Snowblind (6 page)

Ann turns a slow circle, looking up, searching the sky—for anything, a blinking wing light, a sign of the times. The stars stare back. She's dazed, on the verge of falling up into space.

She gets hot angry with herself. The emptiness shouldn't matter. It hasn't ever mattered before; it doesn't matter now.

There are signs up there. Practical signs. Ann's no whizz with the constellations, but whichever way the stars are wheeling is west, minus some whadyacallit, tilt or declination. That's logical enough. The horizons are choked off, so she can't use them to judge motion. She grabs one ice tool, raises the shaft over her head, makes herself as stiff and straight as possible, memorizes the patterns of star clusters around the spike of her axe. Then she gets back into her sleeping bag because the wind and cold are nosing around her like wolves.

Ann checks her watch, sets her alarm. She tries not to think; she tries not to sleep. She does some of both. The stars seem to be in the tent with her. They come right through the roof. She imagines reaching the ocean and finding . . . nothing. And if she lives, if she can catch fish or whatever? What then? In the Stone Age, the mountains were full of trolls. You don't risk getting killed in the mountains when you're eating roots and berries just to keep ahead of death anyway.
Right now, I'd eat dirt. Handfuls.
Suicidal alpinism, symptom of a decadent culture with a protein surplus. Fight the softness, show the rest of the tribe what soul-fat slobs they've become.

Half an hour passes. Ann's alarm jerks her into the present. She ducks out of her tent, plants her feet in the exact steps she used before, raises her ice tool over her head. The stars have moved. Just a giant clock spinning west, nothing more to them.
Keep on saying it, Ann.
She brings her arm down in the direction they've turned and kicks a twenty-foot arrow in the snow pointing that way. Then she gets back into her sleeping bag and drops away again.

Ann resurfaces into grey daylight. It's not raining, but the clouds are low as ever. The arrow she stamped in the snow is there. She half expected to find no sign of it. It makes a right angle with her melted-out tracks leading up to the tent from the day before. At least it doesn't point back the way she came. Ann feels hunched with cold. The temperature has dropped, or her body is shutting down.
Both.

She walks into the fog, and it wraps itself round her. Her eyes crave and wander. Ann remembers hearing that sharks need to stay in motion or they die. Something about their gills and asphyxiation. Ann feels driven before the same lash. Hungry, jagged, adrift and unable to stop.

Snowflakes shake out of the dirty cotton overhead. Little buggers look fat enough to eat. Ann imagines running around with her mouth open and her tongue out in a blizzard of barbecue drippings. She licks them off her glove. Cold ice.
Damn.
The flakes pour down in lazy, windless spirals. Ann retreats deep behind her eyes, away from the snow and the lines tracing themselves through the air right in front of her face. She nearly runs into a copse of twenty stunted alders.

Trees.
Trees.
Ann's eyes all but pop out of their sockets in their eagerness. Awareness rushes to the surface. She may yet come back
from the dead, a thought Ann hasn't entertained since she exited shit creek without her compass. The trees stand isolated. There are rocks under the new snow, and withered old snow-ice shows through gaps. Could be a glacial edge. Could be a skin of rock and soil riding the back of the glacier. One way or the other, Ann has located the land of the living.

The snow keeps dumping, and Ann keeps walking, past rocks, shells of wind-carved ice, a rubble ridge that has to be a moraine. Alders come out of the ground. The land is changing, tidewater approaching.

Ann hits a chain-link wall of alders. There is rock and snow underfoot, snow in the air. No chance of walking forward. The trees are knit tight. Left or right? She can see about forty feet in either direction. Ann chooses right—it beats standing there deciding. She follows the wall of growth to where it turns ragged and the rocks end at the edge of glacial ice. Back on the glacier again? Ann struggles to put the jigsaw cuts of the map together in her mind—she has about six pieces out of five hundred, and none of them fit with the others. It isn't just the map; her mind's also full of gaps. The cold has its wedges in her. Hunger digs into her brain.

