So much relief flooded through me, I started to sob. “I’ve got you.”
I began to scrape away more snow with my hands, down to his elbow. It was his right hand, so I knew which way he was facing. Thankfully he had stuck his pole up in time. Otherwise, how would I have known he was down there? Can’t think about that. Keep digging.
I doubled my speed, desperate to get to his face. Racing the clock. How long?
Was he doing his breathing counts? The blackness and tight, confined space were so fresh in my mind, I knew exactly how he felt down there. Had he filled his lungs before the snow buried him? How much room did he have?
I had to get him. Dig. I worked feverishly. My left glove raked off, my bare hand leaving red smears in the snow. One of the nails on my left hand was broken and bleeding.
I’d dug at least three feet already. How long before I got the snow off his face?
Seconds ticked by. Running out of time. Running out of air. The scene around me was so still. Deathly quiet after all the slamming and crashing and thundering. Snow fell, muffling sounds even more. I was in my own wide-awake nightmare, digging for my brother’s life.
Finally, I felt his nose. I scooped the snow away from his mouth. He gasped.
I slumped forward, nearly toppling into the hole with him. Pain sliced my knee. “It’s okay. I’ve got you,” I said. “Take a breath.”
Scraping farther, I uncovered the rest of his head. His face had cuts all over it. I used the shovel and the last of my energy to dig the rest of him out.
Ryan flailed to get free. I reached to guide his arms out of the backpack. He helped me pull his legs out from the hole that had entombed him.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
He crawled out on top of the snow, taking big gulping breaths. His head was bare, snow clumped in his hair. He’d lost his helmet and hat somewhere. I didn’t see any injuries besides the scrapes on his face.
When I started thinking about what would’ve happened if I’d been a few minutes slower, my head pounded. I began to shake. We collapsed together on the snow. Melting ice cooled on my skin.
“What do we do now?” I asked my brother.
This was bad. It was too cold out here to be wet. We were miles away from the shelter. We had to get warm.
Ryan considered me for a moment as he rubbed a large bump on his head.
“Who are you?” he asked.
Chapter Five
I stared at my brother. “What?” I said.
“Who are you?” Ryan repeated, then looked around blankly. “Where am I?”
My heart broke into pieces. How could he not know me? I pulled in a shaky breath. “We were in an avalanche. I think something hit your head. I’m your twin sister. Mom and Dad don’t know where we are. They think we’re over on the next trail.” I paused as this reality sank in. “And we have to get warm while we wait for help to come.”
I glanced at our surroundings, remembering from our training that we needed to move from the base of the avalanche chute. Another avalanche could follow the same route at any minute.
Ryan picked up a handful of snow, strangely calm. “Should we make a fire?”
“Yeah, good,” I said. “That’s a good idea. I’ve got a lighter in my pack.”
He was the one person in the whole world I could count on to always have my back. Even when I wanted to strangle him, I knew he was there to protect me. How could he seem so unreliable now?
Best not to dwell at the moment, I thought, on why my own brother didn’t know me. I tried to rise. The pain in my knee reminded me of the thundering snow slide. I wanted to curl into a ball and wait for help. Wait for Ryan to do something. But Ryan just sat there, watching me.
We were in a deep ravine at the base of the mountain. The wide path the avalanche took was easy to trace from the havoc of snapped trees and debris in its wake. Solid snow was packed around the trees, only the tips showing on some of them. I crawled to my pack next to the hole Ryan had been in, and reached to lift his pack too. Dragging both packs, I pulled myself toward the trees, away from the destruction the avalanche had spewed. I gritted my teeth in pain each time my knee flexed.
Ryan tried to follow me, but sank into the deep snow. He climbed back out, then looked around again. “The snow is too deep to go anywhere.”
He was right. Skis would help us stay on top of the snow, but we’d both lost them. Ryan only had one pole. What were we going to do? Panic roared through my body. I focused on the packs in my hands. We had these at least.
“The skis are lost but it’s okay,” I said, trying to soothe us both. “We don’t have to go far.”
