She’d be terrified and desperate.
She was, in fact, both terrified and desperate for all three of them.
And a piece of her was glad for the fear because it fueled her system and spurred her on hour after hour after hour after hour down that trail.
Sommer trudged.
And trudged.
When she finally reached their camping spot from the night before, she forced herself to take off her shoes and socks and slowly eat some food.
She wouldn’t look at her watch.
She wouldn’t calculate the time it had taken to get this far.
She’d just keep going.
Restored by calories, hydrated with water that tasted of bleach, Sommer got her boots on and tracked down to where the stream needed to be crossed.
There she stopped, suddenly frozen in place.
Sommer was imagining falling into the water as Marna had. But in her mind, flailing under the weight of her pack with no one to help her like Abbie had helped Marna, Sommer would slide under that second fallen tree, trapped in the sieve.
She’d disappear because no one would look in a strainer to find her body.
Eventually, something would churn loose from her pack and float down the stream.
Eventually, her body would decompose, and there would be no more meat on her bone to hold boot shoe in place, no tendon to hold her tibia to her talus.
Would someone pick up the boot floating downstream and wonder where it had come from?
Sommer closed her eyes and shook her head to rid herself of the cobweb-stickiness of those thoughts.
She pushed away her inclination to wait for the sun to rise and light up the situation.
Climbing onto the trunk, Sommer gripped it in a bear hug with her chest on the bark while she clenched her thighs. In this way, Sommer inch-wormed her way slowly forward with only the tiniest progress with each movement, making sure she was well balanced before she slithered again.
When she finally dismounted from this last challenge, Sommer’s whole body was shaking. Her legs rubbery, she lowered herself to a rock and rewarded her victory with a protein bar so she could taste chocolate.
But soon thoughts of Marna and Abbie squatting behind their screens, purging their bodies, becoming dangerously dehydrated had her up on her feet and moving.
After a while, Sommer noticed the night sounds fading.
And with the day animals still asleep, Sommer could hear a steady woosh, then silence, and again.
There was a road to her left.
From where she was, Sommer couldn’t see any headlights. There was only the black of the shadows and above her the luminescent moon now slipping low over the treetops.
Sommer stopped at a rock, pulling out her phone to check her hiking app, locating the road, and calculating the distance.
It was one mile down the slope to the road and help, or ten miles down the trail to the ranger station.
There was a balance to be processed between safety and speed.
If Sommer left the trail and something happened to her, no one would know where to look, and equally dangerous, they wouldn’t know that Abbie and Marna were in desperate straits.
Getting to a rescue was so enticing; getting off this damn mountain would be so good.
