Edge of Collapse (Edge of Collapse, #1)

by Kyla Stone

Much of this story takes place within the fabulous Manistee National Forest in Michigan. For

Baroda, Michigan.

The first few years, she used to sing. Would sing for hours every day, memorizing the songs she’d written, creating tunes and rhythms and harmonies. She’d loved music. Majored in music education in college.

He flicked ash out the window as he drove past a sign for the town of Newaygo. He continued north on M-37 toward Baldwin. This time, he’d avoided driving through Kalamazoo and Grand Rapids.

His hunting cabin sat on a twenty-acre lot nestled in the middle of the Manistee National Forest, along an unused dirt road that spurred off an old, unused logging road. Manistee National Forest covered over five hundred and forty thousand acres of rivers, streams, and lakes, rolling forest hills, valleys, and marshlands. It was a mosaic broken up by private property and small towns and crisscrossed by highways and hundreds of miles of hiking, biking, and snowmobile trails.

And his Winchester Model 70 Featherweight in .270 with a Nightforce SHV 3–10x42 mm scope that cost more than the rifle,

They spent weekends snow camping and skiing miles of trails in the gorgeous UP wilderness surrounding the Porcupine Mountains.

Southern Michigan contained little to no wilderness. The larger cities of Detroit, Grand Rapids, Kalamazoo, Lansing, and Ann Arbor were all in the lower half of the state, along with hundreds of smaller townships and villages dotting the many lakes and rivers.

Pushing further north, Michigan grew wilder and more remote. The Upper Peninsula north of Mackinac’s five-mile-long suspension bridge was almost an entirely different state. A different country. The land of endless, dense pine forests. Rugged coastlines. The Porcupine Mountains. The UP looked different; it tasted and smelled and felt different.

Hydration was just as important in cold weather as the heat, even if she didn’t feel as thirsty. She’d been careful not to break a sweat beneath her layers.

If she allowed herself to sweat and her clothing absorbed the moisture, the dampness would decrease the insulation of her clothing. And as sweat evaporated, her body would cool even further.

The thought entered her head: COLD. The four basic principles to keeping warm. C—Keep clothing clean. O—Avoid overheating. L—Wear clothes loose and in layers. D—Keep clothing dry.

She pressed on, traversing hills and ridges and crossing a wooden suspension bridge over a frozen, windswept river she didn’t know the name of. Great hardwood and coniferous forest towered on either side of her. Occasional breaks in the trees offered sweeping overlooks of snow-studded valleys and distant hills. Pristine white snow blanketed everything.

She leaned her remaining ski pole against her chest and raised three fingers above the horizon line: a trick her father had taught her. Each three-finger segment represented approximately an hour. Still three hours until sundown.

She didn’t smile. She hadn’t smiled in five years. She didn’t remember how. She did let out an icy breath. Something released inside her chest. She wasn’t alone after all. The dog was following her.

Her voice was impossibly loud in the dense quiet. The snow muted everything. It felt like they were the only two beings alive in the entire universe.

She dug one of the lighters out of a side pocket, but with a sinking stomach, she realized that she didn’t have anything for tinder. Panic rising, she searched the backpack for anything useful. She needed a fire. It wasn’t optional. Her gaze snagged on the bright red bag of Doritos. Her father had used them once in a pinch. The chemicals, powdered flavors, and oil in the chips would burn for several minutes. They were perfect for combustion.

She knew snow should never be eaten for hydration. The energy required by the body to heat and liquefy the snow caused further dehydration and increased the chance of hypothermia.

She needed to melt the snow first, both for drinking water tonight and for tomorrow.

Exhaustion pulled at her. She wanted to do nothing but sleep, but she forced herself to unlatch her ski boots, strip off her damp socks, and replace them with dry ones from her pack. The damp, worn ones she stuffed into an unused sandwich bag. She needed to be careful. Trench foot was a real threat.

Hannah’s canteen was empty. She refilled one of the empty sandwich bags with snow and tucked it inside her coat and layers of clothing against her bare skin to melt it. It made her even colder, but she couldn’t go without water.

North Country Trail

The NCT would take him north all the way to Mackinac Island and into the UP. The 4,600-mile National Scenic Trail stretched over eight states, from North Dakota to Vermont, but it was only the northern Michigan portion that concerned him.

He hiked through towering forests of red pine. The huge rows of red pines had been planted by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s. Many now stood over seventy feet tall. He felt like an ant among giants.

It was about sixty miles to his homestead outside the tiny township of Mayfield, just south of Traverse City, and located outside of Traverse City State Forest.

He made his own soap and knitted his own blankets.

It had taken him three days to travel almost two hundred and forty miles. He could make it the rest of the way in four days of trudging through heavy snowfall—less if he could find a working snowmobile or UTV sans its owners.

Close to a third of Americans traveled over Christmas.

Sighting with the Glock, he “sliced the pie,” searching carefully from 9-3 like on a watch.

a Ziploc bag of Vaseline-coated cotton ball fire starters,

He opened a Ziploc bag filled with his favorite fire starters and took out a few large 100 percent cotton balls, each soaked in a grape-sized dollop of petroleum jelly. He pulled them apart to expose the dry fibers inside. They would burn strong for about four minutes.

As the day warmed into the teens, they were careful to discard layers to keep themselves from sweating. Evaporation would lower their core body temperatures and heighten their risk for hypothermia.