I crawled until I made it out of the danger zone and reached a tree with snow piled high on one side and a depression on the other. Ryan followed. My movements had warmed me, but Ryan was shivering. I inched over and put my hat on his bare head.
“Go collect wood for a fire,” I told him, pointing into the spruce stand behind us.
He struggled to the trees and began to snap branches.
I pulled out the fire starter from my pack. Dad had just made a fire for us at lunch, so I copied everything he had done. When Ryan returned with a wide, broken tree trunk, I used that as a base for the fire so it wouldn’t burn down into a hole in the snow. Then I piled dried bark and twigs on top of two fire starter sticks from my pack. When I flicked the lighter with my freezing thumb, the flames caught on the fire starter immediately, then snapped and crackled. Falling snow sizzled on the fire, but I fed it larger twigs and the little flames grew. I made sure to zip up the lighter inside my pocket. We couldn’t afford to lose it.
We held our hands toward the warmth of the fire. I glanced at Ryan’s face as he sat beside me. The bump on his forehead looked worse than it had when I first pulled him out. It was swelling. Dad had the first-aid kit. Where were Mom and Dad now? Had they begun searching for us? Would they see our tracks? The falling snow seemed to answer me.
What if they didn’t see our tracks?
I cupped my hands around my mouth. “HELP! We’re down here!” My throat was flayed from yelling, and my voice came out hoarse. Ryan’s eyes widened as he stared at me.
“They’ll find us,” I said, quieter. I made a snowball and lightly brushed it across Ryan’s forehead. He winced. Our eyes met and my heart squeezed.
“One time when we were young, we had a fight waiting for the school bus, remember?”
Ryan blinked.
“You whipped your jacket at me so I whipped you back with mine, and the zipper hit you in the forehead. That made you even madder, so you whipped me again, harder. Both sides.” I made a motion to show how he whipped the jacket at me.
“The zipper hit me on each ear. We both ran into the house crying, holding our ears and faces. Mom gave us ice cubes and told us to go catch the bus. It was coming down the hill. We hurried out and waited for the bus to stop, then climbed in, still fuming. We sat far apart from each other.”
Ryan’s mouth curled up a little, so I kept going.
“I had to hold an ice cube in each hand, sliding them carefully over my sore ears. The ice dripped down my forearms. When I glanced back at you, I was happy to see that you were doing the same thing to your forehead. Your face was all red and blotchy.”
I looked at his face now, purple and blotchy. I smoothed back the hair that was sticking out of his hat. The snow melted and slid on his skin. “Won’t be long before Mom and Dad come for us,” I said.
Ryan watched me. It was eerie to see his eyes without the recognition there. He was like a different person. A more fragile Ryan.
My bottom lip quivered.
I turned to my pack and busied myself with searching for my puffy down jacket, which was compressed and sitting at the bottom. Ryan watched and pulled out his own jacket. He seemed to be doing things on autopilot.
My knee throbbed. To see it, I had to roll up my soft-shell outer pants, lightweight fleece pants, and my base layer thermals. My knee was slightly red and swollen, but didn
’t look as bad as it felt. I rubbed a ball of snow on it like I had done to Ryan’s forehead. “I think it’s sprained,” I said.
“Wrap it with an elastic bandage,” Ryan said.
I studied him closely. He could remember years ago when he sprained his ankle and wore an elastic bandage, but he couldn’t remember me? Debbie Martin had pushed him off the slide at the park. He was the one who sprained his ankle, but I was the one who cried.
“That would be a good idea if we had one,” I said, wishing I still had my mohair skins. But they’d been devoured, along with my skis, by the avalanche.
I dumped the contents of my pack onto my lap and sorted through what we had. Spare fleece gloves, a spare thin hat, a frozen granola bar, and a tiny, folded emergency blanket, which was really just a thin sheet that looked like tinfoil. I stuffed the granola bar in my pocket before pulling on the gloves and hat.
