We lashed our snowshoes to our feet, and then we set out. Lelia carried her spear in one hand and used it as a walking stick.
I wish I could say it was an exciting journey, full of adventure and beauty… but it was mostly stumbling around through forests on our snowshoes.
Every once in a while I would stop and gaze around at the beauty… but it was the beauty of a snow-filled forest. After the first five times you look at it, it pretty much looks exactly the same.
And I’d already looked at it hundreds of times over the last few weeks.
So… mostly stumbling around on our snowshoes and stopping at night in exhaustion.
We made good progress, at least. I would estimate we were covering more than a mile per hour. That may sound like nothing at all, and it would have been – on solid ground. Remember, we were walking over snow. And not hardpacked snow, either. The softer it was, the harder it was to get through it. And we were using shitty homemade survival snowshoes. So the fact we were even covering a mile per hour was pretty damn impressive.
Lelia was certainly surprised. She kept pointing at the snowshoes and commenting in wonder, “We go so fast with these ugly things!”
As we made our way through the forest, I realized something: Lelia hadn’t had snowshoes when I first encountered her. Which probably meant that the most distance she could cover in a full day was four miles, if that.
Same for the tribe. They could only cover four miles a day, too.
Lelia had said that it had been six days between the time she last saw her tribe and when she encountered me. That sixth day she had been injured, so she hadn’t gone far then. Actually, I had seen her on the fifth day in the evening, when I’d first woken up here and mistaken her for a survivalist.
So, five days of travel at most. Four miles a day, so… 20 miles maximum. Probably less.
We could do 20 miles in two and a half days, easy.
Well, okay, maybe not easy, but we could do it.
If we could just find some indication of which way we should go, we might find the tribe a hell of a lot faster than I’d anticipated.
The first night we sheltered under a humongous fallen oak tree (or whatever passed for an oak tree in this world). We dug out the snow from underneath it and created a hollow, then leaned a bunch of fir branches against the trunk. I layered the branches with snow, creating a sort of crude fort that would not only keep out the wind but insulate us, keeping in our body heat.
I left just enough room in the fir-tree wall to crawl into, and then we covered the door with more branches from the inside. Between my clothes and Lelia’s scorching body heat, we actually stayed somewhat warm throughout the night.
We even had sex. It was a quickie on top of her fur cape, with us mostly clothed… but that sort of make it hotter, both erotically and temperature-wise. Then we fell asleep in each other’s arms.
The next morning we ate jerky, orange berries from the fir trees, and roots we foraged. Then we set out again.
Another uneventful day of stumbling around through the snow. That night we dug another hollow under a fallen tree, but we were so damn exhausted that we skipped the sex and just fell asleep after we’d sealed up the shelter with fir branches and snow.
We never encountered any wolves, I’m happy to say. It was probably because we’d prepared so thoroughly. It was like bringing an umbrella with you when it’s cloudy: because you brought it, there’s a 95% chance it’s not going to rain.
It’s a corollary of Murphy’s Law: if you prepare for something to happen, it probably won’t.
Fine by me. I had no need to test our tree-climbing speed record.
However, though we never encountered a wolf pack…
…we definitely encountered something else.
19
It was the third day of travel, and we were getting close to the tall, thin mountain peak. I knew that because I’d used my crampons and telephone lineman belt to climb the tallest tree I could find. Up above the treetops, I could see the spire in the far distance. Once I climbed back down to Lelia, we started going up the mountain instead of across the mountain slopes.
It was about midday when we heard it: a low, rumbling roar.
It sounded like an angry lion.
I looked over at Lelia in alarm. My heart was pounding.
She had her headwrap on, so all I could see was her emerald eyes.
But they looked scared as hell.
“Skiris,” she whispered through her headwrap.
We might have practiced getting up in trees specifically to avoid wolves, but I wasn’t about to discriminate against abominable snowmen.
We started moving as soon as we heard the second roar, even louder and closer than the first.
I used my knife to slash the bindings on both our sets of snowshoes. It took no more than ten seconds.
As Lelia stepped out of her snowshoes, I took my rock attached to the rope and started whirling it around through the air.
Two seconds later, I threw the stone over a branch in the tallest hardwood tree near us.
The stone plummeted down, trailing the rope after it.
Lelia grabbed the stone and hooked the rope to her harness.
The roaring was getting louder.
I leaned back hard, helping her scramble up the tree trunk with my ice axes.
As I continued pulling, she scrambled
