Title - "The Lost" Author - Wintersong E-Mail address - wintersong@animatrix.ns.ca Rating - R (language) Category - SA, MSR/UST 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 really sucks, Scully." Hearing 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 Currier 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 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 its final death throws and she managed to drag one free. Snapping off the top, she was left with a ten foot length of solid tree with most of its 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 its 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 its 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. *********************************************** He had been able to justify the expense by blaming the Minnesota field office. The FBI had fucked up and now there was a violent, escalating sexual sadist on the loose. The fact that two agents were missing was almost considered fine print. He hauled in profilers from the VCU, agents from three separate field offices and task force members from municipal and state law enforcement agencies. The Minnesota FBI office building was suddenly thrust back into its role as the hub and home of a command center dedicated to finding Samuel Walsh Corman. It was a little bit busier and a whole lot more crowded than the last go 'round. Faxes hummed 24/7 as copies of regional, local and state maps were sent to every state, city and mapdot police station across Minnesota. Locals confirmed the accuracy or inaccuracy of the maps and swarms of deputies were sent to check on every cabin, cottage, summer home and hunting cabin they could find. When they were done, hunters and old-timers were polled to see if they remembered any cabins not marked on the maps and these were checked out too. Roadblocks were set up around entrances to rivers, lakes,state parks and state border crossings. Flyers were dispatched, hunters were warned to keep their eyes open and the owners of abandoned cars suddenly found state troopers on their doorsteps. Descriptions of all cars stolen within 48 hours of the estimated kidnapping were circulated,and on the off chance Corman might try to slip into Canada, marina and boat docks were canvassed, patrolled and more flyers distributed. The RCMP and the OPP did the same on the Canadian side of the Great Lake. Special bulletins were faxed to radio stations, tv stations and web stations across North America and because of the serial nature of his crimes and the escalating danger level, Skinner approached the producers of America's Most Wanted. Thousands of tips poured in. Tens of thousands of man-hours were spent following up each and every one. Hundreds of police officers and field agents manned phones, faxes and computers hoping to find the one clue that would catch a killer. One day into the investigation, the status of the missing agents was considered grave and endangered. Three days into it, the profilers and task force members started to avoid the eyes of Assistant Director Skinner. They nodded as he told them that if anyone could talk Corman into making a mistake it was Mulder. Then, when he stalked from the room, they looked again at the MO and swallowed. At the five day mark, they agreed with him that the agent profiles on Mulder and Scully showed an enormous will to survive, then they reread the nighttime temperatures for the last three days. On the seventh day, during the tail end of an arctic snow storm, they said nothing at all. Officially the investigation began to shift focus. Corman, with two live agents, would be holed up somewhere cutting chunks from their dying bodies. If they were dead, with his blood- lust temporarily assuaged, Corman would be on the move and looking for more victims. Troopers spent less time chasing where he had been, and starting spreading more flyers around where he might be going. On day 14, Agents Mulder and Scully were unofficially presumed dead. Maggie Scully glared at an exhausted Walter Skinner as he stood in the doorway of her motel room and told him flat out that she did not believe it. She had given up too soon once before, she was not going to do it again. Tara Scully, curled up on one of the beds,was too emotionally battered to react. This was not the first time she had seen her husband's family in turmoil, but it was the first time she had seen first hand the effort, the hours and the emotional rollercoaster behind the official words, "We're doing all we can". Because "all we can" was not enough, and the world was suddenly a much larger and scarier place than it had been two weeks before. Over the next seven days, missing person's reports from Minnesota and bordering states were scoured for a match to Corman's victim profile and methodology. The profilers expected at least one, possibly two matches based on the pace of the killer's escalation. Nothing. They expanded their search across the country. Still nothing. VICAP considered the disturbing possibility that by breaking his pattern in order to go after Agents Mulder and Scully, the killer may have discovered something he liked, and altered his MO. They reran the missing person's data looking for signature commonalties separate from modus operendi. They still came up empty. Finally they went back to AD Skinner with the answer he did not want to hear. Without bodies, there was no trail to follow. There was nothing more they could do. On day 21, Tara Scully tearfully told her mother- in-law that she had to go home. Maggie Scully calmly said that she understood, but that she wasn't leaving. Not this time. Not yet. Then she went to the church and lit bitter candles that seemed to burn too softly for the anger and fear in her soul. On day 28, without more bodies, without more leads, the investigation was downgraded to a local operation. The task force was downsized and the case assigned to four agents from Minnesota who would send fresh flyers out around hunting time and who would dutifully co-ordinate any follow-up on leads that might arise. On day 29, Walter Skinner was ordered back to Washington by the Director himself. Maggie Scully found him sitting alone in the motel bar, staring into the bottom of a glass of Coke. He said nothing, having found nothing there to say. She met his eyes defiantly, but when only bewildered pain and confusion looked back, her face began to crumble. For the first time in 29 days, she cried for her daughter. Thirty days after Samuel Corman escaped, Margaret Scully and Walter Skinner flew back to Washington DC. Special Agents Mulder and Scully vanished without a trace. ******************************************** One more week turned into two, then three and finally four. With his new jacket, Mulder was fully woods functional and the agents spent a couple of days sorting out a new division of responsibilities. As it turned out, their respective talents did the choosing for them. They quickly discovered that Mulder had a better touch with the traplines. In addition to the greater reach and strength which helped with building the predator traps, he seemed to have an instinctive touch when it came to setting the rabbit runs. Scully had teasingly suggested that perhaps his parents had known what they were doing. He actually smiled as he found himself in the unusual position of having his partner using his first name as an occasional nickname. The thought of trying to explain that to anyone had him snickering off and on for an hour. On the other hand, while Mulder could identify the deer tracks when he found them, actually locating the tracks was difficult. Locating the animal that made them proved almost impossible. By the time he got to where they had been, they were always somewhere else. Scully on the other hand seemed to be developing an almost subconscious instinct for where the animals were hiding. She still found herself watching flagging tails and bounding hind-quarters, but she was getting closer. While Mulder would spend two days checking and resetting the traplines and then two days back at camp skinning and tanning the results, Scully spent every hour learning to stalk her prey, pausing only to collect and haul back a load of wood at the end of the day. Mulder found himself watching his partner with increasing fascination. Partly it was the profiler in him, the psychologist, but mostly it was just the chance to witness the genesis of a new aspect of Scully. It was tiny things. Things like developing an unconscious habit of continually scanning the sky, scenting the wind and noting the breeze. Twice she had surprised him by hauling in loads of firewood instead of practicing her deer stalking. Twice, snow had started falling within six hours. The fact that she had developed that skill was not so odd, but the speed at which these new habits were forming was uncanny. He suspected that she had probably always been sensitive to these things, and now, with her whole mind and body focused on learning and absorbing as quickly as possible, her body was able to catalogue and cross-reference the things it already knew. In a way, her habit of continual analysis and quantification of her environment probably assisted this process. Partial skills and almost instincts, things that were dormant in civilization for the simple fact that there was nothing to apply them to, were suddenly stripped clean of constraints and actively being sought out and developed. Everything he saw, he had seen in diluted form in other situations, their odd careers sparking the need for limited development under certain circumstances. But this was the first time there had been enough time and enough need for the skills to develop into near full potential. Her eyes scanned continuously for hollows and brush. Places her chosen prey might be inclined to rest, to sleep or to hide. Her path no longer headed in one straight line, but wandered as the terrain meandered, her body instinctively seeking to stay downwind of these likely places and choosing routes that should lead her to her quarry. Her growing skills were tallied in the increasing numbers of tracks and sightings. Her failures to get close prompted other changes. Her eyes no longer focused on bush, on tree, but absorbed landscape, sensing rather than searching for that which was unusual or out of place. Her gait altered, becoming less heavy in the heel, path unconsciously chosen with an increasingly unerring eye to avoiding the noisy crunchy crusts of snow that would collapse with explosive suddenness and send her target bounding away as if from a gunshot. She learned to differentiate between the wind through the bush and the brush of fur against tree. Four weeks, six weeks earlier, she trooped through the bush as though one of Hannibal's foot soldiers. Point A to point B in a steady rhythm designed to get her to her destination without fail,without complaint. Now, Mulder watched as she drifted, occasionally walking, suddenly pausing for no reason to listen and evaluate and then move on. He watched her follow tracks for no other reason than to learn where they went. From some of things she said, the vast empty wilderness was suddenly one big extremely populated and interconnected society whose rules she was just beginning to learn, whose inhabitants she was just learning how to see. In the process, he learned that they were not as alone as he had thought. Wolf packs, fox families, badgers, bobcats and beaver. Squirrels, rabbits, martens, fishers, coyote and wolverine. Deer, elk and moose. Lions and tigers and bears...oh my. She didn't shoot any of the predators. There did not seem to be a point. It was only a matter of time before she learned to find the deer and one deer gave them so much that they needed. Now that they both had warm clothes, it seemed both a waste of ammo and a waste of life to take something simply because she could. It was the same reason he had stopped setting predator traps. Mulder's unbelievable luck with rabbit runs had bagged them enough furs to finish two pairs of boot socks for each of them. Even after Scully co-opted a handful for feminine hygiene purposes, they still had enough to start on rabbit fur vests. By design, the vests were little more than long rectangular strips of leather with a hole cut in the center for the head to push through. The vest was laced loosely at the sides and was originally meant to be worn under the deerskin jackets. Both agents however, often found themselves using just their vests when working around the camp and on warmer days. It was actually a good thing for their food stores that the rabbits were available in such numbers. They had found their appetites roaring back with painful demand. Instead of the vague urgings that normally prompted a call to the House of Taiwan or a run to Burger Boy, this hunger was a vast hollow emptiness that ached in intensity and demanded to be filled. Both agents found themselves craving the higher fat cuts of meat and only a worry over e-coli and worms kept them from devouring the meat at the rare rather than medium-rare stage. In spite of their appetites, a box full of smoked rabbit joined the boxes of smoked deer. By this point, they had reached a state of equilibrium. They were no longer adding to their stores, but they were not really eating into them. There was a definite shift in the proportions of deer to rabbit however as they ate more of the high fat deer than bunny. Mulder was not really worried about starvation. What he worried about was where the hell they were going to put the meat when Scully finally figured out the last pieces of the hunting puzzle and started bringing the deer home on a near daily basis. He had a feeling that once she figured out what she was doing, they were in for a major meat packing moment. Not that he would complain. The old bullet wound in his left leg, his butt and both his knees were getting more insistent about a warm pair of leggings and they needed rawhide, tenthides, sleeping furs and more rawhide. Scully had commented that a native American wardrobe of outer robe, shirt,jacket, leggings, and boots could take about ten hides. He had just looked at her in shock and started building another meat smoker. He had also started building more boxes. Lots of them. Based on