Emergency in Alaska

by Dianne Drake

  Alaska…Well, that was another gamble, wasn’t it? One thing was for sure—he was going to tackle it with better maps than he had. Of course, with a good map in hand he wouldn’t have met Alek, or at least met her in the way he had. “Maybe I’ll skip the map and let the pretty lady come to my rescue more often,” he said, glancing up at Baranoff Pass looming ahead of him. Because, map or not, he was going to marry Alek. She didn’t know it, and it was going to take some work to convince her she was worth it. But he would do it. How wasn’t a given yet, but…Up ahead. A movement. He squinted his eyes against the glare of the sun reflected off the west side of the massive Baranoff, and what he saw took almost a full second to register. Avalanche! It was a gentle slide, not at all what he would have expected. Almost like a wave…a great, white sweep of the slope sliding its way off the face and down over the pass.

  Michael stared transfixed for another second as the snow continued its slide, then put the Jeep in gear, made a wide circle on the road, and raced back to Elkhorn, alternately trying his cell phone, which didn’t transmit, and looking around him for any signs of another traveler.

  But he was alone. And the slide was gaining momentum by the second.

  “She’ll need an X-ray,” Alek told Eyanna, one of the nurses. “Just the elbow, although I don’t think it’s broken.”

  Ludmilla Popovich gave Alek an angry frown. “It’s broken, young lady. I know a broken bone when I feel one.” Ludmilla was nearly ninety now, and heartier than most people half her age. But she’d taken a tumble on the ice that morning. Of course, she’d gone to the mercantile afterward, darned a pair of woolen mukluks and baked a cake before she’d come to the clinic for a check. Priorities. And a sore elbow wasn’t a priority in the life of Ludmilla. “And I want a sling. Can’t be bothered with anything else.”

  Alek nodded, smiling. Life was normal again. That was probably a good thing, but she missed Michael already. That would pass, though. In time, it would pass, or at least dull. “And a sling you’ll have,” she told the old woman.

  As Eyanna rolled Ludmilla down the hall in an olden wooden wheelchair, Alek looked out the front window in time to see Michael speed up to the front of the hospital and not come to a stop until he was well into the yard area. It was the outside pole light that stopped him, when he ran right over it. “What the…?”

  Dropping her chart onto the table under the window, she ran to the clinic’s front door, only to find Michael already inside and running down the hall. “What are you doing?” she shouted at him.

  “Avalanche!” he gasped.

  Not uncommon. Especially in the mountains…or the foothills. “Where?” she asked, not overly concerned since no one around here lived in an area where an avalanche would be expected.

  “Baranoff Pass,” he choked out. “Headed for the road over the pass, I think.”

  “Are you sure?” she gasped. “I’ve just had a snowboarding casualty in from up there.” Her head immediately started swimming with the possibilities…more snowboarders, for starters. And where there were snowboarders there were snowmobilers.

  He nodded. “It’s what I saw, but I’ve never been up there….”

  Without another word Alek broke into a run and didn’t stop until she was standing on the front porch of Dimitri’s cabin, with Michael standing behind her. “I’m going to have him start the alert,” she called to Michael. “You go on back to my cabin and start getting my emergency packs from the shed out back.” She took a deep breath. “How long?”

  He glanced at his watch. “Less than five minutes.”

  She nodded. They were still on the good side of the time clock. At fifteen minutes things would start to shift, however. “Everything’s marked and ready, so just get it out.”

  Michael nodded, then ran across the street as Alek pounded on Dimitri’s door. Her first knocks brought no response so she opened the door. “Dimitri, Maggie!”

  No response again, so she stepped inside, took a look around, then exited, perplexed. Maggie had a surgery in two hours so they couldn’t have gone far. She looked up and down the street as she ran toward her cabin, and people who’d heard about the avalanche were beginning to wander out of their houses to get organized. They knew the timeline, too, and it didn’t take long to get a rescue response under way. “I’m going up on first response,” she shouted at Mariska, who was running up the street after her. “Call Walter, and see if he can find someone to get up in the air.” Normally, that’s what she did while Dimitri went out, but Dimitri wasn’t here and she didn’t have time to hunt him down.

