Mountain of the Dead

by Jeremy Bates

  After dinner, with everyone preparing for bed, Igor said, “We need to keep watch.”

  This was met with collective groans.

  “Igor—” Zina said.

  “We don’t know how far north we are. We need to monitor the weather, hope for a break, so we can get a fix on Hill 611. A reverse compass bearing on the map will show us where we are.”

  “Why not wait until morning?” Doroshenko said.

  “If the weather hasn’t cleared, then what?”

  “We wait—”

  “There will be no discussion! One hour each. That should not be too hard, should it? I’ll take first watch.”

  He left the tent.

  “Who’s turn is it to write in the group journal?” Rustem remarked.

  “Mine,” Zolotaryov said. “But I think we should skip writing anything today.” Admitting they had camped on an exposed mountain slope, in blizzard conditions, would surely disqualify them from earning their Category III hiking certification.

  In a low voice Rustem said, “He’s acting—”

  “Enough,” Zolotaryov said. “We’ll reach the summit tomorrow, then we’ll start back. Forget about this night and get some rest.”

  And they did just that. Igor returned inside the tent after completing an hour on watch. Kolya put on his boots and outerwear and braved the cold outside. Zolotaryov couldn’t sleep and decided to sneak a cigarette. He was pulling on his boots when Kolya shouted.

  Igor, who was sleeping by the front of the tent, jerked awake. He stuck his head through the door flaps. Zolotaryov scrambled past the others, who were rousing drowsily, and peeked through the flaps also.

  What he saw froze him with terror.

  A tense discussion between Igor and Zolotaryov with Kolevatov looking on

  The Dyatlov group about to make their fateful ascent up the pass that would be named in honor of them

  CHAPTER 23

  As soon as the sun peeked above the eastern horizon, blazing the monochromatic landscape in cool, rosy light, we started after the mysterious creature’s tracks on foot, given we couldn’t take the snowmobile or dogsled into the mountains. Thirty minutes later we came to the base of the ridgeline that connected Hill 1096 and Hill 805. The footprints went up it, and we followed. The ascent proved to be both slow and brutal, like climbing the staircase of a ten-story building in heavy snow-encrusted boots. At the top, we rested to catch our breaths. Vasily seemed especially winded. I went to him and said privately, “You don’t have to come with us. You can wait back at camp until we return this afternoon.”

  “I’m fine, Mr. Smith,” he said brusquely, standing tall as if to prove this. “I’ve made this trek numerous times before.”

  I hesitated, but then nodded. He was in excellent shape for his age, and he knew the limits of his endurance better than me.

  I took the lead up the northeastern slope of Kholat Syakhl through the Dyatlov Pass, the others following closely behind. As the sun rose higher in the leaden sky, hidden for the most part behind the low-slung clouds, the rare waist-high dwarf pines were the only indication of life in the desolate, alien vista, and for whatever reason the sight of them instilled within me a sense of primitive dread. I suppose they reinforced the isolation I felt, the inhospitality of the environment. Trees could barely survive up here.

  By eight o’clock the wind had picked up and it began to snow. At first the snowflakes rode lackadaisical currents to the ground, but then they assumed speed and direction, turning into sharp projectiles that pelted the exposed parts of my face and stuck to my frosted goggles.

  A little after this I spotted the bald, icy dome of Kholat Syakhl looming in the distance. An avalanche on the night of February 1, 1959, had been one of the most persistent theories over the years used to explain what had doomed the Dyatlov group. Yet experts never really took this possibility seriously. For starters, the slope up here couldn’t have been more than fifteen degrees; you’d need something closer to forty to generate a decent-sized slab avalanche. This didn’t rule out a mini-avalanche. Nevertheless, if a mini-avalanche struck the hikers’ tent, the tent wouldn’t have remained neatly tethered to the ground, nor would everything inside it have remained undisturbed. The possibility existed the hikers heard something they believed to be an avalanche, which caused them to panic and flee into the dark. This would explain why they went down the mountain rather than up it or to the left or right. Problem was the orderly way the footprints descended the slope. If they feared an impending rush of snow, they would have run.

