Intrawest Corp.

Books by Seth

Ski tuning video

Equipment advice

Snowdeath, the novel

Contact us!

Search Now:

Chapter 6: Recovery

I poured Hildy a couple of ounces of Jack Daniels. She bowed forward; her
soft straight hair made a little shower curtain around the tumbler. "Have
you eaten anything?" I asked.

She nodded.

"Then drink up. It will help."

Hildy nodded again, then lifted her face and sipped at the bourbon. "I'll
go out first thing in the morning and splint up whatever it is he's twisted
and drag him out of there," I said. "Did you know he saved my life this
morning?" She shook her head vaguely, but looked at me. "The Face of Bell
slid and buried me. Marco had me out almost before I stopped moving."

"Were you scared?"

"Yes, I was scared." I told her about our morning, stopping short of Art
Conover. I tried to make it funny, mimicking Marco's mannerisms, explaining
the crash badge, elaborating the awful jokes. When Hildy smiled, just a
bit, I could feel Marco there in the kitchen with us.

It was after one o'clock, so I sent Hildy off to get some sleep and passed
out in my unmade bed. About half a second later the overhead fixture was
glaring at me and Hildy stood sobbing in the door. I blinked and focused on
the clock: it was just after 3:00.

"Marco's gone, isn't he?" she cried.

"No, Hildy, he's not. Sit down." I pulled the blankets around my shoulders
and sat next to her on the edge of the bed. "I'm not going to lose two
room-mates in two months. That would be goddamn careless."

"I can't sleep thinking about him. I know he's not just hurt. They must
have found out."

"Who must have found out what?"

She screamed, put her fists in her eyes, and rocked. I flinched away, then
extricated an arm from under the blankets and pulled her close, her head
under my chin.

"What, Hildy? What is it?"

"Nothing -- nothing," she shuddered, her voice almost lost in the wooly
folds on my chest. "Oh, god. Oh, god. I don't know what to do. I don't know
what I'm saying. Oh, god."

We sat there, rocking gently, survivors perched on the edge of the raft.
"It feels awful," I said. "I know it feels awful. I almost panicked when he
didn't come down. But he'll be back. He loves you, and he'll be down in the
morning. He wants to come home. He's all right. Really. He's alright."

Hildy's shivering sobs slowed, wound down. She relaxed and softened against
me, and her arms crept up under mine to rest gently on my back, her palms
cupped on my shoulders. I was suddenly conscious of her warm sweet scent,
and of my own rank jock-sock odor, distilled of old polypropylene, heavy
labor and deodorant soap.

"Come on in the kitchen. Let's have some more to drink," I said, unwinding
her arms. I took her hand and led her to the kitchen table. I boiled up
some lemonade and poured rum in it, dropped in a couple of cinnamon sticks
and served it in mugs.

Hildy looked up at me with red eyes. She had a dramatic face, all dark hair
and pupils, with a wonderful thin straight nose that made her full lips
surprising. "I don't know what I'll do if he doesn't come back," she said.

"If you have to think about it, try to think about helping him. Marco may
be hurt, Hildy. We have to be there to help in the morning. You'll have to
be brave to help him."

Hildy drank deeper as her mug cooled. I poured her another, and another. By
four o'clock we were both drunk enough to sleep soundly. The alarm, buzzing
faintly in the bedroom, woke me on the living room floor, my head under the
coffee table, while Hildy slept curled on the sofa.

I turned out the lights in the living room and kitchen, and put in my 5:45
call to the Sundeck.

"Yo."

"It's Sam, Tim. What have you got?"

"Same as yesterday, only more so."

"Listen, I want to go into Keno after Marco. Avvy is short two guys today
-- Marco and me. When Bloom and Mendoza call in, tell them they'll have to
draft some regulars for their routes. We'll clear it all with Craven."

"You got it. Good luck, Sam."

I crawled through the shower, shaved, dressed and started the car, then
washed down four aspirin with a quart of orange juice and drove into town.
Craven didn't argue when I proposed to take Al Hotchner down Keno. "Makes
sense," he said. "Al knows the terrain better than anyone, and if anyone
can figure out what Marco might have been thinking last night I guess it's
you. Call me every five minutes. I'll be on the course."

I fetched an avalanche pack for Al, but when I got back he already had one.
We loaded up on Little Annie and swung over the race-course finish as the
sky lightened. At least two feet of snow had fallen, and in places the
course was drifted five feet deep. The cats were already grinding up Dago
Cut so they could bulldoze the big drifts from above.

Without bombs, the avvy pack is light. It contains only a collapsible
plastic shovel, long probes of spring-loaded aluminum tubing, a light rope,
and some extra first-aid supplies, including a space blanket. Riding up
Ruthie's, I noticed that Al's pack bulged bigger than mine.

"What's in it?" I asked.

Al looked at me, then away. "Craven gave it to me," he said.

"What?"

"Body bag."

When we reached the summit, the sky was blue in the east, clouds breaking
up overhead, the valley still misty. The fog would burn off quickly with
the sun. Al and I skied along the area boundary to where I'd last seen
Marco, and climbed over the bank into the bottomless snow sheltered by the
trees.

