11

When Tessa was drawn out of her tent the next morning by the sound of voices and the smell of brewing coffee, the sky was a used-dishwater hue, a flat, featureless gray that allowed little sunlight to penetrate it. Jessie was poking at the coals of the night’s fire with a stick and adding wood. She glanced up at Tessa. “Soon as you get some coffee in you, you’d better get the tents down and packed, Tess. We gotta get rollin’.”

“Will do, Jessie.” Tessa took her mess cup from her pocket and moved a few steps to join R. E., Kalluk, and the brothers. They were all staring up at the sky as if something very important had been written there by a giant hand. Tessa followed the men’s eyes with her own. What she’d thought was a stagnant, motionless mass of low-hanging, dirty-gray clouds wasn’t that at all. The sky was churning, roiling like a boiling cauldron, huge shrouds of gray being transformed into smaller, faster-moving vaporous bodies. “That’s what the sky looks like just before a tornado,” she said.

“Does Alaska get tornados?” R. E. asked.

“I’ve never seen one,” Kalluk said. “Albin? Randall?”

“One maybe in our lives,” Randall said. His brother nodded toward the sky. “Ain’t no tornado.”

Jessie had approached the group, her cup of coffee in hand. “No, it isn’t,” she said. “Coffee’s ready, and the meals are on the coals. If we’re going to go this morning, let’s get to it. I say we stick close to the edge of the forest until this thing is over.”

The brothers nodded.

“Yeah,” Kalluk agreed. “Good point.”

Breakfast was a rapid meal with none of the talk and banter that usually signaled the start of a day. The brothers were pulling the trailers and were checking the loads, making certain that everything was secure. Jessie and Tessa scraped snow over the coals of the fire and then stepped back from the wet steam that was produced.

The brothers set out first, as usual. Kalluk followed a short distance behind them, with Jessie behind him, and Tessa and R. E. behind Jessie by several feet. Albin and Randall stopped after they’d gone twenty-five yards and waved Kalluk to them. He jogged out. The men talked for a brief moment, all apparently looking at something in the snow, and then Kalluk jogged back.

“Wolf tracks,” he said. “Maybe five or six of them. Kinda strange they’d come out in the open so close to us and our fire.”

“Fuzz was skittish last night,” Tessa said. “Maybe he heard or smelled them.”

“Speaking of Fuzz,” Kalluk said but didn’t finish the sentence. Instead he tugged off a glove and raised his fingers to his mouth. The keening shriek seemed piercing enough to carry to California.

“Look,” R. E. said as he pointed to the tree line. Fuzz was coming toward them, but he seemed like a different animal. He carried his body a full three inches lower than he normally did, and his tongue was like a pink flag at his mouth. Even at that distance it was easy to see that the wolf-dog’s eyes were open much wider than usual. His grace of movement was altered; he moved jerkily, head darting from side to side, his gait stiff, his hackles raised the length of his back.

“Is he afraid of the wolves?” R. E. asked.

“No,” Jessie said. “I doubt that he and the wolves would fight—Fuzz is bigger and stronger than most of the alpha males. He’s feeling the storm, and he’s scared. I’ve known him for most of his life, and I’ve never seen him slink like that before.”

“Me neither,” Kalluk grunted. He turned abruptly from Fuzz’s approach. “Come on, let’s get in gear.” He waved to the brothers, and the trek began again. Tessa and R. E. were quiet as they constantly checked the sky and wondered what the next hour would bring.

“What do you think, Tess?” It wasn’t necessary for R. E. to name what he was referring to.

“I don’t think we should have left camp—we should have dug in and gotten ready. I don’t know—maybe it’s the way the sky looks, or Fuzz’s fear, but I’m just plain scared now.”

“Me too,” R. E. said. “I keep telling myself that Kalluk and the brothers are old hands at this stuff, and that they know what they’re doing. But, look at that sky—and we’re losing light already, and it isn’t even midday yet.”

“There’s no wind at all, though. Maybe the storm is kind of localized somewhere else. That could be, right?”

R. E. chuckled quietly. “You sound like you’re asking me if the tooth fairy is real, and hoping I’ll say yes.”

“Mmmm. That’s not too far off, I guess.” Tessa took a few more steps before she turned away from R. E. and spat. The saliva wasn’t more than a couple of inches from her mouth before it froze with a tiny snap. R. E. glanced at her quickly and then looked away, as if he’d caught her belching loudly at a funeral service.

“It’s a test Jessie showed me,” she explained. “A way to see how cold it is.”

“Oh. How cold is it?”

“Too cold.”