  As the morning wore on, I continued to play a litany of different theories through my head, examining them from every angle—an exercise that had become background music to my thoughts since I became involved with the Dyatlov case—and the next time I checked my wristwatch it was ten o’clock. My breathing, I was surprised to note, was labored, my legs heavy, and I was feeling increasingly lightheaded due to the high elevation, the thinness of the oxygen in the air.

  All of which made me respect the resilience of Igor and his comrades even more. They’d spent several hours out here in much worse weather, and during the middle of the night, without boots or proper clothing. Their stamina and will to live seemed almost superhuman.

  I signaled a rest and waited for the others to catch up. I pushed my goggles up my forehead and unclipped my canteen from my rucksack, an effort with my stiff fingers. I tilted it to my lips and got nothing. The water had frozen solid.

  When Disco and Olivia reached me, they slumped down into the snow, beat. Fyodor shrugged off his rucksack and scanned the horizon, as if attempting to read the weather. Vasily took out his map and compass.

  I went over to him and said, “How much farther is Boot Rock?”

  “Approximately one kilometer that way.” He pointed northeast. “Unfortunately, those have been veering gradually west.” He nodded at the creature’s tracks.

  “Dammit,” I said, though I should have expected as much. For the creature to proceed directly past Boot Rock, thus giving us the biggest window to encounter it, was too much to hope for. Consequently, it seemed we would be parting ways with it permanently now.

  “It’s a shame,” Vasily said.

  “We could come back, better prepared.”

  “And hope to catch lightning in a bottle twice?”

  He was right. Crossing paths with this creature was likely a once in a lifetime coincidence. We would not be so lucky on a second excursion.

  “Fuck,” I said, not sure how else to express my frustration.

  “Will you write about the creature in your book?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know.”

  “What we spoke of last night?”

  “That it played a part in the deaths of the Dyatlov group?”

  “It would make a very compelling story.”

  “I don’t know. I need time to think it all through.”

  Vasily contemplated this, then nodded. He waved Fyodor over. The two of them spoke in Russian for a good minute. Vasily indicated the creature’s tracks several times. Then he said to me, “Fyodor will follow the footprints from here.”

  I looked at him, surprised. “By yourself?”

  “Da,” he said.

  “He has his rifle,” Vasily added, “and he will be much quicker on his own. He will go as far as he can, then meet us back at the camp later this afternoon. It’s the best compromise I can offer.”

  “Thank you, Fyodor,” I said, feeling something akin to affection for the guy for the first time since meeting him. “And good luck.”

  The guide merely grunted and started off after the tracks.

  Disco and Olivia noticed him leaving, got up, and joined us.

  “What’s going on?” Disco asked.

  “The creature’s tracks head away from Boot Rock. Fyodor is going to follow them and meet us back at the camp.”

  “So that’s that, huh?” Disco said. “Goodbye forest giant?”

  I shrugged. “We can’t track it
much longer in these conditions.”

  “Seems sort of anticlimactic,” Olivia said.

  “You can go with Fyodor,” I suggested.

  “Hey, I never wanted to follow the damn footprints in the first place. I’ve had my adventure. I’m cold and tired and just want to go home now.”

  “Vasily says Boot Rock is about a kilometer or so away. Should only take us an hour to reach it, tops. The campsite is a short jaunt from there.”

  Olivia looked up at the darkening sky. “Then we better get going.”

  ⁂

  Over the next half hour the weather deteriorated at an alarming rate, the speed of which caught all of us off guard. The inescapable wind grew strong enough to sometimes stop us on the spot, while the snowflakes turned into an army of biting insects. I kept my head down, my chin tucked against my chest, and focused on taking one step after the other through the knee-deep snow.

