She scrambled as best she could back to the cave. She felt pleased with the splint she had prepared, as she was able to move a degree more easily than the day before. She emptied her pack onto the cave floor and found the stainless-steel water bottle she had caught her urine in maybe twenty-six hours before. It was still full. Cougar in these parts were afraid of humans. She could not let the lion become aware of her weakened condition. She would stake out and mark her territory. She would create the boundaries. And so using the urine, she dribbled it around the periphery of the cave, and then around the elk meat she had stored away from her shelter. She would continue to do this, she decided, until she was found, or until she made her way out of this place. Her own estrus would keep the lion away.
She also knew she would need more water, and the stainless-steel bottle would be her only means for heating the water and purifying it. And so she filled the eighteen-ounce bottle with snow. She would set it in the embers of the fire until the water boiled. After it cooled, she would store the water in the one-and-a-half-liter bladder from her pack. She would have to alternate between peeing in the bottle and using the bottle to heat the snow. She would also continue to collect snow with the three plastic bags she had. And then she thought of the elk meat. A front shoulder, not considering the bone, weighed approximately sixty to seventy pounds. As long as she could keep the meat cool and protected, she could ration it out, and should she not be found, she could keep herself fed. If she remembered correctly, one pound of meat would provide approximately eight hundred calories. But elk meat was leaner than other meat and might only provide her with a little more than half that amount in calories. To maintain her strength, she would need to consume no less than a thousand calories a day. A healthy intake would be closer to fourteen hundred calories. If she was not found right away, with at least thirty-two thousand calories, she could give her leg over four weeks to heal. Even then, without her leg having been set and immobilized with a cast, walking would be painful, and she would need some kind of crutch for assistance. If only she could set the bone, but there was no doubt the break had been clear through. There was no way she was going to be able to straighten out the bone. And too much movement could be dangerous. Hadn’t she read about that? Yes, she knew she had. In a novel by John Knowles. She recalled the character Finny, recalled him falling down marble stairs and breaking his leg a second time, and he had died from the break. When doctors had tried to set the bone, the marrow had spread through Finny’s bloodstream and gone straight to his heart. The whole story had fascinated her, because she hadn’t known someone could die from a broken leg.
Thankful for food and water and firewood within easy reach, she returned to the cave. She organized the belongings she had and took inventory: an eight-inch hunting knife, a bone saw, over two hundred feet of parachute cord, webbing that she was now using for her splint, a stainless-steel water bottle, one quart-size zip-top bag, one gallon-size zip-top bag, a sandwich bag, a burned-out headlamp with no extra batteries, four waterproof matches, an elk bugle, an elk cow call, a small block of flint, a one-and-a-half-liter bladder, and a forty-five-liter-capacity backpack. For clothing she had a lightweight Thinsulate jacket, pants, a long-sleeve thermal shirt, a layer of silk long underwear, cotton gloves, one pair of ragg wool socks, and her green hiking boots.
She finished eating the heart, ate the liver, and washed both down with the remaining water she’d carried in her pack. She boiled the snow in the bottle. After it cooled, she poured it into the bladder. Then she boiled the water from the snowmelt that she’d collected in the bags and used as ice packs. She elevated her leg on her pack and lay back to rest. The day would pass slowly, and each day after that. How many days would she be in here? She picked up a piece of charred wood, reached for the wall behind her, and wrote her full name. Beside her name, she wrote the prior day’s date, and beneath the date, she made a mark. She would keep track of her days, and God forbid, should she not make it out of here alive, should someone come upon her bones one day, she could be identified. But she would be found. Aaron and Kenny would be looking for her. She need only keep herself fed and warm until then. Maybe another day or night. It wouldn’t be long.
She curled up beside the fire, determined to keep it lit, determined for someone to see the smoke, and as she listened to the flames crackle, as she fought sleep, she heard other sounds, branches outside the cave from the juniper and pinyon that had grown through crevasses in the rock, limbs bending with the wind and snow, and small animals somewhere outside the cave that in the thin night air sounded like larger ones. She thought of the rats that might have been living in her shelter; she’d seen their droppings. And with all of these thoughts and each sound that amplified in her mind, her breathing shortened into small clutches of air. She tried to regain her calm. She exhaled more slowly. She focused on the flames.