The winter wind had come howling down Franconia Notch that morning when they had started their hike. But now, halfway up the mountain, the woods were calm and windless. Josie was thankful for it, because she and her companion would be stuck here for a while longer, perched uncomfortably on a snow-covered rock, waiting. Waiting for a search-and-rescue team that may not come. Or for nighttime, whichever came first.
At least Dave was still lucid. She had kept talking to him, engaging him in conversation, both to relieve boredom and to keep checking on his mental state. Head injuries were nasty things. And hypothermia would come on too easily in his immobile state, though he didn't show any signs of it yet.
But forced conversation didn't come naturally to her. She preferred to just be silent in the woods. The sun was still behind the clouds that perpetually hung over the northern end of the Notch during winter, but the woods were bright in the reflected light between snow and clouds. They contained a deep peace that she could only sense when she was still.
"How long has it been?" Dave asked.
"Coming up on three hours." She paused; think positively, she told herself. "Our good Samaritan probably only took an hour getting down the mountain, and he didn't have a long drive from here to someplace with a phone. An SAR team might be down there now, getting ready."
"Hope so. Damn, I'm cold."
"Want anything more to eat? I've still got candy bars that..."
"That aren't frozen yet? Ugh, no. I don't want to go through that again, trying to sit up. I'm almost comfortable now. Really."
You're too cold and so you should keep eating anyway, Josie thought angrily, but she bit back on the impulse to say it. He already thought of her as an overpacked, overprepared know-it-all. Too much like a mother, she thought. She was almost old enough to be this kid's mother. He didn't want to be lectured at by her.
She didn't even know him that well -- they'd just met in person that morning. Josie had originally planned this hike up Cannon Mountain as a solo venture, but in a rare fit of sociability last week, she had posted to a hiking-related Web site, asking if anyone there wanted to join her. She got two responses: one fellow cancelled at the last minute, and the other was this guy, someone she had only known as "Colorado Dave."
She had made a mistake in assuming that he knew what he was doing up here. In his online posts over the preceding months, he'd certainly sounded competent enough. No, that wasn't fair -- he was competent, he just had an attitude problem. He had climbed in the Rockies and the Sierras. Having come East after college, he wanted to take on the White Mountains. His words: "Those aren't real mountains." Four thousand feet high? Not a problem, even in winter. (She knew better, having grown up there in New Hampshire. The Whites were small and accessible, but their weather was ferocious. Unprepared hikers could die up here -- and many had, over the years.)
Lacking the proper respect for these mountains, Dave hadn't packed everything that he should have, and she hadn't quizzed him on what he was taking before they'd left Boston that morning. By then, she was already regretting taking someone else along. What she really wanted from the hike was solitude. But it was too late for that.
So they'd stepped out of her car into the teeth of the wind, buckled the heavy packs onto their backs, and headed up a narrow little trail that brought them through snow-blanketed, perfect New England winter woods. After a few minutes of climbing, they had left the wind behind, and the hike had become truly enjoyable as they walked uphill through a winter fairyland. They were two moving blobs of color in a black-and-white Ansel Adams photograph -- Josie in a yellow-and-black jacket with a huge green pack, Dave in bright blue with a small, sleek red-and-gray pack and a goofy orange fleece hat. Snow clung to the branches and to the windward sides of the tree trunks, setting off the dark fir branches and the pastel-colored paper birch trunks. The snow squeaked under their feet, just deep enough to cover the trail. They hadn't even needed the aluminum snowshoes they had strapped onto their packs under their crampons.
There had a little bit of ice on the trail at first. Not enough to worry about. But it got thicker, and the trail kept getting steeper and more slippery. She had asked him -- twice! -- if they could stop and put their crampons on their boots, so they would stick to the ice and not slip. But Dave didn't want to ruin his good twelve-point crampons on the huge granite boulders that were still close to the surface, so no, they hadn't stopped, not yet.
She should have stuck to her guns. His foot had finally slipped on one of the ice-covered rocks. Caught by surprise (he really shouldn't have been surprised, Josie thought), he fell a few feet, hitting his head on one of the rocks. He barely missed her as he fell. For a few scary moments, he was out cold, lying awkwardly on the trail under the heavy pack. Like a kid lying on the stairs, Josie thought -- you think the weirdest things under stress...
The woods were suddenly quiet, now that their footsteps had ceased.
Josie felt panic creeping up on her. What if he'd broken his back or his neck? What if he didn't wake up? She couldn't carry him out. In fact, she suddenly couldn't even remember his last name. Did he have any ID or phone numbers on him? What should she do next?