  “I’ve already made the calls,” Mariska yelled breathlessly, as she followed Alek around the cabin. “Eyanna’s on the shortwave right now, trying to find out if we have casualties up there.”

  “When Dimitri comes back, which he should as soon as he hears about it, tell him I’m going in with my team, and Michael’s going in with me. Dimitri should be on radio, so let him know, unless he hears from me, not to come up but to stay put and handle the casualties we send down.” She glanced at her watch. According to Michael’s timeline, they were at seven minutes.

  “How are we getting there?” Michael asked, bringing the last of the emergency packs out of the shed. Before Alek could answer, Mariska pulled the tarpaulin off the dogsled next to the shed and started piling on the packs while Alek began to hitch up the team.

  “Have you ever done an avalanche response?” Alek asked him. “Outside of teaching it, I mean. Have you ever gone on a rescue?”

  He nodded. “But not the first response.”

  “Well, I’m going in by sled, and you go by snow machine. Stay wide of me and let me lead since I know the way.” She tilted back her Cossack cap and looked up at him, her eyes filled with worry. “Baranoff’s not normally unstable, but we’ve had fluctuating weather so there’s no telling what we’re going to get into.” She grabbed a pack from the pile and handed it to him, along with a collapsible probe pole. “That’s your basic equipment—shovel, transmitter, AvaLung…” A vest device with an emergency breathing apparatus that would allow air to be extracted from the snow for up to an hour through a breathing tube, if all conditions were optimal.

  He nodded without saying anything as he strapped on his pack and piled his equipment onto the snowmobile. Then, before he climbed on, he pulled Alek into his arms and held her for a instant. “See you up at the top,” he said roughly.

  “Up at the top,” she replied. She hesitated, then pulled his face down for a brief kiss. “And down at the bottom afterward.” Then she put on her goggles, tugged up a scarf to cover her mouth, hopped on her sled and was off. Her dogs were trained to short, verbal commands, and as she shouted “Forward!” she looked back over her shoulder at Michael. She did love him so much.

  She’d done this before. Many, many times. Sometimes things turned out well, sometimes they didn’t. Most often, though, the victims were novices in the snow, people who didn’t recognize the warning signs…precipitation, wind, a weak snow layer, unstable settlement. Sometimes they were people who did know the snow but either got sloppy, too confident or simply played the odds. Baranoff wasn’t as predictable as it once had been…Alaska was warming, great ice floes were breaking up, mountains of snow like Baranoff were giving way. “We’ve got time,” she said as the dogs pulled her efficiently and quickly along the snow-packed trail to the north, barking their excitement at the expedition.

  Alek glanced back to see Michael keeping up—he was driving in a wide sweep out to the side and slightly behind her, so as not to distract the dogs. And to stay far enough away that if the avalanche progressed, or a new one started, he would be out of the sweep that would catch her. He waved at her once, then surged behind a clump of pines, and she held her breath until she could see him again. More than she’d ever known could be possible, Michael was in her heart.

  He was her heart, and later, when this was all over, she would tell him.

  As her lead husky barked his warning of an upco
ming tree, Alek shifted her focus abruptly to the rescue and gave the command for the team to turn. By the time they reached Baranoff, others would be mobilized, and an air team would have been deployed, probably from Nome. “Right,” she shouted to her dogs, who made the next turn without a waver. Michael made the same turn a little way back, and as Baranoff loomed ahead of them, Alek went over the procedures in her mind—start with a beacon-guided search, then do a surface and scuff search, meaning look for signs of life or anything that would indicate someone has been through there recently. She and Michael would walk the area in a zigzag path until other help arrived, then they would do parallel sweeps, back and forth. “Other help,” she choked. Dear God, she hoped that wouldn’t be necessary.

