She struggled to sit up, to assess the damage. Again she heaved, bile coating her throat. Her left leg was useless, and her left hip badly bruised. She cried out again, her tears mixed with the blood on her face. Once more her echo answered her, like something wild. Her body shivered with cold and distress, or was she going into shock? And the night would grow colder. And how had she become so lost? How had she plunged so wildly ahead?
Already the sky had darkened, the shelter appearing no more than a shadow in the rock face. She would have to use her arms and shoulders. She would have to find a way to climb. If she stayed where she was, she would not make it through the night, and she had no idea how long it would take Kenny and Aaron to find her. She unfastened the pack. She slid her arms from beneath the straps. Her jaw clenched as she shifted her weight, as she tried to slow her rapid breathing. Then she unzipped the top opening of her pack and pulled out the rope she had used to drag the elk quarters only hours before. How much time did she have left? A half hour, maybe less, before the gray-glow of daylight would be gone. She threaded the rope beneath the shoulder straps of her pack and around the elk quarter, then knotted the rope and pulled it tight. She placed the other end in her mouth so that her hands would be free to climb. With her palms flat against the rocky surface of the ledge, she lifted her hips and tucked her right foot beneath her, and as she did her voice tore out of her in an angry moan. Her left leg remained extended in front of her. She placed one hand at a time on the edge of the rock face, grabbed handholds, pulled and shifted. Her teeth ground against the rope. Another handhold, and another, her right foot feeling for some leverage, her fingers so cold, the tips numb.
Her hands reached the ledge where she’d spotted the shelter. She folded each forearm over the edge, pulled the weight of her torso. Her left ankle knocked against a rock, nausea like an icy stream. Again she heaved herself forward, until her entire body was on the ledge, a flat area maybe twenty feet from the rock face, and littered with dead wood and pinyon saplings. And there in front of her was the shelter, not just an overhang, but a cave, the entrance a triangular crevice, about three feet wide at the bottom, and another three or four feet high. She adjusted herself to a sitting position, pressed her back against the rock face, removed the rope from her mouth, clasped the rope with both fists, and pulled. About halfway up, her pack became snagged, or was it the leg of the elk, the bone that protruded from the game bag that had gotten caught? She jimmied the pack free, and when she did, she heard something fall out of the pack and drop well beyond the ledge where she had fallen. She hoisted the pack the rest of the way and grabbed hold of the elk leg, and when the entire bundle was beside her, she shoved it into the cave’s entrance. Then she rolled onto her stomach, dragged herself an inch and then another.
Her body shivered. Her blood pressure was dropping. Shock wasn’t out of the question. She groaned loudly. Her elbows and forearms dug into the wet dirt, her right knee bent up to her hip for leverage. She continued to move her body this way until she lay on the floor of the small cave, but just how far back it went she could not tell. What little light was left in the day was nothing more than a shallow, metallic glow across the entrance, across the disfiguration of her left leg. And the shivering created movement in her broken leg, and pain as sharp as a fingernail being ripped from its quick. She’d have to get warm. She’d have to build a fire, and to build a fire she would need to drag her leg yet again in order to gather wood from outside the cave. She had the wild sensation to take her knife, open her skin down to the bone, as if in doing so she’d be able to release the pain.