LITMIR.BIZ

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paused. “What a crock of shit!”

      “I don’t think so,” Carrie said.

      “Are you kidding? Do you know what they say about the guys in Alaska?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “The odds are good, but the goods are odd. The goods are odd, Carrie, and that goes for your gorgeous adventurer.”

      “Hannah, for once in my life I know what I’m doing,” Carrie argued. “Besides, things will never change unless I make them change.”

      But now, lying in the darkness, the wind shaking the walls of the small cabin, Carrie could see Hannah making her points, each time touching a finger on her left hand with the index finger of her right.

      “First, he’s already been divorced. Second, he’s ten years older than you. Third, he’s unemployed.”

      “Wrong,” Carrie said. “Double wrong. He’s only seven years older and, besides, everyone’s unemployed in the wilderness. Unemployed is what they do.”

      Hannah closed her eyes and shook her head. “Fourth—and the real topper I might add—he’s built a log cabin a million miles from nowhere and you’re going to keep him company for an entire winter?”

      “But, Hannah, we’ll read and snow shoe and listen to the wolves and gaze at the stars. Bart says up there the stars look so close you feel you can reach up and touch them.”

      “That’s all you’ll do? All winter? I don’t think you get what ‘living off the grid’ means.” She started with her pinkie finger again. “It means there’s no running water—no hot showers—and no flush toilet.”

      And another finger. “And no electricity. That’s living off the grid.”

      Hannah paused. “Carrie, there’s not even a phone, for God’s sake. That could pose a real problem for you and what will you do if one of you gets sick, or Bart gets eaten by a bear or something?”

      Carrie told her that was all part of the adventure, of “living on the edge,” as Bart had put it, but now she felt her heart beating rapidly and found it hard to breathe and asked herself why she hadn’t listened to Hannah; why she hadn’t stayed home.

      Once again she wondered why Bart had wanted her to go with him. It certainly wasn’t for her survival skills. Was it because she was the only woman desperate enough to say she would? She reached for him to wake him, to tell him that she’d changed her mind, that she’d made a terrible—typical, Carrie Ritter—mistake. She hesitated, her hand hovering above Bart’s shoulder, and then lowered it and placed it over her heavily beating heart. She took a deep breath to quiet herself. She owed it to herself to do this. To get out of her rut, to prove that she could do things on her own, that she was more than people think and better, too. That she can get it right.

      She listened to Bart’s steady breathing mix with the sound of the wind rushing down the runway, the wind-sounds making her feel as if she was in the middle of some godforsaken river of snow, and she drew another breath, interlocked her fingers and squeezed her palms together hard, and let air out quietly through her mouth.

      She thought, I’ll show Hannah.

      The wind’s screaming seemed to grow louder and more desperate.

      And, I’ll show Bart, too.

      She filled her lungs again and exhaled slowly and promised she would. She laid her hands across her chest and smiled for, if worst came to worst, she could always give it up and go home.

      A LITTLE BEFORE first light, Carrie followed Whitey as he carried her bulging duffle bag across the runway and nestled it in the sled that looked like a large toboggan to Carrie. Six huskies—all, Bart had said, rejects from the camp’s kennels—were already harnessed to the sled and were curled in the snow to protect their faces and feet. As Carrie approached, one raised its head to look at her, its pale blue eyes squinting to protect them from the swirling snow.

      “You’re good to go, Miss Ritter,” Whitey said. “McFee and I stocked the camp well this summer. You’ll need to collect some meat along the way, but you should be fine until the spring.”

      Bart smiled. “Another walk in the park.”

      Whitey laughed. “Another winter, McFee. Another cold, dark winter. You take care.”

      The two men embraced and slapped each other on the backs of their large down parkas. Whitey turned to Carrie who forced a smile and shifted her weight from one boot to the other and crossed her arms against her chest to keep warm. “You okay?” he asked.

      “It’s freezing,” she said.

      “A little below,” Bart said.

      She felt a slight twinge of panic. “If it’s this cold now and it’s only October, what’s the weather like in January?”

      “It gets down into the twenties and thirties,” Bart said.

      “But it’s that now,” Carrie said.

      “Twenty or thirty below zero,” Bart said.

      Whitey chuckled as he fumbled for his cigarettes. “It was almost that cold yesterday up at Chandalar Lake.” He looked at Carrie, her face clouding over at the thought of thirty-below-zero temperatures, and turned to Bart. “I could fly you in the Beaver, if that would work better for you.”

      “We’ll be fine,” Bart said.

      Whitey nodded toward Carrie. “You’re sure?”

      Carrie wanted to hear more about flying into camp, but Bart interrupted her thought. “I’m sure,” he said. “Winter is the essence of life in the wilderness and I want Carrie to experience it all.”

      Whitey took a long drag on his cigarette. “She’ll do that,” he said. “That’s for damn sure,” and put out his hand to her.

      Carrie shook his hand. “This is it?” she asked. She wasn’t prepared for the suddenness of the goodbyes, for such a sudden start to her adventure.

      “It’s all she wrote,” Whitey said. “Enjoy the Riviera.”

      Oh, my God! It gets to be thirty below zero and it’s dark all day long and they joke about it? She slumped in the narrow sled, zipped her parka under her chin and arranged a pile of caribou skins over and around her to protect her from the wind that lifted snow in small, icy clouds around her.

      “Ready?” Bart asked.

      Again she thought she had something to prove and, again thought she could always come home. She cleared her throat and whispered, “Ready.”

      Bart walked the line of sleeping dogs and prodded each with the toe of his boot and clucked, “Up you gup. Up you gup.” All six stood and shook the snow from their thick fur. The two closest to the sled reared on their hindquarters and snarled at each other before settling down. Bart adjusted the headlamp he’d strapped over his wool cap, stepped on the sled’s foot boards, gripped the handle bar with both hands and yelled, “Hike up!”

      The dogs barked wildly and strained against the towline. Slowly the sled picked up speed. The swirling snow blinded Carrie, her sinuses bruised by the cold, and she realized that all those things that she imagined only happened in books or on TV or in the movies—whiteouts and avalanches and gangrene and people freezing to death—could happen to her. She slipped on her dark glasses and settled deeper in the sled and knotted her scarf across her nose and mouth and tried to curl up, the way the huskies did, to keep warm. Two days of this? she thought. I’ll never make it. Six months of this? What have I gotten myself into?

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