And suddenly, there she was in front of me, huddled and shivering. I lifted her clear off the ground and hugged her to my chest, arms locked around her like I was never going to let her go.

30. Erin

30

ERIN

His voice was rough and shaky with adrenaline. “From now on,” he rasped, “you stay right beside me. Right beside me!”

The relief of being back with him and the fiercely protective growl in his voice made me go weak. I nodded against his chest and it was a long time before he grudgingly put me down.

We pressed on through the rest of the day, this time staying side by side. The ground leveled out and then began to slope down and I realized we’d done it: we were over the highest part of the peak.

As we started to descend, the snow stopped and we could see properly again. A few hours later, we made it to the tree line. But the forest wasn’t like any forest I’d ever seen. The trees were bare trunks, like something evil had stripped them of everything. Normally, when you walk through a forest, you can sense it growing. It’s in the smell of sap in the air, the creak of branches, the sound of twigs falling to the ground as trees shed the old parts and grow new ones. The trees are breathing, just in slow motion compared to us. But here, it was so cold and the days were so short, nothing was growing. The forest was frozen in time and everything felt brittle and fragile.

And we had a new problem: it was getting dark and, now that the snow clouds had moved off, it was a clear night. The temperature was dropping moment by moment. It was so cold, my head began to ache. “We’ve got to make some shelter,” said Danny. “Or we’re going to freeze to death.”

We found a clearing and Danny dug out a tarpaulin and some rope from the bottom of his backpack. He tied the tarp between two trees so that it hung down in an arc, making a wall and a floor. It wasn’t much but it would keep the wind off us.

We needed a fire but there were only a few twigs lying on the ground. We’d have to cut down a tree but we didn’t have a chainsaw or even an axe. Danny opened up his survival tin, a tiny thing no bigger than a box of breath mints, and showed me a thin, curled-up ribbon of metal with jagged teeth. “That’s all we’ve got,” he told me.