Frostbite Read Online Free PDF Page A

trouble,” she added. “I’m hurt.”
    Dzo looked up as if he’d just realized she was talking to him. His eyes went wide and he studied her ankle for a second. She held it up for him, let the light from the fire glisten on the dried blood that coated her pant leg. “Oh, boy,” he said, finally. “Now you’ll forgive me, I hope. I don’t meet many new folks up here. My whatchamacallems—my social skills—are a little rusty, yeah?” He rested one fur-gloved hand on her shoulders and she almost sank into the touch, she was so glad for a little human contact after so long alone in the trees. The hand lifted away immediately, though, and then patted her shoulder two or three times. “There, there,” he said, and looked away from her again.
    Was he mentally handicapped, she wondered, or just unbalanced from being alone in the woods for so long? Her immediate survival depended on this man. She was pretty close to despair. Struggling with her emotions, she dragged up the story, the one she’d practiced so many times she half believed it herself. She used recent real events to flesh out the bare-bones details. “I was heli-hiking out of Rae Lakes. It was a ‘North of 60’ adventure package, right? They take you up north, about as close to the Arctic Circle as you want to get, so you can see the real wilderness, the primeval forest and stuff. Drop you in the woods with some supplies, give you a map, and tell you where they’ll come pick you up. And then when we were done they were supposed to fly us to Yellowknife for a spa day before we had to head back to civilization. For the first couple of days of hiking it was okay, I guess. I mean, I was having fun even if it was way too cold. Then out of nowhere it went to utter hell. I got separated from the rest of the group. I got lost.”
    She closed her eyes. Clutched herself a little harder. Went on.
    “I was climbing up this valley and then there was just all this water. I was carried away and my pack was—anyway, I washed up a little way downstream with no gear and no way to contact the helicopter to come pick me up. I knew they would send helicopters to look for me, but this part of the world is just too big and too empty. They were never going to find me. If I wanted to live I had to walk out of there.”
    Dzo nodded, but he was watching his frying pan.
    “I had to find other people, people who could get me back to safety. I had lost my good map in the river, but I still had a brochure from the heli-hiking place with a sort of map on it. It said if I walked due north I would eventually come to a place called Echo Bay.”
    That got his attention, though not necessarily in the way she’d hoped. Dzo let out a booming laugh. “Echo Bay? Why’d you want to go there, of all places?”
    “It was the only town on the map,” she insisted. “Here, look,” she said, and pulled the crumpled, water-stained brochure out of her pocket. She smoothed it out on her thigh and showed him—the map included the roads around Yellowknife, and Echo Bay and the enormous lake beyond it, and a whole bunch of white space in between. She’d been in the white space for days now. “It’s on the shore of Great Bear Lake, on the eastern shore—”
    He held up a hand to stop her. “I know where it is, and I know your orienteering skills are crap, lady. You overshot your mark by a couple hundred klicks.”
    “What are you talking about? It was due north of my position.” She grabbed the compass on her zipper pull and waved it at him. “They told us as much when they dropped us off, if we walked far enough due north we would get there. I followed this every step of the way.”
    “You were following that?” He started giggling. At her. “That thing points at
magnetic
north,” he told her. “You wanted
true
north.”
    She could only stare at him as if she had no idea what he was talking about.
    He sighed and held up his hands as if to say, what can you do with these southerners?