The Collected Short Stories of Louis L'Amour, Volume Four by Louis L’Amour Page B

the girl, peering over at him.
    “I’ll get help,” she said.
    “No.” He knew his fingers would not retain their hold. “Can you brace yourself against something? Can your heels dig in?”
    She glanced around, then nodded. “Then slip out of your coat and lower the end toward me. Hang on tight, but if you feel yourself going, just let go.”
    His fingers were slipping in their icy crack, already so numb he could scarcely feel them. Snow swirled in his face and the wind whipped at his mouth, stealing his breath away. He gasped, then the coat slapped him in the face. He let go with one hand and swung it around and up, grasping the suede coat. He felt the weight hit her, but she held it. Carefully, he drew himself up, hand over hand. When his feet were in the crack where his fingers had been, he climbed over and lay beside her in the snow.
    “I never was an Army officer,” he whispered. “I never was anything.”
    His arm was stretched out and his cuff pulled back. He could see the dial on his watch. It was just eleven minutes past three.

With These Hands
    H e sat bolt upright in his seat, hands clasped in his lap, eyes fixed in an unseeing stare upon the crushed shambles of the forward part of the plane. His mind without focus, fixed in the awful rigidity of shock.
    Awareness returned slowly, and with it a consciousness of cold. Not a shivering cold, not even the icy edge of a cutting wind, but the immense and awful cold of a land of ice, of a land beyond the sun. Of frigid, unending miles lying numb and still under the dead hand of the Arctic.
    No movement…no life. No sound of people, no hum of motors, no ticking of clocks; only silence and the long white miles where the lonely wind prowled and whispered to the snow.
    He had survived. He alone had survived. That thought isolated itself in his consciousness and with it came the dread of living again, the dread of the necessity for struggle.
    Yet he need not struggle. He could die. He need only sit still until the anesthesia of shock merged without pain into the anesthesia of death. He need only remain still. He need only wait…wait and let the cold creep in. Once he moved the icy spell would be broken and then he must move again.
    He was alive. He tried to shut away the thought and find some quiet place in his brain where he could stuff his ears and wait for death. But the thought had seeped into consciousness, and with it, consciousness of cold.
    It was a cold where nails break sharply off when struck with a hammer; a cold where breath freezes and crackles like miniature firecrackers; a cold that drove needles of ice into his nose and throat…there was no anesthesia, no quiet slipping away, this cold would be a flaying, torturing death.
    Icy particles rattled against the hull of the plane; a wind sifted flakes across the hair of the sitting dead. Of them all, he alone had survived. Curtis who had believed so much in luck, Allen who had drilled for oil in the most inhospitable deserts and oceans of the world, of the seven men returning to Prudhoe Bay, he alone had survived.
    He slumped in his seat.
    That was it. He had moved. To live he must move again, he must act. What could he do? Where could he go? Outside lay the flat sweep of a snow-clad plain and beyond the dark edge of forest, black and sullen under a flat gray sky.
    Movement had broken the rigidity of shock. With that break came the realization; there must be no panic, for panic was the little brother of death.
    “Sit still,” he said aloud, “you’ve got to think.”
    If he was to survive it must be by thinking. To think before he moved and then to waste no movement. This power had enabled men to survive. Reason, that ability to profit by experience and not only from their own meager experience, but from the experience of others. That was the secret of man’s dominance, of his very survival, for he not only had learned how to control heat, flood, and wind, but how to transmit to future generations