C… not probable. I’d dabbled a bit, but my drug of choice had always been alcohol, not hallucinogens.
D… I couldn’t take that one seriously. I hadn’t seen anything to suggest little green men, and my rectum felt entirely free of probing.
It was E that was seriously shaking my sanity.
The avalanche was real. I couldn’t convince myself otherwise.
And I’d woken up unharmed. That in and of itself was a complete impossibility.
Avalanche…
Unharmed…
Two moons…
The only thing I could plausibly come up with was that I’d died, and somehow wound up… someplace else.
Hadn’t been reincarnated. I was just as old as when I’d started up the mountain.
I doubted this was heaven. No pearly gates, no streets paved with gold… not unless they were snowed under.
I doubted it was hell, either. And it wasn’t just the absence of flames and devils with pitchforks. A frozen landscape might have been some people’s idea of hell, but it wasn’t mine. I’d actually been enjoying myself, so to speak. Yes, I realized that making jury-rigged tree-climbing gear and escaping being eaten by wolves was not everybody’s jam, but it was sort of mine.
I’d never been religious, but I’d sat in on a few Christmas and Easter services that my mom (God rest her soul) dragged me to when I was kid. I knew enough about the Bible to know that whatever came after you died, this wasn’t it.
So maybe the Bible was wrong.
Maybe somebody else was right.
Maybe since I’d died in Denali, I’d wound up in some sort of Inuit afterlife.
Fuck if I knew.
It was hurting my head, so I decided not to focus on the Where I was, but the How to get the fuck out.
Relatively speaking, of course. I doubted there was a spaceship or portal or magic carpet just over the ridge to take me back to Denali.
It was dark enough, so I took out my flare gun, loaded it, and shot it into the air.
PTUNK
fssssssssss
I watched the red spark shoot up in the sky, then slowly arc back down… and I prayed to whatever God might be watching over this weird-ass place that there were people with cell phones or radios or helicopters who could see it.
The wolves howled a little louder as the red flame drifted down.
I waited for an hour… then two… watching as the two moons slowly moved across the sky.
Nobody came.
I knew it was unlikely that they would arrive that fast, but still.
I was starting to feel my mind slipping. I couldn’t bear it, so I prepped another flare…
…and then I thought better of it.
If there’s nobody to SEE these things, then what’s the point of shooting another one off?
Then I remembered:
The fur-wearing survivalist wacko!
Maybe he can call for help, or go get somebody!
“HELP!” I screamed as loud as I could.
My voice echoed in the canyon.
“HEEEELP!” I screamed again.
After screaming myself hoarse for 15 minutes, I got nothing for my troubles except more howling from the wolves.
I couldn’t bear the thought that I was alone out here, so I loaded the last flare and popped it off.
PTUNK
fssssssssss
And waited two more hours in the cold and dark.
Nobody came.
Not a helicopter… not a snowmobile…
Not even the fur-wearing survivalist.
And I was starting to get sleepy. I was tired from the climb, and the cold was beginning to take its toll.
I leaned my head back against the tree trunk and just gave up.
If I died up here from hypothermia, it wouldn’t be that bad.
My parents were both dead. I didn’t have any brothers and sisters, and I wasn’t exactly close with the rest of my extended family.
I would miss my friends… but I had more or less forced them away from me when Katie died. In reality, I’d let them all slip away a year ago.
Maybe all of those friends were right, and Katie actually was in a better place.
Maybe I would even get to see her.
I closed my eyes and thought, If this is it… so be it.
And I let sleep take me over.
6
Then I saw the light.
No, not God or Jesus or whatever the Bible-thumpers would call it.
And not The Light, the one they tell you to go towards when you check out for your dirt nap.
Just the sunrise.
I opened my bleary eyes to see the long shadows of the trees around me stretching up the mountain face.
The sun was rising behind me, so that must be east.
Well… it would have been if I were on Earth.
On planets with two moons, who the fuck knew.
I tried moving and groaned. My body was stiff with the cold, and my ass felt like gravity and the tree branch had colluded to make sure I would never walk again.
Still no anal probing from little green men, though.
I looked down below me to check on the wolves.
None of them were there.
I immediately thought, Was all that real?
Were there REALLY two moons last night?
Were there even wolves?
I figured it had to have been real, because there was no way I would have spent the night up in a tree otherwise.
Then I chuckled in spite of myself, purely out of gallows humor.
You would TOTALLY spend the night in a tree if somebody bet you that you couldn’t do it – even if the bet was a single goddamn beer.
Well… to be honest… I would have take the bet a long time ago.
Not since Katie died, though.
I waited a while to see if the wolves would show up. When they didn’t, I finally started down the tree, creaky as a 90-year-old man.
By the time I got to the base and took off my rope belt, I was warmed up and moving better. More like a 60-year-old man.
My ass, though, felt like it was going to have a permanent branch-sized impression in it for the rest of my life.
I looked at the snow all around me. The wolves had been real, alright. There were dozens of clearly defined tracks. They’d packed down most of the snow
