We Die Alone

by David Howarth

  Standing outside the schoolhouse in Mandal, one can see almost the whole of the route to the plateau which they intended to use. As Marius and Amandus had expected, it lies up the side valley which leads out of Mandal on its southern side. This lesser valley is called Kjerringdal, the word kjerring meaning an old woman or hag, to correspond with the man of Mandal. Kjerringdal rises steeply, in a series of gleaming curved terraces of snow, and in spring almost the whole of it is swept by avalanches; but there is one route up it clear of the avalanche tracks which is known to the local men. It ends in a wide couloir. From Mandal the rim of the couloir stands against the sky, three thousand feet above; and two miles beyond the rim is the place where Jan was lying.

  That night, the snow clouds gathered first above the head of Mandal, and then, even as Nordnes and his men were watching them and debating the weather, they swept up from the south across the plateau, and poured over the edge of the couloir and down into Kjerringdal. Minute by minute they grew thicker and nearer, blotting out the high terraces one by one, till the clouds from Kjerringdal joined with the ones from Mandal and swirled round the vertical crag which divides the two valleys. A few moments later they were overhead, and the snow began to fall, softly and thickly, on the floor of the valley where the men were standing. Soon there was nothing but snowflakes to be seen.

  None of them liked to think of a man lying ill and unprotected and helpless up there in the heart of the clouds; but falling snow put an end to whatever hopes they had of reaching him for the present. The German garrison might have been avoided, and even in snow the ascent of Kjerringdal might not have been impossible; but to find the meeting-place would have been out of the question. Nobody in Mandal knew exactly where it was. They would have to depend on seeing the steep bluff which the Furuflaten message had described, and to begin to search for it when they could not see more than a few yards in front of them would be futile and suicidal. There was nothing for it but to wait till the snow-storm ended.

  It went on snowing all night, and all the morning. Going about their business in the valley the following day none of them had much hope for the man on the top of the mountain. Perhaps they regretted then they had not gone up on the night that the Germans came. As it turned out, they could have done it without being caught; but nobody could have known that at the time. Now, everything depended on the snow. They were ready to go the moment it showed the first sign of easing. It was simply a question of whether the man would survive till then.

  The chance came on the third night after Marius had left Jan up there. There were breaks in the cloud that evening, and the local men, with their knowledge of Mandal weather, believed it would be clear before the morning. The party of four volunteers assembled. The Germans had been watched and counted to make sure they were all out of sight in the billet at the foot of the valley. Everything seemed auspicious.

  The ascent of Kjerringdal went off without any serious trouble, though under the best of conditions it is not a safe or easy climb at that time of year. From time to time Nordnes caught sight of the men toiling on up the valley, picking their course to avoid the avalanche tracks. After four hours, on skis all the way, they got to the rim of the plateau. The snow had stopped by then, as they had hoped, and they struck off right-handed to make the level trek across the watershed and then down towards Revdal.

  They saw the steep bluff well ahead of them. A series of gentle gullies and frozen lakes led down to the foot of it, and they ran down into the shallow valley which Marius and his party had reached three nights before. The fresh snow which had fallen lay thick over everything. The valley seemed just as deserted and still as the rest of the plateau. There were no tracks and no sign whatever that anyone had ever been there. They searched the foot of the bluff, and the whole of the valley bed above it and below, but they could not find anything at all. They scoured the plateau round about, shouting, but there was no answer. For two hours they hunted far and wide; but then they had to give it up and make back for the head of Kjerringdal again, in order to be at home before the Germans began their day’s work of checking the houses. The ski-run down Kjerringdal was very fast, and they were back in Mandal by the time the place was stirring.

  When they all talked over this night’s expedition with Nordnes, the only conclusion they could come to was that the man who had been left up there had gone off somewhere by himself. They still knew very little about him. They had heard he was crippled, but for all they could tell, he might still have been able to drag himself along. It seemed most likely that when the snow had started, he had tried to get down again on the Revdal side to look for shelter. It had also crossed their minds, of course, that he might have died and been buried by the snow. In fact, they thought anyone who had stayed on the plateau for the past three days would almost certainly be dead; but they dismissed the idea that he had died anywhere near the rendezvous, because they thought they would have found his body. There had not been any avalanche up there, and there was very little drifting, and they would have expected a dead man’s body to show as a visible mound on the snowfield. Even if he had dug himself in and then been buried, there should have been something to show where he had done it. But there was nothing at all. He had simply disappeared.

  For all practical purposes, Mandal just then was entirely cut off from the outside world. The Germans had been making strict inquiries about anyone they found was not at home, and they expected an explanation of where every man was and what he was doing. Until they had finished their slow and laborious progress from house to house up the whole of the valley, it was obvious that they would not let anyone leave it; and Nordnes could not send a messenger over the fjord to tell Herr Legland what had happened. He could not use the telephone, either. It had always been tapped on and off, and it was sure to be tapped, or simply cut off, while the German search was going on; and the whole mystery was too complicated to discuss in disguised language without any prearranged code. If Nordnes had been able to have five minutes’ conversation with Marius, everything would have been easy, but they might as well have been on different continents; and besides, at that time neither of them knew who was the organiser of the other village’s part in the affair. The only way of communication between them was through Legland, and for the present that way was blocked.