their current intake, he estimated that they each were going through two to three lbs of meat a day. The days were only getting colder and they would be dragging heavy sleds so he cautiously doubled that estimate to an average equivalent of five lbs of fresh meat each per day. It seemed like an unbelievable amount, but better safe than sorry. They were already eating the highest fat cuts of meat and although they had stopped losing weight, they were not gaining any either. So...10 lbs of meat per day between the two of them. The average deer dressed out somewhere between 60 and 90 lbs. That meant that the average deer, assuming they ate the whole thing, would last them 6 to 9 days. Not long. Add to that fact that logically they should only carry the choicest cuts with them, eating the lesser cuts here at camp and saving the high fat cuts for the trip. Assuming they took the best 40% of the deer with them, that meant that one deer might only provide 25-35 lbs of high fat meat. Assuming a three week supply - probably the minimum they should consider carrying - they would need four deer apiece. Any way you looked at it, they needed a hell of a lot of deer. No wonder humans learned to grow vegetables and raise cows. At an average dressed out weight of 800 lbs, a cow was the meat equivalent of ...gee, ELEVEN deer. More than twice the hide, too. Hell of an incentive to build fences and grow corn. And then there was the milk, the cheese, the sour cream, the... Mulder had yanked that train of thought to a halt when he realized he was drooling. The beginning of week eight,Scully finally got her deer. She got another two days later and dammed if she didn't get two more three days after that. By the time she finished off her first clip and was halfway through the second, Mulder was so sick of skinning and smoking deer he was ready to lay down in front of the first UFO he saw and say "Take me." Scully had started field dressing the things which made life a little easier. Skinning the deer on site, she made a rough pack of the hide and internal organs and carried it back to the camp. The deer itself spent the night hanging in a tree. Because of the offal left on the ground, they made it a practice for both agents to retrieve the deer the next day. There was usually evidence that something or many somethings had found the entrails in the night. Occasionally, all that was left on the ground was bloody snow. But they never ran into anything. Luckily. Whether she just came into her own or it was the fact that she had been studying the local territory for almost four weeks or just the bloody weather, she was bringing the damn things down faster than they could be tanned and smoked. Raw frozen hides hung from the trees while Scully alternated between hauling back wood for the smokers and hunting down more victims for the assembly line. Mulder just sank into a haze of slicing and smoking. He was keeping up until she brought down deer number five. Then he started freezing the strips on racks before dumping them into boxes and hauling the boxes into the trees. The car trunk was already full by the time she killed deer number six and around the time Scully brought in seven, eight and nine, Mulder had two smokers going full-time plus the smoke chamber in the lean-to. With all the deer meat, he was tempted to just skin the rabbits and toss the meat, but something in him cringed at the thought, so he skinned and froze the rabbit furs, then tossed the roughly jointed meat into a box for storage. A three day snow storm forced Scully to temporarily abandon her efforts to single- handedly thin the local ungulate population. It was the smoking that was the time consuming chore. By the time the storm hit, the deer were sliced and frozen into boxes so the agents worked in shifts to keep the smokers going all night. During the day, they hauled back firewood and tanned rabbit pelts. They had finished with the rabbit furs, made an impressive number of boxes and had boiled down the hooves and collected the neatsfoot oil. Scully was making plans to collect more deer, but for the moment had vanished into the woods on some mysterious errand. Mulder did not ask. For once, his curiosity was comatose and he simply relaxed as the scent of smoking meat and woodsmoke combined with the aroma of pine needle tea. He almost could not believe they were finished. Oh there was still a hell of a lot of work left to do. Fleshing and tanning hides, equipment to make. And no doubt Scully would be hauling back at least two or three more deer. But for now, the frantic pace that had ruled them for the last two weeks was temporarily on hold. Mulder looked down at the private project he was working on and wondered if Scully even remembered the date. She hadn't brought it up, and he hadn't wanted to ruin his surprise. So he had said nothing and silently worked on his secret project whenever she was not around. Because according to the watch in his pouch, today was December 24. And tomorrow was Christmas day. ******************************************* The shadowed living room, lit only by the burnished glow of a quietly crackling fire, was a deceptively peaceful place. Certainly no one watching the lonely figure sprawled in a deep chair pulled close to the fireplace would ever guess that within these walls a quiet war was being waged. In deference to the season, a small Christmas tree rested in the corner, but the man had not bothered to plug in the long string of white mini-lights he had clumsily wrapped around the tiny pine. No. The most important light was already lit and shining in the window. Would they laugh if they knew? Somehow, he thought they would understand. Or perhaps, if not understand, then appreciate. This tattered custom born of long ago superstitions and half-remembered folktales. It was more appropriate than they would ever know. The flame they had started was burning bright. Walter Skinner allowed his lips to stretch over bared teeth as he contemplated the files resting on the table beside him. These...these were a Christmas gift he had saved all week to savor. Now, picking up the topmost he allowed himself the indulgence of contemplating the strength and power of small things. The tattered remnants of the Consortium must be shitting bricks right about now. It had started quietly enough, the small revolution. Alive, his two monster chasing agents had been a potential embarrassment to the FBI. Dead, they might have been a footnote. But missing...now that was a whole different story. Skinner's smile took on a dark edge as he imagined the consternation the men in the shadows must have felt when they first realized what the rumblings foretold. Or maybe they had not seen it yet. But they would. Sidelong glances that were just a bit too long and held a hint of suspicion. Agents who formally might have chuckled nervously when the leading class wit made the requisite Spooky jokes now stayed conspicuously silent. Off-hand comments about government conspiracies suddenly no longer seemed as funny and Skinner had noticed a decided shift in attitude gathering slowly, moving on soft feet through the halls of the Hoover building. It was not an overnight rebellion. None of his male agents were showing up at work wearing glow- in-the-dark Marvin the Martian ties, but suddenly the PD was finding it possible to actually get an agent to talk to them if they called about... unusual case reports. Agents who would once have merrily thrown the file on a trolley to the basement suddenly found themselves in a quandary. What to do with the files? Some just shrugged and dumped them. But a few got through. Reluctantly. With grave misgivings. Federal officers who ordinarily would have felt silly taking this seriously, did it anyway. Some did it because the two downed agents were owed at least this much. Others did it out of guilt. Others accidentally stumbled over something they could not explain and found it that much harder to ignore the next time. Slowly but surely, a handful of people got up the nerve to say "what if". And the first domino fell. Agent Caplan, unhappy about the evidence on her case disappearing one night, commented out loud that maybe the aliens stole it. Someone laughed and jeered that she was beginning to sound like old Spooky and his missing partner. Caplan growled and snapped back that maybe they were missing because they got too close to something...and several people in the crowd shifted uneasily and forgot to laugh. One of those people, Agent Gilbert, found himself staring at a casefile involving a witness who claimed a werewolf did it. With Mulder and Scully in mind, he was perhaps more patient and polite than he might have been normally and the deputy on the other end of the line was grateful to be taken seriously. So grateful, that when the odd disappearances continued into the neighboring district, he confidently urged the Sheriff to approach the local field office. Needless to say, the local agents were a bit startled, but in return for the respect he had been shown, young Deputy Willis had taken care to study the FBI crime scene field manual cover to cover and he made sure that he did not miss a thing. The field office was not only thrown by the meticulous evidence gathering and labeling, they actually found something. They just did not know what it was. Someone mentioned the X-Files, and when the locals called Washington to request their assistance they were informed that the division was shut down due to the fact that the agents running that department had disappeared. After determining that this actually was not a joke, the cop jokingly asked if they had been kidnapped by aliens. The silence on the other end was just a bit too long and the voice just a shade too light as it said 'the FBI has no opinion on the existence of extraterrestrials". Which had the unusual affect of giving the listener the odd feeling that maybe the FBI did not have an opinion, but the agent he was talking to was contemplating the possibility. That slight hesitation before denial was more damaging than any photograph taken since Roswell. Because these were feds. And the cops took them seriously. They began to ask "what if". Skinner watched from the sidelines as five weeks after Mulder and Scully disappeared, someone out in Nebraska very seriously asked Research to get them everything they had on vampires. Annoyed at what he perceived to be a waste of time and a personal insult, the head researcher, under the guise of saving himself from redundancy, threw the information up on the internal server and gave said agent's email address as a contact. Within a week, the bewildered agent received twenty-three very serious information requests from people who normally would have talked to Mulder. Many of them had talked to Mulder. They ranged from an NYPD detective who thought he had a serial killer who thought he was a vampire to a Deputy Sheriff in Iowa who thought he had a cult related killing on his hands. Hasty information requests to other agents inevitably led to numerous references to the X-Files. In desperation, the harried agent started asking Research for relevant X-file casefiles to be cross-referenced to the information requests. The assistant to the original researcher suddenly found this new influx of information requests tossed onto her desk. By chance, she was one of the researchers who had worked with Agent Mulder to reassemble much of the data lost in the fire. As a result, she actually had many of the casefiles with accompanying documentation scanned and digitally available. She also had much of the research information done for Mulder over the years still rolling around in the bowels of her computer. She had the information, she just needed a couple of days to put it all together. Without realizing that the first researcher meant it as a nasty joke, the assistant followed his example by placing the gathered data on the secure server. The combination of meticulous background notes and cross-references to digitized casefiles created an instantly credible database of the paranormal. The researcher found herself the defacto database manager and in an effort to keep all of the information current, sent a very serious memo out to all FBI personnel asking for notification when filing related reports. For most people, it was just another resource, but the memo stuck in a few people's minds. The existence of the database was justified when the NYPD detective, using information from the site, not only caught the killer but specifically noted in his report that the information provided had given him the keys to predicting the killer's behavior. One agent noted that the differences from traditional myth and the manner in which the crime differed from the historical, actually gave clues to the behavioral profile. BSU received so many emails and phone calls regarding this theory that they put together a research group to analyze past cases. A chatroom was opened and links added. All of this simply meant that the embryonic tools were there when the inevitable happened and someone stumbled over something that could not be programmed, categorized or easily referenced. On the other hand, it also could not be denied. Nine weeks after Mulder and Scully disappeared, a bandaged and limping field agent pinned up several memos around the Hoover building and emailed copies to all field offices. Further investigation proved it to be a darkly humorous list of all the ways not to try to kill various monsters. Most people just laughed and took it as a joke. But some made photocopies. Skinner had watched all this in silence and done nothing. Until today. Today he had given himself an early present and fired the first shot of a civil war. And the funny thing about it...he was just doing his job. Heavy laughter swirled in the room as he considered his next move. This morning, he had called two agents into his office and summarily closed their case. No reason. No explanation. No recourse. The two agents had stood there stunned. He did not blame them. The case was a two bit scandal that had accidentally crossed paths with Rousch Industries. Rousch was not even involved. But that wasn't the point. The point was that two highly intelligent agents were justifiably wondering