Somewhere in the middle of the dark hours, at maybe one or two in the morning, with the cold deep in our bones, Skim said, “I’m done,” and I said, “Let’s go.” We were robots with rusty hinges. It took an hour just to pack the stove and sleeping bags. Our two ropes still ran up out of the crevasse and into the night despite the abuse they’d taken—though one or both of them might be hanging by a nylon thread for all we knew. Skim didn’t hesitate or ritualize or go eenie-meanie to hang responsibility on fate. He just grabbed the blue strand and wrapped his prusiks around it, eyes wide open like a cold-blooded stoic. Or maybe he was just cold and beyond caring. He caterpillared up the rope on his prusik cords and disappeared into the night. Thirty minutes later, his voice filtered down through the heavy blackness, telling me to come up.
I reached the anchor as dawn began to open the sky. The place looked bombed. We whispered, not wanting to wake the dead. Jags of ice and compressed snow fanned out where towers and avalanches had fallen. The four ice screws we’d placed dangled uselessly from the ropes—they’d heated up, melted the ice, and fallen out. The pack we’d buried as a deadman had taken a direct hit and been re-buried by five extra feet of debris, which had frozen hard as concrete overnight. Without a word, we cut the ropes where they emerged, leaving the ends and the pack embedded. Then we roped ourselves together and fled for the ridgeline at the glacier’s edge.
Maybe the world had ended after all. Sunrise was bleak. Bands of grey clouds rubbed up against the mountain. We saw nothing but white and grey. Shattered ice creaked and popped under our crampons. I felt ghostly, intrusive, nosing my way around the underworld or Valhalla—some place where the powers had duked it out. It wasn’t clear to me if anyone had survived, ourselves included. We followed the debris tracks, telling ourselves those would be the thickest layer. Everything was so frozen we probably could have trusted an eggshell over a crevasse. We moved fast, racing the turning earth and the sun, feeling as if a Valkyrie might come winging past any moment to mark us for the bloody-corpse-in-the-ice treatment.
At the edge of the glacier, we paused to divvy a candy bar—breakfast. We couldn’t stop long. A thousand feet up the flat face of the ridge, a hanging wall of seracs and fresh pack looked dangerous as the future, about a photon away from avalanching down on our heads. We angled west toward the ridgeline and were damn slow because the snow was steep and our consolidated packs were heavy and we’d each had about a thimbleful of food and sleep. I drifted through waking nightmares in which the snow suspended above us began to fall, like horsemen in a cavalry charge, and I cartwheeled down under the white hooves, and then I’d return to my body and take another step and slip away when the snow fell again.
We reached the ridgeline and relative safety. The avalanches would come, but they’d fall left and right. Skim stamped out a little platform and sat on his pack with his head in his hands. Wind rasped along the ridge, scraping off snow and ice, blowing it in our faces. We’d put the glacier far below. Above, the mountain disappeared in clouds, which had fattened, looking about ready to split and drop their feathers all over the place. Between the layers out west, I caught sight of an immense grey surface speckled white. The sea. I’d forgotten it was there. It looked imaginary. We hadn’t come that way. Might as well talk about beanstalks or Middle Earth.
The clouds closed, and the wind cut me open. Skim hadn’t gotten back up since he sat down, and I was afraid the same thing would happen to me. I started digging into the hardpack under the surface of the ridge, using my ice axe to chop and my helmet to scoop, until Skim grabbed my shoulder and stopped me.
“What are you doing?” He had to shout to punch through the wind.
“Digging!” I said. He waved his hands at me to say, no shit, I see the hole. “Snow cave!” I yelled.
“What for?”
I blinked back at him for a moment, then realized he was serious. “The tent’s in the pack on the glacier!” I yelled.
Skim froze hard. Another time and place, I’d have taken some satisfaction from that. It wasn’t often the boy let surprise show. Under the circumstances, I might’ve enjoyed some brotherly bullshit better. I stuck my head back in the pit I’d dug, feeling like a strung-out badger going to ground.
It was a one-man job until I’d excavated enough space to get us both inside. As soon as he could, Skim joined me, and we chopped up snow with our hands and kicked it out with our feet, lying horizontally, side by side, two worms in a frozen apple.
