—
After a fitful sleep, after eating a small portion of meat and drinking some Mormon grass tea, she looked the cave over one last time before leaving. A few bones from the elk’s leg, the firewood, the discarded boot from her left foot, the small handprints on the wall next to where she had slept, the trapezoid figures that she had called carrot people. She had no way of knowing the weather that lay ahead of her. But for now sunlight shimmered over the snow and the morning sky was a cerulean blue. How many days had she held the image of the map in her mind, tried to recall its vertical scale, tried to remember those low chasms where the map’s contour lines were spaced farther apart. But those chasms lay to the west of the bluffs. The cave faced east, and all Amy Raye could see from the ridge were dense woods and steep terrain. She felt certain she was in the thick of the bluffs, and if that was the case, she was standing at over seven thousand feet in elevation. Should she move eastward, that elevation would climb to over eight thousand feet, which would mean an increase in the snowpack. She might very well become more lost than she already was. No, she would have to get around this rocky bluff in which the cave had been carved and eroded so many years ago, and to do that, she would have to climb. To the left of the cave, the ledge came to a dead end, abutting the vertical rock face from where she had fallen. To the right of the cave, the ledge continued to widen into an expanded step into the bluff of almost fifty yards. It was from this area that she had stored the elk meat and gathered wood. Each day she had explored it further, seeing how far it would take her. The ledge eventually merged away from the rock wall, to a more gradual incline of about forty-five degrees. The incline was littered with rocks and deadfall. And without the heat from the afternoon sun, the slope had remained mostly covered in snow. But if she could just get to the top of this hill, she could gauge the direction in which she would need to go, which would involve climbing down in elevation and moving westward, where she might be lucky enough to come across one of the pipeline roads.