Page 61 of Last Chance Cowboy
“I think… That way.”
“Pay attention to which direction you’re going on the compass,” he said.
She nodded. It required her to change direction a few degrees, and she followed the sound of the water.
It was cooler there, and the air was still damp from the thunderstorm, and she began to get a little bit worried about the prospect of starting a fire.
A lot of the fuel for that fire would be wet. But hopefully, it hadn’t rained enough for it to all be soaked through.
She wasn’t happy with the exact place they were as a stopping point, and she kept on moving in the direction of the current for a while, until she found a place underneath the trees that was surrounded by a few large boulders, giving it a closed feeling. They were slightly separated from the river – because she kept thinking about bears coming down to get a drink – but also close enough to get water.
“Here,” she said. “I want to stay here.”
“This is a great spot,” he said. “If you want to build a lean-to, you’ve got these rocks to act as the back of your shelter.”
“I might want to do that,” she said. She liked the idea of having a little bit more coverage, so that she wasn’t just out in the open.
There was something about that which made her feel a little bit nervous.
“And the fire can go here,” she said, pointing to a flat, nice, clear space.
“Great. Is that the first thing you want to do?”
“Start a fire? Yes. Since I’m not actually lost and I’m not going to spend any time blowing on the whistle.”
“Is that how you would do it if you were actually lost?”
She frowned. “Yes. I think so. I think I would blow the whistle a few times, and then I would try to make a fire.”
“Not a bad plan.”
“It isn’t whatyou would do?”
“No. But then, the prospect of spending one night in the woods because it’s too dark to hike out, and needing to crash until the sun comes up, doesn’t really bother me. We aren’t lost.”
Those words were so comforting. He was right. They weren’t lost. She knew how to reverse the coordinates to get back to the truck. At least, she did in theory. She had used the compass all the way here, and she could use it to get back.
She might be stuck in the woods because it was getting dark, and she wouldn’t have time to walk back before it was impossible to pass through the forest, but she wasn’t lost.
“Well, depending on how I feel after spending this night in the woods, maybe that would change whether or not I blow the whistle.”
“Fair enough.”
“All right. So the first thing I’m going to do is actually build my fire.” That meant that she needed to collect fuel.
She found the sticks that she wanted fairly quickly, but all the moss and other brushy-type things were damp. She didn’t want to tear anything off her clothes, but she was afraid she might have to.
She decided to make a ring of rocks around it, mainly because that just seemed nicer, and then she built her little wood pyramid at the center, putting what she had been able to find of the tinder there.
Then she took the lighter out of her fanny pack.
Zane reached over and grabbed it. Plucked it right out of her fingers. “You lost your lighter.”
“Hey!”
“Sorry. The lighter is gone. That means you have to use alternative methods of starting the fire. But luckily, you have trained in those methods.”
“Except that I have a lighter,” she said.
