He arranged this tender on a flat rock and worried the bullet out of a cartridge with his teeth. He spread the powder over his kindling, buried the mouth of the casing in the pile, and held it down with a rock.  Taking his knife, he tapped the primer.

Nothing!

He tapped it harder, and still nothing happened. Shivering and desperate, Tim dropped his knife and struck the casing with a rock. There was a sharp crack and the kindling scattered, but nothing took fire.

A spasm of shivering moved through him and he whimpered in the cold. Flint and steel. It was the only thing left to him, but he had no flint. He grabbed a broken off piece of granite and beat it viciously with his knife. It made no sparks. He tossed it aside and tried another. His breath was coming in sobs now. No sparks. 

He fell to his knees and rummaged among the pebbles and broken rocks, searching for something that was not granite. For a moment, the moon broke through, and he grabbed a rock that was shinier than the rest. He struck it with his knife.

A spark appeared. Tim struck it again and again until a shower of sparks fell on the damp tender. The gunpowder ignited, fizzling and snapping. Tim dropped the rock and knife and fell on his belly.

Blowing gently, he nursed the flame. A shred of bark shriveled and flared, then another. He held a fuzz stick above the tiny flame until it was fully burning, being careful not to smother it. Now he had a handful of flame and be began to feed it larger pieces of wood.

When finger thick pieces of wood were burning, Tim began to relax. He stretched his hands over the flame. Returning circulation almost made him cry out.

Tim gathered more wood and started another fire six feet from the first, then built a woodpile between them. He settled down there, warming himself and feeding them both. It was over an hour before the shivering stopped.

* * *

In the predawn light, Tim examined the rock he had used to start the fire. It glinted with metallic, golden flakes.  Pyrites – fool’s gold. The miners who had dug California’s hills for real gold had despised it, but to Tim it was a treasure.

The canvas case that had carried his emergency gear was basically undamaged. Only the snap had torn out. Tim bored holes in it and tied it shut with strings cut from his shirt cuff to make a secure case for his firestone.

He did not know how long it had been since he started his fire. He had watched the moon cross about a third of the sky before sunrise, peeking from time to time through the overcast. It was a glorious sunrise, but Tim hardly noticed.

Tim could not remember what had happened to him. He could only reason it out. He must have fallen into the stream, and it must have carried him downstream. Had he hit his head against one of those fang shaped rocks?

He explored his head with his fingers. There was a gash above and behind his left ear which had formed its own poultice of matted blood, dirt, and hair. Tim decided to leave it alone, since he could not see to tend it. It explained why he did not remember how he got where he was. It also explained his throbbing headache. more tomorrow

The stream roared in its bed, and towhees darted about, showing him their red sides as the flitted by. Tim was watching them, when he saw his deer. The stream took a sharp bend here, so he saw the muley through a double screen of willows and across the open space above the stream. Its forequarters were matted with dried blood.

“Finally,” Tim thought. He brought up his rifle. Walking at a half crouch, he worked out to the lip of the stream. The wind was upstream and the deer was not looking his way, so he waited, hoping it would move. A tree trunk lay between Tim and a prefect shot. But the muley didn’t move, so Tim carefully shifted sideways.

A rock turned under his foot, the rifle went off into the air, and Tim fell through space into a pit of blackness.

Chapter 2

Tim was caught up and swept away. For an eternity, he fell through frigid space, beaten by unseen fists.

Then there was a time of drifting and slow surrender.

There was an endless slope where he chased his quarry. Then the quarry turned on him and he was running downhill in frenzied panic.

There was the cold. The numbing, all consuming cold.

Finally there was ultimate blackness.

* * *

It was the cold that woke him.

His consciousness did not return all at once. First he was aware of the crumbled granite beneath his cheek. Then he became aware that his clothes were wet and that the world was dark.

Tim rolled over onto his back, tearing his ice encrusted jeans loose from the rock. The moon was up and for a time Tim had no idea where he was.

Fire! He had to have a fire. His clothes were soaked, where they had not crusted with ice. He reached for his match case, but it was not there. The survival pack was torn open and empty.

He sat for a minute, holding his head and shivering.

He was beginning to remember his plunge into the stream. Somewhere along the line, he must have hit his head. His fingers explored his scalp and came away damp and sticky. He had probably smashed into one of the boulders that studded the stream.

He raised his head and looked around. He was nowhere near the stream. He was high on a slope in broken granite country; the boulders and stunted trees around him made fantastic shapes in the night.

