Trial by Ice and Fire (17 page)

“Watch me,” I tell Cali again.

“Go go go!” she says.

I shove off and hit the snow fifteen feet below, sinking in nearly up to my waist. The snow explodes silently under my weight and starts spilling downhill. My next twisting leap lands me in the middle of the mini-avalanche of fluff I've set off. My heart rises into my throat and I hear myself shout something delirious and ecstatic.

Just as they had been on Teewinot, my first turns in the chute are a little bit jerky, a bit unbalanced. I lean back too far and start to lose control. I barely manage to keep from blasting into the rock rib flanking the chute. With a conscious effort I throw my body forward, downhill, and the skis follow. Big bursts of loose snow slide with me on each turn, but as I pick up speed I start to outrun them. The snow is so light it feels like nothing more than tiny clouds are wrapped around my legs. The wind begins to roar in my ears and I can feel the Rat snarling with delight in my chest as he presses down on the accelerator.

I wonder if my brother's watching from somewhere in the shrouded cirque. He'll be grinning, too.

A few more 180-degree leaps and I'm out of the chute and onto the snowfield proper. It's less steep here and the snow is deeper still. I begin to carve instead of leap. Forgetting the line I'd picked from above, the Rat spins the steering wheel to the right where the snow looks so light and deep I might need a snorkel. I don't pay any attention to the threatening bulge as I drive into the fluff beneath it. All I can hear is Cali hooting from above.

The three sharp cracks sound like blasts of lightning.

They echo off the ridge, the peaks, and the canyon walls. Someone's shooting—but with the echoes it's impossible to tell from where or at whom. I almost go down as I whip my head back and forth and try to slow.

I manage to come to a stop in the waist-deep powder. I look up, taking a big breath to shout a warning to Cali.

That's when I feel more than hear a groaning sound coming out of the snowfield itself. From directly beneath my skis. Like a bomb going off. The mountain bucks beneath my boots.

TWENTY-TWO

T
HE EARTH IMPLODES
. The Tetons are collapsing.

The ground gives way so quickly, so suddenly, that it heaves me onto my uphill shoulder. I try to stop the fall by reaching out with my arm but it sinks all the way into the hissing snow a fraction of a second before my head does. I'm sucked in. The mountain rears up and swallows me whole.
Avalanche!
My soundless scream echoes around the inside of my skull as the light goes out and the cold, stinging snow washes over my face and shoves down the neck of my jacket.

I come up only to immediately go under again. The snow around me presses in with greater and greater force as it compacts with the thrashing velocity of a steep downhill slide. It spits me out a second time, blinding me with white light. My skis jerk upward and my face pops out and then my legs are yanked over my head. In a single, snapping gulp the mass of snow swallows me again. It's seizing and tearing at my limbs with incredible force, releasing momentarily before grabbing somewhere new. It punches and kicks me and stomps on my flesh. I'm being savaged. Ravaged. Torn apart. The noise that fills the air is like a freight train rolling over me.

At one point I somehow manage to get my skis pointed downhill so that I'm riding with the rush of frozen water. It's gripping me up to my chest, whipsawing my torso and legs at different speeds, but at least I'm able to breathe. I try to angle to one side as my legs are sucked back and forth, up and down, and in opposite directions. The pressure on my knees is almost unbearable.
Cut your way out! Lean back! You can make it if you can keep your feet!
Then an enormous slab strikes me in the upper back—like a major-league slugger swinging a bat—and it sends me diving head over heels into what's become a gushing torrent of semisolid cement. I start to scream—out loud this time—but the sound is chopped off as my face goes in once again.

Tumbling and twisting, my head comes up one last time. This time instead of screaming I have the presence of mind to inhale as deeply as I can. What I draw in is mostly cold spray.
Snow is porous,
I'd once learned in an avalanche-safety class during my guiding days.
You can breathe for a few minutes at least. If you don't get it packed down your gorge.
I manage to put one glove over my mouth as I'm again yanked down deep for the finale.

Abruptly everything stops. The blows stop coming. The noise is gone. So is the light. The only thing that doesn't stop is my panic. It's increasing in speed with every beat of my heart. Someone's lit the Rat on fire; he's shrieking and clawing and biting in my chest. And the pressure is immense—thousands, maybe millions, of pounds of force-compacted water-weight is pressing in on me.

I sense that I'm upside down. My left hand is still over my mouth, wedged there now like a gag, but my right arm has been torn away somewhere to the side. Neither will move even an inch. The pain coming from the compressed disks in my back and the screaming tension in the muscles of my quadriceps and stomach alert me to the fact that my feet have been pulled around behind my head, bending me into an inverted U. I make a conscious effort to open my eyes. I see nothing but black. I know I'm in deep.

