Scott looked at her. “I heard,” she said. “What are we going to do?”
“You can try to ski out,” the sheriff said.
They both looked back the way they had come—the route was rough, and the last half of the journey would be uphill. “I can’t do it,” Lily said. “And I don’t think the dogs can, either.”
“We’ve got emergency supplies,” Scott said. “We’ll make camp and spend the night. In the morning we can decide on our next steps.”
“Roger that. We’ll be in touch.”
Scott hooked the radio back onto his pack. Silence closed in around them. Snow had gathered on their shoulders and the tops of their helmets. “Come on,” Scott said. “Let’s ski back into the woods. We’ll have more shelter there.”
The woods were farther away than Lily remembered. “Tell me again why we didn’t come out here on snowmobile,” she said.
“It’s a wilderness area,” he said. “No motorized vehicle traffic allowed.”
“Not even in an emergency?” she asked, her voice rising sharply on the last word.
“Maybe there wasn’t time to get permission,” Scott said.
She fell silent. There was no sense debating what they might have done. They needed to focus on getting through the night.
At last, they entered the trees. Immediately the brunt of the storm lessened. By silent consensus they avoided the camp where they believed Jackson and his companion had spent the night. Scott led them to a small clearing and stopped. “This looks good,” he said.
They stood still for a moment, not speaking. The silence of the snowy woods closed around them, making her feel a million miles away from anyone else. If the loneliness of this place spooked her, what would it feel like to a little boy, so far from everyone he knew and loved?
Chapter Six
This was not how Lily wanted to spend the night. She was cold, tired and hungry. The thought of trying to sleep in the snow without even a sleeping bag made her want to cry. But worse yet was the thought of spending long, idle hours with Scott. They had gotten along well enough all afternoon, and the other night at the bar, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that he was judging her, and she could never relax around him. He was so freaking calm and competent—anything she said or did wasn’t going to be good enough.
But she wasn’t going to tell him any of this. She wouldn’t give him the opportunity to label her as a complainer. Instead, she looked him in the eye and said, “What can I do to help?”
“We need a fire, and we need shelter,” Scott said. “I’ll start the fire. See if you can find some dry wood.” He knelt and began clearing snow from a patch of ground. Both dogs lay down to watch.
She turned in a slow circle. Everything was covered in snow. The few tree branches she spotted on the ground would be soaking wet.
“Look underneath trees and deeper in the undergrowth,” Scott said, not looking up. He had taken out a knife and was shaving a twig into small pieces.
She turned and walked away, heading for the far side of the clearing. She plunged into the undergrowth, snow dumping onto her back, head and arms. She shook off the deluge andpulled at a tangle of branches. What she came up with wasn’t exactly dry, but she supposed it was drier.
Shelby plunged in beside her and began tugging at a branch and biting at the snow. She looked up at Lily, snow crowning her head and back, then shook hard, filling the air around her with a cloud of icy white. Lily laughed. The pup made it impossible to stay in a bad mood.
“What are you doing?” Scott called.
“Getting firewood,” she called, and gathered branches into her arms.
She dumped the wood beside Scott. He frowned at her offering. “That doesn’t look very dry.”
“If you think you can do better, you’re welcome to try.” She studied the small blaze he had made. If it snowed much harder, the fire didn’t stand a chance.
Scott stood. “We need to make a shelter,” he said.
“With tree branches?” She pictured the one they had found at the other campsite.
“A snow cave would be warmer.” He pulled the collapsible shovel from the back of his pack. “Help me pile up a bunch of snow to work with.”
For twenty minutes they shoveled, clearing an eight-foot circle and piling the fresh, wet snow around the perimeter. “That’s a good start,” Scott said finally. He stuck his shovel in one pile and pulled a multi-tool from his pocket, opened it and folded out a sawtooth blade, then handed it to her, handle first. “See if you can cut some pine branches. We can pile them beneath us to help insulate us from the cold ground.”
For the next half hour she sawed away at green pine branches, until her fingers ached and her gloves were sticky with sap. She managed to cut a decent-sized pile of leafy branches, and dragged them back to where Scott was putting the finishing touches on a sort of igloo, with built-up snow sides and tarp-covered branches for a roof. “Get inside and I’ll pass the branches to you and you can lay them out on the floor,” he said.
