with These Hands (Ss) (2002) (4 page)

There was a taste of blood in Moran's mouth and a wild buzzing in his head as he waited out the count. He could smell the rosin and the crowd and the familiar smell of sweat and the thick, sweetish taste of blood. Then he was up.

But now he had that smoky taste again and he knew he was going to win. The bell rang. Wheeling, they both trotted back to their corners and the whole arena was a bedlam of roaring sound.

The fourteenth round was three minutes of insanity, sheer madness on the part of two born fighters, wild with the lust of battle. Bloody and savage, they were each berserk with the desire to win.

Every one of the spectators was on his feet, screeching with excitement. Even the pale and staring Marollo sat as though entranced as he watched the two pugilists amid the standing figures around him.

The Soldier dropped, got up, and Moran went down. It was bloody, brutal, sickening yet splendid. All thought of money was gone. For Moran and Barnaby there was no crowd, no bets, no arena. They were just two men, fighting it out for the glory of the contest and of winning.

The fifteenth opened with the sound unabated. There was a continual roar now, as of breakers on a great reef.

The two men came together and touched gloves and then, impelled by driving fury, Flash Moran waded in, slugging with both hands.

Barnaby lunged and Moran hit him with a right that shook him to his heels. The Soldier started a left and again Flash brushed it aside and brought up his own left into Barnaby's wind.

Then the Soldier backed off and jabbed twice. After the first jab, he dropped his left before jabbing again. Louis had done that in his first fight with Schmeling. He was tiring now and falling back on habits that were unconscious yet predictable.

Flash Moran backed off and waited. Then that left flickered out. Moran took the jab and it shook him to his heels.

But he saw the left drop before the second jab. In that brief instant, he threw his right and he put the works on it.

He felt the wet and sodden glove smash into Barnaby's jaw and saw the Soldier's knees buckling. He went in with a left and a right to the head. The Soldier hit the canvas and rolled over on his face and was counted out.

It was over! Flash Moran turned and walked to his corner.

In a blur of exhaustion, he felt the referee lift his right hand, and then he slumped on the stool. They put his robe around him and he was half lifted from the stool and as he stepped down to the floor, he saw Ruth and with her was a tall, gray-haired man who was smiling.

"Great fight, son-a great fight. We'd heard Barnaby was to quit in the twelfth. Glad the rumor was wrong, it would have ruined fighting in this state."

Flash Moran smiled.

"He wouldn't quit, sir. Soldier Barnaby's a great fighter."

Moran turned his head then and saw the Soldier looking at him, a flicker of wry humor in his swollen eyes.

The older man was speaking again.

"My name is Rutgers, Moran," he said. "I'm the district attorney, you know. This is my niece, Ruth Connor. But then I believe you've met."

"That's right," Flash said. "And we'll meet again, tomorrow night? Can we do that, Ruth?"

"Of course," she said with a smile. "I'll be at Gow's place-waiting."

*

He 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 airconditioned 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.