Beartooth Incident Read Free

For how long, he couldn’t say, but when the stinging lash of falling snow revived him, the sky was darker.
    Night was falling.
    Fargo had to get up. He had to keep moving. If he stayed there he would freeze. His days of wanderlust, of roaming the frontier wherever his whims took him, would be done. He got his hands under and pushed but his strength had deserted him. He rose only as high as his elbows and then fell back.
    “Not like this, damn it.”
    Again Fargo sought to rise. Again his body betrayed him. He lay staring up into an ocean of falling flakes, his consciousness swirling like the eddies in a whirlpool. He felt himself being sucked into a black abyss and there was nothing he could do to stop it.
    Nothing at all.

2
    The cold woke him.
    Fargo snapped awake, sucked out of the abyss by ice in his veins. Ice in his veins and in his flesh. Ice in his bones, in his marrow. He stared up into white. A white blanket of some kind. Confused, he tried to remember where he was and what had happened to him.
    Without thinking, he opened his mouth and some of the white filled it. He coughed, and spat, and swallowed, and realized the white was snow, and then everything came back to him in a rush: the blizzard, being unhorsed, the slide, and the fall.
    He was buried in snow.
    Part of him wanted to stay there. Part of him wanted to lie there and let the cold seep through what little of him the cold hadn’t reached, and to go over an inner precipice from which there was no turning back. But another part of him—the part that never gave up, the fighter—refused to go so meekly. That part of him struggled against the cold. That part of him fought with fierce intensity for his very life.
    Somehow, the inner fight warmed him. Somehow, bit by bit he grew warmer, and bit by bit the cold faded until he felt almost himself again. The snow helped. The snow was a cocoon that once he was warm kept him warm.
    Fargo tried to move his arms and found to his immense delight that he could. There was pain, but not more than he could bear. He moved them slowly at first, half afraid they were broken. They were fine. He wriggled his legs next, and tried his toes. His toes moved, but not as much as they should. He must do something about that soon, or he would come down with frostbite, if he hadn’t already.
    Fargo wanted to sit up but first he must do something about the snow. He thrust upward and it broke away, and clear, cold air rushed into his lungs even as bright sunlight nearly blinded him. Only a few flakes fell. The worst of the blizzard was past.
    The sun was where it would be at about ten in the morning.
    “I was out all night?” Fargo marveled. No wonder he had been so cold. It was a wonder he hadn’t frozen.
    Girding himself, Fargo slowly sat up. He pressed his hands to his ribs, to his hips, to his back. His body was intact. Bruised and battered and scraped, but intact.
    Elated, Fargo made it to his feet. He swayed for a few seconds, in the grip of dizziness, but it went away. He breathed deep, relieved and grateful to be alive. He was even more grateful when he looked up and saw the cliff he had fallen over. It was sixty feet high, at least. The fall alone could have killed him. Fortunately, he’d landed in a deep drift, missing a cluster of boulders by only a few yards.
    Damn, he was lucky. Fargo’s elation, though, was short-lived. He gazed about him to find that he was at one end of a broad valley. Everything in it, and everything on the facing slopes, was buried in white. White, white everywhere, an unending vista of white and more white. And nowhere, not anywhere in that sea of white, did anything move.
    Nowhere was there any sign of the Ovaro.
    Fargo turned this way and that, searching, hoping against hope. He scoured the base of the cliff, fearful that the Ovaro had plunged over the cliff as he had done, but there was no other disturbance in the snow. Apparently the Ovaro was still up on the mountain.
    Fargo craned his neck