why the AD had suddenly pulled out the big guns for a non-existent case. And if they thought to do a database search of the server, Rousch Industries was going to come up in a few strange places. X-Files places. How ironic that he was pulling a leaf from Kritchgau's book. Creating phantom conspiracies where none exist to convince the ignorant of a real conspiracy no one could talk about. He would chose his cases wisely. Then he would close cases just a bit too fast, come down just a bit too hard and give particular agents serious reasons to remember certain names. Even his own death at this point would only add fuel to the fire. Because there would be plenty of agents who rightly assumed he had something to hide. The uneasy suspicion in the two agents this morning was just the beginning. Maggie Scully believed that her daughter was still alive. Walter Skinner was choosing to believe her. He wanted to believe her. He needed to believe her. But for now, he would use their disappearance to make things as uncomfortable as possible for the shadow men. And make sure there was a war for them to come back to. Turning his head he stared at the fat pillar candle shining in the window. The same candle he lit each night, a beacon to bring the lost ones home. Raising a glass of wine, he let the light shine through the ruby liquid and phrased a toast to old memories, lost friends and fallen comrades. "Merry Christmas, Agents." **************************************** So what do you get for the person who has almost nothing? It had to be practical. They were not wasting resources on frivolity. So none of this "get them something they would not buy for themselves" stuff. But the list of things they needed or wanted was getting to be increasingly long, and there were small things that had been regretfully put aside... It had to be lightweight. Once they were on the move, personal items were limited to what they could carry. And it had to say something. Mulder pondered over that one. Everything they needed right now was of such a direct practical purpose, that it was difficult to find something that not only met those practical needs, but was something that could actually be made with the limited time and resources available. But what could he make that showed both practicality and caring? A possible answer had occurred to him just before Scully started knocking deer down like nine pins. Instantly he had rejected it as being something that would embarrass the hell out of her. The problem was, that the more he thought about it, the more it made perfect sense. The fact that it was something one partner would not ordinarily get another...well, hell. Partners would not ordinarily know their partners needed something like this. It was the situation that was so cock-eyed. So he squashed his initial qualms and worked on his gift while Scully was out hunting. The first part was easy. Taking one of the larger deer hooves he had boiled it until it softened. Then he had flattened, scraped, smoothed and carved until he had comb she could use for her hair. His partner was fastidious about her grooming habits, and using nothing but her fingers was driving her crazy. The second part? His partner needed a replacement for her bra. Repeated washings, heat from the fire and the abrasive effects of the pine needles was breaking down the fabric of their clothes quickly. As far as Mulder could tell, she had more or less stopped wearing it during the day in an effort to make it last longer. If he had thought he would survive, he would have just suggested that she stop wearing it at all. He had already had to bite his tongue several mornings when he saw the way the heat twisted fasteners on the shoulder straps were digging into her skin. Unfortunately, he could not come up with a politically correct way to make that suggestion. And considering where his hand occasionally ended up, he could see why she might have a few doubts about the selflessness of that idea. The fact was, however, that somewhere along the line they had perfected the art of looking without seeing. He had once tried to explain to another agent that while he was perfectly aware that his partner was a beautiful woman, that most times, he was well and truly not consciously aware that she was female. Which, when you stopped to think about the low level hum of sexual awareness that seemed to wrap itself around their partnership like background noise, it was not surprising that the other man had just looked at him funny. But hell, that awareness was something that they consciously chose to...repress wasn't the right word. Subsume? Convert? Channel? As frustrating as it could be, it was also fun. And so many of the needs that people satisfied with sex were already being met by their partnership in other ways. So he knew why they confused people. The fact was, that he was more than capable of looking at his partner, recognize and enjoy what he was seeing, without being trapped in the moment. Most of the time. There were good reasons after all, not to sleep with your partner. Not the least of which was making sure you were doing it for the right reasons. They respected each other enough to need to know why the hell they were doing it in the first place. A mistake could cost too damn much. He had no problem with the concept of sleeping with someone for simple human comfort. Hell, he had done it. Certain years while at the BSU immediately came to mind. No harm, no foul...as long as everybody knew the rules. But that was with people who really were nothing more than colleagues. Co-workers. But his relationship with Scully was so damn convoluted he did not know how he felt half the time. Did he love her? Of course. Was he attracted to her? Sometimes. Was she someone he wanted to spend his foreseeable future with? He was already doing that, wasn't he? But could they survive all that togetherness without the work to hold them together? That was a larger issue. Throw in the question of whether they could hold both relationships together at the same time and it became a logistical nightmare. Trying to sort all that out while in the middle of a shooting war was a nightmare. They were still looking for emotional down-time to deal with issues from last year. And the year before that. And probably the year before that. So in the middle of all this, how the hell could you justify turning to someone for nothing more than comfort when you knew they would not turn you away? You could not. You would not. Because it was an abuse of trust no matter how you looked at it. And the potential hurt cost a hell of a lot more than a little self control. Their existing relationship put them in a unique position to hurt each other if comfort was all that was asked or could be given. Especially if the need was one-sided. So run Fox run. See Fox run. See Fox bolt for the goddamn door when she caught him off guard with wine and cheese and possibilities turning in her eyes. Because if she had asked, he would have said yes. They needed to wait. Wait until they knew for themselves what they wanted, what they were really asking. He owed her the certainty of knowing she was choice, not lack of alternatives or even laziness and convenience. He owed it to himself. She owed it to him. They were too aware of the damage they could cause if they moved too soon, promised too much...were just plain wrong. He would rather regret lost time than destroy everything by moving too fast. By being too greedy. Too desperate. By finding out that the answer was no. He could wait. They had both lost too much. Their certainties, their privacy, the sanctity of their own homes. They had had every illusion stripped away, until control over their lives and their bodies was nothing more than a hollow fantasy. They walked in a world where doors meant nothing, where every action even in the privacy of their homes was done with the full knowledge that it could be taped, watched and scrutinized by the uncaring enemy. Was it any wonder that they guarded the only thing they truly owned anymore...their hearts and minds. And to ask someone to drop that last barrier. To know that if you told her that you not only loved her, but that you were in love with her, that she would trust you, would believe you. Even if she feared you did not know what you were talking about she would take the chance anyway because your existing relationship would not allow her to not believe you. To force her to take that risk...you had to be damn sure you knew what you were talking about. Because what if you were wrong? What if you mistook need for love and found out too late that you could not keep the promises you made her? What if she decided later that with the best of intentions, what you offered just wasn't enough? That she could not keep her promises to you? They did not have the luxury of walking away from a mistake. They needed each other in far too many ways to play careless games in the name of "taking a chance". Their fears were valid. Seven years. So much time and too little. Too much too lose and so little time to be sure. Because neither of them could afford to make promises they could not honor. Their lives depended on it. ************************************* Scully had excavated a large pit starting about a week earlier. At first, Mulder had thought that she was planning another smoker, but the pit had gotten bigger and bigger and she had dumped most of the dirt close enough to the pit to keep it thawed. She had also kept a roaring fire going in the thing until the ground for almost two feet around was warm and dry. Christmas morning, she had gotten up early and started another hot hardwood fire. He had gone for firewood at her request, and when he came back, the pit was filled back in and there was a fire blazing on top. He did not ask, she did not offer. He had however, been about to bring out her gift when she suddenly grabbed her snowshoes and high-tailed it for the bush. He was only slightly miffed since he was looking forward to seeing her face. On the other hand, he was starting to have second thoughts and dinner was looking more and more like a better time. Heck, he could wait until after dinner. Late evening even. He sighed. They had finished the smoking the day before, all of his rabbit hides were tanned and the deer hides could wait until tomorrow. No big messes today. Finally, he took out the woodsled and spent the morning searching for wood. Not firewood. Wood for travel-sleds. It was late afternoon by the time he made it back to camp, and Scully was waiting for him. She was kicked back in the lean-to by the fire and drinking pine needle tea from the skull of a wolf. The first time she had done that it had seriously grossed him out. Now? He told himself that he should find it bizarre. But the fact was, was that sitting by the fire with pine boughs at her back and dressed in bush tanned leather and fur, it did not look fantastic at all. It looked primitive as hell, though. And every once in a while, he would glance at her lit by the firelight, her hair wild, her blue eyes intense, and he would suddenly get this weird feeling of being caught out of time. For a split second, she would look up and he would see, not Agent Dana Scully, but some warrior woman from her Gaelic past. She would probably laugh if she knew. Then again...he looked at her amused eyes as they watched him over the rim of the skull and sighed. "Merry Christmas, Mulder." Her accompanying grin was smug and he wondered what exactly her devious little mind had been up to. His eyes slid back to the fire and narrowed. Her grin widened. "Uh uh. Christmas gift first." She suddenly picked up a parcel by her side and before he guessed her intent, she tossed it at him. He caught it neatly, then eyed her speculatively. That grin... "You are looking entirely too pleased with yourself, Agent Scully." She grinned again and shifted over as he stepped into the lean-to. However, instead of sitting down beside her, he flashed her a grin of his own and dug a small stick box from the corner. He handed it to her with a flourish and the gleam in her eye brought back memories of another Christmas and tearing into wrapping paper at an ungodly hour Christmas morning. The speculative delight had been almost identical. Her parcel was wrapped simply in a clean square of the car upholstery, the ends brought up and tied with leather lace. The fabric fell away to reveal a beautifully tanned deerskin pouch designed to slide onto his belt. Obviously Scully had snagged a piece of hide when he wasn't looking. And it was heavy. Curiously he undid the drawstring and his jaw dropped as he looked inside. Seeds. Nuts. Dried berries. All kinds. At least four different types and from the delicious aroma, the nuts were roasted. He looked up at her in astonishment. Except for the acorns, most of the seeds were tiny. When had she had time to gather all of these? She smiled,"In case you're wondering, those are acorns, maple seeds, birch seeds, pine nuts, wild raisins and high bush cranberries." Mulder shook his head in bemusement,"All of this is available in winter?" "Uh huh. Although I committed felony theft for the acorn stash. The squirrel is filing charges." Mulder grinned,"Why Agent Scully, I'm shocked." Dryly,"So was he." Mulder experimentally crunched a few of the seeds as her fingers worked to untie the laces binding the top of the box to the frame. They were surprising good. Almost painfully delicious after two months of nothing but meat. Mulder sighed happily. Warm clothes, Scully's company and snack food. What more could a man ask? Well...maybe indoor plumbing. Scully finally managed to get the laces undone and he suddenly found himself wondering again if this had been such a good idea. The hoof comb was lying right on top and from the pleased expression on her face, he had scored a hit with that one. It was not the comb, however, that had been giving him second thoughts. She gave a surprised murmur as her fingers dug into the rabbit fur and realized just how soft the leather was. She had mentioned that repeated freezing and thawing before tanning was supposed to soften leather through the tenderizing effect of the ice crystals. Apparently it had worked, because the leather had come out sensuously