“Why don’t you see if you can start a fire?” Coburn interrupted. “We need to get Vigil warmed up in a hurry.”
“How come I have to be the one to start a fire? I-” Vigil cried out when Coburn cautiously applied traction and inverted his foot. “I’ll round up some wood.”
Shore shed his.300 Win Mag and scampered over a snow-covered pile of wood that had once been part of the roof before the branches of the pines grew through.
“Kind of makes our ‘no cell phones’ rule seem kind of stupid now, doesn’t it?” Baumann said. He had paled considerably and couldn’t seem to take his eyes off of the lump where Vigil’s patella now sat, nowhere near where it should have been.
“We’d never get a signal up here anyway, especially with this storm. Besides, we can use the radio back at the camp.”
“If we can still find the camp…”
Coburn had no response.
Vigil’s teeth started to chatter. He mumbled something unintelligible. The skin on his face had taken on a waxy cast and beads of sweat were blossoming from his forehead.
“I need you to get some things for me,” Coburn said. “I need two lengths of wood, roughly thirty inches long and four inches wide. Are you with me, Todd?” He waited for Baumann to raise his eyes from Vigil’s leg. “I need one of the elk drag harnesses. And give me your flask.”
Baumann pulled the silver flask of whiskey from the inner pocket of his jacket and handed it to Coburn, then began rummaging through the heaps of rotting wood.
Coburn spun off the cap and tipped the flask to Vigil’s lips.
“Drink this, Joel.” Vigil sputtered and coughed, but managed to swallow most of it. “You’re going to be all right.”
“What…?” Vigil gasped. “What are you…?”
“Shh. Shh.” Coburn scanned the ground around him until he found a stick about the width of this thumb. “Just try to relax. This is what I do for a living.”
“Hang on-”
“Bite down on this,” Coburn said, and pressed the stick sideways into Vigil’s mouth, between his teeth.
He gripped Vigil’s leg beneath the fracture line, then pulled down and twisted at the same time.
Vigil’s cry echoed in the confines and shivered snow loose from the gaps in the roof.
* * *
Vigil had mercifully passed out while Coburn applied the makeshift splint, which was a stop-gap measure at best. They needed to get Vigil to a hospital sooner than later, the storm be damned. One of them was going to have to brave the blizzard and hike back to the camp to call for help…and hope that an emergency vehicle would be able to reach them in time. If they had to wait out the storm in order to get a chopper up there…
At least Shore had managed to get a decent fire going. If nothing else, Vigil seemed to be resting comfortably, and Coburn was grateful for the heat. He hadn’t realized just how damp his clothing had become or how cold he was beneath it. The light was a blessing, too. The ramshackle homestead was larger, although much the worse for wear, than he had initially thought. The great room where they had entered was by far the largest, but in the worst condition. More of the roof lay in heaps of rubble around their feet than above their heads. Fortunately, the broad ponderosa pine branches spared them from the brunt of the storm, although the heat was now melting the snow from the needles in a steady downpour and granting access to the rising wind, which made the bare plank walls shiver with each gust. It appeared as though someone had made a halfhearted attempt to reinforce the outer walls with stacked stones, debris, and shingles and planks with bent, rusted nails protruding from them. There was a section of the dirt floor where it almost looked like some animal had tried to dig a tunnel straight down into the hard earth. Old furniture had been broken beyond recognition, save for the tarnished brass knobs and handles partially buried in the dirt.
The other rooms were in marginally better condition. A small chamber with a rust-ravaged tin roof must have served as dry storage. Moldering leaves and dead aspen saplings dominated the frosted floor amid a scattering of opaque broken glass. There were still mason jars and cans of food rusting in the back corner beside a small square entryway that led into a stone-lined cellar excavated into the hillside. It looked more like a tomb than cold storage, and barely had enough room to contain all of the spider webs and insect carcasses. There were rusted brass bullet casings from the days before mass commercial loading on the stone floor, along with clumps of desiccated fur that suggested some animal or other had made its den in there. It smelled faintly of decomposition and feces, as though something had crawled in there to die and rotted to dissolution.
The final room, a bedroom to the right of the main room, showed signs of somewhat recent habitation. Sections of the fallen roof had been propped up with sturdy branches and there was a carbon-scored fire ring near a window that had been boarded over long ago. Shore had scrounged enough kindling to reignite the charred remains of what must have once been a four-poster bed. Vigil was resting reasonably comfortably in the opposite corner from the fire, away from the swirling smoke, which funneled up through the small holes and cracks in the blackened ceiling. Coburn watched Vigil’s chest rise and fall rhythmically beneath a silver tarp that reflected the orange and gold of the crackling flames.
It was reassuring to know that they weren’t the first to have been forced to hunker down in here to ride out a storm, although that didn’t change the fact that one of them was going to have to strike out in search of the camp and the temperatures were already plummeting as the sun began to set behind the peaks to the west. Not that the darkness caused more than a subtle diminishment of visibility through the blizzard.
Coburn checked the pulse in Vigil’s dorsalis pedis artery one last time, then set off in search of the others. He found Shore and Baumann standing outside in the snow, hunched against the wind, mere shadows in the waning light. Both gestured wildly in opposite directions as they argued at the tops of their lungs to be heard over the screaming gusts tearing through the valley. Beyond them, a shifting wall of white and gray masked the forest and the sharp descent into another invisible valley.
This was their fourteenth annual elk hunt. What at first had been a grand adventure into the wilderness had become more of an escape than anything else. The ties that bound them to their everyday lives had grown so strong that there wasn’t a man among them who couldn’t feel their pull even during this one week a year. As eighteen-year-olds with their whole lives ahead of them, this had been a magical excursion into the unknown. Who was he kidding? It had been an excuse to blow off a little steam and drink a lot of beer. They’d stumbled upon a bull by accident on their final day and had been lucky to hit it once between them. It was hard to believe that those four kids had ever existed. This trip was now more about trying to find those distant shades of themselves than bringing down any mythical twelve-point behemoth.
Coburn couldn’t even envision the younger versions of Baumann and Shore as he approached. Blaine Shore had been a tall skinny kid then, and had grown into a tall skinny man, but all that remained of the long, stringy hair was a horseshoe around the sides and back. He was now the kind of guy who looked out of place without a tie and managed money market accounts or securities or some kind of funds, which essentially boiled down to investing other people’s money and taking a percentage off the top when he so much as thought about making a trade.
Baumann was, and always had been, the diametric opposite of Shore. How they had ever gotten along would forever remain a mystery. If ever a man had lived a charmed life, it was Todd Baumann. The good-looking kid had grown into a good-looking adult. He never exercised, but looked like he lived in a gym. He was the kind of guy who could get lucky just taking his trash to the curb. The teenager who had aced his classes without ever going and spent days on end playing computer games had written a program as a twenty-two-year-old grad student that had revolutionized some sub-platform of an existing matrix of…Coburn didn’t really understand what it was, but it had made Baumann the kind of rich that boggled the mind and allowed him to do pretty much whatever he wanted to do, whenever he wanted to do it.