Impasse Read online

  Up the hill to the ridge. Look for the clearing. Can’t miss it.

  Stu had repeated the words over and over. Only there was no clearing on the east ridge, unless bare jagged rocks counted as a clearing. Nor was there a visible clearing on the west side of the lake. Based upon his initial climb, he calculated that a trip to the other side would take at least two hours. But the sun hung low in the western sky.

  I don’t have two hours.

  Stu felt his heart rate rise as the sun sank. Darkness was coming, and he was without shelter. He dug in his pack, yanking out thermal socks and spare long underwear with an orange waistband to get to Edwin’s Comprehensive Guide to Wilderness Survival.

  The lean-to had looked so simple to build in the diagrams—find two trees about seven feet apart with forked branches four to five feet high on the trunk. He glanced about. Nothing nearby fit the bill. That was the first problem. He read on. If he did find likely candidates, he would then need to place a pole in their respective forks. Where the hell am I supposed to get a pole? He could have stripped a fallen branch if he had a hatchet. He didn’t. He had a large knife, but he couldn’t cut thick limbs with it. Retrieve a branch and carve some notches, it instructed. Find another branch. Find many branches to cut and lean across the pole. It all presumed a hatchet. Locate some more branches, grass, moss, and so forth, Edwin’s casually suggested, as though all these materials could be found neatly labeled in bulk outdoor bins. There was no moss in sight, and the rocky slope had no grass. He supposed he could cut some of the thorny brush for cover, but it was not dense enough to effectively repel water. The estimated time of construction, according to Edwin’s, was an hour, assuming the right tools and readily available materials. He had neither. And the sun wasn’t waiting for him.

  Screw you, Edwin!

  Stu slammed the book closed. He had to get going or he’d be working in the dark. He could start a fire, and he had a flashlight. If he gathered all the materials first, he could construct the lean-to by firelight. Not very comforting.

  Then something caught his eye. It wasn’t on the far side of the lake nor on his own eastern slope, but south. It was a small patch of tan where the trees parted, like a small hole in a green blanket. He didn’t have binoculars, and he strained to see. The dot looked out of place.

  Unnatural.

  Stu stepped up onto the rock against which he’d leaned the .30-06, to gain a better vantage. It didn’t help; he could see no better from on top. When he looked down, the barrel of the gun was pointing straight up at him. It was unnerving to have instant death immediately at hand. Police officers carried guns, of course. And when they’d come to the DA’s office wearing their sidearms, the idea that another human being could decide to make him dead at any moment had always made him uncomfortable. The magnitude and finality of the decision did not match the ease with which it could be made—a moment of bad judgment, anger, or even just a touch of insanity and … blam!

  He slid off the rock, careful to avoid bumping the gun and potentially blowing his own head off. Then he paused. The scope. He scooped up the rifle, pointed it toward the dot, and peered through the elongated hourglass-shaped black metal tube mounted on top. It took him a moment to find the right distance to hold his eye from the glass, but when he did, a small clearing popped into focus ten times closer than when viewed with his naked eye.

  There was something. Wooden. Possibly the corner of a structure peeking out from the trees. He’d read in Edwin’s that desperate men sometimes saw what they wanted to see, like an oasis in the desert, and so he was wary. But staring longer didn’t help; it just made his eyes go buggy. He lowered the gun.

  His choice was simple. He could either use his hour of sunlight preparing a lean-to, or use the hour to hike to the possibly imaginary structure. If he built a shelter, it would be modest. If he walked to the clearing and found that it contained only a downed tree or a rail fence, he’d have no shelter at all. Once he descended the hill, he wouldn’t have a view of the clearing again until he stepped into it. It would be either a pleasant or decidedly unpleasant surprise.

  His impulse was to take the safe route and build the lean-to in order to ensure himself some shelter in case of rain, or worse, snow. He couldn’t read the sky. It was gray in one direction, clear in another, and clouds were moving at notable speed in yet another. In its very first chapter, Edwin’s had warned against guessing and taking chances.

  Lean-to it is.

