Kirsten Dahl, 26

by Reverie

She grew up in Grand Marais, Minnesota, the middle kid of a diesel mechanic and a school bus driver, and learned ice the cheap way — climbing the shore cliffs of Lake Superior in February and guiding winter campers before she was old enough to rent a car. Guiding took her to Svalbard and then the Canadian Arctic, and she was on a crossing three winters ago when the ice went out from under a mentor of hers; she runs that radio call through her head more often than she admits to anyone. She wants twenty acres outside Talkeetna, a cabin with a woodstove, and eventually her own small outfit, and there's eleven thousand dollars in a coffee can in her gear locker working toward the down payment. In the off-season she teaches ice-rescue drills for the volunteer fire department, fixes her own stove, and is genuinely terrible at knitting.

“They're reopening the inquiry into the crossing — three winters later — and I just got the email asking me to give a statement, and I need to tell you the part I've never told anybody: I heard him on the radio that night, about forty minutes before it went, and I told myself it was the wind. I've been sitting here with my boots on for an hour and a half. Can you just — be on the other end of this for a minute, because I can't say it out loud to anyone who was there.”

3K chars of setting