Page 6 of Blazing Mountain Man

The rig noses out of the clearing and onto the road, and the headlights hit the pass, and I stop.

Where the road was, there’s no road.

The storm’s laid the whole cut over white—drift on drift of it had come down off the high side, deep and unbroken across the only way down. No plow’s been through and no plow’s coming. Not tonight. I ease the rig forward until the front wheels bite into the first drift and spin, and I feel the mountain quietly refuse to let us leave.

I put it in park.

“We’re not getting down, are we?” Cash asks from the back.

“The rig’s not.” One hand’s still on the wheel. Out past the glass, there’s nothing but white going dark, the trailhead behind us, the buried pass ahead. “Four feet of drift across the only road wide enough for this rig. No plow’s touching that until morning.”

But my other hand is already holding the radio. Will’s slack against the bench with a leg that needs a hospital, and a plowed road isn’t the only way off a mountain.

“Base, this is Elyse. We have the overdue party—conscious, lower-leg injury, hypothermic and stabilizing. We are snowed in at the north trailhead, pass is closed, rig can’t descend.” I watch the drifts eat the last of the light. “I need a sled or a sked up the north side for a patient evac. We can hold, but he can’t.”

The radio crackles. A pause that lasts a year, then, “Copy, Elyse. Ski patrol’s got a rescue sled that can reach you from the upper lot. Give us forty, maybe more in this. It’s a basket haul, patient only, and it’s a bad enough ride in this wind that I’m not putting anybody on that ridge who doesn’t have to be. We take the patient down, and the two of you sit tight in the rig until the plow opens the pass at first light. You’re warm, you’re not hurt, and that’s the safest place on the mountain right now. Keep that heater running.”

“Understood. Patient first.” I set the mic down.

Cash comes up from the back and drops into the passenger seat beside me. Close, in the dark, the heater between us. He looks out at the pass that won’t let him leave—this man who never stays anywhere, held still by four feet of snow.

“Well,” he says. “Guess you and I are stuck here for a while.”

4

CASH

The sled takes Will and leaves us the quiet.

I watch its light go down the north side and get swallowed—one patrol driver and a scared kid strapped in a basket, gone into the white where I can’t follow. Then there’s nothing out the windshield but snow coming sideways through the dark, the heater ticking, and Elyse in the driver’s seat with her hands finally still in her lap.

I brought him down. I put a life on my rope and brought him down, then stood in a drift and let somebody else carry him off the mountain. Every part of me that’s spent four years making sure I never had to do that again is loud right now.

It went right. It went the way the other one should have. I keep waiting to feel the difference, but I can’t find it yet.

The radio cuts in. “Elyse, this is Base. Patient’s off the mountain, en route to the clinic. Good work up there, both of you.”

Elyse keys it. “Copy. Any word on the plow?”

A pause. “Not before morning. Crew won’t touch that pass in the dark with it still coming down. You’ve got a full tank and a heater, so we’re holding you put until first light. Sit tight. Nothing up there but the two of you and the weather now.”

“Understood.” She sets the mic in its cradle. “All night, then.”

“Could be worse.” I say.

“Could be.” She pulls her knees up onto the seat and turns to face me, this small brave woman who walked into a storm because she doesn’t send people into it alone. “We have a full tank and a heater and nothing to do. So you might as well tell me the rest of it.”

“The rest of what?”

“Whatever’s been sitting on you since I keyed that radio.” Her eyes don’t leave me. “You went somewhere. Back in the office, you were all easy charm and I-don’t-winter-twice. The second there was a man missing on that ridge, you turned into somebody else. I want to know who.”

I could tell her the short version. That’s what I do. I give strangers the outline and keep the rest to myself.

But she’s not a stranger. I knew it in the office, and I’ve stopped fighting it somewhere on this mountain. Now it’s just the two of us in the dark with hours to fill, and I’m tired of running along the top of a wall.

“His name was Craig,” I say.

The name comes out into the warm cab, and it’s the first time I’ve said it aloud in longer than I can count.