He wondered how her presence here would play out.
In the absence of fact, any theories were speculation, and trying to formulate any deductions was a waste of time.
His eyes strayed to something on the shelf nearby: the dark statuette of the eagle he’d seen earlier.
Colt, no. Don’t! It’s not our job . . .
22
Are they crazy? They’re going to die.”
Russell is peering up the side of a steep snow-covered mountain, as he speaks these words to his younger brother. Colter is fourteen, his brother twenty. Russell is visiting his family in the Compound over semester break.
They are in snowshoes and dressed for the January cold, which is cold indeed at this elevation. They’ve been looking, unsuccessfully, for bighorn sheep, whose season is the latest of any game in the state. You can hunt them well into February.
Colter follows his brother’s gaze to watch two people snowshoeing across a steep slope. One is in navy-blue overalls and stocking cap, the other wears lavender with a white head covering. The build of the latter tells Colter it is a woman. They are hiking from one side of the angular hillside to the other, about a hundred yards below the crest.
The land here is Shaw property but this particular location is about three miles from a public preserve. Ashton posted much of the land but generally doesn’t make an issue out of trespassing unless there are firearms involved, which might include hunters or—as Colter learned just last year in an armed standoff—an ominous intruder, overly interested in Ashton Shaw and his property.
His concern at the moment is not their legal right to be here, though. It’s that the couple—apparently on a photographic safari—are at serious risk.
The pair is trudging through the heart of an avalanche field. They’ve come from Fresno or Bakersfield or Sacramento to record in pixels the soaring whitewashed mountains after several days of impressive blizzarding.
“City slickers,” Russell mutters, using a term Colter understands though he’s never heard it. Russell has spent two years away from the monastery of the Compound and has been exposed to many, many things that Colter cannot even imagine, new words and expressions among them.
“Don’t know what the hell they’re doing. Got to warn them.”
A hissing wind lifts powder from the crest and continues down the slope. Upwind, the couple couldn’t hear them from where they stood.
“We have to go up, get closer.”
Russell nods. “But stay out of that field. It’s a land mine.”
In his survivalist training sessions, Ashton spent hours lecturing the children about avalanches. And Colter sees instantly how dangerous these conditions are. Snow is at its least stable immediately after a storm, as now. And it’s particularly erratic on north faces, like this. The south sides of mountains get more sun, which melts and packs the fall. North side snow is hoar, as in hoarfrost, unpacked, loose and slippery as grains of sugar. Another factor: any incline above thirty degrees makes a mountain avalanche prone, and this slope is easily that.
Colter and Russell trek as quickly as one can on snowshoes and burdened by their rifles and backpacks.
The couple pauses, balancing on the tricky angle, and shoots some pictures that are surely magnificent and that also might represent their last view of this planet.
Of fatalities in avalanches, seventy percent are due to suffocation, thirty to blunt trauma. Few snowslides are exclusively of fine powder; most torrents are filled with sharp slabs of gray dirty pack and crushing ice like blocks of concrete.
The boys are about a hundred yards below and twenty behind the couple. They are breathless from the altitude and from the effort of climbing quickly uphill.
Finally Russell gestures his younger brother back and continues forward about ten feet, stopping on a high drift. He’s right on the edge of the field, though how safe he and Colter truly are is unknown. Snow travels in any direction snow wants to travel. It can even go uphill.
Cupping his hands to his mouth, Russell shouts, “Hikers! It’s dangerous! Avalanche!”
The wind—which happens to be another risk factor—whips his words back behind him; they didn’t hear.
Both boys are now shouting.
No response. The man points into the distance and they take more pictures.
Russell starts uphill once more and edges into the field, telling his younger brother, “Stay back.”
He stops and calls again, “It’s dangerous! Get back! The way you came!”
A high rocky path led the couple to the mountainside. Once on it again they’d be safe.
Colter notices tiny white rivulets rolling down the hill from where the trespassers stand. Like white-furred animals scurrying from danger. The bundles travel fast and they travel far.
He wonders about using his rifle to fire into a tree and get their attention. Ashton lectured that most experts don’t believe that sounds, even a big-caliber rifle shot, will start an avalanche, but he isn’t going to take the chance. Also, indicating your location by firing a weapon is usually useless, thanks to echoing.
Russell moves closer yet to the couple. “It’s dangerous!”
“Avalanche!” Colter shouts and waves his arms.
Finally the two look down and wave. “What?” The man’s shout carries easily on the wind.
“Avalanche. You’re in an avalanche field!”
The man and woman look at each other. He lifts his arms and shakes his head broadly. Meaning he doesn’t hear. They plod along the difficult slope in the ungainly shoes.
Russell hurries back to his brother and they climb onto a rocky ledge on the border of the field. “We’ll go up through the trees.”
Just as the brothers start uphill, Colter hears a faint scream. The woman has lost her balance. Her legs go out from under her and she begins sliding on her back, arms splaying to stop the descent. There’s a technique to slow yourself using snowshoes but she doesn’t know it or, in panic, has forgotten.
Here it comes, Colter thinks.
But there is no avalanche.
