The Marble Mask (7 page)

It didn’t feel like one, though, after three hours of struggling in the wind-whipped snow, sometimes working a methodical search pattern, other times simply standing stock still in the fog, all visual and tactile references so removed that to venture in any direction was to invite becoming lost or falling prey to the unpredictable terrain. Gentle saddle or not, the supposed “ground” we were standing on was only a thick mantle of compacted snow covering boulders, pitfalls, small cliffs, and a stunted forest of dwarfed evergreens, any or all of which could suck us in, especially if encountered sight unseen.

Eventually, I discovered I wasn’t the only one growing concerned. During one of the few moments when visibility allowed a better view, I saw Ray Woodman about halfway up the Chin, gesturing at his watch to Gary Smith, and then pointing toward the sky. I wasn’t sure if it was the weather or the daylight that had caught his eye, since I thought both were deteriorating, but it was obvious the search team was going to metamorphose back into a climbing party soon.

I was just about to confirm that suspicion by radio, when the entire subject was put on hold.

“Gary? It’s Mike. I think I got something.”

Another blanket of mist was quickly forming, but just before I lost sight of the rocks, I saw one of Smith’s men waving his arms from near the top. After that, I had to rely on my ears alone to learn what was happening.

“What is it, Mike?” Gary Smith asked.

“It’s sort of wedged in here, but it looks like a hand.”

“Leave it where it is. I’m coming up. Did you copy, Gunther?”

“Loud and clear.” I could hear from his labored breathing that Smith was working hard to join his colleague as he spoke. “If it really is jammed in there, I don’t want to mess it up by moving too fast. You want to get up here? It’s pretty easy. I think you could make it.”

I ignored the pointed condescension. “On my way.”

Ray Woodman spoke up just as I felt the unrelenting wind both pick up and become noticeably colder. “I’m not sure I’d recommend that. The weather’s changing. Might be best to just mark the spot and come back.”

Smith tried a sidestep. “How ’bout a compromise? You take the rest of them down. The three of us’ll follow either as soon as we get the hand loose, or can’t and mark where it is instead. I hate to walk away now.”

I didn’t back up Woodman as my instincts told me I should. Too concerned with appearing pushy, and privately fearful that Smith would take such caution as weakness, I allowed his intemperance to overwhelm my good judgment.

Surprisingly—or because he felt outnumbered—Woodman apparently thought Gary Smith was enough of a climber to make this choice, although his tone of voice betrayed some doubt. “All right, but I’m lowering the boom on everyone else. And don’t take too long—you know how fast things can sour up here.”

I made my way over to the Chin’s base, passing Sammie on the way, who murmured, “Show him what you got, boss,” and found that from the foot of the cliff, the climb didn’t look as daunting. During the summer, I remembered, the Long Trail came right down this same face, regularly traveled by people carrying thirty-pound packs. Snow and ice didn’t make it any easier, but I was pleasantly surprised at how fast I joined Smith and Mike on their elevated perch.

Once there, I was also rewarded by Smith’s more subtly respectful demeanor.

“Take a look,” he said and placed his back against the rock so I could squeeze by to where his colleague Mike was crouching by a crack in the wall.

“It’s right in there,” he said. “You can see the ring on his finger. That’s what caught my eye.”

I peered into the gloom of the crack and saw a faint glimmer of gold. Taking Mike’s flashlight, I then clearly saw the stump of a human hand, looking as if it had been broken off a discolored marble statue. I straightened and looked around.

Smith pointed overhead into the mist. “I guess the body bounced here hard enough that the hand stuck like an arrow before breaking off. You may be right about the airplane. I don’t see that happening if someone just chucked him over the edge. It’s too close.”

“How do we get it out?” Mike asked, still crouching over his find.

I held up my ice ax. “Use these as crowbars?”

There was only room for the two of us. Mike put his ax in on one side of the small crack, and I applied mine to the other. It took a while, but eventually we loosened it enough that I could reach in and extract the hand.

I gave it to Smith, who examined it closely. “We can probably get prints from it, and the ring might tell us something.”

A sudden whiteout drew our attention. We looked up at a world without any markers whatsoever. Even our precarious perch had disappeared from view, making me feel I was standing on a cloud.

