From: "Natalie Durdle" <ndurdle@animatrix.ns.ca>
Date: Mon, 23 Jul 2001 18:12:29 -0300
Subject: Submission: "The Lost"
Source: direct

Title - "The Lost"
Author - Wintersong
E-Mail address - wintersong@animatrix.ns.ca
Rating - R (language)
Category - SA
Spoilers - Detour, FTF
Keywords - none
Summary - Mulder and Scully are trapped in the 
remote wilderness and the art of surviving was 
not what they expected.

Disclaimer: They belong to CC and 1013.

Author's Notes: In deference to all of the 
virtual pilots who have given their lives over 
the years to isolate M&S in wilderness 
circumstances, I have sacrificed a serial killer 
this time. 

I should warn everyone that my characters 
rebelled on me and took over the story around 
page 35. I haven't had control since. I 
originally planned (and still plan) to write a 
story called "Found" that explores the 
reactions of the people around M&S to their 
return from their survival situation. I 
personally believe that many of the issues that 
plague ordinary survivors just would not come 
into play for these two and I wanted to show how 
confused things would be for them because they 
would not have the adjustment problems everyone 
expected to see...but they might have others.

"The Lost" was meant to be a short prequel to 
set up the physical situation and many of the 
emotional issues will be explored further or 
resolved in "Found". (If you have any burning 
questions you would like to see answered in 
"Found", please let me know. Pretty please? :o) 

As you can see, my *short* prequel got out of 
hand. As a result, some of my research has holes 
in it. I have no idea how long a missing FBI 
agent would have to be missing before the FBI 
froze their paychecks and declared them dead. I 
seem to remember hearing that unless you go to 
court over it, it can take seven years. I'm 
assuming that the military and the government has 
exceptions for these circumstances otherwise the 
family members would have a heck of a time 
collecting pensions.

That's about it. I hope you enjoy the story.

-Wintersong
 
***********************************************

In Flander's Field

In Flander's Fields the poppies
blow Between the crosses, row by row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks still bravely singing fly,
Scarce heard amidst the guns below
We are dead Short days ago we lived, feltdawn, 
saw sunset glow
Loved and were loved and now we lie in Flander's 
Field
Take up our quarrel with foe
To you with failing hands we throw
The torch be yours to hold it high
lf ye break faith, with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flander's Field

-Colonel John McCrae

***********************************************
***********************************************

Samuel Walsh Corman was wonderfully dead.

Three bullet holes dead center mass had done the 
trick beautifully.

Unfortunately, Scully thought, as she glared down 
at the body and resisted giving it a spiteful 
kick, she should have shot the bastard two days 
earlier. Sometimes, being a law-abiding federal 
officer really sucked.

"This sucks, Scully."

Startled to hear her own thoughts echoed in 
disgruntled male tones, she looked up 
to find her partner glaring balefully at the 
corpse bleeding out on the snow in front 
of them. From the expression on his face, he had 
similar visions of Technicolor brains splattering 
satisfactorily across a warehouse floor.

"We should have shot the bastard when we 
had the chance."

Yep.  Blood and brains it was.

"Either that, or shot the morons who let him 
escape."

"I'm thinking up a slightly more painful revenge 
for them, Mulder."

Mulder's head snapped around at her acid tones, 
then a deliciously malicious grin lit up his 
face. "Oh baby. Can I watch?"

Scully bared her teeth ,"You can hold the 
scalpels for me if you want to."

"I knew there were benefits to having a pathologist 
for a partner."

Scully smiled dutifully at the comeback, then 
soberly took in the disaster facing them.

Nothing but silent wilderness surrounded them in 
all directions. A Burl and Ives layer of snow 
dusted the landscape and big fluffy flakes 
drifted down from a darkening afternoon sky. 
Already, the rutted dirt track they had been 
driving on was coated in a half inch layer of 
snow and the increasing wind was busily erasing 
all signs of their passage. But that was only 
part of the problem. 
 
Against a rocky embankment , Corman's 4-door 
sedan lay in crumpled ruins, smashed into some 
post-modern free-form sculpture of shattered 
plastic and twisted metal. Neo-FBI, Scully mused, 
with the dramatic lines of the X-Files and a hint 
of pathos. She snorted indelicately. Mulder 
looked curious and she gestured toward the car.

"Our lives as art,"

His eyebrows winged upward before he turned to 
study the car for a long moment. Then he smirked, 
"Works for me. But is it a case of seeing truth 
in art, or seeing the art in the truth?"

She stared suspiciously at her partner, then 
tossed her head disdainfully, "College boy."

Walking toward the car she could not see his 
face, but she could hear his voice, "Navy brat."

Standing up close and personal to the mangled 
mess that used to be the driver's side wheel 
well and front quarter-panel,the only thought 
that Scully could come up with, was that they 
were well and truly fucked.   

Not that they had had much choice about causing 
the accident. 

Both agents had woken from their drugged and 
handcuffed sleep to Corman's insane ranting. 
He may have started out as an organized serial 
killer, but he had been deteriorating rapidly. 
It was one of the reasons they had finally caught 
the bastard. He had himself so worked up that he 
had actually slashed at Scully with a knife 
when she sat up in the backseat. Mulder's 
instinctive move to block his arm had sent Corman 
over the edge. Oblivious to the fact that he was 
speeding up a rutted dirt track slippery with mud 
and newly falling slow, Corman had attacked. 
While Mulder had tried to fend him off from the 
front passenger seat, Scully had launched her 
upper body over the driver's seat from her place 
in the back and desperately grabbed the wheel. 

Thank god for kidnappers who handcuff the hands 
to the front. 

Corman been thrown back against her when they 
rounded one particularly tight corner and  she 
had lost her grip. Luckily he had long since 
taken his foot off the gas or the crash would 
have killed them all.

When Corman staggered out of the car, Mulder had 
tumbled out after him. Corman had gotten his legs 
tangled in the falling agent's body and had 
tripped over him. Screaming in rage the serial 
killer had raised the knife, intending to plunge 
it straight into Mulder...and Scully had blown 
three holes into him with his own damn gun. The 
crash had knocked the glovebox open and the gun 
had fallen onto the floor.

In his dementia, Corman had never even noticed.

Now, after unlocking their handcuffs with the 
keys Corman had stuffed into his pocket , Scully 
had to wonder just what they had done to piss 
Fate off this week. This car was not taking 
them anywhere, ever again. Which, considering 
what was about to come down on them, was a very 
bad thing.

"Hey Scully? Do you think they were joking about 
the fact that once it starts snowing in 
Minnesota, it doesn't stop until Spring?"

"Nope."

"'S'what I thought."

They had no idea where they were. They had no way 
of calling for help. They were standing in the 
path of a blizzard. Unless their phones were in 
the trunk of the car,  Scully estimated that it 
would be another two days at least before anyone 
missed them. As far as the Minnesota field office 
was concerned, Mulder and Scully flew back to DC 
(this morning?) and were safely out of harm's 
way. Even if the field office called Washington 
to notify them of Corman's escape, Mulder had 
already told Skinner that they were taking a 
short side trip to do some background 
investigation on another case Mulder had for the 
area. Skinner was not expecting them back until 
Monday.

Corman had gotten to them before Mulder had had 
time to rebook their flight, but until someone 
found their rental car or actually noticed that 
the empty seats, no one was going to be looking 
for them. 

They had a meeting with Skinner on Tuesday. Today 
was probably Friday. Five days. Assuming Skinner 
started looking as soon as they missed the 
meeting, it could be Wednesday before any serious 
investigation got underway.  How serious 
that investigation might be was another matter. 

They had this reputation for wandering off...

Five days. 

At least.

Scully scuffed the road surface under the thin 
layer of snow and was frowning thoughtfully when 
Mulder finally got the trunk open. Her head 
snapped around at his vitriolic curse. Oh shit. 
No jackets, no winter boots, no laptop, no jump 
kit. Nothing. Their weapons and spare clips were 
stuffed under a ratty blue duffel, but the only 
other item in the trunk was an oversized 
toolbox. No cell phones. The contents of the 
toolbox were predictable and ordinary. 

The items in the duffel, while also predictable, 
were something else again. 

"Damn it!" Mulder turned away abruptly, staring 
at the horizon before giving in and kicking the 
back fender several times in frustrated anger. 
It probably did not help. Scully just stared down 
at his sneakers in horror. 

The weather had been deceptively warm the 
last few days and the agents had both dressed 
casually. They had anticipated an eight hour car 
ride with a motel at the end of the journey and 
Mulder was only wearing blue jeans and a black 
turtleneck. Scully herself wasn't any luckier 
with black Capri pants and cream-colored Aran 
sweater. Her boots at least had reflective 
insoles and so far she wasn't feeling the cold, 
but the boots were designed for the city where 
pedestrians made frequent trips indoors to warm 
up. She was under no illusions about what would 
happen once the temperature started dropping.

"Did you happen to notice the weather reports 
Scully?"

He already knew that she had.

"A fucking Arctic front coming down from Canada. 
The first major snowfall of the season. They're 
expecting 18 - 36 inches with high winds.  
And we're stuck right smack dab in the 
middle of it. Fuck!"

Swearing from Mulder was always a bad sign.

"Mulder, we'll need to start building a shelter - 
Is there anything useful in the ki...duffel."

Mulder spun, his eyes locking on hers as he 
caught her slip. The knowledge of what the 
contents of that duffel meant to them was easily 
visible in her eyes and she did not try to hide 
it. That blue bag was more than just a murder 
kit. It was proof positive of how deeply screwed 
they really were.

They both knew the MO too damn well.

Corman had blitzed his victims, incapacitating 
them with a hand-held canister of knock-out gas. 
Then he drove them to extremely remote, seldom 
used cabins, summer cottages and hunting shacks 
he located weeks or months before through careful 
observation and eavesdropping. He never took the 
owner of the cabin - never left obvious clues and 
it was often months or even years before the 
owner of the cabin ever knew that it had been 
used. There were never any connections between 
the cabins and Corman -so there was no way for 
them to begin to guess where he had been taking 
them.

And nowhere for Skinner to begin a search 
pattern.

"When does deer season start Mulder?"

His lips twisted as he shrugged ignorance.

"We might get lucky and get some week-end 
warriors out practicing for the end of the world, 
but..."

Yeah. 

But.

Well...fine.

So they were on their own. Nothing new about 
that.  This was just going to take a different 
type of effort than normal. She firmed her jaw 
and tilted her chin stubbornly.

"You will do anything to get out of those monthly 
expense report meetings won't you Mulder?"

She flashed a determinedly bright smile, then 
turned away from her startled partner and stared 
hard into the surrounding woods. Picking several 
likely looking clumps of evergreens, she marched 
in that direction. The snow was only a couple of 
inches deep. That wasn't enough to make the base 
of a tree a practical shelter. She decided a 
debris hut was their best - and warmest - option. 
The falling snow had tapered off to a few 
sporadic flakes but it was an illusion. A 
lull between weather fronts.  

The snow was coming.

"I need pine boughs Mulder. Lots and lots of pine 
boughs. "

Mulder, who had been watching her tramp around 
with wary fascination, opened his mouth as if to 
speak, changed his mind, and went pine bough 
hunting.  Scully went location scouting. All of 
the fallen trees located close to the crash site 
were too low to the ground or too rotten. Then 
she stumbled over the perfect ridgepole. A larger 
tree had brought down a tangle of younger ones in 
it's final death throws and she managed to drag 
one free. 

Snapping off the top, she was left with 
ten foot length of solid tree with most of it's 
branches sheered off. Dragging it back to a 
sheltered spot, she jammed the butt end into the 
natural notch on the top of an old tree stump 
that had broken off about three feet from the 
ground  Then she used the side of her boot to 
scrape away all the snow and wet debris for three 
feet on either side of the ridgepole.  

Collecting armfuls of heavy sticks she laid 
each stick against the ridgepole, forming a 
tentlike skeleton that went from a height of 
three feet at the tree stump, to nothing at the 
other end. Mulder had returned several times to 
drop loads of tree boughs and she swiftly started 
laying them over the walls of the structure, 
interlacing the tiny branches to keep them from 
blowing away. 

As much as possible she tried to lay the boughs 
bottom to top - as if laying roofing shingles. 
Armfuls of dry dead leaves and pine needles 
scraped from below the tentlike boughs of the 
larger evergreens around them were dumped over 
the roof until this second layer was almost two 
feet thick. She would have preferred to add 
another foot, but the wind was starting to pick 
up and they were losing the daylight. More pine 
bough shingles were laid to hold the light debris 
in place. She didn't bother trying to add a layer 
of snow. The storm would take care of that by 
morning. 

