False Dawn (13 page)

“Do you want to do that now or later?” Evan asked, growing impatient with himself. “It’s going to take time to dig out. We can do that today, get some wood, do our packing tonight, and be underway just after sun-up.”

“So long? I thought…” She realized then that she hadn’t thought, and she considered his suggestion. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe we’ll get something to eat. Then we won’t have to walk hungry.” She nodded at her own resolution. Now that she knew her stay in the stamp mill was almost over, she was not frightened by it. “We’ll dig out now, to hunt. You can get the wood. You’re right about leaving, we can’t do it today. We wouldn’t get more than a couple miles by dark. Tomorrow morning, then. Early.”

Even with her enthusiasm it took them over three hours to clear a trough through the snow into the day. After the dark of the cramped office in the stamp mill, the sun off the snow dazzled them and made the expanses around them disorienting. It was as if they had stepped into an entirely different world from the one they had left, so changed were the mountains after a mere four days.

Shading his eyes, Evan blinked back the glare. The prospect of traveling in this shattering brightness did not please him. He had a fleeting recollection of skiing holidays in his youth, and the expensive dark glasses that kept out the brilliance—he wished he had them now. Everywhere lay the flawless, treacherous snow. “When I was a kid,” he said as he tested the surface, “we’d go skiing: Colorado, Switzerland, New Zealand. Bolivia. All the skiers talked about powder and packed base and slush.” He felt the white stuff turn to water in his hand, running through his fingers leaving only cold behind. He wondered what those long-ago skiers would have made of this waste. Snow then had been a recreation, an escape from the organized tedium of winter cities. Skiing snow was not at all like the snow that clogged traffic and turned city streets to slippery, hazardous trials to be negotiated in the wakes of snow-plows. This snow was of another sort—vast and dangerous, like the sea; beautiful, like the sea, deadly, waiting for that one mistake to wrap them in its unending frigid embrace.

“It’s awfully bright,” Thea said, thinking of the long days’ walks they would make through the mountains. This light would be like shards of glass in their eyes. She knew enough about snow blindness to fear it.

Evan sensed her worry and shared it. “Yes. It’s going to be difficult.”

“I don’t see any tracks, do you?” There was an anxious note in her voice.

“No.” He hoped this wasn’t important. “We’d better get our snowshoes.”

Several hours later they found a couple of frozen rabbits trapped under a small heap of freshly fallen snow where they had suffocated, and when Evan cleaned and gutted them, trimming away the worst of the flesh, precious little was left to go into the stewpot. While Evan worked on this unpromising meal, Thea gathered up the boughs which the weight of snow had pulled off the trees. This took her longer than she had anticipated and it was almost dusk when she returned to the stamp mill.

“I was getting worried,” Evan said lightly as Thea lugged two large branches in through the infirmary.

“So was I.” She swung the branches into the room. “I’ve got another three of these. That should take care of tonight.”

He looked at the boughs. “I’ll use the hatchet on these. Do you need help with the rest?”

She rubbed her hands briskly. “No. But I could use a fire. We’ve got a couple boxes of matches left, haven’t we?”

“More or less.” He had taken the hatchet from its place on the wall, and now, going onto one knee, he began to chop the boughs into manageable sections. “One last night,” he said when she came back with the other branches. “Tomorrow, off to Gold Lake.”

Thea finished securing the doors as he said this, and coming back into the room, she said, “It’ll be better there, Evan. You’ll see. It won’t be like this.”

Out of his doubts, Evan asked, “What will it be like, Thea?”

She thought this over before answering him. “It will be different.”

Packing was painful, for they had to leave some of their things behind: they took food and eating utensils, a pot or two, one box of matches, a few small knives, part of their dwindling supply of first aid equipment, all were sorted and sifted, then packed carefully in order of need.

“Too bad we can’t take one of the stoves,” Thea said with an attempt at humor. “It was sure nice to have them. I’ll miss them.”

“There’ll be other stoves at Gold Lake,” Evan assured her, as much to quiet his uncertainty as hers. “Better stoves, probably.”

Thea looked up from the last of her packing, her face flushed with optimistic anticipation. “Everything will be better there,” she announced. “You’ll see.”

