'Is that the wind, Abe?' Her voice was weary and yet alive with instincts. She knew
there was a storm building. Abe lifted his face to the cold gale. They were racing both
the storm and nightfall now. Any minute now, the others would come over and figure
out how to pull this lonely woman out of the crevasse and they could all leave the
mountain and go home.
'We'll get you out,' Abe said. 'Don't worry.' His words sounded little as they fluttered
down the hole, mere feathers. The woman didn't waste breath returning the brave
assurance and Abe felt rebuked.
'Are you hurt?' Abe asked.
'I don't know.' Her voice got small. 'Are you going to get me out?'
'Of course. That's why we came.'
'Please,' she whispered.
Abe tried to understand what that might mean.
'Is there anything you want? Maybe I can lower something.' Abe was thinking of
food or water.
'A light, please.'
Abe goggled at the simplicity of it. He tried to summon an image of being trapped
down there, but nothing came. He couldn't visualize lying caught in the glassy bowels
of the earth. 'Yes,' he said. 'I'll try.'
Abe stood and approached one of the rescuers, who eyed the hole in the snow before
parting with his headlamp. He seemed reluctant or maybe just sad, and his attitude
irritated Abe. On his return to the crevasse, Abe borrowed one of their coils of goldline
rope.
'I have a light,' Abe yelled down the crevasse. He felt more useful now. He was this
woman's sole link to the surface. Once they rescued her, she would recognize Abe by
his voice and embrace him. She would hold him tight and weep her thanks into his
shoulder.
Lying on his belly, Abe flicked the headlamp on, stretched his arm and head into the
hole and shined it down. He had thought to find the climber sitting far below at the
bottom of a rounded well shaft. Instead the crevasse presented crystal lips no wider
than a man's rib cage.
To his right and left, the crevasse stretched off into dark, terrifying rifts. Except for
this accidental hole, the crevasse was covered over with snow, perfectly concealed
from above. Forty feet down, the icy walls curved underneath where Abe was lying.
The blue rope led down and under and disappeared from sight.
'Can you see the light?' Abe shouted.
'No,' she said. 'It's dark here.'
Abe was glad to extract his arm and head from that awful hole and return to the
surface. Even those few seconds had threatened to rob his self-possession.
While Abe talked and asked questions, he tried lowering the headlamp on the
goldline rope. But the braids were new and stiff and the curve of the walls blocked
passage at the forty-foot level. Abe pulled the headlamp back out.
'Can you catch it?'
'I can try.'
'I'll keep the light on so you can see it coming.'
Abe reached as deep as he could before letting the headlamp go. Its light ricocheted
from the deeper walls, then blinked out. Abe thought the headlamp had broken in the
drop. Then he heard the voice.
'Ah God,' she groaned.
'Did you get it?' Abe had expected joy. She had been delivered from darkness. But
as the silence accumulated, Abe realized that with the light had come the truth, and
now the woman could judge her awful predicament.
'What do you see?'
There was no reply. Abe hung his head into the hole and waited but all he heard was
the wind outside. The storm was ripe. He looked up at the darkening sky, then over at
the rescuers bustling around the litter. They had snugged Daniel into a sleeping bag
and strapped him into the litter. Some of the men were putting their packs on and
they looked close to leaving. Now the team could devote all of its energies to
extracting Diana.
The team leader walked over to Abe and sternly crooked his finger to draw him
away from the hole. Abe pushed up to kneeling. 'All right,' said the leader. 'We're going
down now. We'll need every hand. Go saddle up.'
Abe was sure he had misunderstood. 'Her name is Diana,' he explained. 'She has a
light now.'
The leader exhaled unhappily. 'You didn't do her any favor.'
Abe didn't know what to say. 'She'll be fine,' he finally blustered.
'I'm glad you think so. Anyway, we're shorthanded. If we can get the litter down
before this storm... hell, if we can get the litter down period, we'll be lucky.'
Abe persisted. 'We can dig her out.'
'Dig her out?' The leader's eyes glazed over. 'She's deep. Way too deep. That kid had
no right bringing her to this.'
'But if we all pull...'
'Look, Tex...' And suddenly Abe knew they knew him. He had fooled no one. 'Down
at the bottom, a crevasse thins into a V. You fall far enough, hard enough, and you get
wedged down there. After a while your body heat melts you down tighter. Every
minute that girl's alive, every breath, she's working down deeper.'
'But we're not leaving her down there.'
'We'll come back.'
'When?'
The leader paused. His crow's-feet pinched into a fan. 'When we can.'
'But we have to save her.' For the first time, Abe noticed how the rest of the team
was shunning the hole.
'We can't, not with things how they are. Maybe later, after she starves some more,
loses some of her tissue mass, maybe then. But I doubt it.'
Abe shook his head – against this directive, against his vision of a human being
pinned in an envelope of clear ice, broken and freezing and blind and yet still aware,
still full of her own history and future. She had probably eaten a breakfast yesterday
much like they had last night, had probably walked on the same river ice and spooked
the same herd of starving deer and crossed this same glacier. And now they were
condemning her to infinite darkness.
'Look,' said the leader. The icy tails of his gray moustache waggled. 'Sometimes this
is how it goes. You do a triage. You figure the odds. You save the ones you can save.
And you leave the ones you can't. Now it's going to be a long carry out of here. We're
leaving. I want you to go saddle up. I'll go tell that girl the news.'
'No,' said Abe. 'I'll tell her.' He had the right to the last word. He had touched this
blue rope. He had given this woman light and whatever terrible sights that attended.
The leader made a few thoughtful stabs at the hard snow with his ice axe, then he
walked off without saying more. The rescuers at the litter had turned their backs to
Abe and the hole.
