I scanned the trees 50 feet away. There were a lot of firs with bushy branches that I could cut off with my knife –
Wait – did I even have my knife?!
I had my backpack, I had my metal water bottle – I could feel the liquid inside sloshing as I moved –
I checked my supply bag.
Sure enough, I had my knife, my Craftsman tool, my matches, my flare gun, an assortment of protein bars – my letter from Katie, thank god –
And six spare bullets.
I’d carried them with me rather than leave them with the rifle at the base of the –
The rifle!
I looked all around me at the walls of the gorge –
Fuck.
No rifle, at least not that I could see.
That would have been too much of a miracle, I suppose.
It was enough that I had survived a thousand-foot fall and an avalanche without a scratch. Couldn’t exactly hope to have a hunting rifle, too.
Didn’t want to make this shit too easy.
Alright – I could use the knife and the Craftsman to cut off some limbs from the pine trees and create a lean-to – maybe even use that as a framework for a makeshift igloo. Pack it with snow for insulation and to keep the wind out. Just something to survive for the night.
I looked over at the trees as I started walking through the foot-deep snow –
And then I saw someone looking at me.
I stopped in shock.
I didn’t see much – just a figure in the shadows, hunched over near the ground, wearing furs from head to toe.
FURS?!
What the hell?!
Who the hell wore furs in an Alaskan national park?
An indigenous person? Inuit or Yupik, maybe?
…but all the ones I’d ever met in Alaska wore regular clothes. It was the 21st century, after all. Walmart was almost everywhere, and Amazon delivered everywhere they weren’t.
Was it a hardcore survivalist? Some wacko who wanted to go the full nine yards?
“Hey!” I called out.
The figure suddenly bolted. Turned around into the woods and fled.
“HEY! WAIT!” I yelled, and tried to run after him – but running through a foot of snow while wearing crampons for mountain climbing ain’t exactly the easiest thing in the world.
My peeping tom, though, was pretty goddamn fast. He basically disappeared into the shadows of the forest in two seconds flat.
Weirdest fuckin’ thing…
It might have been a walking stick, but I could have sworn he was carrying a spear.
Shorter guy, too. The bulkiness of the furs disguised it a bit, but he looked pretty small and thin.
I stumbled over to the spot in the trees where the guy had been crouched. The footprints weren’t much of a revelation. They were pretty big and bulky, but that made sense if he’d been wearing feet wrappings made of animal skins rather than boots with a sole.
So I probably had an honest-to-god survivalist wacko on my hands.
Maybe he’d seen my show.
Heh… probably not. If you were fanatical enough to run around in furs in Denali National Park with a spear, you probably weren’t going home to electricity and an internet connection.
But whoever it was could probably guide me the fuck out of here and back to civilization.
I was about to follow the tracks into the forest when something changed my mind.
Several wolves howled in the not-too-far-away distance.
A-ROOOOOOOOOO!
The sound made my neck hairs stand on end.
Chasing after some idiot in the dark suddenly had even less appeal that it did before.
And my idea for a lean-to rapidly evolved into something farther up off the ground.
I started scanning the nearest trees for something that I could easily climb –
And then I froze again.
These fir trees…
They weren’t like anything I’d ever seen before.
And I’d been to 70-plus countries and all seven continents.
They weren’t Frasier firs, which are most people’s idea of Christmas trees, but more like Eastern white pines, with long, thin needles. But there were plenty of branches from the ground on up, just like a Christmas tree.
The branches and needles looked the same, yeah – but these things had berries on them. Round, orange, waxy-looking berries about the size of acorns, growing at the junctures where branches split off from each other. They looked like miniature tangerines.
What the fuck?!
Apparently Denali had some seriously weird botanical shit going on.
No time for that, though.
Time to get moving.
Most of the trees were firs, with thin, springy branches and small trunks. Great for lean-tos, not so great for climbing. Damn thing would bend over under my weight, which would be no Bueno for avoiding wolves.
I went for a regular pine: a sturdy trunk with no limbs for the first eight feet, then sizable branches above that.
Normally it would have been a bitch to climb – but I had on crampons, which are basically spiked exoskeletons for your boots. If they could grab onto rock, they wouldn’t have any problem biting into tree bark.
But I couldn’t just use the crampons. That wouldn’t be enough – if the spikes ripped off the bark while I was climbing, I would fall right into the pack of wolves. Super no Bueno.
I couldn’t use the axes dangling from my wrists, either. They were good for punching through ice or grabbing onto rock, but the tree bark would just rip off under the tips of the blades.
What I needed was a get-up like one of those old-timey telephone linemen – guys who climbed telephone poles to fix the telephone lines, back before they used bucket trucks with extendable mechanical arms. In fact, they probably still used the old ways in rural areas that couldn’t afford a $200,000 machine just to keep AT&T customers happy.
Anyway, it worked like this: the lineman would clip a belt around him and the pole, leaving enough slack that he could lean back at about 45 degrees. Leaning back against the belt allowed him to apply a lot more force against the pole, and his spiked shoes would allow him to walk up the telephone pole.
Physics is fun. Except when it
