The Search
Leif pauses for a drink. Cold liquid running down his throat. He can feel his heart beating hard in his chest, blood pumping. He likes the feeling of being fully in his body, alive.
He’s almost at the top of Blafjell now. The landscape is gray and barren. Rock, earth, lichen-stained rock. The wind is brutal up here, buffeting him from switching directions.
He’s never felt comfortable on Blafjell. There are other peaks that he loves—where he’s slept in his bivvy beneath the stars and felt like he was soaring—but up here, there’s a desolate feeling. The mountain lures the clouds, which huddle so close they shoulder out any view.
A gust of wind sheets across the mountain like a shove. The hairs stand up on the backs of Leif’s arms—not from the cold.
He remembers his father talking about Blafjell. Thin places. Elementals. Words spoken in a lowered voice.
When Leif was just a boy, his father knew a teacher who used to bring his sixth-form class up into the mountains each summer.
One year, there was a seventeen-year-old boy in the group who was known to be able to sense things. His teacher wasn’t a man who gave much heed to sensing things—but afterward, he wished he had.
This boy—he climbed halfway up Blafjell and then stopped dead. Apparently, he just stood there, middle of the trail, staring up at the peak, refusing to go further. Said there was something wrong about the place. Told the teacher they should all turn back.
The teacher wasn’t having it. Tried to make him hike on.
Threatened all manner of trouble if he didn’t—but the boy refused.
Bar dragging him, the teacher was out of options.
He couldn’t leave the boy to walk back alone, so a second teacher descended with him.
The boy pleaded with her, begged her to stop the others from continuing—but the remaining group went on.
Knut took the emergency call. A freak snowstorm had blown in. Four feet of snow in as many hours. It was July. Not a hint of it in the forecast.
The teacher and his students were stranded on the summit of Blafjell, the trail markers swallowed, a total whiteout.
Rescue teams dug them out the following morning—Leif’s father among them.
The teacher and his students had survived.
They’d done all the right things—built a snow shelter, huddled tight, talked and sung to stay awake—but they were terrorized.
Kept saying that when the first snowflakes fell, they were not white but black.
Leif’s father wasn’t a man easily spooked, but Leif had seen it in his face that summer. There was a new wariness. Fear had gotten to him.
He glances at the goose bumps trailing his arms. Clenches his fists. Pushes on.