“You ever dug a snow cave before?” Skim asked.
“I read about it in a book.”
That was all Skim needed to hear, that I had only a rudimentary idea of what I was doing. Meaning he had freedom to work out the details himself. He took over. I was the blunt tool you used to break ground and test the shape of a plan. Skim was the craftsman who turned schemes into substance. By the time he was done, the hole I’d dug had become a tiny cabin with elevated bunks and a platform for the stove, all carved from the snow. We had room to sit up and lie down flat. He engineered an overlap at the entrance that kept blown snow out without suffocating us. It would have been halfway comfortable, a safe house from the blade of the wind and the avalanches. But I could only think of going to sleep.
I woke from deep blackness. Something had hold of me. Was yanking at me. I peeled an eye open. Skim had hold of me. “What?” I managed, about as articulate as a side of beef.
“We need to go,” he said. “Or we’re fucked. We’re already fucked. We need to go.”
I got my second eye open. A checklist flashed inside my skull: Avalanche. Blizzard. Valkyrie. I listened a moment, heard nothing, concluded that none of those pertained.
“What?” I said again.
Skim was sitting on his snow bunk with his feet in his plastic doubles down in the narrow well between the two of us. He had some food between his feet. A few candy bars, a few packets of soup, an end of cheese, a handful of peanuts bagged in plastic.
“This is all of our food,” Skim said.
Ah. Correction. He had all our food between his feet.
“I couldn’t sleep,” Skim said. “I haven’t slept at all. All I could think about was eating. I’d eat toothpaste. I’d eat sand.” He waved at our pathetic little pile. “I could eat this all in two minutes with the wrappers. Or I could wake you up.”
I realized he’d been sitting there, with the food between his feet, for I didn’t know how long. Outside the cave, light seemed to be seeping back through the Arctic twilight. I’d been asleep for maybe five hours. An avalanche snapped free, shaking the pack, breaking bones from the sound of it. We waited and watched each other’s reactions to confirm the massiveness of the slide. The noise and tremors died off.
“That was early,” I said.
“Yesterday, that would have been us,” Skim said.
I nodded.
The roof of our snow cave collapsed.
The wind was on us before I’d even drawn breath. It got in my nose, eyes, and sleeping bag, carrying a load of ice with it. Hard pieces of the cave roof had slammed down all around me, and one side of my face was mashed numb, while the other side was frozen numb—two different sensations, as it turned out. I balled up inside my sleeping bag. I’d left my outer layers in the footwell of my bag overnight in order to keep them warm. I zippered them on, wriggling around inside my cocoon, thinking of Houdini in a straight jacket.
When I emerged, fully armored, the wind had already drifted six inches of loose snow into the now-open bowl of our cave. Skim was on his hands and knees, fishing around in the powder, howling about the food. I dug for my boot-shells, emptied them out, shoved my feet in with snow flying all around. I found my backpack and began trawling the floor, stuffing in anything I found—stove, Snickers, helmet, rope coil. Skim and I put our heads together and yelled out an inventory. Then we dove back in for the missing pieces.
The cold took me to the edge of paralysis. I signaled to Skim that I needed to get moving. He nodded, we threw on our
packs, and we rolled ourselves out of the cave and onto the ridgeline, into the full blast of the wind.
When we were upright, I turned back to Skim and waggled my head once up the mountain and once back down. Up still? Skim cocked his head uphill and shrugged. Yep, up. Don’t ask why. I suppose our gestures could have had a dozen interpretations. At the time, I knew what Skim was saying, strong as telepathy.
It took twenty minutes of shivering and step-kicking to drive the cold into remission—it never left, but it wasn’t eating my bones. For fifteen hundred feet below us, the snow ridge knifed down toward the glacier. Up above, it disappeared into shelves of clouds. Snow fell, and the wind whipped it around us. I caught glimpses of the surrounding mountains, arrows and piles of snow flashing up out of the weather and then blinking out of existence.
We climbed through a hive-swarm of noise. Pistol shots whined through the wind. Curtains of ice-flak rasped past. Avalanches followed each other like train cars. Skim and I were silent—we’d have needed megaphones to reach each other, and it was getting hard enough just to breathe.
