The Collected Short Stories of Louis L'Amour, Volume Four (9 page)

With These Hands

H
e sat bolt upright in his seat, hands clasped in his lap, eyes fixed in an unseeing stare upon the crushed shambles of the forward part of the plane. His mind without focus, fixed in the awful rigidity of shock.

Awareness returned slowly, and with it a consciousness of cold. Not a shivering cold, not even the icy edge of a cutting wind, but the immense and awful cold of a land of ice, of a land beyond the sun. Of frigid, unending miles lying numb and still under the dead hand of the Arctic.

No movement…no life. No sound of people, no hum of motors, no ticking of clocks; only silence and the long white miles where the lonely wind prowled and whispered to the snow.

He had survived. He alone had survived. That thought isolated itself in his consciousness and with it came the dread of living again, the dread of the necessity for struggle.

Yet he need not struggle. He could die. He need only sit still until the anesthesia of shock merged without pain into the anesthesia of death. He need only remain still. He need only wait…wait and let the cold creep in. Once he moved the icy spell would be broken and then he must move again.

He was alive. He tried to shut away the thought and find some quiet place in his brain where he could stuff his ears and wait for death. But the thought had seeped into consciousness, and with it, consciousness of cold.

It was a cold where nails break sharply off when struck with a hammer; a cold where breath freezes and crackles like miniature firecrackers; a cold that drove needles of ice into his nose and throat…there was no anesthesia, no quiet slipping away, this cold would be a flaying, torturing death.

Icy particles rattled against the hull of the plane; a wind sifted flakes across the hair of the sitting dead. Of them all, he alone had survived. Curtis who had believed so much in luck, Allen who had drilled for oil in the most inhospitable deserts and oceans of the world, of the seven men returning to Prudhoe Bay, he alone had survived.

He slumped in his seat.

That was it. He had moved. To live he must move again, he must act. What could he do? Where could he go? Outside lay the flat sweep of a snow-clad plain and beyond the dark edge of forest, black and sullen under a flat gray sky.

Movement had broken the rigidity of shock. With that break came the realization; there must be no panic, for panic was the little brother of death.

“Sit still,” he said aloud, “you’ve got to think.”

If he was to survive it must be by thinking. To think before he moved and then to waste no movement. This power had enabled men to survive. Reason, that ability to profit by experience and not only from their own meager experience, but from the experience of others. That was the secret of man’s dominance, of his very survival, for he not only had learned how to control heat, flood, and wind, but how to transmit to future generations the knowledge of harsh experience.

This was an ancient enemy, this cold. Men had survived it, held it away with walls and fire, and if he, Drury Hill, oil company executive and once a citizen of the air-conditioned city of Dallas, Texas, was to survive, it must be by brains, ingenuity, and perhaps through those shared experiences.

He would need matches, he would need fuel. Shelter first, then fire. Fire here was out of the question. There would be spilled gasoline from ruptured tanks. And this plane was his lodestone for rescuers. His only beacon to the outside world. Very well, then, the forest. He had matches and a lighter, recently filled. He would need tools or a tool. He would need a blanket or another heavy coat.

Carefully, he straightened to his feet. He moved to the body of Curtis, avoiding looking at his face. He searched his pockets and found a lighter, more matches, and a nail file. One by one he searched those he could reach, but it was “Farmer” Peterson whom he blessed.

Peterson came from Minnesota and had trapped his way through college. An astute geologist, he was still a country boy at heart. His pockets yielded a waterproof matchbox filled with wooden matches and a large clasp knife of the type carried by sailors, the blade all of five inches long.

In the back of the plane he found several Army blankets and some cans of C rations. Making a bundle of one blanket, he then took along a roll of blueprints for the new tank and distribution complexes to use as tinder to start a fire.

Pausing to think, he remembered that he must not allow himself to perspire, for when activity ceased the perspiration would turn to ice and then his clothing would become a chilling hull in which death could come quickly.

He sorted through the debris where the lockers had broken open, finding a cup and several other useful utensils. He stuffed them into the blanket along with the food and Curtis’s coat, and dropped down from the ruins of the plane.