Both agents were tired, sore and soaking wet by 
the time the structure was complete. It was 
getting difficult to see and both sets of hands 
were scratched, bloody and painfully cold. 
A handful of the stronger trees in a cluster of 
young maple trees were growing together at the 
base. Scully doubted that it would be possible to 
tell it was more than a single tree after another 
decade or two. In the process, several tall 
skinny maples in the center of the clump had been 
choked out. The wood was dead and gray, striped 
of bark by the elements, resembling standing 
driftwood. She was able to pull out several 
extremely dry lengths of seasoned maple that 
snapped easily into burnable lengths. A hasty 
search of Corman's body had revealed a book of 
matches and she quickly got a cheerful fire 
burning about twenty feet from the shelter.

The brightness of the fire instantly made the 
rest of the forest seem that much darker, but the 
agents gratefully took advantage of the chance to 
stand close and warm their hands. Mulder saw her 
trying to massage a cramp from her left hand and 
instantly grabbed her wrist and set to work with 
his thumbs. He grinned as she groaned in comic 
relief and cocked a curious eyebrow.

"You've been holding out on me, Agent Scully."

"Ummm?" she opened one eye as the warmth from his 
hands worked out the cramps in hers and just 
enjoyed the heat and smoke from the fire as it 
wreathed around them. 

"Why do I have a feeling you've been reading 
something other than the American Medical Journal 
and the Law Enforcement Bulletin lately?"

She smiled," You keep dragging me into 
the woods, Mulder. I had to do something in self-
defense."

He chuckled, then dropped her hands, "So what's 
next?"

Scully sighed. "Not much we can do until 
tomorrow. We're just about out of daylight."

Studiously avoiding thoughts about what the 
plastic tarp they found in the duffel had 
probably been used for, the agents had placed it 
on the ground inside the shelter. They piled in 
leaves and  pine needles until they had a ground 
layer about a foot and a half thick. Carpet 
ripped from the trunk of the car was laid on top. 
Two garbage bags -one of several found in the 
blue duffel, were stuffed with more loose debris 
and would be used to block the entrance once they 
were inside. 

All in all, it was a damn fine shelter if she did 
say so herself.

She dropped another couple of logs on the fire 
and helped Mulder drag over a log large enough to 
use as a bench. Then, they pulled off boots and 
sneakers and carefully propped up socked feet 
near the fire as they waited for them to dry and 
for the snow in the now emptied toolbox placed 
next to the fire to melt. A plastic bag currently 
resting in the toolbox held melting drinking 
water. 

Mulder had made a disgusted face as she pressed 
the second bag of water on him, but did not 
protest. Orange urine was nothing to sneeze at.
He knew as well as she did that dehydration could 
kill. People had dehydrated in cold weather to 
the point where their blood thickened and they 
did not bleed when cut. The side effects from the 
side effects were more than enough to keep him 
gulping as much water as she wanted him to drink. 

Even if it did mean he would be getting up in the 
middle of blizzard to pee.

Water was not going to be an issue, but food sure 
was. There had been nothing, absolutely nothing, 
in the car. Mulder had stripped Corman's body 
before his sphincter muscles relaxed and rendered 
his jeans extremely unpleasant. The dead killer's 
sneakers were too small for him and much too 
large for Scully but he had dropped them into the 
car along with the flannel shirt and jeans Corman 
had been wearing. Mentioning to Scully about 
washing the blood out before using them for fear 
of attracting animals to the shelter, he had been 
a bit taken aback by the suddenly thoughtful 
expression on her face. 

Her next action, however, had shocked the hell 
out of him.

Rifling through the blue duffel  she had located 
a large hunting knife with a wicked edge. She 
also grabbed up a crushed paper coffee cup that 
had pretty much been designated future tinder 
and made her way back to Corman's exposed corpse. 
Corman had gone down in the middle of the road, 
and a thin layer of snow had already begun to 
melt and freeze on his body.  

Without warning, Scully reached out with the 
knife and sliced him open from stem to stern. 

"Uh Scully? I think we know what killed him. We 
really don't need an autopsy."

She had shot him a look of amused irritation - or 
was that irritated amusement? Then she severed 
the abdominal artery and blood started to flow 
sluggishly into the body cavity.  Dumping in 
the warm water she had carried in the paper cup 
she used the knife to stir the gory mixture. 
Mulder had watched, nauseated, and his brain had 
started flipping through references to MacBeth's 
witches and the casting of the runes with the 
entrails of a goat. Not to mention every single 
case he had ever dealt with that had anything to 
do with human cannibalism. He swallowed sharply 
and considered the fact that a photographic 
memory could be a real bitch sometimes.

He was unaccountably relieved when all she did 
was start scooping out cups of watered down blood 
and started walking toward the small field and 
trees across the road from their shelter. She 
left a bloody trail behind her. She did this 
several more times until Corman lay at the center 
point of a large half-circle of bloody spokes all 
leading into the woods. From the air, it was 
probably a highly visible target, but it would be 
covered by snow by morning. On the upside, he had 
figured out what she was doing. She was trying to 
get the food to come to them. 

"Scully? What if we get a bear? I'm not 
sure we have enough ammo to kill a bear."

"We get a bear, Mulder, I'll make sure we have 
enough ammo."

Watching her standing there, her face distant, 
her hands and exposed wrists streaked with blood 
with an eviscerated corpse splayed out at her 
feet like some obscene sacrifice, he had 
believed every word she said. Watching her now, 
the drama of the moment receded into memory, the 
firelight turning her skin a burnished gold, he 
still believed her. Her capability for ruthless 
determination exceeded his own. He had always 
known that. As hot as his passions burned, their 
very nature could work against him when directed 
inward. Hers was a cold rage, as terrifying as it 
was effective for the simple fact that it 
remained undiluted. It hid beneath proper suits 
and government haircuts, emerging only in flashes 
after she had been pushed to some unforeseen 
breaking point.

Every lost piece of evidence, every covert action 
that violated her sense of justice and honor, 
every time he came a hair's breath distance from 
death, the edge on that rage was honed just a 
little bit finer. Their enemies had absolutely no 
idea what they were creating. He was not sure 
Scully herself knew. She looked in the mirror and 
saw the youth her lost naivete and injured 
innocence had leached from her face. He saw 
tempered strength and commitment. 

She saw loss...he saw truth.

If his passions were a weapon then her hand, 
guided by cold logic and ruthless fury , would 
strike the final blow.

And nothing...not a serial killer, not a blizzard 
and not even themselves -  was going to stop her.

He was looking forward to it.

************************************************

An hour after the sun dropped, the agents were 
brutally made aware of the fact that whatever 
plans they had they would have to do all their 
work during the day until they found a way to 
protect themselves from the elements. Not 
even standing two feet from the fire compensated 
for the wind driven chill that ate at their 
backs. They wormed their way into the shelter and 
spent several hilarious moments trying to strip 
down to their underwear without killing each 
other with a misplaced knee or elbow. The burrow 
was already warming up rapidly and would be even 
warmer once covered with a thick layer of 
insulating snow.  

Mulder argued briefly that it might be warmer to 
use the shirts as blankets, but Scully pointed 
out that the whole point was to use their body 
heat to warm the shelter itself. Plus, sweating 
into their clothes would reduce any insulating 
value the clothes had during the daytime. He had 
shrugged and within a remarkably short time, the 
tiny burrow was actually quite comfortable.  

Spooned up against each other, the fit was still 
a tight one. Deliberately. The biggest mistake 
anyone ever made was making the shelter too 
large. Scully blessed the week-ends she had spent 
practicing building these things last winter. 

That first week-end, she had almost frozen to 
death and the park ranger who had stopped at her 
campsite the next morning had just shaken his 
head and pointed out what she was doing wrong.  
He had made a couple of cautious remarks about 
the fact she was out alone, but she had 
accidentally flashed her holster when bending 
over to pick up a load of firewood and he had 
closed his mouth with a rather abrupt snap. Not 
that Scully had any illusions that a gun 
guaranteed her safety, but the campground was 
mostly frequented by families, had a fair amount 
of traffic and she felt fairly confident all else 
considered.

Besides, after liver-eating mutants and ax-
wielding cannibals, she found it a bit hard to 
get worked up over garden variety perverts and 
muggers. It probably said something that she 
found the thought of dealing with something that 
she actually knew would die if she shot it once 
or twice to be mildly relaxing. The average 
FBI agent carried one extra clip. 

She carried three.

She had planned to invite Mulder along on that 
first trip but he had pissed her off about 
something and a vague desire to practice new 
skills had quickly gotten mixed up with a 
burning ambition to rub his nose in his 
ignorance. She sighed as she considered their 
current situation. Not quite the trial by fire 
she had imagined. A half-formed plan involving 
lots of laughter and hot chocolate with 
marshmallows had just died a very abrupt death. 

Why was she not surprised?

With their luck they should just defect over to 
the other side and plan the damn invasion 
themselves. She would give it a week tops before 
the whole thing started crashing down in a 
flaming mass of catastrophic self-destruction. 
The aliens wouldn't know what hit them...

Of course, there were no such things as 
aliens.

Scully smiled at her own automatic qualification 
and turned her drowsy attention back to the 
problems at hand. She wasn't worried about 
freezing anything essential in their sleep. 
Once she had managed to get her last shelter 
constructed properly, she had spent that night 
in nothing more than winter underwear on what 
later proved to be the coldest January night 
of the year. She hadn't even noticed the 
temperature drop. Between the two of them, 
they would put out more than enough body heat 
to keep this burrow warm.

Especially Mulder.

For a moment she sleepily considered the fact 
that men seemed to radiate twice as much heat as 
women. It was logical - more muscle mass and less 
insulation. Of course, it meant he would also 
need to eat twice as much just to survive. 
Considering that she seemed to be the primary 
beneficiary of that extra body heat at the moment 
she supposed she would not argue too much if she 
ended up hunting extra rabbits.    

She suppressed a giggle.

"What's so funny?"

Trust Mulder to know when she was smiling in the 
dark. She answered without thinking.

"Male physiology Mulder. You're putting out so 
much body heat I'm considering cuffing you to the 
bed while I do the hunting so I have a warm place 
to come back to."

There was an astonished silence behind her and 
she was momentarily thrown off balance when the 
expected double entendre never came. It wasn't 
like she hadn't walked right into that one.

"Mulder?"

"Just a second Scully. " the raspy quality of his 
voice as well as...other things, alerted her to 
the problem. 

Her face began to ache as her grin stretched 
wider. "Relax Mulder, I'm a doctor."

His sigh was part humor, part resignation "I'm 
not going to have any dignity left at all by the 
end of this am I?"

She snickered," Male physiology, involuntary 
responses to suggestive stimuli. I won't hold it 
against you "

Her partner groaned again, then rested his chin 
against the top of her head, "My instructor 
didn't exactly cover the etiquette for these 
circumstances in the FBI survival course."

"Mine did."

She could almost feel the eyebrows shooting 
straight up, "You're joking."

She shook her head automatically, "Nope. 
Actually...", Scully hesitated, then plowed on, 
keeping her voice even, "...she made a very good 
point. She claimed that surviving was only half 
the battle. Living with whatever happened was the 
second half. She...also mentioned that emotions 
and responses get very...intense, very primitive 
in these situations. "

Mulder was silent for a moment. She knew he knew 
what she was talking about. She might have 
thought him uncomfortable with the abrupt way the 
subject had come up except his body didn't tense 
and his breathing remained even. When he finally 
spoke, his voice was contemplative, even curious. 
She should have known. 

The profiler at work. 

"Was she talking about what I think she 
was talking about?"

Scully dithered for a moment then plunged full 
steam ahead. "She almost lost her partner over 
it. They were stranded after a plane crash for 
a few days and things got...personal. But they 
couldn't handle it back in the real world. They 
almost split up and I got the impression they 
never got back to where they were before..."

Her voice trailed off. The unspoken fear was 
suddenly very real and easy to hear in the 
darkness. She had not realized how real until 
this moment. There was so much at stake. So much 
that could go wrong. This situation was an 
immediate physical reality and all the normal 
rules were suspended. But there would be a later. 
An after. A time when they would have to go back 
to the rules. 

What happened then? 

Mulder was quiet for a long time. Surprisingly, 
it wasn't an awkward silence. She waited for him 
to come to whatever conclusions he needed to 
find. 

"I don't think we can pretend that this is an 
artificial world and that nothing that happens 
can just be ignored once we get back"

He was choosing his words carefully. Scully 
murmured a soft sound of agreement and he 
continued.

"At the same time, I don't think it's fair to 
beat ourselves up if something does happen 
because of the circumstances. I think we've 
pretty much proven that adrenaline alone is 
something we can handle."

His voice was dry, and Scully smiled 
involuntarily as she considered the sheer number 
of opportunities they had had to go off the rails 
over the years. Heck, there had been times when 
fifteen minutes of hot sweaty sex would have been 
easier than the hours of cold showers, sharp-
edged tempers and over-sensitive nerve-endings. 

Easier, but not better. 

That wasn't the way their partnership worked. It 
wasn't the way they worked. They couldn't just 
use each other and then go on the next morning as 
if nothing had happened. There were times she had 
wished that wasn't true. There were times she had 
wished they were different people. 

But that's just the way it was.

So adrenaline wasn't the problem. Enforced 
long-term physical proximity under emotionally 
charged circumstances was a different story. 

