Exile Hunter (41 page)

The men agreed and the
file order was changed, with Scotty and Browning going first since
they knew the most about snow conditions. Rhee and Linder went next
because they were physically fittest. And Burt and Yost, as the
slowest, went last.

A half hour later, with
Scotty moving cautiously in the lead and barely fifty meters from
reaching the far edge of the snowfield, Linder looked up to see Rhee
step off the beaten track and wait for Linder to pass him.

“You go ahead. I need
to take a leak,” Rhee muttered without making eye contact.

“For God’s sake,
Mark, get back in line. You could get us all killed,” Linder
exclaimed.

“Screw yourself,
we’re almost across,” Rhee replied.

“And what about the
scent your piss will leave for the dogs?“

“No dog is going to
follow us up that cliff, dude,” Rhee answered, pointing back toward
the ridge.

But no sooner did the
words leave Rhee’s lips than a crack appeared in the snow beneath
his feet, shearing off a slab of snow that began sliding down the
mountainside and drawing in the snow resting above it. Though the
first four men in the file stood above the shear line, Burt and Yost
remained below it and now they bore the full impact of the onrushing
snow. All six of them were carried tumbling downhill, accompanied by
a roar like that of a speeding locomotive, and came to rest buried up
to their chests in the rapidly congealing mass of snow. But as Yost
had been on the steepest part of the slope when the avalanche hit
him, he was taken faster and farther than any of the others.

Five of the six men
emerged from the mess and dug each other out within minutes in order
to pursue the search for Yost. Fanning out in a standard search
pattern, the five paced the area for over half an hour, probing with
walking sticks and sometimes with bare hands. Rhee seemed
particularly shaken by losing his ex-foreman, and perhaps driven by
remorse, probed harder and deeper than anyone.

But before long, the
low sun set behind the ridge they had just climbed, casting them into
deep shadow. Scotty pointed out the change and reminded them that
they had one more ridge to climb before sunset to avoid spending the
night out in the open.

“But he’s got to be
down here somewhere,” Linder insisted, out of breath from the
exertion. “He was the last one to cross. Let’s climb back up the
slope and rework the far edge of the debris field.”

As if on command, Rhee
set off immediately for the top of the debris field.

“We’ve been at this
the better part of an hour, Warren,” Browning replied evenly,
approaching Linder and putting an around his shoulder. “Even if
he’s close enough to the surface where we can get to him, he hasn’t
had any air and his body temperature will have plummeted. It would be
a miracle if he were still alive.”

“Depends how you
define death,” Burt argued. “Chilling the body actually helps
protect it from oxygen shortage. Avalanche victims and people who
drown from falling into icy lakes have been revived hours later.”

“Maybe he found an
air pocket,” Linder added, thrusting his arm through the newly
formed crust and removing it to create a cavity. “It would be wrong
to give up till we do all we can to find and revive him.”

While Linder spoke,
Browning and Scotty conferred quietly a few paces away. When Linder
fell silent, Browning addressed the team.

“All right, then, so
maybe we find him,” Browning conceded in a voice devoid of emotion.
“And let’s say we’re able to get him breathing. Even if we did
that, and by some miracle, Charlie managed to wake up again, he’d
be in no shape to climb. So how would we carry him over the next
ridge? And if we wait here until morning, what if the drone comes
back? The reason we decided to take this route in the first place was
to avoid being spotted from the air.”

“That’s just a
hypothetical,” Linder countered. “The fact is…”

“The fact is, we
haven’t found Charlie’s body and we’re running out of time. If
we don’t find shelter by nightfall, Charlie’s sacrifice will be
meaningless. I say, let’s offer a prayer for his soul and move on.
Charlie would understand that.”

Burt stopped probing
the snow with his walking stick and gave Linder a discouraged look.

“Will’s right,”
he conceded. “It’ll be dark soon. We need to keep moving.”

Though Linder
surrendered in the end to Browning’s reasoning, he simply could not
bring himself to believe that Yost was dead. At some deep level, he
just could not make sense of it. Though he joined the prayer for
Yost, he refused to grieve.

