As I jumped off the cliff, I saw the muzzle flash a split second before I heard the gunshots.
BLAM BLAM!
Thank God he was a lousy shot.
I disappeared over the edge of the cliff.
My boots hit the mountainside, and I kicked again.
I was going fast and furious, way faster than was safe.
Ha – that was funny.
With an avalanche about to kill me, I was worrying about ‘way faster than was safe.’
Suddenly I heard a familiar voice scream beneath me.
“JACK!”
I looked down, hoping to catch one glimpse of Lelia before I died.
What I saw both gave me hope – and terrified me.
She had tied the rope around her waist, and was leaning out almost 60 degrees from the edge of the cave.
The other women must have been holding the other end.
She waved her arms frantically.
“CATCH YOU!” she screamed.
OH SHIT –
That part of my brain that had accepted my death?
Now it knew there was a chance.
One in a million, but there was a chance.
And suddenly I was terrified – because if I fucked this up, not only did I die, but Lelia died, too.
I was actually more scared for her than I was for me.
And I was sort of angry at her – like, Don’t you know you could die?!
But maybe she was like me.
Maybe she didn’t want to live in a world where I wasn’t around anymore, either.
Please, Katie, I prayed.
Please – one last miracle.
I kicked off one final time and dropped through the air.
My boots slammed against the mountainside as I came to the end of the rope.
I had misjudged the distance.
I’d thought it was 110 feet down to the cave –
But it was more like 105.
Only five feet to go, not ten.
I heard the roar of the avalanche above me like a runaway freight train –
And I dropped down into Lelia’s waiting arms, twisting my body midair as I slammed into her.
The force knocked her off her feet, and she slipped, both of us slamming against the cliff –
But she hung onto me, and I hung onto her.
Suddenly stone scraped under our bodies.
The women in the cave were hauling up the rope.
Hands grabbed us roughly –
And a second later, we were inside the cave.
Suddenly a wall of white shot past the cave and blotted out all light.
The sound was like being under a ledge at the bottom of a giant waterfall. The sound was deafening.
It went on for almost ten seconds as we huddled in the dark…
And then suddenly the light came back again.
There was a constant sifting of powder through sunlight just outside the cave entrance, with occasional boulder-sized chunks of snow falling past…
…and then it all stopped.
I looked around in amazement at the women.
Their blue faces – some covered in fur wrappings – stared back at me in wonder.
All except for the most beautiful one, who burst out into tears.
“Jack!” Lelia cried out, sobbing.
I grabbed her and held her close to me and kissed her and cried like a fuckin’ baby.
And all I could think was, Thank you, Katie.
Thank you.
33
After a lot of crying and laughing and hugging – and there was a lot of it, since nine women had all worked together to save my life – we peered out the cave entrance to survey the damage.
Outside the cave, there was a massive expanse of new snow that had covered the floor of the valley. And I do mean covered. The trees closest to the cave were half-buried up to the treetops, and what used to be a 40-foot drop to the ground was now less than 15 feet.
That was 25 feet of snow now filling the gorge.
Lelia looked around, fear in her eyes. “Where are skiris?”
“Down there, babe,” I said, pointing directly beneath the entrance of the cave.
Her eyes widened. “Can they get out?”
“No,” I reassured her. “They’re dead.”
Remember what I said about how people can’t dig themselves out of avalanches? That the consistency of the snow is like wet cement that’s set all around you?
I didn’t care how powerful a skiris was – if it wasn’t less than a foot underneath the surface, there was no way it could push up through the snow on top of it.
And the ones I’d seen had been at the base of the cliff when the avalanche started.
They were buried under 25 feet of snow.
So was Weaver, most probably, along with the other 15 skiris who had been on top of the plateau when the avalanche started. They had borne the full brunt of its power – and had fallen 150 feet in addition to being buried under 25 feet of snow.
Which was a pity. I would have liked to have found Weaver’s AR-15 – it certainly would have been a nice tool to have out here.
Ah well. I figured I might find it – and their bodies – in the springtime, when it thawed.
If springtime ever came… or if we stuck around here long enough to see it.
34
It turns out we did stick around, although springtime was still a good ways off.
For one, we had three new members of our group – Nakla, Aras, and Plom – who had been brutalized by Weaver. They needed time to heal their wounds, both physical and emotional.
At first the three women were scared of me, even though they had risked their lives to help Lelia save mine. It made sense: they had suffered horribly at the hands of another pale-skinned vaklik. But over time they gradually came to accept me, and even befriend me. They certainly had no problem learning English.
They didn’t enter into the ‘festivities’ I enjoyed with the other women, but they didn’t disapprove or fuss about it, either, and that was fine by me. I already had my hands full.
I think it’s probably every guy’s fantasy to have six gorgeous women who want to have sex with him. The one thing you’ve got to realize, though, is that it takes a lot of energy to satisfy six women. I was