The black battalions of the forest were a dark fringe where sky and snow had a meeting place. With curious reluctance, he stepped away from the plane and, leaving behind his last link with civilization, comfort, and tangible evidence of man, he walked off over the snow.

It was cold…his boots crunched on the snow…his breath crackled lightly. The all-pervading chill seemed to penetrate the thickest clothing. Yet the movement warmed him and he paused, glancing back. The distance to the plane frightened him, but he turned, and face down from the raw wind, he walked on.

He floundered into the black and white silence of the tree line. This was the ragged fringe of the forest and the growth was not tall…white snow, gray and barren sky, the spidery undergrowth and the solemn columns of the trees.

Then he saw, scarcely fifty feet into the trees, a deadfall. This had been a greater tree than most, uprooted and flung down, black earth clinging to the root mass and making a solid wall against the northeast.

Lowering his blanket pack into the hollow where the roots had been, he gathered four thick branches for a foundation, and then with some of the blueprint paper for tinder, he built a small pyre of twigs. The tiny flame leaped up, hissed spitefully at the cold, and then reached warily for the paper. It caught…edges of flame crept along the folds, then the flame began to eat hungrily into the tiny stack of fuel. He watched with triumph as the flames increased and twined their hot fingers about the cold pile of twigs.

He had achieved a fire…a minor victory won. Man’s first companion against the cold and dark, his first step forward from the animal. It was a simple thing, but it was the first thing.

Yet as the flames sank their eager teeth into his small stack of fuel, he realized with quick fear that he could well become the slave of the fire, devoting all of his time to serving it. He must keep his fire small and remain close or all his strength would be required to feed the insatiable flame.

The root mass of the deadfall was more than seven feet of solid wall with a web of extending roots. Taking his time, Hill gathered evergreen boughs for a thick bed against the very base of the protecting wall, which supplied him not only with a windbreak, but with a reflector for his fire. Through the straggling roots, which extended out and down from the root mass, he wove other evergreen boughs, and into the roots overhead he did the same thing. Soon he had a cuplike hollow with an open face toward the fire.

After gathering more fuel, he banked his fire, placed sticks close at hand, then rolled up in his blankets on the bed of spruce boughs. He slept almost at once, awakening from time to time to replenish the flames, warned by the searching fingers of increasing cold.

At daybreak, he awoke in pain. The muscles of his back and neck were a tightly knotted mass. He had been hurt in the crash, and he was just now realizing it. The night in the cold and his odd sleeping position on the ground seemed to have turned his entire body into an assortment of seized and overstretched muscles. He moved and it hurt, but that wasn’t the worst part. It was the sense of fragility that scared him, the sense that if he was called upon to use his body, it would fail him.

He moved close to the fire and, slowly, carefully, began to stretch, trying to loosen his knotted muscles. In two hours he felt slightly better, he made hot, strong black tea, and while the wind moaned among the icy branches overhead he ate one of the boxes of rations, and listened to the cracking and complaining of the trees. Out across the open field, the wind lifted tiny ghosts of snow and floated them eerily along.

Each day he must think…he must plan. He must go farther afield for fuel, for later he might become weak and must depend upon that which was close by. He must add to his shelter and he must return to the plane to search for whatever else might be useful. And he must keep the plane clear of snow.

During that first day, he thought little beyond his work. He brought more blankets from the plane. He located two more deadfalls that he could draw upon for fuel. He built a framework of evergreens that could be shifted to whatever angle to protect him from the wind. He added more boughs to his bed.

By now they would know the plane was down…a search would have already begun. Drury Hill believed their ship had been off course when it crashed, and with the present overcast, there was small hope of immediate rescue.

That night, he took stock of his situation. With no more exertion than was needed to live, his food supply would last three days. From his experience flying from Fairbanks to Prudhoe and back, he knew three days was simply not enough. In the vast area they must search, he could not gamble on them finding him in less than a week.

