I brought my fist down on the ice but it didn’t even crack. Then I remembered the rifle on my back. It hadn’t gone into the water and it had been warmed by my body all day. I jumped up, pointed the gun at the ice a few feet from where I’d seen Erin, and worked the safety. Please have unfrozen….

The safety catch clicked off. I fired, holding down the trigger and chewing up the ice until I broke through. Then I dropped to my stomach, shoved both arms through the freezing soup of shards and water and fished around until—

Freezing fingers brushed mine. I grabbed her hand and pulled, rolling over on my side as I hauled her up onto the ice.

She coughed up water and then flopped on her side, shivering.

“Erin? Erin!”

She didn’t answer.

I picked her up and hugged her to my chest. “Erin?”

Her head lolled and her eyes closed. Then her shivering stopped and I knew that was very, very bad. She was hypothermic, fading fast. She was already too cold and her soaking clothes were sucking every last scrap of heat out of her body.

I looked around frantically. We weren’t far from the tiny wooden building and now that I knew it was on the edge of a lake, I realized what it was: a fisherman’s hut. I had to hope it had some way of keeping warm. “Hold on, Erin,” I muttered, and ran, snatching up my backpack as I passed it.

The hut was only about four feet square and just tall enough for me to stand up in. There was a narrow wooden bench around the edge so that a couple of fisherman could sit while they waited for a snowstorm to pass. But what I cared about was in the middle: a stove someone had cobbled together from an old oil drum and a metal pipe. Following some sort of fisherman’s code, the last person to use the hut had left the stove stacked with dry wood and some balled-up Russian newspaper for kindling. I lit it, then sat on the bench with the semi-conscious Erin on my knee.

I had to get the wet clothes off her. I stripped off her sopping wet camouflage gear, her boots and socks and then the thermals and bra she had on underneath. I didn’t register that she was naked, just that her skin was like ice and I had to get her warm. I turned her to face me, took off her glasses and used the street clothes in my backpack as towels to dry her off. Then I rubbed her back and arms, trying to get the blood flowing again. “C’mon Erin,” I muttered, frantic. “C’mon.” But she showed no signs of waking up.