Ranger

I had maybe a few hours before he decided to move.

The fourth option was to try to survive the night without confronting him and to walk down in the morning and to radio the district the moment I got a signal.

That was the option that my training suggested.

Keep the civilians alive.

Get off the mountain.

Call for backup.

Let the professionals handle it.

I thought about that option for a long time.

I could not do it.

The reason I could not do it was that I did not believe we would live through the night.

I believed that Dale had a plan, and that the plan had a clock on it, and that the clock was going to run out sometime in the next six hours, and that he was going to kill me first because I was the only trained person in the room, and then he was going to kill Trent and Elise in their bunks.

and then he was going to walk out into the storm in the morning and disappear back into the drainages he had been living in for 25 years.

The three of us would be logged as a permit group that had failed to return from Elk Pass outpost in an unseasonal storm.

The bodies might be found the following summer or not at all.

The district would add three more names to the list.

I could not let that happen.

I considered my position.

I had the knife on my belt.

I had a small flashlight in my jacket pocket.

I had the hand crank radio, which was heavier than a brick, and had a metal base.