There had always been room to get away.

Mulder could go running. She could bury herself 
in reports, or autopsies or visits to her mother. 
Only now, there was no place to go. They needed 
each other in close contact just to survive and 
the only thing they had to distract them - the 
fight for their survival - was the thing that 
would be driving their primitive emotional 
responses in the first place. The lack of privacy 
alone would eventually lead to some sort of 
emotional explosion. 

Sex was probably preferable to killing each 
other.

"I won't lose you because of an accident of 
biology ,Scully. Promise me. Promise me that 
whatever happens...we'll talk about it after we 
get back and after we have time to think about 
it. We talk, we scream, we go to counseling...I 
don't care. Just ...promise me we won't let this 
destroy us."

As calm as he had been before, his words now 
shocked her. Somehow, his ease had fled and she 
had not even noticed. The plea was torn directly 
from the heart, the words raw-edged and bleeding.
She thought, perhaps, even Mulder was caught off
guard by his sudden desperate fear.

Unexpected tears burned down her cheeks and she 
took him by surprise when she flipped over, 
wrapped her arms around his waist and tightened 
her grip. It was not a gentle hug or gesture of 
reassurance. It wasn't even a promise. It was a 
bruising refusal to let him go. A steel-edged 
determination that was more threat than pledge to 
let nothing ...absolutely nothing, come between 
them.

Not even themselves. 

Mulder's body relaxed even as his arms tightened. 
They would be okay. Whatever happened, whatever 
came out of this situation...they would be okay. 

That was all that mattered.

They found themselves drifting as the sound of 
the wind outside built to a howl, then gradually 
faded as a layer of insulating snow slowly 
drifted over their burrow and wrapped them in a 
dark pocket of silence and comforting warmth. 
Scully fell asleep to the comforting rhythm of 
her partner's beating heart. Lulled by the 
familiar sound of her breathing, Mulder followed 
close behind.

***********************************************

"Tell me again why you're doing all the work?"

"Because someone needs to tend the fire and 
Corman's clothes don't fit you."

Mulder glared as he watched his partner pull the 
dead killer's flannel shirt and baggy jeans over 
her own clothes. The ragged ends of the too long 
jean legs had been hacked off and were wrapped 
around her hands and wrists. More strips of 
fabric and narrow lengths of foam cut from the 
seat cushions gave them ragged headbands 
protecting neck and ears. The cloth from the 
backseat now did duty as rough gaiters that kept 
the snow from the tops of their boots and 
sneakers.

The initial storm had blown over them in the 
night dropping almost a half a foot of snow 
over everything. The morning was dawning 
relatively warm and breeze-free. Nothing had 
approached the body during the night and knowing
that the warm weather was temporary, Scully had 
quickly fashioned a crude pair of diamond shaped 
snowshoes using sticks and strips of fabric cut 
from the car upholstery. Co-opting the rope from 
Corman's duffel as well as several lengths of 
wire ripped from the car, she set out to run 
rabbit snares.
  
Mulder had been relegated to firewood and camp 
maintenance duty as he was the one with the 
least amount of clothing available to him. Once 
he had a sizable pile of firewood however and 
made sure that the toolbox was full of melting 
slush and had rewarmed and dried his feet and 
hands, Mulder began to get bored.

He knew Scully was hoping to get some rabbits. He 
had mentioned  rabbit starvation, but she had 
only laughed and said, "Mittens, Mulder, not 
food". Not that the meat would go unappreciated 
right about now, he thought hungrily. You might 
starve to death if you ate nothing but 
rabbits...but you would starve to death eating 
nothing too.

Two gunshots in quick succession echoed in the 
far distance. His head jerked up and he listened 
intently. He told himself to calm down. If she 
was in trouble, she would have fired off three. 
So...assume that your partner is fine Agent 
Mulder and deal with it. Go...collect more 
firewood or something. Except he was heartily 
sick of collecting wood, there was enough to last 
them at least two more days and he needed 
something else to do. He considered what it might 
mean if Scully had actually shot something with 
fur.

He turned over her statement about mittens. They 
would have to do something with the skin wouldn't 
they. Tan it or something? He vaguely recalled 
that smoke had something to do with the process. 
And scraping. The skins needed to be scraped. 
That would make one hell of a mess. Not exactly 
something they would want next to their burrow. 
And they would need some shelter while they 
worked. 

Mulder considered possible options and then 
trudged out after more pine boughs.

It was late afternoon when he heard someone 
stomping through the snow towards the camp. 
Mulder dashed out into the open just in time to 
see a bedraggled Scully stagger out onto the 
road obviously making a large circle around 
the camp. The shock of seeing her covered in 
blood was offset by the blinding ear to ear 
grin plastered across her face.  

"Mulder!"

She was sweaty, her face was scratched, her make-
shift snowshoes had obviously fallen apart 
somewhere outside of camp because she was soaked 
from her waist to her feet...and he had never 
seen such a joyous look of accomplishment and 
pride in his life. The grin was contagious.

"Isn't he beautiful Mulder?"

In the shock of that grin and the blood, Mulder 
had not seen what she had hauled back. He looked 
past her shoulder expecting to see several 
rabbits or maybe a coyote. What he saw made his 
jaw drop. Scully had got a buck. An honest to 
god-probably weighed more than she did - deer. 
And she had dragged it back herself. Mulder did 
not even want to think about how it must have 
caught and snagged on every bush and shrub. From 
the look of her, she had felt every mile. Or had. 
Right now all she was feeling was good about 
herself.

He obligingly let out a rebel yell,"Food! "

Then he carefully pulled off the blood stained 
flannel, wrapped his arms around her waist and 
lifted her into a vertebrae straightening hug. 
"You can have anything. I will do reports, I will 
do expense accounts. Just tell me you know how to 
cook that beast."

Scully laughed, then grinned at him when he put 
her back on her feet.

"Jesus Scully, he's bigger than you are. "

"He ran right at me Mulder. You wouldn't believe 
it. One minute I'm trying to set a trap and the 
next this thing is racing toward me. I think he 
would have run me over if I hadn't shot him. "

Mulder bent over the body and peered at the chest 
and whistled. "Pretty damn good shot under any 
circumstances. I think you got him right in the 
heart."

Scully grimanced."Yeah. And he got me right in 
the thigh with his hoof. He wasn't as dead as he 
looked when I went to check on him. "

Mulder gave the blood on her face another sharp 
glance. "Is any of that yours?"

She shook her head. "I didn't think I'd have the 
time to bleed him out and then drag him home and 
I didn't want to risk anything stealing him so I 
just cut the throat and let him bleed as I 
dragged. We should keep a good watch tonight. 
Something may try to follow the blood trail. We 
also need to hang and skin him as soon as 
possible."

Mulder brightened and grabbed the rope harness 
Scully had fastened around the deer and started 
dragging it across the road. Despite being 
tired and wet, she trailed curiously along behind 
him. She started to help with the hauling, but 
her shoulders were so sore that she did not 
protest when he gestured for her to let him do 
it. She had dragged the bloody thing  for over 
three hours. She deserved a break.

She wasn't expecting what she saw.

Astonished, she turned wide eyes on Mulder as he 
proudly showed off the planned features of their 
brand-new skinning and tanning lean-to. Despite 
the fact that it wasn't finished, the sheer 
amount of work he had already put into it showed 
clearly. 

"Wow."

He grinned."All the comforts of the home garage. 
How do you want to do this?"

Mulder was standing near two trees about five 
feet apart. Both had solid branches sticking out 
about twelve feet from the ground.

Scully sighed, thought about going back to the 
fire and taking a sponge bath and collapsing into 
the burrow-preferably with a nice warm body 
beside her to chase away the cold. Then she 
considered how much more work this would be in 
the morning after she had had all night to 
stiffen up. 

"The hard way, Mulder. What else?"

He smiled ruefully, acknowledging the truth, then 
bounded back to the camp to get the rest of the 
rope. Watching her partner do a good imitation of 
Tigger on acid, she wondered just where in the 
hell he got his energy -  and whether it was 
something you could bottle. Shaking her head as 
she smiled, she laboriously undid the knots 
holding the rope to the deer as well as the ones 
forming the harness. She had just finished when 
Mulder returned.He shot her a concerned look.

"Do you want to warm up by the fire first 
Scully?"

"I'm more tired than cold. I've been moving 
enough and it's been mild today."

That in itself was one of the reasons she had 
fought so hard to get the deer back. The weather 
had been unbelievably mild in the wake of the 
snow storm -  and they knew it couldn't last. The 
storm had been the leading edge of a warm front 
trapped between a moving pressure system and an 
arctic front sweeping down from the North. 
Unfortunately, the arctic part of that equation 
was still headed their way. Scully figured they 
had maybe three days at most before the 
temperature dropped dramatically. 

They not only needed food desperately, the 
clothes they had just were not up to colder 
temperatures. Not without a search and rescue 
party a couple of days behind them. With the 
passing of the front, the breeze had died to 
almost nothing. That would change as soon as the 
arctic ridge moved in. They needed some form of 
wind protection if they were to survive this 
thing.

Using the hunting knife, Scully pierced  each 
back leg just where the leg bones met the ankle. 
They each threaded one end of their separate 
ropes through the hole, pushing it through with 
the knife where necessary, and then secured the 
end around the leg with a slip knot. Mulder 
tossed the other end of his rope over the lower 
branch of the tree on the right - she did the 
same on the left. Then, pulling in unison, they 
hauled the animal into the air by his back legs. 
They tied the ends of the ropes to their 
respective trees and stepped back to study their 
deer.

Mulder was stared at the carcass with speculative 
eyes.

"Come on G-man. The sooner we get this done, the 
sooner we get to the shish kabobs"

Mulder smiled dutifully, but she could see the 
wheels turning. The deer was tangible proof that 
they could do more than huddle and hope to 
shoot enough rabbits to survive until search and 
rescue found them...or not. The deer alone would 
not give them enough to walk out...not if they 
wanted to do it smart. 

But it was a start. 

The lack of food or supplies of any kind in the 
car suggested that either Corman had been 
planning to leave them at the kill site while he 
went for supplies...or that he already had 
everything ready. The gas tank was just under 
half full, but that did not mean that the cabin 
in question was anywhere close. Nor could they 
count on stumbling over someone else's cabin. 
Even assuming they weren't on government land of 
some kind, half these hunters took in snowmobiles 
and ATV's. There would be nothing visible from 
the road. 

And realistically, half these hunting cabins were 
little more than shacks. They would not have 
phones. All they would do if they did find a 
cabin was do exactly what they were doing now. 
Hunt down the resources they needed to walk out 
of the bush.

"Three weeks, Scully."

"What?"

" If they don't find us in the next three weeks, 
I think we should plan to walk out.  "

He turned his head to pin her with serious eyes. 

"They'll assume that Corman has us, but they 
don't know for sure. If it goes three weeks..."

After three weeks, no one would have any reason 
to think that they were still alive.

Scully nodded absently as she considered his 
timeline.  Three weeks would put them to 
November. Considering they had no idea how far 
they might be from civilization, it could take 
days...maybe weeks to walk out. They did NOT want 
to be doing that in January. Any less than four 
weeks and they ran the risk of not being well 
enough equipped to survive. It was frustrating 
... especially since she knew it was more 
than possible that civilization was just over the 
hill. A snowplow could come chugging down the 
road any minute, or  they could find out that 
they were a bare couple of miles from a major 
highway. Or they could be 200 km into a state 
park on a road that had already been closed for 
the season.

Better safe than sorry. 

She shivered suddenly as a small gust of wind 
whipped through her shirt and stole the remaining 
heat from her earlier exertion. They were not in 
any condition to walk anywhere. Not like this. 
Scully moved the last few steps to the fire and 
met Mulder's eyes soberly.

"Three or four weeks sounds about right to me."

Feeling the ache in her bones as she contemplated 
the task ahead, she reminded herself to be 
grateful for last night's good sleep. She had a 
feeling both of them might be working through the 
night to get this done. She debated again whether 
or not it was worth waiting and then realized 
that they still had at least another hour of 
daylight. It would be a shame to waste it. 

She picked up the hunting knife and went to work.

Cutting completely around each back ankle, she 
carefully sliced through the skin of each inner 
leg until she reached the anus. Cutting a 
complete circle around it, she carefully 
reached her fingers in as she neared the last 
cut. Before severing it completely, she wrapped 
her hand around the end of the colon and motioned 
Mulder to give her a hand. Then, leaving one very 
surprised FBI agent holding the ass end of the 
deer's digestive tract, she sliced straight down 
the belly from vent to neck. Mulder yelped as his 
arm was dragged forward as the entire intestinal 
tract plus stomach spilled out onto the ground. 
Luckily  he kept a hold of his end.  With the 
bowel out of the carcass she no longer had to 
worry about tainting the meat. Mulder spent 
several slippery and very bloody minutes hauling 
the offal away from the work area and he piled it 
carefully where they could pick through it later.  
The scent glands at the base of the tail were 
tossed into the woods.
 
