The Missing Barbegazi

by H. S. Norup

  For my three favourite skiers

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  MONDAY, 26TH DECEMBER

  1 Tessa

  2 Gawion

  TUESDAY, 27TH DECEMBER

  3 Tessa

  4 Gawion

  5 Tessa

  6 Tessa

  7 Gawion

  8 Tessa

  9 Gawion

  10 Tessa

  11 Gawion

  WEDNESDAY, 28TH DECEMBER

  12 Tessa

  13 Gawion

  14 Tessa

  15 Gawion

  16 Tessa

  17 Gawion

  18 Tessa

  THURSDAY, 29TH DECEMBER

  19 Tessa

  20 Gawion

  21 Tessa

  22 Tessa

  23 Gawion

  24 Tessa

  25 Gawion

  FRIDAY, 30TH DECEMBER

  26 Gawion

  27 Tessa

  28 Tessa

  29 Professor Bahne

  30 Tessa

  31 Gawion

  32 Tessa

  33 Professor Bahne

  SATURDAY, 31ST DECEMBER

  34 Tessa

  35 Gawion

  36 Tessa

  37 Gawion

  38 Tessa

  39 Gawion

  40 Tessa

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  MONDAY, 26TH DECEMBER

  —1—

  Tessa aimed her binoculars at the white blanket of new snow, searching for a barbegazi. The T-bar lift pulled her uphill, along the boundary of the ski area, as she scanned the mountains on the far side of the gorge. Her skis wobbled over a bump, and the eyepiece knocked against her cheekbone. She winced, but kept her eyes fixed on a crevice, from where small chunks of snow were rolling down the smooth white slope. Had they been loosened by a barbegazi?

  She itched to ski beyond the prepared slopes to get closer. But that was impossible. A blizzard had raged over Christmas Day, and the avalanche warning was high. Today, not even the craziest skiers braved the dangerous off-piste. Yet.

  Tessa’s view of the crevice became a grey blur when the lift dragged her into a cloud. Annoyed, she lowered the binoculars, and let them dangle from their strap. Everything beyond the red trousers and green jackets of her ski-club teammates on the T-bars in front vanished in the mist. The clamminess chilled her, and she pushed her long brown plaits back, snuggled into her soft fleece and thought about the barbegazi. If only she could find their caves in the snow, and see them surf on avalanches.

  When she emerged above the cloud, stray snowflakes glittered in the sun, filling the air with magic gold dust. The brightness blinded her. She tugged down the goggles on her helmet until they protected her eyes.

  Empty T-bars swung back and forth where the other two eleven-year-old girls from the racing team waited. While dismounting the lift, Tessa tried to jam the binoculars into her pocket.

  “Looking for fairies again?” Maria called out.

  “They’re not fairies,” Tessa mumbled through the glove she had in her mouth, while she closed the zipper on her bulky pocket. She hoped Coach wouldn’t notice. “They’re—”

  “Whatever.” Maria exchanged a glance with Lisa. “It’s not like anyone’s ever seen one. Or will.”

  “My opa has.” Tessa pointed with her ski pole towards the gully, on the other side of the T-bar lift. “It rescued him down—”

  “Nobody believed your grandfather.”

  Her throat tightened, at Maria’s harsh interruption.

  “Everyone knows they’re extinct, Tessa.” Lisa’s tone was friendlier than Maria’s. Perhaps she was also remembering Opa’s funeral.

  Not trusting her voice to sound steady, Tessa just shook her head.

  “Oh my God, Tessa.” Maria waved her arms wildly and pointed towards the mountainside beyond the gully. “Look! Quick.”

  Was something moving up there again? Tessa couldn’t help turning.

  “I thought they were extinct. But, no, I see one. It’s a…” Maria drew a long, deep breath. “A-a-a… T. rex!”

  Both she and Lisa exploded into fits of giggles.

  “Very funny,” Tessa muttered. Hidden behind the goggles, tears welled up in her eyes. “Don’t wait. I need the loo,” she said, trying not to sound choked up, and she started gliding over to the mountain hut.

