I sighed. “Okay, speaking of heat, we need to collect some firewood.”
“Let me put the last of this on the fire and then we’ll go out together. I saw a wolf or a coyote or something yesterday, and I don’t want you to come across one of those things on your own.”
“A wolf? I’ve heard them at night, but I thought they were far away. Are they dangerous?”
“I don’t know, but let’s not find out.”
I shivered slightly, not just with cold but with the thought of running into one of those wild things on my own in the forest. Not that there was much meat left on my bones at the moment anyway. I probably wouldn’t look very tasty to a carnivore.
We collected as much wood as we could, Dane lifting me up to reach the higher branches he couldn’t reach on his own. I was able to collect more that way. The higher the branches went, the stronger they got, and we still had no way to chop them off, relying on our own ability to pull and wrench them off the trees. By the time we were done, my arm muscles ached, but we had a decent-sized pile of wood.
As we were heading back, I noticed a furry brown plant growing near a dip in the snow. I rushed over to them, turning toward Dane. “Cattails,” I said. “The stalks are edible.”
“How do you know?”
“I work with plants. I don’t know . . . I come across weird information in books, magazines. These won’t fill us up, but they’ll feed us.”
“Hand me the wood you’re holding and pick as many as you can,” Dane said, coming up right behind me. I transferred the branches to his arms so his pile was up to his chin, and he waited as I plucked as many cattails as I could from the ground.
We headed to our camp and fed the fire and then ourselves, Dane’s expression grim as our eyes met over the precious little food left. I reached for a cattail, pulling off the fluffy head and handing Dane the stem. “It probably won’t taste great, but it has vitamins in it. Wash it down with some water.”
He nodded, ripping off a piece of the stem with his teeth, chewing and swallowing. “Not bad, actually. Kind of starchy and sweet.” He took another bite as I plucked another stem for myself, taking a bite and nodding in agreement with his assessment of the taste. It wasn’t bad. I still felt hungry after we’d eaten, but the hunger’s sharp edge had been dulled and for that small mercy, I was grateful.
“What are your ideas about climbing out of here?”
Dane looked at me, putting the last piece of the cattail stem in his mouth and eating it slowly. “We’d have to make something—a rope—to get us down one of the cliffs. I think the eastern one is our best bet. There’s a rock formation to tie one end to and it looks just slightly lower than the others.”
I nodded slowly. He’d obviously put some thought into this. He must have admitted to himself days ago that our rescue hopes were over. “What could we possibly use as a rope? We don’t have anything strong enough.”
“We could strip the leather from the airplane seats and cut it into strips, tie it together to form a long rope,” he said.
“You said we wouldn’t get back on that plane, that forcing a seat from the base would jar it too much to be safe.”
“I know what I said, but it might be worth the risk. It might be our only option.”
I stared at him. It seemed like a terrible option. That precariously balanced plane scared the hell out of me. I had a bad feeling about it. If it even slipped a little, the ice it was on would only make it slip that much more easily. “What if we get down the cliff and then there isn’t a path from there that doesn’t involve an even higher cliff?”
Dane puffed out a breath, sticking his hands in his pockets and shivering slightly. “There’s no way to know that. We just have to decide if it’s worth the risk.”
“We’d have to leave our fire behind, with no way to make another one. And how would we bring the things we need to make a shelter?”
Dane massaged the back of his neck. “We could use the same method you did to get me up here from that plane. We’d make a sled, decide what we couldn’t do without, and carry that behind us. Maybe we’d make a strap so the sled would be easier to drag.”
“God, Dane, you really have thought about this.”
“I think we have to. No one’s coming for us. We’re on our own.”
My heart seemed to contract slowly and then expand all at once, my breath coming out in a quick gasp. But I forced myself to breathe deeply, to nod my head. “Yeah,” I whispered. “Yeah.”
“We’re going to survive this, Audra. Do you trust me?”
I stared at the man sitting across from me, the man I’d fallen in love with so long ago, the man I’d never truly gotten over. We’d gone to hell once together, and we’d walked out separately. In some ways it felt like we were in hell together, again, just a different sort. But this time, we wouldn’t make the same mistakes. This time, we were going to link hands and survive. Somehow. Somehow. “Yes. I trust you.”
His expression softened and he smiled, small, tender. “You and me?”
“You and me,” I confirmed.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX