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

dome-shaped tarp. Luckily, he’d stuffed it on top the last time he’d broken camp. He repacked the backpack and turned again to hanging his clothes. Every micro-movement of packing and unpacking, undressing and dressing, required four times as much effort as normal. He moved like a zombie, and he had to force himself to stop groaning. He yearned to quit, wanted nothing more in the world than to slip away from the frozen hell into oblivion.

Instead, he shucked off his wet wind shell, his fleece, his acrylic sweater, then his soaked thermal underwear top. He stood bare-chested and balls-out to the frigid breeze, but he had no time to warm himself. Marauders could be stalking him. He dangled the thermal top from a branch alongside the sweater. He climbed back into the wet fleece sweatshirt. Amazingly, it was warmer, even wet, than the thermal top had been. But warmer was a far cry from warm. Taking care not to damage the delicate Gore-tex with flame or sputtering cinders, he hung the wind shell on the underside of the pine, where it too would dry.

With the sleeping bag, sleeping pad, and rifle in-hand, he left the fireside. His boots plunged into the deep, mountain snow as he followed his snowshoe tracks. With every step, he plunged almost to his naked balls. To escape each hole, he launched himself up and out, and threw himself forward. He back-tracked his own trail almost fifty yards without making any prints outside of his own snowshoe tracks. He found a spot beside his trail where a snowberry shrub convoluted the snowfield, and he jumped clear of his trail and came down in the disturbance beneath the shrub. Then, using the brush to conceal his new prints, he picked toward a small pine thirty yards off the trail. If someone stalked up on the fire, following his tracks, they’d walk past him, hiding under the little pine.

He tucked his foam pad up and under the tree and teased the sleeping bag from its stuff sack. Miraculously, only a corner of it had gotten wet. He’d jumped out of the creek so fast that water hadn’t fully saturated his belongings.

A wet corner on his already-damp sleeping bag was dangerous enough. He had no idea if the sleeping bag would be enough to warm him. He was chilled, wet and wasn’t wearing most of his clothing. The wet fleece would compromise the bag even further. The temperature had to be at least five degrees below zero, plus the damnable wind chill factor.

He was so fucking cold he could barely think. His shin bones felt like they’d hardened to stone and the marrow was struggling to break out. It was like having an ice cream headache in his legs. His teeth clacked so hard he worried he might break a tooth. He leaned the rifle against the small pine and scrubbed the snow off his naked legs. So much of it had frozen to his leg hair, that he had to scrape at it with his fingernails. It had to be done. He couldn’t afford to bring any more water into the sleeping bag. Small failures now, could be life-and-death factors later. Finally succumbing to the desperation of hypothermia, he climbed into the bag, only realizing then, that he hadn’t done anything with the rain fly from the tent. It was still laying in the snow.

He closed his eyes and sighed. It was no time to succumb to weakness. He’d made a promise to his father. He would do everything he could to survive.

Sage climbed out of the sleeping bag, stood naked in the snow, lifted up the foam sleeping pad and set them aside. He laid the tent’s rain fly half-inside the snow print of the pad. It would serve as a vapor barrier, blocking heat vapor from rising up and away from the bag, but first it would have to be anchored. He laid the pad down on the fly, then the sleeping bag on top of that.

He removed his wet socks, stepped onto the pad, wrung out the water and spread the socks over his shoulders. He would warm, and maybe dry them with body heat in the sleeping bag. The bottom of the sleeping bag was already the wettest. If he was going to get any part of the sleeping bag damp, he reasoned it’d be better at the top.

Finally, he climbed once again into the sleeping bag, then wrapped the rain fly around it. He tucked it over and around, then under the pad again like a rip-stop burrito.

The warmth didn’t come for a long time. He knew better than to expect it. He was hypothermic, and it would take his body the better part of a half hour to accumulate warmth in the bag and the vapor barrier. Despite the foam sleeping pad under him, he could feel his heat pouring straight through and into the snow. Naturally, the pad compressed wherever his body weight was greatest. There was no stopping it.

Chattering violently, he stilled himself and focused on making micro-movements in the sleeping bag, tensing muscles up and down his frigid legs. Little by precious little, they loosened. Numbness abated, and pins and needles stung like wasps around his calves. He welcomed the pain. There was no sensation in his feet, other than the throbbing ache of the bones.

The 30-30 was tucked alongside him, outside the burrito, but he didn’t dare extricate his arms from the bag to breach check it. He felt certain he’d breach checked it, reflexively, before climbing into the bag.

He worked muscles, up and down his body. He listened and waited. He didn’t so much sleep as fade in and out of consciousness for the rest of the interminable night. He heard the distant fire crackle and pop as it burned down to a restless pile of ash. He worried about his half-dry clothing, hanging under the big pine, fifty yards away in the inky dark.

He could’ve unpacked