BRIAN WAS WORRIED about his leg. The way he saw it, he wasn’t going to spend thirty days starving to death. He was going to die of sepsis in ten. He hated the thought of leaving Tag behind him to die alone, but there wasn’t much he could do about it. Not if his leg was as badly infected as he feared it was.
As a firefighter, he knew a lot about treating minor wounds and the symptoms that heralded an infection, like the fatigue that had dogged him over the past forty-eight hours. Sure, he needed a lot more calories to sustain his muscular body than he was getting, but his reduced activity level should have compensated. It hadn’t.
This morning, their seventh day in the cave, he’d woken up with more pain in his lower leg than he’d felt yesterday. That was a very bad sign. Obviously, the Neosporin had been doing more good than he’d thought, since he’d been healing fine for the first four days. Just as obviously, the lack of it was making a difference. He wondered how much time he had before he developed a fever. And how much time beyond that before it laid him low.
It was clear Tag suspected something was up. She’d noticed the additional redness on his leg and then reached out to see if his forehead was feverish. He’d have to make excuses to keep her from realizing the truth. Too soon for his peace of mind, it was going to be impossible to hide his condition.
Brian was scraping hard enough on the trunk with the knife to put a film of perspiration on his face. He took a break to swipe it away with his sleeve, then put his mouth close to the opening and yelled, “Anybody out there? Heeeeelp! We’re stuck down here. Helloooooo! Can anybody hear me?”
He listened, hoping against hope for some response. He heard an airplane somewhere overhead. He was afraid the air search would already have swept this area by the time he made a hole big enough to slip something through that could be seen. He doubted the planes would come back to the same area again, but there was always the ground search. That was far more thorough, and more likely to result in someone discovering them.
Brian began chipping away at the log again, harder, deeper, trying to get the opening big enough to push through a piece of the parachute. Since everything was burned to ashes all around them aboveground, the parachute would show up like a spill of bleach on a black shirt. The only problem was how to keep the thin cloth from blowing away in the never-ending Wyoming wind. He figured he could tie a knot in the fabric on the inside, to keep it from slipping away. Hopefully the wind would make the parachute billow and the wafting nylon would be an attraction to anyone hunting for them.
“Hey!” Tag shouted. “Time’s up.”
“I want to work a little longer on this log.”
“You’re the one who set the rules, Brian. You need to abide by them.”
She was right, but he’d set the rules before he’d known he was living on borrowed time. “Another five minutes. Then I’ll quit.”
“I’m going to hold you to that.”
Both the Swiss army knife blade and its tiny saw were losing their edges, which made the work harder. Oh, what he would have given to have his Pulaski in here! He’d have made short work of this tree trunk.
“Brian! Come quick!”
Tag’s piercing shriek made his blood run cold. He scurried backward as fast as he could down the tunnel, wondering what had happened. “Are you okay? What’s wrong?”
By then he was dropping out of the hole, his system charged with adrenaline. He whirled to face her and was blinded by the headlamp. “Get that damned thing out of my eyes!”
She made a distressed sound in her throat and yanked it off. It was still aimed upward, so he could see her parchment white face in the stream of light.
“What happened? Why did you scream?”
She was staring at him with wide, frightened eyes. “I saw a fox. A red fox, with a white chest and pointy ears and a big bushy tail, like you see in kids’ books for the letter F. You know, F is for fox?”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
She grabbed his arm, and he winced when her fingernails pierced his skin. “I tell you I saw a fox! I was at the back of the cave with my pants down and I heard something scrabbling in the dark and I turned and…it suddenly appeared right in front of me.”
Her jeans were still unsnapped and unzipped, so something had spooked her. But a fox?
“Are you sure it wasn’t your imagination?”
“Brian, I’m not sick. I’m not crazy. I saw it!”
He might have believed her, if she’d said she’d seen a coyote or a wolf. Yellowstone had plenty of both. But a fox? They weren’t unknown in the park, but they weren’t common, either.
“Do you know what that means, Brian?”
He understood what she was saying. But he was pretty much convinced she’d dreamed up the fox, because she wished so badly for what the appearance of an animal in this cave suggested. “You think there’s another way out of here.”
“Yes! That fox had to come from somewhere. We must have missed something the first time we searched for another way to escape.”
“And the second and tenth and twenty-fourth times,” Brian muttered. Every time he’d gone to the back of the cave he’d looked again, but he’d never found anything, not even so much as a hint of light or a whiff of air to suggest a way out.
“I saw what I saw,” she insisted.
“Assuming you weren’t hallucinating.”
“I had my headlamp on,” she said, her voice rising. “I heard a sound, and when I turned, the fox’s eyes reflected the light. It looked as shocked to see me as I was to see it.”
“I presume it took off. Did you watch where it went?”
“It ran away.”
“You didn’t follow it?”
Her face looked stricken. “I was…I guess I was too excited…and my pants were down around my ankles.”
“Finish zipping yourself up, and let’s go see what we can find. With any luck, your fox left a trail we can follow out of here.”
Brian grabbed the flashlight he’d dropped near the tunnel and followed Tag to the back of the cave. He didn’t think the animal was still around, but he kept the Swiss army knife open in his other hand, just in case they ran into something more dangerous. He slipped past Tag and used the flashlight to see if he could find the fox’s tracks. But there was no paw print on the stone floor where Tag said the fox had appeared.
He sprayed the light from wall to wall looking for an animal sign, but he didn’t find any. Which made sense. If any animal had been coming into the cave at this end, he would have seen the tracks on one of his previous forays.
“I don’t see any sign of it. Are you sure—”
“I saw a fox!” she insisted. “It wasn’t my imagination. It wasn’t!”
Tag sounded almost hysterical, and Brian turned and swept her into his arms, hugging her tight. Her nose was pressed against his throat, and he could feel her quivering.
“It’s all right, Tag. I believe you.” That wasn’t entirely true. But he was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt, because he could see she desperately needed to believe in the hope of escape that her sighting of the fox had provided.
“Look again,” she insisted, shoving him away. “That animal can’t have come and gone without a trace.”
Brian turned and searched again, scanning the floor of the cave, which was made up of stone and hard-packed dirt, with his flashlight. Then he saw it, near the wall of the cave, where the dirt was softer. Half a paw print.
“Tag,” he said. “Look.”
She pressed her hands to her mouth, and her eyes filled with tears. “Oh, my God. I didn’t imagine it. The fox was here.”
Tag joyously threw herself into his arms, and he held her tight, rocking her from side to side. She was half laughing, half sobbing, and he felt his own throat swell with emotion. They weren’t going to die. At least, not in here. Although, that wasn’t a sure thing, either. A hole big enough for a fox might not be big enough for a human. Especially one with big, broad, muscular shoulders.
But Tag might be able to fit where he couldn’t. He gave her a quick hard kiss and freed himself. “Let’s see where that print leads.”
Brian had done plenty of tracking when he was hunting with his brothers. He looked to see whether the paw print was for a right or left foot, and whether it was a front or back paw. It was a right rear paw print. He looked for where the right front foot should be if the fox had left in a hurry and, sure enough, found the barest imprint right next to the wall. No sign of the left front or rear paws showed on the cave’s stone floor.
Brian kept his light aimed along the edge of the wall and found another rear paw print in the dirt. And then another front paw print.
And then the prints simply disappeared.