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CORAL WAS RELIEVED she was moving on and that Benjamin had agreed to go with her. Two would be safer than one, alone. She trotted upstairs the next morning, ready to make plans and get moving. “Where do you think we should go? West? Or is south better?”
“South is too mountainous, and it gets dryer and dryer the farther you go. We have to stay close to water. And our best chance of finding manufactured food is going to be in cities. Still, we need to not just skip into big cities without knowing what’s there.”
Like I did, you mean. “So where are we going? I don’t know Idaho well at all. I’ll rely on you for a direction, a destination.”
“The way I see it,” Benjamin said, scratching his beard as he thought, “there are two choices. We can go mostly north, toward Pocatello, cautiously check for canned food there, and go over and catch the Snake River from there. Or we can head west now and cut northwest to the Snake, avoiding the city. The problem with that is there are a couple lines of mountains to cross to the west. The weather could be a problem, and if it snows too much, and we’re up high, we could regret that decision.”
She nodded. “Will it be warmer as we go west?”
“When we get down into the Snake river valley, a little. But to get out of the cold, we might have to go to the ocean, then turn south hundreds of miles.”
“How long will that take, do you think, to walk all the way to the Pacific?” She hoped that wouldn’t be necessary.
“I don’t know. To Boise, it’s going to take us maybe three months, at a guess. To the ocean, six months or a year beyond that. That’s assuming we can find food.”
“Why so long? I can walk twenty miles a day.”
“You were doing that much getting here from the cave?”
She didn’t want to think about that, but she had to be realistic. She felt herself sag with disappointment. “No. More like five on a good day, taking time to fish. And if there’s no food, I don’t know if I could do even that much.”
“And we’ll have a big load to haul. Over rocky mountain ridges, sometimes. With snow on the ground to wade through on the flats. And, like you say, we’ll have to stop to fish and hunt, probably every day. It could be we don’t average more than two or three miles a day for a while.”
The optimism she’d felt upon waking was nearly drained away now. “If we can even find anything to hunt.”
“If we find plentiful food anywhere close to home, I’m going to turn around and come right back. You’d be wise to come with me. There’s shelter here, living space underground, and that’ll help us survive the cold. If not, we’ll have to move on every day and hope we can find enough food to keep on our feet.”
Coral didn’t like the idea of coming back here, not at all. To do what? Live here until spring and clear skies, not seeing another person, her family not knowing if she was dead or alive? If there were any way to move forward, she would. “Can we get going tomorrow?”
“No way. First of all, we need to gear up, figure out what we need.”
“I don’t know if I can carry much more than I walked in here with. And you don’t have a good pack, do you?”
“Won’t need packs,” he said. “I’ll make a sled, so we can pull the load over the snow.”
“And if the snow melts?” There were only four or five inches on the ground. One warm day would take care of that.
“That’s not going to happen.” He seemed certain of it.
* * *
BENJAMIN ‘S ROOM STOOD at the other end of the hall downstairs. He led her there to start scavenging.
“Was this the owner’s bedroom?” she asked.
“No, that was upstairs. These down here were for me and guests. Here, let me show you this. Go through the closet and see what fits you. Remember, if you’re wearing layers, it’s okay if it’s a bit too big. Then start pulling everything else out of the closet in your room while I’m outside. Get it spread out, look through it, see what looks useful to you. Don’t hesitate about digging through this—I’m not worried about my privacy, at this point. While you do that, I’m going to go start work on building the sled. Let me know when you’re done.”
When he left, Coral pulled out all the clothes and laid them out on the bed. The clothes were all too big for her, but she left the warmer stuff piled on the bed for Benjamin to choose from.
In her room, there were two thick sweaters on the closet shelf. She held their softness to her face. They felt and looked expensive and smelled vaguely of an unfamiliar men’s cologne. The owner’s, she supposed. She looked in vain for a parka or gloves, and she finally decided that either there never were any, or they had been stored upstairs and destroyed in the fire. She held the sweaters up to herself. Big on her, probably a bit small on Benjamin. She’d use both of them.
She found a pair of leather pants, maybe for riding a motorcycle, obviously too small for Benjamin. She’d ask if she could cannibalize them for gloves for them both, that is, if she could figure out how to hand-stitch leather gloves. It wasn’t only that she knew almost nothing about sewing—though she didn’t know anything beyond repairing a hem—but that she didn’t see any needles and thread, much less the sturdier needles she’d need to push through two layers of leather. Her one thin needle in her film-canister survival kit would not do the trick. And lining—wouldn’t that be the thing to do, to make the gloves a size too large and line them with absorbent material? Maybe mittens would be better than gloves. They’d sure be easier to cut and sew.
A pair of terry bathrobes would be useful for something, padding or towels, though they had been baked to brittleness by the days of heat. A leather belt hung on a hook in the back of her closet. That’d surely be useful, if only to hold something down on the sled.
A box on the closet’s floor yielded pens, pencils, paper, stapler, and other office supplies. She’d have wanted these under normal circumstances, but they’d not be worth hauling on her back, or even on a sled. She found an open packet of utility knife blades among them. There were four left. She could lash those to the tips of her arrows, if Benjamin didn’t have a more important use for them. She shoved the package in her pocket so she wouldn’t lose track of it.