There was also my transceiver, an avalanche probe, a ski repair kit with duct tape, glop stopper wax, and ski straps. No elastic bandage. My nearly empty stainless-steel water bottle was the only other thing in my pack. I filled it with snow and set it beside the fire.
Then I went through Ryan’s pack. He had a multitool with a knife, his avalanche probe, a shovel, an empty water bottle, an emergency blanket, a coil of light rope, duct tape, and a candle. He filled his bottle with snow and set it next to mine. He was copying what I was doing.
All my life I had wanted to be different from my brother. To have talents that made me stand out. I don’t have a smart school brain like Ryan. I’m not as athletic. Being his twin always made me even more average in comparison. And now he was copying me.
Ryan fed the fire, and the smoke drifted up and stung my eyes. The fire needed a lot of fuel to keep burning. How long would we be here? I searched the sky and noticed it was late afternoon.
I picked up the duct tape and ski straps. Could I make something for my knee? I needed something wider, stretchy. I reached into my pants and gave myself a wedgie. Using Ryan’s knife, I sliced my underwear off at my hip.
Of all the days to wear my Wonder Woman undies.
I wrapped the underwear around my knee like a bandage. I flexed my knee experimentally and winced. Holding the ski straps in place with one stretched-out hand along the sides of my kneecap, I used the other to grab the duct tape. I wrapped the tape once around the top of my knee, and then again below. The tape looked like it would stay in place.
I glanced up to see Ryan watching. No joke about the underwear. Not one teasing comment from him. My throat ached. That one thing seemed to be the last straw. As I rolled my pant legs back down and tucked them into my ski boots, hot tears ran down my face.
“We’re going to be okay,” I said, sniffling. “They’re coming to get us soon.”
As I said it, the wind gusted and drove sleet into our faces. I tried not to notice the lengthening shadows. I could feel the temperature dropping already.
Even though my twin was sitting beside me, for the first time in my life I felt very alone.
Chapter Six
The wind changed everything.
It sucked at the warmth from our exposed skin and open necks. Icy fingers reached into the cracks of my coat. The temperature felt like a walk-in freezer.
I raised my chin and yelled. “Hello!” My voice was brittle and cracked. “Can anyone hear us? We’re alive down here!”
I listened intently for any sound of rescue. I was so sure they’d come. And now we were losing our daylight. When I glanced at my brother, seemingly helpless and confused, something snapped in me. I had to figure this out, right now. We had to get out of the wind.
“Ryan, remember when we made a quinzee at ski club?”
He shook his head. It made me angry.
“Yes, you do. I know you remember because you thought it was so cool when we piled all the snow and then hollowed it out to make a shelter. You’ve carried that stupid candle in your pack ever since. Remember? We all took turns sliding through the little door like a beaver house, and shared the digging. Then we had to wait for the next day to let it set. You’re the one who poked the air holes. We all crammed in and lit the candles and it was warm!” My voice was getting louder and louder.
“Come on. Remember!” I yelled.
Ryan flinched back, his eyes blazing wild copper brown.
That settled me down instantly. “I’m sorry, it’s all right. It was fun. Let’s do it again, okay? But it won’t be as big, and we don’t have time to let it set. We’ll just dig a snow cave.”
There was a hump of snow next to where the fire crackled and sparked. Using the ski pole, I rose and gingerly put pressure on my right leg. Still hurt. I took the step needed to get to the snowdrift and started digging into it with the shovel.
Ryan crawled beside me and took the shovel. For a minute, it looked like he did remember. But he just kept digging into the snow automatically.
“We have to make a ledge for the hot air,” I explained. “Dig up like it’s a stair step. That’s it. And then dig sideways to make it like a big capital T. I’ll find something to get us off the snow.”
I set to work collecting spruce boughs. Parts of broken trees lay nearby, snapped off by the avalanche. Seeing them made me pause.
We could have been snapped into pieces by the avalanche.
I focused back on what needed doing and broke off some low-hanging branches from the evergreens left standing. I limped back to Ryan and piled armfuls of branches next to him before helping him dig.
