We Die Alone

by David Howarth

  But of course the guard on the roadblock in Lyngseidet was a more unfortunate encounter. They certainly knew he was up to something illegal, because he had run away, and they knew fairly exactly where he had gone. That incident was bound to be reported, at least to battalion headquarters. He could not be sure if they had seen the uniform, or whether headquarters would put two and two together and guess that the man who had been seen in Lyngseidet was the one who had escaped in Toftefjord. It depended how many other people in the district, for one reason or another, were on the run. At the worst, it meant they had picked up his trail again, and if they thought it was worth it, they might put extra patrols in the country he had to pass through. He wondered how badly they wanted to catch him.

  In any case, the best thing, as ever, was speed: to travel faster than they would think he could possibly travel. And now he had the means to do this, because people who do not know much about skis can often hardly believe the distance an expert can go on them in the course of a day. The Germans would not know much about them unless they were Bavarians; and even people who ski in the Alps are inclined only to think of ski-ing downhill, and going uphill by lifts or even railways. Cross-country ski-running, uphill and down, is a particularly Norwegian activity, and a Norwegian skier on holiday, or merely on a journey, thinks nothing of fifty miles a day.

  So Jan set off with confidence, and even with a certain amount of pleasure, in anticipation of the run. He imagined himself staying at about 3000 feet, following the contour along the fjord and keeping the water in sight. But of course no mountainside, even the side of a fjord, is quite so regular and simple. He had only gone a few miles along the slope of Goalesvarre when he found a side valley in front of him which ran deep into the mountains. As he approached it and the head of it opened up, he saw the smooth snow surface of a glacier in it, and even the glacier was below him. Rather than try to cross it, he went right down to the valley bed below the ice and climbed up it again on the other side.

  Beyond the valley there was another minor hazard of a different kind. The side of the fjord became steeper, and finally sheer. To get past this cliff he might have gone over the top; but it was very high, and to the right of it, on the inland side, there was a col which seemed a more sensible line for the summer track to follow. It looked as though it would lead back to the fjord five miles or so beyond. So he headed for the col, and very soon he lost sight of the fjord.

  By then it must have been about eleven o’clock in the morning, and he had covered something like twenty miles since he left the boat at Kjosen. It was good going, and everything looked promising; but it was just before he reached the col that the weather changed again.

  It came over the high summits on his right, first the white wisps of clouds like flags on the highest peaks, and then the stray gusts of wind and the darkening of the sky. The sun went in, and the snowfields lost their sparkling clarity and detail and became monotonous and grey, and the air at once struck chill. And then the snow began to fall, softly at first but more heavily minute by minute as the wind increased and the clouds descended. With the same abruptness that he had seen in Ringvassöy, the storm swooped downward and enveloped him in a whirling white impenetrable wall.

  It had happened before, and it gave him no cause to be alarmed, because all the sudden storms he had seen in the last few days had been short, and had ended as suddenly as they had begun. It was annoying, the more so now that he had skis. In his rubber boots the storms had not made much difference to his speed. He had plodded on all through them. But now he could not make use of his extra speed. He could hardly see five yards in front of him, and any slight downward grade might lead to a sudden drop. He had to be able to stop at any moment, and on slopes which he might have run at full speed he now had to check, and creep down circumspectly. It was not only slow, it was twice as tiring.

  Nevertheless, he pressed on, hoping and still expecting to see the lightening of the cloud which would be the sign that the squall was passing and that a few minutes more would bring sunshine again with the snowcloud whirling away towards the fjord.

  But no sign came. On the contrary, the wind went on increasing. It was getting worse than anything he had experienced before, and as hours passed he had to admit to himself that this was not merely a squall. It was useless to rely upon its ending. He ought to act as though it might last for days. That meant that he must find shelter, and to find it he must get down to the fjord again.