Tessa looked ahead beyond Jessie, where Kalluk walked, Fuzz at his heel. He must know what he’s doing. Albin and Randall wanted to go on too. She watched Kalluk as he moved ahead at his smooth, regular pace. Then suddenly he stopped short, as if he’d heard his name, signaled a stop, and motioned the brothers back.

“’Bout time,” Jessie said.

The group gathered around Kalluk. “We can’t risk this any longer. I’ve never seen a sky like this. We gotta get ready for the storm.”

All eyes moved to the brothers.

“Good,” Albin said. Randall nodded.

Jessie pointed to the woods. “Our best bet is to get some cover between us and the weather. Let’s do it.”

Randall touched her arm. “Cave better, Jessie.” He pointed back toward the path they’d covered. “We saw there by frozen stream.”

“Go,” Kalluk said.

“But,” R. E. questioned, “there are bears around here, aren’t there? Suppose there’s one hibernating in there.”

Albin caught R. E.’s glance and tapped the lump in his coat just above his belt line with the fingertips of his right hand.

“Oh,” R. E. said.

This time they clustered behind the brothers rather than stringing out in their usual travel formation. To Tessa and R. E. the terrain was exactly the same in all directions, except for the periphery of the forest on one side and the occasional low hill.

It took them over an hour to backtrack, taking them past their last night’s camp a mile or so. Tessa didn’t realize that there was a cave until she was standing directly in front of it, watching Randall scooping and kicking away a drift of snow that partially covered its mouth.

The mouth was about four feet high and roughly oval in shape. The cave was pitch black, but Kalluk’s six-cell Maglite pierced the darkness. The interior rose sharply immediately inside the mouth to a jagged ceiling perhaps eight feet from the floor. Jessie stepped next to Kalluk and took a disposable lighter from her pocket. She scratched it to a flame, and the orangish red tongue bent toward the rear of the cave. “Good,” she said. “We got lucky. There’s some draw. We’ll be able to keep a fire going.”

Kalluk shone his light deeper into the cave. The room they were in extended back about twenty feet, with the ceiling angling downward until, at the very rear, the opening was about a foot and a half. Tessa took a tentative step and felt her boot crunch on something. Kalluk swung his light to her feet. The long-dead remains of a fire—gray ash and small, mostly consumed pieces of wood—evidenced the fact that this party wasn’t the cave’s first human inhabitants.

“First thing we need to do is gather up all the wood we can find and get it in here,” Kalluk said. His voice sounded deeper—even more Johnny Cash-ish because of the acoustics of the stone walls and ceiling. “There should be plenty—this is a fairly wide stream, and the spring runoff and flooding would have deposited good firewood at the banks and snagged it on rocks.”

“Let’s stay in couples, people,” Jessie said. “We don’t know when this thing is going to hit. How about Tess going with Albin, R. E. with Randall, and Kalluk and I will pair up. Let’s not wander too far from the cave. We’ll get wood and then drag the trailers in here and see what we can do about setting up. We could be here a couple of days.”

“What about safety lines?” Kalluk asked.

“Not for now, I don’t think. As long as we keep the mouth of the cave in sight, we’ll be OK. Anchoring us to something here would slow us down. Just don’t wander too far.”

Tessa followed Albin out of the cave, crouching at the low mouth, duck-walking through, and then standing. By contrast with the inky blackness inside, the slug-gray overcast seemed almost cheerful. The sky, if anything, was actually darker, and seething maniacally. The wind remained perfectly still. It was a dead calm, a foreboding sort of breathless quiet.

“Spooky,” she said. Albin didn’t answer.

Jessie had been correct about the wood. Albin headed directly toward a series of several boulders, mounded over with snow. He began sweeping at the base of the rocks, revealing broken branches and some larger sections of tree trunks. Tessa rushed to help, shoving snow with her arms. “No,” Albin said. She looked at him. “Don’t work fast. Cold. Move slow.” After a second, he added, “Tessa.”

First time he’s called me by name. Tessa reflected for a moment. Actually, I think this is the first time he’s spoken directly to me. I’m glad he reminded me, though—after a life of being a nonsmoker, I don’t need to mess up my lungs. She scraped at the snow more slowly, uncovered a long branch, and pulled it free. She set it aside and dug for more wood. The pile at Tessa’s side grew rapidly as she uncovered limbs and branches that’d snagged against and between the boulders. She was crouching to wrap her arms around the heap when Kalluk’s strident whistle slashed the silence. She stood back up. Fuzz broke from the tree line at a full, hard run, seeming to course over the snow, head low, body extended. At the same moment Tessa saw the wolf-dog, the cacophonous roar of a hundred out-of-control freight trains shattered the air and tore open the dull gray of the sky. It couldn’t have logically been called a snowfall; instead it was an impenetrable, writhing, swirling wall of white—and it was moving faster than Fuzz was running. He seemed to know that, and it made his flight somehow pathetic, a tragic drama that could not possibly end well.