"Put your Skadi on receive, and let's traverse," I said. "We'll make a
grid."

"This stuff could slide. Whoever goes first should be transmitting." Al had
a point: a Skadi avalanche radio can be found only if it's transmitting its
steady beep-beep beacon. Turned on receive position, it can be used to
locate a buried radio, but can't itself be found.

"No. If one of us is transmitting, we'll never hear Marco's signal. We'll
just have to ski one at a time, stick close, and be real careful."

I screwed the Skadi earphone tight into the side of my head and pulled my
hat down to cover it. It hurt, but I couldn't leave a hand free to hold it
loosely outside the ear. The radio was silent. We began moving laterally
among the trees, gliding or wading through the deep light snow as the steep
irregular terrain dictated, skirting the rocks but keeping close to one
another. It was slow and tricky work: each of us touched off several small
sloughs, which dissipated in the woods below.

It was beautiful and still in those woods. I could have felt calm,
shuffling along two hundred yards to the right, two hundred to the left, if
it hadn't been for the heart-stopping hiss of loose snow whenever it went,
if it hadn't been for sharp ache in my ear and the unnatural bulk of Al's
pack. I watched him push hip-deep through a drift, duck under an aspen,
climb above a rock, dip below a fir and its tree well. In Keno Gulch belts
of aspen alternate with stands of fir, according to soil and exposure
rather than elevation. I listened more closely to the radio whenever we
entered a stand of fir, because I expected to find Marco in a tree well.

Big, thick evergreens spread their skirts tent-like, sheltering their own
trunks from the snow. The snow slides off the branches as from a pitched
roof, falling to the side. Under the branches a well deepens as the snow
level rises; where thick woods break the wind, the tree well can go all the
way to the ground, a perfectly circular manhole centered on the living
trunk, which generates enough heat to hold the snow back. It's a great
place to shelter from a storm if you go into it on purpose, feet first. If
you ski into the tree, and dive into the well head down, you may not be
able to get out. Sometimes skiers suffocate in tree wells. If Marco had dug
himself a cave, he should have started with a tree well. So I listened to
the pines.

There was no guarantee that Marco's Skadi was transmitting. Skiing alone,
he may not have bothered to switch on. So we also kept a sharp eye out for
signs of recent passage: branches broken off pointing downhill, which would
have been against the wind. Because we had to cover the entire area, each
traverse had to be within sight of the previous one. It was work. I checked
my watch frequently and called Craven fourteen times to report nothing.

Al heard it first. He had clambered across the drift gathered around some
deadfall, and stopped, like a pointer. His hand went up.

"Signal," he said. I glided slowly down to him and paused. I could hear
nothing in my earphone. But when I moved five yards to the left it came, a
faint breathless peeping, frail like a chick, so far away it was lost if I
moved.

Now we moved swiftly. We traversed left as the peeping gained strength;
when it began to fade, we backtracked to where it seemed strongest. From
there I made one turn, taking me downslope ten feet. The signal was
stronger still.

"Yes," I told Al. "Down."

Al skied ten feet past me, and nodded. The beep was easy to hear now. I
dropped another ten feet past him. The signal became so strong that I
turned down the sensitivity on the Skadi. After another two turns, Al shook
his head. He looked up at me.

"Fading now," he said.

That meant that I was closer to Marco than Al was. I swung my Skadi to the
left and right. The signal was stronger to the right. I kickturned
awkwardly in the deep snow and found my skis pointing straight at a big
Engelmann spruce.

Marco was under it, hanging upside-down from his skis, which bridged the
top of the well. He had broken a few branches going in, but if he had
struggled at all, the signs were covered by the new snow that had sifted
lightly through the branches.

We had to haul him out to know for certain that he was dead, and it was
hard work. I wept, the tears freezing on my cheeks, as we floundered
crotch-deep in the downy snow under the tree. Al threw a rope over one of
the branches, and tied it off, so we'd have something to hang onto as the
walls of the tree well collapsed under our weight. We tied the other rope
around Marco's waist, and using a branch for a pulley, dragged him out. I
looked once at his swollen face, and away: the blood had pooled there, then
frozen. The back of his head was hurt. Bits of pine bark had frozen into
the blood-blackened hair.

Al called Craven. I laid my skis in the snow to form a bench, while we
listened to Craven's instructions to bag the body carefully, without
disturbing anything unnecessarily. "I'll call the sheriff and coroner," he
said. "Can you two get it down or do you need a hand?"

Al looked at me.

"Tell the son-of-a-bitch we'll take Marco out ourselves," I said. And we
did. I lashed Marco, feet first, to his skis, as if they were a pair of
stretcher poles. The rough sledge rode fairly easily, sinking only a few
inches into the new snow. The plastic body bag itself was nearly as
slippery as the skis. We lowered Marco on the second rope, lifting his ski
tips now and then to aim him between the trees. Al and I were no more
talkative than Marco though we may have grunted a bit more.