  But before he had come unwillingly to this decision, a new aspect of storm began to be manifest. The surface of the lying snow began to creep, first in whorls and eddies, and later in clouds which forced him to shut his eyes and put his hand over his mouth to keep the driving snow-powder out of his throat and lungs. When the very surface he stood on began to move, there was nothing stable left for his eyes to be fixed upon; when he stood still, the snow silted into the tracks which he had made, and then it was only by the wind that he could have any idea which direction he had been going. Each little slope which faced him then became a new problem in itself. Each one which he saw from the bottom vanished into the shifting mists a few feet above his head, and each of them might be the foot of a great mountain or the whole of a tiny mound. From the top of a slope he could not tell whether it was five feet in height or a thousand. He only knew that somewhere about him the surface plunged down in sheer chasms to the fjord waters three thousand feet below, and that somewhere it rose three thousand feet above him to the soaring crags he had seen in the light of the dawn.

  He guided himself by the wind, keeping it on his right. The right side of his body was coated with ice; it matted his hair and his week-old beard, and his right hand grew numb. He had tried to keep on in the direction he had been going when the storm came down, because he believed it would lead him to lower ground. But after some hours he began to doubt even the wind. He would sometimes have sworn that he had travelled for fifty yards in a straight line, and yet the wind which had been on his right swooped down on him from ahead. It seemed to be eddying down from the higher mountains, perhaps following valleys which he could not see. He stood still to test it, and even while he stood still it changed direction. Without the wind to guide him, he was lost.

  Some time during that day he stopped and tried to dig himself into the snow to wait for the abatement of the storm, because he despaired of finding the way out of the mountains. But as soon as he crouched down in the little hollow he scraped out, the cold attacked him with such violence that he knew he would die here if he rested. He had often read that if you lie down and sleep in a blizzard you never get up again. Now he knew it was true: it would not take very long. He got up and put on his skis and struggled onwards, not caring much any more which way he was moving, but moving because he did not dare to stop. Towards the end of the day his wandering became quite aimless and he lost all sense either of time or space.

  One cannot say whether it was the same day or the next that he first perceived a continuity in the slope of the mountain. He was going downhill. By then he had devised a plan for descending slopes which had probably already saved his life. When he came to a void, he gathered a big snowball and kneaded it hard and threw it in front of him. Sometimes, above the sound of the wind, he heard it fall, and then he went on; but more often it vanished without any sound at all, and he turned aside and tried another way. Now, edging cautiously down a slope and throwing snowballs, he saw rock walls both to right and left of it. It was a watercourse. He knew it was possible, or even likely, that it led to the top of a frozen waterfall and that he was running a serious risk of stepping on to the ice of the fall before he could see it. But at last it was something to follow which must lead in the end to the sea. He crept down it with infinite caution, testing every step for hidden ice. He saw little bushes and knew he was getting low. And then, directly below him, there was a square block which loomed dark in the snow. He ran joyfully down the last few yards towards it, because he thought it was a house. But it was not. It was
only an enormous isolated rock. But it had a hollow underneath it, like a cave, and he squeezed in there, lying down because it was not high enough to crawl. As soon as he lay down, in shelter from the wind and snow, he went to sleep.

  That rock is the first identifiable place which Jan came to on that journey. It stands in a narrow valley called Lyngdalen. It is only about ten miles in a perfectly straight line from Lyngseidet, where the roadblock was: but nobody knows where or how far he had been before he got there.

  At the rock he made a mistake which was nearly fatal. There is an acute bend in the valley just there. As he approached it, down the northern side, the valley led on in two directions, one only a little way to the left and the other equally little to the right. Downstream was to the left, and that way the valley ran without any hazard straight down to Lyngenfjord, five miles below. To the right the valley led gently up to the foot of the highest mountain in north Norway, the peak of Jaeggevarre, 6200 feet high. In clear weather, the choice is obvious; in fact, Jaeggevarre towers over the upper valley and closes it with a sheer bastion 3000 feet high and three miles long. But in storm, when neither the mountain nor the valley walls were visible, the place was a trap. A great moraine nearly closes the valley at that point. The summer river passes it through a gorge. But in winter the gorge is full of snow, and the immediate foreground of the valley floor slopes down to the right, upstream. When Jan woke up and crept out of the crevice below the rock, the storm was still raging. He saw nothing except the foreground, and he put on his skis again and set forth, downhill, towards the right, away from Lyngenfjord and all possible help or safety, into the very heart of the highest hills.