My stomach gnawed and squirmed, coveting my blood, my flesh, the fatty tissue behind my eyes. I felt hollow, shadowy. But my legs moved my boots higher, and my ice axe spiked the snow. When I pushed my nose down into my jacket to warm my face, I smelled the ammoniac reek of my muscles breaking down, my body burning its own walls for fuel.
The snow ridge pushed up through the clouds, up through the wind. It seemed geometric. A continuum without beginning or end. I saw snatches of the future—on the mountain, beyond the mountain—but the images flicked out of sight like the mountains in the storm. I had trouble placing myself, linking past and present. How had we come to be here? Time seemed broken off.
In a half-sheltered crotch in the snow, we stopped and ate a candy bar, a pro forma exercise. It made no difference—we were taking a piss in the sea.
Wind-chiseled gargoyles of ice forced us off onto the faces of the ridge, and the faces cut away below my crampons. I looked straight down onto clouds. Just looking, I could feel myself dropping, falling, though I wasn’t. I wanted the rope, but I didn’t want to stop and wrangle it out of the pack while I was hung out over space. And climbing up would be no worse than climbing back.
The clouds thickened. Snow poured down. It sloughed off the ridge to either side, and there was no good reason to stop, so we kept climbing. The dimensions of our reality had been stripped bare. We moved in a monochromatic bubble, a few hundred square feet of whites and darks, carrying less than we needed on our backs. The only direction was up. The only time was now.
The snow slowed and stopped. The clouds unraveled then blew apart. Fairweather looked down on us through a well of blue sky a mile deep. The mountain! A splinter of star, a whiff of infinite space still smoking off its razor sides. Any shield I might once have had to protect myself from Fairweather’s direct stare, I’d lost somewhere on the way. I was pierced. You couldn’t have yanked the mountain out of my chest without killing me.
Clouds rolled back in, and the storm-eye closed. My axe pricked the skin of the snow. The ridgeline plunged below my heels. I’d been standing still, in a pair of kicked steps, for how long? Skim was beside me. The wind had dropped in the calm. I felt it breathing back to life.
“That was it,” Skim said. “The moment the mountain speaks. Tongues in trees and sermons in stone.”
“What did it say to you?” I asked.
“What else? Don’t run.”
“Yeah? Did it offer you I am the light and the life or anything?”
“The opposite, actually. Seemed possessive about eternity. Unlikely to share.”
A belch of wind nearly toppled me out of my steps. “We better go,” I said.
“We better.”
We ascended through storm and snow for hours more, until the sun seemed to be low over the mountain’s shoulder—not that we’d really seen the sun since it tried to explode the icefall on our heads down on the glacier. We stopped at a dip in the ridgeline where we could stand in the snow flat-footed. Skim promised he had worked out the kinks in his design, chose a wall of snow like pressed Styrofoam, and began to dig. Three hours later, in twilight, we finished chopping out the last corners of a new cave.
I had the stove going for water. I unrolled my sleeping pad and bag. There wasn’t much else to do. We went through our simple tasks of preparation. By silent agreement, we stacked our food into a little shrine between us. Five candy bars, three packets of soup, and the peanuts.
“Tomorrow, the top,” I said, and I dumped the soup and the peanuts into the pot. “I’d rather be hungry tomorrow night than tomorrow.” I didn’t bother saying that we had one shot at the summit, and after that, no matter the outcome, we’d be eating snow.
“No panic, right?” Skim said, watching the soup dissolve with a look like a heron stalking a frog. “It’s only food. We’ll have to get through tomorrow in order to face the day after, anyway.”
I ate slowly, ritualistically, fighting the emptiness at the bottom of my bowl. It was the last dinner we’d see for—well, I had no idea. And my teenage metabolism found that prospect scary as death. So even though the soup was more water than gruel, we gave it its due respect and licked our bowls shiny. Then there really was nothing to do, other than shush our half-roused, mostly-empty bellies and go to sleep.
Deep blackness wouldn’t come for me. My head filled with sea waves, long silver rollers. I tried to suck water, to bury myself below the waves, but kept bobbing up to the surface.
