Night was falling faster and faster with each passing day, as the months got colder in the depths of the Rocky Mountains. I quietly worked my way through the woods, following ndmarks I’d used to distinguish the locations of my traps. I was nearly done with my circuit, and growing concerned. For the past two months, I’d noticed the game was thinning out. It wasn’t uncommon as winter drew close for game to get scarce.
Still, the rapid vanishing of animal life was unnerving. Especially this early in the season. Maybe they sensed something I didn’t. Maybe this winter was going to be a rough one, and they’ve instinctively hunkered down or left. All I knew was that if my st two traps were empty, I’d be eating rations tonight and heading into town tomorrow to stock up on supplies.
The three other times I came down to town since moving to my grandpa’s cabin were when I needed supplies for my first and second winters, and when I managed to break my arm falling off a rge boulder during the first three months I was up here. That doctor’s visit was the first time I realized I had gone nose-blind to my own odor. The doctor had been very polite, but she asked how often I showered, which was all the hint I needed.
Consumed in my thoughts, I barely registered my disappointment as the st two traps came up empty and I headed back to the cabin. Dinner would be an ., simir to the ones packaged for the military except, apparently, much more appetizing.
A wolf howled in the distance right before I ascended the steps to the dark cabin. I paused for a second to listen to its haunting melody, then grabbed a couple logs off the stack on the porch and went inside. I perfectly navigated the bck interior, kneeling down in front of the old iron stove and setting down the logs. I reached out to my left and grabbed the kindling box kept nearby.
I quickly had a small fme going in the stove’s open chamber, and I pced some rger twigs on it. Once they had caught, I added the two logs and closed the grated door. With light now spilling from the front of the stove, eerie shadows were cast upon the walls of the small cabin.
The stove sat in the middle of the single room dwelling, with a twin bed behind it and an armchair in front of it. Against the front wall, a washbin sat recessed in a wooden countertop; the trapper’s version of a kitchen sink. The only other adornments to the cabin were cabinets and a variety of traps and snares hanging on the back wall.
I took a rge kettle from a cabinet by the sink and went outside, filled it with snow, and set it atop the stove to melt. The room got warm surprisingly fast, with so little space to heat. I shrugged off my outer gear, ying it out in front of the stove to dry before digging an . and a wooden spoon out of another cabinet.
I ate the sides while waiting for the water to boil, then I poured the boiling water through a thick straining cloth to remove any debris before adding it to the main course and letting it warm up and rehydrate. The chicken tikka masa was very fvorful, but had an unfortunately acidic, almost chemical, aftertaste.
I washed my wooden spoon in the remainder of the hot water, pced it back in the cabinet, and threw the . packaging into the stove, shutting the grate to keep the fumes out of the cabin. The acrid smoke went straight out the chimney pipe, but I could still smell the foul odor of burning pstic.
It was the only effective way of getting rid of trash this far up in the mountains without inevitably attracting curious wildlife. In the summer, I might have been able to dig far enough down to bury it, but I doubted it. This was faster, anyways. The only downside was that sometimes it didn’t burn away completely, and then I would have to scrape out the stove.
Cd in just my long johns and boots, I took the rge kettle back outside and dumped the sullied water before refilling it. I grabbed another two logs on my way back in, and set the kettle atop the stove once more. I id the logs underneath, where I could find them in the dark if the cold woke me up.
When this kettle of water was nice and hot, I removed a rge pstic bottle from yet another cabinet, and filled it with the water before tucking it into my bed. I had one rge woolen bnket that was big enough for a queen bed tucked up under the foot of my mattress, but the other adornments were all of my own making.
Pelts of coyotes that had gotten stuck in my traps were sewn together for a bnket between myself and the mattress, and a rge bear hide served as a comforter atop the woolen bnket. It had not been trapped, but had rather died right in front of me. It wandered out of the woods one day, clearly delirious, and colpsed not ten feet away from the cabin. I’d been worried about taking the pelt, in case the bear had some sort of disease, but I saw a deep wound in the belly and figured it got into a fight, which it had apparently lost.
My pillow was the hide of a bobcat that I had caught, stuffed with the feathers of countless birds. It was still alive by the time I got to it, and I was forced to put it out of its misery. I threw up immediately after. I didn’t have a problem with killing; sometimes you had to. That didn’t mean I enjoyed it, or was even particurly good at it, as demonstrated by my weak constitution when faced with the need to kill. That’s why I favored traps to hunting with firearms; the death was done by the time I showed up, and I never had to see his face when I pulled the trigger.
Early on, I had improvised the traps out of what was already in the woods. I’d grown to learn, though, that animals were more likely to overlook a cleverly-disguised trap that was just staked down somewhere than they were to completely ignore the obvious signs of tampering with their natural habitat, which was always the result when I tried to fashion something out of nothing. Thus, I decided that I would use traps that were designed specifically for this instead of fumbling around with my own inventions.
The first time I went back to civilization, I withdrew every dolr I had from my bank account, which had been severely infted with the money left to me by my grandfather’s passing, and purchased the traps, my axe, the minimal gear and supplies that I’d stocked the cabin with, several sets of heavy winter clothes, and the .s. The next supply run had me getting more survival food, a whetstone and a collection of knives to whittle kitchen utensils out of wood. I had actually gotten quite good at it, and could sometimes spend hours working on a figurine of a fox, or a bird in flight, or whatever caught my fancy that day.
This time, I only needed to restock on .s and soap for washing my clothes and myself. I curled up in bed with my thoughts on the trip into town. My feet were nice and toasty with the hot water bottle next to them, and the fire crackling merrily drove me steadily into my slumber.
