And so she moved on, and everywhere she listened, to the wind, to branches, to the silence as it pounded in her ears. But within a short distance, the ground began to descend more sharply and the wind speed had picked up to maybe twenty-five to thirty miles per hour. She planted her crutch downhill, and as she began to shift her weight, the crutch slipped out from beneath her. She fell onto her left side, landing on both rock and snow, and slid a good seventy feet or more until she had sunk into a drift at the bottom of the decline. All around her was snow, the drift having been more than ten feet deep, and because it lay at the base of this western-facing slope where it had received the full effect of the sun, the drift had softened to the consistency of mashed potatoes. She tried to kick-step into the sides of snow around her, but each time, her foot sank deeper, and her body became more spent from the effort. She’d been foolish to think she could find her way out of this vast place. Her calorie intake had not been enough for her to maintain her strength. Her body was malnourished. She was crippled at best. And now she was cold and stranded with no wood within reach for her to build a fire. Even if she could make it out of this drift, there would be other sink spots, more soft snow, and more ground to cover than she had the strength for, given her lack of food. She felt emptied out of anything good and hopeful. She fell back against the snow, sank to the ground. Oh, God, what have I done? And though it had not been the first time, she cried until there were no tears left in her. Her stomach felt small and tight like a baby’s fist. She took out the remaining juniper berries from her pack, but when she bit into their bitterness, this time her body heaved. She had only a pound or a little less of meat left, and it was frozen, and there was no way to heat it. She removed one of the four-ounce cuts, held it in her gloved hand until the outer layer of frost had melted from the small portion, and then sucked on the meat, and chewed on it, like an animal from the wild. So this was it. This would be how it would all end, and she wondered if her remains would ever be found. She tried to recall the precise core temperature at which a human body would die from the cold, and thought it to be somewhere around seventy-seven degrees. She thought of her swims in Echo Lake and Evergreen Lake, where the water had been well below that temperature, sometimes only fifty degrees in June, and she wondered about that. Why had she been able to swim in those lakes? But when she swam, she had kept her arms and legs moving. She had continued to generate heat. She would have to keep moving now. But she was so weary. Perhaps if she could rest for a while she might have the strength to find a way out of here.
Meltwater trickled down her neck. Her hands and feet ached and tingled with cold. She curled up into a fetal position. Still holding on to the piece of meat, she tucked her hands beneath her head. She thought of the cave and how warm its walls had felt. She thought of the fires she had built there. Perhaps she should remove her fleece jacket and tie it over her head. Though she had kept her ears warm with the strip of fleece, she knew she was losing at least fifty percent of her body heat from her exposed head. But she was so tired, and even her thoughts felt fatiguing. The muscles in her neck and shoulders contracted, and her body shivered, and she closed her eyes, if only for a few minutes. And she dreamed of coyotes, of young pups playing and wrestling in the snow, and she heard the adult coyote bark from somewhere far off in the trees. The adult barked again, but it did not sound like a coyote. Perhaps it was a wolf and these pups weren’t coyotes at all, but baby wolves. She opened her eyes. She heard the bark again, but her mind felt foggy, and she was so cold, the air like ice against the layers of her damp clothing and skin. And she wondered if she was experiencing hypothermia, if she had imagined the sounds. She pushed herself to a sitting position, her hands and feet both numb. But her body was still shivering, which she knew was a good sign. She was still getting enough oxygen to the brain. Though her mind felt dull, she knew she wasn’t hallucinating. She had indeed heard the barking of an animal. She wouldn’t have heard coyotes. It was the middle of the day. Coyotes did not come out until dusk. There were no wolves in the area, none that she knew of. “I’m here,” she said, but her voice was weak, and a thick wall of snow surrounded her. And perhaps it was a wild dog that she had heard. But she had not seen any wild dogs in the area. She had not heard any wild dogs in all of her nights in the cave. Her legs were stiff and her muscles tight, but she forced herself to a standing position. She removed her shovel from the straps on her pack, the small shovel she had made from the elk’s shoulder blade, and she began to dig, and as she dug away at the snow, the blood moved back into her fingers and into her toes and her feet. She dug faster, surprised at the adrenaline in her body. “I’m here,” she cried out again, her voice raspy and weak. She was making progress, and her body was warming, and she was certain she had heard a dog, and if she had heard a dog, there was someone out there. She continued to work, packing the snow down with the shovel and her right foot as she dug a path through the drift, as she created a stretch of compacted snow at almost a forty-degree angle. Using both the crutch and the shovel as poles, she was able to plant them into the incline and pull herself forward, then step, replant the poles, and pull herself forward again until she was out of the drift and standing on frozen rock, her body drenched in perspiration and hope.
She moved in an eastward direction from where she had heard the barking sounds, returning along the same path that she had trekked earlier that day. She continued for a couple of hours, stopping only long enough to drink a few swallows of water and to call out. But the wind seemed to carry her voice back to her, as it had carried the sounds of the barking dog. Dusk was approaching. Still, she pushed on. She had maybe a half hour at best of sunlight left. She had already passed the area where she had camped the night before, and she wondered how much farther she had to go until she would be back at the cave. The adrenaline that had sped her on was quickly waning. “Please,” she cried out to the barking dog and to whoever was out there. “Come back. I’m here.”