Chapter 18

Alice and I hurried toward the source of illumination like moths to a flame. A glimmering halo of white light surrounded the hole Alice cut through the snow drift at the tunnel’s entrance. I crawled into the air shaft that she’d excavated and punched through a thin cap of frost at the end and was instantly dazzled by blinding sunshine.

“Alice, come here and take a look, you aren’t going to believe this,” I shouted over my shoulder as I emerged into the open air.

The blizzard had passed us by, and the heavy overcast it left in its wake was riddled with expanding patches of brilliant blue sky. The sun had broken through the clouds at the center of the largest patch of sky and blazed in magnificent glory.

A few moments later, she emerged from the tunnel and took her place next to me. We stood together, speechless and in awe, with our arms around each other.

The land itself lay before us, transformed by the blizzard into a visual wonderland of strange beauty. The storm swept all the colors of the world away, and only vivid blues, dazzling whites, and a thousand shades of gray remained. The thin, clear air distorted distance judgment in such a way that far away mountain ranges appeared close enough to reach out and touch. Snow-capped summits all along the western horizon blazed white with reflected sunlight against a sky so blue that the color bordered on black.

“Have you ever seen anything so beautiful, Dennis?” Alice gave me an extra hug and rested her head on my shoulder.

“Not in this lifetime.” I kissed the top of her head and returned her hug. “Where did we park Mr. Kawasaki?”

I searched the blanket of snow before us for any sign of our ATV. It was nowhere to be seen.

“I think our Mule is under the drift.”

Alice pointed to a low mound of snow about 10 yards to our right. The chest-high snow made forward motion almost impossible without an extraordinary amount of effort. Any thought of walking back to Liberty Base vanished before I had gone five yards. Our buried ATV wasn’t going anywhere until next spring, and there was no way we would be able to hike the fifteen miles back to base through this snow cover.

“Do you know how to make snowshoes, Alice?”

“No, but the Spanish SAS Survival Manual has a section on how to make them,” Alice said.

“Can you read Spanish?”

“Nope, but we can copy the pictures in the manual. We’ll need to get branches from a pine tree.”

Alice ducked back into the passageway and emerged with our survival saw a few minutes later. We set off together to investigate the nearest stand of evergreens about a quarter mile to our left. The human body is a remarkable machine, but it’s a lousy snowplow.

I was utterly exhausted by the time we reached the trees. I had never been athletic as a youth, and my physical stamina hasn’t improved with age. Alice, on the other hand, looked like she was ready to do a twenty-mile hike. I grimaced; nobody should be so fucking perky after slogging through waist-deep snow.

After about twenty minutes of work, we had cut or collected enough pine branches, garlands, and barrows to decorate the Sistine Chapel. We knitted the load together using paracord and dragged our Evergreen sled across the snowy valley instead of carrying the greenery back to our shelter. We spent a few minutes scooping out a semi-sheltered work area: a depression surrounded by piles of snow to block most of the wind upon arrival.

We had plenty of green pine fuel. We got our hobo stove started and burning in short order and melted snow for drinking water. Our all-purpose chamber pot came in handy, and the steam was an excellent hand warmer. Alice’s attempt to build a replica of the snowshoes pictured in the Spanish survival manual was a perfect reproduction of the illustration.

“Viola!” she said as she triumphantly held her completed set of Spanish snowshoes aloft for me to view and admire. “It was too easy,” she laughed as her smile shifted from grin to gloat.

“Nice,” I mumbled, too embarrassed to speak.

I knew in my gut that I was never going to hear the end of this one. At the age of five, I became a legend as the only kid in my hometown to ever flunk kindergarten Arts and Crafts.

Alice decided to strut her stuff for the hell of it and started tromping across the top of the snow in her snowshoes. Pride goeth before fall. Her footwear fell apart no more than five steps into her victory march. She practically vanished from view as she sank to her neck in powdery snow. The devil lives in the details in the snowshoe business.

We played woodland cobbler and tried to make a working pair of snowshoes for the next several hours. Alice’s creations were things of beauty. Although my efforts were less than stylish, they had one thing in common with my partner’s design. Neither one of them worked worth a damn.

The one thing we didn’t count on in our fight against frostbite and hypothermia was getting sunburned. A UV barbecue is exactly what we got. After about thirty minutes of labor, our faces looked like supermarket tomatoes: red, juicy, and overpriced.

“The cupboard is bare, and we’ve officially run out of food.” Alice licked her fingers and stared forlornly at the empty MRE packages at our feet.

“Correction; we’ve run out of prepared food. We still have a pantry full of legless protein awaiting our culinary expertise.” I waved my arm at the sleeping snakes in the darkness beyond our tent.