The sun made its brief swing over the pole. We hauled ourselves upright about the time it came flying back toward Alaska, though we had ice, mountain, and clouds between us, so our cave was a little tank of night. We took two candy bars each for ourselves and left one in the cave. Skim put the last wizened Snickers inside my sleeping bag and then rolled up my sleeping bag inside of his, muttering: “Little fucker might grow legs. It’s a million to one, but better to be safe.”
Outside, we could see, but the line between snow and cloud was muddy as the line between night and day. Thick, gristly vapors wrapped the mountain like fat on meat. We had to all but scrape them aside to find the snow. Hunger and sleep clouded up my internal sky. My eyes connected world and brain like two long tubes, and they got longer and narrower the higher I climbed.
The connections between moments got real slack. I’d snap into the present and find myself leading sixty-degree ice, the rope running down below my boots, two screws already clipped, and me hacking away, clearing an inch of crust to get to the good ice below. And I had to assume everything was okay—knots tied, Skim belaying, some kind of anchor down there in the grey where the ropes disappeared.
We were roped together but not belaying. The ridge was broad and flat on top. The sides dropped into the abyss, but we couldn’t see that. Wind poured over us. Exploded clouds and loose snow flew by. I hauled in two breaths, stepped forward, hauled in another two, stepped forward. At least I hoped that forward was the same direction the rope was running.
Skim belayed me from above. The ice was wind-scoured concrete. My tools bounced. My calves shook. My front points skated. At the belay, where snowflakes spiraled around us like moths, we began to crack.
“We won’t find our way down through this,” Skim said, swatting at the blizzard with his hands.
“I don’t know if I can keep bouncing back,” I said. “Muscle’s all gone. I’m eating brain.”
“What’s the mountain worth?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“Nothing,” he repeated.
We nodded at each other. We’d made up our minds. Skim handed me the leftover ice screws from his lead. I racked them. And I began climbing—up—while Skim settled back into the belay.
How this happened is hard to explain. We’d decided to go down; I intended to go down. I expected to see—remember, I was watching through some long, skinny plumbing—my hands go to work setting up a rappel so we could retreat. When the o
pposite happened, my mind in its skull castle threw a fit. I’d felt panic before, and I braced, expecting my hands to shake, my breath to come drowning-man fast. Instead, I reached my left arm up, flicked a clot of snow off the surface of the ice with the pick of my axe, reached back, and drilled the exact spot I wanted, easy as a dart in the bull’s eye. Could be it was sheer dumb, unturnable momentum that moved me. Words only cut so deep, and we’d been plowing ahead toward Fairweather since approximately the dawn of man. That ship might not be the kind to reverse itself on a dime. In any case, my inner-I concluded it wasn’t alone and didn’t control the body near as tightly as it thought. There was another agency up there, in the flesh, or maybe something called up between Skim and me, a third person on the mountain that was neither one of us but no one else either. Meanwhile, Skim said nothing to contradict me as I scratched up the next pitch of ice, and I presumed he’d ceded his own internal ground just as I had.
The snow whirled around me. My crampons nicked the ice. My muscles jumped around inside my skin, reminding me of a dead frog in an electric current. I had time to think about dead frogs. My mind had taken a backseat.
We traded leads where the ridge narrowed. Skim climbed the back of a white dinosaur, around plates and horns of ice. I hunkered down in a notch, eyes closed, feeding out rope, listening to the wind.
A wall of green ice disappeared up into the weather. It couldn’t have, but it glowed, turning the clouds that wreathed it a nuclear shade. The ice was stone, kryptonite. It slagged my forearms. The green light infected me. My fingers melted; my stomach-rat turned flips. The wind moaned and raged. Maybe it was me moaning and raging. It hardly mattered.
Above the green wall, the ridge tunneled through the wind and flying snow. We waded through new powder, a zombie pair, the alpine undead driven higher by a pressure as elemental as a hurricane. We stayed roped, ten feet apart, for no reason other than to feel bound together. I babbled wordlessly to myself, to the mountain, to the third climber tied between us. Skim dropped and puked because of the altitude and his starvation, then got up and said, “Good. I was feeling heavy. Now I’ll float.”
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