The wind was beginning to push a little harder as the sun went down, putting a nice chill in the air, and he could see that the last thing any of them wanted was a lecture. That was fine, though. They had to remember these things.
“Jeff?” Ethan said, going right at one of the quiet boys, forcing him to engage.
“Food,” Jeff said.
“No.” Ethan shook his head. “Food is last, in fact. Ask most people to rank things you need in a survival situation, and they’ll say water first, and food second. But the reality is, your body can go a hell of a long time without food, and it can go awhile without water. Certainly, it can go long enough for you to die by other means.”
He unfolded one of the small sheets of ten-mil plastic they had all been given. A painter’s drop cloth, essentially. The best portable emergency shelter that ever existed.
“Positive mental attitude, wilderness first aid, shelter, fire, signal, water, food,” he said. “Obviously, you need to deal with medical problems immediately. But then we need shelter. With shelter, we can stay warm and dry, or cool and dry, while we prepare to deal with the rest of our needs. With shelter, the environment is no longer in control.”
They began the shelter-building lesson then, and he watched them regard their thin sheets of plastic with skepticism. But when he used the parachute cord to create a center-pole line and then stretched the plastic over it, they began to see the classic tent shape and started to understand. He used the button technique to make an anchoring device; this involved placing a small rock or even a squeezed handful of soil at a corner of the plastic, looping the plastic around it with a slipknot, and tying it off to a stake, which would hold that corner of the sheeting in place.
“Anyone have an idea why we’d do that instead of simply cutting a hole in the plastic and tying it off that way?” he asked.
Connor got it. Connor was one of the few in the group who was paying attention wholeheartedly. Good with his hands too, mechanically inclined; his shelter actually demonstrated proper angles, while some of the others looked like downed parachutes that had been stuck in the trees.
“If this was really all we had,” Connor said, “we wouldn’t want to risk cutting it up. It’s harder to put it back together. This keeps us from needing to.”
“Exactly. I learned this one from an Air Force instructor named Reggie. Stole it and claimed it as my own. All of the good stuff I stole from somebody else.”
A few of them smiled. They were getting a little energy back. It was hard work just walking up here, far harder than they’d anticipated. The backpacking was arduous, and in addition, they were camping at nine thousand feet; for many, it was their first experience with thin air. You’d take a deep breath, intending to fill your lungs, and realize with confusion that you seemed to have filled only about a quarter of your lungs.
He watched as they built their shelters, offering advice when it was needed and lifting his head and scanning the forested hills when it wasn’t. They gathered more firewood, and then Ethan took them down to collect water from one of the creek runoffs. Once they’d filled all of their water containers, he passed out chlorine dioxide tablets, a single-stage purifier, and they measured out the water and dropped in the appropriate number of tablets and recorded the time.
“Safe to drink in four hours,” he said.
Raymond regarded the dissolving tablet in the container, unscrewed the top of his own water bottle, and sniffed.
“Smells like chlorine, dude.”
“It’s a form of chlorine, dude.”
“I’m supposed to drink pool water? No, thanks.”
“You want to drink the stream water instead?”
Raymond eyed the stream skeptically, the water running over green algae and carrying mud and silt down to the creek.
“Don’t really like my options, man. But I don’t want to drink any chlorine.”
“Fair enough. Now, there’s always a chance you’ll find some cryptosporidia in these creeks. Unlikely, up here so high, but you never know.”
“Crypto-what?”
“It’ll give you mud butt,” Ethan said affably. “But if you don’t mind that, I’m sure the rest of the group won’t.”
“Mud butt?”
“You’ll crap your pants,” Ethan said. “But again, it’s up to you.”
“I’ll take the chlorine,” Raymond said.
Ethan smiled. “Not a bad choice.”
They dined on MREs, the military-developed “meals ready to eat.” The combat component of the food intrigued some of them, at least, and they were impressed by the way you could pour just a few ounces of water in the plastic pouch, fold it over, and then, after the chemical reaction did its magic, you had a hot meal. Most of them gave unkind reviews to the cuisine, but all of them ate. It had been a hard walk and they were hungry.
“Good day?” Ethan asked.
“Long day,” Drew answered. He had flopped on the ground and was lying there, exhausted, and most of them had matched his posture, staring at the fire through fatigued eyes. They’d hiked just over ten miles to get here, crossing out of Montana and into Wyoming. It didn’t seem so much, ten miles in a day, until you added in the elevation changes and the terrain and the pack.
“We climbing again tomorrow?” Marco asked.
“For a bit. Then we get to go down. But in the morning, we have some up yet to handle.”
They all groaned in unison. The groaning faded to conversation of aching legs and blistered feet, and Ethan leaned back against a rock and stared at the night sky as the boys talked and the fire crackled. A nearly full moon left the tops of the surrounding peaks and pines clearly silhouetted and then melted into shadow at the creek basin below. Behind them, the moon picked up the slope clearly, and so the climb away from the place they were now and the places they had been seemed less foreboding, because it was illuminated. But that was merely a tease of the moonlight, because they still didn’t know what was ahead.
For a moment, though, as the boys began to fall asleep, Ethan felt as if he could see it all.
9
A chain saw was a beautiful tool.
When it worked. And in Claude Kitna’s experience, the damned things didn’t work too often.
A mechanically inclined man, Claude took personal umbrage at his chain-saw failures. Probably because he knew the reason for them damn well and just didn’t want to admit it. He’d never purchased a new model; he’d always bought them used, to save some dollars, and he should have acknowledged to himself along the way that a man rarely sells something that works problem-free, and if he does, he surely doesn’t sell it at a discount.
Now Claude was working with a battered five-year-old Husqvarna that he’d snagged over the winter for just a hundred bucks, which was such a good deal that he’d talked himself out of breaking down and buying a new one. First cut of the summer, and he was already turning the air blue over the thing.
There was good firewood in the ridge above his cabin, where a few hardwoods had died the previous summer, some sort of blight. He’d waited until there was a good dry week and he had a day off and then he loaded the chain saw into the back of his ATV and went on up to get to work, figuring he’d have at least four cords, his winter taken care of before summer even ended.
On the third cut, the blade had pinched and nearly stuck, and he’d checked the bar oil and everything looked fine, so he went back at it, the harsh whine of the chain saw the only sound on the mountain, everything still and baked by the sun, a beautiful afternoon for some outdoor work.