“First priority is shelter, which we have,” I said, looking around the wrecked cabin of the plane. “It’s not great, but it’s a start. Second, food and water, which we have. Next, I’m going to try and see what I can do in the cockpit, find a map, maybe get the radio working. When I glanced in the first time, things looked pretty smashed up, so I don’t know what I can do.”
I went to the door of the cockpit, pushing it open only to have it blown back in my face by the wind that had sprung up in the few minutes that I was outside. “You stay warm and calm. I’ll keep checking on you to make sure you’re okay, but I think the danger has passed. If you start feeling cold or dreamy again, yell for me.”
“I will.”
Robin
Wes shouldered the cockpit door open again, closing it behind him. In the muffled silence, I reflected on our situation. While I knew what Wesley told me was correct, I’m also a woman of action. I don’t like to sit around on my ass waiting for someone else to save the day for me, regardless of what the situation is. Worming my way over to my bag, I worked my arms out, opening the bag to find the skullcap that Wes had insisted I buy.
At first I hated the idea of a week of ratty, knit hat hair, but now I thanked the gods for it. Reaching inside more, I pulled out the hooded sweatshirt he had allowed me to pack. Taking off my field jacket, I pulled it over my head before pulling the jacket back on. With four layers and my head now covered, I could feel the warmth stay in my limbs. I knew I had a set of gloves in the bag, but I didn’t want to worry about them for now.
Rooting around more, I found what I was looking for, the multi-function camp knife that Wes had bought for me. Pulling out the four-inch folding blade, I looked at the seats around me. When I was in junior high school, my English class had bored the hell out of me, so I spent a lot of time at my desk surreptitiously reading books. In one of them, there was a short story that came to mind about a boy and his father trapped in a snowstorm on a school bus after a crash, and how he had saved his father’s life by cutting open the foam seats and creating a smaller, easily insulated pocket of warmth instead of trying to heat the whole bus.
While the plane had only a dozen seats, far too few to fully wall off a section, I thought I might be able to at least create a more insulated ground layer for us to use if we had to stay the night.
Cutting through the fabric shells, I started stripping out the seats farthest from the door, finding that the foam insulation easily peeled away from the frames once the shell was cut. I had stripped two of the seats when I heard Wesley come back into the cabin. “I told you to stay covered up and warm,” he said, moving next to me. “What are you doing out of the sleeping bag?”
“Trying to stay warm and be useful at the same time,” I replied. Brushing a wisp of hair out of my eyes, I tucked it behind my ear and under the knit cap. “Unless you want to sleep on a freezing cold floor tonight.”
Wesley studied me for a few seconds, appearing to be a bit taken aback, then nodded. “Okay. I guess the work will help you stay warm and alert anyway. I found a map, but the radio is smashed to hell—there’s no way I’m getting a signal out with it. That cracking sound right when we stopped was a boulder hitting the nose.”
“What caused the pilot to crash?” I asked as I went to work on the third seat. I gave Wes credit, he didn’t try to take over for me. He knew I could handle it and that I wanted to do it myself.
Wesley shook his head in response to my question. “I don’t know, honestly. But I suspect a stroke. The guy didn’t look the part for a heart attack. I’ve got ten minutes of light at best, I think. I’m going to head outside and try to figure out where the hell we are on the map.”
He gave me a look over and then went back outside, and I went back to work, getting another two seats stripped by the time Wesley came back in, his face grim.
“I had to recheck it two times, but we’re in a pretty bad spot,” he said, making sure the door was sealed behind him. Going to his pack, he helped me strip the remaining five seats, tossing their cushions toward the pile I had already started next to where my sleeping bag was lying on the ground. “We’re not in a national or provincial park; we’re in unincorporated land, I think. Also, while there is a town only seventy-five kilometers away, it’s to the east of us, and between it and us is the highest part of the mountains. There’s no way we could cross that distance with the gear we have right now.”
“So what’s the plan?” I asked as I began to arrange the cushions on the floor. I love puzzles, and this was an interesting challenge that kept my mind busy. It wasn’t perfect, but I was eventually able to jigsaw the cushions together into something that resembled, of all things, one of the cushion forts I used to make as a little girl. I kept the three cushions that would make the “roof” of the fort off for now, setting them aside until I had arranged the sleeping bags and mats. “What do you think?”