soft and he had spent extra time on the rubbing and stretching part of the process. He shifted uneasily as she turned it over in her hands and the underlying shape became clear. For a long moment she just held it in her hands. Then he heard a soft, "Oh Mulder." And then she was smiling at him, not a bright happy smile, but a fuzzy, tearful one that off hand, he could not recall seeing before. But she did not look unhappy,so he must have done something right. He grinned in sheer relief and was startled when she took one look at his face and started to laugh. Despite a couple of inquiring eyebrows she just shook her head and smiled. Then she surprised him by turning her back and pulling off sweater and vest to try it on. He gazed at the fire while she laced and adjusted. Then studied her with curious eyes when she turned back around. All in all, he had probably seen more of his partner's naked and semi-clothed body in the last two months than he had seen in the entire six years previous. As he had thought earlier, he had perfected the art of looking without seeing. Which is why he found himself totally unprepared for his emotional response to her attire. It was little more than a rectangular band of fur with laces that almost completely pulled it together at the front. He had managed to give it a little shape by cutting out tiny slivers at the four main compass points around each breast and sewing them back together with tiny almost imperceptible stitches. Ultimately, he assumed that through wear and the constant tightening and retightening of the laces, the thing would eventually stretch to form fit. Even without that, however, he noted absently that it looked comfortable. It wasn't the fact that, for all intents and purposes, it had been designed as a bra. It actually didn't look like one. It looked like a cross between a halter top and a bikini. In its primitive functionality, the white fur suited her. Her hair had grown slightly past her shoulders and without the attention of hairbrush, gel and blowdryer, her natural wave caused it to flow and curl in wild abandon. She needed only leggings and a wooden spear and he would have no difficulty imagining her as some ice age Viking warrior queen come to life. So it wasn't how it looked that sent a blast of emotion screaming across his nerve endings and woke the animal instincts that lurked beneath civilized custom. It was seeing something that he had made, something crafted by his hands, touching her skin. It was the fact that she had accepted the gift. As if by wearing it, she had acknowledged some unspoken claim and primitive reflex wanted nothing so much as to stand up and growl "Mine!". He bashed primitive reflex on the head with a mental fist and reminded it that instinct and reality had diverged in this situation. Reflex wasn't convinced. Nor was another part of his anatomy. Which would have been fine if he had not looked up into her face and seen something feral and hungry staring back. For a long moment neither agent spoke, then Mulder managed a shaky breath and as if by unspoken agreement, both looked away. She had the good sense to stay on the other side of the lean-to. He heard a unsteady sigh and a short unamused laugh. "Shit." His mouth responded before his brain could check the words over first,"I'll see that and raise you an uh oh." There was a moment of dead silence, then she collapsed onto the log and started to giggle so hysterically he was not absolutely positive she wasn't crying. When she finally raised her head there were tears running down her face, but she was definitely laughing. Nearly out of control and an edgy kind of laughter, but laughing. "Jesus Mulder. Your partner almost drags you back to her cave and all you can say is "uh oh"?" Mulder smiled weakly. Should he explain that his brain was not exactly the part of his body in control of his thought processes right about now? "Tell me again why this would be a bad idea?" Uh oh. He babbled the first things he could think of," I haven't brushed my teeth in three months. *You* haven't brushed your teeth in three months. No deodorant. No silk sheets. No candles. No bed..." His brain was getting off track again and she was looking at him with the strangest look of surprise in her eyes. Almost as if she had had a revelation of some kind. She murmured a couple of additions to his ad hoc list, " The situation is unnatural- due only to circumstance, we're partners, it might ruin our friendship..." Oh right. He had forgotten those. Surprising how natural unnatural could feel. And what the hell was that look in her eyes? "Was that everything?" What was she finding so fascinating about his answers? Was that everything? He was having trouble remembering why he was trying to talk her out of this. Oh right. He dropped all pretense and went out on the limb as far as he had ever gone. No innuendo. No fall back. No safety net. No drugs to blame it on. Just a brutal honesty and the terrified vulnerability of his heart. "Be very sure, Scully. Please." Was that ragged whisper a warning or desperate plea? Did she even understand what he was telling her? There was none of the sudden shock that he expected. Not even any real surprise. Just a thoughtful gaze that was as turned inward as it was directed at him. Then she was studying him again, weighing some decision in her mind. In a way, he almost wished she was not taking this so seriously. Because no matter what she decided to do, he was screwed. If she said yes...would she really be saying yes? If she said no... Despite the fact that he wanted her to say no, needed her to back off, his mind was crying out that it was not fair. He had not expected to be judged today and if she would just tell him what she wanted, he could find a way to give it to her. That he would do better, plead his case differently, offer her a hell of a lot more if she would just give him another chance... Finally she stood and he was too terrified to look into her eyes. He did not want to see the choice he feared she was about to make. Either way, he knew he would lose. "This isn't the right time to make this decision." For a long moment he remained frozen, then he let out a single explosive breath that he had not even realized he was holding. She had found a way not to choose. Thank God. Thank whatever. She had not decided against him. He still had a bit more time. He refused to consider the swirling mass of emotion beneath the relief that felt like disappointment. Emotions were damned illogical. "Mulder?" He looked up at her, too caught off guard to completely hide the confused mess he knew was visible in his eyes. But that was okay. Because he was staring into a mirror image of those emotions and they were not his alone. "We both need to be sure." He absorbed the words she spoke, as well as the ones she did not say. Then he nodded. This was not the time. He knew that. He really did. The disappointment...was something he could live with. He was not alone and he was not the only one who was scared. If she had said the words, if he did, in this place, under these circumstances, they would always wonder. She was right. They both had to be sure. So he took a deep breath and dredged up a wry twist of the lips. "Dinner?" She gaped at him a moment, then laughed outright, this time without the edge, without the pain. Normality returned to their abnormal lives. "Dinner." she agreed. As a diversion it was inspired. Burning curiosity had its occasional uses and he really truly wanted to know what was up with that pit. The expression on her face was too self-satisfied. Whatever it was, it was gonna be good. He could feel himself starting to drool. Getting his Pavlovian responses under control he ignored his partner's smirk as he helpfully volunteered to move the fire and dig up whatever she had buried. He also resisted the urge to strangle her as she S..L..O..W..L..Y dug into the soft earth with a deer bone digging stick. It was worth it. The smell almost carried him off. Turkey. Oh God. TurkeyTurkeyTurkeyTurkeyTurkey. Where the hell had she found a turkey? Did wild turkeys grow...well... wild? He knew there were people raising wild turkeys for sport hunting, but were the really wild cousins still running around or were they extinct? Maybe some of the domesticated stock got loose and avoided the foxes and wolves long enough to reproduce. Actually, he found he did not care. He just wanted her to hurry the hell up and... ...crack open a ball of mud? Mulder stared down at the offending object. Then he looked back at his partner, a dismayed expression on his face. "Where's the turkey?" Okay, so that had come out sounding truly pitiful. But he...he still smelled turkey. He poked at the ball of mud suspiciously. Then he ducked reflexively when Scully yelped and yanked the mudball away from him. "Don't!" He froze. Scully checked her mudball for cracks, then glared at him. "Don't touch. If it cracks out here it'll be one god awful mess." The turkey was inside the mudball? Mulder studied the soccerball sized thing with renewed interest. Now that he looked closer, he could see that the mud actually appeared to be clay. "Hey Scully. Isn't that roaster pot thing that Bill and Tara got you for Christmas last year made of clay?" "You remember that?" Was she joking? It was shaped like a chicken. Who could forget something like that? Apparently clay was an all purpose cooking tool. The fire-hardened clay cracked and pulled away from the bird inside as Scully laid it on the table and smacked it. Skin and feathers tore away with it leaving the tender meat steaming in the winter chill. Hunks of meat fell from the carcass and it was neither pretty nor graceful. It didn't last long enough to matter. Scully had stuffed the cavity with a combination of cracked,roasted acorns and wild onions. The pungent aroma after nearly three months had both of them nearly to the point of hyperventilation as they luxuriated in the smell. The taste was beyond description. Despite their efforts to be moderately civilized, they suspected that anyone watching from the outside would not have noticed the attempt as they ripped hunks of meat from the bones and scooped hot bits of stuffing with their fingers. It turned out, however, that it was not turkey after all. "Pheasant? As in $10 a pound pheasant? That pheasant?" Scully just grinned at the irony of eating luxury game bird while trapped in the wilderness and scooped more of the acorn stuffing. They had long since reduced the first mudball to bare bones and were making serious inroads on the second. There was even a third one for leftovers. Then she lit a tallow candle for her family and they both stared silently into the flickering flame as they thought about the ones they had left behind. Surprisingly enough there were no tears. Pain, yes, for Scully's family and those few friends close enough to miss them on this first Christmas after their disappearance. But no regret for themselves. They were warm, they were safe and they had each other. They had peace,and hope,and a temporary reprieve from the war...but no regrets. In the midst of nothing, they had everything that mattered. ******************************** True to his predictions, Scully brought down three more deer before turning her attention to other matters. Unable to leave the camp while the meat was smoking, Mulder started fleshing the deer hides, but left the tanning until evenings when both of them were present to work the large and unwieldy hides. Scully, meanwhile, started a new career as an acorn pirate. No squirrel den was safe from the red-headed scourge of the wilderness and their breakfast diet soon expanded to include acorn porridge. The added oil and protein allowed them to move completely to eating rabbit and the low fat cuts of deer meat. Following the deer had led her to the wild onions, and she soon discovered several swampy areas around moving water that had not frozen over yet. In addition to a few bitter greens, these unfrozen areas provided wild carrots (with deer and onions, they actually had a stew) while the brooks and rivers yielded up a small harvest of fish. Mulder was ecstatic and some of his enthusiastic experimentation with the greens and other edibles Scully brought back were actually quite good. After she showed him where she had found the clay, Mulder spent several fruitful hours recreating her clay bakeware. The resulting pot with lid, seized with oil from the deer meat roasted in it, made an excellent dutch oven when buried in hot coals. Mulder was so pleased with it, he made another just in case they broke the first one. They were halfway through January when they realized that they were almost ready. The deer hides were tanned, they each had a soft leather shirt to wear under their vests and their jackets had acquired hoods of warm fox fur. Leather leggings covered tattered jeans and for the most part, with the leather acting as a windstop and the fur turned to the inside for an insulating layer, they found them adequately warm. Of course, mostly that was due to the high energy activities they were engaged in when away from the fire, and the trade off was an enormous need for fuel. The fish helped, as did the acorns,but the additional muscle mass they were rapidly gaining, as well as the caloric cold deficit ate into their stores of deer meat at alarming rates. Mulder started putting on a Dutch oven of rabbit stew in the mornings just to give them something to eat between meals. They could not stop eating. Scully was giving serious contemplation to going after two or three more deer when another opportunity presented itself. At least that was how she described it after the fact. Asinine and reckless were the kindest words that Mulder used after he calmed down. She did not have a descriptive phrase for it herself. She had been too busy running for her life. Despite the appeal of a bear skin blanket, neither Mulder nor Scully had any intention of hunting bear with 9mm handguns. The thought was ludicrous. So Scully had taken careful note of the one bear den she did find and kept as far away from it as possible. Avoiding it entirely would have been better, but not practical. So she was careful. Unfortunately, Fate resolved to stir things up and while Scully was