Snowbound

THIRTY-NINE

The beam of Will’s headlamp cut through the onslaught of snow, and aside from the wind, it was stone-silent. He followed Kalyn’s footprints away from the tent. Her tracks headed down through the meadow, and as he walked, his headlamp seemed slowly but steadily to dim, until he could barely see anything but the ankle-deep snow at his feet.

The headlamp winked out. He reached up, tapped the bulb. It flickered on and off, then on again. He went on in the snow, the coldness of the flakes nicking his face like shaving cuts.

As he came to the collection of boulders where he’d cooked supper, his light winked out again. He tapped it. Nothing. Just darkness, cold, and snow.

He called Kalyn’s name and waited, kept thinking his eyes would adjust, begin to pick out things in the dark, but they didn’t. Though he knew the general direction of the tent, he hated the prospect of having to stumble back to it, sightless in the storm.

The snow let up.

A fingernail moon glanced over a cloud, and the world appeared before him out of the void.

The snowpack glowed. Will could see his breath in the eerie light, the profile of trees, the tent forty yards away at the opposite end of the meadow.

He looked into the woods—mostly dark there, save for where beams of moonlight slanted through the spruce, lighting random patches of snow.

Kalyn’s tracks veered into those woods.

Everything began to darken. It snowed again. The moon vanished and the world returned to black. He fiddled with the headlamp, but it was dead.

In the dark, arms outstretched, he started back for the tent.

. . .

Devlin had pulled the sleeping bag over her head, and she was trying to return to a beautiful dream—back at her home in Colorado, a cool summer night, crickets chirping, purr of the river coming across the pasture and no moon, but a million stars. She was walking toward the farmhouse, where her father and Kalyn sat on the back porch, drinking wine, laughing. She opened her mouth to speak, to tell them how happy she was.

Will was working his way through profound darkness, trying to find the tent, confident he was headed in the right direction, but soon his hands were touching the snow-glazed bark of spruce trees, and he realized he’d wandered out of the meadow, back into the woods.

He should have stopped right there, but he kept plodding forward, no sense of sight, everything else in overdrive, his ears picking up the steady thudding of his heart, the dry-grass scrape of snow falling on the hood of his parka, his nose detecting the sterilized odor of snow-rinsed air.

The world blinked—a strange electric blue. He saw trees, his footprints.

Darkness again.

It thundered.

He imagined where the tent stood, saw it in his mind’s eye, assured himself he hadn’t veered that far off track.

He started to call out for Devlin, let her voice guide him back to the meadow. But what if she couldn’t hear his words, just heard him yelling? She might leave the tent, strike out into this darkness by herself, lose her way.

The forest lighted up again. He corrected his bearing and kept going, fighting off the first needling tinge of panic as he stumbled along in the dark.