SHE AND LUCAS ARE AT THE END of the first lake when they hear the howling behind them again. There’s a little rise of land that separates the two lakes, and they’re about at the summit of it when the noise tumbles down from high atop the ridge, blows across the lake, and assaults them with that eerie, inhuman, predatory laughter.
Lucas stops and turns back. Squints up at the ridgeline.
“They found our stuff,” he says. “They’re coming down off the ridge.”
Dawn follows his gaze, but she can’t see anything but snow up there. Regardless, if Lucas is right it means the boys are less than two hours’ hike behind them. It means there’s no time to stop and consider which Instagram filter would look best with this lake.
“Come on,” Lucas says, turning to follow the trail over the rise and down toward the second lake. Dawn studies the ridgeline a moment longer. Feels her fear start to grow into panic as she thinks about what’s up there.
Who’s up there.
She pushes the panic down as best as she can. Turns to follow Lucas again.
The next few hours are a slog, exhausting and terrifying in equal measure. Dawn and Lucas find their way down to the second lake, the lake which they camped by on the second night of the trip. They troop past the campsite, empty and abandoned now, and Dawn sees the place where she set up her tarp, where she and Lucas argued over whether the mountain they were going to climb should be called Fart Mountain or the Raven’s Claw.
Dawn sees the place where Lucas marched off to find firewood, after he’d informed her that Warden and Amber were hooking up.
And she sees the place where she lay under her tarp all night, thinking about how Warden had probably saved her life, and hoping what Lucas said wasn’t true, that Warden wasn’t sleeping with Amber after all.
Hoping that Warden might want to hook up with her.
She hurries past the campsite and doesn’t look back.
The second lake is smaller than the first, with fewer avalanche paths to cross. They make it to the other side in decent time and find where the lake drains into a little river that they have to follow farther down, another half mile or so, before they reach the steep little valley that leads up to the second ridge.
They stop at the river and each eat a hydration candy.
“We have to start rationing,” Lucas says. He says it like Dawn’s been pigging out on their meager supplies, like it was her idea to throw the backpacker meals away.
(Like he actually brought any food on this misadventure.)
“We have a long way to go yet,” Lucas says.
The valley up to the second ridge is steeper than Dawn remembers. And the trail is much slipperier now that it’s covered in snow.
They don’t have their packs, so they’re lighter and can move around more easily, but still. It’s a long, grueling climb, and once or twice Dawn nearly loses her footing and slides down the hillside, almost erasing an hour of work.
She catches herself just in time.
She pulls her way up the mountain until she’s sweating through her undershirt and her clothes and her hands and her face are covered in mud. Until she can barely feel her fingers, which are bloody and raw and cold.
Until she emerges at the top of the valley trail into the alpine again, and the second ridge is just ahead of her and Lucas is behind her, still climbing, panting and sweating and trying to keep up, clutching at the tear in his jacket, at the wound he still won’t show her underneath.
He’s hurting, Dawn can tell. Hurting bad.
Maybe you should find somewhere to hide, Dawn wants to tell him. But she doesn’t.
She’s afraid if he lies down to rest he might not stand up again.