A Chill in the Air, Chapter 1/12

Chapter One

As pitiless freezing rain pelted down from the black sky, the two young women stumbled haltingly along the edge of a flowing stream.  Semiconscious, they held onto one another for support, lurching forward between the trees.  Squelching boots dragged through the snow on the forest floor.  Neither was fully dressed for the weather; one girl was clad in jeans and a sweater.  The other wore leggings and a parka; neither sported a hat.  They had been soaked to the skin, and their clothes and hair, plastered to their bodies, had begun to freeze in place.  The mists of exhalation hung in the air, marking the path they had trod; their labored breathing poured more of the vapor out between their gasping lips.  Both trembled in the frigid air.

Abruptly the one in the parka swooned and listed to the side; both girls fell to the ground.  The one who had fallen first remained prostrate; her friend struggled up and looked over her.  She lay on her side, and shallow breaths racked her chest.  Her comely face, normally flush with vigor, had grown pale.  She was nearly senseless; she instinctively drew her long legs up toward her body.  The fetching tilt of her head was akin to one which has just found the perfect part of a pillow before descending into a long sleep.  But though this pillow was composed of ice and snow, she showed no awareness of the difference.

Her friend swayed on the limits of consciousness herself.  Sluggishly, she shook the prone girl’s shoulder.  Her lips, quivering in the cold, formed around the pleading words as she shiveringly stuttered.  “C-come on.  Have to g-g-get up now.  Almost th-there.”

The girl on the ground barely stirred, one hand reaching up to clasp over that of her friend.  Her half-waking words echoed back from the edge of oblivion.  “W-w-wake me…when we get…there…”  Then her faint grip loosened, and her hand drooped leadenly to the ground.


* * *

Ten Hours Earlier

The yellow dome of the mountaineering tent was a drop of gold amidst the stark firs and silent snow of the Cawdor Wood.  The midmorning light seeped down into the dark forest where it could, illuminating a small oasis of humanity.  The tent had a single occupant – but she was not alone.  The steady crunch, crunch of dark boots on new-fallen snow foretold the approach of a newcomer.

A shadow fell across the doorway of the tent as the interloper approached.  With care not to make any more noise than necessary, a gloved hand grasped the zipper pull and slowly began to move it.  The fabric door gradually opened, with hardly a sound to signal the intrusion; a faint cloud of steam appeared as the vital heat from within began to spill out into the frosty air.

Hannah Duffy slumbered inside.  She had fallen asleep in a somewhat sitting, somewhat reclined position, her back braced against the mound of a hiking pack.  Her head lay to one side, curls of deep red hair escaping from a messy ponytail and embracing the soft lines of her face.  She was half-dressed; a form-fitting deep brown base layer top clung to her body, while tight black leggings complemented her lower half.  The top of the leggings was accented with a horizontal red stripe, which traversed her trim waist at its narrowest point.  A tiny sliver of her smooth stomach showed in between.  One shapely leg was tucked under her, still mostly inside the sleeping bag; the other stretched in its full, considerable length toward the door.  Her exposed foot was bare.  Pencils, notebooks and loose papers were strewn about her; a thick college textbook lay open across her knees.  Her chest rose and fell with slow breaths in her final moments of reverie.  The sting of winter air played across her exposed skin.  She shifted slightly, a soft whimper escaping her cherry lips.

A wicked grin crossed the face of her visitor.  The gloves came off.

A hand reached for Hannah’s outstretched foot, fingertips extending to dance lightly across the underside of her toes.  First a slight smile passed across the sleeping girl’s face, then an expression of uncertainty as the outsider’s gossamer touch began to chase away her slumber.  Finally her sleepy eyes opened slightly – then they widened in sudden alarm.

“What the hell?!”  Hannah jerked upright with a yelp and yanked her foot back towards her as scattered papers flew into the air.  High feminine laughter rang at the mouth of the tent as Hannah sputtered and brushed hair out of her eyes.  “Wha...”

A girl of roughly Hannah’s age crouched at the entrance; doubled over with laughter, the outsider quickly rocked back into a sitting position.  Her blue eyes sparkled with the same laughter, and her full lips were parted in a broad smile.

“Amanda?” Hannah asked, incredulous.

“Morning, sunshine,” replied the other.