But there's no telling how deep. With the amount of snow that had come down and the length of the ride, it could be ten feet or more. Twenty. Even thirty or forty. Another recollection comes back from avalanche-safety classes—how often victims are buried so deep that it isn't until late in the summer before bodies can be retrieved. Sometimes it takes a couple of warm summers to melt their graves away and pry their frozen carcasses from the snow.

My first instinct is to howl in fear. To rant and babble. To pray. Worse than the pain is the pressure, the unbelievable weight of all the snow. And worse still is the way it's squeezing my ribs. I can't breathe. I try to move my glove away from my mouth but the snow holding it there won't budge. Not even a millimeter. Cement.

A fresh spasm of terror writhes through me. What breath I can draw is in tiny, shallow pants that become shallower still with each weak exhalation. I can feel the snow around my face turning to ice from the heat and moisture. Forming itself into what's known as an alpine death mask.
God God God God
runs through my brain like a high-speed chant.

A scream builds in my chest even though I don't have the breath to let it out. My mouth opens wide involuntarily, in a jaw-tearing rictus, but no sound emerges. I can taste the leather palm of my glove. Tears begin to melt through the snow that's pressing against my eye sockets. The drops of salt water crawl up and over my forehead, proof that I'm upside down.
God God God God
is now going ten times faster than the raging beat of my pulse.

It's still repeating, but growing fainter, when I think I hear a soft
crunch
. It's hard to tell what's real and what's not. The mantra has been blessedly slowing, growing quieter in my head and becoming almost soothing. The wetness that's been running from my eyes up to my forehead and under my ski cap is so warm that it burns. For some reason I welcome the sensation. The pain of my hot tears is so gentle compared to everything else I'm experiencing.

Crunch.

The awful ache that's been racking through my spine and limbs is going, too. I'm not as much trapped by the weight of the snow anymore so much as I'm embraced by it. It's becoming womblike, a swaddling hug.

Crunch!
The sound is a little closer now.

It's
so
easy to let go. So much easier than holding on. So much easier than staying and fighting. It's a little sad, giving up like this, but not too bad. More wistful. Sort of like when I left home at sixteen—against my parents' strident wishes—and took off on a climbing tour of Patagonia. “Let him go,” Dad said. Mom just cried. It feels like I'm pulling away from the curb in a slow wreck of a car that's overloaded with packs and gear and old, long-dead friends. Even my old beast Oso is in the car, hanging his massive black head out a backseat window and letting the sticky ropes of his drool start to swing onto the rear fender. My hand is raised out a front window but I'm not really looking back. Not wanting to see any sad faces getting smaller behind us. Just moving my hand in the air. There's excitement ahead. Mountains to climb.
Later, Rebecca. 'Berto. Mom and Dad. Ross. I'll catch you later. I know I will.

CRUNCH!

Something hard and sharp bites my knee, which is stretched over my head and feels about a million miles away. The pain jerks me half the distance back. Then there's a strange scrabbling on my thighs, moving down toward my groin. Like claws tearing at numb flesh. Ripping at what's now nothing more than refrigerated meat. The scrabbling stops as I hear a high-pitched yelp and a heavily muffled voice yell, “Mungo! Get back!”

Crunch! Crunch! Crunch!

The shovel blade starts biting around my legs. Then I feel hands tug hard at my knee. More bites. I can picture a blonde girl in a deep hole in the snow digging frantically. All around her is a broken moonscape of crushed white debris. A wolf is pacing the hole's edge, trying to jump in with the girl but being pushed back with elbows, the shovel's handle, and curses. The girl's crying and swearing and scraping at the bottom of the pit. And I'm being pulled back against my will, drawn in, but the snow holds me with a very determined grip. More warm water is rolling from eyes to forehead and up onto my scalp.
Let go. Let go. C'mon. That's enough.

More bites. One hard between the legs but I'm beyond caring, beyond feeling it hurt. I sense the blade chopping at my stomach and, a moment later, my chest. It seems to be going on for hours.
Enough, Cali. Don't bother. Let go.
I will be gone anyway by the time she gets down to my head.
Too deep. Too far.
But I find myself almost caring, almost wanting her to reach me, if for nothing else than because she's working so hard. There's a spark of hope, a brief desire to stop the rattletrap car, but it would take too much effort to blow it into a flame. Once again I'm struck by how much easier it is to let go than to hang on.

But the best things are hard. That's what climbing is all about. Kicking Death in the face when he grabs at your ankles, bony fingers clutching from billowing sleeves. The best things are worth fighting for.

The realization makes my teeth grind together before a new attempt at a scream opens my jaw. And I wish I hadn't come back. All the panic returns.
Fight, Ant! Fight, you weak-willed son of a bitch!
With an effort greater than anything I've ever exerted on a cliff face, I struggle to control my breathing. Try to stop the rapid, useless pants and the racing of my heart.