checking her fishing lines, the hibernating bear decided it was time to take a pee and find a few winter berries to snack on before he went back to sleep. She did the only thing she could do... She ran. Playing dead only works if the bear attacking you thinks you are a threat. Most mother bears will settle for batting you around a few times until she is satisfied her cubs are safe. That does not mean however that the unhappy human is not going to get badly torn or chewed. And unfortunately, there are two types of bear attacks. Playing dead with the second type just gets you eaten. Having no idea which this would be, and knowing that at full speed a bear can run down a human without even trying, Scully headed for the trees. Black bears can climb too, but a full grown black bear weighs over three hundred pounds. Unless he is serious, he isn't going up that high. And since he is heading up the tree with paws and claws occupied, it's possible to pull a 9mm handgun and put an entire clip into the roof of his open mouth before his teeth grab hold. He also makes an impressive hole in the branches when he falls out of the tree. Still, avoiding the bear in the first place is the safest strategy for all involved. Scully stared down at the motionless cinnamon furred lump for the better part of half an hour before climbing shakily out of the tree. Once on the ground she backed away from the body carefully, just in case there were any stray electrical impulses floating around the beast's jaws or paws. Then she headed for the camp at high speed. The bear was big and she was going to need help skinning and dragging it back to camp. That was not, however, the reason she was racing through the snow as fast as her snowshoes could carry her. There was absolutely no way Mulder missed those gunshots. She was barely sixty seconds into camp when she was picked up, shaken and spun around in a human version of a tornado. After doing his best to squeeze the last of her air from her lungs, Mulder frantically went searching for broken bones, open wounds and other medical horrors. Then, when he finally understood that she was safe, he started to yell. And shake. Finally she just wrapped her arms around his waist and waited him out. His voice had trailed off into incoherence and she suspected that the only thing holding him up was the grip he had on her shoulders. Mulder could fling himself into the hunt with the best of them, but pacing around camp gives the adrenaline no place to go. For someone used to being able to do something about the things that scared him, Mulder had just spent an hour in his own personalized version of Hell. Given the circumstances, Scully could forgive a little shouting. What she would have done under the same circumstances did not bear thinking about. However, they had work to do. Satisfied that her partner was done with his hysterics, she tossed him his snowshoes and grabbed extra knives, ropes and sled. Mulder even managed to maintain his cool until they made it back to the bear and he saw the size of the thing. Since the curse words did not seem to be aimed directly at her, Scully ignored them in favor of trying to figure out exactly how they were going to do this. There was no way they were hoisting this beast into a tree even if the ropes would hold him. Ultimately, Mulder scooped out the contents of the body cavity to keep it from tainting the meat while she loosened the fur from the carcass. Ordinarily they would spread the fur on the sled and place the meat inside it, but the bear was too heavy to roll out of his fur. Instead, they starting hacking off chunks of meat and placed them on clean snow to cool.As they went, Scully was able to separate large chunks of bear fat and these went in a separate pile to freeze. As the pile of meat grew, they were finally able to roll the carcass from side to side by pulling up on one side of the fur or the other. Mulder took the first load of meat back to camp and started a fire in the smoker while Scully continued trimming meat from the bear. The large size of the bones made it impossible to joint the meat easily and there was no way they were going to be able to crack the rib cage without serious effort. They would have left most of the bones for the scavengers, but Mulder wanted the ribs for the travel sleds. Scully figured he would probably find a use for the heavy leg bones as well. Five trips were needed to get it everything back to camp. In spite of the blood, nothing bothered them. Whether it was the smell of the bear or the smell of the humans was anybody's guess. As nice as the meat was, however, the real treasure was the hide. Adequate as they were for clothes, the deerhides just would not be warm enough as blankets once they were on the trail. Not if they ended up using hastily built or snow-type shelters. The bear hide solved that problem quite neatly. In the end, she did not even have to use the brain to tan the hide. There was so much oil in the skin, she simply had to scrape it off as it oozed from the leather. It took two days to build the frame to stretch it out and another two weeks before it was ready for smoking, but in the end they had a luxuriously soft and warm - albeit heavy - bear blanket. With the addition of almost two hundred pounds of high fat bear meat, they were able to scale back their food gathering efforts to acorn foraging and the traplines. They did not need the meat, but they needed the rabbit fur. Most of the remaining deer hides were stitched tightly together to form a tent designed to stretch over a detachable wooden skeleton similar in design to the wedge-shaped burrow they currently occupied. The easily assembled structure could then be covered in snow. The temperature inside would never get above zero-but it would never get below a few degrees below zero either- no matter how cold it got outside. The remaining deerskins would be thrown over pine boughs to protect them from the ground while a rabbit skin blanket and the bear skin would act as an arctic sleeping bag. Mulder threw himself into the task of building their sleds, while Scully finished preparing everything else for the journey. By the second week of February, after the worst of the cold weather had mostly passed, their preparations were complete. Each sled was just over eight feet long and two feet wide. Four of their maple stick boxes fit comfortably in a single layer with room along the sides for the pieces of the tent skeleton. Each sled was designed to carry eight boxes in a double layer. The sled itself was strong enough to be hoisted into the trees to keep the food from tempting predators. Of the eight boxes on each sled, six carried food -four of meat, one of acorns and one filled with various containers of everything else from cranberries to onions. One box on each sled held various cooking utensils and misc. tools. Mulder's eighth box held their leather working tools, rawhide lace and other odds and ends. The remaining rabbit pelts were bundled and loosely tied on top. Scully's extra box held everything else that they could not fit in elsewhere. The hides stacked on top of the boxes and would be tied down with ropes on the trail. Their extra rabbit socks, whatever clothing they were not wearing, the extra knives and three days worth of smoked meat and acorns were stuffed in the deerskin packs they would wear on their backs. Amazingly, after almost five months, they were ready. It was almost anticlimactic. Suddenly there was no more work to be done. They had more than enough food from what was being left behind that they did not have to hunt. There were no clothes to make, no hides to tan, no place to be. Mulder laughed when Scully complained that it was like taking a vacation. They did clean out the fridge, though. Mindful of the calories they were going to use, both agents spent the last two weeks of February eating everything they could stuff down their throats. Whatever they did not eat was getting tossed to the wolves, and they had worked too hard to do that lightly. And then it was time. February 28, four months and three weeks after they were kidnapped by a psychotic, Mulder and Scully built a bonfire and burned all evidence of their enforced stay in the wild. They covered the latrine with the bedding they hauled out from their burrow the next morning and tossed the last of their uneaten food to the wild. With the worst of the winter storms behind them, the morning of March 1 dawned bright and clear and Agents Mulder and Scully started the next stage of their long journey home. ********************************* Ordinary citizens had a hell of a time getting themselves declared dead if they were inconsiderate enough not to leave a body. The implications were quite staggering when one considered that until that official death certificate was signed, insurance would not be paid out, the sale or disposition of assets would be frozen and the assets themselves could be taken over by the government unless a valid power of attorney was held by someone else and pensions could not be collected. It also made it difficult to pay the rent on apartments and the insurance on cars when the paychecks stopped arriving. Skinner filed all the necessary paperwork needed to keep the money flowing for as long as possible. As federal agents, it would have been easy for the estates of either agent to file to have them legally declared dead. The circumstances of their disappearance as well as their occupations meant that precedent existed. Margaret Scully had flat out refused to take that step for her daughter and had forcefully threatened to go to court to have him stopped if Mulder's lawyer made any such attempt regarding Mulder. In addition to the fact that Margaret had both legal powers of attorney, as her daughter's heir and the ultimate beneficiary of Mulder's estate since he had left everything to his partner, everything would have ended up in Maggie's hands anyway. The lawyer conceded that it wouldn't exactly look good to the court to have the beneficiary fighting to keep from inheriting. The courts get nasty about lawyers who look like they are doing things just to create billable hours. Besides, with the estate in trust, the lawyer was collecting a nice retainer as a trustee fee. He was in no particular hurry to accrue legal expenses which could come back on him if he lost the case or his client returned from the dead. In spite of the AD's best efforts, the agents' paychecks would cease six months from the day of their assumed deaths and Administration was going to take another long hard look at the status of the X-Files. Luckily both Mulder and Scully had set up flexible financial arrangements that took long term disappearances into consideration and Skinner thought he had a solution to the other half of the problem. That solution was going to give birth to the pissing contest from hell if Mulder and Scully ever returned. When they returned, Skinner chastised himself mentally. When they returned. But the fact was, that they might not. So he had to consider how best to protect their interests and how to position the FBI for the coming war if they had to go on without them. In a way, their disappearance had created the circumstances which gave him the credibility to pull this off. The VCU had profilers who studied ritual crime. Religious nutdom of some kind was a favorite flavor of psychosis among serial killers. But there were no agents that specifically specialized in all flavors of the paranormal. As a profiler and as a member of the X-files team, Mulder had filled a niche that the FBI had never officially recognized...just used when it became necessary. That was about to change. Without an official place to dump the unexplained, Administration was beginning to realize just how many query calls Mulder and Scully had taken. How many police officers and profilers from across the country routinely called in asking for this about vampires or that about werewolves. It was rarely that they thought they had a werewolf, but if the killer thought he was a werewolf then the pathology of the crime still fit. They also discovered just how many civilians called in regarding everything from UFO sightings to bumps in the night. Looking for clues, cases and connections, Mulder had talked to them all. Again, now the switchboard had no clue where to send them. The on-line database had just increased the problem. Police cases that formerly got shoved under the desk or behind a drawer were now being sent to the FBI. The backlog was getting out of control and the mailroom clerks were scared to go into the basement office for fear of falling files. So...the solution. Maggie Scully had refused a funeral for either her daughter or her partner. But she had held a memorial service for them on Scully's birthday and a general invitation had been issued. Skinner had been very surprised at the number of people who had shown up. Some of them were old acquaintances and friends. A surprising number of the growing legion of MUFON and other internet network administrators had arrived to pay their respects...and take surreptitious photos of the crowd. More than a few local police officers had stood in uniformed clusters as had a small crowd of lab techs and support staff. Some had shown out of respect, some in anger for the perceived injustice of the treatment the agents had received, and others because of a burgeoning belief in the cause they had fought for. The five agents currently being ushered into his office had also been there. On his orders. The past was dead, Skinner realized suddenly. Even if Mulder and Scully returned tomorrow, the wheel had turned and the future would go on with or without them. He wasn't even sure how they would function within the new structure of the team. Their habits had been established to meet certain needs that no longer existed. How would they deal with those changes? Feeling a touch of sadness for the fact that this new team, no matter how they evolved, no matter what they encountered, would never truly understand what it had been like in the beginning. Would, in fact, probably never truly understand their predecessors even if they had the chance to meet them. The survival traits that Mulder and Scully had acquired would be seen as