'I don't want to leave her either,' the older man said. 'If you ask me, it ought to be
that one over there' – he jerked a thumb at the litter – 'who's stuck in the hole. As far
as I'm concerned, he as good as killed that girl. All the same, it's her who stays and
him that gets saved.'
'There's no right or wrong in the mountains,' the leader added. 'There's just
whatever happens.'
'What's your name?' the older man asked.
'Abe Burns.'
'Well, Abe, if we were down in the World, I'd have you tied up. But we don't have the
manpower to carry you out. So that's no good. All we can do is rely on you to do what's
right.'
'Yes sir,' Abe said. 'I'm trying.'
'Quit your jacking off,' the leader shouted. 'We got an avalanche overhead and a
storm and a hurt man. And no time for you to get a hard-on for a dead woman.'
Abe didn't hesitate. He knocked the leader backward onto his pack and would have
kicked him, too, except he had on crampons and the teeth would have cut the man.
'Jesus,' the older man hissed at the leader, 'Jesus.' Then he turned to Abe. 'You
know, you can't save her.'
'I don't care,' Abe admitted.
'Then why?'
Abe didn't answer. He couldn't.
The older man looked around at the peaks. 'Have it your way,' he said. 'I just wish
you wouldn't do this to yourself.'
'It's your funeral,' the leader cursed Abe, struggling to his feet. He pointed at the
hole. 'She's already had hers.'
The older man shouted the litter crew to a halt two hundred yards down the glacier
and Abe trailed him down. The team set down the wounded man, who was delirious
with the morphine and warmth. The rescuers all went through their packs, donating
food and an extra sleeping bag and a bivouac tent and a little kerosene stove for
melting water. They did it quickly, with little respect for Abe but no discourtesy. They
thought him a fool, that was plain, but no one said it out loud. They simply left him
their surplus. To a man, the rescuers were sullen. Clearly they did not relish carrying
Daniel down at the expense of the woman in the crevasse. But the decision had been
made. One went so far as to wish Abe well. Then they were gone.
Abe trudged back up the slope with the supplies. In all, their charity weighed about
twenty pounds, and suddenly that seemed very little against the dark mass of storm
and twilight.
Abe lay the things beside the crevasse and assembled the bivouac tent as best he
could before the wind blew everything away or the snow buried it or he got too cold.
He set the tent door inches from the mouth of the crevasse, which made for an
awkward entrance. But it would facilitate communication, and that was the whole
point. Once inside the tiny tent and burrowed into the sleeping bag, Abe felt like he
was the one trapped. Only then did he call down into the hole and tell Diana what he'd
done.
The woman didn't answer. Not a whisper issued up from the crevasse.
'Diana?' he called. Abe had prepared himself for resistance, which was why he'd
waited to set camp before announcing his presence. Her silence confused him.
'Well, I'm here,' Abe said.
Hours passed. The storm swallowed them alive. What light remained was scooped
away by the wind.
Abe fell asleep and began dreaming he'd fallen into the crevasse. He couldn't move
his arms or legs and it was hard to breathe except in shallow birdlike bursts. He woke
from the dream to find himself smothering in complete darkness. The tent had
collapsed beneath a heavy mantle of snow and his limbs were lodged tight inside the
cocoon of the sleeping bag.
It took all Abe's strength to jackknife his body up and down and punch the tent and
himself free of the snow. Frenzied with claustrophobia, he managed to claw open the
door. There he lay with his bare head extending into the blizzard, gulping huge,
searing lungfuls of air and snowflakes, overjoyed to find himself free of the dream
even if not the mountain.
It was only then that he heard singing. The song was eerie and distant and sounded
like nothing human, and Abe guessed the wind was playing through the high towers.
That or some animal had been driven up from the forest. Or spirits were on the loose.
Abe listened harder. Between the howl of wind and the hiss of corn snow guttering
off his tent wall, he found a rhythm and a tune and a sunniness to it. It was a Beach
Boys song.
Even as he listened, Abe felt the storm layering him with snow all over again. He
shook the tent hard but carefully, for after all his shaking around there was no telling
where the crevasse lay now. Rooting through the folds of the tent, Abe found a
flashlight and shined it outside. He was horrified and at the same time enchanted by
how the falling snow actually devoured his light. The beam reached a few feet beyond
his little nylon cave, then vanished.
It took him several minutes to locate the crevasse. The hole had closed to a small
circle, as if stealing its catch away from the world for good. Still lying inside his
sleeping bag and tent, Abe edged closer. The singing became more distinct, but that
only made it more alien because Diana wasn't singing real words, only jibberish.
Now Abe found the ice axe they had left him. In thrashing around, he'd landed on
top of the axe. The pick had slashed his sleeping bag and down feathers had spilled
everywhere. There was blood on the metal head, and for a bad moment Abe thought
he'd cut himself and was too cold to feel the wound. Then he realized this was Daniel's
axe and Daniel's blood.
Reaching his arm outside, Abe poked at the edges of the hole to widen it. He began
chopping, methodically cutting away at the snow even though the debris poured down
the crevasse, adding to Diana's misery. 'I'm sorry,' he shouted to her, 'I'm sorry.' It
was for himself that Abe cut at the snow. He needed to keep open this doorway to the
underworld. He was afraid to lose contact, quite certain that without Diana's company,
he would never make it through this ordeal.
When Abe had finally cut down to the blue rope and gained proof of his companion,
he rested. He slept. When his eyes opened again, it was day, but it might as well have
been night still. The storm was raging more fiercely than before. Abe couldn't see
anything outside the tent and he couldn't see anything inside it, either, without the
flashlight.
Abe turned to rebuilding his tent. Section by section, he propped the walls up with
the broken poles and taught himself to rustle the fabric every few minutes to shed the
snow. And all the while, he listened to Diana's mindless singing.
'You're going to make it,' Abe shouted down the crevasse. He found some cheese and
a chunk of wet bread and a plastic bottle of mostly frozen water. 'You want some
food?' he yelled.
Diana made no answer. She just sang on and on.