With the body cavity emptied, Scully debated 
briefly, then separated head from body with a few 
deft cuts of the knife. All those autopsies were 
coming in handy she thought with grim amusement. 
Ignoring the odd look her partner gave her as she 
handed him the head and told him to put it 
somewhere safe, she turned back to the carcass. 
She sliced around the ankles of the forelegs, 
then sliced up each inner leg  until she hit the 
neck. It was almost as simple as slipping off a 
coat after that.  Starting from the top, she 
worked her hands between meat and skin, using the 
knife only when the connective tissue refused to 
give. The heavy hide peeled away from the body.

Mulder helped by pulling the hide away from her 
hands, but for the most part they let the weight 
of the hide and gravity do most of the work. 
There was still a bit of daylight left when the 
last of it dropped from the carcass with a 
muffled thump. Wordlessly Mulder dragged it into 
the lean-to and folded it awkwardly, fur side in. 
Scully sliced off long thin slices of deer meat 
and Mulder started scooping snow into the 
trunk of the car by the armful. 

Once he had a hardpacked layer covering the 
floor, he hauled back deer strips by the dozen. 
Laying them carefully without overlap, he left a 
good six inches from the sides of the trunk to 
keep the meat from touching metal or thawing if 
the metal warmed in the sunlight, then he scooped 
more snow over top. More packing , more layers of 
meat, then more hard-packed snow.  It was a tight 
fit, but it all went in. He left enough space 
at the top for an airspace, then shut the trunk 
lid gratefully.

On one of his trips he had threaded several 
slices of meat onto sharpened green sticks and 
the scent of warm roasting meat made his mouth 
water as he stumbled back to the fire for the 
last time.  As he called her name, Scully  placed 
her hands at her back, straightened painfully and 
looked around blankly as if surprised to find the 
daylight gone. She also seemed vaguely surprised 
by the missing pile of meat next to her feet. 
Mulder was not totally certain she had heard him 
when he had told her what he was doing with it.

"Ready for dinner, Scully?"

She groaned as she staggered over to the cooking 
fire and sat down on a log hauled there earlier 
for their seating convenience. The low level of 
the seat had both their legs sprawled out at 
awkward angles, but neither complained. He 
handed her a skewer of meat with a slight 
flourish and bow and she smiled in tired 
appreciation.

"I don't think I've ever been this tired, 
Mulder."

"Not even in med-school?"

He tasted the meat cautiously, the tore into it 
with teeth and hands when he found it not too hot 
to the touch. He grinned blissfully as the taste 
of roasted grease exploded across his tastebuds. 
McDonalds had nothing on this. 

"I don't think so. Of course I was younger in med 
school. "

Mulder grinned around a mouthful of venison, 
"Don't remind me. I'm glad I was 26 when I was 
with ViCap.I think the BSU coffee alone would 
kill me now."

Hunger was the ultimate spice. 

The next twenty minutes were a companionable 
silence filled only with the sound of steady 
mastication and slight moans of flavor-derived 
ecstasy. Finally, stomachs satisfied and fingers
licked clean, the practical issue of what to do 
next arose. Between the blood trail in this 
direction and the bits and pieces of dead deer 
scattered all over the place, there was a good 
chance something would come calling.Personally 
Mulder felt his partner still had her eye on a 
pair of fur mittens, but considering what she had
already bagged he was not going to complain. If 
Scully wanted a dead carnivore, she could have as 
many as he could shoot. he volunteered to take 
the first watch and it was a mark of how 
exhausted his partner was when she did not even 
put up a token protest.

Back at camp, Scully found a toolbox full of warm 
water Building up the fire until it radiated heat 
for several feet, she stripped off the clothes 
she was wearing and used a spare piece of car 
upholstery to wash the blood and sweat from her 
body. It was awkward doing it slowly enough that 
her skin dried against the warmth from the flames 
before washing another part down. Awkward and 
cold. But she got the blood off.

She had rinsed her socks out even before starting 
and they had been steaming gently by the fire. 
Now, standing in only her underwear and boots  
she tried to rinse her blood-stained clothes. 
Pouring cupful after cupful through the fabric to 
get most of the blood out, she shivered as the 
water splashed back up against her legs and 
cursed as she considered that there had to be 
a better way to do this. Finally figuring that 
they were as good as they were going to get...at 
least this night, Scully wrung them out and hung 
them by the fire to dry. Then she dumped more 
snow into the box to melt and grabbed her now dry 
socks. Her last thought after she dove into the 
burrow ,sealed it up with the garbage bag  and 
pulled on her socks,  was a momentary regret for 
the missing comfort of a second body curled up 
with her. 

Closing her eyes, she was asleep before she 
completely drew her next breath.

*******************************************

Walter Skinner hated getting midnight phone 
calls. There were very few reasons why anyone 
would be calling him after eleven at night and 
none of them were personal. Not anymore. 
Emergency strategy sessions for on-going VCU 
investigations were one reason, but in general, 
the only reason anyone called him after midnight 
was to tell him that one of his agents was in 
trouble.

Or dead.

With Mulder and Scully it had been both. On 
several occasions. But it never got any easier. 
Last time a gun shot, this time a forgotten 
signature leading to a rushed trip to the airport 
only to discover two empty seats and an abandoned 
rental car empty of personal effects. Secretly, 
every time that damn phone rang, he knew, 
absolutely knew, that it was someone calling him 
to tell him that his most unusual pair of agents 
had finally gone too far out on that limb...and 
hung themselves.

And every time that call came in, he prayed that 
it was something that he could fix.

He wondered sometimes if his two problem children 
had any idea just how many irate phone calls he 
had taken from everyone from annoyed military 
police all the way up to pissed off SACs and 
livid Congressmen. And they were just the ones 
his two mavericks angered in the general run of a 
normal investigation. OPR, the Consortium and - 
god help him - the press, were issues all by 
themselves.

The funny thing was, the more complaints that his 
agents generated, the more he became convinced 
that what they did was necessary. Accounting 
might have a problem when doing a cost-benefit 
analysis. Their solve rate was way above bureau 
average, but excepting the VCU and HRT, their 
actual cost per agent was off the charts. But how 
could he explain to people who wanted to boil 
everything down to a dollar figure that the value 
of the X-Files wasn't always it's closure rate or 
even the number of lives saved. It wasn't even 
about saving the world from alien invasion.

It was about asking the questions to which no one 
wanted answers. 

No one except the victims.

He had turned his back on the possibilities that 
day in the jungles of Vietnam. Closed his eyes 
and let fear blind him to potential truths. The 
cowardice of a nineteen year old boy had haunted 
the man for over two decades, an omni-present 
weakness forever threatening the foundation his 
life was built upon. Ironically, it wasn't Mulder 
who had been the final push that had finally 
caused him to take a stand against his own 
demons...it had been Scully.

As much as he had been able to admire the man's 
admitted genius and passionate conviction in his 
beliefs, it had been too easy to see him as 
simply another pawn caught in the Consortium web. 
For a marine turned career FBI, Mulder's 
disregard for regulations and seemingly foolish 
reliance on political connections to haul his 
butt out of the fire had been offensive. It had 
taken Skinner longer than he liked to admit and 
several sessions of seeing the man through his 
partner's eyes to realize that it wasn't that 
Mulder didn't think the rules applied to him, it 
was just that he believed so passionately in 
righting the wrong or revealing the lie, that 
personal considerations and costs tended to fly 
out the window. 

Nothing like another man's courage to humiliate 
one into taking a stand.

Skinner had never realized how few survival 
instincts Mulder actually had regarding his 
personal health and well-being. Looking back, he 
would have pointed to his escape from the 
BSU as being made in order to save himself. And, 
perhaps, deep inside, there had been some 
contempt that he had not been able to cut it. 

His conscious mind knew better, knew the horrors 
the BSU hid in the basement. Mulder's emotions 
ran so close to the surface and his actions 
seemed so naive sometimes - but the fact was, 
that most BSU profilers had years in other 
departments. Mulder's mistakes had been subject 
to both inexperience and youth. Skinner had known 
that too. But sometimes, sometimes he had just 
seemed so helpless, so...weak. 

Knowing what he knew now of Mulder's personality 
and the criminally brutal program Patterson had 
devised for his pet team of experimental 
profilers, he had come to believe that Mulder had 
foreseen Patterson's ultimate end for himself. 
Mulder hadn't been trying to save Mulder. He'd 
been trying to protect everyone else from 
what he feared he was becoming. 

Without that knowledge however, Skinner's initial 
assessment of the agent had been tainted with 
preconceptions and he had never looked past 
a list of perceived faults that had included lack 
of discipline, irresponsibility, political 
blindness and naivete, undeserved arrogance and 
emotional instability. Scully's unexpected and 
ferocious loyalty toward her partner had been a 
shock. So had her anger with her superiors over 
their reactions to her reports, and later, the 
official criticism for her perceived lack of 
judgement with regard to Mulder. 

They had lost her the minute she realized that 
their trust was only skin-deep. That her opinion 
only mattered when it agreed with their own. 

It would have made his life easier if he could 
have suspected personal involvement. 
Unfortunately, he was not that lucky. Scully's 
loyalties threw a harsh light, and he had been 
forced to take a good hard look at his own 
preconceptions and actions.

Oh the agents had made mistakes. Stupid ones in 
hindsight. But considering the fact that they did 
not know what he knew, and considering the very 
significant efforts being made to keep them in 
ignorance, their courage had been astounding. 
They just would not stop. They would not quit. 
Mulder because he needed to know the truth...and 
Scully because she wanted justice. He had almost 
laughed when he realized that the shadow men 
were worried about the supporting effect of her 
loyalty on her partner. 

Didn't they get it?  

Personal loyalty only went so far. After that, 
commitment had to come from the soul. Mulder's 
ability to earn her respect, admiration and 
support said more to the ex-marine than her 
loyalty. Any partner would have had that. What 
she gave to Mulder...that terrified him. Because 
it meant that maybe there was more to Mulder 
than he had seen. That maybe the fight was 
righteous. 

And now Mulder had someone who believed in 
him. That validation, that feedback loop would 
drive them both further than either would go 
alone. Further than the shadow men ever thought 
they could go.

There was a growing army of voiceless victims and 
silent witnesses to atrocity getting ready to 
follow. Mulder and Scully were being watched much 
more closely than they could ever realize. They 
had survived long enough for their names...and 
the nature of their honor to become known. Fear 
would only hold the silent for so long. Then the 
anger would batter down the walls and the clarion 
call to battle would begin.

Walter Skinner had already fought one war. He did 
not want to see the aftermath of another. But if 
the time came...when the time came...and Mulder 
and Scully led the charge...

He would be standing there right behind them...

Watching their backs...

Where he belonged.

********************************************

Despite the fact that they had planned for it, 
Mulder really did not expect to see any large 
predators. It seemed a bit much to expect all 
their fur-bearing needs to fall into their laps 
on the same day. So, despite the copious amounts 
of blood that had been spread around and the fact 
that Mulder himself had seen the odd larger 
looking track in the snow while out hunting for 
wood, the invasion caught him completely off 
guard.

He was roasting some venison strips for 
tomorrow's breakfast when a sound almost too 
faint to register had him turning his head toward 
the place where Scully had butchered the deer. 
They were barely visible against the snow. He 
only saw them because the moon cast a bright blue 
light across the scene and for a split second he 
just stood there staring blankly at three fully 
grown wolves nosing into the blocks of deer fat 
Scully had placed in the snow to freeze.

The six member wolf pack had discovered the blood 
trail early that afternoon. They had arrived 
outside the camp barely an hour after Scully had 
and circled cautiously the entire time the two 
humans had butchered the dead ungulate.  They 
were nervous and had no plans to attack the 
humans. They recognized fellow predators and were 
not hungry enough to hunt meat eaters when the 
deer were still fat and plentiful and rabbits 
easy to catch. Later in the season they might 
have been a potential hazard, but not today.

But all that blood.

That was just too irresistible to resist. The 
blood and the fat and the offal had swiftly 
overcome any lingering caution and the pack had 
spent two hours circling carefully, slowly 
spiraling closer and closer to their objective. 
Once Scully had left and Mulder had settled more 
or less into an unmoving lump near the fire, the 
pack closed in. Their big hairy feet cushioning 
the depth of their feet in the snow and muffling 
the noise.

Mulder reached for his gun slowly, carefully 
lifting it to aim at the head of the wolf nearest 
him. At the last moment, just before he pulled 
the trigger, it turned to look at him. The 
intelligence, the lack of menace, the simple 
dignity of the animal almost brought him to his 
knees. He couldn't kill it. He just couldn't. Not 
because it was an endangered species, but because 
this animal deserved to live. Scully...

His mind paused. Then he closed his eyes in 
sadness. Scully deserved to live too.

