A Fatal Thaw

by Dana Stabenow

  The mountain. Angqaq Peak. In Aleut, Big Peak. To mountaineers the world over, the Big Bump. Kate saw a wedge of land rearing up nineteen thousand feet and change, its pointed peak testing the boundaries of the sky. Its sides swept down, unbroken on the right, broken by one secondary peak on the left, similar in shape but two thousand feet less in height. The smaller peak sat at the right hand of Angqaq as if Angqaq was hand-rearing its own successor to take over the climber-killing business when Angqaq itself had retired. In fact climbers called the secondary peak “Child” and the primary peak “Mother,” and, not infrequently, “you mother” and similar less than affectionate nicknames.

  The rest of the Quilaks fell back before such terrible grandeur, their puny twelve- and fourteen- and sixteen-thousand-foot peaks as nothing next to the mountain. Taken collectively, their thrusting bulk was a challenge, a taunt, a provocation. Kate had been born next to the Quilaks and raised in the shadow of Angqaq, and still she was awed, and afraid.

  Mutt uttered an impatient bark. Kate, startled back into her body, looked down. Mutt, blessed with no imagination and intimidated by nothing on the known planet, was all brisk business. We’ve done this before, she reminded Kate.

  “Yes, we have,” Kate said, sighing.

  Well, then. Mutt broke into a trot and headed up the Valley of Death. Kate peered ahead, eyes narrowed against the glare of sun on snow even behind Bobby’s Ray-Bans. She thought she saw a small, dark moving speck about halfway up the valley, but she couldn’t be sure.

  Only one way to find out. She adjusted the straps of her pack and fell in.

  She toiled onward, up the long valley. Lost in the vast expanse of snow and ice, she trudged one step at a time, Mutt in the lead, which reminded her of the old joke about the view always being the same if you’re not lead dog. She smiled, and the thought kept her going until she stumbled onto the remains of a campsite. A startled raven flew up, scolding her furiously.

  “Ha, Trickster,” she said, amused. “Caught you in the act.”

  She waved Mutt back and approached the camp cautiously. By the holes, she could see where they’d pitched their tent. A frozen round in the snow indicated the place someone had put down a hot pot. Going a little way from the site, she found a patch of yellow snow and evidence that Lottie’s climbers had been eating too much, and she grimaced. They hadn’t even buried their refuse, and if Kate hadn’t been convinced of Lottie’s state of mind before, she was now. The raven had ripped the remains of the camp apart. Kate sighed and shrugged out of her pack. Producing a collapsible shovel, she scooped the outdoor toilet into one of the empty food bags she found at the campsite.

  “Pretty soon you’re not going to be able to melt a drinkable pot of snow on this whole friggin’ mountain,” she muttered, and Mutt, nose wrinkled, gave an assenting sneeze. “At least you don’t have to scoop it up,” Kate told her.

  She picked up the rest of the area, buried the trash against the Trickster’s return and flagged the area for later recovery. She paused, wondering if she were hungry. At thirteen thousand feet she had no desire for food or drink but knew it would be wise to force herself to have both. She choked down a chocolate bar and a couple of handfuls of gorp, managed to swallow half a quart of water, and marched on.

  The higher she got, the worse her wound hurt. The sun beat down on her head, and she had to stop to remove her parka and gloves. Retaining glove liners, vest and knit hat, she stuffed everything else into her pack, hoisted it to her back and slogged on. On either side the walls of the valley rose a thousand feet straight up in a vertical wave of ice. The sun picked out the lines of the overhanging cornices, elaborately carved with an artisan’s attention to detail by decades of wind blowing at gale force. Beyond the walls of the valley, the peaks of the Quilaks seemed to be closing in for the kill. After a while Kate tired of looking up and focused her attention strictly on the ground before her, which was a wise decision, since the floor of the Valley of Death was riddled with a thousand crevasses, yawning chasms twelve and more feet deep where the glacial ice below had shifted and ruptured the surface. Some were hidden by deep snow, discovered only as she poked Bobby’s broom handle in front of her. She was forced to double back half a dozen times. Progress was slow, and it was late afternoon when something out of the corner of her eye caught her attention. She looked up, and less than a mile in front of her three tiny figures leapt out from the vast expanse of whiteness. Two stood together, looking after a third who was double-timing up the valley at a gait perilously close to a trot.

  Kate’s heart pumped and she stepped out, rapidly closing the distance between herself and the two nearer figures. As she came up, they resolved into two young Oriental gentlemen, both of whom were dressed in top-of-the-line Everest chic and in spite of it looked very cold. One of them rattled off a string of words at her, gesticulating excitedly and pointing after the retreating third figure.

  “Do you speak English?” she asked them.

