by H. S. Norup
After crossing the finish line, Tessa zoomed in and out between hesitant tourists and caterpillar-like ski-school groups, to the lift. She arrived just as Lisa and Maria got on either side of a T-bar, whispering and giggling.
On the next run, she botched the start, didn’t find her rhythm, and missed a gate. At the top of the course, Coach swore. She conveniently overlooked Karen’s waving arms.
The rest of the morning was like climbing a mountain of ice. Blindfolded. Wearing slippers.
Heavy clouds pressed down on the Alps, concealing the peaks and becoming one with the snow-covered slopes. The lift rides were a complete waste of time—everywhere Tessa pointed her binoculars showed the same grey blur. Besides, the avalanche risk had gone down, and today tourists crowded the off-piste. The barbegazi had to be in hiding.
After her final run, Felix slid up beside her in the queue, and they shared a T-bar back to the top. They were second cousins, but he was almost like a brother to her. Felix was also the best skier in the team.
“Did you see that?” he asked, while they settled on the orange bar. “What a save! My approach to the last red gate was all wrong, but then I took the turn on my inside ski and threw my weight forward and knocked the gate away with my shoulder.”
“Cool,” Tessa said. She hadn’t seen his run.
“And my catapult start… I wanna do it exactly like that on Saturday. Still three more training days left before the first race, and I’m ready!” Felix pushed his sleeve up to look at his sports watch. “Yes! My pulse is already down. D’you have something to eat? I’m starving. I hope there’s still some of Mum’s goulash left over.”
“Don’t count on it. She brought that over for me and Oma yesterday. But I doubt you’ll starve.” Aunt Annie—who wasn’t actually Tessa’s aunt, but married to Mum’s cousin Harry—was known throughout the whole village for her delicious food and cakes.
“What’s that? Is it chocolate?” Felix poked at her bulging pocket.
“Just my binoculars.”
“You’re not still looking for those…you know… Great Uncle Willy’s barbie-fairy-thingies?”
“Not barbies. A barbegazi. One saved him after an avalanche. Right down there.” Tessa jabbed her pole towards Schöngraben. “Opa said he’d show me, but now he’s gone, and—” She stopped speaking before the lump in her throat could choke her voice.
They’d been picking berries in the gully when Opa pointed and said: “The barbegazi dug me out of the avalanche over there. Come December, I’ll show you.” Munching on blueberries, she’d glanced up from the bush for a second. Had he planned to show her a barbegazi, or just the spot?
Tessa speared a clump of snow with her pole, making it crumble. “And your grandfather didn’t even believe his own brother.”
The track turned bumpy on a steep stretch. Tessa concentrated on her skis not crossing, and they glided side by side in awkward silence.
After a while, Felix said, “One of our guests, a regular, was in an avalanche down there yesterday afternoon. It was weird—”
“Did they save him?”
“Who? Those barbie-things? Come on, Tessa. But it was so weird. He never talks to anyone, and he’s only interested in the avalanche report. A fanatic off-piste skier. Has all the coolest equipment. Even that new electrical avalanche airbag…”
She knew just the type. A young guy with multicoloured ski overalls, perhaps a ponytail. Probably Scandinavian.
“…Then last night he’s all chatty, telling me about the avalanche, and afterwards, going up the stairs, he whistled!”
“He whistled? That’s what they do, you know.”
“Who?”
“The barbegazi. Before avalanches, they whistle.”
“So now you think he’s one?” Felix gave a quick shake of his head. They’d reached the top, and he sped off, shouting that he wanted a last run.
Yeah, right. He just couldn’t get away fast enough. Coach had already been dismantling the course when they passed it on the lift. They’d both seen that.
Tessa slid down to help clear the training piste, red-green streaks overtaking her.
If only she could find a barbegazi and prove they weren’t extinct. It would solve all her problems. And everyone would know Opa had told the truth. That was bound to make Oma happy.
—4—
They searched all night. Whistling, digging, probing, digging, whistling.
First, they sifted through the loose snow, where Gawion had discovered the barbegazi fur, and combed the rest of the avalanche trail, finding nothing.
