Burrard Inlet

by Tyler Keevil

  ‘What’s up?’ Mark shouted.

  He extended a hand and Jamie slapped at it in greeting.

  ‘I was balling my girl when these jerk-offs called me.’

  ‘The old withdrawal method, huh?’

  Mark shut the side door, sat down across from Jamie, and strapped in. Eddie was flying for them tonight. Minette gave him the signal, and the helicopter tilted forward before lifting off into darkness. Mark stuffed his First Aid pack beneath his seat and leaned back, resting his board upside down across his knees. The base showed a gray wing stretched from tip to tail, a larger version of the pair in the design on the other side. Mark didn’t know what type of bird it was supposed to belong to. A heron, maybe. He studied it as he considered what lay ahead. Minette had told him about the operation, but not much about this rider.

  He leaned forward and tapped Minette on the shoulder and asked her who it was they were looking for. She half-turned in her seat, and they conversed like that, yelling into each other’s faces. She said that the kid’s name was Patrick. He was seventeen, and he’d come up that day to ride the park with his friends. When they left, he didn’t. But he was experienced: a local who’d been riding for years.

  ‘So he knows the mountain,’ Mark said.

  Next to him, Jamie yelled, ‘Him and every other joker who gets lost on it.’

  ‘Gives us something to do,’ Mark said.

  ‘I got better things to do on Christmas Eve.’

  ‘I’d rather be up here.’

  ‘Maybe you two can get lost together, like soul mates.’

  Mark flipped him the finger without looking at him. He was still thinking about the kid, trying to get a feel for the situation. He asked Minette, ‘Do you have anybody in Suicide?’

  Suicide Gulley was where they found most of the skiers, boarders, and hikers who got lost in the backcountry. It acted as a funnel: it started out wide and made for good riding, but got steep and narrow quickly, and after a certain point was nearly impossible to climb out of.

  Minette nodded vigorously, signalling that she had, and shouted, ‘Christy and Les – they have been searching there since four, but no luck so far. Others are checking the main runs. We just have time to drop you off and do a couple of final sweeps before it gets dark.’

  ‘It’s dark now,’ Jamie yelled.

  There was still a grey smear of light on the horizon to the west, but that wouldn’t last.

  Minette said, ‘We have a few more minutes.’

  ‘What does Talon think of that?’

  Talon was the company they rented the chopper from, and the pilot. Minette said something to him they couldn’t hear. Eddie was ex-military, and accustomed to Minette’s style. He looked back at them and mimed drawing a line across his lips.

  ‘You see?’ Minette yelled. ‘Eddie is cool with it. I want to find some sign of this kid – to know where to look. Then we can go in by ground. Otherwise, it’s just the needle in the haystack. We won’t find him tonight. And by morning...’ She waved a hand dismissively.

  ‘You’ll take shit for this,’ Jamie said.

  ‘Pas de probléme.’ She grinned. One of her upper front teeth was missing, from where she’d cracked it jibbing a rail. ‘I think we will put you two down above Brockton, where the kids hike in to build kickers.’

  ‘Split us up,’ Mark said. ‘We can cover more ground.’

  ‘It is against regs, and risky.’

  ‘We’re big boys. Jamie can handle Brockton. I’ll check the cliffs east of First Peak.’

  She asked Jamie if that was okay with him.

  ‘Pas de probléme, right?’ he said.

  The helicopter banked east. Mark leaned over to look out the window, gazing down at the white mounds passing beneath them. The ridges looked like waves in a frozen sea. A fat gibbous moon was rising in the east; beneath it the snow seemed to glow, luminous, and the shadow of the helicopter was clearly visible as it flitted across the ground. At the top of Mystery they passed over the ski lift, its chairs hanging still, the cables coated with crystals of frost. During the day the mountain was filled with skiers and boarders, colour and motion. Now it felt more like an abandoned playground, a twilight realm. There was no movement and no signs of life. Further west, towards Grouse and Cyprus mountains, a haze of clouds had formed.

