Snow Stalker

by M K Dymock

  “So where is the skier?”

  “I tried to follow the chairlift as much as I could and didn’t see anyone. But visibility was sometimes only twenty feet or so.”

  Patrick looked over their shoulders. “Me and a couple of my guys took snowmobiles up and down the trails but didn’t spot anything. But like Mina said, visibility sucked. We crawled our way down and were lucky not to go over a cliff.”

  Sol stared out the huge picture windows lining the restaurant. Usually a person could enjoy lunch with a view of the mountains, at least on a clear day. That day, it viewed a vast gray rapidly turning black.

  “If he fell and knocked himself out, he’d be covered by snow in a few minutes,” Patrick continued. “There’d be nothing to see. I’ve got a few ski patrollers out around the base, but I’m not sending any more people up, not in this.”

  Sol shook his head. “No, we don’t want to lose anyone else.”

  Mina glanced between the two men. “You can’t mean we leave him out there.” Her voice rose in volume. “He’ll be dead by morning.”

  “Mina,” Sol said.

  “No, I can ski that line again. There are a couple of ravines he could’ve fallen in.”

  Sol pointed to the large windows. “Look out there. Can you even see the chairlift? I’ve been in storms like this. You can’t find the ground underneath you, can’t tell whether you’re facing uphill or down. I don’t want you or anyone else lost until spring.”

  Mina’s jaw clenched. “So we leave them out there to die?”

  “No…” At Mina’s hard stare, Sol stopped. “Yes, we risk that. But I won’t kill you to save someone else.” Sol took a step closer and lowered his voice. “I’ve known you long enough to know that at heart you are a rescuer. And I know this goes against every instinct you have. But you have to learn when to commit and when to wait.”

  “Plus, we can’t say for sure someone is even out there,” Patrick said. “How many riders jump off the lift when it gets close to the cliffs and ski down?”

  She considered that. YouTube was filled with videos of people making the jump. She herself had done it, but she wasn’t stupid enough to post it and cost herself a job. “But not usually this early. The base is shallow, making the jump farther and harder.”

  “I pull people off the mountain every day doing stupid stuff, Mina. If they did, they could be hurt or they could’ve landed it.”

  “All the more reason to not risk any more lives,” Sol said. “We wait until morning.”

  Mina knew they spoke truth, but she also knew in a way she couldn’t explain that someone was out there. She’d had one chance to ski that mountain and find the missing skier, but she’d let her own fears stop her. She had failed.

  If someone died, it would be on her.

  4

  Mina stood in the storm, the cold coursing through her body and freezing the blood within her veins. The lifts were stopped and the world shrank to the ten or so feet she could see.

  Sol stepped out of the lodge. “I could use your help during the winter. Clint wants to take some time off when the baby comes. You’re still sworn in. I know you said—”

  “I said no.”

  During the last summer, the rivers had run low and rafting slowed down, costing her a job as a guide. To make ends meet, or at least come closer together, Mina had taken a temporary job as a deputy for the sheriff. She’d helped out at the harvest festival, directing traffic and picking up trash. Her one exciting moment had been breaking up a fight between two drunks who were each twice her size.

  “It wouldn’t be full time,” Sol said. “Just think about it.”

  “Okay.” She wouldn’t.

  “I’m going to plan out tomorrow’s search with Patrick. Can you go through the parking lot and see what cars are left? Maybe if we have an abandoned car, we’ll have an idea if someone is up there.”

  “Yeah, the employees still working will all be parked in one spot. I can see who else is left.”

  In the parking lot, Mina used her phone to snap pics of each car, along with a close-up of the license plate. She’d made it about two-thirds of the way through the parking lot when she found a couple of snowboarders sitting on the tailgate of a truck, putting on their shoes.

  “Hey,” she called out as she walked toward them. They looked at her suspiciously. She realized she spoke with an authoritative tone but didn’t wear a uniform or anything to back the tone up. “I work here.”

