The Great Alone

SHE SCREAMED UNTIL her throat hurt, but there was no one up there to hear. No help coming. No one even knew they were on the trail, let alone that they’d fallen into a crevice.

She’d fallen.

He’d tried to save her.

And here they were. Battered. Bleeding. Huddled together on this cold, flat rock.

Think.

Matthew lay beside her, his face bloodied and swollen and unrecognizable. A huge flap of skin had split away from his face and lay like a bloody dog’s ear, exposing the white-red bone beneath.

It was raining again. Water sluiced down the rock walls, turned the mud into a viscous pool. There was water all around them, swirling in the indentation in the rock, splashing, dripping, pooling. In the wan daylight that drifted down with the rain, she saw that Matthew’s blood had turned it pink.

Help him. Help us.

She crawled over him, slipped down off the rock, and dug through his pack for a tarp. It took a long time to tie it in place with only one good hand, but she finally did it, created a gulley to catch rainwater into two big thermoses. When one was full, she positioned the other thermos to collect water and then climbed back up onto the rock.

She tilted his chin, made him drink. He swallowed convulsively, gagged, coughed. Setting the thermos aside, she stared at his left leg. It looked like a pile of hamburger with a shard of bone sticking out.

She went to the packs, salvaged what she could. The first-aid kit was well stocked. She found Bactine, gauze, aspirin, and sanitary pads. She removed her belt. “This is not going to feel good. How about a poem? We used to love Robert Service, remember? When we were kids, we could recite the good ones by heart.”

She put her belt around his thigh and yanked it so tight he screamed and thrashed. Crying, knowing how much it had to hurt, she tightened it again and he lost consciousness.

She packed his wound with gauze and sanitary pads and bound it all in place with duct tape.

Then she held him as best she could with her broken arm and cracked rib.

Please don’t die.

Maybe he couldn’t feel her. Maybe he was as cold as she was. They were both soaking wet.

She had to let him know she was there.

The poems. She leaned close, whispered in his ear with her hoarse, failing voice, over the sound of her chattering teeth. “Were you ever out in the Great Alone when the moon was awful clear…”

* * *

HE HEARS SOMETHING. Jumbled sounds that mean nothing, letters flung in a pool, floating apart.

He tries to move. Can’t.

Numb. Pins and needles in his skin.

Pain. Excruciating. Head exploding, leg on fire.

He tries again to move, groans. Can’t think.

Where is this?

Pain is the biggest part of him. All there is. All that’s left. Pain. Blind. Alone.

No.

Her.

What does that mean?

* * *