Fan the Flames (42 page)

Her tone must've been mournful, since he actually looked at her and stopped. He pulled out more trail mix from what appeared to be an unending supply. Balancing her pack, she carefully sat on a chair-sized rock and immediately regretted it. There were very inconveniently located lumps that dug into her posterior. Wincing, she shifted to the other side of the rock, which was just as uncomfortable. With a sigh, she gave up and just chewed on her trail mix.

As she finished off the water remaining in the bottle, a twinge in her bladder reminded her of another biological need. She'd been dreading it, but Ellie knew that peeing outdoors—in the
cold
outdoors—was something she was just going to have to do. There was no sense in whining about it, even just in her head.

George took the empty bottle from her hand and switched it out for a full one he took from a more inconvenient spot on her pack.

“Thank you.” She tried to stand, but the weight of the pack pulled her backward, and the rock behind her prevented her from taking a step back to catch her balance. As she started to topple, George caught her upper arms and pulled her upright, holding her there until she was steady. She looked at him, and their gazes caught for a long second. This time, she was the chicken who dropped her eyes first. “Thank you.” With a silent sigh, she realized she'd turned back into the one-phrase-Franny doll.

He released her arms, and she waved toward a couple of scrubby pine trees ten feet away from them. “I'm, um, just going to go to the ladies' room.”

As she walked toward the dubious privacy of the trees, Ellie could feel him watching her, and she hoped he looked away before she actually got down to business. She'd never had issues with a shy bladder before, but these were new and trying circumstances.

When she reached the far side of the trees, she purposefully didn't look back at George to see if she was truly hidden. If he was watching, she didn't want to know, or she'd never be able to go. On the other hand, being out of his sight and away from his protection brought its own set of worries about hungry predators. Giving the surrounding area a hunted look, she told herself firmly to quit being a paranoid city girl. Skimming down all four bottom layers, she shivered when the cold air met her bare skin.

Belatedly, she realized she should have taken off her pack before attempting to pee. Using a nearby trunk to balance, she lowered herself carefully. It was trickier than she'd expected, and she promised herself that she'd never take a toilet seat for granted again.

By the time she was finished, her teeth were chattering, and the tops of her thighs were beginning to go numb. A movement to her left made her whip her head in that direction as she abruptly stood, almost losing her balance again. Before she even identified what had drawn her attention, she'd dragged all of her bottom layers up to her waist.

A rabbit moved cautiously out of the shelter of a tree, and Ellie's muscles relaxed. It was all white except for the black tips of its ears.

“Hey, bunny,” she said very quietly, standing still so as not to scare it. “Aren't you cute?”

“Snowshoe hare.”

At the deep rumble of George's voice, both she and the rabbit jumped. The hare bolted for cover, disappearing into a group of pines. Ellie, on the other hand, turned to give George a
look
.

He just raised his eyebrows back at her.

“Can't I have a little privacy?”

His eyes dropped to her fully clothed body and then returned to her face.

“You didn't know I was done,” she huffed, and then remembered her pledge to not be difficult. Residual adrenaline from being startled twice—once by the rabbit and the second time by George—had made her snappy.

“You took too long.”

“Sorry.” She must've been behind the pines for quite a while. “We can go now.”

He turned and headed back to the trail, Ellie following.

* * *

Ellie focused on George's broad back, trying to think about anything except her current misery. The top crust of snow had gradually gotten softer, the snow more powdery, and her boots sank several inches with each step. This forced her to raise her knees higher, and her quadriceps muscles soon started complaining.

It was worth dealing with minor discomfort, she told herself grimly, since each step was bringing her closer to her father. She hoped. Instantly, she cut off that train of thought. Baxter had to be heading to her grandpa's cabin. He was just taking a less-traveled route, while they were following the logging road, which is why she hadn't spotted his trail. If her dad wasn't, and this whole miserable trek was for nothing, then she might just sink down into the snow and throw a tantrum. George would probably be annoyed by that.

