The Cruel Peak

by Gil Hogg

  Stuart backed off, his face contorted. The man took his time while they waited in the lashing rain, then lowered his rifle, unlocked the door and nodded them both inside.

  The interior was filthy; it stank of stale food. The floor was covered by damp newspapers and the four, two-tier bunks were strewn with dark items of screwed-up clothing. A pot-bellied iron stove occupied part of the space between the bunks, radiating some warmth and creating a haze of smoke in the room. The only sitting place was on the edge of the lower bunks.

  Tom slipped out of his pack straps and parka, delved into his pack and produced the bottle of whisky; he opened it and handed the bottle to the man. “Have a go, mate. I’m Tom. This is Stu.”

  “Charlie,” the man said. He had two or three swallows and passed the bottle back.

  He and Stuart followed suit while Charlie watched them dully.

  “Let’s get on with it, for Christ’s sake!” Stuart said.

  “We heard that a Swiss climbing team came here, and you told them you had found equipment from earlier expeditions,” Tom said.

  “Naah. I didn’t tell ’em. They reckoned what it was. But what’s here is mine.”

  Actually, the Swiss, according to his information, were more precise; they told a reporter from The Mountaineer magazine that they had seen a cache of articles which appeared to be from the 1967 and 1972 expeditions, and they mentioned documents.

  “That’s OK, Charlie. Look, my father Bill Stavely was killed climbing here in 1972. He was with Ernest Ashton. You could have something belonging to him.”

  “Ernie Ashton, huh?” The man approved; he pulled a canvas bag from the top of one of the bunks and tipped the contents out on the floor; a collection of gloves, leather cases, a camera, a compass, binoculars, and a canvas wallet.

  Stuart fell down on his knees over the articles, shouldering Tom aside, pawing them with shaking hands.

  “For shit’s sake, Stu, what’re you doing? I’m in this too!” He stood up, put his boot against Stuart’s flank and shoved him away. “Get out!”

  Stuart glanced up at him, frantically, with a beaten dog look, and moved away. They fingered the items, but had no way of telling who had owned them. He opened the wallet. Inside was a small leather-bound book, which he removed.

  “Let me see it!” Stuart tried to grasp the book, but Tom swung away possessively.

  He opened the book cautiously. It was scrawled in English. Some of the pages had been torn out, and others, where ink had been used, were blurred, but there were readable pages in pencil. Stuart reached for the book again.

  “Let’s have a look,” Stuart said, with a note of hopelessness.

  “We might be able to identify this,”Tom said, disregarding him.

  Tom began to read a few words of the close pencil writing which straggled over the pages; then he saw the inscription written inside the front cover. He was conscious of his heartbeat. He looked at Stuart, and pointed to the inscription: ‘W Stavely, 1972.’

  “Your father’s!”

  “He must have lost this when he fell,” Tom said.

  He and Stuart squeezed together on the bunk, ignoring the man, the smell, and the darkening shadows in the hut. The last words of a climber who had died on a mountain were of special significance. Death was always near on mountains like Vogel, but you could never tell how near, or precisely how it might come. Both of them were absorbed.

  The early part of the notebook had reminders about the route and lists of stores. Bill Stavely had made checklists of tasks he needed to perform, some written in an uncouth hand when he was preparing for the expedition. It looked as though the book had lain open in the snow or rested in a wet pocket.

  From what he knew, his father was a relatively uneducated man. Bill Stavely was used to farm accounts and invoices, but had seldom been required to write a letter; he wouldn’t have had the introspection or the vocabulary to be a diarist. However, in the sleepless hours, huddled in a tent waiting for the weather to change, he had evidently found something to do in scribbling comments about his condition. Tom wasn’t able to separate in his imagination, the words, however awkward, from his fore-knowledge of the impending tragedy, the searing cold, the shock of falling ice, and the pain of the fall.

