Mike Mullin - Ashen Winter

“Shh. Listen.”

I stood still, suppressing my shivering for a moment. I heard the susurration of rushing water very faintly in the distance.

“Which way is it coming from?” Darla whispered.

I pointed.

“Yeah, that’s about what I thought, too. We can use the noise to figure out what direction we’re going.”

“Lead on.”

Darla pushed her way out of the foxhole into the deep snow. I followed, watching the snow, trying to place my feet in her footsteps. After a few minutes of that, I looked up and felt a surge of panic when I couldn’t see her.

Our chances were bad enough together. If we got separated, I didn’t see how we’d survive. Well, Darla might, she knew how to make a fire. I fought down my fear-all I had to do was follow her trail.

I ran for twenty or twenty-five feet, high-stepping through the snow. I almost bowled into Darla’s back. She was trudging along, oblivious to my panic.

Another half hour or so brought us to a break in the trees. A steep slope led down to the frozen river. I heard the roller dam faintly to my right. I could see a little farther here without the trees overhead, but the other side of the river was completely shrouded in darkness.

Darla got down to the river by sitting down and sliding on her butt. I waited a moment for her to move out of the way, then slid to join her.

Walking across the Mississippi felt like exploring an alien planet. The darkness hid everything but the tiny circles of ice on which we planted our feet. Our boots made weird squeaks and crunching sounds. I feared we might walk through this dark limbo forever, slowing gradually until we froze in place, statues lost from their museum, admired by no one.

I saw Darla’s shoulders trembling and said, “Let’s pick up the pace.”

“Yeah. C-c-christ, I’m cold.”

“And hungry,” I added.

“Thirsty, too. I’d even eat some s-s-snow, but that’d just make me c-c-colder.”

We started jogging across the ice. Darla fell twice. Both times she took my hand, levered herself up, and kept going without comment. Wiping out had to hurt, but she ignored the pain, determined to keep us moving forward.

It seemed like it was taking way too long to cross the river. I mean, yeah, the Mississippi is huge, but we’d been jogging twenty or thirty minutes.

“How much farther?” I asked.

“How should I know? Keep moving.” Her voice was huffy from exertion-or annoyance.

Not five minutes later we finally reached the bank.

“Head downstream following the bank?” Darla said. “That’ll take us farther away from the barge.”

“Yeah.”

We jogged south, away from the lock and barges, skirting around big snowdrifts. After a while, the bank started to curve to the right. As we followed it, I noticed the trees were bigger here-their branches hung far out over the river ice. When I caught a glimpse of a tree to our left, I figured out where we were: traveling into an inlet, a frozen tributary of the Mississippi.

Darla stopped. “Let’s make a camp here. That bend should shield us from anyone at the lock.”

“Okay. So how are we going to build a fire?”

“Rubbing sticks together.”

My chest sank. “Um, that’s going to take for-freaking-ever.”

“Not the way we’re going to do it.” Darla explained what she wanted me to do.

I had to do most of the work. Darla was still shivering badly and spent a lot of time running in place or slapping her legs, trying to stay warm. I split a small cottonwood log twice, forming a roughly flat plank that Darla called a fireboard. Another piece of the log became a small rounded grip-a thunderhead, again according to Darla. I whittled an eight-sided spindle out of a cottonwood branch. A long, curved oak branch became a bow, and one of my bootlaces served as a bowstring. I discovered that the inner bark of cottonwood trees would shred nicely to form a fine, dry firestarter or bird’s nest. It took more than an hour to gather and make everything we needed.

Then we put it together and tested it. I wrapped the bowstring around the spindle, which I placed vertically between the fireboard and thunderhead. The idea was that I’d use one hand to hold the thunderhead in place and the other to pump the bow back and forth, to rotate the spindle. In turn, that’d generate friction between the spindle and fireboard and, hopefully, create a spark.

Of course it didn’t work. The bootlace slipped on the spindle, and we had to tighten it. Then the spindle kept flying off the fireboard, and we had to cut a deeper dimple to keep the spindle in place.

While we worked on fixing our makeshift fire-by-friction set, I asked Darla where she’d learned how to build it.

“From Max’s Boy Scout Handbook ,” she replied.

“I thought he quit scouts after a month?”

She shrugged. “I didn’t know that. I just thought the book looked interesting. And it was.”

Finally we got it all working. I sawed back and forth on the bow, holding the thunderhead with my other hand, trying to keep even pressure on it. Both ends of the spindle started smoking in surprisingly little time, just a minute or two. About thirty seconds after the spindle started smoking, a spark fell out of the thunderhead onto my glove. I froze, trying to avoid any sudden move that might extinguish the spark, not caring if it burned my hand.

It winked out.

“Well, at least we know it works,” Darla said. “The spark is supposed to come from the fireboard, not the thunderhead. I wonder what we’re doing wrong?”

We set it up again. I was surprised by the spindle-it was noticeably shorter. Deep black holes had been drilled in both the fireboard and thunderhead. Darla put one hand over mine on the thunderhead and grabbed the other end of the bow. Working together we could pump the bow much faster and more smoothly. Less than 30 seconds had passed before smoke was pouring from both ends of the spindle.

I heard a cracking noise and the thunderhead broke. The end of the spindle hit my palm, twisting the nylon and burning my hand through my glove. I snatched my hand back and the spindle went flying. It had drilled clear through both the thunderhead and fireboard.

I shook my hand and looked down. The hole in the bottom of the fireboard was nearly filled by a huge spark glowing atop the ash.

“Now I know what we were doing wrong,” Darla said. “We were supposed to put a notch in the fireboard to let out the spark. Probably supposed to lubricate the thunderhead somehow, too.”

I gently lifted the fireboard. There were bits of snow and ice around the spark on the floor of our foxhole. If any of those melted, our spark would be extinguished. I picked up my knife and slid the blade under the spark.

Slowly, very slowly, I lifted the spark while groping around for the bird’s nest. Darla placed it in my hand. I gently slid the spark off my knife and into the nest, cupped in my left palm.

The spark was growing, igniting some of the black dust I’d scooped up along with it. I scooped some more of the dust from the fireboard with the blade of my knife and gently fed it to the spark. It grew larger still, a glowing coal nestled in the shredded bark on my palm.

I whispered to my spark, letting my breath coax it, “Burn. Burn, damn it, burn.” And with a pop and whoosh, it obeyed. The bird’s nest flared to life. I set it down slowly, not caring if it singed my fingers. We had made fire-created life!

We fed the fire together, starting with slivers of leftover wood and quickly moving on to twigs and branches. Darla’s hands shook so badly that the twigs she dropped occasionally missed the fire altogether. I shuddered to think what might’ve happened if the fire-by-friction set hadn’t worked.