Given the choice. Marie had chosen, hadn’t she? Chosen to leave her child motherless and her parents bereft.
Sera tucked the blanket more tightly around her.
I can do better, Estelle thought. I have to do better—for Sera and for Annie.
“It’s not your fault,” Annie said softly.
Estelle turned to the back seat to glimpse Annie’s eyes glinting in the dim light. “You should try to sleep,” she whispered.
A dry chuckle answered her. “So should you. But right now, I have to pee.”
“Me too,” Sera said. “And why is it so cold?”
“Because we’re sitting in an icebox,” Estelle said. “All right, time for a comfort break.”
It took Sera and Estelle both to help Annie exit to relieve herself.
“Reminds me of the old days,” Annie said genially. “My mama and daddy never had indoor plumbing till after I was married.”
Estelle took the opportunity to do a back-of-the-hand check of Annie’s condition. Pulse irregular. Breathing quick and shallow. Skin dry, pale, and cool, even on her torso where she’d been covered up. For Annie, cold was becoming an urgent problem.
The ice under their feet had been laid down as snow, compacted by millennia of snow added to it, until it was now as dense as granite—and as cold as a deep-freeze.
They had to get off the ice.
The cloud cover had lightened some, although the fine ash still filtered down. Estelle broke up another power bar and handed it around. “Eat. The body needs fuel to stay warm.”
“I’d kill for a cup of hot coffee right now,” Sera said. “And some beignets.”
While the women stretched their legs and shared around a bottle of water, Estelle took a good look at their surroundings.
The glacier was a frozen river a hundred yards across. The ice sloped down to the south as far as she could see, filling the valley as it wound between hills. Somewhere downhill, perhaps miles away, the glacier would end in the river, chilling it with the glacier’s meltwater.
The hills hemming in the eastern side of the glacier were bare rock—but to the west, the valley widened to an inviting, grassy meadow. Camping there had to be warmer than remaining suspended over ice.
But how to get there? From the downed plane it was a good fifty yards to the edge of the glacier. Estelle and Sera had hiked on the glacier at Wrangell-St. Elias, but that was with a guide, pointed trekking poles, and crampons on their boots. Even properly equipped, she’d found it difficult. The veneer of gravel hid treacherous ice, as slippery as a skating rink in some places and honed razor-sharp by the wind in others. And the surface might be paper-thin in spots, hiding a void or crevasse where meltwater had carved a hidden stream.
Even if Estelle could somehow get the women across the ice, they’d still have to climb steep banks of moraine—the rock and gravel left behind from the glacier’s last ice age surge.
And Annie couldn’t even climb the steps to her bedroom.
But staying where they were was not an option. There had to be a way.
“All right, ladies,” Estelle said. “This glacier is too damn cold. We’re abandoning ship. Sera, pack everything into the suitcases.” She plugged the satphone into the cockpit charger. If they had to leave the plane, she wanted a full charge.
From the cargo compartment, Estelle retrieved a tarp, the tie-down ropes, and the box of emergency supplies.
Annie gazed toward the grassy field as if it were a distant galaxy. “Estelle, dear,” she said, “I’m not sure I can walk that far.”
“You won’t have to. We’re going to make a sled.”
CHAPTER 24
Ash
Luis was so exhausted, not even the crinkling and muttering of his restless tent mate kept him awake. The next thing he knew was waking to Kanut’s shouts.
“Get out of here! Out! Out!”
Luis sat up, fists ready to fight. “What the hell?”
“It’s a bear!” Kanut clapped his hands. “Out! Away!”
The tent swayed. A heavy snuffling worked at the tent’s underside. A looming shape was silhouetted on the dome, accompanied by a musty barnyard smell.
A deep rumble, like distant thunder, almost too low to hear.
Kanut picked up his rifle—an awkward task for a seated man in a little tent.
“Put that down!” Luis snapped. “That’s no bear. Ruby, back.”
He unzipped a tent flap enough for a curious trunk to wiggle in.
Snort. The herd matriarch didn’t seem to like what she smelled.
“I don’t like him, either,” Luis muttered. He slipped on his boots and crept out of the tent.
Overnight, the world had turned a pale gray, from the clouds that still covered the sky to the ash that coated the tent, the ground, the sacks of supplies, and the spruce and aspen trees.
And the mammoth. Ruby was miserably bedraggled, a walking heap of stringy mud. Clots of ash congealed like lumps of cement around her shaggy fur.
“Tried to wash it off, didn’t you, old girl?” She’d only succeeded in making her ash overcoat heavier. He tried to break off some of the worst of the clumps, but it would take all day and a hedge clipper to clean her off properly.
If the mammoths tried to eat the vegetation with that stuff on it, there was no telling what it would do to their insides.
“Go on, girl,” he whispered. “Stay out of sight for a while, all right?” At Luis’s tcha, Ruby turned and faded back into the shelter of the brush.
A glance at his tablet told Luis the thing he needed to know most urgently—all the mammoths were still in the immediate area. Good old Ruby, staying near as
