Then he dragged himself back. Halfway there, a terrible weakness came over him. Whether it was from pain, poor sleep, or hunger, he could not say, but it frightened him.

In the back of his mind, Tim had been thinking about his mother, and how she would worry about his absence. Now he set those thoughts aside and began to seriously worry about himself.

The clouds rolled above him, gray and heavy with the promise of rain.

Pulling himself to a sitting position, he began to trim branches for a splint. He studied the situation, and decided to replace his boot, then splint over it. That might not be the best or most comfortable way, but at least it would let him walk.

Whatever else happened, he had to get off this bald knob and into shelter.

He cut the splints, but the cord he could have used to bind them had gone with his other survival supplies. He considered his clothing. He wore ten inch boots and socks, jeans, a wool shirt, and underwear. He had a belt, but he needed it to support his knife and firestone case. He had a handkerchief, but that would be too flimsy.

Nothing could be spared, yet something had to be spared. Finally, he decided to sacrifice his shirt sleeves from the elbow down. He cut strips from them until he had enough to bind the splints into place.

He fed the fire and took stock. It was nearing noon, yet a chill hung in the air.

Food? Impossible for now.

Fire? Secured, but not portable. He needed to cut and dry some kindling before he let this fire die out, or he might not be able to start another one later.

Shelter? He had to have shelter by nightfall, or before it rained. And there was no way to make a shelter until he got to lower ground. The edge of the forest was a quarter of a mile away, and that would be a long way to limp on one foot.

He stood to get a better look at the treeline, and to pick the easiest path. He balanced on his left foot, and slowly let some weight down on his right. The pain in his ankle was intense. He lost his balance and sprawled headlong.

* * *

When consciousness returned, the sun was nearly down, and his face was caked with blood from where his head had hit the granite bedrock of the bald.

He was freezing. Again!

He dragged himself to the fire. It was down to a few embers. He chose the driest wood at hand and cut new fuzz sticks – six inch twigs from which twenty or thirty chips are lifted, but allowed to remain attached. He placed these in the embers and blew the fire to life again.

A drop of rain struck his neck.

He gritted his teeth against the pain and crawled to the juniper stem. He would have to have a crutch, so he started working away at its base. It was six feet high and four inches through at the base. Working with only a knife was heartbreakingly slow, but Tim stuck to the task. As he worried away at the base of the tree, the rain began to fall more heavily.

Half an hour later, the juniper fell. Tim crawled back to the fire, dragging it behind him. He was soaked and shivering as he fed the fire and tried to warm himself. His supply of firewood was getting low, and he couldn’t crawl around on the rocks to get more. more next week

At some point he must have gotten free of the current and come ashore. Obviously – since he remembered none of it – he had only been half conscious. What could have happened then?

As the light increased, Tim realized that this was nowhere he had ever been before. There was no familiar landmark anywhere. He was in high, broken country surrounded by manzanita and scattered junipers. The low hanging clouds kept him from seeing any landmarks he might have recognized, and those clouds seemed to be getting thicker. Without his compass or a view of the sun, he didn’t even know east from west.

He let his campfire burn down. It was time to leave, but he had no idea which direction to go.

How long had he wandered in his dazed condition? More important, how far had he wandered, and in which direction? He might be within a mile of some familiar place, but if he set off in the wrong direction he would only make matters worse.

Tim looked up at the low hanging clouds and began to worry. If it should snow or rain he would be in serious trouble. His poncho – two ounces of flimsy plastic – would have been enough to protect him, but it was gone.

STOP. Stop, think, observe, plan. Tim had learned that phrase in outdoor school as a sixth grader, he had never really thought he would be in a position to use it.

He had certainly stopped and thought. He had observed that this bald knob was no place to find food, water, or shelter. His immediate plan was clear. He would move off downhill. Since he was on the California side of the Sierra Nevadas, any downhill movement would take him westward, which was the direction he wanted to go. If he did not find a familiar landmark, he would at least find a better place to build a survival shelter.

He rose to leave

His right ankle turned beneath him

He cried out as he fell. He took the force of the fall on his shoulder to spare his ankle, but the pain did not go away.

Chapter 3

The pain did not go away. It burned on like a hot knife deep into the joint and Tim knew he had not caused all this by a simple misstep. It had to be something he had done in his fall or his semi-conscious wanderings.

He carefully removed his boot and sock. The flesh was pink and swollen, but not sensitive to his touch. The injury, whatever it was, lay deep. Setting his foot down, he bumped it and the pain almost made him faint.

If he had not been in trouble before, he was certainly in trouble now!

His ankle did not seem to be broken, but how could he be sure? Strained, sprained, twisted, or broken – it made little difference, really.

He needed wood for a splint, and for his fire. Now that he could no longer just walk away, that fire had become a matter of life or death once again. Sliding on his back, with his left leg drawn up to hold his right ankle above the ground, he made his way to a nearby dead juniper. Taking his knife, he cut off the stiff lower limbs until he could reach no more, then balanced on his good foot and continued. Every time he made an unguarded move, the pain in his ankle shot through him.

He stripped the tree of branches, then threw them one by one back toward the fire. Then he dragged himself back. Halfway there, a terrible weakness came over him. more tomorrow

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