Snowblind by Daniel Arnold Read Free Book Online

won’t die. There’s nothing but the rain to walk toward.
    Her watch marks the end of the day. Ann doesn’t bother adding an extra hour. She puts up her tent, fighting the snow’s invitation to sit and let her shaking muscles play themselves out.
    Inside the tent, Ann swallows her last gel and eats all the scraps out of the bottom of the food bag. It’s necessary. Her body needs the fuel. It’s also another line crossed. No more food.
    The calories and shelter pacify her muscles. Ann feels a little less like simply drifting away. She pokes at her feet. They look decayed and smell like a graveyard. Black edges four toenails on her left foot, which took the creek splash. She loosens a strip of white skin off her arch and cuts it away so it won’t tear and rub the next day.
    Ann slides into her sleeping bag and falls asleep like a dropped stone.
    She comes to in the middle of the night. Something waked her. A noise. The absence of noise. It’s not raining. She throws off her sleeping bag and pulls on her jacket, then her boots, done gingerly because her feet are dead flesh and live nerves. She unzips her tent and steps out into the snow.
    Stars. Not a full sky of them. Clouds still jam the horizons. Stars. Bright and hard. Motionless. Nothing else. No planes, no satellites. Empty space and frozen stars.
    Ann turns a slow circle, looking up, searching the sky—for anything, a blinking wing light, a sign of the times. The stars stare back. She’s dazed, on the verge of falling up into space.
    She gets hot angry with herself. The emptiness shouldn’t matter. It hasn’t ever mattered before; it doesn’t matter now.
    There are signs up there. Practical signs. Ann’s no whizz with the constellations, but whichever way the stars are wheeling is west, minus some whadyacallit, tilt or declination. That’s logical enough. The horizons are choked off, so she can’t use them to judge motion. She grabs one ice tool, raises the shaft over her head, makes herself as stiff and straight as possible, memorizes the patterns of star clusters around the spike of her axe. Then she gets back into her sleeping bag because the wind and cold are nosing around her like wolves.
    Ann checks her watch, sets her alarm. She tries not to think; she tries not to sleep. She does some of both. The stars seem to be in the tent with her. They come right through the roof. She imagines reaching the ocean and finding . . . nothing. And if she lives, if she can catch fish or whatever? What then? In the Stone Age, the mountains were full of trolls. You don’t risk getting killed in the mountains when you’re eating roots and berries just to keep ahead of death anyway. Right now, I’d eat dirt. Handfuls. Suicidal alpinism, symptom of a decadent culture with a protein surplus. Fight the softness, show the rest of the tribe what soul-fat slobs they’ve become.
    Half an hour passes. Ann’s alarm jerks her into the present. She ducks out of her tent, plants her feet in the exact steps she used before, raises her ice tool over her head. The stars have moved. Just a giant clock spinning west, nothing more to them. Keep on saying it, Ann. She brings her arm down in the direction they’ve turned and kicks a twenty-foot arrow in the snow pointing that way. Then she gets back into her sleeping bag and drops away again.
    Ann resurfaces into grey daylight. It’s not raining, but the clouds are low as ever. The arrow she stamped in the snow is there. She half expected to find no sign of it. It makes a right angle with her melted-out tracks leading up to the tent from the day before. At least it doesn’t point back the way she came. Ann feels hunched with cold. The temperature has dropped, or her body is shutting down. Both.
    She walks into the fog, and it wraps itself round her. Her eyes crave and wander. Ann remembers hearing that sharks need to stay in motion or they die. Something about