Chopping wood was how Matthew Cahill got in tune with himself and the world. For Rachel, it was skiing. The mountain was her church, and skiing was her form of worship.
When she was skiing, she became one with the mountain, the snow, and the earth.
Within moments of beginning their run, she shot ahead of Matt and her rhythm of skiing became fluid and instinctive. It was almost as if she'd fallen into a trance, her body perfectly tuned to the changing terrain beneath her skis. She wasn't even aware of the motions that went into what she was doing-some unconscious part of her mind was doing that. Instead, she simply reveled in the invigorating speed, the cold air whipping at her bare cheeks.
It wasn't the same for Matt, who trailed far behind her. Skiing required his complete concentration. He was good at the sport, but he was acutely aware of each decision and move, of how fast he was going and how one mistake could send him flying smack into the trees that lined their narrow path.
The run was full of sudden drops and big air, offering Rachel the giddy sensation of flying into the sharp, blue sky, before landing again on the snow and rocketing on down the glade.
For her, catching air was pure freedom and unadulterated joy, comparable to nothing else except, perhaps, the body-quaking climax she fully expected to have with Matthew Cahill when they got back to the lodge.
For Matt, the leaps were more terrifying than exhilarating, the joy more from the relief that he'd landed safely than from the thrill of momentary flight.
But Matt marveled at Rachel's grace, how she somehow seemed connected to the landscape and yet was totally free. Her happiness, her soaring spirit, was conveyed in every natural, flowing movement that she made.
Maybe if he could let go, and stop thinking about his skiing instead of just doing it, he might experience the same wondrous freedom that she was.
Let go.
God, the idea was appealing.
What would it be like to just relax, to do something without thinking, to allow himself the risk, and perhaps the exhilaration, of making a mistake, of getting hurt?
Let go.
What was the worst that could happen?
And that's when he noticed, for the first time, just how formfitting Rachel's ski suit was and how good the form was that it fit.
She was beautiful.
How could he not have noticed that before?
And he knew she genuinely cared about him, that there was depth to her feelings beyond mere attraction.
So why was he denying her the affection, the tenderness, and the intimacy that she obviously wanted?
Why was he denying himself?
They could be good together, if he could just…
Let go.
Rachel would have been gratified to know how something as simple as skiing, how just being herself, was allowing Matt to really see her, to finally appreciate all that she was offering him.
But at that moment, she was so lost in her personal reverie, her unity with the mountain, that she wasn't thinking of him at all.
Rachel didn't realize how far ahead of him she was until she heard the thunderous crack.
Matt felt it more than heard it, a deep rumble as much in the air as it was under his feet. He looked over his shoulder and saw the mountain shear apart, a massive, roiling wave of snow rushing up behind him.
Avalanche.
He looked ahead and saw Rachel looking back at him in horror.
"Go! Go!" he yelled.
She hunched down and shot forward, and so did he, trying to build up speed but knowing there was no way he could escape what was coming. He could feel the enormity of it, building in strength, chewing up snow, snapping trees, blasting cold air and ice against his back.
Rachel put everything she had into her arms, into her poles, into skiing faster than she ever had before.
There was a ravine ahead of them. If they could leap over it to the other side, they stood a chance of survival.
Matt saw what she had in mind and knew she'd make it. He glanced over his shoulder, and there it was.
The mountain.
Right in his face.
Rachel sailed over the ravine, knowing as she shot through the air that she was alive, more so in that moment that she'd ever been before.
And she knew that she would survive.
She hit the ground and turned to face what was coming, which she hoped would be the sight of Matt arcing through the air ahead of the avalanche.
But he was gone, lost in tons of cascading snow and trees and rock that spilled into the chasm with an earthshaking roar that was so loud, Rachel couldn't even hear her own scream.
CHAPTER NINE
February 20, 2011
If a skier manages not to be smashed against a tree, or carried over a cliff, or crushed by the weight of the snow and debris, he can survive an avalanche.
For about twenty minutes.
After that, most survivors of the initial impact and burial will die of asphyxiation.
A few lucky ones might find a pocket of air and hold on as their body temperature plummets and blood is diverted from their extremities to their vital organs.
The cruel truth, though, is that even if they manage to be rescued alive, they are still very likely to die, except in the cushy comfort of a hospital bed, a catheter and an IV shoved into them, instead of in an icy grave.
The key to surviving an avalanche is to be rescued within that first, critical half hour.
Matthew Cahill was under the ice for three months.
The facts of the case were unbelievable, so Dr. Jack Travis, the trauma specialist on call in the emergency room, chose to ignore them and deal instead with what he saw in front of him: a patient suffering from extreme hypothermia, typical of someone buried under the snow for an hour instead of months.
In all likelihood, Matt was headed right back to the morgue.
Hypothermia was a condition that Travis, having worked in the ski resort community for a decade, had plenty of experience dealing with.
Matt's body temperature on arrival was sixty-nine degrees. Travis covered him with heating blankets and put him on an epinephrine drip to elevate his blood pressure.
The patient was totally unresponsive to stimuli and his pupils didn't react to light, which indicated to Travis that Matt had suffered anoxic encephalopathy-severe and irreversible brain damage.
Travis ordered a complete metabolic panel, chest X-rays, and an MRI to see just how grim things were. But when the results came back, the doctor was stunned by what he saw.
The blood oxygen and muscle enzyme counts were normal.
The lungs were clear.
And the brain scan showed no swelling at all.
It was as if Matthew Cahill wasn't hypothermic at all, just deeply asleep.
But with the nerve response, pupil dilation, and core body temperature of a corpse.
And he was rapidly defrosting.
There really was nothing Travis could do except wonder how it was possible and wait to see what happened next.
So that's exactly what he did.
He pulled a stool up beside Matt's bed and waited, along with the leaders of nearly every department in the hospital except pediatrics and oncology.
But even those two department heads found excuses to be in the ER, having heard the news, which was already beginning to spread far beyond Mammoth Peaks.
In fact, a stooped-backed fisherman floating down the Yangtze River in a flat-bottomed wooden sampan was using his iPhone to catch up on the hash-marked tweets about "the frozen man" at the exact moment that Matthew Cahill startled everyone in the ER by taking a sharp breath and opening his eyes.
Travis bolted up and leaned over Matt, looking into the man's questioning eyes.