t? Especially one with search-and-rescue experience. “Any idea how you might get me out of here? And how quickly?”

Bryson unfolded the thin reflective survival blanket and wrapped it around Karla like a cocoon. “Working on that. Is the skiff out of commission?”

“Not structurally, but I couldn’t get the engine to start, and it’s grounded on a gravel bar. It’s quite a way upstream. Hit a rock I didn’t see.”

“Easy to do, especially in these conditions. I shouldn’t have let you try it alone.”

“Don’t blame yourself. This is totally my doing,” Karla said. “These packs are really helping. My hands are tingling and burning like crazy. A good sign.”

“Okay, here’s the plan.” Bryson shook off Karla’s boots and put them in her backpack. “I’ll take you as far as I can, moving along the river.” She was strong, but four miles, especially in the dark in this terrain, was quite a distance. “A fireman’s carry is the best way to keep from jostling your feet. Ground’s too uneven and rocky to try to drag you out. If I can’t carry you any farther, I have a plan B ready.” She hoped it wouldn’t come to that, but she could always hoof it back and retrieve her fishing raft. Built for one, it could hold them both and get them the rest of the way fairly quickly.