It is the nature, and the advantage, of strong people that they can
bring out the crucial questions and form a clear opinion about them.
The weak always have to decide between alternatives that are not
their own.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer

MID MARCH, SOUTH NAHANNI RIVER, NORTHWEST TERRITORIES

The morning after the
avalanche, the five survivors scaled yet another sawtooth ridge and
reached the lip of a high mountain pass. From that overview, they
caught sight of a wooded river valley below.

“That is River
Nahanni,” Scotty declared. “Nahanni very angry river, not like
see people here. But if we follow him, he take us to Fort Liard and
British Columbia. From there, we find highway south to Dawson Creek
and Edmonton in three days.”

“And how many days
from here to Fort Liard?” Rhee broke in.

“For men who reach
it, two weeks, maybe three.”

“And what’s that
supposed to mean?” Rhee challenged. “Do you know something the
rest of us don’t about who’s going to make it and who isn’t?”

“I know path is
dangerous and we have little food,” Scotty replied. “Man with
strong will, he survive. Take rest now. And give thanks.”

Without responding to
Rhee, the quiet Kaska seated himself on a rock overlooking the river
and intoned a chant with bowed head.

They ate their only
meal of the day at midday, when Browning handed each man half a meal
bar. Also at midday, the snowshoes were rotated among the men, for
Yost had been wearing one of the four pairs when he was lost and now
only three pairs were left for the five men.

For the next two days,
they made steady progress through the winding river valley, for the
frozen river was like a highway, with the packed snow less than a
foot deep, allowing even those without snowshoes to walk relatively
easily. Now that the men were beyond the likely reach of trackers and
the threat of aerial surveillance had also receded, they walked from
before dawn to after dusk, letting the reflected moonlight guide
their path along the white carpet of snow so long as they had the
strength to keep moving. The air was dry, and so the cold’s bite
seemed less harsh and the midday sun offered an extra measure of
warmth.

At the end of each
day’s hike, the men stopped at a time decided by unanimous consent
and accepted Scotty’s choice of a campsite without question.
Without Yost’s steady leadership, however, tempers flared
occasionally over the allocation of camp duties.

“My knee is killing
me,” Rhee complained on the second day, objecting to his usual job
of collecting firewood, although he was the youngest and therefore
the fittest of the group. “I twisted it on the rocks. How about if
someone else does firewood tonight?”

“Sure, if you’ll
trade me your turn with the snowshoes tomorrow,” Burt replied while
clearing a spot for the campfire.

“No way I’m giving
up my turn. How about I take midnight watch, instead? Who’s got it
tonight?”

Earlier in their
journey, the incident might have led to a quarrel, but by now even
Rhee’s hard edges had been worn down, and no two personalities
clashed sufficiently to spark open hostility.

“I’m on midnight
watch,” Browning replied. “You’ve got a deal if you throw in
your coffee ration.”

“Fat chance, old
man,” Rhee shot back. “Straight trade or it’s not on.”

“Come on, guys, while
you’re horse-trading the rest of us are freezing,” Linder chimed
in. He sat with his back to a tree, watching Scotty light a tuft of
dried tree fungus with a spark from a bent nail and flint and then
nurse the flame that would ignite their campfire. While the haggling
continued in the background, Scotty gathered a few twigs and branches
from nearby to feed the fire. At last, the Kaska turned to Linder and
spoke.

“You keep fire alive,
Warren. I go fetch wood.”

And as often happened
when such matters were not soon resolved, the impasse was resolved by
Scotty walking off and doing whatever had to be done. The old Kaska
never argued with anyone and, despite his age and small stature,
always delivered more than his share.

By the third day on the
river, the meal bars, coffee, and the last of the MREs were gone, and
the five men were reduced to sharing a single tea bag with each meal.
The only food left was a fist-size bag of steel-cut oatmeal found in
the cargo pocket of the dead driver’s parka. They used half of it
for breakfast and saved what remained for the following day.