“She cannot have been taken,” Papa said again and again. “She must have had an accident. A blow to the head… A minor injury… We shall find her farther up the mountain.”
But Gawion had not mistaken the stench of iron in the hollow where he found the fur. Unfortunately, Papa had neither smelt thawing spring snow nor iron, and Gawion cursed himself for having scattered the snow before Papa arrived, making the scents disperse.
Papa took him across the flattened, rippled snow that attracted flocks of humans during the day. A huge metal monster growled like a thousand angry dogs, and chased them up a steep slope with its light beams.
Fear made heat flash through Gawion and cramp the muscles of his sensitive soles. Terrified, he leapt over a sun-coloured net, escaping into a ravine.
“Maeg cannot be here,” Papa said, wide-eyed and shaking, before they slunk back to Schöngraben.
Where the ragged peaks rose naked above the snow, Gawion and Papa explored nooks and crannies, and sniffed behind boulders, looking in places Maeg had never been to. Gawion slid down couloirs and gullies and crawled back up them, making sure he overlooked nothing. Papa followed him, double-checking.
They stayed outside, exposed, long after daybreak, until the strange mechanical structures began transporting humans up the mountains again.
After Gawion had dozed for a while, he was fully rested and impatient to continue the search. He crept through the tunnel and peeked outside. Low clouds blocked the warmth of the sun and made it easy to hide from the humans. He could not even see the nearest of their mountain transporters, although the wind brought a faint echo of its sinister, metallic noise and distant human yells. But, today, he was not allowed to leave the cave on his own.
Back inside, Gawion lay down, close to the ice cooler. Liel was playing with the feathers she had gathered before the first big snowfall, oblivious to the worry around her.
His parents’ muffled voices travelled through the snow wall from their resting cave. Maman’s sobs and occasional shrieks—“We should never have stayed, Aeglosben… do not belong here… carried those twins for nine winters… Home in Mont Blanc’s sea of ice would have been safe”—were clearly audible above Papa’s indistinct murmurs.
Gawion crept to the wall and pressed his ear against it. Papa had now raised his voice, saying, “Safe? Mont Blanc was never safe. They captured us there.” This was a story he had told his children many times. It was also the reason Papa had been so quick to assume Maeg had been taken.
More than a century before Gawion was born, Papa, not quite awake after the summer sleep, had wandered into a trap. When his desperate whistles alerted Maman and her father, they tried to rescue him. But the humans had attacked them with iron chains, and captured all three barbegazi. After travelling for a moon in an iron cage on a cart, they had arrived at Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna. Here they were gifted to the Empress Maria Theresa and, as part of the imperial menagerie, treated like royalty. Imprisoned royalty.
“We are much safer here,” Papa said, trying to persuade Maman that his initial fear of an abduction had been foolish. Maeg could not have been captured. No one could have taken her, because no one knew a barbegazi family lived in these mountains.
Well, that was not entirely true. The berry-human knew about them. And that was Gawion’s fault too. Just like it was his fault Maeg was gone. Potzblitz! If only he had stayed and waited for that avalanche, t
hen they would know what had happened to Maeg.
When Maman appeared, he sprang up and followed her into the eating cave.
“Are we going out to search now? I am hungry.”
“Blueberry or blackberry?” Maman sounded tired. “I shall give you one of each. And no one is leaving until nightfall.”
As she stooped to pick up the berries, Gawion saw that the bald patch at the back of her head had grown since he first noticed it a few days ago. She looked shabbier and even thinner than she did after sleeping for a whole summer.
“Give these two to Liel.” She stroked his beard. “Papa and I have already taken our dinner.”
That did not sound right. Maman and Papa had not been outside the resting cave all morning. And the last few days, his parents had always been doing something else while the children ate. Were they eating at all? Or was that another reason for Maman’s exhaustion?
“Are the rest of our berries on ice somewhere?” He snuffled, trying to catch a whiff of berries that might be hidden under the snow.
“Do not worry about that,” Maman said. “Just find Maeg.”
