The north face was everything Hollis had promised.
A full view of the difficult terrain on the chair ride up had been anything but reassuring. Wide fields of moguls blistered the sharp descent, each threatening mound looking like a concrete World War II pillbox in a frozen Maginot Line. Connecting links stitched their way brokenly across the face of the mountain, opened suddenly into icy chutes that plunged vertically into yet more fields of closely spaced moguls. The turns were abrupt and narrow, treacherously clinging to cliff faces so steep they could not hold snow, exposing instead jagged rock formations that had been thrust up out of the earth Christ knew how many centuries before. Most of the trails appeared windblown and glazed with ice, flanked with deep snow waiting in ambush to catch a tip or an edge. I said nothing to Sandy on the chair ride up, and I said nothing now as we prepared to ski down. I was very frightened. I had stopped worrying about Foderman because I was honestly more concerned for my own safety. I realized, of course, that his usual technique simply would not work on this enormously challenging terrain. But I only thought of this fleetingly. I was cold, and I was frightened, and I wanted to get down to the bottom as fast as I could.
Mary Margaret was a superb skier and an excellent guide. Since she had skied the north face last year, and was familiar with it, she quite naturally took the lead now, with Sandy close behind her, Foderman and David next in the formation, and me in the rear. Foderman, much to my surprise, skied with caution and control, adapting his bulldozing style to the exigencies of the situation, forcing himself to make frequent turns in answer to the demands of the mountain; he had to make the turns, in fact, or he’d have gone off into space and (as Hollis had put it) never been heard from since. We started down through a glade of pines through which the trail deceptively and lazily wound, coming out without warning onto a wide but extremely steep slope. Mary Margaret sliced the hill diagonally in an oblique traverse, neutralizing the fall line, gliding effortlessly down and across the face of the trail. Following her, it all seemed easy. Even Foderman had no difficulty, and I was beginning to think we’d make a good skier out of him before his stay at Semanee ended. Dogging her tracks, we reached an almost level stretch of ground partially covered with glare ice, skirted easily around the patch, carved wide turns around the bend in the trail, and came out onto a narrow passage clinging to the outer edge of the mountain with a drop on the left that fell away vertically to a jagged rock outcropping below. But Mary Margaret handled this with ease as well. The tails of her skis thrust partially out over the edge of the mountain, tips angled toward the wall of snow on her right, checking enough to control her speed but not enough to turn her or to stop her, she led us safely over the ridge and around a curve that opened onto the first wide field of moguls.
We were beginning to warm up a little, but none of us was eager to stop and bask in the sun, not with that wind still raging in over the top of each rounded mogul. Like mist rising over a fen, the snow shifted and swirled as Mary Margaret in green led the way down, again cutting the mountain in a gliding traverse, turning, traversing to the left, turning again, endlessly repeating the pattern until we reached a section of the trail protected from the wind by a gigantic spruce forest. We stopped there to catch our breath. I glanced into the forest. It was shaded and still.
“How we doing?” Mary Margaret asked.
“Good,” Foderman said.
“You’re a nice skier,” she told him. “Everybody else okay?”
“Fine,” Sandy said.
“You’re all nice skiers,” Mary Margaret said, and grinned broadly. There was in her voice a note of condescension, the patronizing tone a master uses to a pupil. Nor had we missed her pointed equation. Foderman was a nice skier, and the three of us were also nice skiers.
“The thing that’s gorgeous about this side of the mountain,” Mary Margaret said, “is the variety. You never know what’s coming up next. You’ll see what I mean. It’s really exciting.”
“I love it so far,” Foderman said.
“I knew you would, Seymour.”
“I really do love it.”
“Don’t get carried away, Seymour,” David said.
“He’s a nice skier,” Mary Margaret said.
“Yes, we’re all nice skiers,” Sandy said, letting Mary Margaret know she had caught the earlier appraisal of our skills, and blowing her nose to emphasize the point and to dismiss the slanderous comparison.
“Well, shall we go?” Mary Margaret asked.
The wind, lying in wait just beyond the edge of the forest, leaped across the trail as Mary Margaret led us through a deep crevasse. Walls of snow on either side of us rose to hide the sun, causing the temperature (psychologically at least) to drop another five degrees. I was beginning to understand what she meant about this side of the mountain. There was no way of handicapping it, no way of predicting responses to secrets it stubbornly withheld. There are mountains that become boring the second time down. The skier learns the trails, establishes a rhythm that nullifies their challenge, and then can ski them effortlessly. There was no doing that on the north face. The crevasse became a narrow catwalk that became another field of moguls that became an icy chute that became a shaded glade that became an open, sun-drenched, virtually flat plain. The challenge was continuous, the mountain refused to be second-guessed. I had the feeling it could be skied indefinitely without ever fully revealing its treasures.
We came across one of those tight little ridges Hollis had talked about, where the trail was barely wide enough to permit passage of both skis, and the outside drop was a sheer cliff surely leading to the very bowels of the earth. I navigated that precipitous ledge with dread certainty that I would fall off the mountain and be found below only months later, crushed and broken, when the Ski Patrol swept the trails during the spring thaw. We skied for what seemed forever on that sharply angled ribbon, Foderman hugging the side of the mountain, Sandy standing erect in defiance, I watching my outside ski for fear it would slip off the ledge and send me on my anticipated trip, David doing God knew what behind me. But at last the trail began to widen, and finally it opened onto a field of small, gently rolling hills, the far sides of which sloped gradually to the next small crests beyond. Mary Margaret, as she had done throughout, showed us the way to best enjoy this new terrain. She skied to the top of the nearest hill, jumped, soared six feet through the air with arms akimbo like a big green bird, landed on the downside, glided to the top of the next hill and jumped again, knees bent to absorb the shock as she landed, rising again to take the next crest and the next jump, as free of gravity as though she were on the moon. We leaped from hillock to hillock, exhilarated. It was on the next stretch of trail that Mary Margaret broke Foderman’s leg.
He had, until that time, been skiing like an angel, keeping his place in the formation, following not three feet behind the tails of Mary Margaret’s skis, fastidiously imitating each of her moves. Exuberantly, he took the jumps with each of us, and then — perhaps because he was so excited, perhaps because he was still cold in spite of all the leaping — regressed to his earlier downhill technique, and schussed the remainder of the field, passing Mary Margaret, taking the lead, and disappearing from sight around a bend at the bottom. Mary Margaret was immediately behind him, and I was behind her. I saw everything that happened. The mountain, in another of its surprises, unraveled a rather steep twisting trail some four feet wide, running through a V-like crotch bounded on both sides by angled walls of snow. Foderman, who should have known by this time that the mountain was secretive and perverse, went into the trail as if it were a continuation of the gently rolling field we had just come down. He was skiing far too fast, and was not skillful enough to check his speed in such a narrow passage. A simple snowplow check would not have worked here because he’d have had to apply pressure by bending sharply at the knees, tips pointed toward each other, and the spread heels of his skis would have struck the walls on either side of the trail, resulting in a certain fall. A better skier would have slowed himself by executing a series of short, sharp heel thrusts, exactly as Mary Margaret and I were doing. If Foderman had been behind either of us, he might have followed our example, imitated our moves, and been able to ski the passage with ease. But he was in the lead, and clearly at a loss, gaining momentum and speed, and faced with a sharp turn below which he could not possibly negotiate if he did not somehow slow down.