Ann stays in the fringe of the alder pack, unwilling to let the trees out of her sight. There she flounders. Loose rocks somersault under the snow. Gaps in the alders suck her in, then pinch off and force her back out. Her instinct for direction scatters like de-flocked birds. She's close, she's sure of it. But the fatigue, the drowning panic, return. She can feel the suck of a downward spiral. She detaches herself from the trees, gets back out on open ice. For
ten minutes she walks, seeing nothing but skydiving snowflakes six inches in front of her eyes. The alders reappear. This time on her right. The same trees or new? Ann tries to scream. What comes out is hoarse and pathetic. Where is the goddamn ocean? It's only the biggest thing on earth.

Ann zeros in on a brown boulder that appears ahead through the snowfall. She knows she hasn't seen it before. She'll turn it into a landmark, trace out a map with search patterns and a center. She needs a system, that's all. Twenty feet away, the rock shrugs and swings a huge dished-out moon face Ann's way.

Two things Ann hates: Avalanches. Bears. Big, dumb, unpredictable, uncontrollable. Randomness given mass and teeth.

The bear lifts its head. Its eyes are small, black, unbelievably far apart.
It's fucking huge.
Ann doesn't move, couldn't move. She's locked down. She has often sensed that a mountain has its teeth in her. Now the feeling hits her as physical pain, as if the bear has already crunched her. The bear stands up on its hind legs, sticks its nose in the air. Ann imagines airborne traces of her sweat, her fear, her exhaustion, going down that big brown snout. The bear is so close she sees the bristles in its lips. Mentally, Ann gives herself the finger, kisses herself goodbye. Two bounds, and the bear will be at her. It's going to be over in less than a second. At least the bear won't get much satisfaction out of her skinny ass. Ann stands straight, prepares to let the bear crash down on her like a wave.

The bear drops. Turns. Ambles away.

Thoughts flash by Ann in a series, going off like firecrackers on a string.

Turn. Run.

Bear knows where it is. You don't.

Bears look for food. Nothing to eat where you came from.

Don't you fucking do this!

Ann races after the bear.

Its big brown haunch is still just visible through the blizzard. Ann chases it through the flying snow. The bear's tracks are deep, but new snow fills them fast, and Ann knows she isn't seeing well or thinking clearly. When Ann loses sight of the bear, even for a moment, an edge-of-the-world terror seizes her. The bear will cross its own trail, vanish in the woods, blink back out of existence, and she'll be left alone again. And when she has the bear in sight, all she can think of is it swinging around a second time, freezing her with its moon face, knocking her down with a paw like a spiked club, and digging into her guts.

The bear is as alien as a meteorite, half a ton of muscle and unknowable intention. It sniffs the wind. Swipes the snow. Ann watches it flip a hundred-pound stone as casually as a kid turning over a rock. It gallops fifty yards, then stalks along with its nose down. Ann follows, fast or slow, through bunkers of brush and over moraines, straining to keep that furry hind end just in view and no closer. At a hundred feet, the bear is still too near. Ann's legs twitch like a rabbit's, trying to turn her away and send her into flight. Each time Ann catches a side view—of hooked claws, a shoulder built like a steam piston—the horror movie looping behind her eyes shows the bear coming all the way around and lunging through the storm, leading with its teeth. The bear enters dark woods with snow underfoot and soil under the snow.

It occurs to Ann that this might be all that's left of the world for her. She'll reach the ocean, and it will be salty. She'll follow the bears and stars until she starves or something kills her. Just because she asked them doesn't mean her questions will be answered.

She follows the bear through the woods, between trees and outbursts of devil's club. The snow drops between the trunks, white on black, a feathery carpet-bombing. Ann drifts closer to the bear. She is starving, tired, numb—and what difference does ten feet make? The bear knows she's here. It will cut short this parade when it damn well pleases. But if Ann loses the bear, she will be on the dark side of the moon. The trail of scents and signs they've followed is so convoluted Ann barely knows her left from her right anymore.

