The wind that rips across the Canadian Rockies in late October does not howl; it screams. It tears through the valleys like a living thing, flinging ice crystals that slice skin and blind the eyes of even the most seasoned ranger. At 3,000 meters, the air is so thin that every breath feels like inhaling broken glass. Night falls early here, and when it does, the temperature plummets to minus fifteen, fast enough to turn a child’s tears to ice on his cheeks. Somewhere in this frozen cathedral of stone and silence, six-year-old Darius Macdougall has been alone for exactly one hundred and sixty-eight hours.

He was last seen chasing a chipmunk.

The trail was supposed to be easy. Fairview Lookout, just outside Lake Louise, is the kind of path where families push strollers and grandmothers in orthopedic sneakers pause for selfies with the glacier. The Macdougalls had done it twice before. James carried four-year-old Liam on his shoulders, laughing as the boy squealed about being taller than the trees. Sarah walked a few steps behind, filming Darius on her phone as he narrated his adventure in full Spider-Man voice. The boy’s red hoodie flashed between the pines like a signal flare. Then Sarah bent to tie Liam’s shoe. Thirty seconds. When she straightened, the trail ahead was empty. No rustle of leaves. No giggle echoing back. Just the wind, and the sudden, suffocating absence of a child who had been there a heartbeat earlier.

The first hour was panic in its purest form. James sprinted ahead, boots skidding on loose gravel, shouting Darius’s name until his throat bled. Sarah ran the other way, phone pressed to her ear, screaming coordinates to the 911 operator. By the time the RCMP arrived, the sun was already slipping behind the peaks, painting the snowfields the color of dried blood. Helicopters thumped overhead, their searchlights carving white tunnels through the dusk. Dogs strained at their leashes, noses to the ground, following a scent that led three hundred meters off the path to a creek bed—and then simply stopped, as if the boy had been erased from the earth.

Night fell like a guillotine. The temperature dropped twenty degrees in two hours. Darius had no coat, no food beyond the half-eaten granola bar in his backpack, no shelter except the thin nylon of his Spider-Man bag. He was wearing Velcro sneakers. In the command tent, a survival expert drew a red circle on the map and said the words no parent should ever hear: after three hours without shelter in these conditions, a child’s core temperature begins to fall. After five, confusion sets in. After eight, the heart starts to stutter. Sarah Macdougall stared at the circle as if it were a target painted on her own chest.

The search became a war against time and terrain. Two hundred people fanned out at dawn—rangers in crampons, volunteers in borrowed snowshoes, helicopter crews flying so low the downdraft flattened the grass. Drones buzzed like hornets, their cameras scanning for the tiniest anomaly: a flash of red, a child-sized heat signature, a backpack snagged on a branch. The dogs worked until their paws bled. A bloodhound named Luna traced Darius’s scent to the edge of a ravine, then sat and whined, refusing to go further. The ravine dropped thirty meters into darkness. No one spoke the obvious: a six-year-old could not have climbed down. But he could have fallen.

By the third day, the family had not slept. Sarah sat in the command tent clutching Darius’s stuffed triceratops, rocking back and forth, whispering the dinosaur song he loved. James walked the trails at midnight with a headlamp, calling his son’s name until the mountains threw it back at him in mocking echoes. Liam, too young to understand, kept asking when Darius would come back to finish their fort. The volunteers brought coffee and casseroles, but no one ate. The air in the tent was thick with the smell of wet wool and desperation.

On the fourth morning, a helicopter pilot thought he saw something—a small, dark shape curled against a boulder. The entire search held its breath as ground teams scrambled up the slope. Sarah ran barefoot across the gravel, ignoring the blood on her soles. When they reached the spot, it was a porcupine, quills glinting in the dawn. The silence that followed was worse than any scream. That night, Sarah sat on the edge of her cot and wrote in Darius’s baby book: If you’re cold, find a sunny rock. If you’re scared, sing the dinosaur song. Mommy’s coming.

The fifth day brought snow. Not the gentle, postcard kind, but a bomb cyclone that dumped sixty centimeters in twelve hours and turned the search area into a white void. Winds gusted to one hundred and twenty kilometers an hour. Visibility dropped to zero. The helicopters were grounded. The dogs could no longer smell anything but their own frostbitten noses. For fourteen hours, the mountain won. When the storm cleared, the landscape had changed. Creeks were frozen solid. Animal tracks were erased. Darius’s scent, if it had ever lingered, was gone.

The experts gathered in a trailer that smelled of diesel and despair. A pediatric trauma surgeon laid out the numbers on a whiteboard: after ninety-six hours without food or water, a child’s organs begin to shut down. After one hundred and twenty, the chance of survival falls below ten percent. After one hundred and forty-four, it is measured in single digits. Sarah stared at the board until the numbers blurred. James punched the wall hard enough to split his knuckles. Outside, the volunteers kept searching, but their footsteps were slower now, their voices quieter. They were no longer looking for a boy. They were looking for a body.

On the seventh day, the RCMP held a press conference at dawn. The community hall was packed with reporters, volunteers, and the Macdougalls, who had not left the search base in a week. Staff Sergeant Emily Chen stepped to the microphone. Her uniform was crisp, but her eyes were red-rimmed. She did not waste words.

“We have consulted every expert available,” she said. “After one hundred and sixty-eight hours in sub-zero temperatures, with no food, no shelter, and no confirmed sightings, the probability of finding Darius alive is now five percent.”

The room exhaled as one. Sarah made a sound like an animal in a trap. James caught her before she hit the floor. Liam, clutching his brother’s Spider-Man mask, looked up and asked, “Is Darry sleeping in the snow?”

Five percent. One chance in twenty. It is the mathematical equivalent of a miracle. It is the difference between a heartbeat and silence. It is the reason a thousand volunteers still lace up their boots at 4 a.m., the reason helicopters still fly at dawn, the reason Sarah Macdougall has not changed her clothes in seven days. Five percent is not hope. It is the refusal to let go.

The search continues, but the language has changed. The dogs are cadaver-trained now. The drones carry ground-penetrating radar. The volunteers walk in silence, eyes on the snow for any flash of red. Somewhere in the Rockies, a six-year-old boy in a Spider-Man backpack is either breathing his last, or waiting for the light. The mountains do not care which. But Canada does. And until the snow melts or the ravens stop circling, the search goes on.

Because five percent is still a chance.