María started bleeding through her nose and kept asking me for water. All we had were a couple of half-litre bottles, one of which was only partly filled. I tried giving her soft snow but she said it froze her mouth. In the first aid box I found a tiny packet of six paracetamol and gave two to María. She swallowed them down with water and that meant one of our bottles was now empty.
I finished clearing the plane of everything that was removable and tried our cell phones again just in case. Both were completely nonresponsive. By now the sky was darkening and nightfall couldn’t be far off. The temperature had dropped to well below freezing.
I picked María up and carried her to the plane. Somehow, she squirmed herself into the back where there was just enough room for both of us to lie down, her on the backseats and me on the floor. I shut both doors but the somersaulting wing had knocked a sharp, jagged hole in the tailpiece, through which an icy wind chilled us to the bone.
The bitter cold increased along with the gathering darkness. I got out and blocked the open gash with a towel from one of our travel bags but as soon as I went back inside the improvised plug fell out.
We used everything we’d brought with us as additional clothing, including wrapping towels around our bodies and covering our hands with spare socks, but still felt freezing cold. I huddled up close to María, careful not to press against her injuries, and we gently massaged each other for warmth.
“Go down to the corner store and get me a Diet Pepsi, will you?” María whispered in my ear.
I stifled a laugh so as not to hurt her. “I’ll get a couple of chocolate bars while I’m at it,” I replied.
Despite the intense cold we drifted in and out of sleep but it was a long, pitiless night. Several times I awoke to the sound of María’s low moans and felt frustration that I could do nothing more for her.
Eventually dim light filtered through the gap in the tail. María stirred and opened her eyes, licked her lips. I gave her the remaining water bottle and she took a couple of mouthfuls.
“Talk to me, Cal.”
I knew what she meant. She wanted the straight dope.
“We’re at about fourteen thousand feet, somewhere between what the GPS called Cerro Sosneado in Argentina and Tinguiririca volcano in Chile. More or less the middle of the Andes. The plane is wrecked with absolutely no chance of repair. The radio is down and cell phones don’t work. No-one knows we’re here, so no-one will come to rescue us.”
“So what do we do?”
“We have snow that we can melt to drink but no food at all. Unless we can find something to eat our chances don’t look good.”
“Then let’s find something.”
“Can you walk?”
“I think so.”
I backed out of the plane and helped her out after me. She leaned some weight on her left leg and screwed up her face. With one hand pressed against her bruised ribs she took a tentative step.
And fell over, moaning.
I propped her against the side of the plane, gave her two more paracetamol and told her to relax. She asked for the bottle of water and I pretended I didn’t hear her. She chewed the pills and swallowed some snow.
The plane lay on a slant, its bent nose pointing down towards a valley which fell away steeply towards the east, back to Argentina. In every other direction, beyond the carpet of deep snow in which we were located, arose steep walls of immense mountains. Occasional patches of gray and rust coloured volcanic rock showed through almost blanket whiteness. The night-time frost had frozen the surface of the snow and I walked around, numbed by the sameness of it all. Thank God my sunglasses had survived the crash but I still had to scrunch up my eyes in the intense snow glare. I searched for vegetation.
There wasn’t a single thing growing. No trees, no bush, no scrub, no alpine-like flowers, not a single blade of grass. Not even moss on exposed rock.
The bleakness of our situation hit home to me. “Unless we can find something to eat our chances don’t look good.”
Our chances looked terrible.