We safely reached the cave less than 30 minutes later. After that, we called it a day, roasted some more venison, and did some baby-making to celebrate.
I was going to have to figure out how to do that on the road, too… no way I was leaving the safety of this cave if our love life was going to suffer.
That was a joke.
…kind of.
The next day, I climbed back up the cliff to retrieve my pitons and anchors. Never knew when we might need them.
Then I did my sight-seeing tour down the ravine again, and walked all the way back to the cave – but this time I took my telephone lineman tree-climbing belt, my bow, and a quiver full of arrows.
Didn’t see nor hear a wolf the entire damn time.
Murphy’s Law.
I didn’t gain a whole lot from the trip, but it was good to know I could get back up to the plateau without having to climb the cliff.
Just in case.
17
After I returned to the cave, we started our preparations.
There were three areas that were of huge importance:
We needed to be able to protect ourselves…
We needed supplies…
And we needed to be able to travel as fast as possible.
So I devised a plan, and we began to work on all three.
As far as protection, the number one threat we would face was wolves. So we began to practice getting up into trees as fast as possible.
It wouldn’t be practical to assume we would always find a tree with branches low enough to climb, so we began practicing with a rope.
The process went something like this:
I found a rock that weighed several pounds and tied it to the end of a 40-foot rope. The rock was purely for weight. It allowed me to swing the rope around and throw it as high as possible – basically like a hammer throw in track and field.
I had to crisscross the rope over the stone many times and tie over a dozen knots to keep it in place – but in the end, I was sure the stone wasn’t slipping out.
Once I swung the rock and got up a good speed, I would throw it over a limb about 20 feet up.
The stone would fall back to the ground, trailing the rope with it. Of course, I kept the other end in my hand so the whole rope didn’t end up flying over the branch.
Once we retrieved the stone end, I attached the rope to Lelia’s climbing harness (actually my climbing harness, still on loan to her), which she wore over her furs.
I would use my weight and strength to pull her up. In reality, it was more like I was counterbalancing her weight, effectively making her as light as possible so she could scramble up the tree using my ice axes. She would spike them into the bark and use them as handholds to pull herself up.
Once she was up on a high enough branch, she would detach the rope from her climbing harness and tie it off to the tree limb – theoretically. And at that point, I would climb it – theoretically.
The problem was, the rope was too small for me to grip effectively. I didn’t have the same freakish grip strength that Lelia had, nor her light weight. I needed knots in the rope for it to work.
But having knots in the rope would make it way more difficult to pull over the tree limb, and would make it useless (or at least a lot less useful) for other purposes, like mountain climbing and belaying.
So we designated a second rope just for me, 30 feet in length. I tied knots in it every two feet, doubling and even tripling them up in size so that I could easily grab hold and use them to climb.
Once Lelia climbed high enough up – 15 feet was sufficient – she would use a carabiner to attach the knotted rope to a limb, and I would climb the knotted rope to safety.
When we put it all together, it went something like this:
I would use the weighted rope to swing it around in the air in a circle, faster and faster, and then release it up over a high limb.
The weight would drop the rope to the ground, at which point Lelia would attach it to the harness she wore.
I would put all my weight behind pulling it, and she would scramble up the tree as I lifted her.
Once she got to the branch, she would immediately attach another, shorter length of rope to the limb so she couldn’t fall.
Meanwhile, I would shuck off my backpack so I was carrying as little weight as possible.
Then she would attach the knotted rope to the limb and throw it down…
…and I would climb up to safety.
After practicing for days – well over a dozen hours, with hundreds of attempts – we got it down to an average of 33 seconds, with a record time of 25.
Was it enough time to escape a wolfpack?
If we heard them coming, yes.
If we didn’t… well, I didn’t like to think about that.
But on both previous occasions, I had heard the wolves coming from a long distance away. After all, I’d had enough time to ‘telephone repairman’ myself up a tree using my crampons and an improvised rope belt.
Our new system used more rope as resources, but it was faster – and it got both of us up in the tree in less time.
We practiced at least an hour every day, trying to beat our record time.
The second thing we needed was supplies – which meant another deer.
Lelia assured me that we could forage for a good deal of our food, but I still wanted a backup, just in case.
We spent several days hunting until we bagged our next kill, a doe this time. After that, we skinned and cleaned it, transported the meat back to the cave, and began roasting and smoking it into jerky. We needed