nothing more than idiosyncrasies. Were his mavericks even capable of operating as part of a larger team? Maybe. Hopefully. He prayed he would have a chance to find out. It was a given that the team would be called upon to assist the VCU. As a result, the inclusion of a profiler had been a foregone conclusion. Agent Mathews wasn't one of Patterson's Children of the Night, but he was solid, experienced and very very good at his job. Agent Vickery held a double degree in Accounting and Computer Science while Agent Landers was not only an ex-marine, she was a crack shot, had a black belt in a free form version of jujitsu and a degree in Criminal Psychology. Skinner had specifically chosen her over others with similar qualifications because of her fighting skills. The team would have standing orders to place themselves directly under her tutelage for regular training. Mulder and Scully would be the last X-Files agents taken out by serial killers, bank robbers or any other form of low-life pond scum criminal if he had anything to say about it. They might still get hurt, but it would not be for lack of training. HRT was going to look easy compared to the program he had in store for them. Besides, if they were going to save the world, they were going to need to know a few things about scaling walls and running for your life. Hoo-yah. The fourth member of the team was Agent Harris. Both he and Agent Lewis were so new they squeaked. Skinner had never forgotten how useful Agent Pendrel had been. Harris had been turned down twice already. In spite of the extra courses he took at night, in spite of the self-defense courses he took, he had two things working solidly against him. First, he was extremely good as a lab tech - it did not matter that he wasn't happy there - the government was thrilled with his job performance. The second was that he looked like a lab tech. In person and on paper. He just did not stand out against all those other police officers, ex-military and people with double degrees. But AD Skinner was looking for very specific qualities. The X-Files dealt with strange substances and weird lab reports so often, it would not only be useful to have someone who could read the data- in a pinch, he could do the tests himself. Especially if they found it...prudent...to protect the credibility of those same lab tests. Skinner had seen too many doctored lab results to doubt that Harris would be worth his weight in gold. Throw in his dogged determination, drive and commitment and Skinner had requested his training and transfer personally. And finally, Agent Lewis. He had been on the look-out for someone like her for almost two years. Ever since Mulder and Scully had returned from Antarctica and he had realized that there was not only a virus, but that there was a cure. A cure that both his agents harbored in their blood and bone. But Scully was the wrong kind of doctor. Despite what she could teach herself, despite what she had been forced to learn over the years, she lacked the basic skills to reverse engineer a vaccine. Assuming it could even be done. So he had gone looking for someone. Someone they could trust and someone who could hide the real work beneath the paranormal reality of the X- Files. Agent Lewis was the result of that search. Officially, she was a paper geneticist with no internship or practical experience. The ink on her university degree wasn't even dry before she signed the application papers to the FBI. But unofficially, Lewis had spent three years on an in-field virology team as an unpaid lab assistant from the age of seventeen. Her mother had been the head of research for a team doing field work on the Ebola virus. Lewis had returned home to the US to complete her studies while her mother ended up in the middle east as part of a UN team investigating bioweapons charges. The charges turned out to be true. The terrorists were poor, but they knew their bioscience. The jury-rigged weapon that the suicide bomber exploded in the center of the downtown market infected 4000 people in less than fifteen minutes. By the time they were done counting bodies, Agent Lewis's mother was among the casualties. Lewis applied for the Academy the day she graduated. Too young, too overqualified for a lab position and without any secondary training in psychology or forensics, she just wasn't what the FBI was looking for. They did not need geneticists. Especially geneticists who wanted to join the anti-terrorism division and had an obvious ax to grind. But AD Walter Skinner did. As far as he was concerned, she was a gift from heaven. She was on a plane to the Academy so fast it probably made her head spin. He had already planted a seed. He had casually brought up some of the stranger medical anomalies and virally related cases as examples of the type of work the X-Files did. Mulder's encounter with the retrovirus just sort of came up in conversation. She was not stupid. She could guess that he was bringing up cases he thought would interest her. But any resentment over being manipulated did not have much of a chance against the fact that he was right. He had a feeling she was going to be giving the old case files an extremely close going over as soon as she had access. If he wasn't mistaken, that alone would be enough to drive the team in the direction he wanted. Once they were there... Well, there were samples of Mulder and Scully's blood and tissue in a cold storage facility that only he and three close-mouthed computer hackers knew about. These five people had just become soldiers in a war they knew nothing about. He could not even bring himself to regret that he had put them square in the line of fire. He needed them too badly and too many others had paid coin in blood to let him give up now. Knowing Mulder, he would be on his doorstep like Jacob Marley, chains and all if he did. Scully had less of a sense of humor about that sort of a thing. She would just make sure he never slept again. Ever. Probably shriek like a banshee and lurk at the foot of his bed like some ice-eyed archangel of Hell. And he had given them a backhanded sort of a warning. He had made sure they were at the memorial service. They had gotten a good hard look at the costs this division could demand. its less than sterling reputation. They were still here. And they had a job to do. ***************************************** Thinking about it later, they realized that they were each hauling almost 150 lbs of sled and gear and an additional 40-50lbs on their backs. Surprising, Scully had the advantage as long as they were on the older snowpacks. They found that most of their pulling power came from their legs and hips, and with her lower center of gravity, she managed as easily if not more so than her physically taller and stronger partner. That only lasted until they found themselves floundering in deep fluffy snow and the lifting power and upper body strength began to play into things. As a result, they found themselves packing the sleds with the heavier furs and skins going to whoever was going to have an easier time of it. Scully found herself grinning the morning she watched her partner unthinkingly hand her the heavier sled...and he did not even think twice about it. Chivalry gave way to practicality extremely quickly. Their plan had been to go until the first four food boxes were emptied. With luck, they would have reached civilization by then. If not, they would take a couple of days per week to set traps and hunt to replenish their foodstores as they used them. Whether because they were using higher fat cuts of meat, because their activity level was actually not much higher than they were already used to, or because of the warmer temperatures, they found that they did not go through their foodstores nearly as quickly as they thought they would. They were each carrying an estimated 60 pounds of dried meat-the equivalent of almost double that in fresh. They had assumed that it would last them about three weeks give or take. Scully soon figured that unless something changed, they could double that estimate. Except for taking time to forage for more acorns, they actually had little need to hunt for food at all. All in all, that was probably a good thing. They had thought that they had gotten themselves into good shape over the past five months. Fat had melted away, cardio had been pushed to the limit by all the trudging through snow and muscles were rock solid. Heck, they were discovering muscles they did not know they had. Now they were discovering a few more. They were up by first light and gone an hour later. In that hour alone, they lowered the sleds out of trees, lifted, folded and repacked deerhides, tent hides and fur blankets. Then they followed up on this with six hours of back- breaking, mind-numbing, leg burning uphill/downhill exercise that Scully could only compare to the Stairmaster from Hell. Then the work began. It may have been staying lighter later into the day, but they needed every second. They would spend an hour digging into the snow, pitching their shelter and then covering it with snow. Then came the hunt for firewood and the back- breaking, finger cramping task of starting a fire from scratch with bow and drill, and finally dinner. They had been careful with their matches and they had done well over the last five months. But they were down to the last few and they had determined to save those for emergencies. Carrying hot coals had proved to be an impossible task so they found themselves doing it the old fashioned way. Scully swore to put matchbooks in every pocket of every item of clothing she ever owned from this point on until she died. Mulder very seriously suggested sewing some into the liners of their jackets. She only had to think about the fact it was her turn to start the fire and she agreed. For that reason and also not to waste the hard earned coals, Mulder took to dumping the stew ingredients into his clay pot turned slow cooker and burying it in the coals at night. The result was a cooked stew ready to be placed in the sled and that only needed reheating for a quick lunch or dinner. They quickly came to appreciate having two clay cookers, the second being used to make their acorn porridge for breakfast. After dinner came hauling the sleds into the trees and mandatory sponge baths. There was no way they could risk sweat rashes or trench anything at this stage of the game. They had survived five months with all their toes and fingers...it would be foolish to do something stupid now that it was warming up. Warming up was a relative term of course. It was still below zero most of the time. Occasionally though the temperature rose high enough to give the daytime temperatures a high enough nudge that the surface of the snow began to get slippery. It was a good thing for the sleds. The crusts got harder as the snow compressed. But Scully was beginning to worry about their feet. It wouldn't be long before the snow turned slushy on them. Between the wolf fur and the rabbit socks their feet were warm enough as long as they were moving, but they were soaked by the end of the day. They started stopping in the middle of the day to dry their feet as much as possible and to change into dry rabbit socks. Then they spent twice as long drying both sets of socks and their boots at night. They also started leaving the socks off at night to let their feet dry against the fur blankets as much as possible and they made a point of washing and drying their feet again after breakfast. It was obsessive. And it was absolutely essential. For the rest of it, they found that they were wearing less clothes than they expected. Except for snowy days or cold evenings, they found themselves working with fox hoods down and the rabbit hoods in their packs. By the end of March, their attire was down to shirt and vest with rabbit fur headbands to protect their ears. Even then they found themselves leaving the vests unlaced at the sides. It was rapidly getting to the point where as long as they were moving, they needed little more than the deerhide undershirts to cut the wind. Of course, once they stopped, everything had to go back on again. By the end of March, it was fairly clear that they were so far from civilization it was not funny. Mulder muttered something about ending up in Canada and after one quick snort of laughter, Scully realized that he probably wasn't joking. Their extreme isolation, the climate and the environment. All of it pointed to a national park. A very large national park. Glacier National Park was over one million acres of primitive backcountry and was only three states away from where they had been kidnapped. All in all, they could very easily end up in Canada. They also had no idea that the road they were on was a fire access road that had been cut into the forest the summer before during a particularly bad fire season. The road was unserviced and the forest service was actually letting nature reclaim it. Corman had been using it to try and keep himself unnoticed. The road itself appeared on no maps, was not part of the backcountry ski trail system and they had no idea that they were lost in the most remote part of the park and actually heading deeper into it. Corman had gained access to the fire line by virtue of an old logging spur that had intersected with the dirt track. Unfortunately, the clear-cut sides of the logging road had looked like open meadow and the agents hadn't even known they were walking past the road which had brought them there. They had followed the obvious unnaturally straight line cut through the trees and instead of heading toward civilization, walked directly away from it. Five weeks and 497 km after they left their campsite, Mulder and Scully stepped out onto a deserted but plowed road and stopped dead. In disbelief they stared at the evidence of civilization at their feet and wondered what in the hell they were supposed to do now. "Left or right Scully?" His partner took one look at him and started to laugh. *************************** Deputy Todd Perkins was bored. Not only was he working night shift in a sleepy map dot of a town, but it was a Monday night. Tuesday night was movie night and Wednesday was wing night over at Bob's Tavern. Thursday was pay day for