Benjamin’s bed had a quilt on it and a wool blanket. He’d want those. She went through the hall closet, which held towels and a pair of spare pillows. She put the pillows on the floor and studied them. Whatever they were stuffed with had survived the heat without melting. The pillows could provide insulation for clothing or a sleeping bag. Maybe she could make one for Benjamin by doubling the quilt and sewing up the sides. That much sewing, a straight seam, she could handle.
Finally, she had several dozen useful items piled next to the stairs, including some small-enough jeans and t-shirts for her. The rest of the clothes, Benjamin could look at for himself to see which he wanted. She supposed one change of clothes would be all the weight she’d want to carry. She was already wearing her jeans over her sweats.
As to everything she’d spread out on the bed, she wasn’t sure if it could be used or not. She was out of her league here. She had packed for five-day camping trips before, but never for months in the wild. She’d wait to talk her ideas over with him. Two minds applied to any of these problems had to be better than her one mind.
She went up to see what Benjamin was up to, and if she could help.
* * *
IN THE END, IT TOOK five days to get ready. Every day Coral had to stop in the early afternoon and go fishing. Benjamin insisted that they needed all the food they could find right now and her making that effort was worth their delaying departure. It was important to eat, she knew, even though she only caught six fish over the five days, and two of those were tiny. She found more grubs among the rocks and brought them back too. They made soup every day, all of it tossed into water and heated with scavenged charcoal, but the few calories the food provided did little to replenish her energy. Like an appetizer, the fish-grub soup stimulated her appetite more than sated it.
The little bit of dried venison—both dried and frozen, now that the temperatures were steadily below freezing—that was left would have to feed them the first day on the road, Benjamin said, and they’d be burning a lot of calories being out in the cold temperatures, pulling a loaded sled like dogs.
It snowed three times during their preparations. The snow accumulated to more than a foot deep.
She was helping him build a box for tools the last afternoon when she said, “The whole time we’ve been doing this, I’ve been thinking about the way people lived before. The Indians. Or not just them, but everyone, if you go back far enough. All this stuff takes forever. Fishing. Building stuff. Sewing clothes. Washing by hand.”
“Yup.” He rubbed his beard. “Bet they didn’t have a lot of time for getting depressed.”
She wondered if that were so. “Not existential angst nor ennui nor any of those 20th century diseases.”
“Or old age complaints,” he added. “Hard to have old age complaints when you don’t live to old age.”
“Now there’s a cheerful thought,” she said.
“I’d be an old man to those people. Damned old, in fact.”
“And I’ve have six kids by now.”
“Or be dead of trying. Childbirth can be a dangerous thing without drugs and surgery.”
She thought about that life for a while in silence. “I wonder if they actually tried for children. Some women must have never wanted any kids, but what could they do?”
“People always want kids.”
“I don’t.”
“You don’t?” He sounded as if he’d never heard of such a thing.
“A lot of women I know don’t want kids. Besides, I half-raised my little brother the last few years. I did my bit as a mother already.”
“I bet you don’t want kids because of the world you lived in. College and career and all that. In a subsistence life, you’d want them.”
Coral didn’t think so. It seemed to her that subsistence living required fewer children, not more. She certainly wasn’t yearning for any now.
* * *
FINALLY, THEY WERE packed and ready to go. The sled was cobbled together of spare parts, cannibalized furniture, and metal brackets pounded into runners and sharpened with a file—her shoulders still felt the strain of that work. The runners were screwed to the bottom of a platform. That was surrounded by metal rails, including two in back he’d pounded into curved handles. Supplies were piled on top and covered with a blanket. It was all lashed together with electrical cabling he’d ripped out of the downstairs walls.
“I’m impressed,” Coral said, looking at the loaded sled. She was telling the truth. Engineering had never been one of her talents, and she was always amazed to find people who could figure out at a glance how things worked. The sled wouldn’t win any beauty competitions, but it was sturdy and functional, and he’d done it all with hand tools.
He was appreciative of her own efforts, particularly the sewing. She had to admit, his new sleeping bag made of his quilt and pillow stuffing turned out well. Lined, padded, and cozy, it wouldn’t be the match of her own down bag, but it wouldn’t be far inferior to it, either. The leather mittens she had made them were less beautiful. Her one needle had bent several times by the time the first one was done, and guiding it through the layers of tough material from then on was no easy task. She had muddled through anyway. By the end, the magnetized needle wasn’t going to be able to function as an emergency compass or even much of a needle any more. But their hands would be protected from the cold and from frostbite. Without hospitals, frostbite could kill.
But she kept the dulled, bent needle—she didn’t want to have to do any surgery that involved stitching, but she might have to, and this was all she had. She’d be on the lookout for another needle.
Benjamin’s plan was to strike north until they caught the line of a highway, move west parallel but out of sight of it until it ended, then keep moving west, at least until they crossed the interstate highway. “It’s not worth making plans beyond that. We don’t know yet how food will go. Or if we’ll find any at all. We could be dead in two weeks of starvation.”
“Or maybe we will find food, along with other people,” Coral said.
“We don’t know what they’ll be like if we do find some,” he said.
“Can’t you spare a little optimism?” she said.
“One of us has to be a realist,” he answered.