  Without any help or advice from outside, the only thing the Mandal men could do was to try again. A second party therefore made the long climb on the following night, the fourth since Jan had been abandoned on the plateau. They regarded it as almost a hopeless effort; but Mandal, in the person of Herr Nordnes, had promised it would do its best, and besides, while there was any chance at all that there was a man alive up there, none of them could have slept easily in their beds.

  This time, when they got to the valley below the bluff, it was still covered with the ski-tracks from the night before. They extended the search farther down towards the edge of the drop into Revdal, and inland across the plateau. Every few yards they broke the oppressive silence of the plateau with a shout, and listened while it died again to silence.

  Somebody had decided on a password which had been given both to Jan and the Mandal men. Presumably as a tribute to Jan’s English training, the Mandal men were to identify themselves to him by saying “Hallo, gentleman.” People in Norway often suppose that the word gentleman can be used as a form of address in the singular, as indeed it could if there were any logic in the English language. That night the plateau rang with this repeated cry but nobody in either Mandal or Furuflaten spoke any English at all, and so there was nobody there who would have thought it odd or ludicrous; except Jan, and he could not hear it. Towards morning, the party retreated again by way of Kjerringdal without finding anything. As they went down, the weather was worsening.

  This second sortie had made it clear that it was no use to search any more without some kind of consultation with Furuflaten. To put a final end to any thought of another expedition, the snow began again, and during the day the wind got u
p and increased to a blizzard. This was far worse than the calm snowfall of two days before. In the sheltered valley, the temperature fell abruptly and visibility was restricted, and any outside work became impossible. On the plateau, as the Mandal people knew from generations of experience, no search party would have a hope of finding anything; it would be all they could do to move at all against the wind, or in fact, after a very short time, even to keep themselves alive.

  But the blizzard did have one helpful consequence, in that it hampered the German troops as much as anyone. They could not keep their eye any longer on the whole of the foot of the valley, even if they did venture out into the blinding snow; and under the unexpected cover of this storm, a skier slipped out of the valley and brought the news of Mandal’s plight to friends in Kaafjord. From there, after a day’s delay in which a boat was found which could cross the fjord in such wild weather, the news reached Herr Legland, and he sent a message at once to Marius.

  This message undoubtedly was a terrible shock to Marius. It reached him in Furuflaten when the blizzard was still at its height and had already been blowing for days. It meant only one thing to him: that after all Jan had suffered, and all that had been risked for him, he was dead. It was exactly a week since Marius had said good-bye to him when he put him in the snow-grave on the plateau. All that time, as he had not heard any more, he had taken it for granted that the Mandal men had found him, and he had even thought of him safe already in a Swedish hospital. It was dreadful for Marius to think that nobody had ever come to take him out of that hole again. His own knowledge of the arctic mountains, and the wisdom he had learned from older people, all made him certain that nobody had ever survived, or ever could survive, a week of snow and storm on the plateau, under the open sky. He could have wept to think of the pitifully inadequate protection Jan had had: two blankets, and a canvas bag which was not even waterproof, and not more than a day’s supply of food. He hated to think what Jan must have thought of him when he knew his end was coming.

  Marius’s imagination would not let him rest on the day when he got the message. He took the news round to all the people he could tell, those who had helped in different ways. They were all of the same opinion: that it was a pity it had to end that way, but after all, everyone had done his best. Nobody even suggested that Jan might still be alive. Yet Marius knew all the time, in the back of his mind, that he would have to go up to the plateau again that night, whatever the weather, and whatever the risk of being seen and arrested by the Germans when it was really too late to matter. Of course he had not forgotten the solemn promise he had made to Jan; and assuming that Jan was dead, the promise had been broken. He had to go, if only to see for himself. He disliked the idea of leaving Jan’s body up there where it lay, till the spring thaw exposed the last remains of it. He wondered if Jan would have left him a message, written on paper perhaps, which the thaw would destroy. Perhaps he had some idea, as people do when the death of a friend leaves them remorseful, of making his peace with Jan by going to look at his body. At any rate, whether it was rational or not, and whether it was suicidally dangerous or not, he knew he was going.

  It was a question who would come with him. To go alone would have added a lot to the danger: two people on a mountain in a blizzard are always more than twice as safe as one. But of the three men who had been with him before, Alvin Larsen and Olaf Lanes were away again fishing, and probably storm-stayed somewhere down the coast, and Amandus Lillevoll was having such pain with his broken ribs that it was foolish to think of him making the climb again. There were no other men in the village in the know, only women: his own sisters and mother, and families of the men who had come with him.