***
The morning came all too quickly, and the cabin was stone cold when it arrived. I got the fire going again before slipping back into the bed. The heat had already left when I got up, but the weight of the bnkets was a nice comfort in the silence.
When the stove was warm once more, I climbed out of bed again and huddled up to it to heat my shivering limbs. It hadn’t been cold enough to wake me through the bear pelt, but I knew I’d soon need to start waking up in the middle of the night to add more to the fire, just to avoid freezing to death.
I picked up the clothes from yesterday, now dried out, and tossed them into the pile at the foot of my bed, waiting to be washed. Then I pulled a set of cold, clean long johns out of a cabinet, followed by another set of cold weather gear. I id the new clothing in front of the stove, to warm as I did. Once I was toasty, I dressed and got started on breakfast.
The sun was lightening the sky, but it had yet to make its appearance over the majestic peaks. When I finished eating breakfast, I snapped snowshoes onto my feet and filled my backpack with everything I’d need in order to make camp if a storm rolled in.
The hike down the mountain was only a few hours, but more than ten minutes in a sudden and unexpected winter storm would be enough to do in even the hardiest of woodsmen, which I was not. Luckily, however, I reached town without any issue. After unsnapping the snowshoes from my boots and securing them to my backpack, I followed the uneven roads of my childhood. I wound through the barely-more-than-a-vilge streets of the remote mountain town, heading for the main drag.
There was only one grocery store in town, and it was there that I intended to restock on my .s. They had become quite a common household item for the denizens of the mountains. When you could get snowed in for weeks at a time without warning, there was a lot of wisdom to having a non-perishable supply of food on hand.
I paused at the entrance to the cemetery. It was right through those gates that my life had changed forever. My grandpa had a massive heart attack while we visited my grandma’s grave, and he had left me, his only grandchild, everything. There had been a single exception to the will, which had left me his life savings and his house in town; if I wanted to keep his cabin, I had to live in it for three years.
It was precisely the kind of thing Grandpa would do. He was a big believer in self-made men, and he loved nature in all its glory; the people who knew him called him the Teddy Roosevelt of the Rocky Mountains. He was an avid outdoorsman, and it was under his watchful eye that I learned how to fish, hunt, and clean my kills. The time we spent in that cabin was precious to me and, despite its negligible monetary value, the memories were too valuable for me to let it go to the park rangers to turn into a storm shelter.
So consumed in the thoughts of my past, I didn’t realize something was off until I nearly ran into the door of the supermarket. The lights weren’t turned on inside, and the automatic doors didn’t open when I approached. Surely they weren’t closed. I didn’t know what day it was, but the store was supposed to be open from seven to seven, seven days a week. That was their whole schtick.
I peered in through the gss, and didn’t see anyone moving inside. My brow furrowed and I turned around, gazing across a parking lot full of cars. Why were there so many cars here if the grocery store was closed? Where were all the drivers? It was like the setup to the worst surprise party ever, and a ball of anxiety began to form in my gut.
I turned back to the storefront and pushed my nose up against the door, cupping my eyes to see into the darkness. It seemed empty. There was definitely nobody walking around, but… Was that… a hand? I grew increasingly nervous as I shifted down the door, getting a better angle. There was a hand, an arm. Someone was lying on the ground at the end of one of the aisles.
I backed up, heart thudding loudly in my chest. The hand looked like it belonged to a skeleton; a badly designed one that still had skin stretched around the bones. Someone was dead inside. Maybe more than one. Why were they in the grocery store? Why had nobody collected the bodies, yet? In fact, why was there nobody on the street? This was hardly a busy town, but I still hadn’t seen a single pedestrian or car. That was definitely weird. The worrying feeling quickly grew until I thought I might choke on it.
Suddenly, the air was rent with the sound of a rge engine flying overhead. I looked up just in time to see what looked like a military pne, one of its engines on fire and flying way too low, ejecting something above the town. The pne took a sudden nosedive, and slid into the ground somewhere to the west. The thing it had ejected had sprouted a parachute, and it only took me a second longer to realize it must be the pilot. The second after that, I noticed they were heading directly for the ke.
I dropped my backpack and set off at a dead run, the adrenaline from seeing the dead bodies in the store channeled into "flight mode" and allowing me to sprint faster than normal. The ke was frozen over already, but the ice most definitely would not be thick enough to withstand the impact, and whoever the pilot was would likely freeze to death in minutes, if they didn't drown first. The ke was situated behind the drag, affording drivers the opportunity to see it peaking between buildings as they came through town. The edge was only a mile and a half away from me, and the parachute was thankfully, blessedly slowing the descent enough that I might have a chance of getting there on time.
I pounded through the snow, praying I wasn’t going to break my ankle on anything buried underneath it. My legs were burning almost immediately with the fast high-stepping required to get my feet free of the white powder, but I forced my brain to ignore it and keep me moving forward. It was only a little more than halfway up my shins, but more than enough to make running difficult.
When I was halfway there, the wind shifted. The parachute was blown towards the strip itself, and would likely miss the ke if it carried on in its new trajectory. I altered my course, aiming for where I now suspected it would nd. Whoever this pilot was, they were the luckiest son of a bitch I had ever seen. The wind proved just enough to get them to plow into a somewhat-solid snowbank instead of into the icy water.
What wasn’t so lucky was that when they nded, the parachute managed to wrap itself tightly around them, mummifying them in their own cloth savior. When I reached them, I immediately began cutting paracord to free the struggling person underneath. Upon realizing there was another person, the woman inside the bunched-up parachute shrieked.
“Friendly! Friendly! I’m with Lazarus!”