Ann gives in to tunnel vision, gives up any pretense of paying attention to the warp of the land or the composition of the forest. Her hood is cinched tight; the bear is in front of her. It is goddamn ironic, is what it is. For how many years she has slapped aside every effort to hook her up with a partner, and now, at the end, she is a donkey on a string behind a side of bear-flesh that would on an average day eat her, or just kill her for mucking around in its tracks.

Fallen logs on the forest floor look like bodies under the snow. Buried deeper, their outlines soften, until Ann runs them over and frags the soft curves. The bear bulls through the drifts. And sure, if Ann were as Stone Age as the mountains, maybe she'd take the bear for her totem. Pray to it, ask favors. But her world is all probabilities and lottery wheels. And she sees her number spinning down to zero. The big void lurks behind the numbers. From the mountains, Ann has watched it draw close and recede, her personal black hole.
Sneaky bastard, to catch her like this. The bear rips open a rotten log and sniffs its insides. Ann is almost tired enough to welcome that treatment. Freezing to death might be more peaceful, but it will give her a long damn time to think.

The bear shambles into a run. Ann follows, her legs clumsy and spazzing. The woods quit at an invisible line, and Ann pops out into space, bewildered. The land slopes down. Above, a low, flat ceiling of cloud spews snow. Below, a second expanse of grey cloud is speckled white. No, not cloud, water. Ocean. A tidal flat. A bay held in by two brown arms of land. Filled with boats. Motherfucking
boats
.

NO PLACE FOR VAGABONDS

J
AY'S SUBARU RATTLED through a labyrinth of streetlight-slicked asphalt and into the bowels of LAX. Chase Vox had come back from Pakistan, and Jay was his welcoming committee. In his car in Los Angeles, Jay felt close to the days when horse carts and automobiles had bickered over the roads. Sleek, hungry machines roared angrily past him and the other stragglers. Jay was allied with the fat white men with bald tires and bald heads driving rusted El Caminos and the workers in broken-backed pickups laden with ladders, pipes, shovels—all moving at one speed while blurs of paint and dollars hurtled by. Jay found Chase squatting by the arrivals curb on a boulder-sized duffel, looking like an island apart from the other passengers milling around. A wild tangle of black hair blew off his head in a permanent wind. In the pink and green lights of the airport, his face was nineteenth-century gaunt. Jay knew the look. Chase could have just stumbled back to basecamp after two weeks pinned up high. But usually in the time it took a fellow to get to an international airport, he had put on weight and washed the grease
out of his hair. Chase looked like the mountain was still just over his shoulder.

Jay stopped his car and jumped out. They embraced, then they each grabbed one handle of the duffle and swung it into the back of the Subaru, which bucked and settled lower. They took their seats, and Jay eased back into the river of cars washing through the airport.

Chase's expedition had not gone well, that was clear enough. He seemed ready to fend off words like fists. Jay could imagine Chase's seatmate on the plane leaning way out into the aisle, pushed away by the psychic tide. But Jay didn't mind it himself. The man could take as much time as he needed.

“The mountain was a shitstorm,” Chase said, at last. “I'll tell you about it. Just let me get used to talking again.”

“Sure,” Jay said. “What's next, now that you're back?”

Chase said nothing. The car groaned up onto the freeway. Jay began to think he might not answer at all.

“Guess I'll go to Joshua Tree,” Chase said, and Jay concluded that Chase had actually been pondering the question, as if he hadn't thought about it before. “Look for a guide job,” he continued. “Probably lie on top of a rock for a few days. Play the lizard. I left some boxes of my things under a rock out on Queen Mountain. It was cheaper than storage.”

“Is your bus out there, too?” Years ago, Chase had acquired a yellow school bus, one of the short ones. He cut a hole in the roof and installed a four-legged, potbellied iron stove and chimney. He pulled out the rows of seats and built a bed frame from scrap wood salvaged out of a derelict house south of Olancha. It was easy to
tell if Chase was about—around the mountains, there was only one decommissioned school bus sporting a chimney. On a storm day, you could knock on his door and come in and sit on old bench seats turned in toward the stove and listen to the rain on the roof, and he'd make coffee and tell stories.

“I sold it for my plane ticket,” Chase said.