  He began to scout around for branches. A curious squirrel tittered above him. He couldn’t see it, but he could hear it up in the trees somewhere. Easy for you to say, Stu thought. You probably have a place to sleep tonight. He recalled that Edwin’s had listed squirrels as an easy source of food in a pinch. They were crepuscular, meaning they were active during the morning and afternoon and could be caught in the light of day. They hid at night when nocturnal creatures came out. Nocturnal. There was something horrible about that word. The darkness. The unknown. Unseen predators. There was a reason squirrels hid at night. Stu recalled a story he’d read about a woman who’d been dragged from her tent by a Kodiak bear.

  Stu dropped the branches he’d gathered and began madly stuffing his clothes and supplies back into his pack. He didn’t bother refolding anything; the sun was no longer visible over the ridge, and it was a long walk to the clearing.

  * * *

  An hour later Stu broke from the shadowy trees on the south slope with his heart pounding. Exhausted and terrified, he prayed that Dugan’s luxurious hunting cabin would be nestled in the corner of the darkened clearing.

  It wasn’t.

  Instead a small dilapidated shack little larger than a toolshed stood against the trees. Stood was generous; it was older than he was, and if it had not been leaning heavily against a sturdy fir, it would have long since collapsed. If he needed moss for a lean-to, however, there was plenty. The sagging roof was a green blanket of the stuff.

  It’s shelter, Stu thought. Sort of.

  He wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry. But the sun was gone, and the glow from the western horizon that had guided him the last hundred yards to the clearing was waning fast. He hurried to the shack and tried the door, which was newer than the logs that made up the body of the place. It opened out. Stu recalled that doors in bear country were made to open outward so that they could not be forced in. A sobering thought. It was sticky, but a hard yank produced a crack and a cloud of dust that made him cough and stagger backward—the air stank of stagnation and something else foul he couldn’t put his finger on. But he had no choice. He put an arm over his nose to attack the door again, and further struggles drew it wide enough to shine his flashlight inside.

  Movement.

  Stu whipped the flashlight to follow the motion. Dark shapes scurried in the shadows.

  Rats?

  He hadn’t given vermin any thought. In fact, if a fat brown one wasn’t crouched squarely in the beam of his flashlight, he’d have guessed they were strictly urban pests.

  At least three of them.

  Under normal circumstances, he wouldn’t have set foot inside. Unfortunately, the circumstances were decidedly not normal. Given the choice between bears and rats, he lowered his pack and duffel to the ground and slipped through the crack in the door, flashlight at the ready.

  He couldn’t very well stab the rodents to death with his knife—too close, too personal. And he didn’t have an ax or a heavy branch. But there was no way he was going to sleep in the cabin with three rats.

  The thirty-aught-six, he thought.

  As targets they presented little challenge. The trio of vermin neither hid nor fled, but simply moved to defensive positions and bared their teeth as though ready to duke it out with him over occupancy.

  Stu shook his head. “Sorry, but I’m in no mood to take any shit from the three blind mice,” he said, and he drew a bead on the nearest one.

  It perched overhead atop a ceiling beam directly over the wooden platform that appea
red to be the cabin’s bed. The gun’s scope was trained at one hundred yards, according to Ivan, and no good at close range, so he nestled his forehead beside it and sighted down the barrel. Then he slowly squeezed the trigger.

  The gun boomed, and Stu’s world went white for a moment. Then he saw stars. At first he thought the bullet had ricocheted and hit him in the head. But he also realized that, if he was thinking about it, he probably wasn’t dead.

  Probably.

  When his sight returned, he saw that he still held the flashlight, but the gun was lying on the floor. He touched his forehead. It was sore, and his hand came away covered with wet sticky fluid. He was bleeding. It took another moment to piece it together. He’d been holding the .30-06 too loosely, he decided, and the recoil had jerked it out of his hands. The gun had kicked, and the scope had smacked him in the head. But there was too much blood. He turned the flashlight to the beam overhead. There was a red notch in the wood where the rat had been. The rest of the rodent was splattered across the ceiling. He gagged. The blood wasn’t his.