The silence of the winter woods closed in around her, uninvited, and she could hear nothing but her heart pounding in her ears. There they were, two thousand feet up the side of a mountain, in the middle of a New Hampshire winter; and she could not leave this guy alone with an injury like this. In a matter of minutes, the pleasant tingling warmth of exercise would wear off, and the cold would begin its relentless work on both of them. She checked to make sure he was breathing comfortably, and then sat down to collect her thoughts.
Fortunately, Dave woke up after about ten minutes. Other than a serious headache, sore ribs, and a few bruises, he was fine. She wrestled his pack off, then helped him move to a relatively flat spot beside the trail, on top of another boulder, where he could lie down. Trying to cover the panic she still felt rising in the back of her mind, she opened up his pack.
"Got a first aid kit?" she asked.
"Nope."
"That's okay, I have one. Ibuprofen included; it's your lucky day. Sleeping bag?"
"For a six-hour hike? Are you kidding?"
"No, I'm not kidding. I've got one of those too. Okay, how about a heavier coat than the one you have on?
"Yeah, rolled up in there somewhere."
"Foam pad?"
"A what?"
"Ever tried sitting on snow for longer than a few minutes? Your butt gets cold. That's okay, I've even got one of those, though two of them would be nice. Cell phone?"
"No way! Why?" Now he sounded hostile.
Josie just sighed and took hers out of her own pack. Dave proceeded to give her grief about that. Some wilderness experience, he said. He has to carry a beeper and a cell phone all the time for work. Why did she take it up here, where it probably wasn't going to work anyway? Because it might help me save your sorry ass, she thought, but it wasn't worth saying.
The signal was there, but only barely. After four tries, she gave up. Dave was graceful enough not to say anything for a while.
"You know, my legs are still okay. I might be able to walk out. I'd probably want to leave the pack, but..."
"Oh, no," she said firmly. "Not with a head injury like that."
"It's not that bad. What's the alternative? Staying here until God knows when? Until night falls and we freeze to death? If we have to stay up here all night, we'll be in serious trouble."
"Someone's bound to come along sooner or later."
"Wishful thinking. It's early January." He sighed. "I'd really like to try to self-rescue. I'd feel really stupid if they sent an SAR team after me. Did you know they can charge hikers these days for rescues?"
"They only charge for unnecessary rescues. This counts as necessary!"
"Yeah, well, I'd still feel stupid."
"You know, you could really hurt yourself badly if you fell and hit your head again. You might be in trouble now, but we can't..."
"All right! I get the point!" He started to say something more, then stopped and sighed again. He put a hand to his forehead and closed his eyes. "You think I'm an idiot, don't you?" Now there was a nasty edge in his voice.
"Huh? About what?"
"Not wearing the crampons. And about not taking all that stuff, for packing as if this was a day hike up Cannon Mountain and not a goddamned Everest expedition."
A flush of anger rose to her face. Josie waited a moment for it to subside; then she spoke in a carefully controlled voice, not wanting to even look at him. "No. I think you're a risk-taker, and you just lost a gamble. It's not the same as being an idiot." As she said it, she found herself almost believing it.
He turned his head away, his hand still on his forehead. "Yeah, okay. Of course I'm a risk-taker. If I wasn't, I wouldn't be up here trying to bag this peak in winter. I just wouldn't enjoy it as much if I carried fifty pounds of stuff I'd almost never need." He paused. "Of course, now we do need it, and you're bailing me out. Which I appreciate."
"You're welcome."
"Sorry. I'm just worried about what's gonna happen. My head's hurting more now than it was before."
This was bad, but Josie let it drop, not knowing what else to say. She busied herself instead with first-aid tasks and getting Dave into a sleeping bag for warmth.
Some time later, another hiker came along, heading up the mountain. He stopped and shared what he had -- water, food, a thermos of hot chocolate (oh, rapture!), and an extra hat. But whenever Dave tried to sit up to eat, he got dizzy, which Josie took as another very bad sign. They made him choke down some gorp anyway, to hold off hypothermia for as long as possible.
Finally, after Josie made a few more failed attempts with the cell phone, the other hiker turned around and headed back down the mountain. He said he'd drive up to the Cannon ski area and ask them for help, or at least use their phone to call the AMC at Pinkham Notch. Failing that, he could drive south to the nearest town and find someplace to call there. Josie and Dave thanked him over and over again, until he left in obvious embarrassment. Then they went back to waiting and talking.