“Amanda!”  Her waking jolt forgotten, Hannah threw herself forward into a hug which very nearly knocked the air from her friend’s lungs.  “What are you doing here?!”

“Oof,” Amanda Jones coughed as she happily returned her friend’s embrace.  “I came looking for you.  You weren’t at the hostel in Inverness, and you weren’t answering your cell.  So I asked around and heard there was a pretty Irish girl camping up this way.”  She tossed her short brown hair.  “Throw in a little rudimentary tracking I learned in the scouts, and here I am.”

“Cell service’s rubbish around here anyway.  I just leave the thing off, or it drains the battery.”  Hannah released her embrace and sat back.  “I could say I’m surprised you found me, but I’m not.  You have a knack for finding anything you set out to find.”

Amanda brushed off the comment.  “Only when I’m properly motivated.  I was just looking for a place to get warm.”  Both giggled.

Then Hannah shivered.  “Well, you‘ve come to the right place, but you’re letting all my heat out.  Come in and zip up that door.”

Amanda did so, first unshouldering her duffel bag; the rest of her luggage was back in town.  Then she sat while she knocked the snow off her boots, one against the other.  The knee-high brown leather boots accented her form-fitting jeans well, but there was no point tracking snow inside.   She removed the boots and left them outside, legs bent as she drew her grey stocking-clad feet through the door.  Soon she was tucked cozily into the small tent.  Off came the knit orange ski headband, allowing her brown bangs to cascade down toward her eyes.  Unzipping her cobalt blue ribbed parka, she removed it, revealing her black and red turtleneck sweater beneath.  She unzipped the sweater’s front as well, to the spot where the zipper stopped at the midpoint of her breasts.  At last her skin could breathe for a bit.

Amanda spoke again.  “You weren’t kidding – it’s almost hot in here.  How’d you manage that?”

“Double-walled insulation.  Plus a few of these heating packs.”  From a small bag, Hannah withdrew a disposable chemical warmer.  As Amanda got comfortable, Hannah bustled about gathering up papers and notebooks to make room.  “You didn’t walk all the way from Inverness, did you?”

“No, only the last mile or so.  I hitchhiked up the main road, told ‘em to let me out after I saw your bike tracks.”

Hannah’s spine straightened reflexively, and she turned to look her friend in the eyes.  “Amanda, you know hitchhiking’s not safe…”

Amanda rolled her eyes slightly.  “Come on, Hannah, you don’t need to be as protective as you were last summer.  I can take care of myself.  Mother Hen is off duty.”   Inwardly she winced; Amanda knew Hannah was very sensitive to the dangers of hitchhiking after a bad experience with a neighbor when she was sixteen.  “Look…I’ll admit your sense of caution helped us out of more than one jam during our backpacking trip.  But this was broad daylight, only a short distance…and I’m fine, see?”  Amanda patted her body with both hands, emphasizing her corporeality.  “All in one piece.”  She quickly shifted the focus of the conversation.  “Frankly I was surprised to hear you were out camping alone in the middle of nowhere like this.  Braving the wilderness, the elements, wolves…”  She tucked her nose up in the air and struck an exaggeratedly affected tone.  “It’s really quite daring.”  She smiled.

A flash of Hannah’s own smile told Amanda there were no hard feelings.  “I know, right?  The solitude, the snow…makes me think of the alien from The Thing, as though it was lurking out there in the cold.”  Hannah settled back into a sitting position, legs tucked under her Turkish-style.  “It’s funny…I think I used to watch all those horror flicks because there was a secret thrill about it.  A thrill I knew I could control, because I could always stop the show and flip the lights on if things got too real.  That summer, backpacking with you and Kat…things got real.”  She twirled a pencil in her fingers.  “I guess I’m realizing there’s some things worth being afraid of in the world, and some things that aren’t.  Nature doesn’t scare me.  Just people…sometimes.”

Hannah realized she was staring at nothing in particular, and quickly looked up at Amanda.  “Anyways, I’m right glad you could stop over in Scotland for a spell.”  The pair’s plans to meet up had been hatched hurriedly, once Amanda had let her friend know she would be in Britain for a few days.  “I might be out here to save Nature, but Nature’s usually not worth shite for company.  I doubt I’ve said ten words out loud in two days, since Chloe left.”

“Your class partner?”