Spirits were low by
late afternoon, when they heard an unfamiliar sound while passing
single file through a dense scrub forest along the riverbank. Linder
walked at the head of the group and leapt when he heard a shuddering,
deep-chested cough, followed by a powerful thumping and crashing as
if a gigantic beast were hurtling toward him through the undergrowth.
Yet no beast appeared. Once again came the sound of labored
breathing, and then eerie silence.

Linder stepped forward
and waved for the others to follow. Around the next bend, he heard
the cough again and then he came face to face with a stag thrashing
its well-muscled body violently from side to side, it muzzle foaming
and flared nostrils pumping steam into the frigid air. The buck’s
eyes were wide with fear upon catching the men’s scent and Linder
noticed that the animal’s forelegs had dug two wide grooves in the
frozen earth in a vain attempt to disentangle its magnificent rack of
antlers from the gnarled roots of a fallen tree.

No one but Scotty had
the faintest idea what to do next. But the Kaska did not waste a
second. He ran forward and brought his steel hatchet down hard at the
nape of the animal’s neck. The deer arched its back and then
slumped forward to collapse on its side.

Though the men did
their best to dislodge the stag’s antlers, they soon tired of it
and switched to sawing at the neck with their knives until they
severed head from carcass. Scotty, noticing the sun sinking toward
the horizon, coached the men through slaughtering the carcass. And
because the meat was too heavy to carry and too precious to waste,
they decided to take shelter among nearby rocks, light a fire, and
camp long enough to gorge themselves on whatever they would not take
with them. For twenty-four hours, they roasted the choicest cuts,
gnawed at meat and bone, then writhed in agony for just as long while
their digestive tracts struggled to break down the hunks of sinewy
flesh after going hungry for so long.

When at last they broke
camp and continued downstream, the river’s channel deepened and the
powerful current flowed swiftly beneath the covering sheet of ice.
One day, as they passed between massive granite outcrops, Scotty
halted the men by a tangled pile of driftwood logs and bade them
watch while he selected a sturdy length of hardwood trunk as thick as
his thigh. At his direction, Linder and Browning helped him wrest the
shaft free of the pile and carry it to the center of the stream,
where Scotty cleared snow from a spot the size of a manhole cover.

Then the native raised
and dropped the vertical log rhythmically onto the ice.

Burt looked on with a
bemused expression.

“Has it cracked yet?”
he asked during a brief pause in the pile driving.

“Soon. But first we
find fish.”

“What kind of fish?”
Browning piped up.

“Grayling, trout,
pike, whitefish,” Scotty replied. “Whatever lives below.”

“Sounds fine to me,”
Browning remarked. “But how will we catch them without nets or
tackle?”

“Easy way. You
watch.”

The Kaska continued
pounding. Then he brought the log down heavily onto the weakened ice
with a single blow that broke through and let out a powerful
upwelling of pressurized water that teemed with a dozen or more fish,
many of them a kilo or more in weight. The men stepped back to avoid
the surging water, then scrambled to collect the flopping creatures
from the ice.

As they gathered fish,
Browning wasted no time in gutting and filleting one of the larger
ones and slicing the filets into thumb-sized chunks.

“Who likes sashimi?”

“I’ll have some,”
Rhee called out.

“Me, too,” Burt
added.

Linder lined up behind
them and Browning carved up two more fish and passed the chunks
around until each of the men had eaten his fill.

“We’ll cook the
rest tonight and save some for breakfast,” Browning informed them.
“Looks like there will be more where this came from, so there’s
no sense in holding back. Damned good thing, too, unless we run
across another trapped deer.”

* * *

For the next several
days the men had all the fish they could eat, raw, steamed, and
grilled. Scotty also brought down a snowshoe hare at dusk one day
with a tossed stick and made a simple stew from the meat and some
roots he dug out from under the snow. But the men could not afford to
stay in one place long enough for trapping, and did not have weapons
for bringing down the occasional deer or wapiti that might cross
their path.

The night they dined on
rabbit stew, the men lingered around the cooking fire to talk about
their plans upon reaching civilization.

Sam Burt, whose
physical stamina and mental outlook seemed to rally after several
days on ample rations of fatty fish, appeared eager to join the
discussion despite having declined to speak about his goals the night
before Yost’s death.