Page 5 of Blazing Mountain Man

ELYSE

Cash breaks trail, and I stay in his boot prints.

That’s the first ten minutes. He goes first and punches the snow down, and I put my feet where his feet were. The wind comes across the open slope hard enough to lean on.

I keep waiting for the point where I fall apart. I’ve sent people up into this a hundred times from behind a warm counter, and some private, certain corner of me always assumed that if I ever had to walk into it myself, I’d come undone.

I don’t come undone.

I count. Switchbacks, elevation, the dark shape of the ranger box shrinking below us. I keep track of where we are and how we’d get back, because that’s what I do. That’s the thing my hands and my head know how to do no matter how cold it gets.

Turns out, working the desk taught me something, after all.

“You still with me?” Cash calls back, not turning.

“Arm’s length. Right where you put me.”

“That’s my girl.”

Two words, tossed over his shoulder into the wind, and they have no business warming me the way they do out here. I clock that too.

He stops at the lip of a shallow draw and throws up a fist. I stop before he finishes the motion, boots planted. He crouches. Below us, half-drifted into the lee of a boulder, there’s a shape that isn’t rock. A pack. An arm.

“There.” Cash is already moving, sure-footed down the pitch, and I follow his line down into the draw.

The hiker is conscious, barely, curled into himself with one leg wrong beneath him. Young. Gray at the lips. He got off the trail, went down the fall line looking for shelter, and put his ankle in a hole doing it.

Cash goes onto his knees in the snow, gloves off, hands sliding over the guy’s leg. He shifts to the man’s face, his color, moving with a speed that has nothing frantic in it.

“Hey. Hey, look at me. What’s your name?”

“Will.” It comes out through chattering teeth. “I couldn’t—I couldn’t get back up.”

“We’ve got you.” Cash pulls the emergency blanket from the kit, and the two of us wrap Will between us without a word passing about who does what. “Elyse, get the hot pack cracked, under his coat, against the skin. Will, this is going to hurt when we stand you up, and I need you to let it hurt and move anyway. Can you do that?”

“Yeah.”

“Say it like you mean it.”

“Yeah. I can.”

As I watch Cash work, I understand something the office never showed me. The man who walked into my office covered in flame ink—this is him. Not the guy who leaves, but this guy. Down in a drift with his bare hands on a stranger’s frozen leg, steady, certain, giving a scared kid something solid to hold.

He guides people up mountains. He also, it’s clear, brings them down.

“On three, we stand him,” Cash says to me across Will’s shivering weight. “You take that side. He goes up between us and stays up. It takes both of us.”

“Both of us,” I repeat.

Something crosses his face at that—quick and gone, older than this mountain. “Three,” he says, and we lift.

Will cries out and gets his good foot under him, and then he’s up, an arm over each of our shoulders. We start the long haul back up out of the draw and onto the trail.

It’s brutal. My legs burn, the wind’s in my teeth, and Will’s weight tries to fold me at every step. But every time I look across him, Cash is there, matching me, holding his half, while I hold mine. We move as one. I don’t drop him. Neither does Cash.

We come off the slope and down the last of it. The rig’s still there in the clearing where I left it, headlights burning through the snow, and I’ve never in my life been so glad to see something I’m responsible for.

We get Will onto the middle bench, wrapped. Cash climbs in after him and keeps working, checking, talking low and easy, and I drop into the driver’s seat, ready to take us all down the mountain and home.