Chapter 17
With a low shudder, everything stilled.
Zach opened his eyes to near darkness, and in a rush of fear that he was buried he thrashed, immediately realizing that he could breathe, he could move; that he was looking out to murk only because the cloud of snow released by the avalanche so darkened everything around him.
He was still standing. His feet and skis were under about a foot of snow.
His back and sides were caked such that as he moved snow fell off of him in chunks.
He unhooked his stiffened arms from the pines, one leg twisting awkwardly.
He tried to lift a foot, but the snow over his skis and boots wasn’t the light powder he’d floated down less than ten minutes before.
Instead its consistency was that of dense, plowed snow.
And just like the icy curls plows forced to the edges of parking lots, the crust over his feet swirled with dirt, rocks and sticks.
With wonder, he realized it had all taken only seconds.
He was only vaguely aware of physical pain.
His shoulders hurt where they’d pressed against the trees.
He felt a tenderness in his left side just below his ribs.
And there was a wet warmth on the back of his fleece neck gaiter he knew had to be blood, though he felt only a distant throb.
His nausea, his uncontrollable shivering, were the only things that broke through his numbness.
But he was okay. He was okay. Wasn’t he? He twisted frantically, trying to free his feet.
When you get upset, when you’re having trouble talking, try counting and breathing slowly. We’ll do it together, all right, lovebug? One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand.
He counted it out. He was alive. He could breathe. He would be okay. The snow around his feet and skis was beginning to break apart.
The avalanche shovel. How could he have forgotten? Mind turned to dirt-filled sludge, just like the snow.
Zach unshouldered his backpack. Its airbag sagged, speared by a freshly snapped stick the size of his index finger.
The stick was bright with blood and he blinked at it.
Traced the blood under his neck gaiter with a bare hand and only then truly felt the pain.
A strip of skin the size of a dime was missing.
His trembling fingers came away bloody, redoubling his nausea.
Three-one-thousand, four-one-thousand.
It wasn’t that bad. It couldn’t be. He was able to move his arm. It hurt, but even so.
Just a scratch.
Zach unstrapped the blade and handle of his avalanche shovel from his pack, shaky hands managing to slide the pieces together with a click.
He jabbed around his feet until he could reach through the snow’s fissured crust, release his bindings, and step out of his skis onto the hard-packed remains of the avalanche.
Russ.
The way Zach’s body had gone unlaced and sweaty with fear had polluted all coherent thought. He should have remembered Russ right away.
Zach reattached the shovel to his pack, fumbling with the snaps.
He unzipped his coat and grabbed his avalanche beacon from where it was strapped around his middle.
He let it hang down from its springy, spiral cord, zipping up his coat before taking the transceiver in hand. He stared down at it dumbly.
For a moment he was looking down on himself from above, watching this separate Zach making an unnecessary fuss, putting on his pack, its airbag flapping behind him.
Turning the beacon’s dial from “transmit” to “search.” Going through the well-remembered motions he’d learned at his mother’s side as he moved toward the tree where he thought he’d seen Russ.
Everything had shuddered so out of step that even in motion he drifted, lost, confused over how he had gotten to this place where a mountain had flipped to its underbelly and tried to eat him alive.
But it was all really happening. The adults were somewhere absurdly far away; useless, out of sight, out of earshot. His mother wasn’t looking over his shoulder under a blue sky, patiently demonstrating what to do. But this was the point of all that playacting.
Within fifteen minutes, someone buried in an avalanche will suffocate.
“Okay,” he said aloud. “Okay, Mommy.”
Zach stumbled through snow marred with branches, weaving among snapped trees, chunks of compacted snow, his blood filling his ears with a rapid woosh-woosh-woosh.
The number ten appeared on the transceiver.
He slipped, dropped the beacon. It knocked him hard on a knee. He grabbed it up from where it bounced on its cord, hands swollen, legs loose.
Nine, eight, seven…
Ahead, an orange glove stuck out of the snow. A guttural sound slipped from Zach, so strange it seemed altogether separate from him.
And then Zach was next to it, yanking off the glove to expose a pale, unmoving hand he squeezed tightly with his own.
He wasn’t thinking at all now, couldn’t think, just tore the avalanche shovel from his pack and pounded it down and down again around that hand, pieces of snow loosening slowly, painfully slowly, the shovel scraping, rasping, and he heard himself screech in frustration at the way the displaced snow tumbled back over what he was trying to expose.
