It was difficult to even see the trees across the ice in this storm. Jack walked ahead of the other two, trying to ensure they were still going in the right direction. He could hear the ice under their feet, cracking and groaning, and anxiety gnawed at him more than the hunger. At any moment, with any step, they might go through the ice and be lost.

Eventually, finally, they reached the trees, but they were not the trees Jack had expected.

“We've drifted,” he muttered, looking around at the high spruces and old firs, their branches moaning in the high wind, not the pines that made up the narrow stand where Avery had his camp.

“East,” Avery muttered. “I've been past here. We should hurry.”

Jack angled them west and they started working their way back. At least they were out of the wind now. Avery even seemed to be coming around a bit, now that they had shelter from the wind. Of course, trees brought other dangers. Falling frozen limbs could kill you as sure as anything else.

“It's good I saw you when I did,” Avery said, diverting Jack’s attention from watching warily for loose branches. “Running from the bear.”

“Yeah, you saved us,” Calder said with a small laugh. “We came all this way to save you and in the end—”

“No, you still saved me,” Avery interrupted, then fell quiet. Calder looked at him with worry furrowing his brow. Avery limped along, alternating leaning on a long branch or on Calder for support, his eyes focused on something none of them could see.

“I killed that bear, you know,” he said. “The first time it came into my camp. Burned it. It doesn't know it yet, but it's already dying. Its body is poisoning it, same as mine.”

“Good riddance,” Jack said, pushing aside a pine branch for the other two to pass. “That thing is a pain in the ass.”

“Wish I hadn't done it,” Avery said. “I've been through this part of the trees. It's got a den around here. Cubs.”

Jack felt the hair raise on the back of his neck.

“It's near here?” Jack repeated. “Where?”

“I was starting to think about coming up here.” Avery looked dazed, tired. “Coming up here and just... Letting them have me. Better than dying of gangrene. Better than freezing slow. At least maybe then those cubs would make it through the winter, even after the mother…”

“Avery,” Calder said, tense with worry.

“The den, Avery,” Jack interrupted. “What did it look like? Is it close?”

Avery looked around them, shaking his feverish head.

“Not sure.”

“Come on,” Jack said, grabbing Calder's arm and urging him on. “We need to move faster.”

They hurried through the trees, Jack's eyes wide, darting around them in fear that at any moment he would see the bear charging at them. He followed the slope of the land angling down toward the ice field, his heart pounding. The wind battered at the trees, sending spears of snow and ice through the branches as the storm raged on.

Jack rushed them on as quickly as Avery’s limping gate would allow them, scanning the trees for a sign of the den. Every rustle of leaves or snap of twigs put his teeth on edge again. His heart rate spiked again as he spotted claw marks gouged into the bark of a pine tree. The den was close.

He gritted his teeth, searching for a familiar sign. They couldn’t have drifted that far off course and they’d been walking long enough, so where was Avery’s camp? Where was the ice field?

Jack paused to determine where they were and heard the snap of a branch nearby. His head whipped around to face the sound, and he felt his stomach drop as he saw, not the grizzly he'd feared, but a cub.

Small and fuzzy and sleepy it stared up at him, bleated curiously, no idea the danger he was to it, nor it to him. Jack raised a cautious empty hand. Calder and Avery were frozen behind him, all of them staring at the cub.

“Whoa there,” Jack said softly. “You just stay where you are. We aren’t looking for trouble. We’re just going to walk slowly away now.”

The cub bleated again, flopping back onto its haunches, harmless and confused.

The bleat was answered by a terrible roar from the opposite side. Jack felt the hair raise on the back of his neck and the three men turned slowly to see exactly what they’d feared.

The bear rose up between the trees like a monolith, a terrible tower of primal anger. They were standing between it and its cub. Jack saw its yellow eye on him. Not, however, on Calder and Avery, who were on its blind side.

“Move,” he told them in a low voice. “Slowly.

“Jack,” Calder started to speak but Jack waved him off.

“Just go!” he hissed.

Calder obeyed, pulling Avery away into the trees. The bear was keeping its eye on Jack, who was closest to the cub and therefore the greatest threat.

“Jack,” Calder said, now about three yards away through the trees.

“When I say run,” Jack said, beginning to slowly back away in the opposite direction, away from the bear and its cub. “Run. All the way back to the camp.”

“But Jack—”

“Run!” Jack shouted, and at the loud noise the bear charged him, bellowing furiously. Jack sprinted away in the opposite direction, just hoping Calder and Avery had done what he said.

The bear crashed through the foliage like a freight train behind him and Jack knew he wouldn't be able to run from it long. This was going to be a fight. He stooped to grab a fist-sized rock from the ground and, with the momentum of the movement, hurled it back at the bear with all his strength, seeing it slam into the burned half of the bear's face. It roared in pain, stopping briefly to paw at its injured head in agony. Jack kept running, desperate for any advantage he could get. He turned, angling for the stand of pines, the ice field. He ran flat out, saving nothing, adrenaline burning like acid in his veins. He was reminded, for a moment, of flying. That sense of freedom, of his life in his own hands. Yet he'd never been this terrified in a plane.

