He heard a distant thud, straightened up to listen but it didn’t come again. From up where the dudes had said the plane was. Maybe he’d imagined it.
Didn’t matter. Whatever those two idiots were doing out there in this frigid night he would find them. Because if they died he’d never get another guide job. Blacklisted.
Nobody hired guys who let their clients die.
Unless the griz got them. Even then.
But when he tried to follow Steve’s and Zack’s tracks uphill they vanished under the blinding new snow, and finally he turned back.
“Steve!” he yelled till he couldn’t yell any longer, “Zack! Where are you?”
When he got back to camp his watch said 02:41. Five hours till dawn.
THE SNOW CAME AT THEM horizontally, then down, then sideways. It ate into their iced-up faces, froze their eyes shut and their ears numb. Each breath was a knife down the throat.
“Maybe here,” Steve called, his words snatched by the wind.
“This ridge, has to be the one above camp.”
“If he’d only shoot again –”
So much seemed familiar, the sloping snow, the firs nestled close, a tall pine, the tinkle of a stream under its ice. “Here,” Zack called. “We’ve found it.”
But it led to a waterfall off a cliff that would have killed them had they gone five more steps.
Snowing so hard Zack couldn’t tell up or down, wished he’d brought a compass, realized he could use his phone, stepped back to reach in his pocket and slipped off the cliff down into the crown of a tree and grabbed a bough that snapped but slowed him enough to grab another and clamp his legs around the tree’s trunk as it teetered over the void.
NOT TO WORRY
HE WAS SHAKING so hard he could barely hold, realized he was biting a branch but didn’t dare let go, hugged the tree to his chest till the teetering slowed. He could hear Steve’s yells but couldn’t tell from where, could see only this cage of boughs encasing him in howling snow, realized he was in the top of a fir tree that stood on a tiny ledge with a cliff beneath it.
“Steve!” he screamed, “Help!”
“Zack!” Steve’s voice wavered. “Zack! Zack!”
He tried to climb higher but the tree grew thin and tipped him out over the cliff. The snowstorm cleared for an instant and he could see gut-wrenching black rock and vertical ice below the tree. Somehow he had to climb down the tree then up the cliff. And not slip and fall into the dark emptiness below.
The terror was like a deer’s in a tiger’s jaws. When there’s no hope.
You will do this. One step at a time.
And if a step seems dangerous you pull back, find another way.
Till you get to the top.
It wasn’t so bad going down the fir tree, stepping from limb to limb, sometimes slipping on icy bark but always able to hold on to the limbs above.
“Zack!” Steve’s voice, tiny on the wind.
“I’m coming!” Zack yelled, but Steve kept calling.
The rock face he had to climb was vertical and icy. Black granite ribs stuck from it, too slick to grip.
He’d always hated heights. Since he was a kid stuck on a ladder and his Dad called, “You big sissy get down from there.”
It was Death, this aching vertical rock. This fir tree like a monastic companion, saving your soul. But you can’t leave it: there’s no way up or down this cliff.
Maybe there was. One point at a time.
One point was ice that he hammered from the rock with his fist, another a slim frozen ledge his foot kept skidding off, then a vertical slit he could jam his fingers into. Once he looked down, the trunk of the fir tree descending below him into darkness, into death, and the looking down nearly made him slip off the cliff.
Twenty feet from the top there was no way to climb further. A pure sheet of black rock, tilted past vertical.
A headlamp flashed down. “Zack!” Steve shouted over the wind, “Hold tight.”
He held on, fingers quivering, breathing fast, shuddering with cold and fear.
The headlamp came back. “I’m sending down a pole. I’ll hold it. You grab it and climb.”
Steve slid a slender spruce trunk down over the cliff. It was just long enough, sticky with resin where Steve had cut off the branches. It was impossibly hard to climb. With each lunge he feared pulling Steve off the cliff.
When he slithered over the top to safety he lay breathing hard into the snow, unable to speak. Steve sat beside him saying nothing, his hand on Zack’s shoulder.
STUMBLING BLINDLY downhill through the new drifts and dark timber Zack tripped over a low branch and fell face-first into something soft and snow-covered. He couldn’t believe it, didn’t dare. His tent. In the flailing snow he’d walked into camp and tripped over a guy line.
They were home.
He brushed ice from his face and clothes and crawled into his sleeping bag and slept.
He woke. For a few seconds he wasn’t sure where he was, what he was. Coffee odor on the biting cold air, the tang of bacon and scrub oak smoke. There’d be pancakes with maple syrup, and fried eggs, and Jack Daniels for the coffee.
What life had been like just a few hours ago, before he’d learned his money was gone and they’d stolen the coke. Then he remembered the cliff, the wandering in the snowstorm, the wicked cold, the burning plane, the cocaine hidden where it could be easily found.
His stomach clenched. How did this happen so fast?
He crawled out of his bag and unzipped his tent and a wall of snow fell in on him.
“You should whack the tent wall first.” Curt called from the fire pit, laying bacon on a cast iron griddle on the coals.
Zack felt an instant of anger, dismissed it. He stretched to full height, arcing his back. Felt all the muscles pull, tired but lithe.
“Where were you two?” Curt said.
Zack stretched more, tightened his coat round his shoulders. “I couldn’t sleep. When the moon came out I decided to hike up the ridge, see the view. Then Steve got up to piss, saw my tracks and followed them, make sure I was okay. We’ve always been like that, watching each other’s backs.”
“Is that so?”
“It was beautiful, till it started snowing. Then we heard a shot so we came back. Was that you?”
“Your damn grizzly got in the horses. I shot to scare him, lost my gun in the snow.”
“He’s gone?”
“He’ll be back. So one of us has to stay here. With the horses.”
“After yesterday and last night,” Zack said, “I don’t need to go anywhere.”
“Yep,” Curt said, “you had quite a time.”
“You can’t imagine.”
Curt smiled. “Maybe I can.”
Zack woke Steve, told him what he’d said to Curt about last night.
“Good, that was smart.” Steve rubbed his face, his words muffled.
“And when we heard his shot we started back, but got lost in the snowstorm.”
“Why’d he shoot?”
“Grizzly.”
“He’s