this accidental hole, the crevasse was covered over with snow, perfectly concealed
from above. Forty feet down, the icy walls curved underneath where Abe was lying.
The blue rope led down and under and disappeared from sight.
'Can you see the light?' Abe shouted.
'No,' she said. 'It's dark here.'
Abe was glad to extract his arm and head from that awful hole and return to the
surface. Even those few seconds had threatened to rob his self-possession.
While Abe talked and asked questions, he tried lowering the headlamp on the
goldline rope. But the braids were new and stiff and the curve of the walls blocked
passage at the forty-foot level. Abe pulled the headlamp back out.
'Can you catch it?'
'I can try.'
'I'll keep the light on so you can see it coming.'
Abe reached as deep as he could before letting the headlamp go. Its light ricocheted
from the deeper walls, then blinked out. Abe thought the headlamp had broken in the
drop. Then he heard the voice.
'Ah God,' she groaned.
'Did you get it?' Abe had expected joy. She had been delivered from darkness. But
as the silence accumulated, Abe realized that with the light had come the truth, and
now the woman could judge her awful predicament.
'What do you see?'
There was no reply. Abe hung his head into the hole and waited but all he heard was
the wind outside. The storm was ripe. He looked up at the darkening sky, then over at
the rescuers bustling around the litter. They had snugged Daniel into a sleeping bag
and strapped him into the litter. Some of the men were putting their packs on and
they looked close to leaving. Now the team could devote all of its energies to
extracting Diana.
The team leader walked over to Abe and sternly crooked his finger to draw him
away from the hole. Abe pushed up to kneeling. 'All right,' said the leader. 'We're going
down now. We'll need every hand. Go saddle up.'
Abe was sure he had misunderstood. 'Her name is Diana,' he explained. 'She has a
light now.'
The leader exhaled unhappily. 'You didn't do her any favor.'
Abe didn't know what to say. 'She'll be fine,' he finally blustered.
'I'm glad you think so. Anyway, we're shorthanded. If we can get the litter down
before this storm... hell, if we can get the litter down period, we'll be lucky.'
Abe persisted. 'We can dig her out.'
'Dig her out?' The leader's eyes glazed over. 'She's deep. Way too deep. That kid had
no right bringing her to this.'
'But if we all pull...'
'Look, Tex...' And suddenly Abe knew they knew him. He had fooled no one. 'Down
at the bottom, a crevasse thins into a V. You fall far enough, hard enough, and you get
wedged down there. After a while your body heat melts you down tighter. Every
minute that girl's alive, every breath, she's working down deeper.'
'But we're not leaving her down there.'
'We'll come back.'
'When?'
The leader paused. His crow's-feet pinched into a fan. 'When we can.'
'But we have to save her.' For the first time, Abe noticed how the rest of the team
was shunning the hole.
'We can't, not with things how they are. Maybe later, after she starves some more,
loses some of her tissue mass, maybe then. But I doubt it.'
Abe shook his head – against this directive, against his vision of a human being
pinned in an envelope of clear ice, broken and freezing and blind and yet still aware,
still full of her own history and future. She had probably eaten a breakfast yesterday
much like they had last night, had probably walked on the same river ice and spooked
the same herd of starving deer and crossed this same glacier. And now they were
condemning her to infinite darkness.
'Look,' said the leader. The icy tails of his gray moustache waggled. 'Sometimes this
is how it goes. You do a triage. You figure the odds. You save the ones you can save.
And you leave the ones you can't. Now it's going to be a long carry out of here. We're
leaving. I want you to go saddle up. I'll go tell that girl the news.'
'No,' said Abe. 'I'll tell her.' He had the right to the last word. He had touched this
blue rope. He had given this woman light and whatever terrible sights that attended.
The leader made a few thoughtful stabs at the hard snow with his ice axe, then he
walked off without saying more. The rescuers at the litter had turned their backs to
Abe and the hole.
Abe checked his watch, then shook it. Only twenty-five minutes had elapsed since
their arrival. Surely hours had passed. He couldn't fathom what was unfolding all
around him. They hoisted the litter like a coffin, three men to a side, one standing
back and feeding out a safety rope in case they slipped.
The wind sucked at Abe's face, then slapped him. The first snowflakes rattled
against the shell of his new white windjacket. The storm was cracking wide open.
Their little motions and hopes could do nothing to hold the sky together any longer.
The rescue was over, at least for the woman inside this mountain. Abe lay down by
the hole to tell her so.
'Hello?' Abe called down.
There was no reply. Abe could feel the blackness down there surrounding that
solitary light.
'We have to carry Daniel down,' he called into the hole. 'We're shorthanded, so all of
us have to go. But we'll come back.' He added, 'I promise.' Immediately Abe wished
the words away. They had already broken one promise. They had come to save the
survivors or carry bodies out, and they were only doing half the job. More promises
could only mean more betrayal to this trapped woman.
There was still no answer, and Abe started to push away from the crevasse. Then
Diana spoke.
'You're not leaving me?'
Abe shook his head no, but the word wouldn't come.
'You promised,' she screamed. Then, quickly, as if chiding herself, she said, 'no,' and
again, more firmly, 'no.'
'They're shorthanded...' Abe started again.
'It was my fault,' she said. Her words came to Abe low and awkward with the
cadence of a last testament. In her weariness or delirium, Abe heard something far
worse than acceptance. It was a tone of surrender similar to what her rescuers were
using. 'Tell Daniel that. Can you hear me, Abe?'
Abe lowered his head deeper into the hole. 'Yes.'
Now her voice gained strength. 'It was me that fell and pulled us down. It was me.
Tell him. I'm sorry. I'm sorry for what happened to him. I'm sorry for what happened
to me. I know Daniel and he'll take this on. Tell him not to.'
Abe wanted to protest that the fall had been bad luck and was not a matter for
contrition. But maybe that was how Diana had decided to make her peace with it.
'Okay,' Abe said. 'I'll tell him that.'
'Now I want you to tell me something, Abe.'
'Yes.'
'How old are you?'
'Eighteen.' For some reason, Abe felt compelled to add the full truth of it. 'Almost.'
She took a long minute. 'I thought something like that,' she said. And now Abe saw
how they'd used him with this woman. They'd used him to buffer the horror to
interrogate her. And they'd used him for this death sentence.
'Well, Abe,' she started, then fell silent. After a moment, she finished. 'There's no
blame on you either. Remember that.'
Abe's throat clenched at that. She was forgiving him, too. He searched for something
to say. At last he thought to ask her age.