But he did worry. The winter solstice had come and gone, without the anticipated gift of berries from the human he had once saved. There was nowhere to find berries at this time of year. Except in the village. No matter what Papa thought, they might soon have several reasons to go near the humans. Perhaps Gawion should seek out the berry-human.
“Go on.” Maman took his hand and placed the four berries in his palm.
Gawion put the blueberry into his mouth with a cube of ice, attempting to dilute the flavour and make it last longer. He manoeuvred both lumps under his tongue, and fought the urge to swallow. His stomach growled.
—5—
At home after ski training, Tessa skipped down the wooden stairs to the granny flat, with the bread she’d bought at the bakery and Aunt Annie’s plastic container.
“Omaaaa,” she called, opening the door. A musty smell met her, mixed with the scent of camomile tea from the kitchen corner. The heavy curtains were opened, but the grey light from outside hardly made it past Oma’s squishy armchairs, so Tessa switched on the ceiling lamp. At the far end of the room, the grandfather clock, next to the massive bookcase with all Opa’s skiing trophies, ticked in rhythm with light snores from the sofa. Here, a magazine crossword puzzle covered part of Oma’s pale face, and her glasses balanced on the tip of her nose. The chequered wool blanket had slid to the floor.
But it was too early for an afternoon nap.
On her knees, by the sofa, Tessa leant in to hug Oma awake. She put her head on Oma’s chest and listened to her heart. It beat much faster than the clock, and it didn’t sound particularly weak.
Oma stroked Tessa’s hair and whispered, “How was the snow?”
Tessa smiled. Every lunchtime in winter that was always the first question Oma had asked Opa. But she used to be bustling around with pots and pans, preparing lunch for the two hungry skiers—or one hungry skier and one hungry schoolgirl—when she asked it.
She almost answered “Not worth getting out of bed for”, as Opa would’ve on a day like today, though she’d never seen him stay in bed.
“Okay, I guess,” she said, and rose.
In the kitchen corner, she emptied the goulash soup into a saucepan and heated it over a low heat, as Aunt Annie had instructed. By the time it bubbled, she’d set the table, sliced the bread, and helped Oma get up.
She gulped down two portions before Oma had swallowed more than a few bites.
“You have to eat,” Tessa said in Mum’s voice. “You love Aunt Annie’s goulash soup.”
Oma leant back and touched her lips with a napkin. “I must have eaten too much at breakfast.”
That was a lie. There was only a teacup in the sink from this morning, but Tessa just nodded. She cleared the table, leaving the dishes for Mum to do when she came home between her lunch shift and dinner shift at the restaurant. Until then, Tessa would do her best to cheer Oma up.
“Do you want to play Rummy? Or I can get Scrabble from upstairs?”
Oma heaved herself up and shuffled back to the sofa.
“I think I need to lie down for a bit,” she replied. “Why don’t you tell me about today’s skiing?”
Like Opa used to do. Tessa couldn’t remember ever seeing Oma on skis, but, from Opa’s daily reports, she knew the ski area better than most locals. They were dangerously close to talking about Opa. Was that a good idea? Mum had told her to avoid drama and anything that might be upsetting.
Tessa perched sideways on the edge of the sofa. Suddenly it seemed that every topic led to Opa. She couldn’t say her skis needed service without both of them thinking how Opa used to sharpen and wax her skis. The avalanche yesterday had been near Opa’s avalanche. Even her problems with the other girls were linked to the barbegazi, and from them, to Opa.
“What is it, dear?” Oma took her hand and gave it a soft squeeze. “I’m not made of glass just because my ticker’s acting up.”
“It’s…” Oma might be the only person in the whole world who knew the barbegazi weren’t extinct. Perhaps they could talk about them without mentioning Opa.
Oma’s thumb stroked Tessa’s hand, teasing the words out.
“It’s the barbegazi. Nobody believes they still exist.”
The thumb strokes stopped. “You mean, nobody believed your grandfather.”
“Did you?” Tessa asked quietly.
