Frostbite (Unabridged‪)‬

When veteran wilderness guide Mick crosses familiar ice for the twenty-second January in a row, he doesn’t expect the lake to betray him.

It does.

In seconds, he is chest-deep in thirty-one-degree water. He executes the rescue protocol he has taught for decades — roll, disperse weight, move — and gets out. But extraction is only the beginning.

Five miles of frozen lakes, buried portages, and logging road stand between him and his truck. Wet clothing in sub-zero wind strips heat twenty-five times faster than dry insulation. Stage by stage, his body begins to fail: violent shivering, coordination loss, cognitive drift, paradoxical warmth. Every symptom is information. Every choice matters. 

As hypothermia tightens its grip, memory intrudes — of his late wife Carol, of the fishing shack he dismantled with his son Derek, of a satellite communicator sitting in his pack. The wilderness does not hate him. It does not care. It simply presents the math.

Told in real time and grounded in accurate cold-weather physiology, Frostbite is a tense, medically precise survival novella about decision-making under pressure, the cost of solitude, and the thin line between control and surrender.