by Jeff Long
was surprised. The climber was a boy, no older than himself.
But even from twenty yards away, the young climber's eyes were too bright and his
clothes were rags, what was left of them, and on his knees in that limbo of gray light
Abe thought he looked more like the Lazarus of his grandmother's worn leather King
James than a mere teenager in the wilderness.
The rescuers slowed their mechanical pace, intimidated by the strange sight. His
jacket was gone and his sweater half off. Now Abe saw that the boy had pulled the
clothing away himself. He had started to bare himself to the wilderness.
'You're okay now,' someone offered to the climber. But there was no trust in the
climber's look, no welcome, certainly no relief. He didn't speak.
Abe saw that his white T-shirt was soaked in blood and that his left shoulder bulged
with a dislocation. His left hand clutched a short ice axe, and with the blood on its
silver pick, the axe looked like a medieval weapon.
The rescuers formed a wide circle around the young climber as if they had brought
something dangerous to bay. His black hair hung clotted with snow and he had wolf
eyes, blue and timid, and he'd been weeping.
'Hey there.' Someone's cold voice.'We got you now.'
'You want to lay down that axe there?' another rescuer tried. His voice was too loud,
and it struck Abe, they were afraid of this boy.
The way the climber stared through them, Abe felt like a ghost. The boy didn't lay
down his axe. Its handle lay loose in his gloved hand, a green wrist strap in place. Abe
guessed the axe was responsible for the long, seeping gash in his opposite arm.
While the climber knelt in their center – mute now, seeming deaf, too – they
discussed him, diagnosing his wounds and trying to understand what had made him so
empty and menacing. But to Abe's ear, they were simply diagnosing their own fear.
'What do you think?' one of the rescuers asked another. 'Hypothermia?'
'Maybe concussed. Probably. I don't see a helmet.'
'One way or the other, he's about as gone as they get.'
'Well what we need's his second,' the leader got on with it. 'Where's your second at,
boy?'
Getting no answer, the leader turned away. 'Joe,' he said, 'take some men and hunt
around. There's got to be a body somewhere. Maybe it hung up higher on a rock or
what have you.' The one named Joe patted three men on their helmets and they
started up.
The two men by Abe's side continued their evaluation. 'I don't see frostbite. A
puncture wound on the right thigh, though. And look at the inside of his hand. It's cut
to the bone.'
At last they noticed the rope tied to his waist harness. It was a beautiful blue rope
with red hatching and it led directly into the hole. Abe saw the pink blood marks in the
snow and recognized that the climber had stripped his hand raw pulling on the rope.
'Now we'll just take it from here, son,' said a man with brushy sideburns. He edged
close and gently reached for the blue rope. With a howl, the boy reacted, swinging his
axe in a wild arc. He missed goring the rescuer by an inch.
And then they heard a voice.
Dreamlike, it called from far away. It could have come from another valley or from
the top of the mountains. Or the bottom of a crevasse. 'Daniel?' it said.
'Oh dear God,' one of the rescuers breathed.
The leader whistled loud and sharp, and uphill Joe and the others came to a halt.
'Down here,' the leader shouted. 'We found the other one.'
'Daniel?' someone said. 'Is that your name, Daniel?'
The boy looked at them with a mask of pure horror.
'Daniel,' the rescuer pressed him. 'Is that your buddy down there?'
Daniel squeezed his eyes shut and tipped back his head. His lips curled back from his
teeth and he opened his throat to the sky. What came out was a terrible wrenching
groan, something from a nightmare. Then his rib cage spasmed with huge, hoarse
sobs.
Abe's mouth fell open at the climber's pain.
While the climber did his weeping, two of the rescuers rushed him from behind and
took away his axe. They were gentle, but he was strong and they ended up jostling his
disjointed shoulder and he screamed.
'Daniel,' the tiny voice called out from the crevasse.
This time they heard it more distinctly and it nearly caved in Abe's heart. Someone
among the rescuers whispered 'no.' Except for that there was silence for a minute.
Even the mourning climber fell mute.
'Are you all right?' asked the voice.
It was a woman down there.
'What the hell?' someone demanded. Now their pity hardened. Abe saw them grow
blunt. Astounded. Their gentleness was gone.
'You brought a girl up here?'
The climber turned his eyes away from them and stared blankly at the hole in the
snow.
'All right, boys.' The leader finally rallied them. 'That storm's not going away. Let's
do our job.'
It was one thing to disarm the boy, they discovered, something else to separate him
from his blue rope. He didn't want to relinquish that bond with the voice from below.
He held on to the rope with his good hand, the one with the mutilated palm. But once
they had tied it off to an ice screw and cut the blue knot, Daniel gave up and seemed
to go somewhere else in his mind.
He knelt there, unbudging, as if his legs were bound to the very mountain. In a
sense, they were. They learned this for themselves when they lifted Daniel and laid
him flat on the snow and ran their hands up and down his body. Both of his knees
were shattered, both femurs fractured. Daniel seemed not to care. He seemed dead
within his own body.