As the afternoon wore on, their stories slowly came out. Dave told her that he lived in an apartment in the South End, and worked for the IS department of some software company in Boston, putting together computer networks. He spent most of his life attached to a beeper, but on his off weekends, he got out of town as much as he could, hiking and climbing and mountain biking. He claimed to be a peakbagger -- said he was going to try to climb all the New England 4000-footers over two years.
She asked him about how he'd gotten started in hiking. He told her about his youth, about the things he'd done out West. He told her about climbs up two-hundred-foot cliffs; about skiing soft snowfields in July; wide-open plateaus of sand and scrub, baked hard by the sun, stretching miles in every direction; cathedral forests of evergreens taller than six-story buildings. Maybe he didn't want to stay in high tech, he admitted in a non sequitur. He was learning Web design in his off hours, but maybe he wanted to ditch it all and live out here. "I work inside too much. No windows in my office. I'd rather work at some shop in North Conway and be out here more."
"I've lived out here. You'd get bored. My kids sure did," she had to reply.
"Maybe. At least it'd be different from what I'm doing now. There's no one keeping me in Boston."
"Which reminds me -- do you want me to call anyone for you when we get back to civilization?"
He looked at her with alarm. "I hope I can do that myself!"
"Well..." She shrugged. "Just in case. You may be fine, but maybe not. I just want to know who I should call."
Dave looked away. He didn't answer for a while. "Um, no. I can't think of anyone." Another pause. "My housemate, I guess. His name's Craig and -- you've got my home phone number, right?" She did. "I guess, just tell him I'm not going to be back tonight. Don't feel like you have to call, though; you don't have to be responsible for me to that extent. You don't have to be responsible for me at all, of course."
"Yes, I do. We're up here together. That makes us responsible for each other, doesn't it?"
"Only up to a point. I mean, I wouldn't mind if you left me at whatever hospital they take me to and head home to Boston. I'll make my way back. Just tell my housemate I won't be home until Monday. Or... wait, I don't even know if he's there this weekend, so if you call, just leave a message to that effect. I'll figure something out."
Josie thought it sounded like a lonely way to live. She talked a
bit about her family -- two sons and a daughter, all out of college
and scattered to the four winds -- and her home in Watertown, but it
rang hollow, as if she was trying to downplay her contentedness. He
just lived in a totally different world from hers. She steered the
conversation back onto safer ground: ice climbing and other winter
outdoor pursuits.
And so there they were two hours later, cold and stiff in their cheerfully-colored Goretex, watching the heavy gray clouds drift lower over the peaks on Franconia Ridge. They had been able to see most of Mount Lafayette before, but now, they could only see the desolate rockslides and miserable-looking scrub forest on its steep lower slopes. No one else had come up or down the trail. Josie tried not to second-guess her decision to stay here with Dave, but the thought wouldn't leave her in peace: should she have gone down for help herself? Was she being more irresponsible by staying here, or by leaving?
Now Josie heard a roaring in the treetops, and she looked up to see them swinging slowly back and forth in the wind. She cringed as the wind reached them, and pulled her hood and scarf tightly around her face against the stinging cold. When the snow flurries began swirling around them, she started becoming genuinely worried about the possibility of the rescue team turning back -- would they choose not to risk their own safety if the weather got too bad? For that matter, were they even coming? She had no way to know.
Her little zipper thermometer read between 10 and 15 degrees Fahrenheit (and falling, she thought). They were already wearing all the warm clothes they'd brought. She pulled a big brown trash bag out of her pack, intending to build some kind of crude shelter from the wind and snow. But Dave stopped her as she started to unfold it in front of them.
"Please don't. I want to see the sky."
"Seriously? Even if you get snowed on?"
"Yeah. And it's cool to see the mountains across the way, too."
"Well, you're not gonna see them for much longer, with those clouds."
"Humor me." He paused. "I want to see that it's still daylight."
Oh, dear, thought Josie. Was he finally getting delirious? "Dave, are you feeling okay?"
"Why, I feel like running and dancing! I feel great!"
"All right, enough with the sarcasm. I'm serious."
He was quiet for a moment. "You think I'm losing it, huh." It was a statement, not a question.
"It crossed my mind."
"The scary thing is..." He stopped, then went on. "What's scary is that I won't even know it if I do. At least, I don't think so."
"And I don't know you well enough to know what's normal for you and what isn't. Besides, there's not a lot I can do about it, anyway, since I can't get you out by myself."
"Yeah, but you're doing everything you can anyway. Gotta stay in control, right? Well, I've got news for you. You're not. I'm sure as hell not. We can't do a damned thing up here except hope we don't freeze overnight."
