Chapter 3

You'd think after a hard days work in the wilds I'd be ready to do some business with two naked women in the same sleeping bag with me. I wasn't and it was obvious neither of them had any ideas at all along those lines. They were beautiful, sexy, and almost naked. I wasn't interested. Our miraculous luck surviving the crash and our current precarious situation kept carnal thoughts on the back burner and that burner wasn't even lit. The biggest surprise was that I fell asleep almost at once.

There was no light streaming in the next morning since I'd done a good job of patching the fuselage with duct tape. When I woke it was still easy to tell the sun was up though since I could see there was light on the other side of the tarp closing off the cockpit. My next thought was about trying out the girl's camp potty. I needed to piss worse than a Rocky Mountain Racehorse. To make things worse there was no way to get out of the fart sack without waking Chris and Mary.

"Where are you going in such a hurry?" Chris asked.

"I have to piss and I don't have time to get dressed and go outside first. I'm gonna try out your potty."

"Well you'd better be able to pee sitting down then. That seat doesn't raise and if you splash all over it Mary and I are gonna throw you outside in your drawers. And don't you dare take a dump. You'll gas us all to death. Come on Mary, let's pull the bag over our heads and zip it closed just in case."

She needn't have worried. I didn't like the smell of shit any better than anyone else. I was a happy man when I sat on the potty and got to relieve the pressure in my bladder. It also made me remember we were probably going to be dehydrated if we didn't pay extra attention to taking in fluids today.

Weather as cold as we were in left damned little humidity in the air. I wasn't familiar with any of the facts and figures but even an idiot could see we were exhaling an awful lot of moisture with every breath. We drank a little water yesterday but probably not as much as we would normally and we hadn't brought that much with us. Nobody needs a lot of bottled water in Alaska.

As soon as I dismounted I found out I wasn't the only one that needed the throne. Mary was out of the bag with her big titties jiggling in a flash and she didn't even mention that I should turn my head. I did anyway because I'd never had a sexy thought about a woman pissing and if one should come up out of the blue somehow, now sure as hell wasn't the time for it.

Mary was on and off in record time and Chris nearly knocked her down as she made her way to the perch. I was trying to ignore them and get into my clothes. We had a hell of a job lined out for us already, what with unloading our stuff and all, and another one had come to me while I was reigning.

We needed to get a big bonfire ready in case we heard aircraft. I wanted to make it easy to get started and have plenty of evergreen branches ready to throw on for smoke. There was no sense in starting it before we heard the searcher's engines since it would work us to death trying to keep it going all the time. Still, we needed to be able to touch it off at the first hint of engines.

That realization brought up a decision Carl and I had made that really pissed me off now. He'd wanted to buy four snowmobiles for our trip and like all really great ideas he had, he hadn't come up with it until the last minute. I pointed out that while they'd be great we just didn't have time to arrange for getting them to the jump off point in Alaska before we had to fly up.

We didn't have time, or I'd told him we didn't, since I didn't want them at all. I'd felt sure the vacation would degenerate into weeks of snowmobile riding instead of hunting and fishing if Carl had the loud monsters with us. Carl was a guy who liked to have fun and while I did too, mechanical fun didn't do that much for me. Besides, we could buy snowmobiles and drive them all we wanted at home. Montana had plenty of places to go ride snowmobiles without the bother of having to fly them in and bring along fuel by air too. Hell, we'd have had to hire another helicopter just to haul the extra fuel.

Of course, now I wished like hell I'd been more of a fun loving guy. With four snowmobiles and plenty of fuel we could get our selves out of this mess. Not to mention the fact that chances were both helicopters wouldn't have crashed and we could have pitched out the fuel and flown back in the other one. Hindsight is twenty twenty and all that shit. We didn't have any snowmobiles, any fuel, or any second helicopter. We'd just have to wait.

And that was another thing. I'd forgotten to try the multi-band radios last night. I don't guess it really mattered much. All it would have told us was the world was still there since I didn't have a transmitter and wouldn't know the proper way to use it if I did. Oh, I'd listened to Ham operators enough to know what to do if I had a working transmitter. It wouldn't be proper procedure or anything, but that wouldn't have really mattered.

There are thousands of guys sitting up all hours of the day and night listening and talking on Ham radios and they live to get a chance to be in on a situation like ours. One good transmission that any of them could pick up would have all of them over the world focusing on trying to help. I'm sure most of them would be mad at me if they ever found out I had been so rude as to leave them completely out by not bringing a transmitter of any type. They'd have to get in line though because right about now I was pretty mad at myself over it.

Melting snow to get water was going to be my first project. Finding clean snow was not going to be a problem and besides, I had three different kinds of filtering contraptions in the stores. We'd planned on four weeks in the wilds and I'd thought this part through. All I needed was three stout sticks for a little tripod to hang a bag of snow from and we'd be in business, kinda.

We should be able to get a good bit of water without even building a fire. One of the methods I'd bought into was hanging a black plastic bag from the tripod and putting a black plastic capture pot beneath it. The black color was supposed to gather enough heat from sunlight to melt the snow and keep it melted. At least it was supposed to work that way unless the temperature outside was below zero. For once I planned ahead and found one of our thermometers to check and see exactly how cold it was outside.

Damned if we weren't exactly on the borderline for this to work, according to the instructions anyway. After I broke out our miniature weather station it let me know the temp was right on zero and the wind was coming out of the north at three to six miles per hour. I set the contraption up and hoped for the best. Meanwhile, back to the signal fire site.

The crash into the trees had helped us out here. I'm sure the rotors hadn't lasted long in the treetops but they had brought down a hell of a lot of limbs and branches. The chainsaw we'd brought along because we expected to be too damned lazy to spend much time cutting wood the old-fashioned way helped too. I wasn't in the mood for real lumberjack work but I found a couple of hardwoods that weren't too big and put them on the ground, uh snow. We'd have plenty of wood for at least a couple of hours of signal fire and it didn't take much work to gather loads of branches off other evergreens to pile near the fire for making plenty of smoke.

The next thing I needed for the signal fire was something I dreaded so we took a break after the main part of the fire was ready and did our unloading job. It was more work than we wanted to do but actually less than I'd thought. We didn't have much distance to carry anything and we saved a lot of time by having Chris throw me boxes from the stacks while I stood at the door and handed them to Mary so she could stack them on the sleds we pulled right up to the door.

By the time we had everything out and loaded and then pulled about a hundred yards from the helicopter it was past noon. I cleared off snow from the ground so we could build a cooking fire and then got it going. While Mary and Chris took care of the cooking I gathered what squaw wood I could find and when the beef stew was ready to eat I was more than ready to eat it.

Damn, it was nice to have real food and plenty of it again. There's also something about having a campfire that makes a human feel secure, especially in weather like this. What I wanted to do right now was set up one of our tents, but I didn't. The signal fire's finishing touches was next on my agenda and it was time to get moving.