Stabenow, Dana - Shugak 02 - A Fatal Thaw
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went on for what felt like forever, compounded of every hurt, every
slight, every insult, every snide comment,
of spring cleaning a Titan had laid hold to the edge of the earth's
mantle and with one snap of his wrists was shaking it free of a winter's
accumulation of dust and
sinuous, deadly fashion of a serpent. The cornices of the glacier walls
cracked, slipped and crashed to the bottom. The walls themselves broke
apart and tumbled down in house-size chunks. Huge clouds of pulverized
crystal billowed up into the still air, as if in a frenzy
The broken, icy floor of the glacier undulated in the
Kate, who was halfway to her feet, back to her knees. She fell forward,
and the secondary shock, a continuing side-to-side motion, kept her from
getting back up again. A layer of snow cascaded down over the hummock
she crouched behind. Mutt, whimpering, flattened herself at Kate's side.
Echoing off the sky was the sound of a thousand gears grinding together
as the entire valley shook back and forth, calling Kate to raise dazed,
incredulous eyes and bear witness.
There was too much happening to take in at once.
The earth answered. Seventy miles beneath them, the North American
continental plate rode over the top of the North Pacific oceanic plate,
forcing it four and a quarter inches down into the earth's mantle. It
was a bluntly struck blow of energy equal to slightly more than the
atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima. The primary shock, a single, hard,
up-and-down jolt, knocked
every smothered snicker, every cruel jibe, but mostly it was a lament
for lost love-parental love, romantic love, maternal love. It was agony
given voice.
Above all, it was a long, excruciating, mournful lament for the dead.
The sound broke off into a low sobbing, and left Kate limp and shaking.
What could she say that could possibly get through that wall of anguish?
Lottie's grief seemed so immense as to be a hart of the earth itself.
A scream came from somewhere, a high, frightened, girlish scream.
"Lottie!" Kate cried, but the name was torn from her mouth. She tried to
stand, but her legs were like jelly and her feet wouldn't work. She gave
up, wound a hand in Mutt's ruff and hung on.
Above the glacier the uneven reaches of the Quilaks jerked awake and
surged to their feet. Miklluni Peak
shrugged its shoulders, and before Kate's disbelieving eyes all one
thousand feet of its west face slid down into one side of the valley.
Opposite, Angqaq Peak shivered and shook, and from the East Buttress
another avalanche raced down the opposite side of the glacial valley and
met the oncoming one from Miklluni. They collided in the middle of the
valley, and a white, mushroom-shaped cloud boiled up.
Everywhere she looked, every surface of snow was exploding into
avalanches. Kate groveled before it all, crouched on hands and knees,
one hand locked in Mutt's coat, the other clenched in the unstable floor
of the Valley of Death.
Then, without warning, even that floor fell out from under her, yanking
an involuntary scream from her throat, a sound of rough terror.
She was pulled up with a sharp jerk. Among the sounds of falling snow
and grinding earth, it took a moment for her to realize that Mutt had
caught her in her teeth, by the scruff of the neck as if she were a
newborn pup. A grunt, a tug, and Kate was up over the edge of the new
crevasse and spread-eagled on its side. Woman and dog, they lay there,
trying to burrow into the unstable ground, riding out the rolling,
quaking, shuddering upheaval of terra not so firma.
Seconds passed, minutes, Kate was sure hours had gone by. The shaking
slowed, and stopped. The grinding sound ended. Slowly, painfully, Kate's
world righted itself. She blinked, and the lens shifted from blur to
sharp, clear focus. She became aware of the last rays
of the setting sun glinting off the ice, of the cold snow beneath her
cheek, of the constriction around her throat where Mutt's jaws were
locked into the back of her parka, twisting the fabric into a noose of
life. "Hey, loosen up there, will you, girl?"
It took a few moments to talk Mutt into letting her go. When she did at
last, reluctantly, Kate raised her head cautiously and looked around.
A new crevasse opened in front of her, falling straight down in a path a
hundred feet across. Perched on its edge, she stared down into that
blatant, leering boast of earthly power that seemed to say, See? If I'd
really wanted you, I would have had you. Maybe next time you won't be so
lucky. The subterranean snicker was almost audible.
She rose to shaky feet and realized she no longer had her pack. It must
have been torn from her back during the fall.