  One of the Koreans said something, and it wasn’t in English, so Kate said sternly, “Stay here. Don’t move from this spot.” She walked over to the nearest man and with both hands on his shoulders forced him down on his butt. “Stay here, or I’ll…” She smiled, showing all her teeth, and drew a line across her throat with one finger. Her shirt collar parted and they could see her scar. Next to her, Mutt was smiling, too, and faced with Kate’s scar and that gleaming expanse of enamel, the second Korean thumped down next to his comrade. Both nodded their heads vigorously, and Kate nodded back at them, satisfied. They’d been eating, and food wrappers littered the surrounding area. Kate picked up one, walked over to their packs—she was pleased to see them both shrink back as she passed by—and jammed it down the open mouth of the nearest one. She leveled a finger and said, her ruined voice rawer from the hike, “You pack it in, you pack it out. Got that?”

  She didn’t know if they had, but they both nodded in complete comprehension, nothing moving except their heads. One of them did give a little scream when she moved her knife around to a more comfortable place on her belt, but his friend patted him soothingly on the shoulder and he calmed. They blinked at her like two owls huddled together as she swung out of camp, following the single set of tracks that led due north, toward the mountain.

  She was smaller than Lottie and she moved faster—she always had—and she gained on the distant figure rapidly. Soon she was close enough to hear Lottie breathing. The other woman must have known she was there, but she never turned, and Kate realized that she was heading steadily for the pass around the east summit, which connected up on the Canadian side with the Slide, which was just that, one long slide east over the border.

  Kate quickened her pace. Beneath her feet the ice cracked and the snow slid. She was panting with the exertion, sweating beneath her layers of clothes but not daring to take the time to stop and peel off another. The load shifted, and the pack thumped awkwardly against her spine. She staggered to one side, trying to regain her balance, but when a patch of ice exploded a foot in front of her boots she let the pack take her down, falling heavily on her left side. Mutt barked a warning and gathered her haunches beneath her. “No!” Kate said. “Stay!”

  Flopping over, a flurry of shards from another patch of exploding ice told her Lottie was picking her shots carefully. She waited until her heart rate slowed down enough for her to speak. Cursing her ragged voice for its inability to carry, she squirmed over to a hummock of snow, wormed her way around it, Mutt squirming and worming beside her, inched forward toward another hummock and slid next to it in a third shower of exploding ice. Scared and angry, Kate yelled, “Dammit, Lottie, cut it out! You want to start an avalanche?”

  There was no reply. “Come on, Lottie. You couldn’t kill me before and I—”

  “I sure as hell tried! If you hadn’t tripped—”

  “If I hadn’t tripped you wouldn’t have hit me at all!” Silence. “You’re not going to kill me and you know it. Come on out. Come back down with me.”<
br />
  “I’ll go to jail.”

  Kate was silent. It was true.

  “Can you see me inside? In a cage? No air to breathe, no hills to walk, no hunting, no fishing, nothing? I might as well be dead.”

  “Lottie—”

  “You know it’s true, Kate. It’s true of you, so you know it’s true of me, too.”

  Kate’s head drooped, until her forehead rested against the snow. Her hands dug into the ice on either side of her. “Why?” she said. “Why did you do it, Lottie? You must have known you’d be caught.”

  There was a pause, and when Lottie spoke again, Kate recoiled. The undertone of venom in the other woman’s voice was a palpable force, spilling out in such an overwhelming wave that even this vast expanse of ice would not be enough to contain it, so fierce that the pain underlying it was almost indetectable. Almost. “I hated her, Kate. God, how I hated her. I think I hated her from the day she was born. I saw McAniff shoot that Jesus freak with a 30.06, and then I came home and saw her with Natty…”

  Kate waited. When Lottie said no more, she called, “Lottie. I would have done everything I could to keep them from finding out it was you. Hell, the Park was lousy with people who believed with all their hearts that the world would be an infinitely better place if someone would just remove Lisa from it. I could have blown enough smoke to keep the cops feeling around blind until they gave up and went away.” She paused, and then, the words wrung out of her, “Why, Lottie? Why did you have to kill Max? You might have gotten away with killing Lisa, but you knew I couldn’t let you get away with killing Max.”

  Nothing. When Kate spoke again, her voice was sad. “When you asked me why he did it, you weren’t talking about McAniff, were you? You were talking about Max. You were asking why he slept with Lisa, weren’t you?” She waited. “Weren’t you, Lottie?”

  The silence was broken with a long, bestial cry, ripping across the frozen fabric of that mountain afternoon. Next to her Mutt howled in unison, and every hair on Kate’s body stood straight up. The awful sound went on for what felt like forever, compounded of every hurt, every slight, every insult, every snide comment, every smothered snicker, every cruel jibe, but mostly it was a lament for lost love—parental love, romantic love, maternal love. It was agony given voice.

  Above all, it was a long, excruciating, mournful lament for the dead.

  The sound broke off into a low sobbing, and left Kate limp and shaking. What could she say that could possibly get through that wall of anguish? Lottie’s grief seemed so immense as to be a part of the earth itself.