  Olaf Lanes had several sisters, and one of them was called Agnethe. Agnethe knew Marius well, and she was fond of him, and so was he of her. When she heard that he was determined to go that night, she knew quite well that if nobody else would go with him, he would go alone; and rather than let him do that, she went and told him firmly that she was coming too. Probably if any other girl had said the same thing, he would have refused her offer without a second thought. It was certainly not an expedition for a girl. But Agnethe was as good as any man on skis, and she was strong as well as pretty; and, perhaps even more important, she was the only person that day who really understood the whole depth of what he was feeling, and agreed with him that it was right to go. He possibly needed sympathy just then even more than physical help. She offered him both, and he was grateful; and because there was really no sensible alternative, he agreed to let her come.

  At dusk, which was all that was left by then of the vanishing nights, these two embarked on what was to be the last crossing of Lyngenfjord to Revdal. Amandus had come with them to help them to handle the boat and to look after it at Revdal. The crossing was wet and wild, and the small boat under sail was beaten down by heavy squalls from the mountains. But at least it was hidden from German eyes as long as the snow went on falling. They reached the other shore drenched and cold but safe, and beached the boat about half a mile south of Revdal. Agnethe and Marius landed.

  They took a new route up the mountain. It looked easier for unladen climbers than the one which Marius had taken with the sledge, but it included some pitches of simple rock climbing, in narrow chimneys, on which the sledge would have been a hopeless hindrance. Marius looked after Agnethe with affection and admiration, but she needed no help from him. On rock she was more agile than he was, and perhaps she was even more anxious to reach the plateau and see the worst, so that his mind would be set at rest.

  They climbed the first steep two thousand feet very quickly. But on the steep face they were more or less in shelter. When they had almost got up to the rim of the plateau, they began to hear a new note in the wind above them, and when they looked up through the murk they could see the snow blowing over the edge. It looked like hard grey pellets, and it shot over in jets with a power and speed which warned them that the dangerous part of the climb was only beginning.

  When they crossed the rim and stood up on the level surface beyond it, the wind snatched at their clothes and threw them off their balance and drowned their voices. The air was so full of whirling particles of snow that it took their breath away and they felt as if they were suffocating. Both of them, of course, were properly dressed, in windproof trousers and anuraks with hoods; but the snow lashed the exposed parts of their faces with such violent pain that they could not bear to turn unprotected into the wind. Marius shouted to Agnethe, half-persuaded himself that what they were doing was madness; but she was already untying her skis, which had been bound together for carrying. She dropped them on the shifting surface, and bent down to buckle on the bindings.

  The way for the last three miles from there to the rendezvous was against the wind. If it had not been so, it certainly would have been more than foolish to go on, because of the danger of over-reaching themselves and being unable to return. They pulled their hoods down as far as they would go, and covered their mouths with their hands to ward off the snow and make breathing possible. Marius set off in the lead, because he knew the way, and marched on with his head bent low, snatching a painful glance ahead of him now and then. Agnethe followed close after him in his tracks. Neither of them could see normally or hear anything but the howling of the wind, and their sense of touch was numbed by cold. When the senses are numbed, a mental numbness cannot be avoided. In this state they went on and on, yard by yard into the wilderness, thinking no farther ahead than the next step and the one after that. They climbed with that thoughtless stubbornness, against all reason, which is often the mainspring of great deeds: Marius driven on by his own compelling conscience, and Agnethe by her sympathy and love.

  When they came to the bluff they could see the loom of it above them through the snow-mist; but even Marius had to hesitate before he could find the boulder where Jan had been laid. Everything was changed. The fresh snowfall and the high wind had made new drifts, exposed new rocks and hidden others. The boulde
r which had stood conspicuously clear of the surface was almost buried, and in the lee of it, where the open hole had been, there was now a smooth windswept surface. The puzzle of why the Mandal men had found nothing there was solved: there was nothing whatever to be seen. Yet Marius felt certain of his bearings. He was sure he had found the right boulder, and that Jan could not have moved, and that therefore, his body was buried far down below that virgin surface. He took off his skis and went down on his knees in the soft snow and began to dig. He scratched the snow away with his hands. Agnethe crouched beside him in an agony of cold. She was exhausted.

  When Marius had dug away three feet of snow, the rest collapsed into a cavity underneath, and he knew he was right. He cleared it away, and saw Jan’s ghastly waxen face below him. The eyes were shut, and the head was covered with rime.

  “Don’t look,” he said to Agnethe. “He’s dead.”

  At the sound of his voice, Jan stirred.

  “I’m not dead, damn you,” he said, in a feeble voice but with every sign of indignation.

  Then he opened his eyes, and saw the astounded face of Marius peering down at him, and he grinned.

  “You can’t kill an old fox,” he said.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  BURIED ALIVE