Suddenly, it occurred to her that Baxter was making his own trip to the cabin. Alone. With no George to guide him. Fear quickened her breathing even more than the thin air already had. Consciously trying to slow and deepen her inhales and exhales, she reminded herself that he was an experienced camper and hiker. Before that catastrophic visit to the cabin when she was ten, he'd taken her on lots of wilderness adventures. He'd be fine. The memory of how confused and chaotic he'd seemed during their last phone call tried to surface, but she pushed it into a dark closet in her brain and slammed the door.
He'll be fine
, she repeated over and over, the words matching the rhythm of each miserable step.
He'll be fine.

Ellie almost crashed into George before she realized that he'd stopped.

“Break time?” At his nod, she pulled off a glove and held out her hand for the inevitable trail mix. As much as she'd been eating, though, she still felt hungry. She figured that walking through the snow must burn a zillion calories an hour. It felt that way, at least.

As she chewed, he removed his pack. Ellie was a little bit jealous of how easily he handled the weight, when she found getting in and out of her own backpack such a struggle. After detaching the snowshoes from his pack, he moved behind her to get that pair, as well. He crouched by her feet like a shoe salesman, and she fit her boot into the bindings. While she was on one foot, she teetered and caught his shoulder to regain her balance. Once she was steady, she realized George had gone still under her touch. She withdrew her hand, oddly reluctant to end the contact, and his hands started moving again. He ratcheted the straps until they fit snugly around her boot and then repeated the process on the other snowshoe.

When he moved away to put on his own snowshoes, she lifted one foot at a time, testing the weight of them. They were surprisingly light, and she was excited to try walking. Almost anything would be better than slogging through the shin-deep powder like they'd been doing for the past hour.

Once George ate a few giant handfuls of trail mix and shouldered his pack, they returned to hiking. Ellie quickly got the hang of the snowshoes, and the novelty of them made the next hour or so go by quickly. Yet as the late-afternoon sun dipped low and the shadows lengthened, her feeling of being watched deepened. Although she tried to tell her paranoid mind that it was only cute bunnies or happy squirrels or curious raccoons eyeing her from behind the trees, fear still soured her stomach.

Despite the snowshoes, her fatigue turned the walk into drudgery. Everything ached—her muscles, the blisters on her heels, her cold fingers. When George stopped again, she wanted to cheer, but she couldn't muster the energy.

A fallen tree sprawled across the small clearing, and Ellie made her way over to it, excited about the prospect of sitting. Before she made it, George stopped her with a hand on her arm.

“We're camping here.”

“Oh.” She wasn't sure why she was so surprised by this. In her misery, she'd just assumed that they would hike on and on, never stopping. “Good.”

He unbuckled the straps around her front and helped her ease the pack off, then crouched to loosen the bindings on her snowshoes. Rolling her shoulders as she stepped out of them, she realized how sore she'd gotten from carrying the weight all day. After removing his own snowshoes and pack, he extracted a small shovel from it. Moving to the other side of the downed tree, where a semicircle of pines created a partially sheltered spot, he started digging.

“Can I help?” When he didn't pause in his work, she frowned. “Please? I'm getting cold just standing here.” As if those were the magic words, his head came up, and he eyed her closely.

“There's another shovel in your pack,” he finally said before returning to his shoveling.

As she pulled it out, she saw several other items she didn't recognize and made a mental note to ask George what they were. By the time she made it back to him with the shovel, he'd already dug out over a foot of snow in a rectangle that was about five feet by eight feet.

“What can I do?” she asked, eyeing the tidy corners. It looked so perfect that she didn't want to start digging and mess up the symmetry.

Using his shovel, he sketched out a smaller square in front of his rectangle. “Dig down another couple of feet. It'll make it easier to get in and out.”

Impressed by the longest series of consecutive words she'd ever heard him utter, Ellie started digging. She soon warmed up again as she cut through the hard-packed snow. Apparently, the soft stuff was just on the trail to make walking difficult. By the time she'd finished her square, George had lowered his rectangle another foot.

He eyed her work and grunted, “Good.” Ellie couldn't help but beam at the praise as she stretched her cramped fingers.