Inside my head I talked Marco down, as I'd talk to any injured skier lashed
to a Stokes litter. We're going around that tree to the left, I said. Now
we're going around those three to the right. Easy here, we don't want to
bump on the rocks. You always knew this is how you'd leave the mountains,
didn't you? I said. Sooner or later. Live fast, die young, leave an
unrecognizable corpse.

I had some questions for Marco, too: Why did you do this? What were you
doing here? What would make you leave the race course in a gathering storm
and try to ski Keno Gulch in the gloom? Were you looking for something? For
what? For someone? Who? Yesterday held too many whys. Why did Marco want to
hide his skis from Dick Bester? Why did Marco disappear? I recalled Hildy's
horror, and spoke aloud: "Who must have found out what?"

"What?" said Al.

I was wrestling Marco's feet out of a drift while Al belayed the rope, ten
yards upslope. "Nothing," I said. "Just thinking out loud. What the hell
was he doing down in here?"

"A lot of people are gonna want to know that," Al said. "Any ideas?"

I didn't have a clue, but I would bet Hildy did. We crossed the Castle
Creek ice and had just finished untying Marco from his skis when a
Sheriff's Department Blazer pulled up. Sheriff Tug Moran and Dr. Hurley,
the medical examiner, got out onto the unplowed road and helped us slide
Marco into the back of the truck. We climbed into the back seat for a ride
into town.

"Tell me how you found him," Moran said. Al told the story, and then Hurley
turned in his seat to face me.

"What do you think killed him?" he asked.

"You'll find the back of his head busted," I said. "He could have done it
against the trunk, going into the well. No way he could have gotten hurt
that way just skiing. We didn't look for any other wounds. He wasn't
wearing a hat, but it might be down at the bottom of the well. We didn't
look. I don't know if he suffocated in the hole or what. You'll have to
figure that."

Moran asked about Marco's next-of-kin.

"Send a wire to his folks in Bolzano, Italy," I said. "The address will be
someplace in his wallet. I'll tell his girlfriend. She's staying at my
place."

"What's his girlfriend's name, and why is she staying with you?"

"Hildy Matteson. She lives in Crested Butte, flies over for a couple of
days several times a month. Stays with Marco. He's my room-mate."

"Okay," Moran said. "Why was he skiing out of bounds?"

"I don't know. He shouldn't have been."

Moran asked us to come by his office after work to make our statements, and
let us out at the clinic. I threw Marco's Spaldings in my car and called
Craven, up on the course.

"I want to run home and tell Marco's girlfriend what happened," I said.

"Get back up here as soon as you can," he said. "We need everybody today."

I drove home in my ski boots, trying to think of nothing. But halfway to
Basalt, unable to see, I had to pull off the road and sob for a couple of
minutes.

Hildy was still sleeping, curled like a snail on the couch. I touched her
back and she started. She stared with red eyes, saw my parka and boots, and
shrank away. "You found him," she said.

"Yes. Marco's dead, Hildy."

We might have simply clung together and cried for a long time, but Hildy
began beating herself, striking her face and head with her fists, hard. She
rocked and chanted: "I hate this. I hate this. I hate this. I hate this." I
grappled for her wrists, forcing her arms down to her lap, and she went
rigid, jaw set and eyes fixed. At first I thought she was staring at me,
but as I moved her eyes didn't follow: she was unfocused, barely breathing.


"Hildy. Hildy!" I said. No response. She sat motionless. I rubbed her
shoulders, tried to get her to lie down. No motion, even of the eyes.

I phoned Maggy. "Hildy Matteson, 24, in good health," I told her. "I think
she's having an anxiety attack. I'll bring her in about 20 minutes." I
grabbed Hildy's handbag and toilet kit, threw them in the car, and wrapped
her in a sleeping bag. It was awkward carrying her rigid body through the
snow to the car, and harder still to wedge her through the door. She moved
not a muscle all the way to the hospital.

Maggy helped me unwind her, and one of the docs did a quicky admitting
exam, then asked me the usual questions about history and drugs. I had to
tell him she'd been alone for several hours, drunk and under stress. I felt
miserably guilty. My life suddenly seemed unbearably messy, the shining
perfectly tiled hospital walls a reproach. My friends were dying, going
mad. It seemed I should be able to stop it.

I found Maggy.

"Can I see you tonight?" I said.

"Of course, Sam," she said. "I heard what happened to Marco. I'm so sorry."

"It really is all coming apart, isn't it?"

"I'm sure it feels that way. Tell me."

"I can't now. Believe it or not, Craven wants me back on the course."

"Tell him to go to hell."

"No. I'd just as soon be alone up there for a few hours."

"Collect yourself. Come over when you can. I'll be home at four." Maggy
stood on tip-toe to kiss the corner of my mouth, steadying herself by
gripping my elbows. I hugged her, hard, bending down to put my face in her
soft hair. She stroked the back of my head lightly. "Take care, Sam," she
said, then disengaged herself gently, touched my lips with a finger, and
turned to go back to her other patients.