The gunshot echoed obscenely in the night air. 
The second cracked explosively a split second 
later. A thump from the inside of the lean-to and 
he realized that more wolves had been inside the 
structure, probably sniffing after the hide. The 
back end of the structure collapsed inwards and 
two terrified wolves were suddenly barreling 
toward him. The third bullet took the lead wolf 
in the throat. The wolf behind stumbled over the 
body of the first and Mulder heard a yelp as it 
somersaulted headfirst into the snow. Mulder 
snapped off a fourth shot which broke the 
animal's shoulder. A fifth bullet finished it 
off. 

It was over before Scully finished getting her 
boots on.

She found him sitting dazedly beside the fire, a 
shattered expression on his face. Stepping up 
cautiously beside him, she took in the fallen 
bodies and quietly holstered her weapon. Then she 
stood patiently and waited silently for him to 
speak. Finally he turned his head toward her.

"I killed them, Scully."

The pain in his voice was enough to break her 
heart. This was a man who could hunt down serial 
killers without shedding a tear, but someway, 
somehow, he still found the strength to let his 
heart bleed for the deaths of these animals. But 
then , she thought, the wolves deserved that 
honor. Monsters like Corman did not.

"They were beautiful Scully. And I killed them. "

He kept staring at the gun in his hands. Was he 
staring at the weapon...or at his hands? Taking 
the gun from him, she carefully wrapped her own 
around them, telling him as plainly as she knew 
how that he wasn't a monster. Then she leaned 
forward and wrapped her arms around him. She 
wondered briefly if she would have felt his  
bitter regret if she had been the one to fire the 
fatal shots. She suspected not. But while that 
fact probably made her the better soldier, the 
better survivor...she rather thought it made him 
the better human being.

The one thing that the man who wanted to believe 
everything, would never believe.

So she would believe it for him.

She pulled back until she could see his face. His 
eyes were dry, but the expression in them was 
haunted. Somehow, she knew that if it had 
only been his own survival at stake, that Mulder 
would not have pulled the trigger. It was a facet 
of his personality that generally scared her more 
than all the mutants in the universe. She said 
the only thing that seemed appropriate.

"Thank-you."

Bringing his hands up, she turned her cheek into 
his palms briefly, then stood up and walked 
toward the animals on the ground. The nearest 
wolves were definitely dead. There was another 
near the place where she had buried the chunks 
of tallow and the fourth was a dark lump several 
feet from the edge of the encampment. Mulder's 
lean-to was decimated and she sighed regretfully 
for all of that hard work wasted. Mulder built up
the fire for warmth and light while Scully made a 
brief trip back to the main camp to add more wood 
to their primary fire. She had only taken the 
time to pull on the flannel shirt. Her pants were 
more or less dry and she pulled them on 
gratefully.  

By the time she made it back to the site, Mulder 
had dragged all four carcasses over to the tree
and was in the process of stringing one of the 
wolves up. Both of them were too exhausted for 
this so Scully suggested that they simply gut 
and skin the wolves and leave everything else 
until the morning. Mulder just nodded in weary 
agreement.

Perhaps because the carcasses were still warm or 
maybe it was simple practice, but the process 
went swiftly. Mulder hauled the offal as far as 
he could into the woods before he started 
freezing and dumped it. Neither agent relished 
the thought of wolf heart or liver and in their 
inexperience, thought they had more than enough 
meat to be choosy. 

The only difference Scully made when skinning the 
wolves was the fact that she didn't slit the 
animal down the middle as she had with the deer. 
The effect, after pulling the skin down the 
carcass was that of a tube, skin on the outside, 
fur on the inside with pieces at the top and 
bottom where the legs used to be. All in all, the 
hide resembled a gory dog sweater turned inside 
out. 

The agents lugged all of the hides back to the 
car and loaded them into the back seat of the 
vehicle. The heads of all five animals went in 
the front. When Mulder asked why she was saving 
them, Scully just muttered that they needed the 
brains for the hides and left it at that. They 
took the time to hang the wolf carcasses although 
Scully suspected they would have to be near 
starvation before she would ever get Mulder to 
eat the meat. She wasn't exactly wild about the 
idea herself. 

Finally, they made their way wearily back to 
camp, wanting nothing more than to sleep for the 
next three days. Too tired to care about what 
they were and were not wearing, both hurriedly 
rinsed the blood from skin and fabric. There 
wasn't enough water to do a great job with the 
clothes and both agents knew the fabric would be 
stiff with it the next morning, but considering 
how wet and icky they were going to get working 
the hides, it did not really matter. 

Mulder was asleep by the time Scully crawled into 
the burrow and snuggled down beside him. She had 
a brief thought that two bodies were definitely 
a hell of a lot warmer than one. Then his arm 
snaked around her waist and five seconds later 
she was dead to the world. 

***********************************************

They were not up with the birds, but it still 
felt too damn early.  Scully started to stretch, 
contemplating screaming and settled for a low 
moan of agony.

"Sore?"

She forced open one eye, saw nothing but burrow 
wall and closed it again. It was not worth the 
agony of turning her head in order to make eye 
contact.

"Just shoot me, Mulder. "

"Can't. I'd have to move for that."

"Surviving this shit is going to kill us."

"As long as I die warm, I'll die happy."

Creaking and groaning the agents contemplated the
fact that their clothing was stretched out by the 
fire pit. The absurdity struck them both as they 
peered through the burrow entrance at the 
clothing not ten feet away yet neither agent 
willing to be the first one to brave the morning 
chill. Finally, the demands of her bladder being 
too great to ignore, Scully made a mad dash for 
her pants only to yell as she hauled freezing 
fabric up over her rapidly chilling butt and made 
a run for the latrine. 

Warned by his partner's yelps, Mulder chose to 
build the fire back up and preheat his jeans 
first before pulling them on. Swiftly donning his 
gaiters, he made his own run for the latrine. The 
warmth in the jeans was long gone by the time he 
made it back to the fire and  he was caught 
between wishing it was warmer and the knowledge 
that if it got above freezing they would not only 
risk their newly acquired food supply but their 
burrow might get uncomfortably damp. There was 
also no getting around the fact that at only a 
few degrees below freezing, snow tended to melt 
on the jeans instead of brush off.

He shivered convulsively and threw more wood on 
the fire. It was damn cold! Despite the regrets 
he had about killing the wolves, the fact that he 
might soon have warm footgear was an increasingly 
cheerful prospect. He was getting really tired of 
damp socks, painfully numb toes and freezing one 
half of his body while he roasted the other by 
the fire. 

Scully rapidly dressed in her double layer of 
clothing and newly repaired snowshoes. She eyed 
him thoughtfully for a moment.

"Any chance you could get the hood off the car?"

Assuming rightly that this had something to do 
with the hides, Mulder thought about the contents 
he had dumped from the toolbox and then shrugged. 

"Probably."

Scully grimaced. "I'll go get more firewood. 
We're going to need a fair amount and ..." Her 
eyes drifted to the clear sky and she chewed on 
her bottom lip worriedly."I think it's about to 
get a lot colder."

Three hours later there was a respectable pile of 
firewood in both camps and Mulder had not only 
managed to remove the car hood, but he had also 
managed to repair the damage to the lean-to. It
had looked worse than it was and he chose to look 
at it as a positive event. The structure had 
obviously needed more work to support any 
sort of banking snow load. He took the chance to 
add extra poles and cross-ties before layering 
the pine boughs back on top. After a short break 
to down copious amounts of water and munch on 
roasted deer, Scully gathered pine boughs while 
Mulder finished closing in the sides of the lean-
to. It wasn't precisely warm, but it blocked the 
wind and it would protect them from both wind and 
snow while they worked.  That alone would make 
working the skins ten times easier. 

It was already mid-afternoon and Scully was 
giving the sky frustrated looks. She had hoped to 
get to work on the skins today, but it was 
obvious that it would have to wait. Instead, 
she hauled the toolbox down to the worksite and 
used it to boil the lower legs of the deer. She 
had already removed the tendons - what would 
eventually become sinew - and now she was after 
the hooves and bones. 

After about 15 minutes she was able to pop the 
hooves off the lower leg bones with a screw 
driver and a sharp twist. By the time she was 
finished, the lower leg bones had been converted 
into hide scrapers, the smaller sharp bones near 
the hoof had been put aside for needles and the 
hooves were boiling gently. It would take several 
hours, but eventually she would be able to scrape 
out a gooey substance called neatsfoot oil which 
they could use to soften and protect their 
leather articles. The hooves themselves would dry 
into a three sided triangle that when tied 
together would chime musically against each 
other. On the move, they would serve the same 
purpose as bear bells. Future hooves could be 
boiled down for glue.

While she was making tools, Mulder tried to 
figure out how to set up the hood so that it 
would do what they needed it to do. He spent 
almost an hour with the hammer bashing sides of 
the hood up on all four sides. It wasn't even and 
the hood was twisted from the crash, but he 
thought it would do. Using a combination of rocks 
and logs he managed to get the thing more or less 
solidly braced horizontally a good two feet above 
the ground. He kept having to stop and run back 
to the fire to thaw out his hands and feet. By 
the time Scully was done, he was drying his socks 
and roasting several chunks of venison for 
dinner.

She sat down next to him, propped up her own feet 
to dry and stared at him pensively.

"Why do I feel like we didn't get anything done 
today?"

"Because no matter how much wood you gathered-
you're just going to have to do it again in 
another couple of days."

She sighed,"How depressingly true."

By uniform accord they both decided to make it an 
early night. The first part of the tanning 
process would be messy, wet and time intensive. 
It was not something she wanted to do at night 
and their clothing made it impractical. They were 
also both still excruciatingly sore and tired 
from the day before. Scully stretched  and ambled 
back to the camp. She had something else she 
wanted to do.

She found Mulder staring into the cleaned and 
returned toolbox with a bemused expression on his 
face.

"Pine needles and pine bark, Mulder."

He nodded, then shook his head in confusion.

"For my hair, Mulder. Pine oil is an antiseptic 
as well as an astringent. I'm hoping I can get 
some of this blood and grease out of my hair and 
off my skin. At the very least I'll smell a 
little better."

"Is that a hint Agent Scully?"

She eyed his wry expression with amusement,"I 
don't know. I haven't been able to smell anything 
but my own hair since yesterday." She studied his 
short cut with outright envy.  Until she had 
proper headgear she was leaving her hair the 
length it was, but the minute she had a fur hat, 
she was seriously considering digging out the 
hunting knife and lopping it all off. Hygiene vs. 
cold. Damn.

She had no idea what long term use of the pine 
water would do to her skin...there were trace 
elements of turpentine in the bark after all. But 
they needed to get the bacteria off their skins 
somehow or they risked rashes and infections. 

Moving to the far side of the fire where the 
rinse water wouldn't turn the ground where they 
were walking to slush, Scully tested the 
temperature of the water and stripped off both 
shirts so they wouldn't get wet. Between two days 
of sleeping in their underwear and swapping 
clothing back and forth, both agents were 
rapidly starting to lose a good part of their body 
consciousness. Despite his choices in swimwear, 
Mulder was surprisingly shy about exposing his 
body at other times. 

At least around other people. 

Any shyness he might have directed at her had 
rapidly disappeared that first year, Scully 
thought wryly. So the fact that she had nothing 
on above her waist except her bra was not the 
first thought going through her head when she 
felt Mulder take the cup from her hand as she 
tried to pour the liquid onto her hair without 
getting it into her eyes.

Cupping his hand under her forehead, he gently 
poured the water into her hair, the palm of his 
hand  efficiently capturing much of it and 
bringing it back to her hair before it was lost. 
She hummed in pleasure and he worked his fingers 
gently through her hair, untangling knots and 
massaging the scalp. Scully suddenly remembered 
why she liked to go to the expensive hair salons. 
The ones where they spent a good amount of time 
just working the lather into your hair. Because 
it felt so damn good. Without soap, she didn't 
get a squeaky clean, but the pine oils seemed to 
break down much of the grease and by alternately 
scrubbing her head with the pine bark tea and  
rubbing her hair with the flannel shirt, Mulder 
seemed to get most of it feeling clean. The 
tingling of her scalp from the pine extracts just 
added to the feeling.

Mulder moved from her hair to her back and she 
was about to take the cloth back from him with 
thanks when she heard his breath hiss suddenly in 
concern.

"Jesus Scully, have you had this thing off at 
all?"

His hands were suddenly undoing the clasp of her 
bra and her eyes shot open in startlement, but he 
was only running his fingers lightly over the 
skin that had been covered by the fabric.

"It looks like you've got a rash developing."

She winced. She had been hoping it was just 
friction burns. She would definitely have to make 
sure she rinsed it out everyday. Frowning 
suddenly, she twisted around to look Mulder in 
the eye. He handed her the wash flannel with one 
hand and grabbed her sweater off the rack with 
the other. She pulled it on, dropping the bra 
into her hand.

"I didn't see any of your underwear drying by the 
fire."

He lifted his hand solemnly, "I did it while you 
were hunting Bambi. I swear. "

He groaned at her suspicious look, "Jeez Scully. 
That's not a place a guy wants to get a rash 
okay. Been there, done that. It ain't fun. So I 
swear, I'm wearing slightly smoky but relatively 
clean underwear."

