There was a rushing sensation but no sense of up, no sense of down, and he was choking and the pain in his chest and in his head was too much to bear, so that he was certain that he was going to have to inhale, to breathe in the cold water, to die. And then his head hit something solid.
Ice. He was pushing against the ice on the top of the lake. He hammered at it with his fists, but there was no strength left in his arms, nothing to hold on to, nothing to push against. The world had dissolved into the chill blackness beneath the lake. There was nothing left but cold.
This is ridiculous, he thought. And he thought, remembering some old Tony Curtis film he’d seen as a kid, I should roll onto my back and push the ice upward and press my face to it, and find some air, I could breathe again, there’s air there somewhere, but he was just floating and freezing and he could no longer move a muscle, not if his life depended on it, which it did.
The cold became bearable. Became warm. And he thought, I’m dying. There was anger there this time, a deep fury, and he took the pain and the anger and reached with it, flailed, forced muscles to move that were resigned never to move again.
He pushed up with his hand, and felt it scrape the edge of the ice and move up into the air. He flailed for a grip, and felt another hand take his own, and pull.
His head banged against the ice, his face scraped the underneath of the ice, and then his head was up in the air, and he could see that he was coming up through a hole in the ice, and for a moment all he could do was breathe, and let the black lake water run from his nose and his mouth, and blink his eyes, which could see nothing more than a blinding daylight, and shapes, and someone was pulling him, now, forcing him out of the water, saying something about how he’d freeze to death, so come on, man, pull, and Shadow wriggled and shook like a bull seal coming ashore, shaking and coughing and shuddering.
He breathed deep gasps of air, stretched flat out on the creaking ice, and even that would not hold for long, he knew, but it was no good. His thoughts were coming with difficulty, treacle-slow.
“Just leave me,” he tried to say. “I’ll be fine.” His words were a slur, and everything was drawing to a halt.
He just needed to rest for a moment, that was all, just rest, and then he would get up and move on, for obviously he could not just lie there forever.
There was a jerk; water splashed his face. His head was lifted up. Shadow felt himself being hauled across the ice, sliding on his back across the slick surface, and he wanted to protest, to explain that he just needed a little rest—maybe a little sleep, was that asking for so much?—and he would be just fine. If they just left him alone.
He did not believe that he had fallen asleep, but he was standing on a vast plain, and there was a man there with the head and shoulders of a buffalo, and a woman with the head of an enormous condor, and there was Whiskey Jack standing between them, looking at him sadly, shaking his head.
Whiskey Jack turned and walked slowly away from Shadow. The Buffalo man walked away beside him. The thunderbird woman also walked, and then she ducked and kicked and she was gliding out into the skies.
Shadow felt a sense of loss. He wanted to call to them, to plead with them to come back, not to give up on him, but everything was becoming formless and devoid of shape: they were gone, and the plains were fading, and everything became void.
The pain was intense: it was as if every cell in his body, every nerve, was melting and waking and advertising its presence by burning him and hurting him.
There was a hand at the back of his head, gripping it by the hair, and another hand beneath his chin. He opened his eyes, expecting to find himself in some kind of hospital.
His feet were bare. He was wearing jeans. He was naked from the waist up. There was steam in the air. He could see a shaving mirror on the wall facing him, and a small basin, and a blue toothbrush in a toothpaste-stained glass.
Information was processed slowly, one datum at a time.
His fingers burned. His toes burned.
He began to whimper from the pain.
“Easy now, Mike. Easy there,” said a voice he knew.
“What?” he said, or tried to say. “What’s happening?” It sounded strained and strange to his ears.
He was in a bathtub. The water was hot. He thought the water was hot, although he could not be certain. The water was up to his neck.
“Dumbest thing you can do with a fellow freezing to death is to put him in front of a fire. The second-dumbest thing you can do is to wrap him in blankets—especially if he’s in cold wet clothes already. Blankets insulate him—keep the cold in. The third-dumbest thing—and this is my private opinion—is to take the fellow’s blood out, warm it up, and put it back. That’s what doctors do these days. Complicated, expensive. Dumb.” The voice was coming from above and behind his head.
“The smartest, quickest thing you can do is what sailors have done to men overboard for hundreds of years. You put the fellow in hot water. Not too hot. Just hot. Now, just so you know, you were basically dead, when I found you on the ice back there. How are you feeling now, Houdini?”
“It hurts,” said Shadow. “Everything hurts. You saved my life.”
“I guess maybe I did, at that. Can you hold your head up on your own now?”
“Maybe.”
“I’m going to let you go. If you start sinking below the water I’ll pull you back up again.”
The hands released their grip on his head.
He felt himself sliding forward in the bathtub. He put out his hands, pressed them against the sides of the tub, and leaned back. The bathroom was small. The tub was metal, and the enamel was stained and scratched.
An old man moved into his field of vision. He looked concerned.
“Feeling better?” asked Hinzelmann. “You just lay back and relax. I’ve got the den nice and warm. You tell me when you’re ready, I got a robe you can wear, and I can throw your jeans into the dryer with the rest of your clothes. Sound good, Mike?”
“That’s not my name.”
“If you say so.” The old man’s goblin face twisted into an expression of discomfort.
Shadow had no real sense of time: he lay in the bath until the burning stopped and his toes and fingers flexed without real discomfort. Hinzelmann helped Shadow to his feet and let out the warm water. Shadow sat on the side of the bath and together they pulled off his jeans.
He squeezed, without much difficulty, into a terrycloth robe too small for him, and, leaning on the old man, he went through to the den, and flopped down on an ancient sofa. He was tired and weak: deeply fatigued, but alive. A log fire burned in the fireplace. A handful of surprised-looking deer heads peered down dustily from around the walls, where they jostled for space with several large varnished fish.
Hinzelmann went away with Shadow’s jeans, and from the room next door Shadow could hear a brief pause in the rattle of a clothes dryer, before it resumed. The old man returned with a steaming mug.
“It’s coffee,” he said, “which is a stimulant. And I splashed a little schnapps into it. Just a little. That’s what we always did in the old days. A doctor wouldn’t recommend it.”
Shadow took the coffee with both hands. On the side of the mug was a picture of a mosquito and the message, GIVE BLOOD—VISIT WISCONSIN!!
“Thanks,” he said.