the shattered bone back with his thumb, and wrapped a bandage around the ruined ankle as tightly as he could to hold the bones in place. Snow fluttered through the open door as he worked.
“Ain’t we the lucky ones,” Dryman griped as he worked. “Maybe we’ll get lucky. Maybe an avalanche’ll get us. Or maybe Harris was right. Maybe Trexler’s snowed in up there and we can...”
“Yeah. Maybe we’ll all sprout wings and fly out of here. And maybe we can get the hell off this damn car if you stop talking and fix that ankle.”
“I’m fixing it, I’m fixing it!”
At Kramer’s cabin, Trexler worked feverishly to get ready for the trek across the mountain to Copperhead Ridge. He carefully checked the cabin, then pulled on an extra sweater and his fleece-lined jacket, then a ski mask and goggles and put Kramer’s hat on over his own. Important to keep the head warm. If his head got cold, his body temperature would go down accordingly. He strapped on his backpack, pulled on his gloves and headed out into the storm.
The ridge sloped away from him and vanished in the blizzard. He could see twenty, thirty feet around him at best. He knew the trail but not the hot spots, not the drop-offs and the slicks. Half a mile down the mountain there was a sudden fall-off. A three-hundred-footer. He could not afford to drift down the slope, get too close to the cliff.
He slipped his feet through the leather thongs on his wooden skis and tightened the straps around ankle and heel.
The trail ahead was gradual for three or four hundred yards, then it sloped sharply up to the right. The last two hundred yards was a bitch—a forty-degree slope up to the cabin in the open wind. In this wind, a slip there could mean an unrestricted slide—four thousand feet to the bottom of the mountain. Nothing to break it. There wasn’t so much as a daisy on that slope.
Trexler smiled to himself. At the top of his lungs, he yelled:
Dawn. And it was still snowing. Trexler had made it to Copperhead Ridge just before dark, crawling up the last two hundred yards from rock to rock on his belly to keep from being blown over by howling winds. Once inside, he had built a fire, eaten and then slept for eight solid hours. Nobody was going to follow him up there, he was sure of that.
He was up well before dawn and ready to go down the other side of the Copperhead as soon as the sun permitted. The wind had died down in the predawn hours. At 6:30 he was on his way again, skiing cautiously until the sun broke over the Sawatch range to the east. As his vision improved he went faster, staying on the high ridges. Skiing cross country to keep on the high side. By noon he was almost adjacent to Mt. Harvard, which was his halfway mark. But the wind had picked up and swung to the west, slowing him. His hands and feet were beginning to get numb and his visibility was down to thirty or forty feet. He entered a pine thicket and walked instead of skiing.
Then an instant of panic. Ahead of him, immediately to his right, the snow was curling upward. A moment later he felt the updraft. He was almost on the edge of the cliff. He stopped and traversed up the slope, his breath coming harder. Through the icy swirls off to his left he saw something. At first he thought it was the root bowl of a fallen tree. But as he drew closer to it he realized it was a cave, a gaping hole five feet wide in the side of the mountain. He worked his way up to it, shoved his knapsack through the opening and took off the skis, shoving them inside the cavern. He gathered up some sticks and branches and crawled into the hole. He took out his torch and flashed it around the opening. It was a funnel-shaped cleft narrowing to a smaller opening thirty or forty feet from the main opening.
Leaves and broken limbs, nature’s refuse blown from the outside, littered the floor of the fissure.
He made a fire near the opening, letting the updraft suck the smoke out. He took off his boots and socks and warmed his feet and hands over the fire. Then he put on fresh socks. He ate some canned meat and an orange and drank almost a full canteen of water.
An hour passed. The snow shower tapered off and the wind shifted. It got brighter out. But the wind shift blew the smoke into the cavern. He repacked his bag and prepared to get back on the trail.
Then he heard something. At first it was a low growl. A snort almost, like a dog sneezing. Trexler sat up and peered into the dark cave. He flipped one of the tree limbs out of the fire, made a torch out of it and held it at arm’s length deeper into the mountain lair. He saw nothing. He reached into the knapsack for the flashlight.
Then he heard it again. This time it was louder, deeper, more threatening. Trexler instinctively backed up a foot or two, the torch still burning in his hand, He reached into his knapsack with the other, rooting around, feeling for the flashlight and his pistol.
Then he heard movement and realized suddenly that whatever was in there was big. And he was between it and freedom. He rustled the fire with his torch so it burned brighter, still groping for the .45, still searching the darkness of the cave.
The beast roared an angry no-nonsense challenge and then it took shape in the darkness. A grizzly bear, awakened from his winter’s sleep by the smoke, stalked toward him, half asleep, its black lips folded back over bared teeth, its eyes flashing with anger.
Trexler screamed with pain, falling backward and kicking the fire at the enormous animal. It backed off for a moment and he held the gun at arm’s length, aimed at the bear’s face and fired. The bullet tore into its forehead just above the eyes, grooved the top of its head. The bear charged again, looming up over him as he squeezed off shot after shot. The bullets thunked into its thick body without effect. With each hit it roared louder, became angrier, as Trexler scrambled backward to get out of its path.
He backed into one of his skis and it tipped and slid out of the cave. He reached frantically for it but missed. The ski bounded down the steep cliff and plunged out of sight.
