Chuck Logan - Absolute Zero

“Sore subject. I married my high school girlfriend. It didn’t survive my residency at Mayo. Now I can’t afford it,” quipped Allen. “Hell, I’m still paying off med school and the Crash of ’87. Certainly can’t afford it doing hernias and hemorrhoids for a freaking HMO.”

Allen took his frustration out on the lake and they fell into a brooding physical rhythm. The paddles rose and fell, filling time. Broker figured it had to be worse for Allen. His friend was slowly dying in a makeshift winter camp while he moved under muscle power at the same pace as French and Ojibwa fur traders three hundred years ago.

At dusk they came ashore and made camp, using the upturned canoe as a shelter. They brewed cocoa over a small fire, ate their energy bars, and, huddled back-to-back in their sleeping bags, fell into an exhausted sleep.

“Jesus, what’s. .?” Allen jerked upright and banged his head on the canoe.

“Wolves.” Broker, thrilling to the howls reverberating through the dark trees, pictured raw meat in the snow. He’d been awake for an hour, warming his hands over a low fire, listening; ten or twelve animals, more than a mile and a lake away.

“They don’t attack people, right?” Allen asked.

“Not here, not yet. In India they snatch infants and eat them. Population pressure probably.”

“We don’t have a gun,” Allen said.

Broker allowed a smile. It was the appropriate response. “C’mon. Let’s go,” he said.

The wolves ended their serenade as the dark leaked away, and by the light of a fuzzy dawn Broker hoped he didn’t look as numb with cold as Allen.

They ate a fast breakfast of instant coffee, chocolate, and Pemmican bars as their breath came in dense white jets. It was getting colder and they stamped their feet to get their circulation going. In the canoe, they fell into the same dogged rhythm, just their muscles yanking at the time and distance. Allen was not talkative today and put all his effort into the paddle.

They lasted two hours and had to beach, take a pee, and stomp around to restore the circulation in their hands and feet. The temperature hovered at freezing, and frostbite whiskered the air. They climbed back in the boat.

Lift, reach, dig, pull, recover.

Broker was watching hypnotic whirlpools of dark water spin away from his paddle when the first snowflake wobbled down almost big as a quarter. Broker glanced up hopefully, grabbing at an old Indian saying: Little snow, big snow; big snow, little snow.

“Another hour,” he shouted as the flakes plummeted here and there like crumbs from a huge white weight suspended above them. Lift the paddle, dig the water, lift the paddle. A tent peg of pain pounded between his shoulder blades each time he raised his arms and the rowing chant in the back of his mind mocked him.

You just never know never know never know. .

. . When the joke will be on you.

Numb with the pain of the paddle, he didn’t notice at first. Then, faintly, he smelled the harsh flavor of wood smoke and raised his head and sniffed.

Definitely wood smoke.

He took the fumes like a dry-rope bit between his teeth and his paddle foamed the water and they rounded a point and saw a gay yellow tent pitched next to a green canoe on a storybook island. A man and woman relaxed in front of a fire.

“Phone?” Broker screamed as he flailed his paddle toward the campsite.

“PHONE!”

The man rose in a defensive crouch, alarmed by the manic energy of the two hollow-eyed men paddling toward him and his companion.

Broker’s voice sobered him. “We left a critical injury back on Fraser. Do you have a cell phone? ” The bow of the canoe clunked onto the rock beach.

Galvanized, hearing Broker clearly, the man yelled, “Gotcha.” He dashed for his tent, emerged, ran to the shore, and handed over the button-studded black plastic wand.

The St. Louis County 911 operator switched the call through to the county deputy on duty in Ely and deputy sheriff Dave Iker picked up the phone. Broker recognized Iker’s voice. They exchanged quick greetings and then Broker described the situation. Iker dispatched his last cruiser not tied up in weather-related traffic accidents to meet Broker and Allen at Uncle Billie’s Lodge. Then he called the U.S. Forest Service seaplane base across town on Lake Shagawa.

Iker continued down his checklist. He alerted the northern team of the St. Louis County Rescue Squad, notified the state patrol, and requested the status of their helicopter. Then he called Ely Miner Hospital to put an ambulance on standby. The hospital dispatcher told him that all the medics were on the truck pileup out west on Highway 169. But the dispatcher would call Life Flight in Duluth and request a helicopter to fly to the hospital helipad. Ely Miner was a Band-Aid station that was not equipped to handle major emergency surgery on a critical patient.

When Iker left his office in the Ely courthouse only one Ely town cop remained in the building to cover the radios and Ely itself.

Outside, he saw low clouds skimming over the storefronts and spitting flurries, so he radioed for a weather update from the cops at the accident site to the west.

“We got us another October Surprise. It’s snowing like hell here, and Hibbing’s socked in,” came the reply. Hibbing was sixty miles south and west. “Two feet of snow predicted. Winds already gusting to forty mph. The state patrol is thinking about closing Highways Two and Seventy-one.”

“Sam, break out one medic and head back for Ely. We’re way understaffed here. There’s a critical stranded on Lake Fraser. I’m going in with the seaplane.”

“In this?”

“Affirmative. Call the hangar for details.” He keyed off the net and put his Ford Crown Vic in gear. Four minutes later he walked into the hangar at the seaplane base. Outside, a stubby red and white Dehaviland Beaver floatplane tossed on its pontoons at the dock. Inside, two pilots stood at the radio and the one with the mike in his hand said to Iker, “Where we’re at, Dave, is dispatch recommends no fly. I just talked to the state patrol. They’re not turning a prop in this. The Rescue Squad’s socked in and so is Life Flight out of St. Mary’s in Duluth. The National Weather Service just officially named it a blizzard and it’s going to clobber us in half an hour.”

“This isn’t a sprained ankle. We got a guy who’s going to die,” Iker said.

“That’s what I told them and it’s my call.” He depressed the send key on the mike. “I’m going up,” the pilot said to his dispatcher, clicked the mike twice, and turned to Iker. “Looks like just you and me. The paramedics are on that truck pileup.”

Iker nodded and said, “I got a cop and a medic on the way back in but we can’t wait.” They leaned over a map and Iker said, “One of the guys paddling out is a surgeon; we’ll zip him to the hospital just in case. I know the guide. He says the patient will be hard to find from the air with the snow. No tent. It’s not a normal campsite. They’re hunkered back in a rock hidey-hole on a low bluff. He says he can steer us in.”

“Where are they now?” the pilot asked. His eyes darted out the windows where the ground crew was readying the Beaver.

“Paddling in on Lake One. They should be at Billie Broker’s Lodge in about ten minutes.”

“Okay,” the pilot said. He was clear-eyed, clean-shaven, and neat in his Smokey Bear-green jacket, sweater, and trousers. He’d flown Black Hawk helicopters into Iraq and danced with blizzards working the Alaskan bush. He’d bailed out of flying commercial passenger flights because they were too boring.

“We got one shot,” he said. “We drop in on Lake One, pick your guy up, then fly to Fraser and find the stranded party.” He pulled on a jacket and moved through the hangar toward the pier. Outside, he shouted over the rising wind. “The tricky part is meeting this big bastard storm on the way back.”