Snowdeath A novel by Seth Masia
Maggy inhaled her eggs. "Late," she explained.
"Elegant, though. Dainty."
"Think how much more sleep you'd get if you lived in town."
"Can't afford to live in town."
"You could afford this."
"If I lived with you, ducks, I'd get a lot less sleep than I do now."
Maggy nodded, and swallowed. Then, gravely, she asked "Who's going down Keno with you?"
"I'm going alone. I don't want anyone to know I'm poking around in there. Don't tell anyone, okay?"
"Unless you don't come out."
"If I don't call you before end of shift, let Tug know where I went. And don't forget that Szell is coming in to see Hildy."
"Isn't Keno dangerous?"
"It hasn't snowed in a couple of days. It was already skiable when we pulled Marco out. By now anything that might slide has already gone. It's okay." I hoped.
"Be careful." Maggy stood. I stood, and she kissed me thoroughly, hugging close. I bent to kiss her throat and she squirmed away, laughing. I caught her another good one at the front door, then watched as she started her car and drove away, waving.
Up the block, a sheriff's cruiser idled, and I waved there, too. But the morning sun reflected off the windshield and I couldn't see the driver's face.
I cleaned up the kitchen, then flopped on the sofa. Years ago, in college, I could work all night and still feel prime. Now it took days to recoup. An hour later I drifted happily out of a dream about Maggy and me wrestling like puppies naked among the pillows on her floor.
I parked at the locker room half an hour after the lifts had opened to the public, and killed another half hour tuning and waxing Marco's Heads. The plan was to go up the mountain alone, without running into any late-starting patrollers who would want to ski with me. Putting the skis outside to cool, I went back to the car. My civvy avalanche pack -- the gear I carry into the backcountry on my days off -- was a flat black patrol belt stowed in the trunk. It contained a folding aluminum shovel, my Pieps transceiver, a headlamp, some light cord and the usual snowpit stuff. The transceiver and shovel would be useless if I were caught in an avalanche alone, but alone was the only way I could do this job. I stuck the pistol in there, too, checking that the hammer rested on an empty chamber, and buckled the pack underneath my parka. A box of cartridges went in a pocket.
The sun cast short late-morning shadows, but a thin high haze softened their edges. A freshening northwesterly gusted the empty chairs about. At the summit I checked the barometer -- it stood 29.85 and had been falling slowly since midnight. There would be more snow tonight, so if I wanted to dig up Marco's gravesite, now was the time.
I bought cookies and an orange to serve as lunch. In the men's room I reorganized the pack, hanging the Pieps around my neck and dropping the pistol in my righthand coat pocket. Lunch went in the pack, hidden once again under the coat. Then I carried the skis around behind the Sundeck and slipped into the woods where no one would spot my tracks going out of bounds. Below the shoulder of the hill, out of sight from the area boundary, I traversed right, climbing occassionally to clear a deadfall, dropping below outcrops in a couple of places. Two days of bright sun had put a shiny crust on the surface, a surface so fine I couldn't feel it parting in front of my shins. But it gleamed, even in the silver light of overcast.
It took just five minutes to find the tracks Al and had made looking for Marco, and I followed them down to the big spruce. I didn't want to come in from another direction and screw up anything that might be hidden under the snow.
I stuck my skis upright in the snow, assembled the shovel and began digging at the light dry drift. It moved easily. Usually I can make a snow study pit in under a minute. In the smooth upper wall of this snowpit I could see the last three storms, laid down like geological epochs in a road cut, or layers of a tall cake. Each storm had put about a foot of new snow here, but the older deposits had already settled a few inches. Between the storm beds, like icing, were thin crystalline layers where the sun and wind had crusted the old surface before a new storm arrived.
If you want to know if something's likely to avalanche, you use your snowpit to do a rough shear test, levering with the shovel blade to encourage upper layers to slide off the lower layers, looking for weak layers in the snowpack. I was looking for something else.
I started my pit level with Marco's tree, and extended it into a semicircular trench, going uphill around the tree. The trench would thus cross any tracks leading to this tree from above. I kept the trench twenty feet out from the tree, and I looked for depressions in the first crust down.
Marco had skied to his death through that first crust. Unless Al Hotchner and I had trampled in on the same route, I would find Marco's tracks.
And if someone had met him here with intent to kill, I would find a second set of tracks as well.
It wasn't easy, of course. I dug the trench in half an hour. The light dry snow moved quickly and there wasn't much deadfall in the top few feet. But without my skis I sank to my crotch in the snow, and walking was tough, even following my own trench. Despite the cold wind beginning to scour up out of the gulley, I had worked into a fair sweat before the semicircle was complete. I floundered back to get the pack and ate a cookie while I contemplated the next step: cleaning up the trench wall to make a fine inspection.
This was going to take longer. The light was getting flat now, as the clouds lowered, so the ridiculously thin crust I needed to follow -- the product of a single day of sunshine -- was becoming hard to see. I got out a thin plastic card and a pocket microscope. Hunkering in the trench I was more or less out of wind, nose to the snow wall, and I worked the crust inch by inch, scraping gently at the snowpack with the edge of the card. I soon found that when I lost track of the crust I could find it by looking for the transition between the soft, well-defined crystals of the last storm and the saltier, less angular crystals of the older storm, already turning to depth hoar.