“Yeah – she arsed her way through the whole first semester, she’s trying to arse her way through this project, and she’ll probably be arsing her way through the spring too.  I cannot believe I got stuck with her.”  Hannah gritted her teeth.  “I might have already been at the hostel waiting for you if she’d stayed to help me finish.”

“I thought you were planning on being done three days ago.”

“We were – but that was before we discovered way more than the prof thought we would.”  Hannah’s voice rose with excitement.  “I think I’ve found out the reason for the microcytic anemia we’ve been seeing in the local vendace  -- ineffective heme synthesis caused by lead!”

Amanda stared at her blankly, and cocked one eyebrow.  “How’s that translate for someone who’s not majoring in Environmental Science?”

Hannah launched her explanation breathlessly.  “So the vendace – this freshwater whitefish, the rarest in Britain – starting dying out in Scotland back in the ‘60s.  But they managed to start bringing up their numbers again in the ‘90s.”  She clicked her tongue.  “Score one for Mother Nature.  But in the last few months the conservationists have been noticing the vendace in this area have been having trouble metabolizing certain proteins.  Very current stuff if you read the right journals.  I had a hunch there might be some heavy metal toxicity in the water, possibly lead contamination.  So I convinced the prof to let me and Chloe do our midterm project on it, come up here and do a water toxicity survey.  But right after we’d gathered the minimum amount of data to meet the class requirement, Chloe split!  Filthy shitehawk.”

Amanda blinked, somewhat bemused at the barrage of information.  Their mutual friend Kat had once suggested that Hannah take her environmental views to Twitter, spreading the message through modern media.  The idea had gone over like a lead balloon; @greeneyesofEire sat almost unused.  The character limit had done her in.  Hannah just couldn’t contain herself to only a few words on any subject that she felt passionate about.

Amanda tried to sort out what she’d just heard.  “So basically these fish have lead poisoning?”

“Yes.”

“But if you’ve figured that out, why are you still here?”

“Stubbornness.  I haven’t gotten to the bottom of the mystery yet.”  Hannah paused in rummaging through her papers long enough to look up at Amanda and grin.  “Trait I picked up from a certain American.  Believe me, I’m looking forward to some quality time in the Inverness pubs, but work comes before play.  Ah!  Here we are.”  She pulled a large map of the local waterways from her sheaf of papers and spread it across their laps.”  Several lines and circles in red pencil were traced across it.  “The contamination is abnormally localized.  Not all the tributary creeks around here have it.  I’ve tracked it this far; the Cawdor Burn has it, but the Riereach Burn and the Allt Dearg upstream don’t.  I think I’m narrowing in on the source.  I just want to take a few more readings today to be sure.”

“What do you think the source is?”

“Maybe an old lead mine somewhere hereabouts.”

“Well…er…do you want a hand?”

“Couldn’t hurt – it shouldn’t take more than three hours or so to finish and pack up.  But at this point a second pair of hands won’t save much time.  Instead…,” Hannah’s eyes twinkled, “you could kill a couple of hours at Macbeth’s castle while I finish here.”

Amanda’s eyes lit up with sudden realization.  “Oh!  I knew I’d heard the parish name somewhere before.  So the castle’s the home of the infamous Thane of Cawdor, huh?”

“Sort of.  Shakespeare took some liberties; the historical Macbeth was never Thane of Cawdor.  But the Earl of Cawdor still owns the property, which includes this wood – I had to wangle special permission to camp here and do my study.  The castle is open for tours, and there’s a set of exhibits on Macbeth lore and Highlands history.  Ton of neat artifacts – they’ve got a pair of Robert the Bruce’s spurs, a shattered buckler from Culloden, that sort of thing.  I enjoyed it when I went.”

Amanda struggled with conflicting desires for a moment.  “Well…you’ve got me pegged.  I’m always a sucker for castles.”

Hannah chuckled.  “I remember.  Why don’t you take my bike and walk it back to the main road?  From there, it’s not too far after you cross over the Cawdor Burn bridge.  I can’t use it for what I’m doing; bike’s useless in the snow anyway.  Swing back about noon, and we can go have our fun in Inverness like we planned.”  She yawned and stretched.  “If I’m not dead on my feet, that is.”

Amanda started to zip up again.  “Don’t worry, Hannah.  All you need is a real bed and a good beer.”

Hannah grinned.  “And some time to catch up with a good friend.”