He must find other sources of food. He was too far from the coast for seals. There were caribou, but he had no rifle nor had he yet seen their tracks. There were lichens that could be eaten. That was what he had read. Hovering over his fire in the darkness and cold, he strove to remember every iota of information culled from his reading, listening, and living.

On the second morning he awoke in a black depression. The pain was back in full force. He had slept fitfully through the awful cold and now he lay staring into the fire. It was no use. He was a fool to expect rescue. He was one man in all this vast waste. They would never find him. He stared at his grimy hands, felt the stubble on his jaws, and then stiffly, he pushed himself to a sitting position and stoked the fire.

His head ached and his mind was dull…was he becoming ill? Had he overworked? It had been twenty years since he had done anything like this…twenty good years of living and leisure and seeing all the world held.

This could be a miserable way to die…on the other hand, suppose he lived? A fire of optimism blazed up within him…it would be something…they had said he was past his prime…that he should take it easy. He cursed. He made tea and ate several crackers. He must find food.

With a stout stick cleaned of bark, he started out, keeping to crusty patches of snow or ground swept bare by wind. He found, growing on some damp soil, a patch of Idelana lichen and gathered a bundle of it to take along. He searched for berries, having heard that some low-growing bushes held their berries all winter long. His back hurt as he walked but soon he was standing straighter and as he warmed up he felt less and less like a crippled old man.

Twice Arctic hares bounded away over the snow and once he saw a herd of caribou in the distance.

Nothing moved in the forest when he started back. The trees were more scattered. He crossed two streams frozen hard by the subzero cold. The branches of trees creaked in the wind. He cupped a gloved hand over his nose and tried to breathe slowly, his exhalations warming the incoming breath.

Wind picked up the snow…he should improvise some snowshoes…a gust of wind whined in the trees…he glanced at the sky. A storm was blowing up.

Darkness came suddenly and he found himself floundering through soft drifts. Feeling his way back to solid ground, he started on, then caught a whiff of wood smoke and then saw the black blob of his shelter. He started toward it, collecting wood as he went. His fire was almost gone, and he nurtured it carefully back to life.

With some meat from a can and some of the lichen, which he soaked to remove the acid, he made a thick stew. Huddled in his shelter of boughs, Dru Hill of Dallas, Abu Dhabi, and Caracas…all places that were warm and populated…added fuel to his fire and slowly ate the stew. He ate, and found it good.

Around him the walls of his shelter became suddenly friendly and secure. The wind caught at his fire and flattened the flame. It would use a lot of fuel tonight. He grinned as he leaned back against the root mass. He had plenty of fuel. Here he was, a lone man in an uncharted wilderness, yet he had created this little bit of civilization, it was a long way from being a building, even a crude one, but it was shelter nonetheless. He thought of the buildings he had ordered built, the oil and gas wells he’d drilled, the tank complexes and pipelines. All had been a natural outgrowth of this same simple need. Shelter and fuel. At one end of the spectrum it demanded a wood fire and a windbreak, at the other cracking plants and parking lots. He saw in himself an extension of the natural order of things. Man against the elements. Man triumphant against the elements. The third night coming and he was still alive. He could win. He could beat this racket. Old Dru Hill wasn’t dead yet.

Tomorrow he would make some snares and catch a few Arctic hares or snowshoe rabbits. Maybe he could make a net and trap some birds. He would have meat and there were more lichens. East through the woods, there might be berries. He might even improve his shelter.

At seven in the morning, he heard the throbbing motors of a plane. The sky was heavily overcast but he rushed out, shouting loudly, uselessly. He heard it overhead, heard it pass on…at least they were trying. Hope mounted, then died. He considered a dozen unreasonable doubts, worried over fifty objections. They might never return to this locality.

Yet he did not despair, for they would continue to search. He worked through the fourth day at his usual tasks, a man below medium height, inclined to be fat, but he hurt less…in some strange way his body seemed to be stronger. To the west he found a vast stretch of tundra broken by only occasional outcroppings of rock and by the stalks of some plant. Intrigued, he dug into the snow and frozen ground and got out the fattish sulfur-yellow roots. They tasted sweet and starchy. He collected enough to fill his pockets.