Chapter 18 - Paisley
My mouth hung open in shock. The absolute madman was heading down one of the most dangerous trails on the mountain, and was about to disappear from my sight if I didn’t make a decision soon.
I had been fully prepared to follow him down the easier trail to make sure he didn’t break his neck, only bluffing that I was going down the rougher track. The snow was getting heavier, coming down in harsh gusts now, and I cursed myself for not pointing that out to him during my tirade.
My heart was still pounding double time from watching him hurtle over that rocky rise.
It had taken a bit of maneuvering for me not to land on my ass, and I’d gone from transcendent glee that I nailed it to complete horror as I watched Dan attempt it instead of inching his way down like someone who had a lick of sense.
And then when he landed, the slow dread that crawled up my spine kept me from drawing breath, certain he was gravely injured.
With the way the weather was, I might not have been able to get help back to him in time.
Right now I had a good mind to call for backup from the mountain patrol, but remembered my phone was still sitting on my bedside table, turned off and ignored. Damn it. There was no other choice but to go after him.
This early morning ride was supposed to clear my head, but it was anything but that. It was full of Dan’s idiocy, his absolute arrogance, and now worry, of all things.
For a split second, as I watched him get smaller down the trail, I contemplated just turning and going down the easier way on my own.
He’d lived through the jump and he was really remarkably good for someone so inexperienced, strong and naturally athletic.
He could fumble his own damn way down the mountain in this gathering storm.
With a huge sigh, I shoved down the hill, picking up speed to catch up with him.
All my years of safety training, along with the fact I worked for his family, wouldn’t let me leave him behind.
It had nothing to do with the fact I was still shaken from watching him hit the ground and lay unmoving for a second.
Nothing to do with that awful feeling when I worried he wouldn’t be grinning at me ever again.
When I caught up with him, he had the audacity to laugh.
Despite the fact visibility was getting worse and we were still a good way from the bottom, I joined him.
We were flying, taking on nature, going fast. Everything I used to love so much.
Once again I was free and we separated to keep from hitting a clump of trees, meeting up again with more laughter on the other side.
It was short lived. The snow was battering us now, and suddenly the way wasn’t so clear. We were no longer flying, but getting bogged down in the new, slushy snow. The only thing we could do was continue to struggle our way down.
We finally had to stop in front of a long swathe of trees. “Are we lost?” Dan asked, his voice muffled in the steady rustle of falling snow.
I turned, wondering where we went wrong, but really having to accept the fact we might have lost the trail a long ways up.
It was a hell of a distance to try to backtrack, and with the wind picking up, blasting us toward the trees that groaned under the onslaught, it would have been impossible to try.
Nodding for him to follow me, I nudged my way under the cover of the trees, wiping snow off my frozen nose and pulling my face mask up. “Try your phone,” I said.
He brightened, pulling it from a hidden pocket in his snow pants.
I could tell he wasn’t getting any signal from the moment his eyes met mine.
He shook his head anyway, and I kicked out of the locking mechanisms, glad I favored the softer snowboarding boots since they were slightly easier to walk in.
“We’ve got to get out of the wind if we can,” I said, blocking out rising panic.
Anyone who spent as much time on snowy mountainsides as I did, understood what to do.
I also understood that if we didn’t find shelter, we were screwed.
I tugged my neckwarmer up as far as it would go to try to cover my stinging ears.
Dan gave me a long look as he also kicked out of his board, then pulled the thick, handmade purple hat off his head and plopped it down on mine.
Staying close, as if he were trying to shelter me from the gusts that whipped through the trees, we made our way further into the forest, leaving our boards propped against a tree.
I gave mine a last look, certain I’d never see it again, but too scared of freezing to death to give it much thought at the moment.
We trudged along in silence, the effort of walking through the underbrush and snow in our unwieldy boots taking most of our concentration.
Every time I shivered, Dan moved closer, wrapping his arm around me and pulling me close to his body heat. He was like a furnace and I took a moment to gather his warmth before pushing away and continuing.
“We have to keep moving,” I said.
The trees were a welcome guard against the snow, which was coming down in sheets now whenever we came to a clearing. They wouldn’t be enough to shelter us for long if it kept up, and I was beginning to lose hope when I could no longer feel my toes and my hands were aching in their thick gloves.
Whenever we came to a clearing, Dan tried his phone again, but due to the storm there was still no signal. “Did you tell anyone where you’d be this morning?” he asked. When I shook my head, he nodded briskly. “Neither did I. But the lift operators know we went out.”