Tessa watched, horror struck, her precious wood forgotten, as the white mass touched Fuzz and flung his back end and rear legs up and forward and slammed him, inverted, onto his back twenty feet ahead. He scrambled to get up, all of his paws seeking purchase. He was close enough now to Tessa and Albin that the red-pink of his tongue and the fear in his eyes showed clearly. Then the storm swallowed him, sweeping over where he’d fallen, enveloping him as if he were a speck of dust in a hurricane.

Tessa wasn’t certain that she was screaming. Her throat felt the sensation of a scream, but there was no way any human sound could penetrate the screech of the wind. She’d taken a step toward where she’d last seen Fuzz when Albin tackled her, ramming her down into the snow and pinning her body to the ground with his own weight, his hooded head and shaggy hair next to her face. “Stay!” he hollered into her ear. “Can’t run now. We stay, then we run.”

The streambed was an indentation from the flatland around it, its bottom perhaps three feet below level, cutting a twisting course over years of spring runoff and summer rainstorms. In another fifty years it might be ten or even twenty feet deep, or it could simply stay as it was now if the rushing waters were diverted by a quirk of nature in another direction. This day it was a lifesaver. The leading edge of the blizzard winds raked across the plain and into the forest, uprooting trees, shearing others, bludgeoning standing trees with those wrenched from the frozen ground.

The earth trembled under the power of the storm. Albin’s weight pressed Tessa’s body against the snow and rocks of the streambed. The din was beyond human comprehension—the roar of the wrath of nature unleashed, proving how very feeble man and his inventions really were.

Even with her layered clothing and with Albin’s mass on top of her, the minus fifty degree temperature began to tease Tessa’s mind, to lead her to the darkness. Her thoughts became disjointed, her perceptions askew. Strangely, she wasn’t shivering although she was profoundly chilled. It’s getting warmer—it really is. And I’m so tired. Funny—it’s too early in the day to be so tired. We haven’t gone far. The storm is almost over. I can barely hear it now. A warm front must be following it, ’cause I’m so much warmer. This is like sliding down a long, smooth, velvet slope and into a big four-poster bed piled with quilts and comforters and blankets.

“Time for cave.” The words came from a distance, and Tessa couldn’t place the voice. It was somehow familiar, but no face came to mind.

“Tessa. Now.”

Tessa realized that she was being shaken by the shoulders, and the rest of reality filtered painfully back. The storm howled on, but the voice of its roar was no longer steady; it was higher pitched with peaks of sound followed by equally strident valleys.

“You hold my coat with two hands and don’t let go.” Albin’s face was inches from hers, and she knew there must be some warmth in his breath, but she could feel none. “My face is numb,” she mumbled through lips that wouldn’t move. Albin either didn’t hear her or wasn’t interested in the numbness of her face at the moment. “You can hold,” he said. “I carry some wood. You hold. Don’t let go.” The wind screamed. An image of Fuzz being catapulted through the air by the storm flickered in Tessa’s mind. She swallowed and nodded.

Albin released Tessa’s shoulders and held a gloved finger in front of her face. “Minute,” he said and turned away. He was lost to her in a blinding whirlpool of snow before he’d taken a second step. She wobbled on her benumbed feet as the wind buffeted her, forcing her one way and then immediately another. She held her right arm out straight ahead of her, squinting at it. She couldn’t see beyond her elbow. That frightened her more than anything else about the storm had. A gust from behind her shoved her ahead a few stumbling, disoriented steps. She went down on one knee, started to rise, and was slammed back down by another blast of wind. She had no idea what distance she’d lurched from where Albin had left her. Feet? Yards? Even if I scream he won’t be able to hear me. What if . . .

Tessa had never been so glad to feel the touch of another human being as she was at the insistent nudge of Albin’s hand at her shoulder. He stepped in front of her, his arms loaded with firewood that reached to his nose. Tessa locked her hands into the shaggy elk hide his coat was fashioned from. Even with next to no sensation in her hands or fingers, this was a grip she knew she’d never loosen until she was safe or there was no more life in her. As she lumbered after Albin, her clenched hands occasionally bumped against his back. Although his coat was thick and his clothing underneath layered, it felt as if she had come in contact with a solid wall; there was no more slack in his muscles than there was in a piece of marble. He’ll get me through, she thought. All I need to do is follow him.

