Rappel down.
Break wood.
Stuff backpack.
Climb cliff.
Haul up wood.
Stack it.
Repeat.
I was going to have to figure out some sort of pulley system to get the damn wood up in the cave. All this hauling was getting old… but for right now, it had to be done.
Every so often, I would go back and add more logs to the fire when it needed it. What was great was that the back of the cave was actually warming up, to the point that I could have removed most of my cold-weather gear and been okay.
I was going to get that sucker up and running and sit there bare-ass naked at some point, I promised myself that.
By the time all the wood was hauled up, I had more than enough to last me for the night.
I had no more water left in my metal water bottle, so I packed it with snow down by the base of the cliff. Once I was back in the cave, I set it by the fire on the rocks. The snow gradually melted, and I had my first taste of cold water on whatever the fuck planet this was.
Tasted like H2O to me. Delicious.
I sat there in the rear of the cave with my jacket and fleece and boots off, feeling the glorious heat rolling off the fire. I pulled out a protein bar from my limited supplies, along with a couple of berries, and ate and drank like a king. Albeit one with very small rations, and a pretty fucked-up castle.
But it was my castle.
I felt great. I felt alive.
I realized part of me should be freaked out, but for the first time in a year, all the grief and sorrow and chatter in my head had gone away – at least temporarily.
But I would take ‘temporarily’ any day of the week.
What it came down to was this: I was going to die unless I did something about my situation… and I realized I didn’t want to die.
I had been okay with checking out last night, up in the tree… but in the light of morning, I’d decided I wanted to stick around.
That’s pretty huge when you’ve been more or less contemplating suicide for the last twelve months. In fact, my coming out to Denali alone was more or less a subconscious plea to the universe to take me out and end the suffering.
Apparently the universe had obliged… sort of.
But it had also thrown me into a situation where I literally had to choose every minute whether I wanted to keep on living.
And, to my great surprise… I did. I wanted to keep on living.
Nothing like the threat of imminent death to focus the mind and get it off lesser problems. Of which there were a whole slate coming up.
But for now, I luxuriated in the warmth of the fire, chewed that protein bar for as long as I could make it last, and sipped that water like it was the finest bourbon in the world.
As I gazed into the fire, my survival-minded brain began to make a to-do list of the most pressing concerns.
I had shelter, fire, and plenty of snow to thaw out. That was good.
Now I needed food.
The berries were apparently nonpoisonous. If I didn’t start puking my guts out in the next 24 hours, I would consider it a raging success and start eating more of them. But I needed protein and fat.
So far, I hadn’t seen any wildlife beyond wolves and deer. No rabbits, no squirrels, no mice, no birds – which was pretty fuckin’ weird. But, hey – maybe having two moons in the sky changed everything.
The deer was the obvious choice to hunt. That buck I’d seen could supply me for over a week.
Figure he was 170 pounds. A normal hunter would have field dressed him – gutted and skinned him – and maybe gotten 50-60 pounds of lean venison off him.
At a pound of protein per meal, that was roughly two weeks worth of meals.
But I wasn’t a normal hunter. And I didn’t have a damn thing to supplement that protein with except some weird-ass berries.
So I was going to be making use of the internal organs – especially the heart, liver, and kidneys. And I would have to eat more of the fat than what a normal hunter might. If you only eat protein and no fat, you run into a problem: protein poisoning, also known as rabbit starvation.
Rabbits are the leanest game animals out there, with only about 8% fat. If you had to subsist only on rabbit and nothing else for a winter – as some settlers and Native Americans had to in centuries past – you’re screwed. Rabbit actually takes more vitamins and minerals to digest than the vitamins and minerals you get out of it.
After a week of eating nothing but super-lean meat, you develop diarrhea. After a couple of weeks of that, you’re a goner.
That’s why the Inuit could subsist on a diet of seal meat for months at a time: plenty of blubber, or seal fat, kept them from developing malnutrition and protein poisoning.
Luckily I had the berries. The carbohydrates in them would counter any problems with the protein.
That is, if I didn’t die from them in the next 24 hours.
Good times.
The question was, how to get the deer?
I could craft a bow out of a good hardwood sapling, and I could use a section of my rock-climbing rope for the string, but I had to be honest with myself: I was not a good shot. I had never been much of a bow hunter, and I was too much out of practice. I
