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Montani Semper Liberi
"Mountaineers are always free men"(Book Two of 
 Mountain Evasion
)
Silence filled the shadowy recesses of the granite gulley; the echoes of the blast and of the resulting rockslide having several minutes before reverberated and died out, the dust beginning to settle in the dusky light of that increasingly overcast March evening. Themen on the ledge, scrambling to tend to their wounded, had little thought at that momentto spare for their erstwhile prisoner, who had disappeared into the dust and smoke andflying rock as the ledge had fractured and given way before the force of the explosion.Far below and too faint to be heard over the shouts of the deputies and agents on theledge, there was a faint stirring on the gulley floor; up against the rock wall a freshly broken flake of granite scraped and slid and flipped over, then another. A sign of life…
 
 
 
Slowly fighting his way back to consciousness after the blast, Einar, covered with dust,found himself pressed up against the rock face on the blast side of the narrow rocky chutewhere he had come to rest after his fall, much of the rock having been thrown clear of him to land against the far wall. A number of chunks of fractured rock had come to reston his lower body, pinning him to the ground, and he worked to free himself, lifting andshoving them one by one, glad that none of the jagged fragments were too heavy for himto move. The gulley was still full of dust, the acrid smell of freshly broken granitehanging heavily in the air, reminding him of times when he had been up high and tooclose for comfort when lightning struck rock, and Einar knew he had not been out for long. His thinking was muddled and slow from the concussion that had knocked him out, but something screamed at him to
move! Get out of here!
Shoving at the rocks, he was beset by a sudden wave of nausea, turned his head and vomited, saw that there was bloodin the vomit. It took him a minute to realize, to his relief, that the blood was coming froma freely bleeding laceration on his cheek, rather than being an indicator of some type of serious internal injury.
Which I may end up having, anyway…
Turning his head to look up at the route of his fall, he was sent sprawling onto his back by an overwhelming surgeof dizziness. When the rock walls around him had finally stopped spinning to the pointthat he was again able to make some sense of the world and attempt sitting up, Einar quickly tried to assess the damage, and found that in addition to one side of his face beingcoated with blood from the wound where a rock had grazed his cheek, his head throbbedsickeningly, and the ribs that had previously been injured were again tender and painful.Gingerly probing the side of his head where the pain seemed to be originating from, hefound his hair damp with oozing blood, a lump the size of an egg already forming justabove and forward of his left ear.
Well. That’s not so good. “Head trauma with loss of consciousness…” Anything else?
Unaware of the most immediately serious of his
 
injuries until he deliberately inspected his legs, Einar discovered a deep gash just under his left knee which had already produced quite a pool of blood on the rock beneath him.
That’s a lot of blood. Got to stop that.
He quickly tore a strip out of the alreadydamaged leg of his orange prison uniform, tore another piece and wadded it up againstthe wound, then tied a strip tightly around his leg to hopefully provide enough pressure tohalt the bleeding. He fumbled with the strip, eventually getting it tied despite thehandcuffs he was encumbered with.
 I can get these off, but not here and now. No time.
Bruised, bleeding and beginning to be in serious pain, Einar told himself that
at least  you’re conscious, you can move, you’re not bleeding to death any more
.
Go up. Theywon’t expect you to go up.
But he was feeling awfully weak and dizzy and was pretty sure he was going into shock.The pool of blood beneath his leg, while it had stopped growing, was not insignificant.
Yeah, well you can’t exactly lie still and elevate your feet right now Einar, so just get moving…hope you can somehow keep it up long enough…
He didn’t know what was going on up on the ledge, or where the ledge had been— 
that recipe worked a little better than I thought it would— 
 but could hear the occasional shout,and supposed they must have sustained some injuries. Glancing quickly around—andregretting it the next minute for the stabbing pain and dizziness it set off in his head— Einar decided that there was no obvious way for them to reach him without ropes andtechnical gear. Which he did not believe they had with them.
So I may have a chance,here.
In the dimming light
 