  Then a gust of wind blew me over. I lay on my back in the deep powder, panting, staring up at the slate-gray storm clouds armoring the sky, turning it nearly black in places. Suddenly my view was blocked as Disco leaned over me. He took my hands in his and pulled me to my feet. Vasily and Olivia appeared next to him, holding their arms in front of their faces in defense of the wind and snow. Vasily said something to me.

  “What?” I said. My voice sounded coarse, dry, broken.

  “We’ve run out of time—” A squall whistled down from the summit, erasing the rest of his words. He waited for it to pass, then added, “We have to turn back.”

  “We’re almost there!” I said.

  “Are you crazy, Corey?” Olivia said, her face tight with fear, but also anger. “We’re in the middle of a blizzard on a mountain! We have to turn back.”

  “It’s not a blizzard yet!”

  “This is a blizzard, neg,” Disco said, and behind his goggles I could see the conflict of loyalties in his eyes.

  “I didn’t come all this way to turn back!”

  “Look around, Corey!” Olivia said. “We can’t see more than twenty feet in any direction. We’ll be lucky to find the way down again. And if we get caught up here, during dark, we’ll freeze to death.”

  “We have gone as far as we can,” Vasily said. “There’s no more arguing. We must turn back.”

  “You guys go back! I’ll catch up!”

  “We’re not splitting up!” Olivia said.

  “We’re wasting time!” I said, starting forward.

  Olivia grabbed my arm. “Corey!”

  I shook her free and marched onward and upward into the snowy white pall.

  ⁂

  My course of action was reckless at best and suicidal at worst. But I simply couldn’t accept failure when the finish line was in sight. I couldn’t turn back. I was too close.

  But too close to what?

  Literally speaking, Boot Rock, of course. But metaphorically speaking, what? What did reaching Boot Rock really matter to me? What would the accomplishment offer? Closure like I kept telling myself? Closure on Denise’s death? That was bullshit. Reaching Boot Rock wasn’t a panacea. It wasn’t going to magically erase my pain and loss and guilt and regret. I wasn’t going to wake up tomorrow and feel like my old pre-Denise-death self.

  Having said this, however, I knew it might be a start, and that was my hope. It might allow me to feel as though I’d completed what Denise and I had started together when we first began planning this trip. Not to mention it might allow me to finally sit down and write the dammed Dyatlov book. I might not have all the answers to the fate of Igor and his friends, I might not even be fucking close in my belief of what happened to them, but there would be no more excuses enabling me to procrastinate. No more research or travel that needed to first be undertaken. No more bullet points on my pre-writing to-do list. I would sit down and write the book and then it would be done. And then, well, maybe then I could move on. I would start a new book at some point. I would cut back on the drinking. I would rekindle ignored friendships. And I would meet somebody. Yes, eventually that would happen too. Denise’s memory would still be inside me—it always would until the day I died, and I wouldn’t want it any other way—but her memory would become manageable, something I could recollect when I wanted to, not something that tormented me every hour of every day.

  Besides, it would only take twenty more minutes to reach Boot Rock and get all of the aforementioned rolling. That was it. Twenty minutes, then I would be on my way back to the campsite, out of the blizzard, blue skies and green meadows ahead. I could deal with the snow and the wind for twenty measly minutes if it meant this.

  I wished the others would have let me go on alone. I didn’t need them tagging along. But that’s what they were doing, stomping through the snow in line behind me, and I felt scared and responsible for them, because now it wasn’t just my life I was putting in danger, it was theirs also.

  To the west, through the salvo of icy snowflakes, I spotted a snowcapped black monolith jutting from the barren tundra.

  All reservations forgotten, I redoubled my efforts.

  ⁂

  The closer I got to Boot Rock, the more I appreciated its moniker. It really did resemble a boot, albeit a thirty-foot-tall one. Even in the chaotic snowfall I could see the metal conical thingamajig perched atop its crown, which the 1959 search-and-rescuers had installed to increase the rock’s visibility, so they could find it in weather no doubt not much dissimilar to what we were experiencing right now.