Abe stood back as the team frantically raced against the storm. Over where they'd
laid the boy, two men labored at piecing the halves of the litter together and several
arranged ropes for the carry out. Two more knelt over Daniel, fitting his legs with air
splints from the Vietnam War and taping his arm across his chest. They weren't
exactly rough, but they weren't gentle either. They didn't try to reduce the shoulder,
just stuck him with a hit of morphine.
Abe was staggered by the dire scene, by the blood and unhinged bones and the dark
clouds and the voice in the hole. Several men set to work with the blue rope.
'We're the rescue, miss,' one called down into the crevasse. If she said anything in
return, no one heard it, not with the wind mounting and the frenzied shouting and the
clank of gear. A man hauled out long hanks of blue rope until it came taut. They
tugged on the line experimentally.
'She's down there probably seventy, eighty feet,' guessed the man with the hanks of
blue rope in his hand.
'Get her the hell out,' the leader called over. 'And be quick.'
Abe went over to help. Bending to take up the blue rope, he noticed it was smeared
with gore, what had once been Daniel's flesh and blood. For the next five minutes he
and the other men yanked and hauled on the rope, but it was fixed in place.
'You budge, miss?' the man with sideburns shouted down the crevasse. Abe put his
head directly over the hole. A few feet below the surface, the ice showed dark green.
Below that was blackness and Abe turned his
eyes away quickly, as if the darkness
were obscene.
'Nothing,' said the little voice in the hole.
Abe was surprised by how clear the voice rose to him once his head was right over
it. It slid up the glass walls, distinct and free of echoes, counterpointing the building
storm.
They pulled again, and this time Abe thought there was progress, but it was only the
rope's natural stretch. 'How about that?' shouted Sideburns.
'No,' said the voice.
They tried again, this time with a complicated winch system of slings and ropes and
customized equipment. When that produced no results they tried a different
configuration of parts and pulled again. Again it didn't work. She was jammed.
'How about it Ted?' Sideburns asked a small man.
'I'll try,' said Ted. While a third man cut away the snow fringing the hole, Ted
shucked his jacket, then his sweater and shirts. He tied another rope around his waist
and had them lower him down the crevasse. No matter how he shimmied, though, the
ice walls were too tight. He got only about five feet down into the darkness and finally
called for them to pull him out. He shook his head no and dressed again.
'What on earth possessed him?' Sideburns said, glaring over at Daniel. 'Now look at
what it is.'
'He should have known a whole lot better,' someone agreed. 'I wonder how old she
was.' Past tense. Abe cut him a side glance, but already he was trooping off, and
Sideburns and the others were walking after him. Abe dumbly followed them, then
realized that they were indeed abandoning the effort. He halted.
'You want me to keep trying?' he said.
The men kept walking. 'She's jammed,' one pronounced.
'I can start digging,' Abe offered hopefully.
No one bothered answering him.
Abe saw how useless he was to them, illiterate in their universe of glaciers and
mountain storms and green ice. Their very language – of brake plates and 'biners and
front pointing and all the rest of it – excluded him. He felt stupid and vulnerable and
put himself to work picking up whatever litter didn't blow away.
'You,' Abe heard. The team leader had spotted him off by himself. 'Come over here.'
Abe approached. The leader handed him a small notebook and a pencil.
'I want you to go over and talk to that girl in the crevasse. Get her name, hometown,
a phone number, you know, next-of-kin kind of stuff. Don't panic her. Keep her spirits
up until we get things figured out. Can you do that?'
Abe nodded his head. He walked over to the black hole and knelt down in the
imprints left from Daniel's knees. He peered into the darkness and licked his lips,
suddenly shy.
He couldn't see this woman trapped below the surface, and she couldn't see him. All
they had were words, and Abe wondered if words could be enough. He felt like a child
talking to a blind person. Before he could speak, however, the woman spoke to him.
'Hey,' the voice called up from the darkness. 'Is everybody gone?' She didn't ask, Is
anybody there? It struck Abe that she had no expectations. None. And yet she
sounded calm and with no begrudging.
'No.' Abe cleared his throat. 'I'm here.'
'Is Daniel going to be okay?'
Abe flinched at the question. Whose was this voice that put another person's welfare
before her own? But at the same time, Abe felt relief. He reckoned that whoever it
was down there had to be comfortable and secure, otherwise she would have sounded
hysterical. Such calmness had to have a reason. Maybe she'd landed on some soft
snow down inside, or simply bounced to a stop on the end of the rope. Abe's spirits
picked up. Everything was going to be okay.
'Yes. He's fine,' Abe answered. 'What's your name?'
'Diana.'
She didn't ask for his name, but Abe told her anyway. He couldn't think of anything
else to say, then remembered what the leader wanted. 'Where are you from?' he
asked.
She said, Rock Springs.
He asked for her phone number. She gave it, but warily. When he asked her
address, she suddenly seemed to lose interest in his interrogation.