  When the pages were readable, Ernest Ashton and Bill Stavely were at ten thousand feet, within a day or perhaps two days of the peak, in good weather. He lived the climb himself as he followed the scrawl on the discoloured pages. His father sparingly detailed their uncomfortable arrangements to sleep that night, on an ice ledge, with a steep slope above and an abyss below. They had managed to ascend a near vertical wall, and roped themselves and their packs behind a safety fence, precarious but secure enough in their bivvy. The weather, their fitness and their spirits seemed to be in order for a dash to the summit in the morning.

  The next entry was more wavery, and the shape of the wording uncertain. It was dated the 12th. He felt horror rising in him as he read. It was an event known to him from Ernest Ashton’s chronicle, written at leisure at Tamaki Downs. Bill’s comment, made within hours after the event, was as fearful as the words he used were prosaic. Tom could hear the ice crack as his eye passed over the faltering pencil lines on the faded page.

  About 3am ice ledge broke. No warning. Fell. Hit end of line hardly awake. Swinging. To ice-face. Drove spike. Sharing weight till dawn. Both unhurt. Up sheer 100 ft & over cornice to slope.

  Now the weather was threatening, and Bill made another of his sparse references to Ernest after what must have been a crucial conference.

  Ernie shocked. Wants down. Risk both ways. E final on descent. I summit. Row. Chance weather. Visib 10 yards.

  Tom put his finger on the page and looked at Stuart, shaking his head. “We’ve never heard of this.”

  “It’s years since you read the book.”

  “No, I skimmed a copy in your library the night before we left.”

  Ernest’s story of his solo Mt Vogel conquest was well known, and written with verve, a classic of mountain endurance that had been in print and selling steadily since the time it was first published. The fall which Bill described in a few words, and the tense discussion afterwards, was a major chapter of the book, and no doubt had helped to make it a bestseller. What was in the book was a very different account of the discussion; the fateful moment when the threat of extreme danger separated two men; the moment when master and man parted.

  Ernest’s account in The Fateful Snows purported to be a factual assessment of risk, but as Tom remembered from his recent rereading, there was a whiff of condescension. Bill Stavely was said to be ‘brave and resourceful’, but by implication didn’t have the gumption of a leader like Ernest. Bill had made ‘a reasonable decision’ to give up, but Ernest vowed to dare the elements. If what the notebook said was true, the facts were the reverse.

  Stuart was shaking his head in disbelief. “That’s a screwed-up version.”

  “Why shouldn’t the notebook be true, Stu?”

  “It’s just… comment, not what actually happened.”

  He tried to think what that moment might actually have been like. If Bill’s account was correct, Ernest would have detailed the risks in his hectoring way, and most likely ordered Bill to accompany him down the mountain; that Bill had the nerve to oppose must have seemed monstrous, and had a suggestion of the impetuosity which some mountaineers experience at heights, not that the air at ten thousand feet was particularly thin. And there was a hint of the nature of the exchange between the pair in Bill’s cryptic note; both men were final - Bill’s word - on their decisions. And they had a ‘row’. Mt Vogel was a great prize, and that Bill Stavely, a nobody in Ernest’s calculation, should desire it against Ernest’s judgement, must have been explosive.

  Stuart’s head hung down.

  “It’s a shock for both of us, Stu.”

  Bill had made an entry marked 1300 hrs the next day: 4hrs. Solid ice. 60 deg slope. Visib 20x. Light sleet impvg. 8hrs summit?


  “What the notebook is implying is that Ernest is going down the mountain at this point. Bill is on his own, Stu.”

  “We don’t know that,” Stuart said. “They could be together.”

  Bill’s next entry was joyous, given the whole page, and clearly readable through the brown stains. He had over- pencilled the words to make them plainer.

  Summit! 1700hrs. Slow prog up soft snow west ridge. Clear, sun above clouds. SW wind vicious. Plant flag. Photo. 2 mins!

  “He knocked the bastard off!” Tom said.

  “It’s not clear,” Stuart insisted feebly.

  “Only one person made it, Stu.”

  Stuart seemed to lose interest and deflate. He grabbed the whisky bottle and swallowed heavily while Tom read on.

  Slow descent 1500ft. Gusty wind. Dig ice hollow before dark. Exposed face. No choice. Roped in. Biscuits. Chocolate. Orange juice. Freezing. No sleep. Stiff at dawn. No strength. Try north wall now. Trav to west ridge too long and windy.

