Honor Road by Jason Ross (best non fiction books of all time TXT) 📕

The chill of the water and sub-zero mountain air went immediately to work killing him. As much as he wanted to lay there and catch his breath, there was no warmth whatsoever to be had in the snow, yet he so wanted to stay still, curled in a ball. Every movement exposed his flesh to the frigid cold of his soaked clothing. Staying perfectly still minimized the discomfort, but the specter of death nudged him with the back of its scythe, urging him to move; to push through the galactic pain of the ice that frosted his skin. Move or die, Father Death seemed to say.

Sage worked his snowshoes underneath him and plunged his wet gloves into the snow. He hunted for anything solid to help him stand, but the snow gave way with every thrust. Nothing held his weight enough to push against. After compressing the snow with a dozen vain attempts, he created his own snowpack and finally floundered to his knees, then to his feet.

Without a fire, death from hypothermia would come in a few hours at most. Other than his head and his left arm, ice water covered him, gobbling up his body heat. The moon was only an hour from setting. Soon, it would be completely dark.

The feeder canyon towered over him, too far to reach deep cover before hypothermia sapped his will to live. He could feel ennui coming over him, like a slothful demon occupying his mind, slipping in behind the freeze.

Sage’s teeth clacked together in the worst shiver he’d ever experienced. He stumbled and shivered for a hundred yards, heading toward a pine with a skirt of dead branches at its base—fuel for a fire. He reached it, then set to work bending and popping the dead branches from the tree, clearing a small area under the pine canopy. Starting a forest fire was the least of his worries. In his frozen state, lighting the whole damn mountain range on fire didn’t sound like an entirely bad idea.

He was making a lot of noise, snapping branches off the pine. Several of them cracked like rifle shots, but he had no choice. Death by cold was imminent. All other contenders would have to wait their turn.

In five minutes, he had enough pine boughs. He’d read the Jack London story about the man who’d died in the same scenario; alone, wet, and huddled beneath a pine. He remembered the guy running out of matches while he willed his frozen hands to function.

Sage spoke out loud just to bolster his grit, “Fuck matches. I’m using the JetBoil.”

He piled a teepee of pitchy pine twigs then dug into his frozen, stiff backpack. He removed the camp stove and dumped the pieces onto the packed snow around his knees. His hands struggled with the threads on the burner head to get them to line up with the propane tank. He finally got a smooth twist, ran the head home, cranked the valve, and clicked madly at the piezoelectric igniter until a flame burst to life. The warmth hit his hands like acid, but he sighed with relief. Sweet warmth—but it would be short-lived. The propane bottle felt light.

He pointed the stove at the teepee of twigs, and the fire from the JetBoil hissed long and strong, a flame thrower dousing the twigs in curling, greedy tongues of flame. He kept it on the twigs until they caught solidly. He tossed the loose parts of the stove back in his pack without repacking the case, then alternated warming his hands and adding pine boughs until steam spun night-ward from his frozen sleeves and pant legs.

With death no longer imminent, another brand of chill ran down his spine. It’d been a half-hour since he’d fallen into the stream and since he’d considered any risk other than hypothermia. He sat next to a blazing fire, the smell of smoke traveling up the mountain on the prevailing breeze, announcing his presence to any threats nearby.

He hadn’t so much as looked up from the fire in thirty minutes—a soft target if ever there was one. He snatched up his 30-30 rifle from the pack and worked the lever to make sure it hadn’t frozen shut. He ran it six times, ejected the rounds onto the snow, wiped each round with a dry spot on his fleece and reloaded the rifle. His hands were growing cold again. He’d shucked his gloves off to dry them by the fire.

Still soaked through, he couldn’t leave the flames. He’d to freeze again within minutes. Yet, the men he’d heard on the road could come at him any second. Reluctantly, he got up and walked away from the flickering light, collecting more firewood while he listened for movement.

If they were stalking him, they wouldn’t speak. He might hear the crunch of compacting snow, but that would be all the warning he’d get.

Sage set a bundle of wood beside the fire, added a few sticks and spent a moment in thought. Full-dark would descend any moment. The moon perched now on the rim of the mountain range and would soon vanish. The odds of being ambushed because of the light signature and smell of the fire, this close to the road, were high. He’d die faster from an ambush than hypothermia. If he sat by the fire, warming himself, he might not even hear the bullet that would take his life.

In frozen agony, he pulled off his pants and underwear and hung them in the pine tree over the fire. He had no extra coat or dry, insulated jacket, and both pairs of pants were soaked through. Naked from the waist down, he unclipped his sleeping bag from the base of the pack, put on his one pair of dry socks and slipped back into his wet boots.

The blood in his hands had returned to ice water. He struggled to dig his tent sack out of the pack, then to extricate the rain cover—a