And so she began the climb. Before leaving, she had sharpened the end of her crutch so that she might use it as a trekking pole. She bore her weight on her right leg and planted her crutch uphill. She rotated the crutch back and forth as if screwing it in place. Then she transferred her weight onto the crutch. With her right hand, she found a hold in one of the rocks embedded in the hillside and was able to pull herself forward. When that step was completed, she began the process all over again. It would take her a couple of hours to make this one small climb, an ascent that would have taken her minutes in her healthier state. But she knew she would have to fight off those kinds of thoughts if she were to continue to make progress, if she were to have any hope of going home. And with that thought her body felt a surge of momentum and she moved more quickly. She prodded the snow with her crutch, screwed the crutch into the frozen ground, pulled herself forward, again and again. Her mouth touched snow, and icy rocks abraded the sides of her face, and in her mind she saw Farrell and Trevor and Julia. Her anticipation of seeing her family became both an ache and a thrill so strong in her chest that she literally felt her heart had swelled.
She stopped only a couple of times to catch her breath. Her body was shaking from the sheer fatigue of it all, and the sun felt warm, as if teasing her forward. Maybe two hours had passed. She couldn’t be sure, but at last she’d made it to the top of the bluff. Somewhere on the rock face beneath her, and maybe seventy paces or so to her right, was the cave, and beneath that another ledge, the same ledge that had broken her fall when she had first come upon the shelter. But that was behind her now, and she had all of this land before her, and a big sky, and a warm sun. How cold was it? Maybe twenty degrees, but with her exertion she was ready to shed layers of clothing. She tried to speculate how far she could go in a day. Perhaps a mile, as long as the weather was hospitable. And how many miles was she from help? Without knowing the exact location of the cave, without a compass and a map, there was no way to tell. In some ways she felt she was staring out into oblivion, but instead of feeling discouraged, she was overtaken with how beautiful it all was, and she wished Farrell were with her and she could share it with him. And just as quickly as she had felt exhilarated for having made it to the top of this bluff, she felt saddened and her body began to chill from the perspiration on her skin and in her clothes, and she wanted to cry for all the times she might have had, the moments with Farrell when her mind was someplace else, afternoons when she might have been with Farrell or the children but had found a reason to be away. Errands she’d told him she had to run, or some billing she had to take care of for Aaron, and as she drove away, she would be filled with anticipation for another man, for danger and pleasure, the kind that had slipped under her skin when her body and mind were still clean, until she was no longer clean and the danger had become a craving. And yet all those hours spent in the cave, when the only thing she had to pass the time were her thoughts, it was her moments with Farrell that she relived in her mind, over and over again, as if her life with him were all that had ever been.
Amy Raye took several swallows of water, ate a few pinyon nuts. She then moved on. The sun was still at her back. Soon it would be directly above her, and then the afternoon would pass quickly. She felt certain somewhere to the west of her there was a road. Eventually she would find it.