The pilot answered from far off. He refused. The weather had turned and he
couldn't stay. There was only the one victim. He'd looked. He approximated his
coordinates for their map finding.
'Ask him the man's condition,' said the leader.
'Oh, he's down there,' came the thinning voice. 'He's alive all right. Flopping around
on the high glacier.'
'Damn it,' snapped the leader. 'Is the man hanging on a face? Is he wandering? Is he
tore up? What's his condition?'
'Wait till you see this one,' the pilot said. 'In all my days...' Their reception tore to
rags.
'Repeat, over.'
The voice resurfaced, small and halt. '...like a gutshot angle,' they heard. That was it,
just enough to frown at and shrug away.
'Screw that,' someone said.
'Well, whoever he is, let's go save him,' said the leader, and they broke the huddle to
go saddle on their gear.
In all the mass of hardware and meds they off-loaded from the trucks and jeeps,
there was not one single item Abe knew how to use or even handle. Abe recalculated
his foolishness. He was a liability, not a savior, and his bluff was getting called. But he
couldn't bring himself to confess.
He had joined up, gambling the rescue team would teach him the ropes, literally, as
time passed. Afraid they would judge him too young, or his unchipped fingernails or
bayou accent would expose him as a flatlander, he had entered the rescue office shyly
and with his hands in his pockets. When they asked if he had experience, Abe had said
yes, though carefully, keeping the sir off his yes, and dropping the names of some
mountains in Patagonia which he figured to be safely obscure. Only two days later –
yesterday afternoon – they'd phoned him in urgent need of dumb backs and strong
legs. And now he could not share that this was the first snow he'd ever seen and the
coldest sun he'd ever woken to. This was his first mountain.
They set out through the trees, shortcutting along a frozen river. The water was
animal beneath its sturdy shell. Abe could hear it surging under the ice. Its serpentine
motion came up through his boots. Here and there the river ice had exploded from the
cold and its wounds showed turquoise and green.
Christmas was near and so they were undermanned, meaning everyone was
overloaded. Some carried hundred-meter coils of goldline rope and homemade brake
plates, others hauled the medicines and splints and the team's sole, precious Stokes
litter, a crude thing made of welded airplane tubing and chicken wire.
Abe stayed alive to the other men's cues, to how they breathed and how they set
their feet and leaned into their pack straps and to how they just plain managed. With
every step he was reminded all over again of his hubris, for he'd loaded his pack
himself, hastily and without any order, and now something was stabbing his kidneys
and the bags of saline solution kept rocking him off-balance. Each boot step chastised
him. He didn't belong, he didn't belong.
The sun died at noon in a gangrene sky. Shortly after, they broke the treeline, but
their first clear view of the coppery mountains was undermined by dark storm clouds
looming north and west. Even Abe could tell the advancing storm was going to be a
killer, the fabled sort that freezes range cattle to glass and detonates tree sap, leveling
whole forests.
The line of men struck north across a big plateau scoured bare to the dirt. The wind
sliced low, attacking them with a fury that Abe tried not to take personally. In a
matter of minutes his glasses were pitted by the highspeed sand. If not for the ballast
on his back, the wind would have sent him tumbling down the mountainside.
Midway across the plateau they startled a herd of skeletal deer grazing among the
stones. 'They oughtn't be up here,' one rescuer observed. 'It's strange.' The deer
clattered off with the wind.
The cold day drew on. The air thinned and people quit talking altogether. They
hunched like orphans beneath the overcast. Wind bleated against the rocks, a
maddened sound.
As it turned out, none of the team had ever visited this region. For budgetary
reasons, Wyoming was far beyond their normal range of operations. Abe was secretly
gratified that the group seemed as lost as he felt. When the leader unfolded their
USGS topo to match its lines with the geological chaos around them, the wind ripped
his map in two and then ripped the halves from his hands. After that the group
tightened ranks. The mountains took on a new sharpness against the ugly sky.
Nearing the coordinates given them by the pilot, the team reached a natural
doorway that suddenly opened onto a hidden cirque of higher peaks. Despite the
poisoned sunlight, it was a spectacular sight in there. To Abe it looked like a vast
granite chalice inlaid with ice and snow. On every side glacial panels swept up to
enormous stone towers girdling the heights. All around, men muttered their awe, and
Abe thought this must be how it was to discover a new land.
And then they saw the climber.
'He's alive,' someone said, glassing the distance with a pair of pocket binoculars.
'There's one alive.'
Abe couldn't see what they were talking about until a neighbor handed him a
camera with a telephoto lens and pointed.
Perhaps a half-mile distant and a thousand feet higher, a lone figure was kneeling
upon the glacial apron, unaware that rescue had arrived. His head was bare, black hair
whipping in the wind. He swept one arm up and out to the storm and Abe could see
him shouting soundlessly.
'That poor bastard,' the man with the binoculars declared to the group, 'he's talking
to the mountain.'
'Say again.'
'I swear it. Look yourself.'
Abe breathed out and steadied the telephoto lens. The mountain dwarfed the tiny
figure and Abe tried not to blink, afraid of losing this solitary human to all that alien
expanse.
The climber repeated his motion, the arm raised high, palm out, Abe realized that
he was seeing desperation or surrender or maybe outright madness.
After a minute, the climber bent forward and Abe noticed the hole in front of his
knees. It was a dark circle in the snow and the climber was speaking to it as if sharing
secrets with an open tomb.
'He's praying,' Abe murmured, though not so anyone could hear. But that's what he
was seeing, Abe knew it instinctively. Abe was shaken, and quickly handed the
camera and telephoto lens back to its owner.
'Well if he's got a buddy, I don't see him,' the man with the binoculars pronounced.
'One's better than none, folks. Let's go snatch him before this front hammers us in.'
They hurried. Another twenty minutes of hard march over loose stone brought
them to the base of the glacier. Abe edged over and stood on the ice, feeling through
his boot soles for the glacier's antiquity. He'd never seen a glacier before, but knew
from his readings that this plate of snow and ice had been squatting in the shadows
ever since the last ice age.
The rescuers opened the big coils of rope and strapped on their scratched
red-and-white helmets and their cold steel crampons. Abe watched them closely and
covertly. Between bursts of wind, they heard a distant howling. It didn't sound
human, but neither did it sound animal. A gutshot angel, Abe remembered.