“Damn,” Mike muttered.

“It’ll pass,” Gary reassured us. “It’s done it a couple of times already today.”

“Not this bad, it hasn’t,” Mike said.

He was right.

“Let’s give it a few minutes,” Gary said. “If it doesn’t blow over, we’ll just have to climb down by feel.”

“We can barely see our feet.”

Gary Smith was losing patience, perhaps goaded by his lingering against Woodman’s advice. “Mike, I’ve been in this crap before. It’s more psychological than anything. You take it slow, it works out fine.”

No one spoke for a couple of minutes, until, as if yielding to an inner, heated argument, Smith wrenched his radio from his pocket and addressed it. “Smith to Woodman. Come in, Ray.”

Woodman’s voice, clear and calm, sounded otherworldly from out of the clouds. “What’s up, Gary? You folks okay?”

“Yeah, just socked in by the fog. What’re conditions where you are?”

“Bad and getting worse. You still on the wall?”

“Yeah.”

“The wind’s picking up. You better get off as best you can. It feels like a storm coming. We’ll head back to intercept you. If that fails, make for Taft Lodge instead of going back up Profanity. Things are a little better on the east face.”

Smith signed off and looked up at me. “You should be in the middle. You got the least experience.”

I was standing behind Mike, who expressed what I was thinking, “Already can’t see the ledge, Gary. We start switching places, we could all go off.”

Smith nodded unhappily, saying softly, almost apologetically, “Wish we had some rope.”

The going was slower than I’d imagined it would be. I’d envisioned the equivalent of climbing backward down a ladder with my eyes shut, but this wasn’t close to being that easy. Each move was punctuated by the fear of slipping, each tentative groping for a foothold accompanied by the doubt about what, in fact, was being trusted with my weight.

And in the midst of such uncertainty, the wind grew harder, now pushing snow ahead of it.

And making everything much colder.

When I slipped and fell, I had no real sense of it at first. I merely extended my boot as I’d been doing all along, and felt nothing. For a fraction of a second, still unaware that my hands were no longer holding the cliff, I began to simply look for another perch with my toe. And then my body hit something hard, and I knew I was in freefall.

It didn’t last long. A couple of jars, dulled by my heavy clothing, and then a single, stunning smack to the head.

Followed by nothing at all.

I DON’T KNOW HOW LONG I LAY THERE.
It was dark, pitch black, and I was so cold at first I had trouble moving. My head also hurt, although not as badly as I thought it should, for which I figured I had the frigid temperature to thank.

But useful or not for headaches, the cold was about to kill me. I knew that before I’d even confirmed that all my parts were functional and intact. As soon as I opened my eyes, and heard the screaming of the wind, I realized most of my body was almost totally numb.

I didn’t worry about the others. They were either alive or not, either safe or in peril. I also didn’t think about how I’d come to be lying in the snow at night alone, seemingly abandoned by people who more than most were trained to work as a team. My only thoughts were about survival and how to attain it. It was the same kind of focus I’d encountered in combat, when the enormity of the threat comes second to the will to live.

I tried standing at first, more to see if I could than to actually start walking anywhere. I had no flashlight and knew that even if I had, it wouldn’t have done much good. But the point was moot in any case—the wind threw me to my knees before I got halfway up.

I felt around me. Like Jean Deschamps, I’d created a hole where I’d landed, although blessedly less deep, and so decided to finish what I’d unwittingly begun by digging not just down but to the side as well, hoping to end up with a cave of sorts.

It wasn’t easy going. I couldn’t see, couldn’t feel with my hands, and I wasn’t even sure if I was burrowing in the right direction. It occurred to me that if I’d landed on a slope and was tunneling downhill, my reward would be to eventually reemerge back into the storm.

But I got lucky. After what felt like hours, I not only began feeling comfortably entombed, sheltered from both the wind and its incessant, biting howl, but I was warmer as well, my exertions having pushed blood if not to my fingers and toes, at least most of the way there.

It was only then that I thought beyond the immediate and remembered the radio.