'Is that the wind, Abe?' Her voice was weary and yet alive with instincts. She knew
there was a storm building. Abe lifted his face to the cold gale. They were racing both
the storm and nightfall now. Any minute now, the others would come over and figure
out how to pull this lonely woman out of the crevasse and they could all leave the
mountain and go home.
'We'll get you out,' Abe said. 'Don't worry.' His words sounded little as they fluttered
down the hole, mere feathers. The woman didn't waste breath returning the brave
assurance and Abe felt rebuked.
'Are you hurt?' Abe asked.
'I don't know.' Her voice got small. 'Are you going to get me out?'
'Of course. That's why we came.'
'Please,' she whispered.
Abe tried to understand what that might mean.
'Is there anything you want? Maybe I can lower something.' Abe was thinking of
food or water.
'A light, please.'
Abe goggled at the simplicity of it. He tried to summon an image of being trapped
down there, but nothing came. He couldn't visualize lying caught in the glassy bowels
of the earth. 'Yes,' he said. 'I'll try.'
Abe stood and approached one of the rescuers, who eyed the hole in the snow before
parting with his headlamp. He seemed reluctant or maybe just sad, and his attitude
irritated Abe. On his return to the crevasse, Abe borrowed one of their coils of goldline
rope.
'I have a light,' Abe yelled down the crevasse. He felt more useful now. He was this
woman's sole link to the surface. Once they rescued her, she would recognize Abe by
his voice and embrace him. She would hold him tight and weep her thanks into his
shoulder.
Lying on his belly, Abe flicked the headlamp on, stretched his arm and head into the
hole and shined it down. He had thought to find the climber sitting far below at the
bottom of a rounded well shaft. Instead the crevasse presented crystal lips no wider
than a man's rib cage.
To his right and left, the crevasse stretched off into dark, terrifying rifts. Except for
this accidental hole, the crevasse was covered over with snow, perfectly concealed
from above. Forty feet down, the icy walls curved underneath where Abe was lying.
The blue rope led down and under and disappeared from sight.
'Can you see the light?' Abe shouted.
'No,' she said. 'It's dark here.'
Abe was glad to extract his arm and head from that awful hole and return to the
surface. Even those few seconds had threatened to rob his self-possession.
While Abe talked and asked questions, he tried lowering the headlamp on the
goldline rope. But the braids were new and stiff and the curve of the walls blocked
passage at the forty-foot level. Abe pulled the headlamp back out.
'Can you catch it?'
'I can try.'
'I'll keep the light on so you can see it coming.'
Abe reached as deep as he could before letting the headlamp go. Its light ricocheted
from the deeper walls, then blinked out. Abe thought the headlamp had broken in the
drop. Then he heard the voice.
'Ah God,' she groaned.
'Did you get it?' Abe had expected joy. She had been delivered from darkness. But
as the silence accumulated, Abe realized that with the light had come the truth, and
now the woman could judge her awful predicament.
'What do you see?'
There was no reply. Abe hung his head into the hole and waited but all he heard was
the wind outside. The storm was ripe. He looked up at the darkening sky, then over at
the rescuers bustling around the litter. They had snugged Daniel into a sleeping bag
and strapped him into the litter. Some of the men were putting their packs on and
they looked close to leaving. Now the team could devote all of its energies to
extracting Diana.
The team leader walked over to Abe and sternly crooked his finger to draw him
away from the hole. Abe pushed up to kneeling. 'All right,' said the leader. 'We're going
down now. We'll need every hand. Go saddle up.'
Abe was sure he had misunderstood. 'Her name is Diana,' he explained. 'She has a
light now.'
The leader exhaled unhappily. 'You didn't do her any favor.'
Abe didn't know what to say. 'She'll be fine,' he finally blustered.
'I'm glad you think so. Anyway, we're shorthanded. If we can get the litter down
before this storm... hell, if we can get the litter down period, we'll be lucky.'
Abe persisted. 'We can dig her out.'
'Dig her out?' The leader's eyes glazed over. 'She's deep. Way too deep. That kid had
no right bringing her to this.'
'But if we all pull...'
'Look, Tex...' And suddenly Abe knew they knew him. He had fooled no one. 'Down
at the bottom, a crevasse thins into a V. You fall far enough, hard enough, and you get
wedged down there. After a while your body heat melts you down tighter. Every
minute that girl's alive, every breath, she's working down deeper.'
'But we're not leaving her down there.'
'We'll come back.'
'When?'
The leader paused. His crow's-feet pinched into a fan. 'When we can.'
'But we have to save her.' For the first time, Abe noticed how the rest of the team
was shunning the hole.
'We can't, not with things how they are. Maybe later, after she starves some more,
loses some of her tissue mass, maybe then. But I doubt it.'
Abe shook his head – against this directive, against his vision of a human being
pinned in an envelope of clear ice, broken and freezing and blind and yet still aware,