At his aggrieved look Scully started to snicker, 
"You were saying about dignity, Mulder?"

His answering smile was rueful.

Picking up the cup she gestured for him to sit on 
something so she could reach his hair. Because of 
the length it didn't take more than a couple of 
cups to have it feeling relatively clean. 
Considering the amount of pine needle tea left in 
the toolbox she decided to try washing her 
underwear in it to see if it got the fabric any 
cleaner. Mulder smirked but behaved himself when 
she ordered him to turn around so she could slip 
out of the other half of her underwear and back 
into her pants. Then, washing them as best she 
could she hung them by the fire and prayed the 
heat from the fire wouldn't melt anything.

Despite the fact that they had only been up for a 
little over eight hours, neither agent felt any 
great desire to stay awake once the sun went 
down. It was cold, they were sore and once the 
burrow warmed up, they both passed out. 
Surprisingly, even Mulder slept straight through 
until the next morning.

The next day dawned bright and clear, colder than 
the previous two, but not as cold as Scully had 
feared it would be. She had given the sky another 
of those thoughtful frowns that were beginning to 
bug her partner and tried once more to see if the 
car radio could pick up anything but static. 
Unfortunately, some of Mulder's bashing around 
the previous day must have damaged something 
because she couldn't even get it to turn on. 
Either that or the battery was frozen.

While she was mucking around with the radio, 
Mulder was scooping armfuls of snow into the car 
hood which now rested over a merrily blazing 
fire. It wasn't long before there was a 
respectable amount of warm-although not boiling- 
water in an even layer. She threw in copious 
amounts of pine needles and the inner bark of the 
tree hoping that it might take care of any 
potential lice or flea infestations in the fur 
and and while they waited for that to cook, the 
two agents retrieved the frozen hides from the 
car. They laid the hides into the water and let 
the skin thaw and soak briefly while they 
searched for a solid log they could drag back to 
camp to use for a fleshing beam. 

They finally located a nice solid pine tree that 
had snapped off in some previous storm. The log 
was solid, but not rotted and after several 
frustrating minutes they were able to kick it 
loose from the stump it was still partially 
attached too. Scully scrubbed and hung the wolf 
hides while Mulder spent the better part of an 
hour twisting and hacking off tree branches. 
Then, with no real other way to secure it for 
use, they lashed it between two trees at waist 
height. Using the end of a crowbar that had 
made up part of the contents of the toolbox, 
Scully skinned the bark from the tree while 
Mulder went off for more wood.

Knowing that they were going to get soaked, the 
agents built two relatively large, heat-producing 
campfires just in front of each tree the newly 
smoothed log was secured to. Standing between the 
two fires, the agents found they were relatively 
comfortable, although one side of their bodies 
did tend to get uncomfortably hot after a while. 

The wet hides steamed in the winter air when they 
threw them over the fleshing beam and the two
agents spent the next three miserable hours 
scraping the fat and inner membrane from the 
hides. Dull edges were better than sharp ones for 
this job because of the fear of slicing the hide 
and they found that Scully's hide scrapers worked 
extremely well. By the end of it, they were wet, 
cold, sticky, bloody and painfully cramped in 
hand, shoulder and back...and they still had 
three steps to go. 

The fleshed hides were quickly rinsed, wrung out 
and hung near the fire to keep them thawed. 
Mulder had somehow thought that oak bark was 
involved in the tanning process. Scully just 
smiled and said that this way was easier. 
Cracking open the wolf skulls she dumped each 
brain into the toolbox and added about five cups 
of water. Once the brains were thawed, she 
mashed and whipped until she had a thick red 
slurry. She left it near enough to the fire to 
keep it warm without cooking it and went back to 
check on the pelts. 

Two of the pelts were partially dry and 
stiffening. Taking them down they laid them on 
the hood and started smoothing the brain slurry 
onto the skin of the pelt with their hands. 
Getting it onto the fur side of the pelt would 
not be necessary.  Within minutes, the 
combination of brain mixture and warmth had 
started to soften the skin of the hide in places. 
When each hide was completely coated, they rolled 
each pelt it on a warm spot on the hood to let 
the mixture soak.

For the next hour, they let the hides soak. While 
waiting, they found a ten foot length solid 
length of 3 inch diameter maple and lashed it to 
two trees about three feet from the ground. At 
the one hour mark, they added another coat of 
brain slurry and spent another hour stripping the 
bark from the lashed log that was about to become 
their softening beam. 

When each pelt has soaked for at least two hours,
they each took one over to the maple log and 
stood with a leg on either side of the beam. 
Then, holding an end of the pelt in each hand , 
and bearing down with their weight and strength 
they rubbed and pulled the skin back and forth 
across the narrow tree. As they pulled and 
tugged, the friction started to dry the skin, 
while the pulling and stretching as well as the 
rubbing began to soften the leather. They kept it 
up until the hide was completely soft and dry.

It was several hours after dark before they 
were finished all four wolf pelts and the deer 
hide. Scully had taken advantage of the hood bath 
to boil one set of clothes clean. Mulder had 
found a t-shirt stuffed into the blue duffel and 
changing into that, they cleaned and hung 
Scully's second set of clothes and Mulder's 
jeans. By the time they were done taking a hasty 
sponge bath and racing back to the burrow as 
quickly as exhausted muscles allowed, Scully
could not decide which she wanted more - 24 
hours of sleep or 50mg of Demerol. 

She was just tucking herself into the curve of 
her partner's body when she remembered that she 
still had to check the rabbit traps she had set. 
Groaning softly, she squirmed for a few minutes 
to get comfortable and then surrendered to 
unconsciousness. Neither woke until just before 
dawn the next morning.

Mulder groaned as he tried to unglue heavy 
eyelids, " God Scully, this can't be normal."

A mumbled muffle from somewhere below his chin 
sounded vaguely interrogative.

"This sleeping we're doing. Is it healthy?"

It took her so long to answer he was starting to 
get worried. Then she groaned and stretched 
kinked muscles and agonized shoulders. "S'normal 
Mulder. We're burning too much energy walking 
around in the cold and snow. The system is trying 
to conserve energy. We need to eat more. Up the 
fat content."

Mulder snorted. "Bet that's the first time you've 
said that in a while."

She contemplated slugging him and then decided it 
would hurt too much. 

"How much longer is this going to take anyway?"

Scully shrugged, then began hauling herself in 
the general direction of the burrow door. "We 
should get most of it done today and tomorrow if 
all goes well."

It took the better part of the morning to 
check and reset her snares. She was amazed to 
discover that she had actually caught a rabbit in 
one of them. She was even more amazed that the 
damn thing had worked the way it was supposed to, 
the young tree snapping upright when the snare 
released, hauling the bunny into the air and away 
from prowling predators.
 
By the time she stumbled back into camp, her 
knuckle-scraped and battered looking partner was 
proudly laying out five completely smoked and 
finished hides.

Building a tripod of three stout poles and some 
rope, he had sewn the leg holes in the wolf pelts
closed with some strips of fabric and a couple of 
small holes punched in the fur. Then, tying a 
rope around the neck end of the hide he had hung 
the furry tube skin side in from the tripod. 
Sacrificing Corman's t-shirt, he attached the 
neck of the t-shirt to the open end of the pelt 
tube with more holes and rough ties. 

He had dug under the coals of one of their fires 
from the night before. The heat had thawed the 
ground several inches down and he was able to 
clear a pit almost a foot square and a foot deep. 
Burning a hot fire down to coals, placed the 
tripod to position the fur over the hot embers. 
Then he dropped several punky pieces of oak onto 
the coals and, stretching the end of the t-shirt 
wide, had pinned the bottom edge of the shirt to 
the ground with bone pegs. Thus sealed in, the 
smoke had no option but to fill the t-shirt, then 
the pelt. 

Each pelt smoked for about 30 minutes. He was 
just wrapping the deer hide around the tripod 
tipi style when his partner returned. In no time 
at all, the rabbit was skinned and roasting for 
lunch. By the time the deerhide was finished, 
Scully had fleshed and cleaned the rabbit fur but 
was leaving the tanning for another day.  

A large portion of their extra wood had been 
piled on either side of the open front of the 
lean-to. Slanting inward and toward the center 
the two piles gave the appearance of box flaps 
closing inward. When they built a small fire in 
the middle of the open front, they reflected some 
of the heat inward into the structure. Sticks 
lashed perpendicularly to two logs with a piece 
of carpet laid over top formed a low table.    

For the rest of the afternoon Scully measured 
their feet and set about forming and then 
cutting out a pattern for knee high laced 
moccasin boots from the last few pieces of carpet 
torn from the car. Roughly sewing the fabric 
boots together with narrow fabric strips the 
agents tried them on several times as she made 
minor adjustments here and there. Scully was 
focused on tacking the last attempt together when 
she looked up to find Mulder staring at her 
curiously.

"What?"

He smiled and shook his head. "I can't believe 
you know all this stuff."

She held up the cloth boot and stared at it 
critically. "There's a wilderness survival group 
that holds classes. I dropped in on a few last 
year. I've actually made a pair of these 
before." She shoved the boot in his direction, 
"That should fit."

Mulder pulled on the boot and then nodded. In 
comfortable silence, the two agents  picked apart 
the rough seams of their pattern pieces. The 
pelts tubes had already been sliced open and 
spread on the table, skin side up, the fur snow-
washed clean. Adding a generous seam and fur 
allowance, the agents carefully wielded newly 
sharpened knives and, as the light fell, cut 
out the pieces to their new boots. 

Using hammer and screwdriver, Scully punched 
holes in the leather pieces since she was 
familiar with the process, while Mulder cut
a piece of leather from the newly smoked deer 
hide and painstakingly sliced lengths of 
leather lace. Finally, all that was left 
was to put it all together. Screw drivers and 
tiny pieces of bone were used to laboriously 
push lace through holes and slowly, by the 
light of a nearly full moon and flickering 
firelight, the boots took shape. 

The silver gray fur was turned to the inside for 
warmth and the leather side of the wolf pelts 
showed as a multicolored mix of reddish brown and 
both pairs of boots, when pulled on, reached to 
the knee. Like those worn by trappers and 
frontiersman over one hundred years ago, these 
boots laced up the front from ankle to knee 
giving the wearer a fair amount of control over 
the tightness and fit of the boot. The boots 
themselves had been designed to fit just a bit 
loose - and they would stretch even further. The 
added ease would allow the agents to add a set of 
rabbit fur socks once they caught enough of the 
critters.

Mulder sighed in sybaritic delight as he tied off 
the laces and slowly held up one foot to admire 
his new outerwear.

"The latest style in survival wear, Scully. Warm 
toes."

The lean-to was surprisingly warm enough that 
the top layer of snow inside was starting to get 
slushy. The agents decided to keep their original 
footwear to wear when skinning or working in the 
lean-to. The fire would keep their feet from 
freezing and the last thing they wanted was to 
start getting the new boots soaked with blood and 
other bodily fluids.

Exhausted, but surprisingly not as bruised as the 
evening before, the agents decided to end on a 
high note. Bundling deer hide, rabbit fur and 
wolf pelt scraps into the car, they fell into a 
relaxed rhythm as they worked through the 
evening chores, bath and laundry, then went to 
sleep. 

The next morning came as a surprise. Six inches 
of new snow had already fallen and more was 
coming down gently. It seemed logical to move 
breakfast to the lean-to and as the agents sat 
sipping hot tea made from the soft inner bark of 
a pine tree and roasted strips of venison. Scully 
finally put her fears into words.

"I don't think we're in Minnesota, Mulder."

Her partner studied her silently, neither 
agreeing nor disagreeing. He was simply 
calculating the effect of that fact on any rescue 
attempts should she be right. More specifically, 
the fact that they might be several miles and 
maybe more than one state away from the official 
search grid. He tilted his head inquiringly.

Scully jerked her chin in the direction of the 
snow falling outside the lean-to. 

"The arctic front should have been here by now. 
It's been too warm, too long. I think we're on 
our own here, Mulder."

Her words should have sounded ominous. Instead, 
they came out as a simple statement of fact. 
Scully's eyes gleamed with reflected firelight as 
she watched the snow swirling outside.

Sheltered from the wind and warmed by the fire, 
the interior of the structure glowed in soft 
shades of orange and umber browns while outside 
was painted in muffled shades of gray and blue. 
It should have been depressing, the warmer 
temperatures and lower pressure system which had 
arrived with the snow gave the air a heavy 
quality that seemed to absorb sound, isolating 
them from the rest of the world.

It was ...relaxing.

Cozy.

"What's the Mona Lisa smile for, Scully?"

She leaned back. Mulder had slanted several 
sticks back against one of the support posts 
before placing the bench log in front. The effect 
was that of a slightly reclining high back chair. 
Under the circumstances, pure luxury.

"Just enjoying the moment."

"I think that's against the rules."

She snorted softly, "Since when do you worry 
about rules?"