5

They went east into the sun with the morning, following the line of what they hoped was Haskins Valley, where once there had been a trail, and perhaps still was, deep under the snow. They went slowly, their path spreading out behind them, tracks huge from their snowshoes, looking like some long-fossilized monster had returned to haunt the mountains.

At the end of the first day they were exhausted, their legs leaden and deeply sore, their eyes shot with red from the fierce light off the snow. They made camp for the night not far from the ruins of an old mine, the most protected location they had seen all day. Their makeshift tent sprawled over the snow, suddenly rickety and uncertain shelter against the night.

“It’ll be fine,” Thea said, her conviction sounding forced, even to her. She barricaded one end of the tent with her pack, and strapped her crossbow to her arm.

“I don’t know if we can get a fire going,” Evan said after a moment. There were small bits of kindling at his feet, and they sat on the snow like an abandoned bird’s nest, giving no promise of warmth.

“Then we can eat the meat cold. It’s cooked enough,” Thea said, struggling not to be discouraged.

So they ate their cold food, huddling near the tent as the sun sank below the jagged horizon. Wind sliced at them as night fell. The trees, with their burden of snow, sang to one another in eerie harmony.

When they had finished their sparse meal, Evan buried the bones in the snow, feeling both foolish and frightened as he worked.

In the tent they lay near each other, wrapped like cocoons in heavy blankets, each trying to forget the aches in stiff muscles which were magnets to the cold. They had a long way to go, and the next day would be no warmer.

“Evan?” Thea’s voice sounded far away in the little tent.

“Yes?”

“Remember when you were talking to Rudy Zinimermann about music and your father? Is this the kind of music you meant?” And she sang the few words in her small, quavering voice, words about love and betrayal: “
Sola, perduta e abbandonata In landa desolata…
” She stopped. “I don’t know if the words are right, but is that what you were talking about?”

He was genuinely surprised. “That’s from Puccini’s
Manon Lescaut.
Where did you hear it?”

“I don’t remember very well. I think my father used to play it, when we were still in Davis and had a big system to play disks. Sometimes my mom sang it, at Camminsky Creek. It always upset people when she did. It’s been running around in my head all day.” She made an apologetic sound, “I just wanted to know: what does it mean?”

Reluctantly, he told her. “It says, ‘Alone, lost, and abandoned in a desolate place.’”

“Oh.” She took an unsteady breath. “I guess that’s why people didn’t like it. I just wanted to know.” Then, after a moment she said, “There was another one, about a father asking his son to come home. It was pretty. Jack Thompson would sing it, sometimes.”

“Do you remember any of it?”

“Not really.” She pulled her blankets more tightly about her so that almost all of her face was covered. In a while she was asleep. But beside her Evan lay awake for long hours, listening to his memories.

The next day found them farther along their path. They knew they would have to find Sawmill Tom Trail if they were to get through the mountains quickly. Hobart had told them where it lay, but all the landmarks described were under the snow now. They struggled through the brightness, their eyes burning as the day wore on and the sun swung over their right shoulders. Once or twice they saw shapes moving through the trees, animals without features or definition going silently over the snows, anonymous as shadows.

“Do you think they’re stalking us?” Thea asked when two more shapes had melted away in the dark under the trees. The wind was sighing mournfully, touching the forest with wisps of low-flying clouds which Thea watched anxiously. “It’s piling up in the east. I think it will snow again tonight,” she said when the clouds grew denser.

“I’ll cover the tent with boughs. It will give us some insulation.” Evan glanced at the compass as he spoke. “We should find a ghost town a few miles on. Oddle Bar, or something like that.”

A cry from a cold, wild thing rose in the woods. “Maybe we can get there tonight? It would be good to sleep indoors again,” Thea said, feeling gooseflesh rise on her arms as a grue touched her spine.

“That sounds like dogs: the wolves were killed off a long time ago, and I don’t think there are coyotes up here,” Evan said calmly as the sound came again.

The eerie wail was still moving through the trees when they stopped for the night. Oddle Bar lay too far ahead of them, hidden by the shoulder of the mountain, and lost in the coming night. They had waited dangerously long to make their camp and Evan worked in worried haste to cover the tent with rusty-needled pine boughs. Once more they ate their evening meal cold and in listening silence, burying the scraps deep in the snow before going into their blankets.