  Ahead, she could see the great Baranoff casting its shadow. It was the divide that separated the Arctic from the sub-Arctic, and she’d loved to come up here with Dimitri when she’d been a child. She’d loved it best when the sun dipped below the horizon and the glow of the evening shone like glitter scattered across all the snowy mountain peaks that could be seen only from the top of Baranoff. It was a golden world, filled with a child’s amazement over how the white snow could take on such a new, vibrant life in blues and pinks and golds, and she’d always begged Dimitri to build her a house up here so she could always look out over this world she considered all her own, and never, ever have to come down.

  Right now, though, Baranoff was ugly, and the closer she got the more her stomach lurched. Finally, when she’d reached the base and knew the rest of the way in was by foot, she climbed off the sled, ran to the bush line and immediately started a visual scan, along with homing in her transceiver, hoping that if anyone had been up here, they’d been smart enough to carry a transmitter.

  “We’re still on good time,” Michael said, running up behind her. “Less than fifteen minutes since I saw it. So are you ready to go in?”

  Alek gave him a grim nod, never once taking her eyes off the snow field ahead. She was already searching for any sign that someone needed to be rescued. “Over there,” she said, pointing to an area that was parallel to the road running through the pass. “Something in the snow.” As she said that, her stomach gave another lurch.

  Michael pulled up his binoculars and took a look. “Can’t tell for sure. It might be a ski pole, or maybe something shiny off a snowboard or snowmobile. It’s metallic, but there’s not much…”

  Before his words were out, Alek was making her way across by foot. Halfway to the object, she turned to find Michael coming up from another direction. They converged on the spot at the same time.

  “Snowmobile,” she said, looking down at the blade. It wasn’t buried deeply, and she dropped to her knees to scoop away the snow. “Begin a pinpoint search, using the snow-mobile as your start position.” A pinpoint search involved sweeping the transceiver over the snow from side to side, back and forth. “And I’m going to do a spot probe.” Probing areas where victims might have escaped to, such places as the base of a tree or nearby rock. In the distance, the sound of emerging rescue teams split the unnatural stillness of the area, but Alek didn’t take her focus off digging through the snow at the snowmobile in case someone was buried down there.

  “I’m not going to lose you,” Michael said quietly, as he set his transceiver to maximum volume. “I know this isn’t the time, Alek, but I’m not going to lose you.”

  She looked up long enough to smile, then went back to her work. “You’re not going to lose me, Michael,” she said, scooping away the snow. “I promise, you’re not…” What she saw on the side of the buried iron dog choked away the rest of her words. Iron Doc.

  This was Dimitri’s snowmobile.

  “Are you getting a signal?” she choked, backing away and gentling her probe pole down into the snow.

  “Nothing.”

  “How much time?”

  “Just a little over fifteen. I think we’re probably still okay, but…” He turned around and saw that Alek’s face was as white as the snow. “What?” he asked.

  She pointed to the snowmobile. “Dimitri’s.”

  “Are you sure?”

  She nodded, too numb to speak.

  If Dimitri was out here, then his mother…Michael swallowed back a hard lump in his throat. “Listen, sweetheart. We’re going to find them. Just expand your search.” At a time when he needed to be closer to Alek, to pull her into his arms and hold her, he stepped even further away. This was no time to quit, no time to slow down. In another fifteen minutes the odds would be against a rescue and the rescue would, without a spoken order, turn to a body recovery. “Do what you do, Alek. Don’t think about anything but the rescue. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” she whispered, pulling out her probe then putting it back in another spot.

  Two minutes later, after crisscrossing a wide span of the immediate search field without any luck, they moved their search north and did the same. By the time they’d moved on to the third, then fourth fields, other rescuers were already joining the search, stretching out in the areas he and Alek had not yet covered. Friends, strangers, old, young…When the word went out, nobody hung back. Those who couldn’t search stayed on the ready with warm blankets and hot drinks that seemed to materialize from nowhere; those who could search simply did what they knew how to do without being told. Amazing teamwork—something he’d never taught in his classes, or experienced in person.