Next to her Mutt climbed to. her feet and shook herself vigorously,
spraying Kate with ice and snow. She reared to thrust a cold nose in
Kate's face, as if to say, Can we please get off this goddam mountain now?
Kate looked around apprehensively. "Not yet, girl. Where's the pack?"
Mutt nosed out the pack some fifty feet away, teetering on the edge of
yet another entirely new chasm. Kate pounced on the pack thankfully and
cast an anxious look around for shelter. A boulder-size chunk of ice had
been heaved up out of glacial bowels; it was all she could find in the
time she had left and it would have to do. She dragged her pack over to
its downhill side and, not daring to look up the valley, emptied it out.
With still-shaking hands, she pitched her one-man tent, anchored it down
as best she could, shoved the rest of her gear and Mutt inside and
crawled in behind them.
Mutt gave an anxious whine. "There's no time, girl. Come on, move over."
The silence outside seemed to grow heavier with each passing moment, and
its ominous threat made Kate's hands clumsy. She had barely gotten the
tent zipped, the sleeping bag unrolled and herself inside it when the
wave of spindrift from the collisions of the multiple avalanches hit
like a blustery club. The thin Vortex walls of the tent flapped and
strained, the weight of Kate and Mutt and the pack on the tent floor all
that kept the wind from picking it up and rolling it end over end down
the valley.
The wave of particulate ice pounded the tent for half an hour, a raging,
howling force that screamed its frustration at not being able to get at
them. The tent was sealed shut and still the inside was filled with
tiny, whirling bits of ice. All Kate could do was lie there, draw as far
back into the hood of Bobby's sleeping bag as she could get, and wait it
out. She wondered if the avalanche would run out of steam before it got
to her, but it seemed to be too much to worry about at the moment, and
she stopped thinking about it almost as soon as she started. She curled
up in a ball inside the tiny tent, Mutt huddled close beside her, and
waited it out.
The silence jerked her awake. It took a moment to orient herself, to
accustom herself to the quiet. Incredibly, she must have dozed. She
raised her head and met Mutt's
her head, neck stiff, shoulders tense. The length of the sleeping bag,
the pack, the inside of the tent, all were covered with a layer of fine,
crystalline snow. She kicked her sleeping bag clear, unzipped it, then
the tent flap. Crawling outside, she rose to her feet on legs that
trembled a little.
Everywhere she looked the features of the Quilaks had changed, and
changed radically. The southeast face of Mount Kanuyaq had been swept
clean of snow and ice, scoured down to bare rock. The mouth of Sisik
Glacier was filled from wall to wall with a flow of snow that reached
out a mile and a half into the Valley of Death.
The only way Kate recognized the Barnes Wall, a
five thousand-foot drop from Angqaq Peak to Sleighter Glacier, was by
its location. Every feature, every fissure on it had been altered,
shifted, broken. Carlson Icefall's once tiered, stairstep surface had
been polished smooth by a gigantic hand and now gleamed in the twilight
like a marble flagstone.
The Valley of Death itself had been ripped open in every direction.
There wasn't a cornice left intact on top of a glacier wall as far as
the eye could see. Everywhere, the fresh blue of newly exposed glacier
ice gleamed coldly in the setting sun's refracted glow.
As Kate watched, the sun slipped behind the Alaska Range, leaving only a
band of misty mauve on the western horizon. One after another, stars
found their way through the firmament to appear overhead. The air itself
seemed to glitter with a thousand diamonds, the glint of starlight. off
spindrift. The mountains stood still and serene.
It was beauty. It was innocence. It was peace.
It was a lie. Kate turned her back on it, repacked the tent and went in
search.
But there was no sign of Lottie. There was no sign of Lottie's rifle.
There was no sign of Lottie's pack, or of Lottie's tent, or of any of
the rest of her gear. There was no sign of Lottie's tracks.
There should have been something-a mitten, a boot, a half-empty bag of
trail mix. Kate raised her head from contemplation of the bland stretch
of snow at her feet and stared up the long valley, her eyes narrowed,
trying to see through the deepening twilight, around the jumbled remains
of the Avalanche.
There was nothing, no movement, only the calm after the storm. Kate
shoved her hands in her pockets and cocked an eye at Mutt. "For that
matter, there was no sign of our tracks, either. That tidal wave of
frozen water pretty much obliterated everything that got in its way.".