  Still giggling, Maria set off, and Lisa followed her new best friend.

  The lump in Tessa’s throat grew. She didn’t need the toilet, and she didn’t really care what they thought. She missed Opa so much her chest hurt. The pain pulsed into her heart as if all the blood in her body was trying to fill an Opa-shaped hole. No wonder Oma was ill, if this kind of pain was attacking her weak heart.

  Tessa stopped and looked back to where Maria had pointed for her dinosaur prank. Above it, by a rocky outcrop, a small movement caught her eye. She gasped. Something white was bouncing up the snowy slope, then disappeared behind the rock. It definitely wasn’t a skier. Could it be a barbegazi?

  Without taking her eyes off the outcrop, she fish-boned her way back up the slope, past the swinging T-bars and the top station of the lift. Here, on the crest of Kapall, orange netting barred the way out onto the ridge and the untamed part of the mountains. Tessa tried looking through the binoculars, but the outcrop obstructed her view of where she’d seen the creature last. If she could just get a bit nearer…

  A ski-route-closed sign warned of alpine danger. Tessa checked to make sure that none of her teammates were looking. If anyone saw her ski off-piste in these conditions, Coach would ban her from training, and Mum would lock her skis away for ever.

  And she wasn’t going to ski off-piste. Not really. The first stretch of the ski route, through the gully and into the gorge, was almost flat, and she’d turn back as soon as she’d had a peek behind that outcrop.

  With a last glance back, she squeezed through a gap between the nets, and out into the deep snow.

  The wind had blown most of the snow away from the top of the ridge, and Tessa glided effortlessly along the flat surface. More of the crevice behind the outcrop came into view. To gain a better perspective, she planted her poles into the snow and stepped nearer to the edge. She looked through her binoculars.

  There was a blurry spot on one of the lenses. Without taking off her glove, she rummaged in her pocket for a tissue, and one of the lens covers fell out. Instinctively, Tessa leant down to grab it.

  Under her sudden, shifting weight, the ground beneath her right ski disappeared, as the snow overhang she had edged onto broke apart. A reflex sent both her arms outwards, to help her balance. The binocular-strap jerked at her neck as she let go of them. Tessa threw all her weight onto her left ski, but it was sliding sideways towards the drop… then stopped with a screech, on a flat rock that was sticking out of the snow.

  Tessa’s breaths came in sharp gulps. She balanced on her left leg. It shook with the effort.

  Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. How many times had Opa told her to watch out for overhangs after a storm?

  Below her hovering right ski, the bulk of snow she’d released was now tumbling down the mountainside, gathering speed and volume, and growing into a mini avalanche.

  When she lowered her right leg, only a narrow strip of the ski rested on solid ground. She’d not slid far, but her ski poles were beyond reach. What could she do?

  If she jumped the drop and landed on both feet, she could ski down the steep slope. She’d done it before with Opa. Though not from this height. Not with this much new snow. And never alone.

  Instead, with the carefulness of a tightrope walker, she shifted her weight to
the right ski, testing its hold on the rock. It held. In slow motion, she lifted the left ski a tiny bit and pushed it left. She balanced, shifted her weight and continued, lifting one ski at a time, very slowly inching away from the edge.

  When she had made it to the other side of her ski poles, she collapsed on the snow, sobbing. Her whole body quivered. Only now did she dare to think what might have happened if both her skis had been on the overhang.

  After Tessa stopped shaking, she hauled herself back to the ski area. By the barrier nets, she paused and looked back at the outcrop. Had she imagined the movement earlier, or really seen a barbegazi?

  As she turned round, she collided with a tall man in a white ski outfit, a white helmet and mirrored goggles, who was pushing through the gap in the nets. He grabbed her arm.

  “Watch where you’re going,” he snarled, his teeth gritted below a pale wispy moustache, which was so thin it looked like a pair of frowning eyebrows.

  “Sorry.” Tessa wrenched her jacket out of his hold.

  The man skied along the ridge, past the breach Tessa had made in the overhang, before he disappeared down the steep decline into the gully.

  All in white. How stupid. No one would ever find him if he got caught in an avalanche.

