The
Freeze (cont.)
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
It was seven years ago this
May
that I saw my last human being . . .
 More
fuel...the appetite of a fire is amazing...the tongues of flame
lick the chill from the dead branches.
More fuel here now than there was twenty years
ago. Two or three days more and I should reach the site of Palm
Springs. What would they think at that once desert resort to see
it now? All the northern Mojave and most of the old Colorado deserts
have been pine forests now for more than fifteen years.
Snow falling...the rain is changing to snow. It is May now,
if my calculations are right. It was seven years ago this May that
I saw my last human being...it was a woman, she was dying. Dying
when I found her.
Starvation...cold...exhaustion, and loneliness. Women need people,
they need company, they need someone who depends on them, and on
whom they can depend. She had nothing. Had seen no living human
being in four years, she said.
It had come so suddenly there was no chance to prepare. Somewhere
some scientist may have recorded the temperature. My own thermometer
showed minus 70' before it went out of whack. The temperature must
have fallen to 100' below zero. Possibly colder...my advantage was
simple. I was coming back from a year in the Arctic, taking the
route up the MacKenzie River, and I had plenty of warm clothing
and was conditioned to great cold.
 At
a trappers cabin I holed in, and the snow buried it except where
I kept an opening. It snowed for more than a month, but the winds
blew, and sometimes I could get out for more fuel. There was food,
so I stuck it out. It was more than a week before I appreciated
what must have happened.
After a while the food got short so I loaded the rest on a hand-sled
I found near the cabin, loaded up a little dry fuel, and struck
south. By that time I was ready for the cold. My body had adjusted
itself to a degree. I was always cold, but I survived.
Three Indians were living at the trading post. They let me have
a few more supplies, and I continued on. They may have survived.
The snow is falling steadily now, like it was then. But with
the sled and snowshoes, I kept at it. But after that one city...after
that I learned to avoid them.
It was a month after the cold struck that I reached the city.
The cold had struck at the end of a winter and fuel supplies
had been low. There had been a rail strike and food supplies were
depleted also. There was open war in the city, bitter fighting over
food, and ransacking and looting of houses and stores. Thousands
had died in the first awful blast of cold, most of them stricken
where they stood.
It had been a warm spring in the states. The Cold had struck
on a lovely spring day with the temperatures in Minnesota, the Dakotas
and Maine in the middle 70's. The temperature had dropped more than
150' in less than ten minutes...people died where they were.
The human body is amazingly tough, and amazingly adjustable
to change...only it requires time, and there was no time.
Twenty-four, that's what I was, just twenty-four years old,
with a great future before me, they said. But it was neither my
education nor my training that saved me, it was my hobby. Hunting,
tracking, living off the country...that saved me. I knew how to
survive.
Got to move, getting stiff. That's the penalty of growing old...and
I'm old now, although in good shape from activity and out-door living.
Got to get more fuel before I settle down, and some snow to melt
for water.
One thing about cold...it preserves. It killed everything living,
but it preserved it, too. My advantage was that I was away from
cities, that I knew what to eat, and where to find it, and that
I avoided people.
It is probable that sixty percent of the world's population
died within thirty minutes on that day of April, 1954.
Others died within subsequent days, and then still others in
the struggle for existence and in fighting over food, clothing and
fuel. Here and there small groups organized and worked together
for mutual benefit. These groups survived best of all, some to finally
die, but often to survive on down the years. . . .
****** THE END ******
<<
Previous page
1,
2
Return
to the Preview Table of Contents
|
