Bob nodded, with more than an inflection of: Yes, of course, what am I, an idiot?
The bear was not long awake, this early in spring, Emily thought. Big and brown. Hungry. It could tear off a limb from a person like a person would tear off a chicken wing.
She pulled Aidan down toward the ground, toward the snow, and Bob crouched too. Emily pressed a finger to her lips, as if they needed telling. Bob, anyway. You didn’t go disturbing bears so soon after hibernation.
Her own breathing roared in her ears. The bear was maybe fifty yards away, head low.
They crouched, Emily holding Aidan’s hand tight in hers. She licked a finger and held it up. The wind was blowing from the bear toward them: that was good.
And the bear kept its head low, snuffling along through the undergrowth. She remembered something from a trip with her parents: in the spring, bears mostly foraged for berries and roots, instead of hunting.
Mostly.
She began to relax a little, though there was an ache deep in her thighs from crouching, and she couldn’t sit—the snow would get on her clothes, and her dad always said, “You get wet, you die.”
It felt like forever, but might have been twenty minutes, when the bear, at last, lumbered heavily away from them and into the forest. They straightened a little, to ease their joints. Bob and Emily did anyway. Aidan was quite small.
Then, after another ten minutes or so, they began to slowly move in the direction they’d been heading: northwest. Emily glanced at the sky worriedly. The sun was very low now. It would be dark soon, and the temperature would drop below zero.
They descended through a valley, over a brow, and then into another, smaller, valley. Bob was walking slowly, she noticed. Limping, and inhaling sharply when his unsteady footing in the snow caused him to twist his shoulder and arm.
They walked.
And they walked.
What must have been an hour passed. It was freezing, and Aidan was shivering—she could see him trembling. They needed to stop soon, to shelter.
There was a lake far below, on the other side of an outcrop of rock. The low sun gleamed on it—it was still iced over in the middle, tinged blue, but the outer parts were reflecting light in the shifting way that suggested water. Ringed with a stony beach, it looked like, then a layer of pine, a belt of what might be cottonwood, thickets of cranberry bushes, probably, though it was the wrong season for the berries…and rock, and grass, up to where they stood.
Twin lakes, actually, Emily realized: one higher, feeding the other via a small river that this far off registered as white, from the spray.
And at the upper lake, a cabin. A low structure, wooden, one story. No smoke coming from it, so unoccupied, it seemed. A hunter’s cabin, maybe. About a few miles away. A few clicks, her dad would have called it.
“Cabin?” said Emily to Bob.
“Yeah, I see it.”
Too far away, though. Too far to reach before nightfall. Night was something that really did fall, this far north. Something dangerous. Like a guillotine.
“Can’t reach it before dark,” she said.
“Nope.”
Emily scanned the small valley, noticed the shadow of the cliff to their left. It was sheer, the rock, and trees grew close to it, aspens and cedars.
“There,” she said. “We’ll make a lean-to shelter against the cliff.”
“Oh,” said Bob. “You know how to do that too, do you?” His voice caught on a snag of pain somewhere inside him, softened his sarcasm.
“Yes,” she said neutrally.
She led the way downhill and to the left. Southwest, she could see, from the setting sun. Off-track, for where she and Aidan were going, but they had to stay alive before they could think about their final destination.
She found low-hanging branches, thick with needles, which she was able to twist until they snapped away from their trunks. She made Bob sit against the rock of the cliff, Aidan too, while she did it—gathering as many thick branches as she could. There was no point in Bob bleeding out, and she sure as hell wasn’t going to let Aidan freeze to death.
She was sweating, soaking her clothes with it, and she knew she’d pay for that when the sweat froze, but she was grateful—in the moment—for the warmth. Anyway, if you didn’t get shelter, you might as well butcher your own carcass and give it to the nearest vulture.
She paused to take off her jacket, made Aidan put it on over his own. He tried to refuse, but she could see the skin going pale, almost blue, on his face. She hugged him, until his shivering stopped, then carried on working. She didn’t like the color of his skin.
She leaned the branches against the cliff wall, longest first, and then made a sort of weave across that. She left an opening in the middle, a very basic chimney, for smoke. No point insulating your shelter and then dying in your sleep of smoke inhalation.
An image: their first camping trip after moving to Alaska. Her dad had made a shelter just like this. Her parents’ joy at this vast open landscape, at being finally in the wilderness for good; her fury at being trapped, confined, in so much huge emptiness. And yet, it had all gone in, somehow, the stuff she had learned, and it was keeping her alive now.
Still, if her family had never moved here, she would never have needed to know, to be kept alive.
But she wouldn’t have Aidan, either.
Her mind went in circles like that: a fish in a bowl.
Meanwhile, she needed to build the fire.
At least Bob had the lighter, so they could cheat there. But the ground, she thought, the ground was a killer. Too cold—it would leach the life right out of you. She couldn’t do much, but she forced herself to go out again into the trees, breath ghosting in front of her, arms aching, and gather more branches, soft ones dense with needles, which she laid on the ground, to form a kind of mat to sleep on.
Then: More wood, this time dead branches, no leaves, the drier the better. She got some, and then she got more, and then she got more. They didn’t want to run out in the night. It was spring, but the temperature would easily fall to twenty below when it was full black. In the sky, the moon floated above the treetops, ribboned by thin mist: it was like something done with Day-Glo paint, then smudged with a finger.
She dragged the wood back and stacked it at one end of the shelter, then went back a final time, looking for leaves and moss, anything to use as tinder. She formed it into a pile in the middle of the lean-to. “Come in,” she said, to Bob and Aidan.
Aidan scooted in, and she made room for him, then held out her hand to Bob, who had entered the shelter from the other side.
“You’re going to light a fire?” said Bob. He looked up the mountainside in the general direction of the crashed plane. “With those men out there?”