In the Bleak Midwinter

From the hillside behind her, she heard an enraged bellow. She skidded to a halt. She turned around, her feet deadened, her legs burning and stinging with cold, her arms cramped and aching. She clutched the boots in her stiff, clumsy hands and shook them over her head.

“Suck wind, you loser! I’m gonna put your boots over my fireplace and laugh at you every time I see ’em!” She spun around and bounded away. Another garbled, angry cry. She could make out, “Bitch!” and “kill you . . .” There was a sound of branches cracking, a deep whumpf as a heavy load of snow slid off an evergreen. Was he coming after her? Clare churned through the snow, blinking away the flakes that landed on her eyelashes, desperate to find that ridge.

She fell onto it, face first, when her nerveless feet rolled over a branch hidden underfoot and sent her sprawling. She swiped at her face, a hopeless gesture of drying, and groped for the boots. Dangling one glove from her teeth, she knotted the laces together and hung them over her shoulder. She went up the ridge soundlessly, listening for any indications that her attacker was on her trail. The huge silence of the forest was disorienting; she had no way of knowing if he had given up on catching her or if the sounds of his pursuit were being muffled by the snow and the trees.

At the top of the ridge, Clare crouched, looking for her old tracks. She finally found a few, frighteningly indiscernable, already vanishing under the falling snow. She stood up, thighs and back complaining, and pressed a gloved thumb hard between her eyes. Risk that the ridge would lead her to the road? Or backtrack along to the camp road, hoping that there was enough of a trail left to follow?

There was a sharp crack followed by a rustle. Impossible to tell how far away. Her heart seized hard, trying to send the icy slurry that was her blood into her frozen extremities. Time to fish or cut bait. She took one last look at the blurred marks she had left climbing up the ridge during her flight from the camp road. She stamped her boots and waded into the virgin snow to her right.

It was slow going. Plodding over branches and around trees, stumbling down one side or another and scrambling back up to the narrow ridge crest, misstepping again and again because she felt as if she were walking on wooden boxes, unable to read the terrain under her feet.

The cold stole inside quietly, implacably. Her legs had gone numb. Beneath her parka, she shivered spasmodically, violent quakes that did nothing to dispel the damp chill of her skin. Her face felt raw, her hands distant and unwieldy. Even her brain seemed stiff with cold. Instead of listening alertly for any noise from her attacker, she found herself drifting, mesmerized by her legs breaking the snow, by the constant movement of the flakes filling the air, by the patterns of the trees she slapped against as she plowed onward. Birch, pine, birch, unknown, fir, fir, hemlock.

With a start, she realized she had run out of ridge. The thin spine of rock had melded seamlessly into the forest floor, no slope on either side of her to keep her headed in one direction. No indication of which way she should continue. Nothing to keep her from wandering in circles until she surrendered to the cold. They say hypothermia is a happy death, the old warrant officer observed. Angry, frustrated tears flooded her eyes and spilled over, hot against her raw skin. She took off a glove and wiped them away with the heel of her hand. Breathed in shakily. Okay. She would navigate by line-sighting between trees, even if she could only see a few feet ahead. Tree by tree, she would try to keep to a straight path. If she didn’t reach the road within . . . a half hour, she would dig in. Branches and evergreen boughs were sure to provide her with some protection. Snow itself was an insulating material.

She had to force her spine to straighten, her legs to move forward. Her fear had cooled, too, to chilly despair. She sighted a marker tree and stumbled through the snow. When she reached it, she did it again. And again. And again.

When she caught the first flash of light from the corner of her eye, it almost didn’t register. It flashed again, and she jerked her head left, her mouth dropping open. It was a flashlight beam, a strong one, casting through the forest from some distance away. She steadied herself against a birch. Either she was saved, or there were two of them. All she had to do was find out which.

She giggled involuntarily. All she had to do was stalk this one, knock him down and whack him with her flashlight. Then she could take his car keys. She giggled again, shrilly, unable to stop herself. Stress and tension, the warrant officer drawled. Screws up your thinkin’. She swallowed a giggle, hiccuped, giggled some more. Hit herself three times hard in the midsection. When she was silent again, she set out for the light in the distance.