I awoke and my hand went to my throat, feeling for María’s rosary. She’d kept it in her purse in a separate pouch and I’d put it on yesterday after I’d visited her mound. My fingers felt the little black antique beads and the silver crucifix inlaid with mother-of-pearl. It was a beautiful thing and having it close gave me tangible comfort that what I was doing was right, or at least acceptable.
Outside, the sky was overcast but calm. I was still feeble and weak but knew if I continued on my chosen path I would inevitably grow stronger. Soon I hoped to have enough energy to attempt a descent of the mountain and search for help.
Escape was my new obsession and it kept my mind off the mound where I went later that morning and opened the knife. I worried about the . . . meat. Was it really healthy? Drying the strips on the top of the plane definitely made them softer to swallow but could they be rapidly going bad at the same time? With my sense of taste almost gone and my sense of smell suspect, I couldn’t be sure. Perhaps I’d be struck down with food poisoning for my sins. That would be appropriate enough.
None of these fears stopped me from plunging the knife in deep and hacking away. This time it was easier to overcome my revulsion but inside I was just as torn between conscience and necessity. I tried to think of it like the Holy Communion I’d taken in church as a teenager. The minister at the front would say something like; “When Christ died he gave his body for us so that we could have spiritual life forever.” Perhaps María was giving me her body so that I could have physical life. I hung onto this thought while I swallowed the shreds and sucked on snow to help them down.
As soon as that task was over, my thoughts returned to planning my walk to freedom. The valley I was in ran east and it would have been relatively easy to walk in that direction. But my instincts told me that I had almost succeeded in crossing the mountains. Another ten minutes of flying time and we’d probably have been safe. María would still be alive and we’d be together.
Through slit eyes I studied the mountains to the west. They presented a solid towering wall that, if I chose that direction, I’d somehow have to get over. It would be even colder up there and I’d need extra clothing to survive the extreme night-time chill. I went back to the snowy mound and stripped María’s body. She was a lot slimmer than me, of course. I tore the seams of her clothes until I was sure that some of them would fit underneath my own and supply me with a couple of extra layers. Again María was supplying my needs, always María.
I was convinced that I had to go up the sheer western slope and down the other side. My fate would be decided by what I found there.
The next day I checked my body and found that the patchwork of scratches, scrapes and bruises were starting to heal. I couldn’t see any signs of infection in any of the open sores. The swellings were going down. After a bit of stretching I could now walk fairly normally rather than hobble about, as I’d been doing since the avalanche.
I decided on an exploratory walk west, to discover how my body would cope as much as anything else. Every twenty or thirty steps I was forced to stop and rest, wait for my heart to beat normally again. Soon the slope seemed almost vertical and I had to clutch at the snow with my hands. My casual shoes, which I was terrified might split and fall apart, were no match for the deep snow drifts and my feet were soon sodden and freezing.
The broken sunglasses tumbled off my face again for about the twentieth time and I cursed under my breath as I groped for the left and right halves. I had joined them back together with a small strip of my precious duct tape but they kept coming apart and falling off. Now, even worse, the right lens popped right out and fell somewhere around my feet. I felt around the surface snow and couldn’t find it. It had to be there somewhere. Swearwords tumbled from my mouth and white hot anger surged up in my chest, matching the whiteness all around. My hands roamed around and around, digging, excavating, fingers filtering. Where is the damned thing?
I kept searching until my head began to swim with fatigue and frustration. Tears streamed down my face and I pounded the snow angrily with my fists. I knew I was acting out of all proportion to the loss but couldn’t stop cursing myself for having tramped on it and buried it deeper.
Exhausted, I sat down, no longer caring that I might be sitting on the lens. So be it. I would just have to do without it. Minutes later, I staggered to my feet and peered upwards. But even screwing up my eyes and squinting into the snow glare still left me blinded and stumbling along.
After about an hour I came upon a rock and noticed that the snow around it was melting. I threw myself down and sucked up the drops. There was green-gray lichen on one side and I scraped it into my mouth. It tasted of soil and I had to spit it out again. I leaned my back against the rock and rested some more, then started back. The wrecked Cessna seemed a tiny speck, almost indistinguishable from the snow mounds.
I carried on for another half an hour until I came to a small hillock where the snow was blown away, revealing more bare rock. No water drops to lick up this time. I slumped down behind the mound, sheltering myself from the strong, ice-chilled wind, and closed my eyes to rest them. By this point in the day the snow was so soft that I was sinking to my knees and I knew there was no going further. I rested until I started to shiver then started back.
By the time I got to the plane the sun was low and I was utterly exhausted. I drank a bottle of water and, as soon as I was able, went over to the food mound and began to cut up some meat. Doing so was as repugnant as ever but, to my surprise and shame, a calmer part of my mind was already thinking in terms of where best to insert the knife to hack out prime ‘cuts’. I recalled that the liver contained vitamins, so found it and carved it out. It was almost black in colour and I forced the hard slivers down my throat there and then.
The heart, kidneys and intestines I would begin on tomorrow. Fatty areas were good for energy but needed to be cut into thin sheets and dried in the sun before consumption. Her head and genitals I would never touch or even uncover.
That night in the dark, even with my eyelids shut tight, I had a permanent milky white film in front of my vision. I bandaged my eyes with a strip of material from one of the seats and collapsed into sleep. I dreamed of home, of the Vancouver skyline, of the Lions Gate Bridge and all the times I’d flown over it. Of all the times I’d wanted to fly under it and had to remind myself that losing my pilot’s license wasn’t a smart option. I must have rolled over at some point as I began to dream that María was lying beside me. We were in a soft bed, naked together, her warm body cupped in my lap. My hand rested on her smooth hip and I murmured something about wanting her to stay. As I caressed her I began to awake. My hand was wrapped around some foam padding I’d ripped from one of the seats.
I wiped away tears drenching my face and fell back into sleep.