People would eventually begin a search party for us, and anyone else unlucky enough to get caught out in this mess, but if we didn’t find shelter soon, or if the harsh wind and snow didn’t ease up, they’d only be finding our frozen corpses.
“Stop worrying,” he said. “I’m from Moscow, remember? I know my way around a snow storm.”
He had the audacity to smile at me, even with his lips turning blue and the tips of his ears bright red because he’d given me his hat.
I shouldn’t have goaded him. Now I was getting him killed.
I pushed past him, traipsing onward, shoving aside the anger at myself and trying to get it back on him where it belonged.
We came to the other side of the forest, faced with nothing but a vast expanse of white, interspersed with harsh, rocky uprisings.
Tears welled in my eyes as I grabbed his hand to keep him from continuing on and getting lost in the swells.
There was a brief moment of heat on my cheeks before the tears froze and I swiped them away.
“We can’t go out in that,” I said, throat raw from the cold.
We had to have been wandering in that forest for more than an hour.
The storm was nowhere near abating, and in fact it was only getting worse.
I looked up at him, about to say we should turn back and look for a fallen tree to hunker down under.
To my astonishment, he was still smiling, looking off into the distance.
He raised his arm, pointing, pulling on my hand to face me in the direction he wanted me to look. As I squinted through the wall of white, I saw a vague, brown outline when the wind blew a path through the falling snow.
“That’s a house,” he said, pulling me close and wrapping his arm around me to stop my shivers, brought on by hopeless fear as well as cold. “Don’t let go. We’re going to make it.”
We sank up to our shins with every step and had to fight against the howling wind. Every few feet, Dan would stop and find the outline again, getting ever nearer despite seeming like we were being pushed backwards.
It felt like I’d been slogging through wet cement for days but we finally came up to the building.
It was an old ranger shack that looked like it had been unused for quite a while, but the roof was sound and the walls were sturdy.
Dan managed to break in and hustled me inside, following close behind me and slamming the door against the raging gusts of snow trying to get in with us.
It was instantly quieter and I fell onto a bench with a few hard cushions on it, letting my head fall forward in exhaustion.
The small cabin consisted of two rooms. I could see several bunks in the next room, with blankets at the bottom of each one and a rack of towels, first aid supplies, and bottles of water.
Besides the bench I huddled on, there was a counter with a few chairs pulled up to it.
A big metal woodstove took up half the front room and there was a bright yellow call box on the scuffed wall.
As soon as I saw it, I hauled myself up and fumbled the receiver off its stand, hearing nothing but dead air when I held it to my ear. “No signal.”
He nodded briskly as I sat back down, fighting the shivers that wracked my body. “For now. It could come back online when the storm stops. Or my phone will start working again.”
His optimism was both comforting and irritating. I still had that nagging guilty feeling like this was all my fault somehow, but had I invited him to follow me? Didn’t I tell him to get his ass on the easier trail? Didn’t I tell him to leave me the hell alone?
There was a chance I’d be back at the lodge by now, but there was also the chance I’d be trapped out here alone, or worse, still traipsing around the forest because I hadn’t seen the cabin until he pointed it out.
I hated feeling beholden to him almost more than I hated feeling guilty.
There was no way I would be grateful we were trapped here together. No way.
Dan made a quick round of the small place, finding a box full of logs and building a fire in the stove before pulling the limp flannel curtains across the windows to block the drafts that rattled the panes.
I watched him, my face too numb to do much more than stare. I sat on my hands and breathed into my neckwarmer, feeling myself slowly return to a normal temperature.
“There’s food,” he said, sounding altogether too pleased with himself as he held up a container of protein bars he found in one of the cupboards over a sink.
He tried the sink and after a few groans, water sluggishly poured out.
He pulled the bench I sat on closer to the fire and sat beside me.
“We’ll be fine. This is actually getting cozy with the fire. ”
I stared at him, smiling down at me like everything was peachy, and I jumped up. “Are you kidding me? This storm could go on for days and no one knows where we are. This mountain is huge. We could be stuck here for days after it ends before anyone finds us.”
This didn’t alarm him the way it should have. He clearly wasn’t thinking about what happened when the protein bars ran out, when the box of logs was depleted and the fire died down. No. If I wasn’t mistaken, he looked delighted, almost like he planned the whole thing to get me alone.