  ‘We’re coming up to Brockton,’ Minette shouted back.

  Jamie held up a fist, and Mark punched it in farewell.

  ‘Watch it out there,’ Mark told him. ‘Snow’s coming.’

  ‘Not according to the weatherman.’

  ‘According to me.’

  Jamie grinned, then twisted around to converse with Eddie. The chopper dipped and slowed to a standstill, about thirty-five feet above the snow. Jamie clipped himself onto the rappel line – which was hooked to a donut ring bolted to the fuselage – before unstrapping from his seat and getting into a crouch. He fastened the chinstrap on his helmet and lashed his telemark skis to the back of his First Aid pack, then shrugged it on and buckled it across his chest. Opening the door, he took a look at the terrain below, and casually tossed out his deployment bag; it plummeted towards the ground, the rappel line ribboning out after it. He checked his safety belt and the anchor point, tugging on it with the full weight of his body to ensure it was solid. It was. He got in position on the landing skids: facing inwards, braced against the fuselage, brake hand reaching behind him to grip the rope. He did all this with the precise confidence that comes with experience. At the last, he looked up at them, his face focused and serious, waiting for Minette to give him the signal. When she did, he leaned back against the landing skids, angling away from the helicopter until his body was nearly horizontal. Then he shoulder-checked, pushed off, and dropped down out of sight.

  Mark stood up, still strapped in by a safety line, and leaned out to watch the descent. When Jamie reached the ground, he unclipped from the rappel line and waved them off.

  ‘He’s good,’ Mark shouted, and gave Minette the thumbs up.

  Mark gathered in the rope as they floated away. Up front, he could see Minette talking to Eddie, but none of the words reached him over the furious drone of the rotor. While they cruised higher up the mountain, well into the backcountry, Mark gazed ahead to First Peak. He wasn’t sure about searching beyond it. He considered what he would have done, had he been alone up here on a night like this.

  ‘Min,’ he yelled, leaning forward. ‘Forget First. If this kid knows the terrain he wouldn’t be stupid enough to fall off the cliffs. Take me past Second Peak and drop me on the far side, towards the glades.’

  Minette considered. ‘Why?’

  ‘There’s good riding there. I can cover that ground then join Jamie if it duds out.’

  ‘Fine.’

  Minette relayed his message to Eddie, who banked westward. Mark unzipped his pack and did a quick equipment check – radio, GPS, First Aid kit, avalanche beacon – and then zipped it up again and strapped it on. He was fastening the buckles when Minette called back to him, and signalled that they were closing in on Second Peak. Mark leaned forward between the seats, surveying the terrain through the convex windshield. Second was a white dome of snow surrounded by glades, gulleys, and forests. Above it lay the summit, and below it First Peak and the rest of the mountain dropped away towards the city. From that distance you could see the shimmering spires of downtown and the strands of streetlights, strung out in grid-like patterns. But it all looked faint and far off and part of another world, separated from the North Shore by Burrard Inlet, which was now just a vast stretch of black.

  ‘Put me down on that slope,’ he shouted, pointing.

  Eddie nodded and angled that way. Mark removed his snowboard from the equipment rack. Minette wasn’t watching him, so he laid the board flat on the floor of the helicopter and squatted down to strap in: fastening the right binding first,
then the left. He flexed his feet. There was still a bit of give, so he cranked the ratchets on both bindings to tighten them. Last he tugged on his gloves and cinched the drawstrings around his wrists, taking real pleasure in these small details, and the ritual of preparation. As Eddie swung the helicopter around and slowed to a hover, Mark shifted into a sitting position with his legs hanging out the door, the board resting on the landing skids. He unclipped from the safety line and held onto it, one-handed. Twenty feet below his board lay a smooth slope, glowing white in the twilight.

  That was when Minette turned to look back at him.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she shouted. ‘Use the rappel line, idiot!’