  Thirty minutes later he emerged with the beaten carcasses of the other two rats. It had taken some time to grope through the dark with the flashlight for a branch to club them, but he couldn’t bring himself to shoot the other two and sleep in a bloody slaughterhouse. He wiped the rat guts from his head with a shirt and threw it outside. Then he stretched out his sleeping bag. His coat became his pillow. There was a rock-lined fire pit in one corner and a sheet metal hood built to funnel its smoke toward a hole in the ceiling. But starting a fire didn’t appeal to him. His matches and other fire-starting tools were deep in his pack, which was now jumbled because he’d had to empty it and restuff it in a hurry. Nor did he have kindling, and he wasn’t about to go out in the dark again to find some.

  There were signs of some human use in the cabin—an old burnt log in the fire pit and the replaced front door—but not frequent use. Stu knew he should unpack his gear and get organized. But the door was shut, the rats were gone, and he was much less likely to be eaten by a bear than if he were in an Edwinian lean-to, so it seemed best to simply go to sleep. When he was a child, his mother had told him that if he was having a bad day, going to bed was like hitting the reset button.

  And that’s exactly what I need at this point.

  Stu pulled off his damp pants, socks, and underwear, and hung them over his pack. Then he fished out the orange-banded long underwear, which made him look like he was wearing an orange hula hoop, and stuffed himself into the sleeping bag, thankful that the aggressively laid-back sales kid at the Great Beyond had talked him up to the Arctic Fox model.

  He settled in, bitter and confused. The cabin was in the wrong location, it was the wrong size, and it certainly wasn’t what he’d expected from Dugan. The wood bed frame was hard without a mattress, and he could smell rat blood. He didn’t bother to clean it; he found that he was physically spent from his hikes up and down the mountain, and emotionally drained. And when the rain began to pour through the ceiling, he didn’t even bother to get up, but simply cursed Clay, Dugan, Ivan, and anyone else he could think of, and curled himself into a ball in one corner beyond the spatter, like a cowering pretzel.

  CHAPTER 12

  Stu uncurled from his fitful sleep as a shaft of light crept in through the bullet hole in the roof and settled on his face. He found himself staring at the log wall inches from his nose. Something was crawling there.

  A walking yellow and black thumb drive? No, that made no sense. He blinked. Oh, a wasp the size of a thumb drive.

  As he watched, two more emerged from a nearby hole. Yellow jackets. Stu snapped into a sitting position, fully awake. He’d been half awake for an hour, drifting in and out, too uncomfortable to sleep, too tired to rise. Sitting upright, he could no longer fool himself that he was trying to sleep in a puddle on the hard cot. Now that the sun was up, however, he might be able to get a fire going, he thought.

  That bastard Edwin can at least help me with that.

  He rose to change clothes again, goose bumps standing out on his pale flesh. He had no idea how cold it was, except that he could see his breath. He finished donning a moisture-wicking T-shirt and a wool sweater, and then he pulled out Edwin’s Comprehensive Guide.

  Chapter 1 discussed climate. It said breath became visible at fifty degrees or less, depending upon humidity. The weather had been rain, not snow, the night before, and his hands weren’t growing numb, which meant it probably wasn’t freezing. Closer to fifty. Thank God.

  With his coat on, he tried to shake the chill by moving about to inspect the cabin and rummaging through his pack to organize his gear. The cabin inspection took all of two minutes. I’ll have to clean it, he decided immediately. There was no counter space upon which to prepare food, the yellow jackets were a lurking menace, and the rat slaughter demanded a thorough scrub. There was no stove. More distressing, there was no canned food tucked away on shelves or in a cabinet. In fact, there were no shelves or cabinets at all. Stu tapped on the walls to see if there might be a hollow space. No dice. He even got down on the floor and looked under the cot. There was nothing—no cans of beans or freeze-dried soup or even Spam. He began to get a sick feeling in his gut that was either hunger or dread, or both.

  I’ll have to hunt.