After an hour I found the first set of tracks, near the top of the semicircle, almost directly above the tree. Here the newer snow penetrated a foot into the older layer, which itself was compacted. Instead of growing cup crystals here, the older snow had packed together. Something had pressed the air out of it.
I stopped and ate a second cookie and the orange. It was just after one o'clock. I would work the trench for another hour. If I found no more tracks, I'd do a quick dig close to the tree and sift for odds and ends -- anything that might have fallen out of Marco's pockets, for instance, though they'd all been zipped tight when we found him. And I could still ski out easily before dark.
Not finding a second set of tracks in the trench would feel like failure. I was prepared for that.
I was not prepared for gunfire.
At the first shot I dropped flat on the bottom of the trench. Holy shit, I thought. The second shot came immediately and I scrambled toward my skis, stuck there at the far end of the trench. I didn't know where the shooter was but didn't want to lie still. Snow makes a lousy bunker.
Another shot and this time I saw a tiny lateral geyser of snow as the bullet creased the top of the trench wall ahead. The shooter was uphill. If I dropped down the vertical end of the semicircle he'd see me in enfilade. More shots. If the guy had enough ammo he could sit up there and swiss-cheese the snow around the trench until it turned red. Or he could just ski on down and plug me once.
To slow him down, I'd have to return fire. I pulled off my right glove and struggled the pistol out of my pocket, turned the cylinder and stuck my hand straight up out of the trench. I fired uphill, without aiming.
He quit shooting. That meant, I hoped, that he'd ducked. But I knew better than to look for him.
"What the hell are you doing?" I yelled. In answer, he fired again. I shot aimlessly uphill again.
The shooter didn't want to talk. That meant I'd have to get out of the trench. I needed my skis -- I couldn't expect to get away from this guy by floundering through chest-deep snow. He had skis and would overtake me in two seconds flat. But he also had a clear shot at my skis, so I couldn't go directly to them.
I'd have to tunnel. Get deep, where he couldn't easily guess where to shoot, and come up in the trench again near my skis.
To keep his head down I fired uphill once more and then began burrowing, tunneling downward and straight across toward the skis. I just screwed the shovel into the side of the trench and followed it. I attacked the light snow, making a tube just wide enough to pass my shoulders.
Working at a leisurely day's-end pace, I can dig an eight-foot one-man snowcave in about ten minutes. Now, scared and sweating, I worked twice as fast and a lot less carefully, moling furiously, pressing the loose snow back against the tunnel walls as I squirmed forward. There were more shots, muffled by the thickness of the snow, but I was sure now that this clown wouldn't come closer to the trench to look for me -- not while he thought I could shoot back. Not for awhile, anyway. I burrowed.
The snow had to be at least six feet deep here and I wanted to go all the way down. I was lucky. A couple of minutes digging and I struck deadfall, a big old spruce lying straight down the hill. Under the fallen tree was looser snow, even an airspace -- an irregular natural snowcave. I struggled around into a sitting position and peered back up my tube. The silver light filtered down eerily, but the tunnel kinked enough that I couldn't see its entry end. Under the dead tree the cave stretched black and muddy. I sat in damp pine needles and bottom hoar, but the trunk pointed downhill -- roughly toward my skis. The shooter upstairs had to figure I'd be heading for the skis, but he didn't have to know the direction I was taking.
With one hand on the fallen tree and the other shielding my face with the shovel, I scooted downhill on a muddy butt. Away from my tunnel the cave grew darker. I quickly came to the end of my airspace, where the trunk angled sharply downward to rest on the semi-frozen ground.
This was not like being buried in an avalance. I had room to move and act. I could plan.
I was safe for a bit. Huddled under the old spruce, I was protected from gunfire directed straight down through the snow. And if the shooter were foolish enough to follow the White Rabbit down his hole, I'd blast him as soon as he stuck his head into the cave.
So he couldn't get me now. Nor could I get him.
What would he do next? What if he went directly to my skis, and waited there?
For all the shooter knew, I might still be waiting for him in the trench. He couldn't come down to it without making himself a target.
What if he didn't care?
What if there were two shooters?
If there were two, maybe I should just wait in the damned cave until dark, and try to sneak out without the skis -- roll downward through the woods to Castle Creek and run like hell in my ski boots. If there were two shooters, I'd better sit underground, with my little Chief's Special ready, and plug anyone who put his nose through the tunnel.
The more I thought about it, the more sense it made. If I waited for dark, I could put my head up anywhere and he wouldn't spot me. I had, say, three hours until dusk. Four to full night. Time was on my side -- the temperature in the cave was barely below freezing, while my friend up top was sitting in a rising winter storm.
I shook the snow out of my parka and put up my hood. I slipped shells into the four empty chambers of the revolver. Then I rolled into a ball in the pine needles, lay still, and listened.
It was like listening for Marco to rescue me, but now I prayed not to be found. I hoped not to hear the crunch of snow as the shooter looked for me, then probed for me. I was protected from probing by the tree trunk, from the storm by six feet of insulating snow. I could move -- it wasn't like being held helpless in the grip of the avalanche.
The guy who had killed Marco stalked me, but I had survived worse.
I could wait.
Go to Snowdeath Chapter 12