Robin followed suit and leaned her pack against Anna’s. Bob and Katherine stood dumbly on the trail, two spavined nags asleep in the traces, too tired to think or move without direction. That Katherine did so didn’t surprise Anna. She was nearly to that point herself. Only pride and the promise of hot drinks kept her moving. That Bob had reached paralysis wasn’t what she’d expected.
Big game hunting, she remembered.
Big game hunters were not known for long, arduous treks carrying heavy loads. There were native peoples for that, and ATVs to carry the carcasses and the conquerors back to the lodge and the wet bar.
Uncharitable, she thought without caring.
She and Robin checked the camp area. As far as they could tell, the little meadow was devoid of hidden evils. Had it possessed a snake pit or hellmouth, Anna would have voted for stopping there anyway. Much as she would have loved feeling superior, she could identify with Katherine all too well. She doubted she had the where-withal to take up the fifty-three pounds again.
They headed back to spark enough life in Bob and Katherine to get camp set up.
“Stop that,” Robin said as they crunched south shoulder to shoulder.
“Stop what?” Not only was Anna not doing anything, she was too tired to think of doing anything.
“Stop touching your nose. You’ve been touching your nose all day. It’s not frozen.”
Sheepishly Anna put her hand back into her mitten.
“You’re obsessing, aren’t you?” Robin asked. The question wasn’t judgmental. She asked it like a physician familiar with the symptoms of poison ivy might ask: “You itch, don’t you?”
“I guess,” Anna admitted. “I keep thinking it might be frostbitten.”
“Mine’s here,” Robin said and tapped her mittened fingertips against her high cheekbones. “I can see them turning dead white out of the corners of my eyes and I picture myself with two holes in my face. Leave your nose alone. You touch it all the time like you’ve been doing and you’ll irritate the skin to where it’ll peel. Then you’ll really think your nose is falling off.”
Anna nodded and stifled the urge to check her nose one more time before she went on the wagon.
Because it was lighter to pack in and their body heat would be consolidated, the four of them were sharing a single dome tent. While Bob and Robin went about pitching it – a task that in moderate weather would have been the work of fifteen minutes but was roughly doubled by the clumsy mandate of winter – Anna settled Katherine on a sleeping pad, for the little insulation from the ground it afforded, and set about boiling water. In a pinch, snow could be melted to drink, but the process wasn’t as easy as one might expect. On a freezing day, if snow were packed into a cooking pot and the stove turned up, the pot would burn before enough snow melted to even out the temperatures. Small portions had to be heated slowly till slush formed before the gas could be cranked up. Eating snow was a taboo of which even Anna, with her penchant for avoiding the cold at every opportunity, was cognizant. To convert snow to water robbed the body of so many calories that the heat transfer could lead to hypothermia.
Anna used the water she’d carried inside her parka next to her body. When it was hot enough to pass muster, she stirred in cocoa, twice as much as she would normally use. Backpacking in winter burned three times a person’s baseline calorie requirements. To stay warm, a woman Anna’s size needed nearly five thousand calories a day.
“Drink this,” she said and handed a plastic insulated mug to Katherine. Metalware was useless when the cold got serious.
Katherine shook her head wearily. “No thank you. I just want to sit for a minute.”
“You need to drink it,” Anna told her. “It’ll make you feel less tired.”
Katherine took the cup between her mittened hands, and Anna was put in mind of a seal trying to clap with its flippers.
“Hold it tighter than you think you should,” she cautioned.
Katherine began to sip.
Anna slipped off her mitten, stopped her hand halfway to her nose, then put the mitten back on.
The tent was up. Robin handed out hot drinks and candy and granola bars while Anna started another pot of water for their dinner of freeze-dried pasta, peas and chicken. Robin unwrapped a block of cheddar, cut it into four pieces and said: “Hors d’oeuvres.”
They ate in silence as the light dimmed to nothing. The snow, mean and sparse all day, showed no sign of changing, and Anna was glad. On the Great Lakes, changes in the weather were usually heralded by high winds. The balmy sixteen degrees they’d enjoyed in the heat of the day was going with the light. Had there been wind, what scant warmth the food generated would have been quickly stripped away.
When it was too dark to see the cups in their hands, they put on headlamps and blinked at one another.
“The lights of Marfa,” Anna said. Maybe the others knew of the Texas town, famous for its mysterious UFOs. Maybe they didn’t. Nobody had enough energy to say either way and she hadn’t the energy to volunteer an explanation.
Dishes were scraped and wiped. Washing was out of the question, but since no self-respecting bacteria could survive in such cold the health risks were minimal.
When they’d finished, Robin announced “Jumping jacks!” and Anna feared for the young woman’s sanity.
The jumping jacks were to warm them before they crawled into their sleeping bags; calories and layers alone would not suffice.
“Pee,” Robin suggested after they’d run around the tent and jumped like mad things for several minutes. “Your body has to work harder keeping extra fluid warm.”
They separated in four directions and bared various parts of their anatomies to Jack Frost’s kiss.
“No mosquitoes,” Anna told herself, trying for a scrap of good cheer.
Then it was bedtime. It wasn’t yet seven p.m.
Retiring was a miserable process. Food for the following day’s lunch was retrieved from packs; full water bottles were dragged into the tent. To keep these precious items from freezing – or to thaw them out for the next day’s use – meant they would spend the night in sleeping bags with the campers. The bags’ stuff sacks were turned inside out and boots put in and stowed between the knees to keep from freezing overnight. Parkas and what outer garments wouldn’t fit into the bags were piled on top. Thus cocooned, neck scarf and balaclava still on, Anna switched off her headlamp.
“Good night,” she said to the black nest filled with her fellow larvae. Even to her own ears, her voice sounded so gloomy that she laughed.
“It’ll be okay,” Robin whispered. “You’ll sleep.”
Anna said nothing, but she took comfort.
“Leave your nose alone,” Robin said.
The biotech was freakishly intuitive. Anna pulled her hand back under the covers.
“Don’t breathe in your sleeping bags.” Robin’s voice filled the cramped space though she spoke quietly. “It’ll make them damp and you’ll freeze to death.”
Anna quit breathing warm air into her bag.
“Will it happen soon?” she asked hopefully.
8
As challenging as it was to play the Pollyanna glad game with dirty boots and a hunk of half-eaten cheddar snugged between her thighs, Anna was glad for the physical demands of the past day. She was so thoroughly tired that she knew Robin was right; she would sleep. Eventually.
Darkness inside the tent was absolute, thick, pressing down on skin and mind the way it did underground: Carlsbad Caverns, Lechuguilla. Anna remembered that crushing blindness, air so hard with earth and ink that it choked her.
Claustrophobia tightened her skin and squeezed on her lungs. People, flesh, crowded in on her: breathing and rebreathing the air, snuffling, wriggling, adjusting; a filthy monstrous womb and the four of them stillborn.