Blake Crouch - Snowbound

“Weird, how quiet it is.”

“I’m cold,” Devlin said.

“You’ve got gloves in the pocket of your fleece. Put them on, baby girl.”

Will sat down in the sand, pulled a folded sheet of paper out of his back pocket—a map he’d printed off from TopoZone.com.

“All right, look here.” Kalyn and Devlin flanked him, peering over his shoulder. “Obviously, the plane Kalyn saw yesterday didn’t land on this lake. Now the interior lake is the only other body of water in the Wolverines large enough to accommodate a floatplane.”

“You think that’s where that plane landed, Dad?”

“I don’t know. Part of me thinks there’s no one here but us and that we’re wasting time.”

“What was the alternative?” Kalyn asked. “Walk up to the Alaskan mob, ask them who they’re delivering kidnapped women to? We’d be buried in the tundra, pushing up glacier lilies.”

Will touched a point on the map. “We’re here.” He traced his finger over the paper. “The inner lake is here. That’s about six miles away.”

“Here’s what I propose,” Kalyn said.

“What?”

“We’ve got a few hours of light left. Let’s see how much ground we can cover. We’ll find a safe place to camp, close to the inner lake, so we can explore from there without having to drag these monster packs around with us.”

“Okay. I like that.”

. . .

There was no trail marked on Will’s map of the Wolverine Hills, but a stream connected the inner and outer lakes, and this is what they followed, progressing slowly for the first hour, taking their time navigating the mossy bank where they could, bushwhacking through underbrush where they couldn’t, the air so clean, redolent of white spruce.

They stopped midafternoon at the base of a waterfall, a set of smaller cascades above it. Will searched his pack and found the Ziploc bags containing nuts and dried fruit that Buck had packed for them. While he distributed the snacks and water bottles, Kalyn studied the map, tracing their path from the outer lake up into the hills.

“How far have we come?” Devlin asked.

“That’s what I’m trying to figure out here.” She finally located the tight contour lines that crossed the blue line on the map, denoting the series of waterfalls.

“Looks like we’ve covered about . . . three miles.”

“Look!” Devlin whispered.

A pair of caribou were working their way carefully above the lower waterfall, stopping every few feet to look and listen.

They pushed on, the stream narrowing, becoming steeper, rockier, with fewer stretches of flat water and more cascades.

Devlin was leading the way, and she stopped suddenly, said, “Listen.”

Will heard only the babbling of the stream. “Devi, I don’t . . .” No, there it was—a man-made sound, possibly two of them, in the middle of nowhere, engines barely audible over the rushing water.

“That what I think it is?” Kalyn asked.

The sound of the planes grew louder. They couldn’t see them through the overstory of spruce trees, but they seemed to fly right over them before fading away, leaving only the whisper of the stream.

“No way one of those could be Buck, right?” Will said.

“I don’t think so.”

Devlin said, “Maybe one of them is the plane you saw yesterday, Kalyn.”

“No way to know, baby.”

It was getting colder and darker, the mist that landed and clung to Will’s black fleece jacket freezing into flecks of ice.

“We should probably start looking for a campsite,” he said.

It was another hour before they crossed a piece of ground level enough to pitch a tent on. They’d climbed more than a thousand feet from the outer lake, and the character of the forest had changed—the spruce trees more withered-looking, more space between them, the underbrush a violent red.

“Let’s camp here for the night,” Will said. “Pretty little meadow, close to the stream.”

They found their sleeping quarters in Devlin’s pack—a roomy four-person, four-season domed tent. Will hadn’t set one up in years; Kalyn never had. It took them the better part of thirty minutes to assemble the poles and finally run them through the corresponding sleeves, another fifteen to stake out the guylines and get the rain fly fitted. When the tent was finally erected, they tossed their packs and sleeping bags inside and climbed in out of the deteriorating weather.

“It’ll be dark soon,” Will said. “Wish I could say that I’m a master outdoorsman and will have a fire ready momentarily, but that’s not gonna happen with everything soaked.”

“Just fire up the stove and you’ll be my hero,” Kalyn said.

While the women inflated the Therm-a-Rest pads and unrolled the sleeping bags, Will took the kitchen set outside. He vaguely remembered the bush pilot warning them against cooking near the tent, so he found a grouping of rocks fifty yards away.

Pockets of mist had begun to form around the edges of the meadow, drifting between the poplar and spruce, and he thought about the previous night with Kalyn as he scanned the directions for the camp stove. It hadn’t been as strange with her as he’d feared it might be. Maybe they’d take a walk later tonight, talk about what had happened—the kiss, the obvious attraction they both felt for each other.

By the time Devlin and Kalyn walked over, he had a pot of water coming to a boil over a blue propane-fueled flame, bubbles rising to the surface, steam swirling into the air.

They drank hot chocolate and ate surprisingly delicious rehydrated suppers, standing in the meadow as the snow began to fall—big downy flakes melting on the rocks and trees.

No one spoke, and it was cold, wet, and nearly dark as they stumbled back toward the tent, the ground now frosted, their breath clouds pluming in the dusk.

“This sucks,” Devlin said.

THIRTY-EIGHT

They sat bundled in sleeping bags, their faces illuminated by a flashlight Will had rigged to hang down from the tent ceiling. In the poor light, they could barely make out one another’s faces.

Kalyn held the map under the flashlight. “I think I see where we are,” she said. “The contour lines stay together for a while after the waterfall, and then they spread out again. If so, we’re only about a half mile or so from the inner lake.”

“We made good time today, didn’t we?” Devlin said.

“We sure did. And you did great.”

Will said, “Well, we should probably get your therapy over with. Being at this altitude has got to be stressing your lungs.” Devlin sighed, climbed out of her sleeping bag, and stretched out on her stomach across the Therm-a-Rest.

As Will moved into position, Kalyn said, “Can I do it?”

“Um, I guess, if that’s okay with Devi.”

“I wouldn’t mind,” Devlin said.

“Okay, show me how.”

Will unzipped the tent and poked his head outside. Snow danced through the beam of the flashlight, a few inches having already accumulated. He ducked into the tent and zipped the door back. Kalyn and Devlin were revving up for the final game in a three-set match of Rock Paper Scissors. Will would face the winner.

He said, “All right, Devi, all comes down to—”

The high register of a howl erupted in the dark—long, sad, and beautiful.

Devlin looked up from the game. “Was that a wolf, Dad?”

“I think so.”

“That’s the loneliest sound I’ve ever heard.”

Devlin lay in her sleeping bag, snuggled between Kalyn and her father. They’d turned the flashlight off, and it was black and soundless except for the pattering of snowflakes falling on the rain fly.

“Dad?” Devlin said.

“Yeah, honey.”

“Kalyn?”

“What?”