2. Jakob #2
I sit back on my heels and see the fire paint shadows across the shape of her under the blankets.
The rain hammers the roof in sheets. The Douglas fir pops and cracks in the stove, sending orange light through the isinglass window.
She's alive. She's warming. She's going to be a problem I haven't had in four years of deliberate, disciplined, unbroken solitude.
I look at the ruined pastry box. Look back at her. Something in the architecture of me something I bricked over and mortared shut a long time ago, develops a hairline crack.
I feed the fire and don't sleep.
The fire holds steady for three hours. I check her pulse every twenty minutes, adjust the Nalgenes when they cool, feed the stove until the isinglass glows a dull arterial red.
Around two in the morning her shivering returns.
Violent, whole-body tremors that rattle her teeth and make the blankets shake.
That's good. That's the body remembering how to fight.
Stage two sliding back to stage one. The right direction on a bad scale.
By three she's warm enough to move. Her color has shifted from waxy gray to something approaching human, the blue fading from her lips, replaced by a pale pink that I notice and then deliberately stop noticing.
I pick her up off the floor, blankets and all, and carry her down the narrow hallway to the bedroom.
My bedroom. The only one. The mattress is a queen on a hand-built lodgepole frame and I pile every blanket I own on top of her.
The down comforter, the wool trade blanket, the fleece liner I stripped off my old bivvy sack.
She disappears under it, just a tangle of dark hair on the pillow and the small white curve of a shoulder where the blanket slips.
I close the door and go back to the main room.
I should check the road. Should have done it hours ago but the woman on my floor was more urgent than the woman's car in the mud and I've been operating on triage protocol since she hit the porch.
Now that she's stable, now that her body is doing its own work and doesn't need mine, the tactical part of my brain starts running its list. Vehicle location.
Road condition. Scope of the storm damage.
Communication options, of which there are none because I don't own a phone and the nearest landline is at the ranger station fourteen miles south and the two-way radio I keep for emergencies is currently sitting in pieces on the workbench because I was replacing the capacitor this morning and didn't finish.
I pull on my oilskin coat, lace my boots, grab the headlamp from the hook by the door.
The Remington is still outside where I dropped it.
I pick it up, wipe the action with a dry rag, cycle the bolt to clear any moisture.
Sling it over my shoulder. Not because I'm expecting trouble.
Because the mountain doesn't care what you expect.
The storm has downshifted from apocalyptic to merely brutal.
Rain falls in heavy curtains instead of horizontal sheets and the wind has backed off enough that the ponderosas along the ridge aren't bending at forty-five degrees anymore.
The temperature has dropped further, though.
My breath clouds thick in the headlamp beam and the mud under my boots has taken on a glassy sheen that means ice is forming underneath.
November in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The mountain can't decide if it wants to drown you or freeze you so it tries both.
I follow the road down from the cabin. My road.
A quarter mile of packed gravel and dirt that connects my property to the old logging cut that winds twelve miles down to the county highway.
I built this stretch myself, graded it with the blade on the front of the old Case tractor, laid drainage culverts every hundred yards, reinforced the switchback above the ravine with riprap I hauled from the creek bed by hand over the course of one entire summer.
Four years of work to make this road passable in all but the worst conditions.
These are the worst conditions.
I hear it before I see it. A low, grinding roar that vibrates up through the soles of my boots and into my knees, a sound like the mountain clearing its throat.
The headlamp beam catches movement ahead, two hundred yards down where the road hooks around the steep face above Cutler Creek, and I stop walking and observe it happen because there is nothing else to do.
The entire hillside lets go. Not a trickle, not an erosion channel, but the whole face of the slope, thirty feet of saturated earth and root systems and second-growth timber sliding downhill in a mass that moves with a terrible slow-motion inevitability.
It takes the road with it. The section I reinforced, the culverts, the riprap, all of it peeled away and carried down into the ravine like the mountain decided my four years of labor were a suggestion it no longer felt like honoring.
Trees snap at the base and ride the slide down, root balls tearing free in explosions of dirt and rock.
The sound is enormous. It fills the canyon and echoes off the far ridge and for thirty seconds it is the only thing that exists.