  One slipped a silver can behind him. “We were heading home.” He wore a patched-up coat and pants with duct tape across his knees.

  The other one held up a cell phone. “We lost track of our buddy. Been trying to call him.”

  “When?”

  He stuttered a bit at her abrupt tone. “Afternoon, three or four.”

  “Can you come with me back to the lodge? The sher—” She thought better. “The Search and Rescue chief is there, and I’d like him to know there’s a boarder missing.” Seeing how nervous they’d been at her seeing the beer can, she didn’t want to scare them off.

  “I don’t know if it’s that big of deal,” said the one in patched-up pants. “He’ll turn up—tends to take off occasionally.” They jumped off the tailgate and turned toward the cab.

  “We’re actually looking for a missing boarder. Someone loaded the chairlift but never made it to the top,” Mina said.

  The men turned in unison. One stood openmouthed while Patches let loose a torrent of curses at the missing friend. He pulled out his cell and made a call, but evidently got voicemail. “Jason, call me back, man. Now. No more of this.”

  Neither of the men argued with Mina as she led them back to the lodge.

  Sol still sat in the empty restaurant, pencil in hand, making notes on the map. He glanced up when the three of them walked in the room.

  “These guys lost their friend around three or four,” Mina said. “His name is Jason…” She turned to the two guys. “What’s the last name?”

  “Collins,” Patches said. “Jason Collins.”

  Sol stood. “I’m Sheriff Chapa. Where did you last see him?”

  “We got on the Lucky Jack lift and then got separated on the way down.” Lucky Jack ran on the other side of the resort from Summit.

  “He talk about making a run on this side of the mountain?” Mina asked.

  They turned to her, looked down at her, then back to Sol. “We were planning on skiing the entire mountain. Didn’t want to repeat a run.”

  Sol took a step back and glanced over at Mina, silently asking her to take over. He knew she spoke these boys’ language better than he did.

  “I’m Mina Park, deputy.” She stared straight in their eyes without flinching, hoping they wouldn’t notice her uncertainty. “Did you plan on meeting Jason at the bottom of the lift after the run? Is it common for him to go off without you?”

  “We just said something about racing to the bottom. We got down and he wasn’t there, so we figured he went back up.”

  “What run did you take down?”

  “Didn’t take a run. We dropped down Corner Chute.” Chutes were steep gullies and usually lined with rock, at least in Lost Gorge.

  If she wanted these guys to pay attention, she had to admire their riding and show she knew what she talked about. “Did you run into that patch of ice after the first pitch? I wiped out on that a few days ago. Rolled down about fifty feet.”

  Patches stood straighter. “About did, but skirted the edge and dropped farther down the ridge.” Sol sat on a nearby table, scribbling notes.

  “What was Jason wearing?”

  The one looked down at his own clothes as if that could give him a clue. The other one shrugged. “Don’t know. Maybe a blue or a black coat.”

  “Was he boarding or skiing?”

  “Boarding, like us. Just got a new Burton board; it’s got this crazy graphic of a beast looking over the mountains.”

  Had David mentioned the missing person was a boarder or a ski
er? She’d assumed skier but didn’t know.

  “Yeah.” The buddy jumped in. “It’s mostly black and gray, but underneath is red. Jason saved his tip money from guiding in the summer to buy it.” His voice went quiet. “Today was his first day on it.”

  People might judge someone for dropping $500 on a new piece of gear while wearing pants duct-taped together. Those people were not Mina. “You try texting him?”

  “Tried to, but the texts bounced back.” Cell phone service was known to be unreliable at best in this corner of the mountains. “I figured if we lost him, he’d turn up at the truck, but nobody was there.”

  Jason was originally from Wisconsin; he’d come out West after college to drop down the steeps of the Rockies before he would settle into a real job after a gap year. Mina had done the same thing ten years ago, but the real job had never panned out. She worked winter seasons at the resort, summers wherever jobs were, and wandered the in-between times.