The woman slides downward amid a cloud of powder and comes to a stop about even with the brothers, thirty, forty feet away from them. She struggles upright in the thigh-high powder, anchored by her wide mesh shoes. She checks her camera and other gear. She touches her pocket, shouting uphill. “Phone’s okay!” She actually laughs.
Her friend gives a thumbs-up.
The woman is now in hearing range and Russell explains the danger. “You have to get out of there now! Both of you! It’s an avalanche field. Dangerous!”
“Avalanche?”
“Now!” Colter calls. He thought her tumble would start one. People are the number-one cause of avalanches: skiers, snowmobilers and snowshoers, who go carelessly where they should not. But so far the massive ledge holds.
Russell says, “Get over here, off the slope! Unhook the snowshoes and pull them out. And your friend, he needs to go back to the trees, the path you were on. He needs to turn around!”
She looks up and waves to him and then points to his left, meaning to return to the path. He gives yet another raised arm of incomprehension.
She pulls her gloves off and digs out her phone. She makes a call. Colter sees him answer.
“Brad, honey, these boys say it’s an avalanche area. Go back to the trees. That path we were on before we started across the hill.”
Russell says, “Tell him to move very slowly. Really.”
She relays this information, puts the phone away and bends down to unhook her shoes. She gets one undone and, after a struggle, yanks it out.
Can’t she go any faster?
Uphill, Colter sees, the man starts toward the safety of the path.
He glances down and sees the trickles of snow accelerating away from beneath his feet.
More and more
of them.
He panics and charges forward, slamming the oval snowshoes hard on the surface.
“No!” Colter and his brother shout simultaneously.
Just as the man scrambles out of the field, literally diving to safety, a shelf of snow breaks away and cascades downward. It is only ten feet wide or so and shallow but avalanches are a chain reaction. Colter knows this will trigger a much bigger fall.
The woman evidently hears the whoosh too and looks up at the wall sliding toward her. A brief scream. She is still forty feet from the safety of the high ground where the boys are. She’s trapped in place by the remaining snowshoe. She bends down into the froth and frantically tries to undo the strap.
Colter assesses:
Odds that the whole field will give way? Eighty percent.
Survival of somebody who has no deep-snow training? Five percent.
Somebody who had some training? Unknown but better than that.
He drops his backpack and discards his weapons.
Russell is staring at his younger brother.
“Colt, no. Don’t! It’s not our job.”
No time for discussion. Colter leaps off the ridge and runs quickly across the field, in the ungainly lope of a snowshoe jogger.
Just as he reaches her, the rest of the mountain cuts loose, a vast swath of snow, fifty or sixty yards wide, dropping, tumbling, picking up speed. Tides like this can easily exceed a hundred miles an hour.
As he pops the quick release of his shoes and steps out of them he sees her panicked face, tears streaming. She has large dark eyes, an upturned nose and lipstick, or sunscreen, that matches her violet snowsuit.
“Your other shoe?”
“What’s going to happen?” she cries.
“Shoe?” he snaps.
“Undone.” She straightens up and tries to pull it out. She blinks as she looks him over, maybe realizing for the first time how young he is.
“Leave the shoe!” Colter orders.
He lifts her camera off and tosses it away. In the turbulence of an avalanche, solid objects, even small ones, can maim and kill.
A glance crestward. They have thirty seconds.
“Listen to me. When it hits, don’t fight it. Pretend you’re swimming, kick with your arms and legs. Swim with it, like you’re in the surf. Got that?”
No answer.
“Have you got it?” he insists.
“Yes, swimming.”
Twenty seconds till the tide slams into them.
“When you feel yourself slowing, curl up and take a deep breath, as deep as you can. And with one hand clear a space around your mouth for air. Lift the other arm up as high as you can, so the searchers know where you are. Make a big space around your mouth. There’ll be enough air for a half hour.”
“I’m scared!”
Ten seconds. The wave is six feet high, now seven, now eight and accelerating. It’s trailed by dust swirling and thick as forest fire smoke.
“You’ll do fine. Swim, hand to mouth, arm up.”
It’s a slough avalanche—more loose snow than slabs. If they died it would be by suffocation, not a blow to the head. Colter doesn’t know which is worse. Suffocation probably.
She stares at the wave. Colter turns her around so that she’s facing downhill.
Five seconds.
Colter shuffles away so their bodies don’t become bludgeons.
“Swim!”
She does. He does too and takes a deep breath.
In the time it takes to fill his lungs, the world turns black.
23
Mary Dove finishes tending to the wounds on her fourteen-year-old son’s neck and cheek.
While most of the avalanche was slough—granular hoar snow—Colter didn’t escape a chunk of sharp ice. Or possibly a rock.
The damage isn’t severe.
They are in her office, which is a typical physician’s, except for the walls, which are—as everything in the cabin—made of hand-hewn logs.
“Anywhere else?” she asks.
“No,” Colter says. “Just a little sore.”
“How far did it sweep you?”