  But it was that teamwork that would rescue his mother and Dimitri. He trusted that, and counted on it. Michael glanced at his watch. Time was critical now.

  “The whole area of the slide is relatively small in circumference,” Ivan Petrovich, Mariska’s husband, shouted as he approached Michael. “I’ve heard from the pilot that there’s no sign of life, at least not from the air.”

  Michael nodded as he looked back at the snowmobile. Alek was still searching, but she had circled out now, meaning she’d given up hope that Dimitri was near the snowmobile. “Come on, Maggie. Don’t do this to me,” he choked as he continued, one slow, cautious step at a time, listening, listening…

  Alek stopped for a second to survey the area. Right now, at least fifty people were walking the same steps, doing the same probe, and word was out that Dimitri might be buried, which made the efforts even more frantic. And with Dimitri…Alek chanced a glance at Michael. He knew Maggie would be with Dimitri, but he hadn’t said a word. Instead, he’d continued like everyone else, intent in what they were doing and determined to bring this to a good end. Except they were drastically out of time now.

  “It’s Dimitri,” she told herself as she turned in a full circle. “Dimitri…” Raising her hand to visor her eyes, Alek looked at the little ledge where they’d picnicked at times. It was an easy climb, but to a young girl, it had seemed an awesome one because it had seemed so high. She’d towered over the world up there, and the two of them would spend the afternoon playing chess, of all things. They would eat sandwiches and play, sometimes well into the evening, and afterward she’d always…

  Alek sucked in a sharp breath. She’d always climbed down the ledge into the tiny cave—one that fit her and barely fit Dimitri. “Michael!” she shouted. “Over there.” She pointed to the area underneath the ledge as she started to trudge through the snow.

  “What?” he shouted.

  “The cave. I think they’re in the cave.” Packed in by the snow and possibly suffocating!

  Michael reached the cave before she did, as did several of the men, and they were busy digging with their hands by the time she fell to her knees in the snow in the shadow of the ledge and shut her eyes to pray. If they weren’t here…There was a shout and a renewed flurry of activity near the cave. Then more indistinct yelling.

  “They’ve found him! He’s in there with Maggie,” Michael called. “He’s shouting something awful,” he said a few seconds later. “Something about not leaving here without his buzhenina.”

  “They’ve found him?” she whispered, her voice trembling.


  “Almost. They’re in there, and Dimitri is being rather vocal about directing his rescue. So, what is this buzhenina he refuses to leave?”

  Alek took in a deep, ragged breath, pushed back her Cossack cap and fell into Michael’s arms. “A ham,” she said, as the tears started to flow. “He must have gone over the pass to Elim Ost’s to get a ham.”

  “On a snowmobile with my mother?”

  “That’s the best way to get there.” She swiped at her tears and laughed in relief. “A stupid ham.”

  Five minutes later she was still in Michael’s arms as first Maggie and then Dimitri were carried from the cave. Michael ran to his mother as Alek ran to Dimitri, who was clutching his buzhenina with one hand and waving to his rescuers with the other, as if he was on parade. He was probably already telling the tales of his day in the avalanche. As a round of cheers went up, Alek gave Dimitri a kiss on the forehead, tugged on his beard affectionately, as she’d done when she’d been a child, then returned to the search field in case anyone else was buried. The hard tears she wanted to cry would come later, but right now there was work to be done. Halfway back to the area, Michael caught up to her, took her mittened hand in his, and they went on, together.

  This was the fifth time she’d heard the story, but she wanted to hear it again and again. Sitting here next to the hearth wrapped in Michael’s arms, listening to Dimitri tell the tale and watching him hold on to Maggie…Alek let out a contented sigh because she was contented. No one else had been involved. No injuries, no deaths. Everyone was safe and all was well.

  “It was the crack,” Dimitri boomed. “If you’ve lived your life here like I have, you know what it means.” He chuckled. “It means run like hell. And that damn iron dog just wouldn’t back down there fast enough. So we did what you’re supposed to do. We got off, stayed on the high slope and ran across to the side. I always knew Alek’s cave was good for something.”