And he was freezing!

The cold was intense. As he became more fully awake and aware, Tim’s discomfort changed to pain. His fingers ached deep in the joints and he shivered so that he could hardly move.

His rifle was gone. His watch was gone. He had an empty canteen and a hunting knife at his belt, but the canvas case that held his survival kit had torn open. The snake bite kit, salt tablets, coil of snare wire, coil of fish line, hooks, sinkers, compass and plastic poncho – all the things his dad had helped him put together, all were gone. He still had the clothes he was wearing, a handkerchief, and four cartridges for his missing rifle.

Those cartridges seemed his best hope of a fire. He knew how to start a fire with them if he had a rifle. But without one . . . ?

He gathered firewood as best he could in the near darkness, where the moon only showed occasionally through the clouds. Using his knife, he shredded bark from the driest wood and cut fuzz sticks. He arranged this tender on a flat rock and worried the bullet out of a cartridge with his teeth. more tomorrow

Tim started up the slope and the muley broke from cover.  With surprising speed, it went up the slope on three legs. Tim sighted quickly and squeezed the trigger – but nothing happened! He had forgotten to work the lever after his first shot. He jacked a shell angrily into the chamber and fired, but the deer kept right on going, and he knew he had missed.

Tim topped the skyline fifteen minutes later. Below him was a broad, shallow valley, now lost in shadow, and behind him the sun was setting. The deer was nowhere in sight.

* * *

Tim was in trouble, and he knew it. It was too late to find his way back to the campground before full dark, and he was growing cold, so he built a fire near a circle of junipers. He had slept out many times with his father, but never without a sleeping bag or jacket, and never without food. “Serves you right,” he told himself, bitterly. He fed the fire and squeezed close to it.

Tim could imagine his mother coming home from work, past midnight, and moving about the silent, empty house. She would see his note. If he was really lucky, she would assume that he had decided to spend the night at his grandfather’s house. It would be late, so she probably wouldn’t call. It would probably be morning before she knew he was missing.

If he just had his cell phone he could have told her what happened, although he cringed at how lame the story would sound.

It was a miserable night. Tim dozed in snatches on a bed of dry ferns and needles. Before is was fully light, Tim had already stamped out his fire and started off, but even exercise did little to warm him.

He had a decision to make. Within an hour, his mother would be calling his grandfather, and would find out that he wasn’t there. He didn’t want to worry her, but there was no way to avoid it now. The question was, should he go back immediately and face her, or should he spend a little more time to bring the muley in. He decided to spend one hour looking for the injured muley, then he would have to go back.

The ground was too rocky to take tracks, so he headed for the stream he could see at the base of the valley. It was rocky with only a few patches of dirt, and he found no tracks there, so he worked his way downstream, looking for anything to indicate that the deer had passed that way.

Just when he was about to give up and turn back, he found three-legged deer tracks.

Now Tim was really in a dilemma. He didn’t want his mother to worry, but he didn’t want to leave his wounded deer either. And he certainly didn’t want to have to tell his dad that he had left a wounded animal.

“Just a little longer,” he decided.

Tim followed the tracks down the valley. It was slow work; the tracks only appeared at scattered intervals where the ground was soft enough to hold them. Several times he lost them altogether, but always managed to pick them up again.

The sunny morning was turning into a very cloudy day. Up here snow would be dangerous, and even rain would be a first class misery. At least he had the survival pack his father had helped him put together. It held matches and a plastic poncho, and he never went into the woods without it.

The stream roared in its bed, and towhees darted about, showing him their red sides as the flitted by. Tim was watching them, when he saw his deer. more next week

He hid his bike in the manzanita a hundred yards from the campground and took his rifle with him. Then he slipped a few cartridges into the magazine, just in case.

He walked into the woods. It was late October and the Sierra Nevada mountains of California were beautiful. The aspens were gold against the deep green of the firs and the air was clear and cool. As the morning slipped by he occasionally heard the shots of other hunters, but he didn’t see any deer.

By mid-afternoon, Tim reached a high valley, cut through by a small, swift brook. There he lay back with the sound of water in his ears. The rifle was across his stomach as his eyes searched the edges of the trees.

Five deer came out of the woods on an eyebrow of trail fifty feet higher up the slope and a long hundred yards away. A four point buck led the way, followed by three does and a yearling. Tim sat up and brought up his rifle. He took up slack on the trigger and squeezed gently, just as his father had taught him.

