Abandon

SEVENTY-FIVE

T

he wind was storm force at the Sawblade, blasting through the gap in streamers of freezing fog, the pass blown clean of snow. Scott held up a small yellow instrument with a digital display, locking arms with Abigail to keep her from blowing off the mountain.

They took cover on the lee side of the pass behind the palisade. Scott clipped a couple of carabiners onto the hip belts of their packs and short-roped them together.

He leaned over, shouted in Abigail’s ear, “My Sherpa clocked that last wind gust at fifty-one miles per hour! Stay close!”

As they started down, Abigail couldn’t help but think it a good thing the clouds had socked them in, so she couldn’t see the sheer drop that awaited even the slightest misstep. Two days ago, she’d freaked out on this part of the mountain, been paralyzed by vertigo.

Despite the relentless wind, the rocky trail near the top lay under three feet of snow.

Scott led, Abigail close enough behind so she could touch his pack if she reached out.

They descended slowly, painstakingly.

Before each step, Scott stabbed the old ski poles he hiked with through the snow to probe the depth and check the ledge width, ensuring they didn’t stumble onto a cornice. Abigail followed in his footsteps, trying to ignore how the oval of her face not protected by the hood of her Gore-Tex jacket was progressing once again from burning into numbness.

The wind let up the lower they went.

After the sixth switchback, Scott stopped to unclip their carabiners.

Where they stood, in the upper realm of the cirque, the wind had diminished to a soft, icy breeze. They’d dropped out of the clouds into a boulder field, the snow having buried all but the largest rocks, the lumpy white terrain resembling a field of sugar cubes.

They moved on. Within the hour, they reached the timberline, and though still post-holing in waist-deep snow, they had come safely down from the pass and back into the trees.

The sense of relief was potent and long overdue.

In the late afternoon, they rested at eleven thousand feet in a pure stand of Douglas fir. The cold front had pushed through, driven out the clouds, and scrubbed the sky into high-gloss Colorado blue. They dug out a spot in the snow, sat leaning against one of the old firs, eating gorp, sharing a bottle of water.

“Drink as much as you need,” Scott said. “I have a filter with me, so I can pump more.”

“I feel guilty drinking this,” Abigail said. “Knowing my dad doesn’t have this luxury.”

Scott broke open a pistachio, plucked out the nut meat. “You getting dehydrated isn’t gonna . . . Lawrence is your father?”

“We aren’t close. He left us when I was very young.”

Abigail lifted the Nalgene bottle, and as she unscrewed the lid to take another sip, it twitched, the tree trunk between them went psst, a piece of bark flew off, struck her face, and two streams of water shot out from the middle of the bottle, one arcing into the snow, the other into her lap.

Abigail said, “What the—”

The delayed report of a high-powered rifle broke out above them in the cirque.

Scott tackled her into the snow.

“How close?” she whispered.

“There was a three-second lag from when the bullet hit the bottle to the gunshot. . . . If he’s shooting one of the bigger cartridges, he’s maybe . . . fourteen, fifteen hundred yards away. Just under a mile. Probably scoping us from the ledges below the pass.”

A bullet tore through Scott’s pack, followed by fleeting silence, then a resounding gunshot.

“I don’t know how the hell he’s got us sighted up in these woods,” Scott said. “You run first. I’ll be right behind you. Don’t run in a straight line. Zigzag between the trees. Make yourself a harder target. Go.”

Abigail scrambled up out of the snow, took off downhill through the firs.

After ten steps, she heard another gunshot, glanced back, didn’t see Scott, kept running, thinking, The bullet’ll hit you. You’ll go down, might never hear the shot.

She came out of the forest into the little glade where they’d camped three nights ago, and on the other side, she ducked behind a tree. When she caught her breath, Abigail peeked around the corner, spotted Scott running toward her across the glade.

He stepped behind the tree, threw his pack down in the snow.

“What are you doing?” she said.

“I wanna see where this fucker is.” He unzipped the top of his pack, jammed his hand inside, and pulled out a small black leather case, which he unsnapped.

He took out a pair of eight-power Nikon binoculars and lay flat in the snow.

Propped up on his elbows, so the lenses just barely poked above the surface, he brought the eyecups to his eyes, adjusted the focus knob, and glassed the cirque.

After a minute, he said, “There you are. Shit, I thought we were making much better time. You wanna see?”

Abigail got down in the snow with him and took the binoculars. Scott guided her finger to the focus knob. “First, find the pass,” he said. She glassed the buttresses and couloirs of the cirque in the big sphere of magnification, then the jagged rock outcropping of the Sawblade, two thousand feet above and a mile away, the sharp rocks and snow glinting in the sun, a deep, shimmering quality to the condensed air.

“Okay, I’ve got it,” she said.

“See the trail we took?”

“Yeah.”

“Just follow it on down.”

Abigail adjusted the focus, slowly glassing the ledges, tracing their steep descent down the back wall of the cirque. “I see him,” she said.

“That’s the guy who locked you in the mine?”

“Yeah, that’s Quinn.”

Minuscule among the huge broken crags, Quinn post-holed at a fast lope just past the fifth switchback in that silver-and-black down jacket. He toted a backpack and a scope-bearing rifle slung over his shoulder.

“Oh my God,” she said. “He’s almost down from the ledges.” Abigail lowered the binoculars. “He’s gonna catch up to us, Scott, and he has our tracks to follow.”

Scott’s face paled, and she wondered if it was from blood loss or fear.

He said, “We have to get down below the snow line.”