Abandon (38 page)

Before each step, Scott stabbed the old ski poles he hiked with through the snow to probe the depth and check the ledge width, ensuring they didn’t stumble onto a cornice. Abigail followed in his footsteps, trying to ignore how the oval of her face not protected by the hood of her Gore-Tex jacket was progressing once again from burning into numbness.

The wind let up the lower they went.

After the sixth switchback, Scott stopped to unclip their carabiners.

Where they stood, in the upper realm of the cirque, the wind had diminished to a soft, icy breeze. They’d dropped out of the clouds into a boulder
field, the snow having buried all but the largest rocks, the lumpy white terrain resembling a field of sugar cubes.

They moved on. Within the hour, they reached the timberline, and though still post-holing in waist-deep snow, they had come safely down from the pass and back into the trees.

The sense of relief was potent and long overdue.

In the late afternoon, they rested at eleven thousand feet in a pure stand of Douglas fir. The cold front had pushed through, driven out the clouds, and scrubbed the sky into high-gloss Colorado blue. They dug out a spot in the snow, sat leaning against one of the old firs, eating gorp, sharing a bottle of water.

“Drink as much as you need,” Scott said. “I have a filter with me, so I can pump more.”

“I feel guilty drinking this,” Abigail said. “Knowing my dad doesn’t have this luxury.”

Scott broke open a pistachio, plucked out the nut meat. “You getting dehydrated isn’t gonna . . . Lawrence is your father?”

“We aren’t close. He left us when I was very young.”

Abigail lifted the Nalgene bottle, and as she unscrewed the lid to take another sip, it twitched, the tree trunk between them went
psst,
a piece of bark flew off, struck her face, and two streams of water shot out from the middle of the bottle, one arcing into the snow, the other into her lap.

Abigail said, “What the—”

The delayed report of a high-powered rifle broke out above them in the cirque.

Scott tackled her into the snow.

“How close?” she whispered.

“There was a three-second lag from when the bullet hit the bottle to the gunshot. . . . If he’s shooting one of the bigger cartridges, he’s maybe . . . fourteen, fifteen hundred yards away. Just under a mile. Probably scoping us from the ledges below the pass.”

A bullet tore through Scott’s pack, followed by fleeting silence, then a resounding gunshot.

“I don’t know how the hell he’s got us sighted up in these woods,” Scott said. “You run first. I’ll be right behind you. Don’t run in a straight line. Zigzag between the trees. Make yourself a harder target. Go.”

Abigail scrambled up out of the snow, took off downhill through the firs.

After ten steps, she heard another gunshot, glanced back, didn’t see Scott, kept running, thinking,
The bullet’ll hit you. You’ll go down, might never hear the shot.

She came out of the forest into the little glade where they’d camped three nights ago, and on the other side, she ducked behind a tree. When she caught her breath, Abigail peeked around the corner, spotted Scott running toward her across the glade.

He stepped behind the tree, threw his pack down in the snow.

“What are you doing?” she said.

“I wanna see where this fucker is.” He unzipped the top of his pack, jammed his hand inside, and pulled out a small black leather case, which he unsnapped.

He took out a pair of eight-power Nikon binoculars and lay flat in the snow.

Propped up on his elbows, so the lenses just barely poked above the surface, he brought the eyecups to his eyes, adjusted the focus knob, and glassed the cirque.

After a minute, he said, “There you are. Shit, I thought we were making much better time. You wanna see?”

Abigail got down in the snow with him and took the binoculars. Scott guided her finger to the focus knob. “First, find the pass,” he said. She glassed the buttresses and couloirs of the cirque in the big sphere of magnification, then the jagged rock outcropping of the Sawblade, two thousand feet above and a mile away, the sharp rocks and snow glinting in the sun, a deep, shimmering quality to the condensed air.

“Okay, I’ve got it,” she said.

“See the trail we took?”

“Yeah.”

“Just follow it on down.”

Abigail adjusted the focus, slowly glassing the ledges, tracing their steep descent down the back wall of the cirque. “I see him,” she said.

“That’s the guy who locked you in the mine?”

“Yeah, that’s Quinn.”

Minuscule among the huge broken crags, Quinn post-holed at a fast lope just past the fifth switchback in that silver-and-black down jacket. He toted a backpack and a scope-bearing rifle slung over his shoulder.

“Oh my God,” she said. “He’s almost down from the ledges.” Abigail lowered the binoculars. “He’s gonna catch up to us, Scott, and he has our tracks to follow.”

Scott’s face paled, and she wondered if it was from blood loss or fear.

He said, “We have to get down below the snow line.”

A little past six o’clock in the evening, they arrived at the alpine lake where they’d lunched on Sunday afternoon. The sun had slipped below the valley wall an hour ago, and a fleet of leaden clouds invaded from the west. Scott’s Sherpa put them at 8,700 feet, but they still stood in snow to their ankles.

“How you holding up?” Abigail said.

He squatted by the bank. “Fucking agony.”

“What can I do?”

“Nothing. We just have to keep descending. Think Quinn’s stopping?”

