The snowpack was shallower up there. There were only a few spruce trees, nothing much else, and the wind had thinned the drifts down to a depth of less than a foot, exposed patches of bare ground along the far lip. Ahead and below, where the downslope flattened out into a long, wide, treeless snowfield, the drifts were unbroken and looked deep. But it wasn’t the drifts that caught and held my attention.
There was a road down there.
It ran along the far edge of the snowfield, where the terrain rose sharply into steep red-earth cutbanks and tree-clad hillsides. Its surface was mostly covered with a thin crust of snow, except for streaky areas where the wind had scoured it away and the asphalt showed through. But it was the high windrows flanking it on both sides that clearly identified it as a road, and gave me a small measure of relief. A snowplow had made those windrows; and no county sends out snowplow crews to clear mountain roads unless there is enough traffic to warrant it.
The road was maybe 300 yards from where I stood atop the hill-300 yards of wind-smoothed virgin snow. No telling from here just how deep the drifts were; I would find that out when I started wading through them. If I’d still had the use of the snowshoes, I could cover the distance in a few minutes. As it was…
I started downslope, keeping to the cleared patches wherever I could, and the first seventy-five yards or so weren’t bad. Then the drifts began to deepen, and before I was three-quarters of the way downhill the snow was hip-high and getting deeper. Flakes of frozen powder got into my clothing, burned where they touched bare flesh. My hands were stiff and numb inside the coat pockets. The wind was still up and it hammered at me, chilled my neck, sent tremors through my body.
The depth of the drifts leveled out to just above my waist. But the snow was packed solidly down close to the ground, and I couldn’t make more than six to eight inches with each lifting, thrusting forward step. It wasn’t long before the muscles in my hips and thighs began to cramp from the strain.
Near the bottom of the slope, I put a foot forward and down and there was no ground under it. I plunged into a depression of some kind, and for an instant my head was submerged and I was struggling wildly in freezing whiteness. Snow particles stung my eyes, poured inside the collar of my coat, caked in my nostrils. I fought upward, thrashing with my legs-and one foot found purchase, then the other, and I came heaving up through the surface blowing and gasping. Slapped clumps of icy wetness off my face and out of my eyes and stood for a time, racked with cold spasms, to get my breath and my composure back before I pushed onward.
It took me something better than an hour to cross the last 150 yards of the snowfield. Twice the drifts deepened to armpit level; both times I veered away, half floundering, until I found a shallower course. I was so fatigued by the time I churned out onto the roadbed, where the snow was only a few inches deep, my legs wouldn’t support me and I fell to my knees. Knelt there shaking, swaying like a sapling in the wind, until I was able to summon enough reserve strength to boost myself upright and keep my wobbly legs under me.
Which way, left or right? I seemed to recall, dimly, that the last turn the whisperer had made that night three long months ago had been to the left: left turn and then we’d climbed up and down the hillocks and eventually stopped near the cabin. I wasn’t sure I could trust my memory after all this time, but I had to go one way or another; and to the right the road ran in a gradual downhill curve. To the right, then. And hope to God I reached some kind of uninhabited shelter before anyone came along or I collapsed from the cold and the dragging tiredness.
Before I started walking I remembered the package of Fig Newtons I’d put into my overcoat. Mostly sugar, those things: fast energy. I fumbled in the pocket, and the package was still there; I pulled it out, managed to tear the cellophane wrapping with my teeth. I choked down three bars, and three more as I set off, and three more at intervals until I had eaten all of them.
I had to move in a slow, shuffling gait because of the weakness in my legs and because the asphalt was ice-slick beneath its patchy skin of snow. The three or four inches on the road had to be yesterday’s and last night’s snowfall, I thought, which meant that the snowplow crew had been here sometime within the past twenty-four hours. Would they come again today? Probably not. Not enough new snowfall, and this wasn’t a major road; its patched and eroded condition told me that. Had to be other cabins around here somewhere, though. And people living in them. I listened for engine sounds as I walked. If any vehicle came along I would have to get off the road, take cover behind a tree or rock or bush close by. My tracks might give me away, though the wind seemed to be obscuring most of the ones I was leaving on the road. Still, I would have to try.
Only it didn’t come to that. There was nothing to hear but the steady throbbing plaint of the wind, the steady throbbing plaint of my breath as I shuffled and shivered my way downhill. Nothing to see but the swaying branches of the trees. The sky had taken on a restless look and seemed to have lowered, so that its grayness partially obscured the tops of the hills that rose on my left. The chill in the air seemed to have more bite in it, too. It was going to snow again before long.
I had gone maybe a quarter of a mile before I saw the first sign of habitation. The road straightened out after a long leftward bend, and off to my right, above the tops of a thick stand of blue spruce, a thin spiral of smoke-chimney smoke-lifted into the low-hanging grayness above. The cabin itself was invisible behind the trees, and that was good because it was no place for me. I kept going, even more cautiously now, and pretty soon I came to the access drive. From there, through the trees, I could see part of the cabin-a big A-frame with a Ford Bronco parked under a lean-to to one side. The Ford had been there all night because the surface snow on the drive was smooth, unbroken. There was nobody out and about, nobody to observe me as I moved past and out of sight.
The first flakes of snow began to flutter down, then increased to a thin flurry almost at once. Just what I needed-Christ! I kept my head pulled down into the collar of my coat as I walked, eyelids half-lowered; but even so the wind-flung crystals stung my cheeks and made my eyes tear.
After a time I saw the shape of another cabin materialize among the trees ahead. No smoke coming out of this one, or at least none that I could make out, but it was just as inhabited as the previous one. The snow skin on its lane had been rutted by thick tires, probably sometime earlier today.
I got past there, too, without anybody coming out to ask who I was and why I was traveling on foot in a mountain snowstorm. The fall got even thicker, coming down now in shifting patterns that obscured most of what lay outside a hundred-yard radius. Some of the flakes adhered to the skin of my face, forming a crust and turning my eyebrows into little ridges of ice. The shiver spasms grew more violent, and my legs grew weaker, and the understanding crawled into my head that if I didn’t find shelter soon I would crumple into an inert mass and never get up again.
Shuffle-step, shuffle-step, shuffle-step. Another fifty yards, and another leftward jog in the road, and another twenty-five yards-
– and another access drive opening up to my left. Unmarked snow on this one; I might have missed it entirely if it weren’t for a break in the trees and a closed and icebound bargate across its entrance. I stopped, squinting through the swirl of flakes, but I couldn’t make out anything except the wind-tossed shapes of spruce and fir.
Chance it: I had no other choice, now. Even if the home was occupied I would have to bang on the door, take the risk of being admitted. I turned in toward the gate, sank immediately into drifts up to my knees. Plowed ahead a few painful inches at a time, angling around the gate and then over into the trees where the drifts were a little shallower. I was moving then in half-light and shadow, both externally and internally: My mind seemed to have gone as fuzzy and indistinct as my surroundings.