Mutt, sitting with her tail curled around her paws, looked the picture
of patience as she waited for Kate to give her the signal to start tracking.
"Well?" Kate asked her. "Who's to say Big Bump didn't eat her alive? It
could have been us. It damn near was us. Why not Lottie?"
The more she thought about it, the better it sounded. Resettling the
pack on her shoulders, she turned and began retracing her steps in the
direction of the base camp. Surprised but pleased to be going in a
direction of declining altitude, Mutt rose to her feet and followed.
As always, the journey down seemed half as long as the journey up. The
Koreans were alive, which surprised Kate, and touchingly glad to see
her, which did not. Their radio, recovered from the bottom of a
brand-new twelve-foot ravine not three feet from the front of their
tent, was crusted with ice and battered from the fall. She switched it
on without much hope and rejoiced when by a minor miracle it came to
life. The volume knob was turned all the way to the right and Dan
O'Brian's voice blared out over the still arctic night.
"Kanuyuq Base, Kanuyuq Base, this is Ranger 1, Ranger 1, come in.
Goddammit, you guys! Where the hell are you! Answer up! Say something,
even if it's in Korean!"
The Koreans cried out at the sound of his voice and fell sobbing into
each other's arms. Kate lunged for the volume knob and turned it down.
Keying the mike, she said, "Danny boy, you got yourself a mouth on you
could wake up a wooly mammoth."
A brief silence. "Kate? Kate, is that you?"
"That's me. I'm about five thousand feet above your base camp, around
the southern mouth of what used to be the Valley of Death. George's two
Koreans are here, too, and they're okay."
"Never mind them, what about you?" "I'm fine. We just have an earthquake.
"No shit we just had an earthquake, about six-point-two's worth on the
Richter scale. For a while there I thought the whole Park was going to
slide into the Gulf of Alaska. I'll never make fun of your 64 quake
stories again, Kate. What's the mountain look like?"
Kate gave a short laugh and settled for "You won't believe it."
Even over the radio's static she could hear the change in his voice.
"What's the base camp look like?"
Kate, having already sighted in on where the base camp used to be with
Bobby's set of Bushnell field glasses, replied, "What base camp?"
Valuable airtime was wasted with a string of words for which the using
of over the public airwaves the FCC fines heavily. Kate stood it
patiently for as long as she was able, but she was tired and hungry and
her patience didn't last long.
She clicked the transmitter key, interrupting the circuit, until he shut
up. "Fire up the Llama and come get these two nitwits before I shove
them into a crevasse."
ten
THE Lama showed up less than an hour later and took on the Koreans.
Behind them Kate shoved in as much of their gear as had been salvaged
and stood back. Dan looked around. "Come on, Kate, quit screwing around!
Get aboard!"
"Go!" she yelled over the sound of the engine. "Quit screwing around!"
"Go on!" she yelled. "I'm heading up to the summit! I've never been!"
Dan doffed the headset and slipped out of the chopper. He ducked around
to stand next to her. "What's the matter with you?"
"I've never been to the summit," Kate repeated.
He looked at her, one eyebrow raised. "You're the last person I ever
expected to get summit fever."
"The climbers always want to do the last leg on their own. The weather's
good. There'll never be a better day to see what all the shouting's
about. Plus, I can take a look at what the quake did to the route."
He squinted up the valley. "Can you do ten thousand feet in a day?"
"It's only five thousand up."
"And five thousand back," he pointed out, "and you know as well as I do
coming down's always more dangerous than going up."
She shrugged and spread her hands. He swore at her.
"You gonna keep on after Lottie, is that what this is about?"
"Lottie's dead," she said flatly.
He gave her a sharp look. "Lottie's better at wilderness
than just about anyone I know, including you.
You find her body?"
"Nope." Kate shook her head. "But she's dead. Avalanche got her. Buried
her without a trace."
He looked from Kate's expressionless face to the pass
below the East Buttress of
Angqaq Peak and back again.
"How tidy."
"I thought so."
"No point in looking for the body, I guess." "No point at all," Kate agreed.
"But you want to go mountain climbing anyway." Yup.
He threw up his hands. "Okay, fine, all right. Weather's about near
perfect, forecast is for more of the same. Take the radio with you, and
call me from Carlson Icefall.
I'll pick you up there."