  When I arrived at the landmark, I stumbled and fell to my knees, panting for breath. I turned and saw the others fighting their way through the storm behind me, three indistinct shapes in a world of white.

  Then they reached me, moved past me, and took partial refuge beneath a rocky outcropping. I crawled toward them and said, “Five minutes,” raising my voice to be heard above the wind. “That’s all I need.”

  Vasily said, “Hurry.”

  I pushed myself to my feet and followed the rockface until I came to a rectangular plaque attached to the rock. Vasily and Yuri Yudin and some others had installed it there to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the tragedy. On the left of it was an engraving of the mountain and the dates 1959 and 1989; on the right several lines written in Russian. I’d seen photographs of it online, along with the English translation, and to the best of my memory it went something like:

  “Friends, take off your hats

  In front of this granite rock.

  Guys, we won’t let you go…

  We keep warming up your souls,

  Which are staying forever

  In these mountains…”

  Continuing along the rockface, running one hand along the stone like a blind man fearful of losing his guide, I came to a deep fissure. At the back of it a ratty old Stetson cowboy hat sat on a jagged shelf. Using my body to block the worst of the wind, I lifted the hat to reveal a treasure-trove of yellowed notes, poems, and a few photographs in honor of the Dyatlov group. They were all old, left a long time ago, likely in the summertimes when the trek here would be much more forgiving.

  I pulled off my gloves and produced from a zippered pocket a photograph of Denise I’d brought with me from LA. I stared at it for a long moment, imprinting the image of her on my mind.

  I’d taken the photo during a camping trip in June of last year. It was Denise’s nine-month anniversary of being clean, and we went to Mammoth Hot Springs Campground in Yellowstone National Park. We pitched our tent in a sagebrush steppe above the Gardner River, and on the second morning Denise woke me early, telling me to come take a look at something. I climbed out of the tent and joined her sleepily. She pointed to a stand of scattered juniper and Douglas fir trees one hundred meters away.

  “What am I looking at?” I asked.

  “There!” She jabbed her finger.

  And then I made out three grazing bison. I had been staring right at them, but had thought they were nothing but large boulders.

  Denise crept forward to get a better
view.

  I retrived my phone from the tent, then returned to where I had been standing.

  “Hey,” I said, readying the camera.

  Denise glanced back. Her face lit up, her delight genuine, not assumed for the camera—and that’s when I snapped the picture.

  The last picture I’d ever take of her.

  “Well, I made it, Denny,” I said, a tear freezing on my cheek. “Wish you were here with me. Wish we could have done this together. But I got here. Fuck, I actually got here.” I wiped my eyes with the frosted back of my glove. My chest was so tight I found it hard to speak, but I forced the rest of the words out. “Goodbye, Denny. I love you. I need to go now…and I need to let you go too.”

  I kissed the photograph, letting my lips linger on the glossy paper for a long moment.

  “Co-rey!” Olivia’s voice called, ghostly, shrill, shredded. “We have…leave! Com-ing?”

  I set the photo amongst the others on the rock shelf, replaced the cowboy hat, and walked away without looking back.

  ⁂

  We got on our way quickly, but it immediately became clear I had royally fucked up. My obsession to reach Boot Rock might have doomed us all. Because the weather was now so bad I could barely see Vasily a few feet in front of me. Everything was pearly white, barren, identical, and dangerously cold. The wind had to be gusting at sixty or seventy miles an hour, while the blistering snowflakes assaulted us like millions of granules of icy buckshot. And there was no sign of the murderous blizzard letting up.

  I bumped into the back of Vasily. He had stopped and produced the compass he wore around his neck. He took a reading, turned ninety degrees, and pointed. “The valley…that direction!” he shouted to be heard above the storm, and led the way.