  He was beginning to suffer from exposure by then, and one cannot deduce how long he had been stormbound, or whether it was night or day. When one’s body is worn by a long effort at the limit of its strength, and especially when its function is dulled by cold, one’s mind loses first of all its sharp appreciation of time. Incidents which are really quite separate become blended together; the present and the immediate past are not distinct, but are all part of a vaguely defined present of physical misery. In a person of strong character, hope for the future remains separate long after the past and present are confused. It is when the future loses its clarity too, and hope begins to fade, that death is not far away.

  Jan’s mind was certainly numbed and confused by then, but so far he had not the slightest doubt about the future, and he was still thinking clearly enough to use the common sense of the craft of mountaineering. Now that he had found what he knew was a river valley of considerable size, he did not expect any trouble in following it to the sea; and so he was astonished and baffled when he found the ground rising in front of him again. He had come to what he thought was a frozen lake, though in fact it is only a level part of the valley floor, and he followed what seemed to be the shore of it, with the valley wall above him on his right. He came to the end of it expecting to find its outflow; but there was still a steep slope above him, and he could not see the top. He went right round the lake till he came back to the moraine where he had started; and there for the second time he missed the snow-filled gorge. Search as he might, he could not find the outlet. He seemed to be in the bottom of a bowl, with the lake on his left as he circled round it and unbroken snow-slopes always on his right. There was nothing for it except to give up the hope of going on downhill. He had to start climbing again.

  His choice of direction then, if it was not at random, was probably governed by the light. In the thickest of cloud and snow one sometimes has an impression of greater darkness where a steep rock face is close above. The sides of Lyngdalen may have thrown extra darkness, and so may the sharp bend downstream in the narrow valley. But upstream Jaeggevarre stands farther back, and in that direction there is less to obscure the light. Jan may have concluded that this was south, or that it was really the lower reaches of the valley. At all events, he began to climb that way. He went up diagonally, hoping and expecting all the way to find an easing of the gradient and a sign that the valley went on beyond. Very soon he lost sight of the bottom, but although he climbed on and on, he could not see the top. He was on a slope of snow which in his restricted vision seemed eternal; on his left it vanished into invisible depths, and on his right it merged in the cloud above. In front of him and behind him, it was exactly the same: his ski tracks across it disappeared a few seconds after he had made them. It was a world of its own, dizzily tilted on edge, full of the tearing wind, with himself for ever at the centre and the farthest edges diffuse and ill-defined.

  Suddenly with lightning speed the snow slope split from end to end and the snow below his feet gave way. He fell on his side and snatched at the surface, but everything was moving, and the snow fell upon him and rolled him over and over. He felt himself going down and down, faster and faster, fighting with roaring masses of snow which were burying him alive. It wrenched and pounded his helpless body, and choked him and battered him till he was unconscious. He fell limply in the heart of the avalanche and it cast out his body on the valley floor below. Down there he lay still, long after its thunder had echoed away to silence.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  SNOWBLIND

  THE NEXT summer, somebody passed that way and found the broken pieces of Jan’s skis among the massive blocks of melting snow which were all that was left of the avalanche. They were at the foot of the icefall of the unnamed glacier under the east face of Jaeggevarre. One can guess what he had done. He had started his final climb up the valley wall, but had traversed on to the icefall without knowing it. When one can see a little distance, the snow on ice looks different from the snow on rock; but if one can only see a yard or two one cannot tell what is underneath. The snow on the steep ice at that time of year would have been very unstable, ready to fall by itself within a week or two, and Jan’s weight and the thrust of his skis were enough to start it. The scar of the avalanche stretched from top to bottom of the icefall. Jan himself must have fallen at least three hundred feet.

