The Mountain Between Us

by Charles Martin

He looked early seventies with the body of a fifty-year-old and the heart of a teenager.

With all of me, I love you.

You were floating. Barely skimming the surface of the grass. A concert of arms over legs controlled by some unseen puppeteer above.

We lose half our body heat from our head, so I pulled a wool beanie from my pack and slid her head into it, pulling it down over her ears and forehead but not covering up her eyes.

As sleep pressed in, I made a mental list, which included two things: food and water, and we needed both soon. With emphasis on water. If Ashley was fighting infection, I needed to get her kidneys working and I needed to get her hydrated. Shock has a way of burning up your fluids, and while I may not have been conscious of it, I had been in shock and running on adrenalin since the crash.

“I have three addictions. Running. Mountains. And good hot coffee. And not necessarily in that order.”

“Percocet.” “What’s in it?” “A combination of Oxycotin and Tylenol.”

People experienced with reading compasses, and who take it seriously, who engage in what’s called orienteering, can overcome the side-to-side adjustments required by conditions and return to a straight line, allowing them to arrive at an actual predetermined point.

Ashley was all muscle. Long, lean, limber muscle. Which probably saved her life. A normal person would have folded in the fuselage.

She was thin and had lost a lot of weight. Maybe twenty pounds. Her eyes were sunken, circled in black, the whites of her eyes were red road maps, and her breath was bad—meaning, her body was eating itself from the inside out.

“Ben, you’ve been doctoring long enough to know that very few people on the planet could have done what you did. For more than a month you hauled that woman, in subfreezing temperatures, nearly seventy-five miles.”

He laughed. I liked him. She’d chosen well. They’d be happy. He’d marry above himself. As would any man who married Ashley. She was one in a million.

think when two people really love each other…I mean…” My voice cracked. “…Way down deep…like where their souls sleep and dreams happen, where pain can’t live ’cause there’s nothing for it to feed on…then a wedding is a bleeding together of those two souls. Like two rivers running together. All that water becoming the same water. Mine did that.

I had to let her go. She’s not coming back. The distance is too great. The mountain between us is the one mountain I cannot climb.

being lost with you is better than being found and alone.