  “The north wall is quicker,” Tom said. “Yes?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Ernest said my father was good on rock and ice.”

  Avalanche on ice-face. Fall/slide 2000ft? Conscious. Ledge. Secured. Move to eat. Snow & sleet. Leg broken. Hip? Hoping for E.

  “Hoping for Ernie!” Tom burst out.

  Charlie giggled and swigged the whisky, watching the pair. Stuart was silent, his face full of dark hollows. Tom focussed on the small stained book. The damp had wrinkled the leather and left surreal makings on its brownish surface.

  The next entry was the last and was written with a shaking hand: Weak 24hrs. Sighted E! Movg strongly. Seen me. Arr 2hrs?

  Tom thought he could see part of the sequence. “So Ernest found him. Ernest must have hung about to see if Bill was going to come back. He found out about the conquest. The weather wouldn’t have been clear enough for Ernest to have followed Bill’s climb with his glasses after eleven thousand feet. They must have met. What happened? We don’t have any story about Ernest leaving his injured buddy on the slopes and coming down the mountain for help, or trying to help him down.”

  “Stop speculating about something you know nothing about! They still had a lot of dangerous work to do to get down. Bill could have slipped while the old man was helping him. Bill could have slipped off that ledge. We can’t know.”

  “What we do know is that Bill Stavely went to the top alone.”

  As they sat in Charlie’s hut, trying to absorb the implications of the notebook, he began to see himself elevated to the position of judge of his friend’s fate. Stuart might want to bury the truth deep, but Tom had the notebook. He could tell the story - or destroy the notebook. He imagined he was invested with an awesome power - to drag the Ashtons off their perch, or save them.

  He and Stuart sat quietly, engrossed in their private thoughts, while Charlie grinned and slurped the whisky. Then Charlie produced a folded paper, inscribed To Stu Ashton. Stuart read a short handwritten note on a small page torn from a notebook, and it dropped from his fingers.

  Tom retrieved the note. Stu: After our chat on the phone, we thought at the office, that the story was too good to lose touch with. So we’ve come up here. Charlie would only show us his stuff guardedly and wouldn’t part with it. We have a video of him and the hut etc. We will be in touch with you for comment. We take it you will let the Stavely family know. Best, Bob Drake, Chief Reporter.

  “The bastard never mentioned coming up here when we spoke,” Stuart said.

  “They don’t know much more than they did before their trip. But we do.” Tom reflected that if Drake had at least been able to photograph the pages of the notebook, the story would have been out, and his options as arbiter of the Ashton’s fortunes would have been snatched away. He would have been reduced to what he had been before this climb, a spectator of the festering hatred between father and son. As events had happened, the notebook was still, it seemed, a hidden and explosive secret between him and Stuart.

  He started bidding with Charlie for the notebook. “I’ll give you $100.”

  The man grinned cunningly. “No way.”

  “OK, $200.”

  “Wait a minute,” Stuart interrupted. “I’ll give you $300.”

  “What are you saying, Stu? It’s my father’s book, surely…”

  There was a long moment of silence, Stuart’s face red, creased, his breathing heavy; Charlie simpering and gulping; the wind crying.

  “I could outbid you every fucking dollar of the way, Tom.”

  “Are you going to do that?”

  Stuart plunged his head into his spread hands. He howled like a kicked dog.

  “Two fifty’s the limit, Charlie. Take it or not,” Tom said sharply.

  Charlie’s amusement had gone. They closed at $250 which Tom produced and tucked the notebook into an inner pocket.

  Stunned by their discovery, both of them donned their parkas and packs in silence and resumed their descent. When they were a few hundred yards from the hut, Stuart suddenly rounded on him.

  “What about the photograph?” he said fiercely.

  Tom had studied the photographs when he was looking again at The Fateful Snows. Ernest had produced a shot of the flag and the summit view, and a blurred photo of what was said to be his own head and shoulders. From the look of the open sky and surrounding peaks, Tom concluded that they were authentic summit shots. But he had already worked out the answer to Stuart’s query.

