He flexed his leg. It was in better shape than he ever would have hoped, partially thanks to the Holiday Inn’s weight room and exercising machines. There was still considerable stiffness and some pain but he was able to limp around without the crutches. They could take it slow and easy. He was quite sure he could show Tom how to run one of the Arctic Cats that almost everyone around here kept packed away in the back of their garages. Do twenty miles a day, pack shelter halves, big sleeping bags, plenty of those freeze-dried concentrates…
Still…
He crushed his smoke and turned off the gas lamp. But it was a long time before he slept.
Over breakfast he said, “Tom, how badly do you want to get back to Boulder?”
“And see Fran? Dick? Sandy? Laws, I want to get back to Boulder worse than anything, Stu. You don’t think they gave my little house away, do you?”
“No, I’m sure they didn’t. What I mean is, would it be worth it to you to take a chance?”
Tom looked at him, puzzled. Stu was getting ready to try and explain further when Tom said: “Laws, everything’s a chance, isn’t it?”
It was decided as simply as that. They left Grand Junction on the last day of November.
There was no need to teach Tom the fundamentals of snowmobiling. Stu found a monster machine in a Colorado Highway Department shed not a mile from the Holiday Inn. It had an oversized engine, a fairing to cut the worst of the wind, and most important of all, it had been modified to include a large open storage compartment. It had once no doubt held all manner of emergency gear. The compartment was big enough to take one good-sized dog comfortably. With the number of shops in town devoted to outdoor activities, they had no trouble at all in outfitting themselves for the trip, even though the superflu had struck at the beginning of summer. They took light shelter halves and heavy sleeping bags, a pair of cross-country skis each (although the thought of trying to teach Tom the fundamentals of cross-country skiing made Stu’s blood run cold), a big Coleman gas stove, lamps, gas bottles, extra batteries, concentrated foods, and a big Garand rifle with a scope.
By two o’clock of that first day, Stu saw that his fear of being snowed in someplace and starving to death was groundless. The woods were fairly crawling with game; he had never seen anything like it in his life. Later that afternoon he shot a deer, his first deer since the ninth grade, when he had played hooky from school to go out hunting with his Uncle Dale. That deer had been a scrawny doe whose meat had been wild-tasting and rather bitter… from eating nettles, Uncle Dale said. This one was a buck, fine and heavy and broad-chested. But then, Stu thought as he gutted it with a big knife he had liberated from a Grand Junction sporting goods store, the winter had just started. Nature had her own way of dealing with overpopulation.
Tom built a fire while Stu butchered the deer as best he could, getting the sleeves of his heavy coat stiff and tacky with blood. By the time he was done with the deer it had been dark three hours and his bad leg was singing “Ave Maria.” The deer he had gotten with his Uncle Dale had gone to an old man named Schoey who lived in a shack just over the Braintree town line. He had skinned and dressed the deer for three dollars and ten pounds of deermeat.
“I sure wish old man Schoey was here tonight,” he said with a sigh.
“Who?” Tom asked, coming out of a semidoze.
“No one, Tom. Talking to myself.”
As it turned out, the venison was worth it. Sweet and delicious. After they had eaten their fill, Stu cooked about thirty pounds of extra meat and packed it away in one of the Highway Department snowmobile’s smaller storage compartments the next morning. That first day they only made sixteen miles.
That night the dream changed. He was in the delivery room again. There was blood everywhere—the sleeves of the white coat he was wearing were stiff and tacky with it. The sheet covering Frannie was soaked through. And still she shrieked.
And it came, it came in a final freshet of blood. George pulled the infant free, grasping the hips because it had come feet-first.
Laurie began to scream. Stainless-steel instruments sprayed everywhere—
Because it was a wolf with a furious grinning human face,
Stu woke up, his harsh breathing loud in his ears. Had he screamed?
Tom was still asleep, huddled so deeply in his sleeping bag that Stu could only see his cowlick. Kojak was curled at Stu’s side. Everything was all right, it had only been a dream—
And then a single howl rose in the night, climbing, ululating, a silver chime of desperate horror… the howl of a wolf, or perhaps the scream of a killer’s ghost.
Kojak raised his head.
Gooseflesh broke out on Stu’s arms, thighs, groin.
The howl didn’t come again.
Stu slept. In the morning they packed up and went on. It was Tom who noticed and pointed out that the deer guts were all gone. There was a flurry of tracks where they had been, and the bloodstain of Stu’s kill faded to a dull pink on the snow… but that was all.
Five days of good weather brought them to Rifle. The next morning they awoke to a deepening blizzard. Stu said he thought they should wait it out here, and they put up in a local motel. Tom held the lobby doors open and Stu drove the snowmobile right inside. As he told Tom, it made a handy garage, although the snowmobile’s heavy-duty tread had chewed up the lobby’s deep-pile rug considerably.
It snowed for three days. When they awoke on the morning of December 10 and dug themselves out, the sun was shining brightly and the temperature had climbed into the mid-thirties. The snow was much deeper now, and it had gotten more difficult to read the twists and turns of I-70. But it wasn’t keeping to the highway that worried Stu on that bright, warm, and sunny day. In the late afternoon, as the blue shadows began to lengthen, Stu throttled down and then killed the snowmobile’s engine, his head cocked, his whole body seeming to listen.
“What is it, Stu? What’s—” Then Tom heard it, too. A low rumbling sound off to their left and up ahead. It swelled to a deep express-train roar and then faded. The afternoon was still again.
“Stu?” Tom asked anxiously.
“Don’t worry,” he said, and thought:
The warm temperatures held. By December 13 they were nearly to Shoshone, and still climbing toward the roof of the Rockies—for them the highest point they would reach before beginning to descend again would be Loveland Pass.
Again and again they heard the low rumble of avalanches, sometimes far away, sometimes so close that there was nothing to do but look up and wait and hope those great shelves of white death would not blot out the sky. On the twelfth, one swept down and over a place where they had been only half an hour before, burying the snowmobile’s track under tons of packed snow. Stu was increasingly afraid that the vibration caused by the sound of the snowmobile’s engine would be what finally killed them, triggering a slide that would bury them forty feet deep before they even had time enough to realize what was happening. But now there was nothing to do but press on and hope for the best.
Then the temperatures plunged again and the threat abated somewhat. There was another storm and they were stopped for two days. They dug out and went on… and at night the wolves howled. Sometimes they were far away, sometimes so close that they seemed right outside the shelter halves, bringing Kojak to his feet, growling low in his chest, as taut as a steel spring. But the temperatures remained low and the frequency of the avalanches diminished, although they had another near miss on the eighteenth.
On December 22, outside the town of Avon, Stu ran the snowmobile off the highway embankment. At one moment they were running along at a steady ten miles an hour, safe and fine, spuming up clouds of snow behind them. Tom had just pointed out the small village below, silent as a 1980s stereopticon image with its single white church steeple and the undisturbed drifts up to the eaves of the houses. The next moment the cowling of the snowmobile began to tilt forward.
