“I don’t want this to end,” Leni whines.
Mama’s smile is unfamiliar. Something isn’t quite right. “You need to help him, baby girl. Help yourself.”
Suddenly the canoe tilts sideways so hard everything tumbles into the water—bottles, thermoses, a day pack.
Mama somersaults past Leni, screaming, and splashes into the water, disappears.
The canoe rights itself.
Leni scrambles to the side, peers over, yells, “Mama!”
A black fin, sharp as a knife blade, comes up from the water, rising, rising, until it is almost as tall as Leni. Killer whale.
The fin blots out the sun, darkens the sky all at once; everything goes black.
Leni hears the gliding of the orca, the splash as it emerges, the snort of air through its blowhole. She smells the decaying fish on its breath.
Leni opened her eyes, breathing hard. A headache pounded in her skull and the taste of blood filled her mouth.
The world was dark and fetid-smelling. Putrid.
She looked up. Matthew hung in the crevice above her, caught between the two rock walls, suspended, his feet hanging above her head, stuck in place by his backpack.
“Matthew? Matthew?”
He didn’t answer.
(Maybe he couldn’t. Maybe he was dead.)
Something dripped onto her face. She wiped it away, tasted blood.
She struggled to sit up. The pain was so violent, she vomited all over herself and passed out. When she came to, she almost puked again at the smell of her own vomit splattered across her chest.
Think. Help him. She was Alaskan. She could survive, damn it. It was the one thing she knew how to do. The one thing her father had taught her.
“It’s a crevice, Matthew. Not a bear cave. So that’s good.” No brown bear would be ambling in, looking for a place to sleep. She moved inch by inch around the entire interior, her hands feeling the slick rock walls. No exit.
She crawled back onto the saucer rock and looked up at Matthew. “So. The only way out is up.”
Blood dripped down his leg, plopped onto the rock beside her.
She stood up.
“You’re blocking the only way out. So I need to get you unstuck. The pack is the problem.” The added width had him pinned. “If I can get the pack off you, you’ll fall.”
Fall. That didn’t sound like a great plan, but she couldn’t think of anything better.
Okay.
How?
She moved gingerly, wedged her numb hand into the waistband of her pants. She slid/fell off the saucer-shaped rock, splashed into the squishy mud. A sharp pain jabbed her in the chest, made her gasp. She dug through her bug-out bag and found her knife. Biting down on it, she crawled to a place directly below Matthew’s feet.
Now all she had to do was get to him and cut him free.
How? She couldn’t reach his feet.
Climb. How? She had one good arm and the stone wall was slick and wet.
On rocks.
She found some large flat rocks and dragged them to the wall and stacked them as best she could. It took forever; she was pretty sure that twice she passed out and awoke and started again.
When she had built a stack that was about a foot and a half high, she took a deep breath and stepped on top of it.
At her weight, one of the rocks slid out from under her.
She fell hard, cracked her bad arm on something, and screamed.
She tried four more times, falling each time. It wasn’t going to work. The rocks were too slippery and they were unstable when stacked.
“Okay.” So she couldn’t climb layered rocks. Maybe that should have been obvious.
She slogged to the wall, reached out to touch its cold, clammy surface. She used her good hand to trace the wet stone, feeling for every bump and ridge and indentation. A little light bled down on either side of Matthew. She burrowed through her pack, found a headlamp, put it on. With light, she saw differences in the slab—ledges, holes, footholds.
She felt upward, sideways, out, found a small lip of stone for her foot, and stepped up onto it. She steadied herself, then felt for another.
She fell hard, lay there stunned, breathing hard, staring up at him. “Okay. Try again.”
With every attempt, she memorized a new bump in the wall of the crevice. On her sixth try, she made it all the way up, high enough to grab his backpack to steady herself. His left leg was terrible to look at—bone sticking out, torn flesh, his foot almost backward.
He hung limply, his head lolling to the side, blood smearing his face into something completely unrecognizable.
She couldn’t tell if he was breathing.
“I’m here, Matthew, hang on,” she said. “I’m going to cut you loose.” She drew in a deep breath.
Using the pocketknife blade, she sawed through the pack’s straps, shoulder and waist. It took forever to do with one hand, but finally she was done.
Nothing happened.
She cut all the straps and he didn’t move. Nothing changed.
She yanked on his good leg as hard as she could.
Nothing.
She pulled again, lost her balance, and fell into the mud and rocks.
“What?” she screamed at the opening. “What?”
Metal snapped; something clanged against the rock.
Matthew plummeted, banged into the wall, thudded hard into the mud beside Leni. The pack landed beside her, splashing mud.
Leni scrambled over to him, pulled his head onto her lap, wiped his bloody face with her muddy hand. “Matthew? Matthew?”
He wheezed, coughed. Leni almost burst into tears.
She dragged him through the mud to the saucer-shaped rock. There, she struggled and fought to get his body up onto the indented stone surface.
“I’m here,” she said, climbing up beside him. She didn’t even realize she was crying until she saw her tears splash on his muddy face. “I love you, Matthew,” Leni said. “We’re going to be okay. You and me. You’ll see. We’ll…” She tried to keep talking, wanted to, needed to, but all she could think was that it was her fault he was here. Her fault. He’d fallen trying to save her.
*
SHE SCREAMED UNTIL her throat hurt, but there was no one up there to hear. No help coming. No one even knew they were on the trail, let alone that they’d fallen into a crevice.
She’d fallen.
He’d tried to save her.
And here they were. Battered. Bleeding. Huddled together on this cold, flat rock.
Think.
Matthew lay beside her, his face bloodied and swollen and unrecognizable. A huge flap of skin had split away from his face and lay like a bloody dog’s ear, exposing the white-red bone beneath.
It was raining again. Water sluiced down the rock walls, turned the mud into a viscous pool. There was water all around them, swirling in the indentation in the rock, splashing, dripping, pooling. In the wan daylight that drifted down with the rain, she saw that Matthew’s blood had turned it pink.
Help him. Help us.
She crawled over him, slipped down off the rock, and dug through his pack for a tarp. It took a long time to tie it in place with only one good hand, but she finally did it, created a gulley to catch rainwater into two big thermoses. When one was full, she positioned the other thermos to collect water and then climbed back up onto the rock.
She tilted his chin, made him drink. He swallowed convulsively, gagged, coughed. Setting the thermos aside, she stared at his left leg. It looked like a pile of hamburger with a shard of bone sticking out.
She went to the packs, salvaged what she could. The first-aid kit was well stocked. She found Bactine, gauze, aspirin, and sanitary pads. She removed her belt. “This is not going to feel good. How about a poem? We used to love Robert Service, remember? When we were kids, we could recite the good ones by heart.”
She put her belt around his thigh and yanked it so tight he screamed and thrashed. Crying, knowing how much it had to hurt, she tightened it again and he lost consciousness.
She packed his wound with gauze and sanitary pads and bound it all in place with duct tape.
Then she held him as best she could with her broken arm and cracked rib.
Please don’t die.
Maybe he couldn’t feel her. Maybe he was as cold as she was. They were both soaking wet.