  To start an avalanche is apt to be fatal, but it did not kill Jan. Luck was extraordinarily kind to him again. Of course nobody knows how long he lay there unconscious; but when he came to, his head was out of the snow, so that he could breathe, and most of his body was buried, which had possibly saved him from freezing to death; and none of his bones were broken. To be alive was far more than he had any right to expect, and so the other results of his fall can hardly be counted as bad luck. One of his skis was lost and the other was broken in two places; and the small rucksack with all his food had disappeared; and he had hit his head and could not remember where he was trying to go. He dug himself out of the snow and stood up, and unfastened the broken bit of ski and dropped it there, and wandered away on foot, utterly lost, with no plan and no notion of where he was going; in fact, without any coherent thoughts at all, because he had concussion of the brain.

  After the avalanche, Jan had no sense of time, and hardly any awareness of the reality of what happened. He never stopped walking, but as his body froze slowly and ice formed in the veins of his feet and hands and crept inch by inch up his legs and arms, his mind became occupied more and more by dreams and hallucinations. But the length of this ordeal is known: he was four days and four nights in the mountains from the time when he passed through Lyngseidet. The storm lasted for nearly three days, and then the snow stopped and the clouds lifted and the mountains were clear; but Jan knew nothing of that, because by then the glare of the snow had scorched the retina of his eyes and he was blind.

  One has to imagine him, both in the dark and the daylight, and both in the mists of the storm and the clear air which followed it, stumbling on unable to see at all. He never stopped because he was obsessed with the idea that if he lay down he would go to sleep and die; but all the time he was in snow between knee-deep and waist-deep, and towards the end of the time he fell down so often full length on his face in the snow that he might be said to have crawled and not to have walked.


  His movements were totally aimless. This is known because his tracks were found here and there, later on in the spring. For the most part, he probably stayed in the valley of Lyngdalen, but at least once he went over a thousand feet up the side of it, and down again in the same place. He was deflected by the smallest of obstacles. There were boulders sticking up out of the snow, and when he ran into them head-on he turned and went away; not round the boulder and on in the same direction, but away at an angle, on a totally different course. There were birch bushes also, in the bottom of the valley, and among them he wandered hither and thither for days, crossing his own tracks again and again and blundering into the bushes themselves so that he got tangled in them and scratched his face and hands and tore his clothes. Once he walked round and round a small bush for so long that he trod a hard deep path in the snow, which was still to be seen in the summer: one can only suppose that he thought he was following somebody else’s footsteps.

  But he himself knew almost nothing of this. Because he was blind, he believed that the mist and falling snow went on all the time, and he could not reckon the nights and days which were passing. All that he knew of reality was pain in his legs and arms and eyes, and cold and hunger, and the endless, hampering, suffocating wall of snow in front of him through which he must force his way.

  On one of the mountains he came to, there were hundreds of people, marching with bare feet which were frozen and they were afraid of breaking them, because they were quite brittle.

  He knew it was a dream, and he wrenched himself awake because he was terrified of falling asleep, but when Per Blindheim began to talk to him it was more real than reality, and he swung round joyfully and called “Per, Per,” into the darkness because he could not see where he was. But Per did not answer him, he went on talking to Eskeland. They were talking together somewhere, and a lot of the others were with them too, but they were not listening to him. He shouted louder, “Per! Eskeland!” and began to run after them, afraid that they would miss him in the night. And then they were close, and he was thankful to be with them all again. But they were talking together among themselves, quite cheerfully as they always did, and they never spoke to him. He called them again and again to tell them he could not see, but he could not make them hear him. They did not know he was there. And it came back to him that all of them were dead. Yet they had been talking together before he lost them, and he was the one who could not make himself heard. He began to believe that the dream was reality, and that he was the one who was dead. Stories of death came back into his mind. It seemed likely that he had died.