I pulled it awkwardly from my pocket, fumbling with hands that felt like useless claws, and finally succeeded in depressing the transmit button, the small red light on top of the radio giving me a curious, instant comfort.

“Gunther to Mountain Rescue. Anyone out there?”

The response was instantaneous. “Jesus, Joe. That you?” Ray Woodman’s voice betrayed a relief he’d obviously all but abandoned.

“One and the same.”

His next question was more hesitant. “How’re you doing?”

It was a professional’s concern. In his place, I might have asked where I was. Knowing the futility of that, he was more interested in how long I might last.

“Okay so far. I hit my head, but I don’t think there’s any damage. I’ve dug a snow cave, so I’m out of the elements. Can’t feel my hands or feet.”

There was a telling pause.

“Where are you guys?” I asked, more to quell my own anxiety than out of any curiosity.

“Taft Lodge. The weather totally shut down the mountain. After you fell, Mike injured his ankle. Gary tried to find you, but I ordered him to take care of Mike. As it was, we had to go back and get them—they were already lost in the storm. Dumb luck they even made it.” There was another long hesitation. “I’m sorry, Joe. I had to save who I could.”

I understood what he was going through, and could only imagine the efforts he’d expended. Good news that it was, my returning from the dead was also like the resurgence of a guilt-evoking ghost. “Don’t worry about it. I would’ve done the same thing.”

“Well, we’re in good shape now,” Woodman came back with forced optimism. “The storm shouldn’t last too much longer. You just stay hunkered down there, and we’ll come get you as soon as we can. I got someone who’d like to talk to you. After that, we better conserve our batteries. And put the radio next to your body if you can,” he added.

I waited for a moment and then heard Sammie’s voice—small, worn, and worried. “Hi, boss. How’re you doin’?”

“Not bad—kind of making like a bear.”

Again, there was a long silence. I knew she’d already been dealing with my death and now was groping with my resurrection. If I’d correctly judged Woodman’s false nonchalance about the storm’s length and ferocity, she was also contemplating losing me all over again. Stowe Mountain Rescue was famous throughout the state for braving weather other people called lethal, especially if the lost person was a colleague. But they were buttoned down now.

Things were really bad out there.

I tried to ease her distress a little. “Sam, thanks for asking, but we’d better follow Ray’s advice for now. Keep warm and I’ll see you in a bit.”

I took my finger off the transmit button and watched the red light die, wondering how long it would take me to do the same.

IT WAS SNOWING—THE KIND OF FAT, LAZY FLAKES
kids love to catch on their tongues. It came down gently, incessantly, softening the view of the hospital parking lot and crossing the window with a soothing, lulling monotony. It was all I could do to turn away at the sound of the door opening.

Gail stood on the threshold, watching me, her expression a mixture of concern and irritation.

I tried stacking the deck by giving her a big smile. “Hey, there.”

It had the opposite effect. She frowned and said, “Why’s it always you who gets banged up? Couldn’t you let someone else go first, just once in a while?”

“I was last in line this time, and someone else did get hurt.”

She shook her head. “I heard—a twisted ankle.”

Still, she came across the room to the bed and kissed me long and tenderly.

“You’re a pain in the neck, Joe Gunther,” she added after straightening up. She dragged a chair over to where she could sit within reach.

I hit the control button by my head and moved the bed to a more upright position. “You didn’t ask how I was feeling.”

She smiled grudgingly. “God, just like a kid. I know how you’re feeling. I just spent fifteen minutes with your doc getting the lowdown, and half an hour before that being briefed by Sammie Martens on the phone. It’s a miracle all you got was hypothermia—you should’ve at least lost some toes or fingers. You need to do something about that girl, by the way. She’s a walking grenade—steel on the outside and a wreck inside. If you ever do get yourself killed, she’ll go to pieces.”

I waved a hand dismissively, understanding from her rapid patter that Sammie wasn’t the only one wound up. Self-serving as it sounds, I found comfort in that. “She’s not that fragile.”

“Don’t bet on it.”

I knew not to. When it came to judging character, Gail, hyper or not, was rarely wrong. We’d known each other a long time, had been lovers almost from the start, and, whether living together or not, were as intertwined as any long-married couple.