“Of course I did. He survived an avalanche that flattened two rows of trees, and somehow he made it home on a broken leg. Your grandfather—rest his soul—had no patience for fantasy. He could never have imagined the barbegazi.”
Oma let go of Tessa’s hand. She found the handkerchief hidden in her sleeve and dabbed at her eyes, but she spoke with more force than Tessa had heard in a long time.
“Until that professor came, he didn’t even know they were called barbegazi.”
“What professor?”
“The author of that fairy book. Even mentioned Opa in the barbegazi chapter. The two of you were always looking at it when you were little. Don’t you remember?”
Shaking her head, Tessa walked over to the bookcase, and scanned the heavy, dark-green and wine-red hardbacks.
“Try behind my knitting basket,” Oma said.
On the bottom shelf, squeezed in after volumes nineteen to thirty of the encyclopedia, stood a thin black book.
Tessa prised it out. Seeing it, she vaguely remembered drawings of elves, and sitting by the fire upstairs, listening to Opa’s story. She’d been too young to read, but he always showed her the section about him. This would be proof. Lisa and Maria could see for themselves that Opa had told the truth.
A bookmark stuck out in the middle, and her trembling hands opened it there. The font was small, and Opa’s notes and a pencil-sketched barbegazi filled the margins. A big arrow pointed to the place she was looking for, and she read:
Over the years, several skiers caught in avalanches claim to have been dug out by something white and hairy. However, as the persons were unconscious when found by rescue teams, none of their stories have credibility.
As late as last year, a skier reported his miraculous rescue in the Arlberg region of Austria. Despite the fact that Arlberg is several hundred kilometres from any historical sightings of barbegazi, which were all near major glaciers in the Swiss and French Alps, this author travelled to the region to investigate. Unfortunately, the skier, Willy Berger, withdrew his story of the sighting, confessing to have suffered a serious head trauma, with resulting hallucinations, in the avalanche.
Head trauma. Hallucinations. This was all wrong. Opa had always told her a barbegazi saved his life. Why would he say something else to this author?
Tessa slumped into a squishy armchair, across from the sofa where Oma lay with her eyes closed. It didn’t prove anything. But she still believed Opa. Whoever had written this book had misunderstood. She closed it and tried to decipher t
he name on the spine. The tiny letters there, once golden, had lost their colour and become dark shadows. Inside the cover, curly writing said: Habits & Habitats: A Historic Account of Alpine Elves by Professor, Dr Eberhart Ludwig Fritz Bahne.
What a strange name! She entered it in the search engine on her phone, and tapped the first result. It was from the Institute of Zoology at the University of Zurich. A long list of Professor Bahne’s publications appeared. She scrolled down, stopping to read interesting titles, like Animal Behaviour: Dying Elfish Customs and On the Origin of Elves: Survival of the Least Humanoid and Secrets of the Glaciers: Proof Against Barbegazi Extinction?
At that last one, Tessa jumped up.
Oma stirred. “Did you say something, dear?”
She wanted to do a happy dance, but stopped herself. Mum had said no drama.
“That professor believes they’re alive,” she replied, as calmly as possible.
Outside, on the snow-covered garden table, tiny flecks landed at irregular intervals. The clock chimed. Two thirty. Mum would be home soon.
“Sorry, Oma. I forgot… Tell Mum I went skiing with… Erm…”
“Mmm hmm,” Oma murmured, with closed eyes.
For a moment, Tessa watched her still shape, reluctant to leave. She spread the blanket over Oma’s stockinged legs, before she ran upstairs, hugging the book against her chest. A-live-a-live-a-live, her steps tramped.
Of course, the barbegazi had survived. And she’d find them, if she searched in the right spot.
FROM HABITS & HABITATS: A HISTORIC ACCOUNT OF ALPINE ELVES BY PROFES SOR, DR EBERHART LUDWIG FRITZ BAHNE
The name barbegazi comes from the French barbe glacée, meaning “frozen beard”.
The white beards of grown males often reach the ground. Female beards are slightly shorter. Both females and males use their beards as scarves, but whether the beards have other functions as well is unknown.
