Gray (Book 1) by Lou Cadle Read Free Book Online

days she walked, fueled only by water and her own determination. Steadily the stream grew broader as other snowmelt trickles joined it. She expected mosquitoes to appear, but none did. In fact, she saw no sign of insects at all—not in the air, and not in the water. Maybe the heat had killed them all, too. Soon, the stream grew wide enough so that, by the time the light was fading the second night, she could no longer jump across. It was an established stream, not just random melt water flow. It had carved a place for itself years before.
    Bushes and small trees began to appear inside its edges, some standing in water, their bases having survived the fire. No leaf had survived. One tall pine had fallen and the fire on it had been put out, leaving its charred trunk half in the water, with unburnt wood submerged on the other side. The stream spilled noisily over it.
    On the fourth morning since she had left the cave, another sizeable stream joined the one she had been following. A dark smudge of mud spread from its mouth into the main watercourse. She walked downstream of that spot and peered into the stream. There was enough water that she believed fish might be swimming in these murky pools.
    When she peeled the pack off and looked at the rod. She stuck her finger into the reel, feeling a dried mess of molded plastic. She pulled out her knife and sat down, opening the reel. Carefully, she began to slice away at the melted line, hoping that deeper down, individual strands would have stayed separate.
    No such luck. She had to carve away every bit of what had once been more line than she would ever need, had she fished with it to the age 100. She had that little bit of line in her emergency survival kit. That might be enough. Not for casting and reeling in, but to tie to the last eyelet of her rod. She’d be fishing as she had when she was five years old, with a simple pole and line.
    She unpacked her backpack, finding the tackle box at the bottom of the bag and the black film container with its few survival supplies. She repacked everything else before she opened the tackle box.
    Among her lures, she had a tiny glass jar of red salmon eggs, just bought in Wyoming at the advice of a bait store clerk. And the lures: a sculpin, a small crayfish, a silvery minnow, a purple worm, and a package of neon pink scuds.
    She flipped back the second compartment of the box. Here, she kept weights, corks, leaders, a scaling knife. And—a chill of relief—a tangled mess of monofilament she’d never thrown away. Now she remembered putting it there. At a lake she’d fished in southern Montana, she had gotten her line entangled in some bushes. She felt silly—it was a novice’s mistake, and she was no novice at angling, having been taught by her mother when she was just four or five. That day in Montana, she hadn’t been paying close enough attention to her casts, watching birds fishing the lake across the way instead. Coral had been taught to take her angling responsibilities seriously, and so she had collected the knot of line. Pack all your trash out, is the rule, so she put the mess in the tackle box, meaning to toss it into a trashcan later.
    Thank heavens she had not.
    Coral tied on her emergency line, baited the hook, and let it dangle in the stream. While she waited for a bite, she sat cross-legged, the knotted wad of line in her lap, and began to work at untangling it. She found the two ends and worked for a while from one end, then switched to the other and worked at that. Under the gray sky, it was like trying to thread a needle in the moonlight. The chore tried her patience, but what else was there to do but stick with it? Picking at the line with her fingernails and teeth, feeding the loose ends back through knots, she gradually saw the length of line slowly emerge.
    It wasn’t a lot. But it was enough to tie to the rod. She pulled in the rod, cut off the emergency line just at the grommet, and wound it back into her