They laid a tarp over the bottom of the dug-out rectangle, and then George showed her how to fill the fabric tent anchors with snow. As she did that, he assembled the tent with impressive quickness. While he secured it, she pulled the sleeping bags out of their compression sacks.

“Pads,” George grunted. When she just looked at him blankly, he jerked his head toward the packs. Ellie discovered he'd brought two pads each—one foam and one self-inflating.

“Whoa!” she said as she hauled the pads through the entrance of the tent. “I figured we'd be on the ground. This is four-star camping.”

He crawled in after her with an odd expression on his face, as if he was trying to figure out if she was teasing. “The ground's what makes you cold, not the air. We need insulation.”

“Plus, it'll be cushy.” She unrolled them, and George showed her how the self-inflating pads worked. The foam pads went on the floor of the tent with the air-filled ones on top, followed by their sleeping bags.

Ellie looked at the oddly shaped bedrolls. “These look like cocoons.”

“Mummy bags.”

Tilting her head, she said, “I can see why they were named that.”

When he climbed out of the tent, Ellie followed. “What's next?”

“Dinner.”

He hitched his pack over one shoulder and walked away from their campsite. After staring for a second, wondering where he was going, she hoisted her own pack onto her back and hurried after him. Her feet broke through the snow, making her appreciate the snowshoes. Although her pack was lighter now, it pressed down on the sore spots it had created during the day of hiking.

As she followed George, she hoped that he hadn't meant they were going hunting for their dinner. An image of the cute bunny she'd seen earlier flashed in her mind, and she swallowed. Maybe she could convince him to stick with trail mix.

He finally stopped, placing his pack on the ground. By the time she'd reached him, he'd pulled out several items, including a small camp stove.

“What's for dinner?” she asked warily. When he handed her two foil pouches, she relaxed. “Beef stroganoff and chicken teriyaki. In a bag. This should be interesting.”

His grunt actually sounded amused as he held out a small pan. “Snow.”

Resisting the urge to salute, she traded him the pouches for the pan and went looking for a clean patch of snow. In the fading light, it all looked pretty good, so she filled the pan and returned to where George had fired up the cook stove. He took the pan and poured some water from one of his bottles over the snow before setting it on the burner.

“Why add water?”

“Keeps it from scorching. Watch it.”

Apparently, “please” was not part of George's vernacular. She couldn't get too bothered by the lack of politeness, though, since he hadn't even been talking to her just that morning. She kept an eye on the pot while also watching George, who'd pulled a long length of thin rope from his pack. After filling a bag with snow, he tied it to the end of the rope and tossed it over a branch fifteen feet up in one of the pine trees. The snow-filled bag flew over the branch and headed toward the ground, bringing the line with it.

The water started boiling, and she hurried to pull it off the stove. “That was fast.”

“High altitude.” At her confused look, he clarified, “Water boils at a lower temperature up here.”

“Really? Huh.”

Instead of responding, he just handed her a small, soft-sided cooler and a coffee filter. When she looked at the items and then back at George, he gestured toward the food pouches.

“Right.” The water would be to reconstitute the food, and she guessed that the coffee filter was to catch any dirt, tree bits or dead bugs that might have been hanging out in the snow they'd melted. She read the directions on the back of the beef stroganoff. It looked pretty easy—add water and let it sit for nine minutes. “What time is it?”

Pulling back his coat cuff, he moved a step closer and held his watch so she could see it. He'd do anything to avoid actually speaking, she figured.

“Can you let me know when nine minutes has passed?” At his nod, Ellie tore open the first package. Pouring hot water through the filter into the pouches was a little tricky, but her gloves were thick enough to protect her from the small amount she spilled on herself. After sealing up the first pouch, she repeated the process with the second, and then zipped them both into the insulated cooler. “There. Dinner's made.” The satisfaction in her voice made her grin. There was something about camping that turned the simplest tasks into great feats of accomplishment. It was like she was a pioneer—or it would be, if they'd had Gore-Tex and Under Armor and artificial food preservatives in the 1800s.