he could see a smaller side chute that joined his some twentyyards up. It was a narrow, steep gnarly-looking thing that he expected probably ran outinto cliffs not far above his position, but was angled in such a way as to offer himconcealment from the men on the ledge, so it looked to be, if not his only chance, at leasthis best. To continue up the main gulley meant climbing in full view of the ledge,allowing him to be seen, and possibly recaptured or, if he resisted, shot, by anyone abovewho had remained uninjured. Which, as he figured it, ought at least to include the threeSheriff’s Deputies, because he had been careful to make sure they were some distance behind when the blast went off. Keeping as close as he could to the ledge side of thegulley, hoping to avoid being seen, Einar began dragging himself up towards his escaperoute. He had not gone far before realizing that, with his heart rate high and his blood pressure low due to the blood loss, he was not going to be able to move very quickly atall. Anxious to be out of the area as soon as possible he tried anyway, but the slightestexertion seemed to produce immediate dizziness and, if he raised his head too quickly, arapidly spreading blackness that threatened to send him collapsing in a heap on the rocks.
Slow and steady, Einar, or pretty soon you’re not gonna be moving at all…
 Reaching a point directly across from the side chute, he studied the terrain above him,looking for any sign that people might be watching, but could see nothing. Praying thathe would not be seen, he hurried across the big gulley and clambered up into the protective shadows of the narrow one that he hoped would allow him to make his escape.And promptly passed out again. Einar woke up bleeding, the improvised bandage havingcome loose in the scramble, and did his best to again secure it in place, wadding a freshstrip of cloth from his pants and shoving it under the strip that he had bound around the
 
leg. He wished he could get ahold of some of the yarrow he had used so successfully the previous fall as a coagulant, but it was too early in the season. The snow had just barely begun leaving the ground in open, sunny places at his elevation.Beginning his climb up the steep chute, glad that its angle did, indeed, conceal him fromthe ledge, Einar struggled to make progress despite the difficulties posed by the cuffs,wishing he was not effectively reduced to climbing one-handed. Once he put his weighton an unstable rock which promptly came loose, and he had to scramble to put somedownward pressure on it with his other foot to keep it from clattering down the gulleyand giving away his position. Raising his head after the struggle with the rock, he wasovercome by a terrible dizziness, simultaneously losing his sense of direction and histenuous grip on the steep rock, sliding sideways into a steeper section of the chute that hehad been carefully avoiding, falling. Scratching uselessly at the steep rock of the chutewith his cuffed hands, he was pretty sure he was headed for a nasty and rather abruptending until finally the cuffs snagged on a protruding root, arresting his fall rather  painfully but saving him from disaster on the rocks below. Einar was stuck, hanginghelplessly by his wrists on the nearly vertical slope, unable to get his feet under him. Hetried pressing the soles of his boots against the wall, hoping the friction would give himenough leverage that he might be able to free his hands. Below him by no more thaneight feet and a little to the right was a small rock bench, and he thought that he could possibly roll to the right and land on it, once free of the root. But he couldn’t seem tofree himself, couldn’t break the root even when he tried, and soon it would be too dark tosee what he was doing, risking a serious fall when he did get loose. Every time hestruggled he could feel a fresh warm trickle of blood running down his leg and knew thatthe bandage must have long ago soaked through. Swinging himself to the left, Einar tried bracing his foot against the granite slab that met the one he was trapped on, forming adihedral, wanting to wedge the toe of his boot into the crack where the two met, but hecould not get close enough to do it, and was rapidly losing the light as the clouds loweredand a wet spring snow began to fall. It was beginning to look like he might be spendingthe night.
 Not a good idea…
He knew he was staying warm only because of his ongoingefforts to free himself, that he would quickly become hypothermic when that struggle wasinevitably cut short at some point by his growing exhaustion.
Then you die, Einar.
Heknew that his blood loss combined with the cold
 
could very quickly turn lethal astemperatures fell for the night, especially if he should happen to be hanging there by hisarms all night with no way to curl up for warmth or slow the bleeding from his leg.
 And if you do somehow make it through the night, they’ll find you right here in the morning when they send searchers up this chute.
There was a narrow ledge above him, composed of little more than an inch of granite,that he could just hook his heel on if he tried very hard, but, with his boot up higher thanhis head, could not use it to lift himself at all. That ledge, though, seemed to be the keyto his escape. All he needed were a few more inches, and he would be able to raisehimself far enough to get some weight off of his arms, work the cuffs off of the root, andhopefully be able to grab the root with his hands and lower himself to the larger ledge beneath him. He knew the more likely scenario involved falling as soon as he freed thecuffs, having neither the strength nor the speed to grab the root in time. Even that,

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