Searing, white hot pain lanced through his back so suddenly Jack almost didn't feel it until he was falling, dirt in his mouth as he rolled, screaming pain and hot with blood. He hadn't even realized the bear had caught up.

He rolled onto his back as the bear fell on him and clawed at its burned face, gouging at its injured eye. The bear howled in agony and swiped at him as it recoiled. He felt the claws tearing at his face and shoulder, but more than that he felt the strength, the sheer weight of it, slamming into him like a truck. He rolled, dazed, vision spinning, but knew he had no time to recover. He got on his feet and stumbled away even though he could barely see where he was going. His left arm was numb at his side. He wished his back was numb, but it shrieked with every step he took. He could hear the bear coming. He wouldn't get away if it took him down a second time.

But he could see light through the trees, through the blood in his eyes. He threw himself forward with all the strength in him and felt the trees give way to open light and the cold brightness of ice. He slid on it as he ran and heard the bear crash through the underbrush behind him, after him. The ice creaked and groaned and split beneath his feet.

“Jack!”

He heard the scream, and through the blood and confusion saw Calder on the other side of the ice, waiting for him. He'd somehow managed to come out of the trees just a few hundred yards from the camp. But now the ice was splitting and he could not run fast enough to escape it, not with the bear running after him, the ice opening wider with every strike of its heavy feet. Jack could only think that he didn't want Calder to see this.

Something sailed past him. He felt the wind of it past his face before it hit the bear. He realized belatedly as powder exploded across the bear's face that it was a snowball. Calder and Avery were throwing snow at the bear. Avery was limping out onto the ice on his improvised crutch, coming to meet him. No, coming to meet the bear.

“No slow death for either of us,” Jack heard Avery say, before he clubbed the bear in the head with his stick and the ice went out from under them.

The cold was blinding and absolute. In water this cold, the body went into shock in seconds. Jack had more experience with it than most. He'd fallen in water this cold before and survived, done it for training during his rescue days. But still the fear and confusion, the all-devouring cold, was beyond what any man could keep their head in. Flailing blindly, he felt fur, then found a fistful of cloth and dragged upwards. His head broke the surface and he felt shock trying to loosen his grasp, darken his vision. He felt for the edge of the ice with what he knew was the last of his strength.

A hand caught his, warm and sure, and dragged him up. His iron grip on Avery's coat slackened as Calder grabbed the other man and pulled him up to the edge of the ice as well. He was unresponsive and the ice was loose, still breaking up.

“Take him,” Jack gasped, shoving Avery higher up onto the ice. “Get off the ice.”

“No,” Calder said, gripping his hand tighter. “No!”

He tried to pull Jack up, but Jack didn't have the strength to do any more than hang on, and every time Calder let go of Avery to get a better grip, the other man began sliding back into the water. The ice Jack was holding on to kept crumbling, Calder scrambling back as Jack clawed his way to surer purchase only to have it slip away a second later.

“Calder,” Jack begged. “Please, go!”

He was beyond caring if he died. He was too cold, too numb to it. The single fear that gripped him was the thought of seeing Calder falling in beside him. But Calder only shook his head, gritting his teeth and hanging on to both of them, flat on his stomach on the collapsing ice, stubborn as ever. There was a thunder in Jack's ears, the frantic rushing of his heart trying and failing to warm his body. All three would die here and there was nothing Jack could do.

The thunderous noise grew louder, the wind whipping Calder's hair more frantically, and Jack realized the noise was not his heart as a ladder dropped down behind Calder. A man in rescue gear was clinging to it and pulling Calder away, up on to the ladder, despite Calder's protests. They were lowering the board for Jack and Avery. Calder was already out of sight.

“Take him,” Jack said, doing all he could to push Avery into the stranger's arms. “Take him.”

The man didn't fight him. He watched them strapping Avery to the board while the ice he clung to crumbled and slid apart under him. The heaviness of hypothermic sleep was pushing down on him as though he'd been sedated. Soon he would sleep, and slip into the water.

They were raising Avery up to the rescue chopper, swaying in the wind of the snow storm. Calder was already safely aboard. Jack closed his eyes. He'd kept his promise. His thoughts turned to Robert Cunningham, clinging to his sons, one dead and the other as good as, begging Jack to save them instead of him. He supposed he understood that a little better now. If Robert’s ghost was watching him, haunting Jack for failing him, he hoped this made them square. If there was some afterlife, maybe he and his sons had been reunited now.

Maybe Calder was right, and there was nothing after, just the impressions they made on the world, on each other. The death of Robert Cunningham, the worse-than-death of his son Brian, had left their silhouettes on the fabric of Jack's life for a long time. Jack couldn't let those impressions fade, any more than Calder could let go of the impression Avery had left on him. Their souls were molded around the lives of others. Jack wondered what shape he'd left on Calder's soul. How soon would it fade once he was gone? Would Avery smooth it away, a flame under the wax, softening and shaping it back to what it had been before he'd left, before Jack had even met Calder? A selfish, aching part of him hoped he never forgot. With the terrible cruelty of the dying, he hoped Calder returned here and lay in the place where they had been together and remembered him.

Darkness was soft and without sensation. It closed around him gently like hands around a moth trapped in the house. He surrendered to it gladly, and hoped there was some peace to be found beyond it.