What could Josie say to that? He was right. She held her breath, hoping he would continue. He finally did, in a softer voice.
"As long as I can see the sky, I can watch the clouds go by overhead, and I can see when it starts to get dark. I can't look at my watch very easily... It's hard to explain, but I don't want to lose track of time passing... oh, never mind."
"No, I think I understand." Maybe it was a matter of staying sane.
"By the way, I'm sorry about ruining your hike. I know you weren't crazy about having me along, and this is a sucky way to end it. We should have summitted, at least."
"Don't apologize. Actually, I'm not really a peakbagger, myself. I didn't need to climb the whole thing -- I just needed to get out into the woods for a while. To recharge, kind of."
"Me too, believe it or not. Peakbagging's just an excuse."
Josie laughed sympathetically and nodded. "Sure, that's what the tough guys all say when they can't get to the summit!"
It seemed like a long time passed. The snow flurries stopped, and the clouds rose a bit. Josie got up and climbed up and down the trail for a while, to keep the blood moving in her hands and feet, then sat down again when she got warmer. It seemed as if the wind had finally died down. She enjoyed the silence at first, but suddenly it started to make her uneasy.
"Dave?"
No answer.
"Dave, you still with me?
Nothing. He was lying on his right side now, with his back to her, so she couldn't see his face -- "Dave? Hello?"
Then he responded in a soft voice: "Look, the sun's out!"
Cold fear hit her stomach and drained the strength from her limbs. He really was delirious now. Seeing things. "Dave, the sun is behind us, behind the mountain. Where do you see it?"
With some difficulty, he pulled a hand out of the sleeping bag and pointed. "Over there, across the notch. On the slopes of the ridge."
She followed the finger he was pointing. Sure enough, deep golden sunlight was shining on the steep talus slopes of Franconia ridge. "Oh, that's pretty. Weird, but pretty."
"Yeah. Worth coming up here for. Wonder how long it'll last." His voice was even quieter now.
And suddenly she had something new to worry about. For the sun to hit the ridge in just that way, it had to be close to setting. The sun had sunk low enough to shine underneath the local cloud cover. Now it would probably set within the hour, and the temperature would drop faster. She decided not to share this with Dave, who was probably too far gone now to figure it out himself. Instead, she watched the band of orange-purple sunlight on the ridge, expecting it to fade into gray any time.
"Josie?"
"Yes?"
"Would it be... can I... I can't keep my eyes open. Is it okay if I go to sleep?"
His words were slurred together. Josie started to warn him not to fall asleep -- he would get colder, and that could be deadly. But she couldn't bring herself to say the words. He had been through enough by now, between the headache, the cold, the hours-long wait while lying on top of a rock, and the dread of the oncoming night. There really was nothing more she could do. If he could now escape into sleep, it seemed heartless to deny it to him.
"I think it'll be all right, yeah."
"Okay," he said drowsily. "Stay with me, all right? I don't wanna die alone up here."
"Good night, Dave. Sleep well. I'll see you at the bottom."
For a long time, she stared into the woods, as still as one of the stones, except for the shivering that was now ceaseless. All her life, she had thought of the woods as benign. The snow-covered, sunset-lit wilderness around her was in perfect balance with itself -- complete and self-subsistent, with a deep stillness that arose from the patient way it absorbed all disturbances. Certainly it didn't need the presence of humans; their noises were muffled by the snow, their footsteps covered by later snowfalls, their trails and roads overgrown by the woods themselves over the seasons. But she had always felt that her presence -- and that of other people who trod lightly and respectfully through it -- was at least accepted with some measure of grace.
There were times when she'd wondered if those feelings would change if she ever got into real trouble in the woods. Now she had. And she found that her feelings did not change. The wilderness was still simply itself; how could she think that any of it, even the wind, could be malevolent? All that mattered were her own responses to it: how she prepared for it, the choices she made, and how she treated the other people out here with her.
Like a stone, she sat motionless and listened to the tiny noises in the woods around her. Far away down the mountain, the wind probably still blew through Franconia Notch, screaming as it was squeezed between the steep granite ridges. But here, it was quiet. She closed her eyes and relaxed as her shivering stopped for a few blessed moments.
Some unmeasured time later, her eyes still closed, she thought she heard a new sound, right at the edge of her awareness: a siren, echoing up the slopes from the highway that ran through the Notch, moving slowly and then stopping somewhere below them. It disappeared almost before she noticed it. Some distant part of her wondered idly if it was real or imagined.
She tightened her scarf around her face with numb fingers, and as
the orange-gold light around her faded into twilight gray, she waited
patiently for night to fall.