“That’s smart. Not something I would’ve even thought about.”
She shrugged. “Everything needs to work as it should when you’re out there on your own. I’ll do another training closer to race day at a higher elevation. The race is along the Continental Divide and never drops below seven thousand feet. At one point, we’re almost to tenthousand. Altitude can mess with the stove, and you won’t want that on race day.”
“I’m ready for a break,” he admitted.
“The place I want to stop is about half a mile off the road. Can you manage that?”
“No problem.”
“We’ll take a decent break. Have a hot meal before looping back to the road and returning to Silver Mane’s.”
Jack glanced at his watch. “We’ve been out here about four hours now. You think it’ll take us the same time to get back?”
“Pretty close.” She glanced at him. “You good?”
“Yeah, I’m good.”
She nodded and kept moving, a strange warmth settling in her.
Chapter 14
Jack
The trail off the road was narrow and ungroomed, nothing like the packed surface they’d been traveling on for hours. Steph went first, and he followed her as closely as he could, but the snow was unpredictable in the trees. Knee-deep in some places, crusted and breakable in others. He punched through twice in the first hundred yards, then pulled his leg out each time and kept moving.
“Does this happen during the race?” he asked.
“It can. They groom the trail, but conditions change. There could be drifts, bare ground, ice. Depends on the year.” She punched through on the left side and pulled free without breaking stride. “Some years it’s bone-chillingly cold. Negative temps and too much wind. Some years it’s almost reasonable.”
“And the course conditions change with it.”
“Everything changes with it. That’s the point.”
The trees thinned ahead, and he could see the meadow opening up, the snow catching the ambient light from the overcast sky. It was broader than he expected, a long, flat stretch bordered by dark timber on three sides, the kind of place that would be beautiful in daylight and was quietly unsettling in the dark.
Steph moved to a flat section near the tree line, set her pack down, and started pulling out her stove. He watched how she set it up, the order of things, the efficiency of it. She had a small pad she set the stove on first, insulating itfrom the snow so the heat didn’t melt through and destabilize it. Smart. The kind of thing he wouldn’t have thought of.
He got his own stove out and followed her setup as closely as he could.
“Altitude affects the flame,” she said, not looking up. “Up high, the burn is different. I want to know my stove works the way I expect it to before I’m depending on it at hour thirty-five in a whiteout.”
“Makes sense.” He had the stove assembled and lit. The flame came up clean and blue in the dark. He cupped his hands around it briefly, not for warmth exactly, but for comfort.
“I always change my socks here,” Steph said. “Eat something warm. Rest a bit. Then head back.”
“It’s a good idea,” he agreed. That was when he heard it.
A low mechanical sound, distant and then less distant, coming from beyond the far tree line. It took his brain a moment to sort it out of the ambient winter quiet.
“Snowmobile,” Steph said before he could.
He looked up. Through the trees on the far side of the meadow, lights moved. Not on the main road—he could orient himself well enough to know the road was behind them—but somewhere beyond the meadow, deeper in.
“What’s out there?” he asked.
“More trails.” She was watching the lights too. “Hiking trails during the summer, but they aren’t usually used during the winter. The snowmobiles mainly stick to the road, though I guess they could use the two-tracks that are set up for access and forest breaks.”
“But there’s one out here? In the middle of the night.”
