rhythmic pounding of the bear’s heart. He brought his smoking fingers to his
mouth and licked the salty blood. His stomach heaved with revulsion for a few
moments, but he fought against the sickness, lapping at the clotting crimson
liquid, taking as much nourishment as he was able.
He sliced away a few thin pieces of the meat, chewing with a grim determination,
forcing himself to swallow. Then he took more. From previous experiences of
hunger, he knew that to eat too much, particularly such rich meat, would only
make him throw up.
The blood dried and began to freeze on his hands, cracking and falling off in
dark brown flakes. Ryan rubbed his hands together to remove as much of the blood
as possible and felt his circulation reviving. Night was now very close, and it
was time once more to build a shelter.
This time there was less snow, and he was forced to struggle with boulders,
painstakingly chipping them free of the ice with his panga, piling them into a
wall, filling in the cracks with snow.
It wasn’t solid enough.
After a couple of hours he began to feel the telltale signs of the biting cold.
His feet and hands were growing numb and he was becoming drowsy. It wasn’t the
usual, healthy desire for sleep after a hard day; it was an insidious, creeping
sleeplessness, offering a tempting promise of warmth and relief from pain. It
was overlaid with the feeling that he’d done his best and had now earned his
rest.
“Fuck that!” said Ryan.
He stood, stamping his feet, pulling up the hood around his ears, then changing
his mind and lowering it once more. If he was going to start walking this night,
he would be virtually blind. It would be madness to make himself virtually deaf
by covering his ears with the hood.
He had decided that his only genuine hope of surviving was to make for the old
ruined radar station with its conspicuous geodesic dome. There might be shelter
there. And it was the obvious place for Henn and the others to wait for him.
Every few minutes the moon broke through the low clouds, throwing the land into
sharp relief. The track toward the tumbled buildings wandered like a drunk man,
gradually coming down off the windtorn edge of the escarpment. Ryan’s guess was
that his destination was about four miles off. At his best normal pace on level
ground, that would take him under an hour.
After three exhausting hours he was still less than halfway there.
He began to hallucinate.
Once he saw the Trader. He stood a few yards ahead of Ryan, pointing an accusing
finger. His lips moved but Ryan couldn’t hear the words. Just a little while
later, he fell and slipped into the blackness. His mind told him that he had
broken some teeth in the fall, and he reached inside his mouth and found
splintered fragments of teeth awash in blood along with feathery pieces of
crumpled blue plastic. Yet it seemed to him that this was a perfectly normal
thing to find inside his mouth.
Once, on a ridge parallel to the one where he staggered onward, Ryan thought he
saw a pack of lean hunting wolves, all facing him, their slavering jaws,
glittering in the moonlight. The leader was a huge creature, standing as high as
a man’s chest. Then the pack vanished behind some boulders. Ryan was not certain
they’d been there in the first place.
Dawn brought a spectacular sky of orange and yellow streaked with fiery crimson.
But Ryan Cawdor scarcely noticed it.
His snospex were in the ice buggy; without them, his sight was deteriorating.
His eye felt full of grit, and everything seemed to be tinted red and was
blurred with shadows. But he was closing in on the radar station. Behind him, to
the left, he could make out the silhouette of the huge dam, dominating the plain
and valleys beneath it.
The night’s cold had struck deep, and he kept stumbling. He lost one of his
gloves on the descent from the ridge, and his left hand was bruised and swollen.
His knees and ribs hurt, as did a cut along his jaw from the jagged edge of a