chest. I still couldn’t get up and I had to fight off a thrust of panic as I floundered around again until I was facing downhill, my legs spraddled out below me. I could feel the ground, then, with my hands and hips. I managed to get both palms down flat, then pushed and twisted upward. It took two tries before I was able to heave myself erect.
But the frame on my right showshoe had snapped in two places; when I tried to put my weight on it it folded up around my ankle and threw me back down into the drift. The panic jabbed at me again, the same kind of panic a poor swimmer must feel in deep water. I rolled again, coughing snow out of my mouth and throat, blowing it out of my nose. I couldn’t see; everything had become a misty white blur. Once more I flailed over onto my buttocks, twisted upward. Finally managed to stand her-onlike on one leg, sawing the air with both arms until I had my balance.
I stood there wobbling, feeling crippled and anxious because I was out of my element, in a survival situation that I didn’t understand or quite know how to cope with. Maybe the right shoe would take a little weight, if I was careful… but when I tested it my right foot sank and I couldn’t free the left shoe to slide it forward, and I almost fell again.
I cleared my eyes, took deep breaths until the apprehensive feeling eased and some of the tenseness went out of me. All right. The first thing I had better do was to get rid of the snowshoes; the right one was too badly damaged and that made the other one just as useless. I untied the thongs, pulled off the right shoe and let that leg down as far into the churned up snow as it would go-thigh-deep. Then I took the other shoe off and got that leg down so that I was standing on both feet.
Walking was something else again. The first step I took, with my right foot, I sank to my hip on the left side. I tried it again and again, slowly and deliberately, and found a way to move forward and upward without losing my equilibrium, but each step netted me no more than eighteen inches of progress. The effort of moving, burrowing forward at this snail’s pace, was so great that I had to stop before I had gone more than ten yards.
I rested for a time, looking up at the crest of the hill. Maybe the drifts weren’t as deep along its flattish top, over on the other side; at least the going would be easier downhill. And if there was another steep hillock on the far side? One obstacle at a time. Get up to the top of this one first.
I struggled upward again, one short slogging step after another. It was slow, exhausting work and I had to stop twice more to rest my aching legs before I was able to cover the last few yards to the crown.
The snowpack
There was a road down there.
It ran along the far edge of the snowfield, where the terrain rose sharply into steep red-earth cutbanks and tree-clad hillsides. Its surface was mostly covered with a thin crust of snow, except for streaky areas where the wind had scoured it away and the asphalt showed through. But it was the high windrows flanking it on both sides that clearly identified it as a road, and gave me a small measure of relief. A snowplow had made those windrows; and no county sends out snowplow crews to clear mountain roads unless there is enough traffic to warrant it.
The road was maybe 300 yards from where I stood atop the hill-300 yards of wind-smoothed virgin snow. No telling from here just how deep the drifts were; I would find that out when I started wading through them. If I’d still had the use of the snowshoes, I could cover the distance in a few minutes. As it was…
I started downslope, keeping to the cleared patches wherever I could, and the first seventy-five yards or so weren’t bad. Then the drifts began to deepen, and before I was three-quarters of the way downhill the snow was hip-high and getting deeper. Flakes of frozen powder got into my clothing, burned where they touched bare flesh. My hands were stiff and numb inside the coat pockets. The wind was still up and it hammered at me, chilled my neck, sent tremors through my body.
The depth of the drifts leveled out to just above my waist. But the snow was packed solidly down close to the ground, and I couldn’t make more than six to eight inches with each lifting, thrusting forward step. It wasn’t long before the muscles in my hips and thighs began to cramp from the strain.
Near the bottom of the slope, I put a foot forward and down and there was no ground under it. I plunged into a depression of some kind, and for an instant my head was submerged and I was struggling wildly in freezing whiteness. Snow particles stung my eyes, poured inside the collar of my coat, caked in my nostrils. I fought upward, thrashing with my legs-and one foot found purchase, then the other, and I came heaving up through the surface blowing and gasping. Slapped clumps of icy wetness off my face and out of my eyes and stood for a time, racked with cold spasms, to get my breath and my composure back before I pushed onward.
It took me something better than an hour to cross the last 150 yards of the snowfield. Twice the drifts deepened to armpit level; both times I veered away, half floundering, until I found a shallower course. I was so fatigued by the time I churned out onto the roadbed, where the snow was only a few inches deep, my legs wouldn’t support me and I fell to my knees. Knelt there shaking, swaying like a sapling in the wind, until I was able to summon enough reserve strength to boost myself upright and keep my wobbly legs under me.
Which way, left or right? I seemed to recall, dimly, that the last turn the whisperer had made that night three long months ago had been to the left: left turn and then we’d climbed up and down the hillocks and eventually stopped near the cabin. I wasn’t sure I could trust my memory after all this time, but I had to go one way or another; and to the right the road ran in a gradual downhill curve. To the right, then. And hope to God I reached some kind of uninhabited shelter before anyone came along or I collapsed from the cold and the dragging tiredness.
Before I started walking I remembered the package of Fig Newtons I’d put into my overcoat. Mostly sugar, those things: fast energy. I fumbled in the pocket, and the package was still there; I pulled it out, managed to tear the cellophane wrapping with my teeth. I choked down three bars, and three more as I set off, and three more at intervals until I had eaten all of them.
I had to move in a slow, shuffling gait because of the weakness in my legs and because the asphalt was ice- slick beneath its patchy skin of snow. The three or four inches on the road had to be yesterday’s and last night’s snowfall, I thought, which meant that the snowplow crew had been here sometime within the past twenty-four hours. Would they come again today? Probably not. Not enough new snowfall, and this wasn’t a major road; its patched and eroded condition told me that. Had to be other cabins around here somewhere, though. And people living in them. I listened for engine sounds as I walked. If any vehicle came along I would have to get off the road, take cover behind a tree or rock or bush close by. My tracks might give me away, though the wind seemed to be obscuring most of the ones I was leaving on the road. Still, I would have to try.
Only it didn’t come to that. There was nothing to hear but the steady throbbing plaint of the wind, the steady throbbing plaint of my breath as I shuffled and shivered my way downhill. Nothing to see but the swaying branches of the trees. The sky had taken on a restless look and seemed to have lowered, so that its grayness partially obscured the tops of the hills that rose on my left. The chill in the air seemed to have more bite in it, too. It was going to snow again before long.
I had gone maybe a quarter of a mile before I saw the first sign of habitation. The road straightened out after a long leftward bend, and off to my right, above the tops of a thick stand of blue spruce, a thin spiral of smoke- chimney smoke-lifted into the low-hanging grayness above. The cabin itself was invisible behind the trees, and that was good because it was no place for me. I kept going, even more cautiously now, and pretty soon I came to the access drive. From there, through the trees, I could see part of the cabin-a big A-frame with a Ford Bronco parked under a lean-to to one side. The Ford had been there all night because the surface snow on the drive was smooth, unbroken. There was nobody out and about, nobody to observe me as I moved past and out of sight.
The first flakes of snow began to flutter down, then increased to a thin flurry almost at once. Just what I needed-Christ! I kept my head pulled down into the collar of my coat as I walked, eyelids half-lowered; but even so the wind-flung crystals stung my cheeks and made my eyes tear.
After a time I saw the shape of another cabin materialize among the trees ahead. No smoke coming out of this one, or at least none that I could make out, but it was just as inhabited as the previous one. The snow skin on its lane had been rutted by thick tires, probably sometime earlier today.
I got past there, too, without anybody coming out to ask who I was and why I was traveling on foot in a
