BAILEY STEPPED BACK TO SURVEY THE FRUITS OF HER labor, and not because she was overwhelmed by its beauty. The “shelter”—she hoped it was sturdy enough to qualify—was such a motley collection of odds and ends, and so weirdly shaped, that a third-world country might have disavowed it. Her knees were wobbly—after all the work putting the shelter together she was on the verge of falling on her face.
Her head was throbbing with pain. She was so thirsty her mouth felt like cotton, and melting snow in her mouth provided only short-term relief, plus it made her even colder. She was hungry. She ached all over, her muscles protesting every move. And she was so dizzy that, toward the end, she’d been forced to crawl, which meant her sweatpants had gotten wet with the snow and now leeched even more of her body heat away.
But the thing was finished, and she and Justice had a place to sleep that, if it didn’t fall down on top of them, would provide at least some protection from the icy wind. And that wasn’t easy.
WITH ONLY JUSTICE’S pocketknife for cutting, she had to use what broken limbs and branches she could find. The plane had broken a lot of limbs, but not all of them had been sheared completely off. Some of those that hadn’t been completely broken off she’d been able to hack free, if they were hanging by a few shreds, but she couldn’t afford to spend a lot of energy or time on them. Picking up two broken limbs from the ground, even if they weren’t as sturdy as one left still hanging, was much easier than performing an amputation with a pocketknife.
After picking out a sort of oblong spot among a fairly tight grouping of trees, tucked against the slightly concave side of a boulder and recommended mostly because the spot was fairly level, as well as by the lack of large roots protruding from the ground, she had scraped away as much snow as she could and lined the cleared spot with a crosshatch pattern of the most limber branches. All of the trees seemed to be evergreens and firs, so the branches with their bristling of needles would make a good, cushioned layer between them and the ground.
Maybe she went about it backward, but for her own thought patterns she needed to make their bed first, then build the shelter around it so she could better visualize how large the shelter should be. As he’d said, the smaller the better. Because she was concerned about getting the shelter long enough so he could stretch out his legs, she stood beside him and carefully measured him by the heel-to-toe method. He was a little longer than seven of her heel-to-toe steps.
He watched her do this, a quizzical little frown on his face. “Are you practicing for a sobriety test, or something?”
“I’m measuring you. You’re an inch or so longer than seven feet—my real feet, not the twelve-inch kind. I don’t want to make the shelter too short for you.”
She tried to make their bed maybe an inch longer than that—rather, she tried to make one side of it longer than that, because overall the thing was kind of lopsided because of how the trees were positioned. She figured she’d take the short side.
Over the crosshatch of limbs and needles, she put the foam pads she’d removed from the plane’s seats. She had six short pads and one long piece from the bench seat, and she figured that would give more cushioning than they’d have in sleeping bags. Given her druthers, though, she’d have taken the sleeping bag—at least that way she’d be warm. Staying warm tonight, without a fire, would be a real challenge.
When she had the pads positioned, she went to work with the bigger limbs. Obviously she needed some sort of frame, and just as obviously her roll of duct tape was called for to lash the limbs together, but she was oddly reluctant to use it. The roll was a small one, and wouldn’t go far. If she used strips of cloth to tie the skeleton frame together, at least the strips could be reused if she didn’t get it right the first time, whereas the tape, once it was used, was gone.
The ruined silk jacket was perfect for cutting into pieces.
At first she tried making an inverted V-shaped thing, but that was evidently beyond her building skills, which wasn’t surprising. After the rudimentary frame collapsed for the third time, she made an executive decision and stopped wasting time on that method.
Returning to where Justice lay under the mound of clothing, she crouched beside him and said, “Remember when I said I suck at construction?”
He cracked his eyes open. “Is this your way of telling me we’re sleeping in the open tonight?”
“No, this is my way of asking for help. Help! Just give me some instructions. Pointers. Anything. If you have any experience at this, you know more than I do.”
“I thought you’d been rafting before.”
“I have. I’d like to point out that you don’t raft on top of a snow-covered mountain.”
“Didn’t you set up a tent?”
She made a scoffing noise. “I was a college student. Of course not. We slept in sleeping bags, around a campfire.”
“Okay.” He thought a moment. “What type were you trying to build? An A-frame, or a lean-to?”
“A-frame. I can’t get it to stand up.”
“Make the base first. Lay out the long sides with two parallel long branches, then lay the cross braces on top, one on each end, and secure all four corners.”
That sounded easy enough. Returning to the site of collapse, she sorted out the variety of limbs, sticks, and branches into the two best fits for the length of the bed, which she then placed, one on each side. Then she positioned two shorter limbs, one on each end, and used the strips of silk to tie each short limb to the two longer ones. When she finished she wiggled the frame to see how sturdy it was, cautiously pulled each knot tighter, and wiggled the frame again. Good enough.