  Mina took their numbers and promised to call if they found anything. They promised to call if they heard from him.

  By the time they left, it was long dark outside. “Go home,” Sol told Mina. “Get some sleep. When the storm breaks, we’ll be out there. Even if it’s dark, least we can do is take one of the Cats down the run. Might see something.” The Cats referred to the large groomers that went down the ski runs each night to smooth out the snow.

  “I skied down the runs where they cross under the lift, Sol. If he fell in a place a Cat can get to, I would’ve seen him. If someone is there, he would be in the backcountry in the trees.”

  “We’ll do everything we can.”

  She hated that statement. Sometimes everything they could do wasn’t enough. Three seasons ago, the SAR team had spent a week searching for a six-year-old who’d wandered away from the camp. They’d never found him, and still she dreamt that little boy called out to her.

  Mina trudged through the snow to the parking lot, where the storm had already left several inches on her car. That morning, in anticipation, she’d pulled her wipers away from her windshield to keep them from being iced over, but it still required a good amount of effort to scrape the ice off. She’d forgotten her mittens, and it took more than a few minutes to get feeling back in her fingers even in her warming Jeep.

  A few minutes in the snow and her hands were already numb. How long could someone lost in the storm survive?

  5

  The second Mina walked through the door of her home, she turned on the electric space heater to vanquish the cold air.

  Her place, a studio apartment, wasn’t much, but at least she didn’t share it with five other instructors like a lot of her coworkers. Real estate came cheap in the town of Lost Gorge, but so did seasonal salaries.

  Mina’s room resided in what had been a large mansion built at the turn of the century by a mine owner who’d struck it rich in silver. Within a year of moving in, the mines dried up, striking him poor just as quickly. The opulent house had served a series of purposes over the last 100 years until her landlord had purchased it and converted each floor into two studio apartments, making six units.

  The second she walked in the door, the red chili spices of the Dakdoritang overwhelmed her, and for a brief moment, she relaxed in the warmth of being home. That second passed too quickly as the events of day set on her. She knew there would be no sleep tonight.

  She dished out the stew made from a recipe that had been passed on by her grandmother and was supposed to be passed on to Mina’s own kids one day. As if on cue, her phone rang—her mother. She didn’t have the heart for a conversation tonight. Her mother would ask about her day, and Mina would lie. Otherwise, it would turn into an argument about the direction her life was going, which wasn’t anywhere. Even Mina could admit that; she just didn’t care.

  She’d come to Lost Gorge, a graduate fresh out of college but deep in the recession. Majoring in political science was supposed to launch her into law school, but watching all her lawyer friends graduate neck-high in debt and jobless, Mina decided she was done with school. It seemed like doubling down on a bad bet. The only problem was that undergrad degree didn’t really mean much on its own.

  Mina had looked into instructing at Bear Mountain and some of the other SoCal resorts, but lack of snow that season meant lack of opportunity. A posting for instructors in the faraway town of Lost Gorge in the northern Rockies had beckoned, and she took it.

  It was supposed to be a seasonal job and a gap year until she figured out her career. That gap had turned into ten.

  It didn’t matter. She valued a nomad’s life. One summer she’d even chased winter all year, bouncing from the States to New Zealand. She wouldn’t even sign a six-month lease to save $50 a month—way too much commitment. The only long-term commitment she’d made in her life was to that worthless four-year degree she still paid loans on and the four months she taught skiing each winter, which paid better than the rest of the year.

  The phone rang again. Sol’s number popped up, and she answered. “What’s up?”

  “Just checked the latest weather. The storm’s stalled out. There won’t be any searching before morning. We’ll be lucky if we’re searching before noon.” The frustration in his voice echoed through the phone. “But I want the crew up there by dawn so that we’re mobile the second there’s any break in the snow.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  “You give any more thought to my offer?”