The blade chops at my exposed throat. Then somewhere just underneath my chin. So close, but I can't move a muscle. My forehead and cheeks are gripped by the mask of ice caused by my exhalations. Suddenly the chopping stops and gloved fingers are tearing away the ice from my face.

The light sears my eyes. I'm not sure if this is the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel, but it seems too bright to be the cloud-wrapped daylight I'd left so long ago. I blink but nothing will clear the liquid of mingled tears and melted slush that films my face. My lungs, though, fill with sweet, dry air.

It takes a long, long time for Cali to clear enough snow so that I can move even my head. My right arm is buried deeper, outstretched beneath me, and my legs are still locked almost behind me and uphill in the frozen cement. But finally I can see and hear and breathe.

The pit is a jagged hole more than six feet deep with more snow sloughing down from above. My wolf's face peers down at me as she circles the rim. Her ears are all the way forward and her tongue droops halfway out of her mouth.

Cali is sobbing as she digs, with sweat running down her cheeks and dripping from her hair. Mungo's whining is a constant hum and she keeps jumping into the pit to lick at my face and throat. Cali has to force her back several times with gloved cuffs to the wolf's shoulders and head.

“Thank you,” I say, spitting snow and lifting my head. “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.” I can't seem to stop. I'm ashamed of the tears that now roll to make stinging tracks over my temples and toward my ears but I'm as helpless to control them as I am to control my gratitude.

“Shh,” Cali whispers as she works, the sound coming out as almost a grunt. “Shh, Anton. Be quiet.”

A little later she tries to lift me up. My arms are both free now, back-paddling against the pit's walls, and she's standing astride my arched chest and lifting at my shoulders. She manages to raise me to a sitting position. I'm clawing weakly at the snow above my still-encased legs for some sort of purchase when she lets go. My torso flops back down, sending a new shriek of pain running up my spine—my vertebrae clacking like a dropped stack of dominos—and ripping through the muscles of my stomach. For the first time I wonder if I'm paralyzed.

Cali apologizes and climbs back over me to dig around my legs. When she frees them I slide headfirst into an upside-down heap in the bottom of the pit. My toes and fingers are tingling as if a thousand fire ants are sinking in their teeth.

It takes a long time, but she manages to right me. Slowly my limbs begin to work. I'm not paralyzed, I realize. My back's not broken. But something else seems to be. Not any bones or tendons but something in my head. Something in my soul. I can't believe I'd almost given up. I can't believe I'd been so weak.

“You nearly chopped my head off,” I tell her after she helps boost me out of the pit.

“Let me see.”

I tilt back my head and she studies the wound on my throat. Her fingertips come away a little bloody but not streaked with too much red.

“It's just a scratch,” she says, and begins laughing.

We're sitting in the snow next to the pit that had been my prison and torture chamber. And very nearly my grave. It's almost at the bottom of the snowfield, meaning that the avalanche had run more than a thousand feet as it picked up speed and material. I can see the fracture point far above us. The slab that cut loose beneath my feet must have been fifteen feet thick. Cali is sitting so close to me that she's almost astride my ankles. Her green eyes are enormously wide and the smile on her red-streaked face is crooked.

“Jesus, Anton. I didn't think I'd ever find you. You popped up a couple of times in the middle of the slide but I couldn't keep track, it was moving so fast. If it hadn't been for Mungo . . .”

She'd already told me that it had been Mungo who started digging before Cali was even able to pick her way down the slope. Mungo was actually moving toward the slide before it even came to a complete stop. The rope leash I'd anchored her with had been bitten in half—not gnawed, but sheared with a single bite. She'd sniffed around for only ten or so seconds in the still-settling debris before she began pawing madly at the snow.

I seize the ruff of the wolf's neck and gently shake her. “Thank you, girl. Good girl.”

She lets out a low moan and sweeps the air with her tail.

Without thinking I grab the back of Cali's neck, too, and pull her face into my chest. I almost pull her to my mouth. She leans forward willingly, turning her cheek to press it against me. “Thanks, Cali.”

She'd come down the slope knowing someone was shooting. Knowing the shots had started a massive avalanche, and knowing she, too, could be caught in the slide, or trigger another. She'd risked her life for nothing but a meager hope of saving mine. But strangely no more shots had come her way. Whoever had been firing the gun had been swallowed by the mist as I'd been swallowed by the snow. He hadn't stuck around to finish the job. And that wasn't smart, because now that my strength's coming back, I know without a doubt that I'm going to finish him. Bury him. The humiliation I feel for having given up only pumps up the volume of my building rage.

I'd been the target this time, not Cali. McGee's prophecy has come true. I don't know for sure who'd drawn the bead on me—at least I don't have any proof yet—but Myron Armalli, with his abortive experience as a ski patrolman, would sure as hell know a lot about triggering avalanches.