“I wish it were,” he said.
The Packer stove had given me my feet back. They were snug inside the wool socks and I stepped on them freely and without pain. I had been warmed all the way through by our time in the shanty but now that the cold had returned it was damn blunt about it. Like it hurt even worse because I was still so near to the alternative.
“How long was I out?” I said. “In the shanty?”
“I don’t know.”
“Can’t you tell it by the way the snow falls or something? By the way the light slants? Mountain man that you are.”
“Of course I could,” he said. “But what does it matter? Time don’t move in a straight line up in these hills. It sort of wiggles around and folds back on itself. There’s no way to put a number to it.”
“Whatever that means,” I said.
“It means what it means,” he said. “It ain’t a riddle.”
“I’m just curious what time it is?” I said.
“Roughly, nine in the A.M,” he said.
“I guess we’re not making breakfast,” I said.
“I did not factor in frostbite and another dumping of snow into my calculations.”
I looked at Jenna sleeping and was heartened by her calm and the soft touch of color in her cheeks. For the first time since I found her I had a solid feeling inside, like we were actually going to get her to the hospital.
“How far to the truck?” I said.
“A mile or so.”
“That’s not bad.”
“It won’t feel like any mile you’ve ever walked. I can promise you that.”
“It’s tough walking,” I said. “But it can’t be but so bad.”
“We’re going uphill the whole way,” he said.
“It doesn’t seem like it.”
“It’s a gradual incline.”
“That’s good,” I said. “Gradual is good.”
“You say potato,” said Portis.
I could see him swaying a little as he stepped, but I figured it was from the labor as much as the drunkenness. Portis had been walking drunk near his entire life. Portis always said the key to walking drunk was to try and walk crooked.
Up ahead I watched as a swarm of chickadees broke from a jack pine, scattering tiny mists of snow as they searched out neighboring trees. And that’s the thing about Cutler—it’s a hard place, but sometimes it’s so damn pretty you don’t know what to do with it all. Portis drank from his whiskey bottle and I trailed behind him.
I tried to lose myself in the rhythm of the march. I tried to remain focused on how good my feet felt and to be grateful for their return. I was feeling better about our situation, that much was true, but it was hard to hold on to that feeling when the cold started to creep back in.
I had never considered myself the adventuresome type, and this entire ordeal had only confirmed that fact. You will not find me in any of those mud races, or leaping from a perfectly good airplane to prove some vague point about the human spirit. I do not relish risk or seek thrills and cannot understand people who pay their good money to endanger and punish themselves. You got to have it made to even think like that, to walk around feeling like your life needs a few more challenges thrown in.
I wish they had a website for such people. Rich folks with a bunch of crackpot energy. People like me could post help-wanted ads and then the adrenaline junkies could do something of actual value with their foolishness. I mean, why run through some mud you put there on purpose when you could come to Cutler and rescue a baby from the drug-ravaged farmhouse of a fucking lunatic?
I was getting a little loopy out there in the woods, thinking about how we could turn the whole thing into a race. I pictured a bunch of those X Games, Lance Armstrong types milling around Shelton’s porch with their heart-rate monitors and protein shakes. I was cracking myself up good—imagining the Sandra Bullock moms in numbered running tights—when I heard the sleds in the distance and stopped cold.
There was more than one this time, but they sounded far away and muted—like flies buzzing in a windowpane.
“Do you hear them?” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “I hear them.”
“It sounds like two.”
“Yeah,” he said. “It does.”
“Where are they?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Somewhere across the river.”
I hurried to catch up to Portis and yanked on his coat to get him to stop walking. I figured that if we could hear them, they might be able to hear us, say if they stopped their sleds all of a sudden. It didn’t seem to make much sense to stand there hollering at each other up and down the hill.
“Do you think it’s him?” I said.
“Probably,” Portis said. “Probably Shelton and one of those retrobates that run with his uncle.”
“Shouldn’t we be hiding or something?”
“I already told you they’re across the river.”
“They sound pretty close to me.”
“Well,” he said. “They ain’t.”
“How can you be so sure?”