Till she said it, she’d not allowed herself to think it, to notice that her muscles, tired from two days’ hard walking with a heavy pack on her back, were starting to twitch as she stressed them in her ongoing balancing act. Tiny muscles, seldom used, were being called into play as the infinitesimal weight shifts were executed. They weren’t strong. They wouldn’t last. When a knee buckled or a leg cramped up, she was going to lose her delicate balance.
“I’ll call Robin,” Bob said, and she heard him busying himself with his radio. “Hey, Robin,” he said. Winter Study didn’t bother with radio protocol. With so few people, it wasn’t necessary, and their natural contrariness when it came to NPS regulations demanded they eschew it. “Anna broke through the ice. It won’t hold me, I’m too heavy, and somebody’s got to get closer to her than I can. Where are you?”
“Lake Richie.”
While Anna and Bob had set a single trap, she and Katherine had completed their side of Intermediate and moved on to Richie, the next lake in the short chain. They were an hour’s walk away.
“Why don’t you go ahead and start toward us,” Bob said authoritatively. “They’re coming,” he added unnecessarily.
“I heard.”
Bob wasn’t going to do as she asked. He had it set in his mind that the ice wouldn’t hold him. Or he was afraid that it might not, which amounted to the same thing. Anna fought down the urge to scream and shriek imprecations and obscenities. Sharp, hot tears sprang into her eyes and promptly froze like the Ice Queen’s splinter.
Arguing a person out of being afraid – particularly when they wouldn’t admit to being frightened – seldom worked, and Anna didn’t try to do it now. A tic started in her left thigh muscle above the knee, a flick of the skin the way a horse’s hide will flick to shake off flies.
“I suppose I could just balance here till the ice refreezes along the seams,” she said sarcastically.
“How long do you think that would take?” he asked seriously.
Anna was going to die and there would be no one but an oversized clown to witness her demise. “Come around to where I can see you, would you?”
“The ice won’t-”
“Big circle, Bob, big circle, stay as far out as you need to just-” She stopped to let off the steam building in her brain. She’d been about to say “just move your fat ass,” etc., etc., expletive not deleted, but, from what she’d observed of Bob Menechinn, he wouldn’t respond well to that approach. “Keep well back from me,” she said instead. “The ice is solid there.”
For a moment, he didn’t speak or move, then she heard his boots squeaking over the snow to her left. He loomed into her peripheral vision then, finally, to where she could see him without straining. Pissed off as she was, the sight of him relieved her. He didn’t look like he was about to run off and leave her to perish. She had that going for her.
“I need you to go to the shore and get a tree limb, a long one, as long as you can manage.”
Bob looked toward the shoreline. Though less than half a football field away, it was murky, dark and out of focus behind falling snow. “Visibility is getting bad,” he said. “I’d be afraid I wouldn’t be able to get back to you. I don’t want to leave you alone out here.”
Anna cocked her head the way a Jack Russell terrier will when it’s trying to figure out what its master is saying. The visibility was bad, and she knew, as close as they were to the shore, connected by radios, if he went into the trees he could still get turned around and be unable to find where he’d come in off the lake.
“Don’t go into the trees,” she said. “There’ll be something along the shore. Something is better than nothing.”
“I don’t want to leave you alone,” he said. “It would take too long.”
His words sounded fine, his voice was even and strong. Still, she suspected his sudden devotedness had more to do with not wishing to go into the spooky old woods alone.
Blinking past the snow and the shards of tears frozen in the inner corners of her eyes, she tried to see who he was, a key to move him. Mockery wouldn’t do it. His ego was too fragile. In a way, he reminded her of the psychotics she’d worked with in the lockdown ward where she did her brief mental health internship when she was getting her EMT. Men and women shared a common room, with a television set between the men’s ward and the women’s ward. Anna’d spent her time there, too ignorant to be of much help to the nurses and too small to be of much assistance to the orderlies, who looked more like bouncers or second-string football players than upstanding members of the medical profession.
It had been a number of years ago, back when “crazy” was as much a medical diagnosis as an insult. The ward wasn’t for neurotics; the people who ended up there were desperately ill. Most had lost so much of their world to mental illness and the drugs administered to control it that they didn’t care what was said to them. It had little to do with what they heard. Those who could still interact tended to respond instantly, and sometimes violently, if their delusions were challenged. Anna’d always thought it was because somewhere inside they still knew the difference between the reality around them and the one that they forged for themselves, and they believed when the illusion they had of themselves died they would die too.
Sane people weren’t a whole lot different; they just didn’t drool as much.
Bob Menechinn had a vision of himself. The squeaky, scared man in the tent attacked that vision. That’s why he’d had to work so hard the following day to rebuild it. The cowardly Bob, who panicked at the snort of a wolf, wasn’t a man he could live with.
At the moment, Anna could muster no pity for him, but she knew she would get nowhere trying to shame him into doing right. Shame would attack the illusion.
The tic in her thigh graduated to a twitch. Soon the muscle would cramp.
“Get the traps out of your pack,” she said. Bob was as formless and shadowed in the snow as tabloid pictures of Bigfoot. He went down on one knee and slung the backpack to the ice. As he fumbled with the buckles, Anna went on: “Put the end of the kinkless chains in the jaws of the traps. Don’t make a circle; make a line. We’ve got twenty-four feet, if you link it together.”
“I was just thinking that,” he said.
Anna watched without speaking as he spread the traps out on the ice and connected them, jaws to tails. She moved her left foot fractionally to ease her thigh muscles. The ice did not shift alarmingly. Maybe the seam was refreezing. It wouldn’t take much, she thought hopefully. The urge to jump was almost overwhelming. Body and mind craved action. They also serve who only stand and wait was an understatement. Waiting was a purgatory a nonbeliever could not pray her way out of. Trusting in the kindness of strangers was another.
“How’s it going?” she asked to take her body’s mind off just yelling “Fuck it!” and leaping for the good ice.
He looked up, his hood thick with snow, his shoulders white with it. “Good,” he said. “Another minute. Hang on.”
The work of his hands had driven thoughts of the oversized wolf from his mind. The linking of the three chains had relieved him of the necessity of getting near where the ice had broken. He sounded manly, strong, stand-up. It was hard to believe not too many minutes ago he was poised to leave her to her fate or, worse, watch while it visited itself upon her. He wasn’t afraid now, Anna realized, and that made him brave. Except brave didn’t count if one wasn’t afraid. Without fear to burn away the dross and transform it from baser metal, bravery was merely stupidity or poor impulse control.
“They should hold,” he said and held up the three chains attached to each other by the steel-jawed traps.