“The fire, Will Henry,” the doctor said wearily. “We mustn’t let it go out.”
I set down the lamp and hurried outside, relieved to make my escape from that claustrophobic space. The hungry embers chomped at the fresh wood; the flames reached with supplicating hands toward the sky. All was hunger, I thought. All was longing. After a moment the doctor dropped beside me and wrapped his arms around his upraised knees.
“Is he—?”
Warthrop nodded. “Asleep—or unconscious. He has to be exhausted. I don’t think he’ll get up again.”
“But why did he—”
“Delirium, Will Henry. Obviously.”
He absently picked the needles of wolf’s claw that had adhered to his palm and flicked them into the fire, where they sparked for an instant and died. As bright as stars, then gone.
“We’ll wait an hour more after sunrise,” he said. “Then we’ll press on. If we are doomed to perish here, I would rather die looking for the way home than sit here like rabbits paralyzed with fear.”
“Yes, sir.”
Over the comforting crackle of our fire, the wind whistled, a melancholy sigh, a song of lamentation.
The doctor lifted his face and said, “There is a storm coming.”
It arrived just before dawn. The wind dove down, driving ahead of it the first heavy snowfall of the season. By eight o’clock, when we broke camp, two inches of fresh powder lay upon the ground. It continued throughout that day, and we shunned the clearings, for our protection lay under the arms of the forest. In the open spaces the snow furiously swirled into blinding white maelstroms in which we were no more substantial than ghosts. By two o’clock more than a foot had fallen, and there was no sign of the snow abating. We stumbled over buried root and bumped into each other in the murk, trudging through a trackless maze. Too cold and too numb to speak, we lowered our heads against the freezing wind, and stopped only to relieve ourselves and fill our canteens with snow. I now carried both rucksacks and Hawk’s rifle. Our provision bag had long ago been discarded.
My mind darkened with the day. By four, the storm had all but murdered the light, but the doctor pushed on, saying, “A little farther, a little farther.”
With light nearly gone, all at once we happened upon some half-obscured tracks cutting across our path—human footprints—and immediately my fatigue melted away, replaced by unutterable joy. Fresh prints! The world had not swallowed up all humanity; here was proof we were not alone in the vastness. They snaked across our path, going from right to left, two pairs, one noticeably smaller than the other, small enough to be the footprints of a child. The significance of this hit the doctor first.
“Oh, no, Will Henry. No!”
He fell against a tree. Ice had formed in his whiskers; snow frosted his eyebrows. Other than his rosy cheeks and bright red nose, his face was horribly drawn and pale, the wrinkles in his forehead cavernously deep.
“They’re ours,” he murmured. “We have been walking in circles, Will Henry.”
He slowly slid to the ground, cradling his charge in his lap. I stood next to him, buried to my ankles in snow, and so great was the loss in his eyes that I turned away. Around us the forest had been blasted white, and the snow continued to fall, flakes the size of quarters, a heartbreakingly beautiful landscape. Suddenly my eyes welled with tears—not tears of sorrow or despair but tears of hatred, of rage, of a loathing that rose from the very depths of my soul. The doctor had been wrong. His true love was not indifferent. She rejoiced in the brutality of her nature. She savored our slow, torturous death. There was no mercy, no justice, not even a purpose. She was killing us simply because she could.
“It’s all right, sir,” I said through my chattering teeth. “It’s all right. We’ll set up camp here. I’ll make the fire now, sir.”
He gave no reply. I might as well have tried to console the tree. I found my own consolation, however, in the task itself, the mindlessness of gathering the kindling for the fire (a chore that proved more challenging than usual in the three-foot drifts), clearing a spot well away from any tree, piling up the damp wood. The wind worked against me, the wind and the wet wood, for barely had I lit the match when it was a smoldering, impotent wick. Warthrop appeared beside me, jerking his head toward Chanler. “I’ll do it; watch him.”
“I can do it, sir,” I said stubbornly. “I know how.”
“Do as I say!” He grabbed at the box, and it flipped out of his fingers as I pulled back. The matchsticks cascaded onto the snow, and the monstrumologist cursed loudly, his voice strangely muffled, stamped down by the wind.
“Now see what you’ve done!” he cried. “Go! Fetch the tinderbox from the sergeant’s rucksack. Snap to, Will Henry!”
I found no tinderbox in Hawk’s gear. I turned over the contents of the doctor’s rucksack next. Nothing. My heart sped up. What had happened to it? When was the last time I’d seen it? Was it the night the sergeant disappeared? Had Hawk taken the tinderbox with him, and if so, why?
I felt someone come up behind me. Crouching in the snow, I craned my neck around. The doctor had stopped a few feet away. I could barely see him in the glimmering twilight.
“Well, Will Henry?”
“I can’t find it, sir.”
“It must be there.”
“I thought so too, sir, but it isn’t. You can look for yourself if you like.”
“I would not.” I could not see his face. I could not read his tone. Somehow that made it worse.
“If we had a knife,” I began, “we could whittle a stick and—”
“If we had a knife, I would cut your throat with it.”
“It isn’t my fault, sir. The wind . . .”
“I left it to you. I thought such a simple thing as lighting a campfire would not be beyond even your limited capacity.”
“You dropped the matches,” I pointed out, trying to keep my voice level.
“And you lost our tinderbox!” he roared.
“I didn’t lose it!”
“Then it hopped out of the rucksack and took off into the woods on its own little legs!”
“You’re the one who decided to break camp in this!” I hollered back. “We should have stayed where we were! Now we’re lost and we’re going to freeze to death.”