  Mark pretended not to hear and heaved forward with both hands, springing clear of the door. He fell through darkness and roaring wind and landed in an explosion of powder; his knees buckled and snow splashed up into his face and his momentum carried him forward and down, half-submerged in snow that was thick and tangible as water. To keep himself afloat he leaned back hard, riding the tail of his board, and the slope swept beneath him as he swerved back and forth, fighting for control, executing quick turns that sheared swathes off the face and created a small slide, a tumbling crystal-cloud that cascaded down around him.

  When the terrain leveled out he eased onto his heels and stopped to get his bearings. He experimented with his headlamp, but the bright beam only lit up the ground in front of him, leaving everything else shrouded in darkness. He switched it off and let his eyes adjust to the moonlight instead. He was on the west side of Second Peak, which overlooked an open glade lined by dense bunches of pine. At its base, the glade folded into a gully – the sides steep and smooth as an average half-pipe, but four times as wide. Snowboarders loved it, despite the avalanche danger. Any snow sliding off the peak got channelled straight down the gully. That night, though, there was no real risk of a slide. There were no tracks, either.

  He dropped into the gully, sweeping back and forth across its base, hunting for any sign of the missing rider. He was not being methodical about it but instead simply trusting his intuition and following the route that seemed to present itself, in the hopes something would come of it. He thought it was the best chance that they had, and maybe the only chance, under the circumstances. If it started snowing, even that would be lost.

  For the moment, visibility was still good. The moonlight made the snow sparkle, as if the slope was covered in shards of glass. Over the past three days fifty centimetres of fresh snow had fallen, and beneath his board the powder felt soft and dry as icing sugar. He lost himself in the gentle, metronome rhythm of the turns, cruising like a low-flying bird across the frozen landscape. Further down, the gulley forked into two natural runs: a steep, straight slope that ran past First Peak towards Brockton, from where you could get back to the ski resort if you knew the way, and a more challenging trail that zigzagged through the woods and had been an old logging road at one time. Mark turned that way without hesitation, dropped over a series of rollers, and aired off a nice hip near the left-hand side, landing so deftly that it felt as if his board was barely brushing the surface of the snow.

  Just below, off to the right, he noticed what could have been markings or tracks of some kind. He pulled up sharply, sinking into the knee-deep powder as soon as he lost his momentum. He stepped out of his bindings and trudged across the hill to examine the spot. A set of footprints, climbing up, receded down along the logging road. About a mile below, the road connected with one of the resort’s snowshoe trails, which in turn led back to the parking lot. That was where whoever it was must have come up from.

  Mark reached for his radio and hailed Minette. She answered immediately, as if she’d been waiting for a chance to chastise him.

  ‘Mark – you gave me some kind of heart attack with that stunt.’

  ‘It was just like heli-skiing.’

  ‘Bullshit. It is unnecessary. It is dangerous.’

  ‘Listen – I’ve got something. Looks like a hiker below Second.’

  There was a pause as she digested this, and maybe debated whether to drop the issue of the helicopter jump.

  ‘Going where?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know yet. I’ll follow.’

  ‘You should not be riding. You know this.’

  ‘I can cover more ground this way.’

  ‘I do not want to be rescuing you, too.’

  ‘I’ll take it easy.’

  ‘Keep us posted.’

  He said that he would, and signed off. Cradling his board under one arm, he followed the tracks, which ran upslope for a few hundred yards before veering to the west. At the edge of the logging trail, where the tree-line thickened, it looked like the kid – if that’s who it was – had strapped in. Mark knelt down in the same spot. He was breathing hard, and sweating, and had that distinct, copper-taste of cold in his throat. Slogging around in all that powder was about as easy as wading through knee-deep water.

  ‘Where are you going, buddy?’

  His voice sounded odd in the quiet, and he felt foolish for talking aloud.

  From there, it looked like the kid had ridden further west, into the trees. It didn’t make much sense because in that direction the woods became too dense for riding. Within ten or twenty yards the kid would have been forced to turn back towards the trail.