everyone working at the plant and Friday ...well, Friday was Friday. But nothing ever happened on a Monday. He had checked. For the last ten years, according to Miller's Gap crime statistics, the only thing that had ever happened on a Monday night was the time Fred Durst's cattle had broken through the fence and ended up tromping through Edna Crane's vegetable garden. Even then Edna wasn't threatening to shoot Fred, she was threatening to shoot George and Daisy. If Todd remembered correctly, a large chunk of George ended up in Edna's freezer courtesy of a contrite Fred who, now that his wife was gone, had been actively trying to get Edna into bed for almost two years. In terms of relative priorities, George never had a chance. Too far from the highway to be a good gas stop, too poor to be picturesque and too far from the plant to be a favored bedroom community, Miller's Gap eked out a living by catering to the summer tourist crowd which consisted mainly of back roads campers and week-end cottagers from the city. Considering that Miller's Gap was a good four hour's drive from the city limits, most of the cottagers had inherited their property or bought it in anticipation of future retirement. Miller's Gap had a summer week-end population of about 4000 and a week-day and wintertime population of 350. And since the cottagers considered themselves to be locals, albeit locals who socialized in a completely different social strata and community network than the local locals, they stayed home and refinished the back deck instead of heading for the bar on Monday nights. So nothing much happened on a Monday. Which is why when he noticed two vagrants camping in the day park he actually bothered to stop. Then he noticed other things. Like their weathered features, the leather clothing and the sleds that seemed to be packed with furs. He did not see two FBI agents. He did not even see that they were sober and not making any threatening moves. Nor did he see that they were actually starting to smile. Deputy Perkins saw two scruffy, lank-haired criminals, probably native trappers from their outfits,with a shit load of illegal furs. He saw that he was twenty feet from his truck and that there were two of them. He saw broad shoulders on a man six inches taller than him and well used leather leggings that clung to well defined thighs. He saw lean waists, bladed cheekbones and glittering eyes. Then he saw the knives. ********************************* Scully stared at the ceiling tiles. "Not quite how you pictured our triumphant return, huh Scully?" She sighed and rolled over on her side, eyeing the lanky form of her partner stretched out on the cot on the other side of the room. "Do you ever wonder whether or not our luck is an X-File, Mulder?" He grinned and was about to reply when they heard the rattle and bang of the front door and then voices and footsteps echoing in the hall. Both agents rolled to their feet and were standing when the Sheriff flipped on the lights and moved toward the jail cell door. Dark adjusted eyes that were finding the fluorescent lights to be unexpectedly painful after six months of natural light squinted against tears before widening as they recognized the bulky form standing at the Sheriff's elbow. Both agents stiffened reflexively and they watched Assistant Director Skinner slowly move his eyes from one to the other, his face rapidly losing all expression. Behind the mask, Skinner battled a swelling sense of disbelief as he absorbed their appearance. Mulder's hair actually fell to his shoulders for the first time in probably two decades-if ever- and Skinner noted a surprising breadth of muscle across upper arms and chest. The agent had been a gangly tangle of skinny arms and legs hidden beneath white shirts and tailored suit jackets for so long that Skinner had failed to notice the changes as he matured. Now, non-essential body fat pared away and wearing only supple leather leggings that hugged muscled runner's legs, the newly revealed strength of body combined with his graceful movement and restless air to give him a dangerously feral look more suited to his animal namesake than Special Agent Mulder, FBI. But if Mulder looked dangerous, his partner looked deadly. Icy blue eyes roved constantly, not really looking, but scanning. Her body was held with almost unnatural poise and the coiled energy was more sensed than seen, explosive potential waiting to detonate into motion. Her hair flowed in a wild tumble down bare shoulders that curved with a wiry ripple of muscle that ran down her upper arms and forearms and across her chest. A white fur brassiere of some lace up variety left cleavage and ridged abdomen aggressively exposed while her grayish brown leather leggings clung to thigh and calf. Both agents stood in bare feet, barely clothed in outfits that would have done a costume designer from Xena:Warrior Princess proud. Their bodies bore the visible marks of weather and strenuous labor and they should have looked silly. They should have looked incongruous. They sure as hell did not look like FBI agents. But instead of looking like the shattered survivors of six months of purgatory, they looked blindingly alive, lethally primed and absurdly healthy. They *were* being rescued, right? Unlike his two wayward investigators who, unbeknownst to him, were viewing their current situation with nothing more than mild aggravation and some rueful amusement, Skinner found himself battling a torrent of emotions that snapped frighteningly into focus when he saw the blue marks from someone's fingers clearly imprinted on Scully's right shoulder. "Why are they in the same cell together?" Mulder, who had been shifting bare feet self- consciously, froze and regarded his boss warily. Scully just narrowed cold eyes and smiled. The sheriff, not being in possession of similar survival instincts, said nothing about the agents refusing to be separated. A fact which Skinner would have believed instantly considering it was both true and typical. Instead, the man wrinkled his nose and explained about wanting to limit both the smell and any possible flea or lice infestation. Skinner's voice was biting. "These agents have survived a serial killer and six months in the bush in a Northern Wyoming winter and you were worried about a smell?" The sheriff paled as one word struck him. He stammered,"Agents? They really are..." His face whitened further as certain comments he had made to both of them came back to him. Skinner's upper lip curled and the sheriff hastily fumbled for the keys and unlocked the door. Scully actually sauntered through the open door with feline disdain and Skinner felt his face pulling into a frown as he contemplated the scenarios that might have prompted her attitude. Not to mention those of the obviously defensive sheriff and her partner. Mulder paused as he came abreast of the man and stared down at him with a profiler's darkness in his eyes. Skinner felt his breathing tighten as the paunchy man whitened still further and leaned back slightly as the taller man leaned in. What the hell was going on here? Mulder intimidated people with the power of his mind or his status as an agent of the FBI. He did not intimidate people physically. At least, this was the first time Skinner had seen him try. Except for his height, Mulder just wasn't that scary. At least, he didn't used to be. "Thanks for the hospitality." There was more than silence in the chill depths of that voice. Sheriff Rawlins broke into an unattractive sweat and then his head jerked as Scully chuckled softly. He seemed to shrink as he met her eyes. Skinner flinched at the contempt she did not bother to hide and her voice held an arctic amusement that flayed as it burned. "Come on Fox, leave the rabbit alone." Mulder bared his teeth in a lupine grin, then padded over to her. "I'm not hungry, anyway." Skinner actually found himself holding his breath as their eyes met and the hallway seemed to shrink. Jesus. Who the hell were these people and what had they done with his agents? Christ, they were toying with the officious fool. Then both agents dismissed the sheriff with insulting totality and headed for the door. Skinner found himself focusing briefly on the unexpected sight of a circular tattoo on Scully's lower back before it was hidden by the palm of Mulder's hand. He had forgotten about that. The sight sent a visceral and totally unanticipated and almost inappropriate response zinging through his body. He wasn't sure why it startled him so much. Well, maybe he did. It seemed so shockingly out of place for Scully. Out of character. And all the times he had seen Mulder put his hand to her back, her partner had been touching that tattoo...and Skinner suddenly had to wonder if he had known it was there. Was it getting hot in here? If he had thought the energy that had burned between them before was intense, this was almost inconceivably incandescent. It was as if the fire burning beneath the surface was sucking all the oxygen from the room and he found himself literally battling a psychosomatic instinct to hyperventilate. Jesus Christ. Was this the result of six months of fighting for their lives? Or had this always existed? Was this what really lived hidden beneath suits and civilized protocols? Holy Mother of God. This was what the Consortium had being playing games with? The blind eyed sheriff stared in horror as the burly ex-marine started to laugh wildly. Both agents strode through the station with unnerving silence. They paused by a table where a twitching deputy was piling several unidentifiable objects. Skinner watched uneasily as the agents pulled on leather shirts and knee high moccasins. Two of the items turned out to be packs and both agents appeared satisfied that everything was present although Scully was frowning over a broken lace on one of her boots. Instead of knotting it, she nonchalantly drew one of the largest hunting knives Skinner had ever seen and cut a length of lace from a ball Mulder pulled from one of the packs. Then she calmly relaced her boot. Considering how completely she was ignoring everyone from the Deputy to the Sheriff, Skinner had the definite suspicion that she had flashed the knife on purpose. On the other hand, both agents were standing with packs shouldered before Sheriff Rawlins returned with their weapons and clips. Turning towards them with guns in hand, Skinner paused as his agents' bizarre attire hit him all over again. Scully was wearing some sort of leather jacket that looked vaguely like a tribute to Daniel Boone. In fact, if he ignored the modern style of the knife sheathed at her side, she could have walked right out of the pages of that novel. Did that rodent pouch actually have feet and head still attached? Mulder's knife was strapped to his left upper thigh -which made sense as he did not appear to be possessed of pouch or pockets at the moment. Instead of a jacket he wore a leather shirt under a white fur vest and between the laces and the agent's height, Skinner couldn't decide if he looked more like a Viking or a Celt. Skinner eyed the snowshoes strapped to their backs. They did realize that the car was right outside didn't they? Then he caught the mischievous glint in their eyes and it struck him that they were putting on a show. For him? They were waiting patiently for his reaction. He couldn't help it. The grin he had been holding back, the one that had tried to start the moment he had got the call from ATF that someone had run the serial numbers on their weapons was accompanied by a caroling inner shout... ... and exploded across his face. They were alive. First Mulder, then Scully responded and the deputies were treated to the sight of three federal agents grinning at each other like delighted idiots. Then the assistant director tossed over weapons and clips. He probably should not have done it. Considering their rather confused status right now, he should have kept guns and ammo-especially since it was obvious that both weapons had been fired and the third weapon, the one Mulder dropped into Scully's pack, had probably belonged to Corman. But he would be damned if they walked out of here as anything other than fully recognized agents of the FBI. Even if they did look like escapees from Clan of the Cave Bear. "What about the rest of it?" Skinner jerked his head and stared blankly at the deputy glaring sullenly at the former jailbirds. The rest? How much stuff did they have? A curious glance just garnered him a couple of shrugs and he sighed. The "rest" turned out to be enough fur to pack the trunk of the Taurus. Skinner considered the bindings on the sleds contemplatively as he watched Scully finger the contents of one of the stick boxes that made up the bottom layer of their sleds. Finally she hesitated, then drew out another of those animal pouches. Sudden movement near her shoulder caught Skinner off guard and he realized that Mulder too, must have been watching his partner because he took the pouch from her hands, replaced it in the box and after brushing her hands aside and throwing in a few items from a box on the other sled, slung it into the backseat of the car. Skinner winced thinking of the damage deposit, then remembered the furs in the trunk and realized that it was probably a lost cause anyway. At least neither agent seemed to be scratching. Scully hadn't moved, nor had her expression changed. But when Mulder came back and simply said,"Decide later", she astonished Skinner by standing up and, without even a glance in her AD's direction, wrapped her arms around Mulder's waist. At that moment, Skinner determined to have an agent sent over from the field office to arrange to have all of this stuff shipped to Washington. If Mulder and Scully wanted to burn it all later at some celebratory bonfire that was their choice. He would be damned if he would let some stranger destroy something his agents had obviously invested hundreds of hours of work and energy into. The thought alone of how they had acquired that bearskin made his blood run cold. If the accountants wanted to squawk he would be more then happy to...discuss the matter with them. Without further discussion, Scully climbed into the back seat with the snowshoes and packs, leaving the front seat for