In the moment that Tim fired, the lead muley caught sight of him and pulled up short, then stumbled. His forequarters failed him and his chest hit the trail as his back legs struggled for balance. Then he was up again and running up the trail.

The other deer were gone. Tim’s attention had been all on the leader and he had not even seen where they went after they disappeared into the forest.

Now he was in a panic. Until he had fired that shot, he had not really admitted to himself that he was out hunting alone. He had just been “taking a walk”. If he turned away and went back down to the campground now, his parents would never know the truth. But Tim would know, and in the hunter’s code his father had taught him, leaving a wounded animal was unthinkable.

Tim plunged into the stream where it ran shallow across a bar of harder rock, holding his rifle high. He scrambled up the talus slope, using rocks and juniper as handholds. When he reached the point where the deer had been, he found the manzanita covered with a fine spray of blood.

Tim turned up the narrow, winding trail in pursuit of the wounded deer. Near the stream there were vines and underbrush, but as the trail climbed, it became more open. The muley was nowhere in sight.

There were a number of tracks on the trail, but only one set going in the right direction. Tim studied them for a moment, looking for some distinctive feature, but he found none. The deer held a grueling pace for more than a quarter of a mile before his tracks showed that he had slowed and begun to limp.

The situation didn’t look promising. The deer had run into an area of broken granite and stunted firs. It was not a place for an inexperienced tracker.

The sun was low, filling the land with shadows and strange suggestions of shapes. It was beginning to get cold, and Tim’s jacket was back at the campground, tied to his bike.

Tim sat down on a rock to scan the slope ahead of him. Finally, almost lost in the tangle of roots at the base of an uprooted ponderosa pine, he thought he saw a set of antlers.

Tim started up the slope and the muley broke from cover. With surprising speed, it went up the slope on three legs. more tomorrow

Last year, Tim had been allowed for the first time to go with his father on his yearly deer hunt. Then his father had given him a rifle for Christmas, and this year they would have hunted together for the first time. There had never been any open agreement between them – that would have spoiled the whole thing – and his father would never have admitted that these were rewards for good behavior. Good behavior was simply expected. But if Tim hadn’t gotten control of his temper, the rifle and the hunt would not have been his.

Tim picked up an axe and took his anger out on the wood.

* * *

Tim was standing beside the pickup when his parents left the next morning. His dad tossed a worn leather satchel into the back and squeezed his shoulder. “Your mother is going to drop me off on her way to work,” he said. “Maybe I’ll be able to get a day between runs before deer season is over.”

“Now don’t you go driving crazy!” Tim’s mother said.

“You know me, Helen.”

“Yes, I do.” She turned and kissed Tim, and said, “There are leftovers in the refrigerator. You’ll have to make your own supper. I’m taking another double shift while Susan is having her baby. Maybe you ought to bike over to see your Granddad.”

“All right, Mom,” Tim said, but inside he was shouting, Not you too! He knew he shouldn’t be angry at either of them, but he was. After the pickup pulled out of sight, he wandered around the yard, feeling abandoned and feeling sorry for himself.

Eventually, he went to his bedroom and sat down on the bed with his new rifle across his knees. It had never been fired, except on the practice range. He took the shells from the box on his desk and loaded it, then unloaded it again. Finally he dropped a half dozen cartridges into his pocket and picked up his pack. As long as both parents were gone for the night, he figured he might as well spend the time with his grandfather. Maybe he could get in some target practice, or maybe he could get his grandfather to tell some of the family tales about the old Miwuk Indian days.

He left a note for his mother and strapped his rifle across the handlebars of his bike. He turned up the main highway into the mountains, standing on his pedals to make the initial grade. When he got to the turnoff to his grandfather’s place, he hesitated. Up the road, only seven miles further into the mountains, was the campground where he and his father had parked last year when they went hunting. At least he could go there. He had all day.

The road rose sharply for those seven miles, and Tim was thoroughly winded when he arrived at the campground. Half a dozen empty campers were parked there, but there was no one in the campground. Everyone was out hunting.

Tim stood astraddle of his bike for a long time, running his hands across the smooth steel and wood of his rifle. He was sorely tempted to have his hunt anyway, alone. Finally he decided to just walk in the woods for an hour before he went down to his grandfather’s place. He reached for his cell phone to tell his grandfather, then remembered that it was at home.  The one girl he liked least had begun to call him twice a day, so he had stopped carrying it. more tomorrow