“I guess this is where we make the fire,” Cam said, bracing the sled against a big rock so it wouldn’t go careering down the mountain. Wearily he removed the harness, then wiped the sweat from his face.
“Here?” This was bad. If they weren’t rescued, there was no good place here to construct even the roughest shelter. Even the trees were relatively sparse in this area, which would make gathering firewood more arduous. She sighed; it wasn’t as if they were overloaded with choices. This was the end of the trail. “Here.”
He stretched his back muscles, rolled his head back and forth. Then he laughed and said, “Look.”
She looked where he pointed and saw, not all that far below them, where the snow ended. There wasn’t a sharp line of demarkation, but a gradual lessening of the snow and thickening of trees. Unfortunately, they couldn’t get there now.
Bailey lifted her face into the wind, and realized that it wasn’t much more than a breeze. Smoke from the fire might stay together enough to be noticed, if not now, maybe tomorrow. They’d build this fire big and smoky and keep it going until someone noticed and came to investigate, damn it.
Cam was already doing the prep work, scraping away snow, digging a shallow pit. Bailey let the backpack drop off her shoulders and went in search of firewood. She couldn’t gather much at one time, because she had to have one hand free for balance and climbing; on a trip back, she noticed that he’d dug three fire pits. “Why are there three of them?”
“Three is a universal distress signal: three blasts of a whistle, three fires, three stacks of rocks—whatever you use, there should be three of them.”
“The things I’ve learned on this vacation,” she said drily, returning to her task. On a practical basis, three fires meant she had to gather three times as much wood. Yippee.
With wood laid in all three pits and paper and bark scrapings as tinder, Cam sparked one more fire from the battery. Carefully they built the blaze, feeding it until the wood began blazing, then using a burning stick to take flame to the other pits. Soon all three were blazing high, but there didn’t seem to be a lot of smoke. She wanted hugh billows of smoke, a column of it reaching a mile high.
Cam was evidently thinking the same thing, because he added some green wood to all three fires. The smoke that was soon puffing out was more gratifying.
“Now we wait,” he said, putting his arm around her and pulling her in for a slow, deep kiss. She leaned against him, too exhausted to do much more than simply loop her arms around his waist.
He dragged the trash bags of clothes off the sled and positioned them side by side. With the contents punched into just the right position, the trash bags functioned somewhat like bean bags, and they both gratefully sank onto their makeshift seats. For several minutes they didn’t speak at all, but gathered what strength they had left. When he did speak, she was surprised by the track of his thoughts.
“When we get back,” he said, “don’t you dare try to pull away from me.”
She couldn’t say the thought hadn’t occurred to her several times since she’d first realized how important he was becoming to her. When she had truly panicked, however, was when she knew that it was too late to pull away. “I won’t,” she said simply, turning her head to smile at him. She held out her hand. He took it, folding her fingers in his, and raised her hand to hold against his cheek.
Just before sunset they were still sitting on their trash bag chairs, looking out over the mountains like two tourists, when they heard the distinctive beat of the helicopter’s blades. Cam rose to his feet, waving his arms as the helicopter surged into view, swooping toward them like a moth toward three flames.
33
THE HELICOPTER HOVERED OVER THEM, SO CLOSE THAT wind from the blades whipped around them and Bailey could see the sunglasses the pilot was wearing. Beside him was another man; they both seemed to be wearing some sort of uniform, so she assumed they were with the Forestry Service. There was no place for the chopper to land, but what mattered was that now someone knew where they were, and help would arrive—soon, she hoped. They hadn’t built a shelter, but if need be they would sit by the fires all night to stay warm.
She was so bone-tired she didn’t think she could have helped build a shelter, anyway. She didn’t even stand up to wave at the helicopter, despite the excitement of imminent rescue—or fairly imminent rescue, depending on how long it took a team to reach them.
Cam was making some hand signals to the pilot. “Tell him to go get some sleeping bags and drop them down to us,” she told him. “And a couple thermoses of coffee. And a dozen doughnuts. Oh, and a two-way radio would be nice.” Fatigue was making her giddy, but she didn’t care.
The helicopter banked away from the mountain, returning from whence it came. She heaved a sigh as she watched it leave. Somehow this was rather anticlimactic.
Cam was laughing as he sat down beside her. “Hand signals don’t run to that kind of detail.”
“What did you tell him?”
“That there are two of us, and we’re both ambulatory, meaning a rescue team shouldn’t risk their lives trying to get to us. And that we’ve been here five days.”
She stretched out her legs and crossed them at the ankle. This was almost like sitting on a porch somewhere, admiring the view—which was spectacular—but instead of a porch she was lounging on a steep mountainside, with a vertical cliff not far to her left. “We should probably get ready for nightfall. Gather more firewood, make a shelter, that kind of stuff.”