  —2—

  Gawion was too hungry and too warm to wait for the avalanche any longer. He left his sister below the most unstable-looking snow cornice, and traversed the steep mountainside to their cave entrance. After wrapping his long beard round his neck three times, he dived down into the hole and propelled himself through the narrow snow tunnel. His enormous foot got stuck when he forgot to twist it at a bend, but two paddling kicks soon enlarged the tunnel and freed his foot. He arrived home, sliding on his belly.

  “Ahh, it is awfully nice and chilly in here,” he said. His eyes adjusted to the dim light, and he hurried over to the huge chunk of glacier ice in the centre of the cosy cave. Pointing his feet outward, he leant his whole body against it to absorb the coldness. Papa sat on a smaller cube of ice around the other side, with Liel on his knees. They both stretched their furry hands towards the blue ice. Gawion had once sneaked down to the village after dark and seen humans sit in exactly the same way in front of flames.

  Next, he lay down on his back and shuffled the soles of his long feet up to the glacier ice cooler. Only the claws on the ends of his toes stuck out above it.

  “Gawion!” his mother screeched. “You have soiled my newly snowed floor.”

  “Sorry, Maman.” He began picking up the pine needles and moss that had come off his fur and dirtied the floor.

  With a swish, Maman swung her long beard over her shoulder, so she would not stumble on it, and marched back into the eating cave. Gawion followed her, hungry as always. This smaller cave was closest to the rock face, and the cascading icicles of a frozen waterfall decorated the back wall. He threw the dirt into a crack between the snowy floor and the gleaming ice.

  Gawion scooped a handful of snow out of the wall next to the waterfall—his favourite flavour of snow inside the cluster of linked caves—and stuffed it into his mouth. The tiny crystals prickled his tongue. He munched and sucked on them with loud smacking noises. This snow had the delicious taste of a particularly icy snowstorm.

  “Are there any raspberries?” he asked.

  “Stop talking with your mouth full.” Maman sighed. She looked tired, and her eyes had a faint, sun-coloured tint around their sky-blue centre. “We are out of raspberries. You can have one blackberry.”

  She carefully removed the shard of ice in front of their berry store, picked a large one from the tiny pile inside, and popped it into his mouth. Gawion savoured it, sucking on the hard, frozen lump until it dissolved into the tart juice of a not-quite-ripe forest blackberry.

  “Where is Maegorodiel?” she asked, glancing over his head into the other cave.

  “Waiting for an avalanche,” Gawion said. “Only, I was hungry…”

  “How could you leave her? There might still be humans about!”

  “Maman, we are one-hundred-and-fifty-four years old.”

  Just then they heard a shrill whistle. A loud rumble followed it, and flakes fell from the ceiling. Finally, the avalanche he had been waiting for. And he had missed it.

  “Potzblitz! Why is Maeg always lucky?” As usual, he should have listened to his twin sister.

  Maman had closed the berry store, so he returned to the main cave, where Liel nestled into Papa’s beard.

  Gawion could not be bothered getting fresh snow for the floor, so he swept his foot sideways, hiding the remaining pine needles, while he looked over his shoulder to check his mother was not watching.

  “Papa, tell the story of how you escaped from the zoo,” Liel murmured, half asleep.

  From somewhere outside, three piercing whistles could be heard. The third whistle was cut off and lacked the urgency of the first two, but left no doubt this was a desperate cry for help.

  “Maeg!” Maman screamed.

  Papa sprang up. Liel toppled over, hit the ice cooler and began wailing. Gawion scrambled through the tunnel behind Papa.

  Outside, the trail of a huge avalanche stretched out below them, all the way into the gorge the humans called “Schöngraben”. A few times they had dug human corpses out of avalanches there, and he had wondered why naming a place something that sounded like “beautiful grave” had not been sufficient warning.

