One thing I’ll say: I had no desire to go out there. Only an idiot would do that.
Sure, I wasn’t hinting as much to Benedict, but odds are they’re already frozen dead or at the bottom of one of those crevasses in the ground by the lake, or worse. It’s been a long winter, and some of the animals out there have an awful lot of teeth.
I even let Clifford know over the CB radio and he said not his problem, not sticking his head outside in this weather. No surprise there, although I figured he wouldn’t mind finding the girl, if not the kid. I tried my darndest to drag my feet. I rummaged around for my warmest socks and also those fancy little silk liners that old Magnus always told me to put on first, even if they’d been darned so many times that it was only by the grace of God they didn’t fall apart. Course, we’d still end up frozen worse than Eskimos.
Benedict was waiting on me, leaning on the doorframe. He looked like he’d aged ten years in a split second. Knowing they were out there had to be the worst thing he could imagine, and he was one to know. Men caught in spring runoff, crushed flat by the tree they were chopping, found stiff like twigs in ditches—he’d seen more’n his fair share when he was little and the sawmill was still there. A kid and a pretty woman lost in a blizzard, though? Best as I can recollect, no such thing’s happened before. And Benedict knew just why. ’Cause there’s no sense in that, and everyone here’s got some sense to them, because each thing you do costs you and Mother Nature never goes easy on you. That’s the deal you get. You want to live here? Clean air, big game, plenty of fish? Full freedom, nobody to answer to, maybe not even a soul in sight for weeks on end? You can live here on your own, all on your own.
The day you find yourself face-to-face with a grizzly or your rig won’t start when you’re miles from your place, though, you got to accept that nobody’s there to help you, nobody but yourself. That’s not something that damn girl can get in her head.
I finally found those socks. I grabbed two dozen cartridges for the rifle. Benedict had his with him, too, and I was going to open the door when I remembered Clifford’s hooch. Not a bad thing to bring on such a harebrained expedition, that. This way I won’t even feel the worst of this mess.