Mulder. Skinner headed for the field office. About ten minutes down the highway, the AD was fiddling with the buttons to the heaters. He hadn't noticed anything wrong with it earlier, but he had been so focused on getting to his missing agents-to make sure that it really was them-that he probably wouldn't have noticed if the car even had a heater. Now, with his two passengers sweating uncomfortably into furs and leathers, the car was warm enough that the windows were beginning to fog up. As a side effect, the smell that the Sheriff had mentioned was making itself noticed. It wasn't precisely unpleasant, the AD told himself, just strong. Very strong. Most predominant was the heavy odor of woodsmoke. Beneath that was the light scent of leather mixed with pungent human musk. Not a rancid or oily smell it was cut with the woodsy odor of pine and the tang of human sweat. Except for the woodsmoke, it was a clean animal smell like you would expect from a horse blanket or animal den. Considering that they had just spent six months without soap and deodorant, Skinner was surprised that it wasn't actually that repellent. He still remembered staying upwind of the scouting parties getting back to base in-country. Back then, he hadn't known which was worse, the smell, the heat or the lice. Skinner eyed the side of Mulder's head speculatively, then made a quick executive decision and headed for the nearest Wal-Mart. Neither agent had spoken a word since they had gotten into the car. A quick sideways glance showed only patiently calm faces and a quick glance at Scully's eyes in the rearview mirror showed him an expression he hadn't seen in over twenty years. It was the expression you saw when a group of soldiers had been with each other so long that all the small talk had been talked out and all that was left was silence. Everyone knew what had to be done, so there was no need to talk about it. That was how you could always tell the newbies. They talked. God how they talked. Until they lived past the first six months. They eventually shut up. One way or the other. Most people talk to fill the emptiness. Mulder and Scully had already gone past that. It was one of the things that unnerved people who spent time in their company when they were not concentrating on being sociable. But this was a whole other category of speechlessness. He was actually looking forward to seeing the effect they had on the Hoover Building. He rather wondered if he should bring popcorn. Then again, when they found out about the invasion of their offices, he might need body armor. Mulder and Scully silently followed him into the store and waited patiently as he came to a halt beside the cash machine. It was Tuesday. It would be at least Thursday before they got back to Washington. Way too late for them to get anything sorted out at the bank. Pulling his daily cash limit from his card he handed each of them $200 and then gave his Bureau credit card to Scully. He shrugged awkwardly when she raised a curious eyebrow. "We may be here a couple days. Use the card to get anything you need. The money is for food and incidentals. Your accounts are all frozen and it may be a few days before you can get any money advanced. If you need any more, let me know." Both agents thanked him quietly, frowns creeping over their faces in tandem. As they stood there lost in contemplation, Skinner realized that this was probably the first time they had really started to consider the difficulties with picking up their old lives. He knew from experience that it wasn't the big changes that threw you. It was small things. Things like car keys and credit cards and having enough money in your pocket to buy pizza. It was realizing that you did not even know if you had apartments and personal possessions to go back to. He cursed as he thought about the fact that he should have told them about that stuff first off. "There's no food in the fridge, and the cleaning lady only comes in to dust once a week, but your places are waiting for you. We put your cars in storage and Mulder, your fish tank is at my place. They are all alive." He carefully did not look at the agents as he spoke, keeping his voice casual. Even so, he heard the tiny indrawn breath from Scully's direction and felt more than saw Mulder touch her shoulder. A rustle of leather as they moved apart and her voice came across extremely controlled and quiet as she simply said,"Thank- you, Sir". Skinner caught the bob of Mulder's adam's apple as the agent swallowed sharply and then nodded in agreement. They stood like that for another long moment until the doors slammed open and a family of five crashed through them, the kids hollering something about Breakfast Burritos. All three FBI agents started momentarily, then they all laughed. At themselves, at the situation, but mostly just for being alive. Skinner hesitated then offered his calling card to Scully if she wanted to call her mother. He was startled when she hesitated. "Does she know?" Skinner just shook his head. Scully drew in a deep breath. "Then I'll wait until I get back to the motel, Sir." He was about to protest when he realized what Mulder had probably already known since he did not seem surprised in the least. She was going to need time and privacy for the call itself, and probably afterwards. Hell. It was only 5am back in Washington. He should have remembered that. Then she was gone. Skinner blinked. Once minute she was standing there. The next minute she had handed Mulder the credit card and was gone. Mulder just started to whistle tunelessly as he grabbed a cart and headed for the clothing section. For lack of anything better to do, Skinner followed him. Two pairs of jeans, two black sweaters and a t- shirt were swiftly joined by a six-pack of socks and three pairs of boxers. Skinner then watched enthralled as Mulder ignored the stunned (and interested)looks from the sales ladies in women's wear and rapidly added jeans, sweaters, t-shirt, bras, socks and a triple pack of Hanes Her Way underwear for his partner. Skinner noted that he added an extra t-shirt that was both oversized and too long and he realized that he now knew what Scully would be sleeping in. What a bizarre day this was turning out to be. And if Mulder was doing the shopping, where was Scully? Looking at his watch he realized that they had barely been in the store fifteen minutes and Mulder was already headed for the sundries section. Hell. Who said that men did not know how to shop? Skinner was frankly beginning to enjoy himself. The incongruity of Mulder's wild man appearance clashed with the domestic picture he did not even know he was making. Did Mulder even realize that he was talking to himself? It was an unusual peek into a partnership that had always fascinated him. Soap, shampoo, a fluffy bath sponge, moisturizer, deodorants, toothbrushes, toothpaste, blue and pink packages of disposable razors, his and hers shaving creams and a box of Tampax all ended up in the cart in less than five minutes. It was when Mulder paused to search for a particular brand of shampoo that Skinner realized that he was actually making choices not just pulling the first thing off the shelf that he saw. Eidetic memory, Skinner remembered. Scanning the choices in the cart he wondered how many of the choices he was making for his partner were brands she preferred. Probably all of them, he thought ruefully. Two pairs of black Brooks sneakers and two black duffel bags later, Mulder was pushing the cart through the checkout and Scully was walking toward them juggling three large bags from McDonalds and a cardboard tray of coffee. Mulder's eyes lit up. "Caffeine!" Skinner considered the likely effects of a caffeine high on a man who had been clean for six months. He almost groaned. Scully was looking over the contents of the cart when Skinner heard her laugh. "Jesus Mulder. We're going to look like the Bobbsey Twins." The agent protested,"Hey, I got your sweaters in different colors and the ivory one even has a cable pattern." Scully placed a hand solemnly over her heart,"I stand corrected. Ya did good Mulder. Here's your reward." Mulder all but drooled as she handed him the food sacks and then she was swiftly dividing the contents of the cart and efficiently packing them into the appropriate duffel after the girl rang them through. Skinner barely even glanced at the total before signing the slip and replacing the card into his wallet. He was more interested in watching his agents eat. In the most co-ordinated food ballet he had ever seen, they handed bags and tray back and forth as they shouldered duffel bags and headed for the car. Between the checkout and the parking lot, they had eaten four breakfast burritos between them. They weren't pigs about it. They were just very efficient. And hungry. Mulder handed his boss an egg McMuffin as soon as he was behind the wheel and then Skinner watched in disbelief as they proceeded to polish off eight more Breakfast Burritos, four egg McMuffins, six hash browns and two cups of coffee. That was when Skinner realized that the remaining egg McMuffin, six Burritos, and two hash browns were for him. When he told the agents faintly that he wasn't hungry, they ate those too. They pulled up to the field office before he found out if they were hungry enough to start chewing on the upholstery. He thought at first that maybe they had gone hungry for two or three days but Mulder remarked casually that they had eaten before they got arrested. So that was just breakfast. He fiddled with the air vents as the windows starting fogging up again. He only meant to pop in for a second, meet the local SAC and then explain that he would be back once his agents had a chance to clean up. The smell wasn't bad, but it was still...a smell. If he had been thinking at all he would have used his cell phone. They were ten feet into the doors when alarms were suddenly screaming their electronic heads off and agents were slamming into the foyer, weapons drawn. Skinner had his own weapon half out before he realized the muzzles were all pointing behind him. He turned to see Mulder and Scully with their hands in the air, expressions of surprise and resignation on their faces. Skinner's own surprise lasted until he got a good look at them. His first thought was "Oh shit, I forget about the knives." His second,"Oh fuck. They went into Wal-Mart like that." Well, hell. They were lucky nobody called the cops. That would have been cute. Not out of jail 45 minutes and the local SAC would have been bailing all three of them out. He was so used to thinking about his agents as being armed and their whole attire was so bizarre that the knives just sort of ...blended. They were so unselfconscious he had never even noticed. From the looks on their faces, neither had they. Luckily the SAC knew his face and had a sense of humor. He also had a camera. Turns out he even had the sleds to use as a backdrop. The local PD had unilaterally decided that they wanted everything to do with the FBI as far away from them as it could get and had dropped off the whole kit and caboodle about fifteen minutes prior. The local agents were familiar with Wyoming winters and were inclined to be amazed and admiring. One of the security guards was an avid hunter and the look on his face when he saw the bearskin sent shivers down the AD's spine. The look when he found out that Scully had shot it with a 9mm told him more adequately than words just how close his agent had come. Knowing that the reaction from their colleagues in Washington was more likely to be disdain for getting themselves captured in the first place than admiration for their survival skills, Skinner wandered off to talk with the SAC while they enjoyed their 15 seconds of fame. SAC Rivers just grinned as a lab tech rushed by carry a handful of film. "His wife teaches social anthropology at the college down the street. Five gets you ten she wants pictures of *everything*." He was right. There was a regular photo op going on in the parking lot. Mulder was lounging good-naturedly against one of the sleds. The bearskin had been hauled from the trunk of the car and thrown back on top. Scully was talking seriously to a young woman who was probably the lab tech's wife. The contents of the second sled were being spread out across the pavement by a handful of chattering teenagers who were probably students. Anything to get out of class, he supposed. Except that they seemed genuinely impressed. Items that looked like nothing to him...a bone of some kind, those snowshoes, each engendered a hurried round of whispers and serious study while the lab tech took rolls and rolls of pictures. They were seeing history come to life, he realized. This wasn't a textbook picture. This wasn't two hundred years ago. This was two people who had reinvented Native American tools for a specific purpose. The odd thought occurred to him that maybe the differences between what the natives had created with time and resources compared to what his agents had created in need could actually tell the students something about the people they could no longer interview. Then he saw something that truly illustrated the demands the last six months had made on their bodies. They were not showing off. In fact, they did it so casually that he got the feeling it was something they had done many times before. Whoever had unloaded the sleds had done a good job of placing them out of the way. But with the contents of the second sled spread out like sales items at a bazaar, the car that pulled into the parking lot was forced to a stop. Before the driver could decide to back out and go in the other entrance, Mulder and Scully each casually grabbed an end of the bearskin covered sled and lifted it out of the way. No one spoke for a long moment. The lab tech snapped several hurried pictures. Then Scully went back to her conversation like nothing out of the ordinary had happened. Which is when Skinner realized that for them, nothing had. "It took four agents to get that off the truck. Partly it's a question of balance, but it's heavier than they think." Skinner turned to see the SAC watching the two agents soberly. "They don't know their own strength yet." Skinner just shook his head. "You have no idea." ~The end~