It was well into the night when they were awakened—sounds of a desperate fight dimly penetrated the pine boughs and canvas tent. First there were snarls, then whining challenges, then they heard the deadly struggle accented by yelps of pain and fury.

“Dogs?” Thea asked in a whisper which Evan silenced with his hand on her wrist.

Now the bodies of the fighting animals crashed against the tent, bringing down the limbs which had protected it. A sudden stench filled the air.

“Opened the guts, I think’ Thea whispered, feeling sick. A stinking wet patch was spreading on the tent wall a few inches from her face. Abruptly the animals rolled back against the tent once more and the material pressed downward, taut under the thrashing bodies.

Involuntarily Thea let out a scream. For a moment the unseen combatants stopped their ruthless thrashing, but then the fight was resumed, more ferocious than before, and more desperate. Thea drew away from her side of the tent as the canvas ripped, revealing a dog’s hind paw and the bloodied head of a raccoon that snapped its jaws spasmodically, closing on the dog’s leg with an awful splintering of bone. The dog howled, jerking against the relentless badger, freeing himself at last as the muzzle lunged again.

“Thea! Oh, God, Thea!” The cry was wrenched out of Evan as he saw in the pale light, long stained fangs close on Thea’s hip, sinking through the double layer of blankets to her body, coming away smeared with blood.

Thea twisted, shouting and striking out with the full force of her straight arm. The badger snarled, confused, then was dragged from the tent as the dog closed in for the end of the fight, whining as the badger met the attack with teeth and supple, grasping paws.

The sounds went on, then one of the animals coughed and the fight was over. The survivor began to feed.

“Thea?” Evan began anxiously.

She moved away from him, her words brusque to cover the nauseating hurt. “It’s all right. I’ll be fine. He got more of the blankets than me.” As she pulled fruitlessly at the ripped tent, she went on. “I’ve got a couple of scratches, that’s all.”

Again Evan reached out. “Let me look at them.”

Thea moved beyond his extended hand. “It’s too dark, Evan. You can look in the morning, if it’s still bothering me. Too bad about the tent. Do we have needles and thread?”

“I can fix it,” he assured her, puzzled by her refusal to be helped. He knew she had been hurt; he had seen her face, and no matter how brief his glimpse had been, it was enough to tell him that the badger had hurt her. He thought that perhaps she still could not bear his touch.

“The badger was bigger than usual,” he said, hoping to convince her to let him examine her injuries now.

“They’re getting bigger, from what I’ve seen.”

“Don’t that worry you? If they’re bigger, their bites can be worse. We can burn a little lamp-oil, just to be sure that—”

“We’d better do the fixing in the morning, when it’s light. We can keep the lamp-oil for when we really need it.” She pulled the blankets around her tightly and shut herself away from him, keeping her hurt to herself in the dark.

The morning was hazy, high ribbons of clouds taunting the sun, throwing soft, indistinct patterns on the snow.

The first thing Thea saw as she crawled out of the torn tent was the mauled body of the dog. Its stomach had been ripped away and the badger had made a solid meal of what he found. Near the remains there was a hole in the snow where the two animals had dug for the scraps from their dinner of the night before.

“So that’s what brought them,” Evan said slowly as he emerged from the tent. “I wondered about that last night.” He turned to Thea, still concerned, still wanting to see what had happened to her hip. “How do you feel? Is the bite scabbed over?”

“I’m fine,” Thea said, which wasn’t an answer.

“Let me look at it,” Evan persisted.

“I said I’m fine.” Then she changed her mind. “Oh, go ahead and check it if you think it’s that important. It’s nothing more than a couple of scratches. Really.” Sulkily she opened her jeans and pulled the heavy cloth away from the gash on the top of her hip. She winced as the scabs tore and blood welled.

“There’s some antiseptic in the first aid kit, isn’t there? It should help,” Evan said steadily after examining the four deep furrows the fangs had left in her skin. He blotted the wounds with a small rag from their first aid kit, and wished they had more bandages. Five years ago, he would have worried about rabies, but by now most of the rabid animals were dead and their disease had died out with them.