My stomach pinched, telling me we had missed supper. We hadn’t eaten anything since lunch and we were doing all this work out in the cold. At the club we learned about how our bodies needed fuel to keep warm in the outdoors during winter. I thought of what was in my pocket. One granola bar. Better save it for after we made the snow cave. The most important thing right now was to get shelter from the wind.
We lay on our bellies, side by side, carving into the mound to make a space big enough for both of us. Dusk was approaching fast. The light of the fire barely illuminated what we were doing.
“That’s good enough. Let me try it,” I said.
When I crawled in, the difference in temperature was immediate. Inside the cave the wind couldn’t find me. It couldn’t suck my body heat away. Being out of the cold gusts was a relief.
I looked around and shuffled in the loose, squishy snow of the floor. There was room to sit up, but not enough to stretch my legs out. The cave wasn’t as good as the cozy quinzee we had made at the club. The door was much bigger, but it had to be so we could both dig at the same time in our race to beat the darkness.
I peered out at Ryan next to the fire. It had burned through the wood I’d built it on and was sinking into the snow. It needed air to breathe. The fire would die soon.
But we were not going to die soon. Not if I could help it.
Chapter Seven
I slid out of the snow cave and let Ryan drag himself in. I passed him the branches to line the floor with. The wind bit into the back of my neck. It found its way through my jacket and thoroughly chilled the sweat on my skin.
After I edged back in next to Ryan, I piled the rest of the spruce boughs behind me. The door was supposed to be just a crawl hole to keep the heat in and the cold out. I piled snow around the boughs to build a smaller opening. Then I propped up the packs in the doorway the way we did at the quinzee so we could push them out in the morning and not be sealed in by snow.
I turned to Ryan but strained to see him.
“I should have lit the candle before I closed the door,” I said, fumbling in the dark. The click of the lighter was loud in the muffled stillness of our cave. Once the candle flickered shadows around the tight space, I stuck it into the ghost white wall.
“We need tinfoil like we used in the quinzee,” I said. “We used it to wrap behind the candle. It helped to reflect the warmth.”
I remembered our emergency blankets. Digging into the packs I found them and tore op
en the wrappers. When I handed Ryan his blanket, he shivered as he unfolded it and wrapped it around his body. I cut a small piece from mine to arrange with the reflective side facing the back of the candle.
“Want to make a ventilation hole?” I asked, handing Ryan the avalanche probe. I hoped it would jog his memory.
He blankly poked a hole through the ceiling, then just as blankly passed back the probe. The loneliness of it made me bite my lip to keep from crying. I took a sip of the melted snow in my water bottle. Ryan copied with his.
Time to pull out the granola bar. “Supper’s ready,” I said, trying to appear to make light of our situation.
That got a spark of interest from Ryan. I carefully broke the bar in half and gave my brother the slightly bigger piece. He took it and stuffed the whole thing in his mouth.
I smiled, thinking that must be a good sign. Ryan was hungry. I chewed mine slowly, using tiny bites to make it last longer. I washed it down with more water, but it wasn’t enough to fill the emptiness in my gut.
Ryan had lain down and his eyes were closed. Thinking of the long night ahead, I couldn’t bear to be alone. Maybe if I reminded Ryan about things we’d done, it would bring my brother back to me.
“Last year we went to that fishing lodge on Lake Champlain,” I began. “Remember, Ry?”
He looked at me. “Yeah?”
I told him about how neither one of us had wanted to touch the worms. We resorted to sticking them on the hooks, with great difficulty, while they rolled on the ground. Until Dad bent down to see what we were doing. And suddenly Ryan became brave and picked one up. He had chased me with the pulsing, slimy thing dangling from his fingers.
Through much of the cold night I told stories. I talked about the time in fifth grade when Ryan won a prize at the science fair for his universe model. Dad had been so proud when we went to the award ceremony, he told everyone we met that he was Ryan’s father.
Avalanche! Page 2