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molasses.
    And the sabertooths, relentless predators, did not give up easily.
    A shadow emerged from the murk on Buckle’s left, and his hammering heart leapt. He veered straight at it, splintering through a thin, dead, frozen tree that blocked his way. It was a cave, the mouth of a cave, mostly blocked by a snowdrift, and overhung by rafts of snow and icicles, its maw as dark as night.
    Buckle bounded through the deep snow between him and the cave in a matter of seconds. Once he’d plowed through the high snowdrift and stumbled in under the overhang, he found his snow-coated legs suddenly unencumbered, for the floor of the cavern was clear, the uneven granite gleaming under a layer of clear ice with a dusting of granular snow.
    Buckle tossed his torch, the flames now burning much brighter, away from the wind, into the darkness. Through his iced-up goggles, he could see little of the interior of the cave, and he remained in a ducking crouch, unable to measure the height of the ceiling above him. He carried Max a few strides farther, as far as he dared, until he could see where he was going, and then knelt, gently laying her on the icy floor.
    Buckle pulled his goggles up onto the brow of his helmet, knocking off the frosty crust that had accumulated there. The flickering torch lay about ten feet ahead, and in its ebbing light, he could see that the cavern was of a decent depth, perhaps thirty feet to the irregular back wall and wider on the sides, and the ceiling high enough for a man to stand. Small, secondary chambers honeycombed the rear and sides of the cavern, though how far into the mountain the subterranean intestines might reach, Buckle could not tell.
    Buckle could build a fire here and tend to Max. He could make a stand against the sabertooths here. If he had the time.
    Buckle removed his gloves and pressed his fingers against Max’s neck, searching for the pulse of the jugular vein. At least, he assumed that Max had jugular veins. He had no idea. He knew very little about the anatomy of the humanlike alien creature who had saved his life so many times. They had stood together through many a happy hour and sad, and yet he hardly knew her.
    The half-frozen skin of his fingertips managed to find the dull beat of her heart in the flesh, but it was weak and erratic. And the coldness of her body unsettled him.
    “You are one tough bird, I’ll give you that, Max,” Buckle said, hoping Max could hear him.
    Buckle lifted Max again. She sighed, not with an easy relaxation of air from the lungs, but with a shuddering tightness that suggested agony. Buckle carried her deeper into the cavern, closer to the back wall of the main chamber. He laid her on the ice-glazed floor and, after making sure she was as deeply folded into her warm clothes as he could arrange, reached into his ammunition pouch to reload the one pistol he had remaining in his belt.
    He worked quickly in the weak torchlight, biting off the top of the paper cartridge and pouring the blackbang powder down the barrel, ramming it home with the wadding and the lead ball. His eardrums, for so long brutalized by the battering storm, now roared of their own accord, drowning out the wail of the wind behind him.
    Removing his powder horn from his belt, Buckle poured fine-grained into the pan just under the flintlock. He grabbedthe torch and stood up. “You hold fast, you hear me?” he said to the unconscious Max. “I shall be right back.”
    Buckle turned and strode toward the mouth of the cave, feeling oddly negligent for taking the torch with him, and leaving poor Max alone in the freezing dark. Max needed to be warmed up. He had to make a fire, and a fire required fuel. Beasties or no beasties, he had to go outside and gather wood.

FIRE AND THE LITTLE PINK SCAR
    L ASHED BY THE STORM , B UCKLE thankfully did not have far to go in the unnatural twilight to collect the pieces of the dead tree he had snapped only moments before. He stuck his pistol in his