Life Expectancy

more competitive evergreen forest. The enormous spreading elders, greedy for sunlight, had repressed new individuals, which withered as saplings.
        Consequently, the pines-and interleaving stands of firs-were more widely separated than they might have been elsewhere. Their impressive trunks-straight, with fissured bark-reminded me of fluted columns supporting the many-vaulted ceiling of a cathedral, though this cathedral offered no warmth to body or spirit and listed like a sinking ship.
        As long as I could control our speed, I would be able to steer between the trees. Eventually we would find a bottom, a valley, or perhaps only a narrow defile. I could then turn north or south and hope to find a forestry-service road that would provide a route out of the wilderness.
        We would not make it back up the slope that we were descending. A four-wheel-drive vehicle might cope with the snow and the terrain, but the severe angle of incline would defeat it sooner than later, in part because the high altitude would starve a laboring engine.
        Our hope of escape and survival depended entirely on reaching the bottom intact. As long as the Explorer remained drivable, we would have a chance.
        Although I had never learned to ski, I had to think like a skier in a slalom event as I piloted the Explorer in a serpentine course, weaving through the maze of trees. I dared not turn as sharply as a skier tucking close to a marker flag, because I would surely roll the SUV.
        Smooth wide easy turns were the trick, which necessitated quick decisions about each new configuration of obstacles but also required that I comprehend the oncoming forest in dimension, holistic ally in order to be considering the next maneuver even as I executed the current one.
        This proved to be markedly more difficult than cooking a custard to precisely the right consistency.
        "Jimmy, boulders!"
        "I see 'em."
        "Deadwood!"
        "Goin' left."
        "Trees!"
        "Yeah."
        "The gap's too narrow!"
        "We'll make it."
        We did.
        "Nice move," she said.
        "Except I wet my pants."
        "Where'd you learn to drive?"
        "Old Steve McQueen movies."
        I couldn't avoid this controlled plunge by simply turning across the face of the slope, because in places the incline seemed too steep to allow the Explorer to remain upright while navigating laterally. So I took what little comfort I could from the word controlled.
        If the vehicle were damaged and we were forced to abandon it, our situation would become almost untenable.
        In her condition, Lorrie would not be able to walk miles, not even on more friendly ground. She wasn't wearing boots, either, just athletic shoes.
        Our parkas offered considerable protection, but neither of us wore insulated underwear. I had a pair of unlined leather gloves in a coat pocket; she'd brought no gloves at all.
        The temperature was at best twenty degrees above zero. When rescuers found us-if they did before spring-we would be frozen as solid as mastodons in polar ice.
        "Jimmy, rocks!"
        "You bet I do."
        I arced around the stone formation.
        "Swale!" she warned.
        She wasn't usually a backseat driver. Maybe this compulsion to direct my driving reflected her time as a ballroom-dance teacher, when she called out the steps of a fox-trot to her students.
        The depression-the swale-measured about twenty feet wide, six deep. We traversed it, scraped bottom coming out, and so narrowly avoided a head-on collision with the trunk of a fir tree that the passenger-side mirror was torn off.
        As the Explorer bounced across uneven ground, dervish shadows whirled and swooped from the slashing headlight beams. I found it dangerously easy to mistake some of these phantoms for real figures, and to be distracted by the movement.
        "Deer!" Lorrie exclaimed.
        Seven white-tailed deer were dead-center in our path, all adults, no fawns at this time of year. The herd leader, an imposing buck with a magnificent rack of antlers, had frozen at our approach, head raised, eyes as bright yellow as the reflective plastic of embedded highway lane dividers.
        I figured to swing left, go wide around them, and I spotted a passage through the trees beyond the herd.
        As I steered the Explorer in that direction, however, the old buck startled.