  Gawion chased his father down the mountain, surfing on the snow. They swerved on overhangs, hoping they might start new avalanches to carry them downwards even faster. Where they reached the end of the avalanche’s long tongue, the ground flattened. An assortment of boulders lay scattered in front of it, like gigantic, frozen blackberries spat from the mouth of the gully. They whistled for Maeg while they searched underneath and around each one. The snow posed no danger to Maeg, but if she had somehow hit her head on a boulder… That was what Papa said, at least. Gawion wondered how Maeg could have whistled the emergency signal if she had been knocked out, and how she could have been knocked out in the first place. She was even better than him at surfing the avalanches.

  Papa’s whistling calls moved farther away from Gawion as they continued their search. Gawion had no problems seeing in the dark, but, trying to look everywhere at once, he stumbled into a hollow in the snow.

  He sniffed, smelling all the different snow types the avalanche had carried. There was a whiff of thawing spring snow too—the sweet scent of Maeg.

  “Maeg, where are you?” he called, and began digging.

  But then his large nose caught something else. A pungent stench that gave him a scalding, trickling sensation down his spine. The snow around him reeked of iron.

  He whistled for Papa to come, while he groped around in the loose snow. When Papa appeared, he had just found a handful of barbegazi fur.

  Without speaking, he handed it to his father.

  Papa gasped and said, “She has been taken, I fear.”

  FROM HABITS & HABITATS: A HISTORIC ACCOUNT OF ALPINE ELVES BY PROFES SOR, DR EBERHART LUDWIG FRITZ BAHNE

  Barbegazi are mountain elves, although humans often mistake them for dwarfs, due to their short, stout stature. A mature barbegazi of approximately three hundred years in age can reach a height of 1.2 metres, roughly the size of an average seven-year-old. Fully grown, they weigh around ten kilograms—less than half that of a similar-sized human child.

  This lightness and low density, combined with their enormous feet, enable them to “surf” on avalanches.

  TUESDAY, 27TH DECEMBER

  —3—

  Tessa had forgotten to get her skis serviced. Again. So she began the training session with Coach on a bad note.

  If him yelling “Those skis’d better be like new tomorrow or you can take them down to the sawmill, borrow a chainsaw, turn them into splinters, make a bonfire in your garden and forget about the race on Saturday!” without taking a breath could be called merely a bad note.

  Tessa just sta
red at the ground. The race meant nothing to her any more. Yesterday, when Aunt Annie dropped off some homemade goulash soup, she’d overheard her talking to Mum about Oma. Mum had cried. From the gap left open by the kitchen door, Tessa had glimpsed Mum’s thin, convulsing shoulders as she was embraced by Aunt Annie’s pudgy arms.

  “What if she gives up?” Mum sobbed. “This article I read said if one spouse dies, the other might lose the will to go on. Especially around Christmas.”

  Aunt Annie murmured something that Tessa couldn’t hear because blood was pounding in her ears and surging towards her chest. The thought of having two holes to try and fill in her heart made her run to her room, and hide in the soft fluff of her pillow.

  “Your turn, Miss My-head’s-in-the-clouds,” Coach yelled. “And stay active. Bend your knees. Don’t sit like you’re at a tea party.”

  Tessa nodded, without looking up, and got into starting position between the long stakes that marked the beginning of the training course. She planted her poles into the snow and leant back, flexing her knee and hip joints, tensing her muscles. On the piste in front of her, giant slalom gates were positioned in a colourful zigzag.

  “Three, two, one, go!”

  At “Go” Tessa catapulted herself forward and pushed off with both poles three times. Then she crouched, and, shifting her weight, raced through the maze of red and blue gates.

  “Knees, Tessa!” Coach shouted from behind.

  The dull metal edges of her skis had little hold on the snow, and she slid sideways in the turns. Cold air slipped under the rim of Tessa’s helmet, whistling in her ears. If only she could hear a barbegazi whistle. Opa had told her they whistled warnings, signalling avalanches.

  A figure in green stood waving their arms just ahead of her. Tessa canted her skis, sending a shower of powdery snow over Karen, the assistant coach, who’d stopped her in the middle of the run.

  “Wake up, Tessa! The U12 competition will be tough this year. You need to up your game. Like Lisa and Maria.” When Karen shook her head, fine white dust fell from her striped, knitted hat.