But there! A shoulder, the strap of a backpack, which meant the face—the all-important mouth and nose had to be—
An inch down the shovel skidded off Russ’s helmet and bright red bloomed through a scrim of snow. With his mittens Zach pawed snow off lips, mouth, a newly bloodied nose tip, and realized that all along he’d been yelling, “Russ, Russ?”
Russ didn’t react, didn’t flinch. Like the elk. Like his mother.
No. No, no.
Russ’s cracked goggles were packed with snow.
Zach pried them off, exposing closed eyes, one bruised and swollen.
There was a blue tinge to Russ’s lips, his skin an unnatural white that was only interrupted by a cheek gone rugburn red and the bleeding slice on the nose.
Zach whiplashed back in time to see his mother’s pale face before returning to himself and the emergency at hand.
The strap of Russ’s helmet pulled so tight under his chin that Zach thought the older boy might be choking.
He flung off a mitten and used naked fingers to unsnap it, the nylon bands flying away from the neck.
Did the blueness fade a little?
“Russ? Russ?” Zach held a bare finger under Russ’s nose, but felt nothing, not even the cold, as if Zach’s own body had gone senseless with adrenalin and terror.
Russ coughed.
The relief was so immense Zach sat back, stunned, head washed muddy, disparate things colliding.
“Russ? Russ are you there?” Dave’s tinny voice scratched through the radio.
Zach unzipped his coat pocket and pulled out his own radio.
Why hadn’t he contacted them right away?
Such a simple, basic thing to forget. Not that the adults could have done anything but slow down his search for Russ with a bunch of talk.
And the men hadn’t contacted him, either.
Hadn’t thought to radio until now. How long had it been?
“Shane? Come in!” Bram said.
“It’s Zach. I found Russ, I’m digging him out. Over.”
“Russ?” Dave repeated.
“No, it’s Zach. I’m digging Russ out.”
“Is he okay? Is Russ okay? Where are you?”
“Where we’re supposed to meet. In the trees. Russ is breathing. I’m digging him out.”
“Russ, buddy, you there?”
Russ groaned.
“He can’t answer. I’m still digging. At the meeting point. Over.”
A swelling sob through the radio. “You dig, you just dig. We’ll be right there! I’ll be right there, Russ, I’ll be right there, bud!”
“Where’s Shane?” Bram asked again.
“Dunno. Over and out.” Zach pocketed the radio, ignoring Bram saying, “Wasn’t he with you? Where is he?”
The teenager’s unhurt eye fluttered open and then shut again as tiny, shining pieces of broken goggle plastic, disturbed by Russ’s movement, tumbled into it.
Zach blew hard to disperse these broken bits, some of the tiniest pieces lodging in and sparkling among the blood and melting snow smeared on Russ’s cheek, his nose.
“Are you okay? Can you breathe okay? Does anything hurt?”
A dry, pained sound escaped Russ’s open mouth.
“I’ll get you out, then you’ll be able to breathe easier, okay?”
As Zach dug, huge flakes drifted onto Russ’s unburied skin, onto the closed eyes and smashed goggles. It wasn’t the settling snow from the slide, but the start of another storm. Snow collected gently on the older boy’s clotting blood, on his eyelashes.
Maybe right now Ximena was making Bonnie pancakes.
One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand.
“My side hurts,” Russ wheezed. “My head.”
“It’s okay,” Zach said, words piling on top of each other through rapid breaths, through tears that froze his cheeks. “You’re okay. I’m here, Russ! You were hardly covered, I’ve almost got you out and then we can see—”
Voices called out from the unexpected direction of the ridge above.
“Russ? Russ?”
How were they so close already? And why up there? The men must have skied down the more forgiving path they’d taken up to the peak along the rim rather than risk skiing the steep Bowl after it had slid.
“Can you hear me? Russ?” Dave called.
“Here!” Zach yelled.
The men didn’t respond.
After seeing the gloved hand, Zach hadn’t needed to use his avalanche probe to locate Russ’s body. But he took the folded aluminum pole from his backpack now, and banged it against the handle of his shovel.
Cling! Cling! Cling!
“Did you hear that? Boys? Russ?”
Cling! Cling! Cling!
“It’s there—it’s from over there.”
Zach couldn’t see the men through the still-hovering cloud of settling avalanche snow, through the trees and the storm, but their voices got closer. Again he called out, “Here!” And Dave and the guide materialized out of the gloom.
“Russ!”
“He’s here,” Zach said.
Dave popped out of his skis, rushed clumsily along the snow. “My boy—Russ! Are you okay?” Dave went to his knees and embraced his son. “My boy, my boy! My God!”
Russ winced. “Dad! That hurts.”