The trek took either fifteen minutes or several eternities. Tessa wasn’t sure which. How Albin could see where he was going, Tessa had no idea; she’d long since closed her eyes and shambled after the man she was connected to by her hands, as trusting of him as a newborn infant clutching her mother.

When Albin stopped and then crouched, Tessa thought he had fallen. She bent over him as he turned his face back to her and hollered over the wind, “Cave.” Her hands refused to release Albin’s coat, and he dragged her inside, loaded down with more wood than a single man should have to carry under such conditions.

At first the fire in the cave appeared to Tessa as a shimmering orange glow. Then, as R. E. was prying her fingers away from the fur of Albin’s coat, images became more distinct. Jessie sat on one of the trailers, guiding MREs into the fire with a stick. Kalluk stood next to her. The coffeepot was balanced on three rocks arranged as a triangle to the side of the fire, its bottom a few inches above the flames. Her fingers suddenly radiated pain, the muscles screaming at her as she released the death-grip clutch she’d been demanding from them.

“You’re OK now,” Jessie murmured, embracing her. “We’re all here and we’re all safe, and that’s what counts. Let’s get you over to the fire and thaw you out.”

Albin stomped snow from his boots on the stone floor of the cave, dumped his load of wood, and faced the fire for a few moments. Then he strode over to where Randall was hunkered down.

Tessa’s teeth were beginning to chatter, and her body shook with uncontrollable shivering. “Albin,” she called through cold-stiffened lips, “thanks. Thank you.”

Albin turned to her and nodded.

Bringing Tessa’s body back to a near-normal temperature was a painful process. As the fire warmed her, nerves cried out as sensation returned. Her feet alternated between what felt like scalding heat, numbness, and a return to their frigid state. She sat on the log close to the fire, huddled under blankets. She shook half the coffee out of the mug R. E. handed to her; the refills became small splashes that would stay within the mug. Jessie stood behind Tess, working her shoulders and back muscles, her thumbs pressing and kneading. “R. E. wanted to go out after you,” Jessie said. “Kalluk and I had to hold him back. We knew that if anyone could get you to the cave, it was Albin. We—Kalluk and me—were just getting back with wood. We managed to get one of the trailers inside, but the other took off like a big, tall bird in that first blast of wind. We lost some stuff we need.”

“How bad off are we?” Tessa asked.

Jessie waited for a moment before answering. “We can make it through the storm. I’m pretty sure of that, unless it goes on for longer than any storm I’ve ever experienced. After that, the brothers can feed us with game. We’ve got the tents at least, but the medical kit, most of the MREs, canned goods, hand tools—the hand axes and the long one—are gone.”

Tessa slurped coffee and swallowed, waiting for Jessie to continue. When Jessie didn’t speak, Tessa did. “Can we go on?”

Jessie shook her head sadly. “I don’t think so. We’ve lost too many essentials. It’d be too dangerous. I’ll talk to Kalluk, but I don’t think . . .”

Kalluk approached from behind Jessie. “We might just as well talk now, Jessie,” he said. “Randall, Albin, c’mon over here for a minute, will you?” The brothers walked over together and stood facing Kalluk. R. E. sat next to Tessa on the log. Jessie remained standing, still massaging Tessa’s back. Kalluk stepped in front of the fire.

He sighed before he spoke. “We—I—lost a sled. I lost a trailer. I lost Fuzz. Some very important things were on the trailer that blew away today. I don’t see any options or alternatives, folks. We need to start back to the snowmobiles as soon as the storm lets up.” Kalluk looked directly at Tessa. “I’m sorry, Tessa and R. E. I know this trip was important to you.” He shifted his gaze to the brothers. “I’ll see that you boys are paid for the entire trip. I know that you two would go on, and that you’d make it to the end—if you were alone. That’s not the case.”

Neither brother spoke.

“Comments, anyone?” Kalluk asked.

“It’s the only decision we could make, Kalluk,” Jessie said. “We couldn’t—”

The branches and limbs that’d been piled in front of the opening at the front of the cave exploded inward, and snow, ice, and wood erupted as if struck by a cannonball.

Fuzz, snow covered, tongue hanging from the side of his mouth, skidded to a stop in front of Kalluk. Kalluk embraced the wolf-dog as he would a long-lost best friend.

Tessa was the first one to begin clapping, even though she could barely feel her hands. R. E. and Jessie joined in, and after a moment, so did Randall and Albin. Now, at least they were all together. No lives had been lost.

Thank you, Lord.