  “Sol,” she said with no small amount of exasperation.

  “I’m sorry,” Sol said. “Just because I didn’t have much of a choice in being sheriff doesn’t mean I get to take yours away.”

  She forgave him. He was one of those people who gave everything and got nothing. A quality she didn’t want to entirely emulate. “I can keep working on call, but I don’t know.”

  “Do you still have the paperwork I gave you?”

  She glanced at the drawer where she’d stuffed the forms in an attempt to ignore them. “Yeah.”

  “Then it’s up to you, and I won’t bring it up again until you decide. Have a good night.”

  State law required all its deputies to go through eight weeks of police training within a year of taking the job. She’d received some initial firearm training and such but needed to be certified. When she’d accepted the temp position, Mina had no intention of sticking with it. Told herself she was just helping Sol out for a few months.

  It did offer health insurance, and after her ski injury a few seasons ago, she was more breakable. But if she did the training, she had to commit to the job for at least a year or pay back the cost of instruction. A year was a long time.

  The job was another reason she didn’t take her mother’s call. Nobody outside the town knew she moonlighted as a cop. The way her parents worried, Mina didn’t know if being a stripper or a police officer would be more welcome news.

  She kept the drawer and its decision shut. There’d be time enough to think about it after they found the missing snowboarder.

  Mina was up far before the sun, which didn’t matter much. Even when dawn came, the storm would hold them hostage. What little sleep she’d managed was filled with shadows in the snow. Sometimes she called out to someone unseen, trying to help. Other times, she ran away, the deep snow hindering her escape.

  By 5 a.m. and thanks to four-wheel drive, she sat in the parking lot of the resort, hoping for a break in the storm, but instead watched other cars trickle in. The parking lot had been empty when she pulled in. If someone had spent the night out there, they hadn’t left a car behind.

  The resort had delayed opening any lifts due to the wind, but the parking lot was still half full by nine. Once the lifts opened, half the town would vie over first chair and the chance to make fresh tracks in the powder.

  About ten or so people from SAR and ski patrol hovered in one corner of the lodge. Several ski patrollers, including Patrick, had already gone out. With dynamite tucked in their vests, they would ride snowmobil
es to the peaks and bowls.

  Every fifteen minutes or so, the windows would shake at a boom that echoed across the lower valley. The hope was that these explosions would bring down the avalanches before people could. They would not be setting them off on the Baldie lift for fear of covering up the missing person. The skiers could wait all they wanted to, but the resort wouldn’t open much terrain today.

  At about ten the winds died down, and the resort agreed to open one lift to get the search going. With totals of 22 inches at the base and several feet at the top, no one held much hope of stumbling across anyone before June.

  Mina clicked into her fattest skis, chosen for their ability to float on the powder. The ride up the chairlift with Sol made for a slow trip as they scanned the ground for any sign of life, or anything, really.

  “There,” she said about halfway up, pointing at the cliff that came only fifteen or so feet below them. “I saw the movement in the trees on the other side.”

  As they crested the ridge, they came into view of the bowl Mina had planned to revisit. Sol jabbed his pole in the direction of the highest point of the bowl. “We come down there, we bring an avalanche down.” The wind had blown the snow into an overhang over the edge. You wouldn’t know it, skiing on top, which was where Mina usually dropped in.

  “We can drop in closer to the lift. The pitch isn’t as steep,” Mina said.

  They unloaded, and Mina waved at David, who operated the lift. She dropped into the trees on the same trail as last night, with Sol following. Sol skied—everyone in Lost Gorge did—but not at the same level as Mina. When they reached the edge of the bowl, her previous tracks had long since been covered.

  With the ledge too precarious to ski off, they stayed lower. The storm had come in with wet and heavy snow, which froze before the powder fell on top. This created two separate layers and a higher likelihood of sliding.

  “I’ll go first,” she said. She knew the resort and its temperamental ways. “Stay in my tracks when you follow.”