  Once his breathing steadied, Mark brushed the snow from his bindings and strapped in. He twisted around and angled his board downhill and slipped into the other track. It was a familiar game and one Mark played well. Following the kid’s line, he wove in and out of ice-encrusted pines, heading west, always west. Branches slapped across his thighs and torso, showering him in snow. He pulled his goggles down to protect his eyes. He’d never ridden this route before, and as he went deeper into the woods the trees thickened and the riding became more of a challenge.

  The treetops created a canopy, blotting out the moonlight. The turns grew tighter, with less time between them. Huge rooster tails showed in the powder where the kid had made cutbacks to avoid obstacles: stumps and rocks and fallen logs. He was thinking that this kid had to be good, to be able to carve like that, and then he didn’t have time to think anymore because the darkness made it dangerous and he had to almost feel his way through the trees, focusing on his own turns and not losing the line. He bent low and his mind emptied and he dissolved into an awareness of his body in which everything became attuned to right, left, right – that rapid weaving rhythm as he slipped through the dark with tree trunks flashing past and branches whipping at his body and snow whispering beneath his board.

  Then the trees broke and the ground dropped away and he was floating, airborne. He instinctively grabbed the front side of his board with his left hand, like he would have during a jump, and extended his right arm to keep balanced in midair. White ground rushed up from below. On impact his knees buckled and he fell backwards against the slope, sinking into a pillow of snow, but managed to spring upright without losing his momentum and without losing control. He was covered in powder and as he surged forward downhill he pumped his fist and yelped like a coyote into the night because it felt as if he’d pulled off the impossible – landing that cliff blind and in the dark – something nobody else could have done, except maybe the kid he was following.

  He’d come out in a wide and empty bowl that went on and on and on. The only marking in the snow was a single track of sweeping arcs nearly perfect in their symmetry. He knew then that this was why the kid had come here, and why he’d come here tonight, and why he’d come here alone. And it was only through following him that Mark had found a part of the mountain that he’d never known about. He felt as if he’d come across hallowed ground, and he leaned into each turn with special reverence, stretching his body out parallel to the slope, trailing one glove through the soft powder. With the wind pulling at him, and the cold burning his cheeks, he mirrored the turns across the bowl, so th
at where the kid had cut left he cut right, and vice versa, weaving figure eights into the pristine snow. As he did this Mark glimpsed something flickering at the edge of his vision, but when he glanced over he saw that it was nothing – just his own moon-shadow skirting the snow, keeping pace.

  Further on the bowl became a glade dotted with pines, ten or fifteen yards apart. The snow-heavy trees were bowed towards the ground, and the white, gnarled shapes looked like shepherd’s crooks, planted on the slope to mark the way. Each curve of the figure-eight turns now encircled one of the trees. Mark carved around a trunk, the branches brushing against his shoulder like a slalom gate, and cut back across the kid’s line and flew past another, and back again around another, and another, and another.

  And then he stopped.

  He hadn’t crossed any track on the cutback. He reached down to undo his bindings. They were encrusted with snow from the ride, and he had to brush them off before he could pop the clasps. He suspected what had happened but couldn’t be sure. There was the chance that the kid had hurt or injured himself – clipping a tree branch, maybe – and had managed to hold on. But it was a small chance, and by the time Mark had stepped out of his bindings, a coldness had settled in his stomach, leeching the exhileration out of him. Grabbing his board, he dragged it behind him as he trudged upslope, and that was how he found the body.

  He could see the heel-side edge of a snowboard jutting out of the snow, and the kid’s feet, still strapped into it. The rest of him was buried. He must have been doing a frontside turn when the loose snow at the base of the tree had given way. He would have sunk into it like quicksand. His head looked to be five or six feet below the surface. More snow had probably fallen from the tree as he struggled.

  Mark radioed Minette.

  ‘Mark here.’

  ‘Minette, over. Any luck?’

  ‘I found him. He’s dead. Tree-well. Just shitty luck.’

  Silence.

  ‘I’m south-west of Second Peak, east of Suicide Gully. Below that old logging road.’