They pushed on past the spruce-rimmed lake, down and down, faster than they’d moved all day, light dwindling, clouds thickening up, dark and without texture, an immense sheet of metal stretched across the sky. They tramped through occasional patches of bare ground. Then there were more bare spots than snow-covered ones. Then just tatters of wet snow on the tree-shaded north aspects. Then no snow at all, but only the naked floor of the forest—spongy and saturated from two days of cold November rain.

At dusk, they came into the aspen grove—slim silvered trunks as far as they could see, some marred with arborglyphs, carved graffiti from the old West.
Abigail hadn’t noticed it before, but the aspens had eyes, hundreds of them all around her, mysterious dark bark scars from where old branches used to be, watching her from every side.

Scott collapsed. “We have to decide,” he said, breathless, “whether to stop for the night or keep going.”

“Could you even go on any farther?”

He shook his head. “I don’t think so, but maybe you can.”

“I’m not going anywhere at night and alone with this lunatic out here. Besides, I’m wiped out, too.”

“Well, we’re out of the snow, so we’d better find a place to camp.” Scott struggled to his feet. “The valley’s a half mile wide here. Let’s get ourselves out of the middle of it.”

As they headed east through the aspen, Abigail felt her stomach tighten. The imminent threat to her life notwithstanding, there was still something unnerving about being in the wilderness with night coming on and watching the sky lose its light above you, a sinking feeling rooted in the most basic of primal fears—the woods after dark.

They came to a stream. It flowed stronger than Abigail remembered, and it seemed two lifetimes ago that she’d watched Scott fly-fish this same watercourse two miles up the valley for their supper. “Stream’s up,” he said. “I’m gonna filter some water, since we can’t camp here. First place Quinn will look for us is along this stream. We’d never hear him coming.”

They climbed down into the gully and found a place at the water’s edge beside a pool protected from the chaos of the main current and clogged with aspen leaves that looked like gold coins floating in the water. Scott dug the PUR filter out of his pack and inserted the two hoses into the bottom. He fitted the end of one with a bottle adapter and screwed it onto an empty Nalgene bottle. The other hose, he dropped in the pool.

Abigail sat beside him in the fading light, watching Scott pump the filter and holding the newly filled bottles between her legs. She kept looking back up the gully. Scott had been right. Streamside, you couldn’t hear a thing but the chatter of water flowing over rocks. Approaching footsteps would be lost in the noise. When he’d topped off five Nalgene bottles, Scott disassembled the filter and packed everything away.

There would be no dry, easy crossing.

They forded the stream—fifteen feet across and thigh-deep in the middle, so strong that Abigail had to brace herself and lean into the current to keep her footing. The water had been snow less than an hour ago. Her legs burned and her lungs contracted from the freezing shock of it.

They climbed onto the bank and up the muddy gully on the other side, hiked several hundred yards over a forest floor carpeted with brilliant aspen leaves.

The air smelled metallic and stale. It began to rain.

Scott turned to her, said, “I see where we’ll camp tonight,” and Abigail followed him into a thicket of chokecherry, not much space between the shrubs, but enough to conceal a tent.

With the tent pitched, they threw their packs into the roomy vestibule, climbed in, and zipped themselves inside. Scott shivered uncontrollably, and he slurred his words.

Abigail said, “You have spare clothes in here?” He nodded. “Why don’t you get in the tent and take off your wet ones.” Scott unzipped the inner tent and crawled inside. While he stripped, Abigail pulled everything out of his pack, realized she didn’t feel right, either—her motor coordination was disrupted and she had trouble focusing on the task at hand.

“I can’t find your sleeping bag,” she said.

“Bottom compartment.” She dragged out the Marmot compression bag, tossed it in with the Therm-a-Rest and his bag of extra clothes. Then she unlaced her boots, pulled off her socks, all her soaked clothing, and climbed in.

Scott twisted shut the air valve on the Therm-a-Rest, laid his sleeping bag on top of it. He wriggled inside, said, “Get in with me. We both have hypothermia.”

Abigail climbed into the down mummy bag and zipped them up. Scott spooned her. She could feel him shaking against her, their legs so cold, like malleable ice.

“I should really get us something to eat and drink,” she said.

“Just stay here with me for a minute, get some body heat going.”

They lay shivering together, listening to the rain patter on the tent. The sky detonated. Thunder shook the ground and decayed like a shotgun blast, Abigail thinking it sounded so different from East Coast thunder. In the West, it was deeper, right on top of you, and seemed to fade forever.

“Think we’re safe in this thicket?” Abigail asked.

“As long as we stay quiet and don’t turn on any lights. Fuck, I can’t get warm.”

Abigail turned and faced him. She ran her hand along the right side of his abdomen. It felt hot, swollen, and sticky. “Your wound’s leaking,” she said.

“My boot was full of blood. I’m hurting pretty bad again.”

“I saw the first-aid kit in your pack. I’m gonna get it out, and you’re gonna tell—”

“You think I’m dying?” he asked.

“No,” she said, though she didn’t know. “I think once we get some food and medicine in you, you’ll feel a lot better.”

She started to sit up, but Scott stopped her. “Not yet,” he said. “Just stay with me. This is the worst shit I’ve ever been in. And I’ve been in some real shit. You believe in karma?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, I think it’s fucking me over at the moment.”

“How so?”

“This trip isn’t the first time I’ve gotten someone killed in the backcountry.

I was involved in an accident on Rainier a couple years ago.”