  The cabin was also smaller than he’d thought the night before, which didn’t seem possible. Seven by seven. Forty-nine square feet, with the cot taking up fifteen of it and the fire pit five more. The cot would have to double as the food prep area, Stu decided, and he wished he hadn’t sprayed rodent guts all over it. His pack and duffel sat atop a cut log just inside the door, which kept them off the damp dirt floor. The cot still harbored small puddles of water courtesy of the hole he’d blasted in the ceiling. He wiped it off as best he could with his hand so he could sort his clothes. He already needed to hang his sleeping bag out to dry. With that thought in mind, he turned to the door. There was no more putting it off; it was time to face the day.

  The wood groaned, and the flood of light made him wince. He poked his head out and glanced about for bears, then shoved the door fully open and stepped through. The first breath of air was sharp and clean in his lungs. The sun still hid behind the ridge to the east. Its generous light spilled over the mountain and into the valley, but it remained stingy with its heat.

  “Friggin’ brrr!”

  Stu’s human voice sounded foreign in the quiet clearing. I don’t belong here. It also deflated the morning’s bubble of surrealism. He could have mistaken his dim minutes inside the cabin for a bad dream, but once he breathed the chilled air and talked aloud in the silent glade, there was no denying reality. And when the lush green backdrop of immaculate forest didn’t melt into the taupe and starched lace of his familiar bedroom walls on William Street, his Memory Foam pillow didn’t materialize beneath his head, and Katherine wasn’t pushing him off her side of the bed, there was no denying that he was thousands of miles from home in a completely ludicrous situation.

  He hung his sleeping bag on a limb to dry and sat nearby on a log to read. Edwin’s chapter 1 also had a short list of survival necessities. It first advised that a person should have appropriate clothing. Check. Thank you, Great Beyond, and one-percent-cash-back Visa card. He was supposed to secure shelter next, according to the list. One rotting cabin. Check. At least, it would be secured as soon as he did some roof repair and cleared out the wasps. A clean supply of water was the next priority. Stu looked down the hill. One huge pristine lake. Check. Then Stu’s stomach turned.

  Food.

  He’d been avoiding thinking about it, but this was the killer. He had no food. The cabin had no food. Edwin’s had suggestions. Wild vegetables. Edible flowers and trees. Hunting, trapping, or scavenging dead animals. Dead animals? Stu turned slowly.

  The decaying body of one of the rats he’d clubbed lay nearby. Its lips were pulled back to expose its long teeth, and the resulting expression was an angry shut-eyed grimace. Fuck you for killi
ng me, it seemed to be saying. Especially if you’re not going to eat me. Stu quickly decided that he wasn’t that desperate yet. He’d only missed breakfast so far. Besides, the flies were already at the body, along with one of his wasp friends.

  There was a lesson, however; any food he left out for more than a few moments would be eaten by other hungry animals. The second rat corpse was already missing. It had been thrown beside the first one. His bloody shirt was gone too. Stu shuddered to think what he’d attracted by leaving it there. A mistake. Edwin’s pointed out that “mistakes” in the wilderness accounted for more deaths than severe conditions. It also annoyingly reminded him that he should only kill what he intended to eat. I wonder if rats wrote that section, Stu thought.

  He gathered wood for a fire. Another piece of advice from Edwin’s. Filling the rock pit in the cabin took only a few branches, which he found lying around on the ground or snapped from nearby trees. He broke them to length by leaning them against the wall and stomping on them. He couldn’t stack them very high in the pit or they crept too near the top of the rock and too close to the log wall. There was space for one large dense log, but he had no ax. In Cub Scouts he’d learned to start fires—small tinder on the bottom, larger kindling in a pyramid on top, logs later. Easy enough. Some underbrush seemed a good bet for the tinder, and he lined the bottom of the rock pit with it.

  The Great Beyond fire kit contained a small box of matches along with the traditional and notoriously difficult-to-use metal match, designed to be used with a knife as a flint and steel. Stu went straight for the matches. Once he had a fire started, he could keep it going by adding wood. Simple. After that necessity was provided, he could try to learn the new skill. He went through five matches, however, without success. The shrubs caught, but the small branches didn’t. As he reached for a sixth, he decided to count the remainder. Ten. Not nearly enough for a week at his rate of failure. He gritted his teeth, swallowed his Cub Scout pride, and consulted Edwin’s.