He hurried back to the car and put it in gear. Driving with the door open, he steered it out onto the lake and aimed at the air hole. Then he slammed down the gas pedal and rolled out of the car, skidding and rolling across the frozen surface until he slid to a stop. He rose to his knees and scurried on all fours toward shore. The car slowed, rolled out to the middle of the lake. Through the wind, 27 heard the ice groan. He reached hard ground and looked back. The car had almost stopped and had skidded sideways. The ice groaned again, then there was a sharp crack like lightning, and another, even louder than the first, and suddenly the front wheels of the car crashed through the ice. The surface shattered and the front end of the automobile plunged through the frozen surface and the car slid nose down into the lake. A large air bubble burst through the hole.
Then there was only the sound of the wind.
Trexler snapped a pine branch off a tree and walking backwards, dusted the car tracks and his own footprints, smoothing them out. Then he hurried back to the cabin.
Keegan was lying on his back against the door on his side of the Ford. It had flipped three quarters of the way over and jolted to a stop, lodged five feet above the ground against a thick pine tree. Harris was hanging upside down, his head in Keegan’s lap. He was unconscious. Keegan cautiously looked over his shoulder and out the window. He was staring straight into the deep gully.
Keegan struggled to get his feet under him. He had cracked his ribs but otherwise was uninjured. Harris’s right leg was twisted grotesquely above him, caught between the clutch and brake pedals. In the backseat, Dryman lay on his back with his knees against his chest. A large bruise was beginning to discolor his forehead.
“You okay?” Keegan asked.
“Yeah,” said Dryman, gingerly touching his forehead and flinching. “Though I’m gonna have the worst headache in history.”
“Harris’s out. How’s your first aid?”
“I took the army course about ten years ago.”
“Well, you’re one up on me,” said Keegan. Hefting Harris with his shoulder, he carefully dislodged the foot.
“His ankle’s broken,” Keegan said. “The bone’s sticking out. We’ll have to tie it up and get him back to Trexler’s cabin.”
Keegan carefully forced open the door on Harris’s side and worked his way out of the sedan. He was sitting on its side, staring up at the road. The car seemed safely wedged in the tree.
He stretched out along the length of the Ford and forced open the luggage kit on the back. Inside were a first aid kit, blankets, a coil of rope and a large tool chest. He pulled out the blankets, first aid kit and rope and inched back to the door.
“We’re in luck. He’s got enough stuff back there to start a hospital,” he said. “Tie up that ankle and wrap him in a blanket so he doesn’t go into shock. I’m going to wrap this rope around the tree so we can lower him down by rope.”
“We ought to be dead, you know that, don’t you?” Dryman said, “We ought to be down there in that creek.”
“But we’re not,” Keegan said. He was lying on his stomach, handing the first aid kit and blankets down to Dryman. “That tree’s gonna give out if we don’t get the hell out of here.”
“Then hurry it up, pal.”.
Dryman stretched out sideways. Reaching between the seats of the wreck, he pulled Harris’s leg taut, pushing the shattered bone back with his thumb, and wrapped a bandage around the ruined ankle as tightly as he could to hold the bones in place. Snow fluttered through the open door as he worked.
“Ain’t we the lucky ones,” Dryman griped as he worked. “Maybe we’ll get lucky. Maybe an avalanche’ll get us. Or maybe Harris was right. Maybe Trexler’s snowed in up there and we can...”
“Yeah. Maybe we’ll all sprout wings and fly out of here. And maybe we can get the hell off this damn car if you stop talking and fix that ankle.”
“I’m fixing it, I’m fixing it!”
At Kramer’s cabin, Trexler worked feverishly to get ready for the trek across the mountain to Copperhead Ridge. He carefully checked the cabin, then pulled on an extra sweater and his fleece-lined jacket, then a ski mask and goggles and put Kramer’s hat on over his own. Important to keep the head warm. If his head got cold, his body temperature would go down accordingly. He strapped on his backpack, pulled on his gloves and headed out into the storm.
The ridge sloped away from him and vanished in the blizzard. He could see twenty, thirty feet around him at best. He knew the trail but not the hot spots, not the drop-offs and the slicks. Half a mile down the mountain there was a sudden fall-off. A three-hundred-footer. He could not afford to drift down the slope, get too close to the cliff.
He slipped his feet through the leather thongs on his wooden skis and tightened the straps around ankle and heel.
The trail ahead was gradual for three or four hundred yards, then it sloped sharply up to the right. The last two hundred yards was a bitch—a forty-degree slope up to the cabin in the open wind. In this wind, a slip there could mean an unrestricted slide—four thousand feet to the bottom of the mountain. Nothing to break it. There wasn’t so much as a daisy on that slope.
Trexler smiled to himself. At the top of his lungs, he yelled:
“Heil Hitler!” And hunching up his shoulders, he pushed off into the face of the storm.
Dawn. And it was still snowing. Trexler had made it to Copperhead Ridge just before dark, crawling up the last two hundred yards from rock to rock on his belly to keep from being blown over by howling winds. Once inside, he had built a fire, eaten and then slept for eight solid hours. Nobody was going to follow him up there, he was sure of that.
He was up well before dawn and ready to go down the other side of the Copperhead as soon as the sun permitted. The wind had died down in the predawn hours. At 6:30 he was on his way again, skiing cautiously until the sun broke over the Sawatch range to the east. As his vision improved he went faster, staying on the high ridges. Skiing cross country to keep on the high side. By noon he was almost adjacent to Mt. Harvard, which was his halfway mark. But the wind had picked up and swung to the west, slowing him. His hands and feet were beginning to get numb and his visibility was down to thirty or forty feet. He entered a pine thicket and walked instead of skiing.
Then an instant of panic. Ahead of him, immediately to his right, the snow was curling upward. A moment later he felt the updraft. He was almost on the edge of the cliff. He stopped and traversed up the slope, his breath coming harder. Through the icy swirls off to his left he saw something. At first he thought it was the root bowl of a fallen tree. But as he drew closer to it he realized it was a cave, a gaping hole five feet wide in the side of the mountain. He worked his way up to it, shoved his knapsack through the opening and took off the skis, shoving them inside the cavern. He gathered up some sticks and branches and crawled into the hole. He took out his torch and flashed it around the opening. It was a funnel-shaped cleft narrowing to a smaller opening thirty or forty feet from the main opening.
Leaves and broken limbs, nature’s refuse blown from the outside, littered the floor of the fissure.
He made a fire near the opening, letting the updraft suck the smoke out. He took off his boots and socks and warmed his feet and hands over the fire. Then he put on fresh socks. He ate some canned meat and an orange and drank almost a full canteen of water.
An hour passed. The snow shower tapered off and the wind shifted. It got brighter out. But the wind shift blew the smoke into the cavern. He repacked his bag and prepared to get back on the trail.