"Well...no one's shooting at us. That's a plus."

The corners of her lips turned upward and Mulder 
watched fascinated as he realized that she was 
just as composed, just as carefree as she would 
have been sitting beside him in their basement 
office in DC. Maybe more so. 

She really was not worried. 

Was he worried? 

Mulder's thoughts turned inwards with a touch of 
surprise as he felt around for the familiar 
tension and could not find it. There was mild 
apprehension regarding Scully's going out to 
checks the traps alone, but it was nothing more 
than the normal apprehension he lived with 
everyday regarding her safety. It would appear 
that his subconscious filed potential bear 
attacks under the same category as alien 
abductions, visits by Consortium informants and 
earthquakes in LA. 

Possible. Deadly.

And just something that had to be lived with.

Go figure.

He supposed that when you actually thought about 
it, they moved through an everyday world fraught 
with danger. They rode buses, drove cars, crossed 
busy streets, took planes. They ate hamburger 
they didn't cook, did business in banks that 
could be robbed, and walked on streets populated 
by HIV positive junkies. Everyday, they faced the 
possibility that they could be robbed, raped, 
mugged or murdered simply by being in the wrong 
place at the wrong time. 

And that was just for the ordinary, non-X-Files 
citizen of the urban jungle.

Hell, the possibility of falling down a cliff was 
no more or less than the possibility of losing 
your balance and falling down a flight of stairs. 
Considering the heels women wore, he rather 
thought the possibility of taking a header off 
concrete steps was more plausible. The only 
difference was the distance to medical attention 
if the injury was serious. 

The fears were known and familiar.

They faced their everyday urban dangers without 
really seeing them. They were known variables in 
the constant test of survival called modern 
living. Given the proper knowledge, this back-
country detour of theirs was no different. It 
just had a different face. 

And really, if he thumbed through a mental list 
of everything that had tried to stab, bite, 
break, shoot, squash, tear, rend, infect, explode 
or otherwise adversely affect their health and 
well-being, most of those villains had walked on 
two legs not four. Cutting down their potential 
dangers to just freezing to death, starving to 
death, avalanche, wolves and bears...well, that 
actually improved the odds.

Holy shit.

Not to mention that the bear would only attack if 
he was hungry or Mulder threatened him. There 
were rules of a sort and ultimately, all that 
would happen was that he would be dead. Which was 
reassuring in a warped sort of way.

Some of their enemies would do them for fun.

And death was only one option.

Movement caught his attention and he watched 
silently as his partner spread out the deer hide 
and considered it carefully. Although they had 
planned on making a jacket large enough to fit 
either of them, realistically, that was not the 
best choice. By making the first jacket Scully
sized they had hide left over for other things.

Like boot laces.

Mulder put down his tea and contemplated the 
items at his feet. Before brain-tanning the deer 
hide, the agents had sliced off a good length of 
the raw hide and cut it into strips and left them 
fleshed, but untreated. Now, while Scully worked 
over her jacket, Mulder contemplated his own 
project. 

Several four foot lengths of green maple sapling 
about one inch in diameter had been simmering in 
the hood bath for the past couple of hours. He 
had only been able to submerge half of each 
length, but that was fine. Mulder supposed there 
were other ways to do this, but Scully claimed 
she had not taken that class yet, so he would 
have to try this and see. It seemed logical.

The soaking had left the wood slightly pliable, 
and Mulder slowly worked at the wood, careful not 
to apply too much strength too quickly. Working 
four lengths concurrently, he was able to change 
off as each length dried and became harder to 
work. When that happened, he put it back in the 
water to simmer some more and went on to the next 
one. By early afternoon, as Scully was starting 
to cut leather, he had managed to work an extreme 
hooked curve into the top of four lengths of 
maple. One had snapped under too much pressure 
and not enough soaking, forcing him to start over 
with another length, but now they were ready. 

Mulder had chose to curve the thinner ends of the 
wood lengths. The first thing he did was overlap 
two curved ends by about one foot. He secured the 
ends tightly with wire, and then, using sticks as 
temporary crosspieces, he began to bent the seven 
foot length into the shape of a bear paw 
snowshoe. By the time dusk rolled around, two 
tear drop shapes had taken form and were resting 
by the fire to dry and he was working on one half 
of a larger pair. By the time Scully had finished 
cutting out the pieces of her jacket, the fourth 
snowshoe form was completed.

They slept just long enough to see the sunrise 
and  dove right back into work. The leg tendons 
of the deer had dried, and Scully bashed them 
with the edge of a large wrench until they 
separated. Separating several threads she soaked 
them until they softened, rolled them slightly 
against her thigh to strength them and then poked 
the stiffened end through the holes she had 
already punched through the leather with a nail 
and began sewing her jacket together. By keeping 
the sinew moist, it stayed pliable and the dry 
hardened tip negated the need for a needle. It 
was slow, frustrating work, but the jacket began 
to come together.

Meanwhile, Mulder had removed all of the 
temporary crosspieces, leaving the forms attached 
at the three places where the ends met. He 
debated removing the wire as well, then decided 
it did not matter and would probably make his job 
easier. The wood itself was only the form. The 
skeleton that would give the snowshoes their 
shape. The material that he hoped would give them 
their strength was soaking in a warm bath of 
water and turning white. Picking up one of the 
rawhide strips, he tied one end near the crossed 
tail pieces and started wrapping the form 
tightly, the same way he would have wrapped the 
blade of a hockey stick or handle of a bat. He 
was amazed by the amount of stretch in the hide 
and found himself using a fair amount of the 
strength in his upper arms to keep the hide as 
tight as possible. Each strip was about an inch 
wide, and he allowed a generous overlap. 

Rather than trying to tied off each strip when he 
ran out of hide, he simply laid the end of the 
next strip along the form when he was down to 
about five inches of lace left. He wrapped the 
old lace tightly, covering the first two or three 
inches of the new lace and securing it to the 
form tightly. Then, crossing the old end over the 
new so that it would hold, he held the last two 
inches of the old strip against the form and 
starting wrapping with the new. Except for a 
small bulge, the joining was almost invisible.
 
His stack of rawhide was three-quarters gone by 
the time he finished wrapping the second 
snowshoe, but he figured he's have enough to 
finished the webbing. He had started with 
Scully's snowshoes first since there had always 
been a possibility he would only have enough for 
one pair. Since she had the jacket and thus would 
be doing all the woods tromping, it made sense to 
outfit her first.

Setting the snowshoes by the fire to dry, Mulder 
wandered over to where his partner was working. 
The technique was fascinating, and after watching 
her for a few minutes, he began to get an idea. 
There was very little left of the wolf pelts, but 
maybe there would be just enough. Scully glanced 
over at him curiously as him a few times as he 
measured, cut and punched, but she did not ask. 
The sinew sewing trick took a bit to master, 
but he eventually got the hang of it. The look of 
astonishment and pleasure on her face when he 
presented her with a pair of wolf fur mittens to 
go with her boots was worth every strained thumb 
and sinew blister.

She finished her jacket that night. She had cut 
the hide to take advantage of the legs and 
shoulders already present in the deer's hide. 
There wouldn't have been enough room across the 
shoulders for Mulder, but it fit Scully 
surprisingly well, and the dropped shoulder 
pattern forced by the pattern gave her more than 
enough space around the arms. The upper legs of 
the deer formed the sleeves and the rear end 
became panels for the front. All in all she had 
managed to create a three-quarter length winter 
coat with a minimum of effort. Like the boots, 
the fur was turned in for warmth and the front 
edges of the jacket overlapped by a good margin. 
The whole thing was secured by a belt around the 
waist.

It didn't look half bad on her either, Mulder 
acknowledged.

The next few days fell into a predictable 
pattern. Scully set snares, brought back rabbits 
and hauled in firewood. Mulder skinned and tanned 
the rabbit fur while he worked on finishing 
Scully's snowshoes. By the third day, he was 
experimenting with smoking the meat strips and 
the snowshoes were ready.

Scully started expanding her traplines.

By the end of the second week, the temperature 
had dropped considerably. Mulder had made himself 
a pair of rabbit fur gloves and rabbit hoods for 
the both of them, but the wind and the cold made 
it impossible for him to venture outside of the 
lean-to to work. Scully was finding it necessary 
to venture further and further to find wood and 
after Mulder cobbled together a small sled using 
deer bones, sticks and wire, she started hauling 
wood back to camp on the return leg of her 
hunting trips. Mulder had wrapped the smooth 
synthetic leather from the backs of the car seats 
to the bottom and she found that the sled glided 
easily over the snow.

Frustrated by her inability to locate another 
deer, Scully started setting traps for larger 
predators. Using the wolf meat as bait, she 
managed to catch three marten and a fox. Mulder 
had almost fallen over laughing at the guilty 
look on her face when she brought the latter 
home. She was beginning to think they were going 
to have to piece his jacket together from the 
different pelts. She added another rabbit 
trapline in the hopes of catching enough rabbits 
that they could at least make some form of vest.

Then the damn deer ran into their camp and 
committed suicide. 

She had taken more time than expected while 
collecting wood and it was getting dark. The
last mile of the trail was so beaten down by 
use, that her snowshoes were not necessary so
she had taken them off in the hopes that she 
might be able to move quietly enough to surprise
something along the trail long enough to shoot
it. She hadn't yet, but she figured she could 
always hope. 

A light layer of snow had fallen over the trail, 
and her boots were almost noiseless as she moved 
easily up the trail. It was early dusk, and 
everything was beginning to be painted over in 
shades of blue and light gray. She was only a few 
minutes out of camp when she heard what sounded 
like a startled yell followed closely by the 
explosive crack of a handgun.

Hurtling up the path, Scully had her glove off 
and her automatic in her hand before she reached 
the edge of their camp. Hollering out her 
partner's name so he didn't shoot her by 
accident, Scully launched herself into the 
flattened circle of snow that signified their 
territory, scanning for everything from mothmen 
to grizzly bears. 

"Scully!"

Her head swiveled and she found her partner 
crumpled in the snow about 150 feet away near 
the latrine. She started running. As he hauled 
himself to his knees, she noted absently that his 
jeans were around his knees but was more 
concerned with the gun in his hand.

He had a dazed expression on his face, but he was 
flapping his hand at her and gesturing beyond his 
body. She was just about to check her speed when 
he gasped out one word.

"Deer!"

Startled, she looked beyond him to find tracks in 
the snow. Her intent obvious as she suddenly 
leaned into the run, Mulder squawked and 
flattened and she hurtled his body and bounded 
after her partner's jacket. She was tearing her 
snowshoes off her back and desperately trying to 
figure out how she was going to find the damn 
beast in the dark when she almost feel over it. 

Vividly recalling the multi-colored bruise the 
last "dead" deer gave her, she checked herself 
with almost comic haste and stood there heaving 
as she tried to catch her breath and figure out 
what to do next. A cautious poke with one of her 
snowshoes got her a tremendous heave of powerful 
back legs and she barely managed to throw herself 
out of the way. Growling, she finally said to 
hell with saving ammo and shot it in the head.

It didn't move after that.

Heading back to camp for the ropes, she holstered 
her pistol and swore when she realized that she 
had dropped her glove somewhere on the trail. She 
would have waited until morning to  search for 
it, but she had dropped it the same time she 
dropped the four rabbits she was carrying and she 
didn't want to lose either of them. Padding  
through camp she found no sign of Mulder so she 
quickly loped back along the trail. Despite the 
lack of a moon, the edges of the trail showed a 
darker shade of gray and she found her rabbits 
within minutes. Luckily she stepped on her glove 
and she retrieved it with a sense of relief. 

Back  at camp there was still no sign of Mulder 
but the lean-to was glowing brightly. Considering 
the cold, he was probably down there getting warm 
and dry. From the looks of the trail, the 
deer had run right over him and he was probably 
soaked. At least she only had to haul this one 
down to the worksite. Grabbing the ropes from the 
car, she hurried back to the deer and got to 
work.

Whether it was all the upper body work she had 
been doing for the past three weeks or just the 
fact that she was a lot warmer and less tired 
than she had been last time, it didn't take 
her more than twenty minutes to get  the deer 
down to the worksite. She found Mulder in the 
lean-to in the process of pulling his sweater 
back over his head. He gave her a wry smile when 
he saw her.

"I told you Scully. The Fates are determined to 
humiliate me."

She smiled gamely, but her worried eyes tracked 
the slow way he was moving and the short pained 
exhalations of breath as he lifted his arms to 
pull down the sweater.

"What happened?"

Mulder snorted,"You flushed him right to me. 
Unfortunately, I was occupied at the time. I 
heard him coming and had my gun out and was 
trying to haul my jeans up when the damn thing 
burst out of the trees right on top of me. I hit 
it in the chest and then it hit me. Damn thing 
knocked me flying. The rest you know."

Scully nodded absently as she listened. She was 
more concerned with his ribs. She ignored his 
half-hearted protests - uttered more because of 
the fact he didn't want her poking at his already 
painful bruises than the fact he didn't want 
help. Pulling his sweater up to his collarbone 
she was shocked at how prominent his ribs were. 
Avoiding his eyes she clenched her jaw and 
examined him for breakage. They got lucky. Just 
bruises.