  “I think you’ll find you really can’t tell exactly who the person swaddled up in in all that gear is, Stuart, but the photos were surely was taken at the summit.”

  The shot of the climber had been taken by holding the camera at arm’s length; it was evidently taken in a wind which swirled snow powder around the lens and the subject. The snow goggles were barely raised above the eyes. The head was enclosed in a padded hood. Below the eyes and covering all the lower face was prolific ice-encrusted hair. The only human feature exposed, apart from hair, was a pair of almost closed, deep-set eyes, and a blob of nose.

  “I don’t believe that’s necessarily a photo of Ernest. Both men were wearing much the same gear.”

  “Well, how did Ernest get the photo, Mr Smartass?”

  “Bill must have been alive when Ernest arrived at the place where he was lying injured. That’s how he knew that Bill had summited, and he took the camera. He had a bit of time to consider the story he was going to tell the world. He would have had the opportunity to look at a print before he released the photo.”

  “It’s all supposition.”

  “Is the notebook supposition? Is Bill’s declaration in it that he had achieved the summit supposition?”

  “Why didn’t Ernest take the notebook and destroy it?”

  “He may have known that Bill carried and used a notebook. Would he have thought about it in the agonising circumstances of their last meeting? Would he have expected that Bill would have been able to make blow-by-blow entries? I doubt it.”

  “More supposition.”

  “Stu, the point where Ernest conceived that he could steal the conquest wouldn’t necessarily be when he found Bill. Bill may have died shortly after. Ernest left him and mulled it over on the way down. He had plenty of time to think. I expect his mind was in a turmoil. He’d failed.”

  “No. The only time he had was until he got to the lower base camp…”

  “Hours; long enough to mull over the possibilities.”

  Stuart said, “The team was waiting for him. He announced his victory straight off to them. We know that independently. He didn’t go home and think about it.”

  “Not quite right, Stu. Ernest wrote that when he got to the camp, the very first words were from his team; they congratulated him because the spotter pilot had called them on the radio to confirm the victory. They assumed Ernest was the one. He was the big man. Ernest knew for certain at that point that Bill had made it to the top, and he must have known that there was nothing to sto
p him stepping into Bill’s shoes. What was to stop him? Bill must have been dead to his certain knowledge. Nobody could contradict Ernest. Later, there were Bill’s summit photos which were so ambiguous that Ernest could claim them for himself. An additional piece of luck.”

  “You’re making up fairytales.”

  “I agree we’ll never know the full story, but the bare fact remains that one man summited, and it wasn’t Ernest.”

  Tom felt simple shock as they continued down the slopes. His mind moved slowly over the evidence which would have enabled Ernest to decide to steal Bill’s achievement; to steal it, and be hailed as a great mountaineer… And he was concerned about Stuart, who was like a man concussed.

  The way down was trackless but not difficult and they made good speed. When they had several miles yet to cover, they were overtaken by a heavy snowfall. Stuart, who was leading, stopped.

  “What’s up?” he asked, as Stuart turned to face him.

  “I want the book, Tom.”

  “What do you mean? It belonged to my father. I bought it from that guy.”

  Stuart came very close. “Give it to me. I should have bought it and I could have. I want it now. I want you to hand it to me voluntarily.”

  “No way, sorry.” He tried to make a joke of it, pushing Stuart away, and stepping to go round him.

  Stuart caught his arm. “Give it to me or I’ll take it.”

  “And what will you do with it?”

  “Destroy it.”

  “Why try to destroy the truth?”

  “You’re going to ruin me and disgrace my father with lies and innuendo.”

  “Stuart, the truth is clear.”

  “And you’re going to blab to The Mountaineer. You’re going to ruin me.”

  “I haven’t said anything about blabbing. Let’s get home and think this thing through.”

  “No!” Stuart said, throwing his weight against Tom. “If they can’t produce the book, if the book doesn’t exist, all they’ll have is a few photos of a rotten hut and a recluse and some gobbledegook from the Swiss.”

  He stumbled over in the snow under Stuart’s thrust. “Have you gone mad?” He spoke lying on his back in the snow, his arm up for protection.