“Football field,” Colter says, though he doesn’t have much frame of reference, only pictures in newspapers or magazines. He’s never seen a game. In a home with no TV and no internet, one doesn’t have a chance to view broadcast spectator sports, and the nearest teams are those of the colleges and high schools around Fresno. When the family went there, they always had errands to run or acquaintances and family to see. None of the children had much inclination anyway. If parents aren’t excited about sports, their youngsters probably won’t be either.
Mary Dove executes some range-of-motion tests, arms and legs, which her son seems to pass. More or less.
He goes into his bathroom and takes a very hot shower, minding the rule to keep the bandages dry. He towels off, dresses and lies down on his blanket, which is brown and woven in a Native American design.
He closes his eyes briefly, picturing the torrent of snow enwrapping him.
He followed the same advice he’d given the woman.
When he slowed, though, he realized that extending his arm to signal his whereabouts would do no good. He was too far under the surface, so he’d pulled his arm back, and taken another deep breath and, using both hands, cleared a large air reservoir in front of his face.
Finally he stopped sliding and he wasted no time in attempting to free himself, kneeing and punching and elbowing. The space he opened up before him was completely black, and he was disoriented as to where the surface might be. He recalled his father’s lesson and made small snowballs and dropped them near his face and hands to see where they landed, so he could tell which way was down.
Never question gravity . . .
Then came the digging—scooping the snow down, packing it and then pushing upward with his feet and arms. Inches at a time.
Finally there was slight illumination over his head and he broke through, sucking in the air, which as in all snowfields gave off a sweet electrical scent.
He climbed out and rolled onto the snow surface, catching his breath. He called to his brother, who was probing the field nearby with a long branch. He dropped it and ran to Colter to help him up.
“The woman?” Colter asked. “She all right?”
His brother pointed.
The man who’d been with her, Brad, was digging her out of a deep pile of snow near the avalanche’s toe—the end. She’d been swept much farther than he’d been. Colter saw that she had survived and was helping to dig herself out. She was unhurt.
Colter struggled to his feet, with Russell helping. His brother looked up the mountain and said, “The whole pack didn’t come down. There’s more that’s unstable, a lot more. We should get them out and into the trees.”
They walked to the couple.
“We spotted her arm,” Russell said. “That’s how we found where she was. You told her that.”
Shaw nodded, and the foursome made their way to safety.
Now, in the Compound’s rustic cabin, Colter is finally warm once more, inner core warm, and in only slight pain. He rises from his bed and walks into the living room where Russell and Dorion are sitting near a soothing dance of flames in the stacked-stone fireplace. They are both reading. When Colter enters the room, Dorion, eleven, leaps up and hugs him. He tells himself to give no reaction to the pain and he doesn’t. She regards the bandage with still eyes, which means she’s troubled.
“It’s all right. A scratch.”
“Okay,” she says.
“Hey,” Russell says and goes back to his book.
“Hey.”
Dorion sits once more. “You know what the biggest one in the world was?”
She’d be talking about old-time locomotives, which, for some rea
son, she is passionate about.
“No clue.”
“Union Pacific’s Big Boy. Come on, Colter, look!” She shows him the book. According to the caption, the engine depicted was Locomotive Number 4014, and was an impressive piece of machinery. It had a 4-8-8-4 wheel arrangement, which, she explained to him a few years ago, was the number of locomotive wheels from front to back; it’s how the machines are classified.
“Biggest expansion engine there ever was. It weighed more than a million pounds. It’s in a museum in Los Angeles. I want to see it someday.”
“We’ll make sure that happens.”
“You’ll come too, Russell?” she asks.
“Sure.” The older brother doesn’t look up from his book. Colter wonders what he’s reading. Russell has been into spy thrillers lately.
Mary Dove is in the kitchen, preparing dinner, while Ashton is in his study, the door closed, where he disappeared an hour ago after learning that his sons were all right.
Colter stretches and happens to glance to the mantel, where he sees a trio of framed pictures—two artist renderings and one photograph. The picture to the left is a sketch of a woman who has some Native American features. A handsome face, black hair parted severely in the middle, the sides dangling to her shoulders. She is Marie Aioe Dorion, the nation’s first mountain woman. She was of Métis heritage, indigenous people in the central part of the United States and southern Canada. Widowed early, Dorion survived in the wilderness for months with two small children, in hostile territory.
The center picture is a reproduction of a painting of a handsome, rugged man wearing leather and a raccoon hat that encompasses much of his head. He is John Colter, an explorer with the Lewis and Clark Expedition.
The photograph on the right is of Osborne Russell, the explorer, politician and judge, who was in part responsible for founding the Oregon Territory. He is the most recent of the three, surviving into the late 1800s; hence the photographic image.
These three individuals were the sources for the Shaw children’s names.
The study door opens and Ashton walks into the living room. He has changed a lot, Colter thinks, in the years since the family left the Bay Area for the Compound—to escape some threats that troubled him greatly but that he hasn’t discussed much with the children, other than to warn them to be on the lookout for strangers on the Compound. His hair has gone mostly white and is often, like now, mussed. He wears jeans, a white shirt with pearl buttons—Mary Dove made it—and a leather vest. On his feet, tactical boots, the sort a soldier might wear.
The Final Twist Page 10