Smoothing his turtleneck back down she studied 
his face sadly. The cold had been cruel to her 
partner. Despite staying close to the fires, the 
fat had melted from his body at an alarming 
rate. Neither of them were hungry anymore, their 
tastebuds sick to death of  venison and rabbit. 
They would have paid in gold for spices of any 
kind. Even so, he had choked down the high fat 
cuts of meat she pushed on him. 

It wasn't enough.

Over the years, her partner had started to fill 
out, the lanky length of his bones finally losing 
that unfinished boyish look as his body matured 
into early middle age. This recent loss of weight 
hadn't returned him to that earlier state. He did 
not look young, just gaunt. He had to be aching 
in every bone in his body and she felt him 
shivering longer and longer into the night as his 
body tried to warm itself. And Mulder, who 
complained about hangnails, never said a word.

She thought about the deer lying out in the snow. 
Leaning forward she wrapped her arms around her 
partner's waist and leaned against him, trying if 
only for a moment to share some of her warmth. 
She felt him rest his chin briefly on the top of 
her head, then he stepped back.

"Come on, Scully. We got work to do."

Setting two blazing fires on either side of the 
skinning trees, Scully stripped right down to 
skin, replacing only Corman's flannel shirt and 
jeans. After helping her to haul the deer into 
the air, Mulder retreated to the lean-to which 
now boasted a second fire. They were burning 
through wood unbelievably fast, but if it would 
see Mulder with warm clothing, Scully would 
gladly spend the time replacing it. The added 
warmth allowed Mulder to exchange turtleneck for 
t-shirt and as soon as Scully was done removing 
the hide, she simply jointed the meat and dragged 
it into the lean-to for Mulder to finish.

One end of the lean-to had been converted into a 
leather working space. The low table had been 
joined by rough shelves for tools and the ground 
had been covered in enough pine boughs that the 
damp from the floor no longer soaked through to 
Mulder's sneakers or the occasional careless 
knee. A length of wood served as a place to store 
their leather boots when they changed back into 
their old footgear to work. The finished hides 
were stacked in the car.

The other half of the lean-to had been converted 
into a meat smoker. Mulder had closed in the 
front of that half of the lean-to with sticks and 
pine boughs. In the center of this space he used 
fire and bone to dig a firepit.Then he started 
building racks. Each rack was nothing more than 
two long lengths of wood, crossed by smaller 
sticks placed about one inch apart. Each  shelf  
rested on lengths of wood he had lashed 
horizontally to the front and back of the lean-
to. The removable nature of the racks allowed him 
to work back to front, adding and removing racks 
as necessary.

He had created a stick and pine bough wall for 
the upper half of the smoker, the part with the 
racks. He had attached it to the back of the 
lean-to with loops of rope, and the hinges 
allowed him to swing it up against the back wall 
where another loop of rope would hold it against 
the roof. When down, he could secure it to the 
front wall and the edge of the bottom rack 
forming an almost solid wall between the racks 
and the rest of the lean-to. Another removable 
section of pine bough wall was made for the lower 
section of the wall below the racks, but because 
he needed easy access to the fire, this simply 
lifted in and out of place.

Mulder used one rack as an impromptu table and 
spent the next couple of hours slicing the joints 
of meat into thin slices suitable for smoking. He 
filled rack after rack with layers of meat, then 
when they were full, kept slicing and piling the 
meat on the last rack. He would cart it out to 
the trunk of the car when he was done. Most of 
the frozen meat from the first deer had already 
been smoked and was stored in one of four boxes 
he had made using sticks of wood and rabbit 
rawhide lashings. Three were full of the 
shriveled strips of meat that they would need on 
their trip out of the woods. 

The difference in weight alone dictated smoking 
rather than freezing as the preservative of 
choice. The fourth box was half full of frozen 
tallow. If they were lucky, the tallow from this 
second deer would just fill the rest of the empty 
space. A fifth box rested in the corner and a 
sixth was in a state of partial construction. 
Mulder figured that he could fit the two of them 
into the front seat of the car. After that, they 
were going to have to start hanging them from 
trees.

Mulder dumped the last of the excess meat into a 
box he used for carrying raw meat. The fire 
beneath the racks was almost all coals, and the 
punky maple wood he added quickly started pushing 
out billows of blue-white smoke. He dropped both 
doors into place, sealing the smoke chamber from 
the rest of the lean-to. He had made a small hole 
at the top of the end wall in the sealed section, 
and while smoke did seep into the workspace, 
seated near the floor as they generally were, it 
wasn't much of a problem.

He was about to head out to the car with the meat 
box when he realized that almost an hour had 
passed since his partner had handed him the last 
joint of meat. He stepped outside expecting to 
see an immaculate kill site, with tallow already 
stored in the car and bones neatly stacked 
waiting to be boiled clean for some future use. 
What he saw was a wet and bedraggled figure 
laboriously scraping the last of the fat and 
membrane from the deer hide. Two new fires had 
been kindled near the fleshing beam and even by 
their unsteady light he could see the 
determination on her face.

He suddenly found it hard to swallow.     

He also had a feeling they were working through 
the night.

She gave him a tired smile when he gathered up 
the chunks of frozen tallow and added them to his 
load. He made a very rapid trip to the car where 
the tallow was dumped in it's box and the meat 
was hurriedly spread out in layers in the trunk. 
He didn't bother to pack the snow tightly. The 
meat would only be there long enough for the 
first batch of smoked meat to finish and then he 
would be digging it out again. It wouldn't be in 
the trunk longer than a week.

He raced back to the lean-to to warm up, 
then finished the clean-up chores. He stacked 
bones, washed and hung the ropes inside where 
they could dry and  finally, he sorted through 
the offal. Large intestines and stomach were 
quickly emptied and washed. He carefully peeled 
away and washed the sac around the heart, while 
the heart, liver and kidneys were put aside to 
freeze.

Scully was just rinsing the hide as he finished 
and Mulder assumed that would be it for the 
night. Scully had other ideas. She dug out the 
toolbox and started mashing brains. After they 
brained the hide and left it to soak they used 
the hour to empty and clean the hood and to move 
the fires from the fleshing beam to the softening 
and working beam. They also cleaned the hide 
scrapers and tidied up and burned as much of the 
gore and icky bits as possible. When they brained 
the hide a second time, they then were left with 
a good one to two hour wait. 

They retreated to the lean-to.   

He expected it, but Mulder was still mildly 
shocked when he looked at his watch and 
discovered that it was only nine o'clock. The 
relatively early evenings caused by sundown had 
thrown their internal time senses completely off. 
As the lean-to had become more and more habitable 
and as they had acquired the resources to start 
projects, they had been spending more time at the 
worksite. Partly this was due to logistics, but 
the simple fact was, that as they acclimated to 
their new physical routine, their sleep needs had 
stabilized around nine hours. Since there were 14 
hours of darkness between dusk and dawn, that 
left five hours of firelight time to fill. 

They built boxes. They made fur accessories. 
Scully was in the middle of stitching together 
one rabbit fur boot sock and when the rabbits she 
brought back today were tanned, she would be able 
to finish the pair. The martens were so small, 
that Mulder made pouches out of them. Scully's 
hung on her jacket belt and she used it to carry 
her spare ammo clips. He studied his unfinished 
snowshoe forms leaning against the wall.

They definitely weren't getting out of here in 
three or four weeks. 

It struck him for the first time, that back when 
this had all started, he really hadn't seen much 
difference between staying put and walking out. 
If they could acquire food here, they could 
acquire food on the go. They could build a 
shelter anywhere so the only real problem was 
clothing. A couple deer and their problems would 
be solved.

Mulder was slowly coming to realize just how 
lucky ...and naive, he had been.

Scully's deer had been so dramatic, had seemed 
like so much food, that he had failed to consider 
the fact that it had largely been a matter of  
blind luck. Her snare lines had netted them a 
continuous supply of rabbits, but he was only now 
beginning to realize just how different that was 
from hunting skill and just how much they were 
eating. Between them they were consuming at least 
a rabbit a day - and there was no escaping the 
fact that both of them should be eating more. 
They had both lost weight despite the available 
food. 

Was Scully even catching a rabbit a day?

And if she didn't have her snare lines, how and 
what would they catch instead?

The fact was, that they were safe here. They had 
food, shelter and they were rapidly acquiring 
clothes and tools. Over the last two weeks, 
Scully had expanded her traplines and their 
surplus of food bought them time to trap more 
food. Once they started moving, however, they 
would leave the traplines behind and need to rely 
on hunting. Instead of having snares working for 
them while they worked, they would consume their 
stores on the march, having no choice to then be 
successful each and every time they stopped to 
hunt. With their elevated energy needs, they 
would consume their food that much faster. They 
were losing weight now. How much more would they 
lose on the march?

How much more could they afford to lose?

They would need to make a shelter each night - 
that would take time, energy and they had no 
guarantees what sort of terrain they were heading 
into. The chances of being able to build the sort 
of shelter they currently had , every night, 
every time, were slight. He wasn't sure any other 
type of shelter would be sufficient. Not in the 
long-term. Not when they had no idea what sort of 
terrain they were moving into. Especially when 
they were also moving steadily into colder 
weather. They would need to catch a lot of 
rabbits to make even a small blanket and would 
that compensate for a more hastily built or less 
well -insulated shelter? 

A shelter allowed you to survive. It did not 
guarantee that you got to keep all your toes.

It violated every one of his instincts. Every 
fiber of his being shouted that they should be 
doing something to rescue themselves. That if 
they truly were intelligent, resourceful, action-
orientated people, then they should be doing more 
than sitting on their butts, catching rabbits, 
waiting to be rescued. It felt lazy. It felt 
cowardly and it felt wrong.

But he was beginning to think that his 
instincts were 180 degrees from intelligent.

At least out here.

It felt easy, because it was safe. And his brain 
kept trying to tell him that safe wasn't the way 
he should be feeling in this circumstance. But 
his brain also seemed to have a small problem 
remembering just how much work "easy" took. 
Worse, his mind kept telling him that roads lead 
to civilization and that somewhere two or three 
hours down this road there were people. True, 
three hours was a measurement by car. But the 
average human walking pace was 3mph. Even given 
the short days and the need to build a shelter 
every night, they should be able to walk six or 
seven hours per day. That meant 20 miles per day 
if they were lucky. Rationally, a week should get 
them anywhere they had to be.

Until he took a closer look at the equation.

One, they were assuming they would not get lost. 
That was not as silly as it sounded. With the 
road covered in snow, the tell-tale edges were 
vanishing. A long stretch through sparse trees, 
open fields or swamps, and they might very well 
lose track of the road. Especially if it 
curved...and they did not. On open ground, with 
no electric lines, fences or other signs to 
follow and everything flattened to uniformity 
with a six foot blanket of snow, they would only 
know they had a problem when they reached trees 
again, and found no pathway cut through them.

Two. They did not know what kind of terrain they 
were moving into. They might very well find that 
they could not average 3mph. In loose fluffy 
snow, dragging sleds and carrying packs, day 
after day? He would be very surprised if they 
managed it. 

Three. The weather. A snowstorm could  trap them 
in one place for days. The snow did not even have 
to be heavy to end their walking. All they needed 
was high wind. The risk of hypothermia due to 
wind chill and loss of visibility due to white 
outs would eliminate several days of travel. 
Extreme cold would be just as bad. Both 
conditions would keep them from hunting for food, 
so they would not even be able to make some 
productive use of the time. All they would be 
able to do would be to huddle in their shelter 
and wait.

Four. Food. How often would they have to stop to 
hunt? How many of those hunts would be 
successful? How much of that food would they be 
able to take with them and how long would it 
last. Their metabolic needs could easily double 
if not triple or more. Could they even eat enough 
to keep warm and moving under those 
circumstances?  

He was beginning to understand why so many people 
died walking away from plane crashes. 

"Scully?"

"Hmmm?"

He looked over to find her focused on her rabbit 
sock. A wolf skull, boiled clean rested upside 
down on the table by her bent head. Melted tallow 
and a cattail wick made an impromptu lamp that 
threw an amazing amount of bright, albeit smoky, 
light.

"We're not walking out of here any time soon, are 
we?"

Her hands paused, then she made another stitch.

"No."

He found himself staring at his watch. Why was he 
still wearing it? Their lives now were ruled by 
the lines between night and day, not the 
timetable of nine to five, late night programming 
or when the drive-through closed at Burger Boy. 
Was he still doing it? Trying to force a 
timetable of something that simply would be?

Question: When would they be ready?

Answer: Whenever they were ready.

Mulder's hand hesitated and then he slowly 
unfastened the band and slipped the watch 
from his wrist. He just held it, wondering what 
on earth he was supposed to do with it. 
Finally he dropped it into the pouch at his 
waist where it clinked softly against his spare
clips.

Whenever they were ready.