  The earth answered. Seventy miles beneath them, the North American continental plate rode over the top of the North Pacific oceanic plate, forcing it four and a quarter inches down into the earth’s mantle. It was a bluntly struck blow of energy equal to slightly more than the atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima. The primary shock, a single, hard, up-and-down jolt, knocked Kate, who was halfway to her feet, back to her knees. She fell forward, and the secondary shock, a continuing side-to-side motion, kept her from getting back up again. A layer of snow cascaded down over the hummock she crouched behind. Mutt, whimpering, flattened herself at Kate’s side.

  Echoing off the sky was the sound of a thousand gears grinding together as the entire valley shook back and forth, calling Kate to raise dazed, incredulous eyes and bear witness.

  There was too much happening to take in at once. The broken, icy floor of the glacier undulated in the sinuous, deadly fashion of a serpent. The cornices of the glacier walls cracked, slipped and crashed to the bottom. The walls themselves broke apart and tumbled down in house-size chunks. Huge clouds of pulverized crystal billowed up into the still air, as if in a frenzy of spring cleaning a Titan had laid hold to the edge of the earth’s mantle and with one snap of his wrists was shaking it free of a winter’s accumulation of dust and debris.

  A scream came from somewhere, a high, frightened, girlish scream. “Lottie!” Kate cried, but the name was torn from her mouth. She tried to stand, but her legs were like jelly and her feet wouldn’t work. She gave up, wound a hand in Mutt’s ruff and hung on.

  Above the glacier the uneven reaches of the Quilaks jerked awake and surged to their feet. Miklluni Peak shrugged its shoulders, and before Kate’s disbelieving eyes all one thousand feet of its west face slid down into one side of the valley. Opposite, Angqaq Peak shivered and shook, and from the East Buttress another avalanche raced down the opposite side of the glacial valley and met the oncoming one from Miklluni. They collided in the middle of the valley, and a white, mushroom-shaped cloud boiled up.

  Everywhere she looked, every surface of snow was exploding into avalanches. Kate groveled before it all, crouched on hands and knees, one hand locked in Mutt’s coat, the other clenched in the unstable floor of the Valley of Death.

  Then, without warning, even that floor fell out from under her, yanking an involuntary scream from her throat, a sound of rough terror.

  She was pulled up with a sharp jerk. Among the sounds of falling snow and grinding earth, it took a moment for her to realize that Mutt had caught her in her teeth, by the scruff of the neck as if she were a newborn pup. A grunt, a tug, and Kate was up over the edge of the new crevasse and spread-eagled on its side. Woman and dog, they lay there, trying to burrow into the unstable ground, riding out the rolling, quaking, shuddering upheaval of terra not so firma.

  Seconds passed, minutes, Kate was sure hours had gone by. The shaking slowed, and stopped. The grinding sound ended. Slowly, painfully, Kate’s world righted itself. She blinked, and the lens shifted from blur to sharp, clear focus. She became aware of the last rays of the setting sun glinting off the ice, of the cold snow beneath her cheek, of the constriction around her throat where Mutt’s jaws were locked into the back of her parka, twisting the fabric into a noose of life. “Hey, loosen up there, will you, girl?”

  It took a few moments to talk Mutt into letting her go. When she did at last, reluctantly, Kate raised her head cautiously and looked around.

  A new crevasse opened in front of her, falling straight down in a path a hundred feet across. Perched on its edge, she stared down into that blatant, leering boast of earthly power that seemed to say, See? If I’d really wanted you, I would have had you. Maybe next time you won’t be so lucky. The subterranean snicker was almost audible.

  She rose to shaky feet and realized she no longer had her pack. It must have been torn from her back during the fall.

  Next to her Mutt climbed to her feet and shook herself vigorously, spraying Kate with ice and snow. She reared to thrust a cold nose in Kate’s face, as if to say, Can we please get off this goddam mountain now?

  Kate looked around apprehensively. “Not yet, girl. Where’s the pack?”

  Mutt nosed out the pack some fifty feet away, teetering on the edge of yet another entirely new chasm. Kate pounced on the pack thankfully and cast an anxious look around for shelter. A boulder-size chunk of ice had been heaved up out of glacial bowels; it was all she could find in the time she had left and it would have to do. She dragged her pack over to its downhill side and, not daring to look up the valley, emptied it out. With still-shaking hands, she pitched her one-man tent, anchored it down as best she could, shoved the rest of her gear and Mutt inside and crawled in behind them.

  Mutt gave an anxious whine. “There’s no time, girl. Come on, move over.”

  The silence outside seemed to grow heavier with each passing moment, and its ominous threat made Kate’s hands clumsy. She had barely gotten the tent zipped, the sleeping bag unrolled and herself inside it when the wave of spindrift from the collisions of the multiple avalanches hit like a blustery club. The thin Vortex walls of the tent flapped and strained, the weight of Kate and Mutt and the pack on the tent floor all that kept the wind from picking it up and rolling it end over end down the valley.

  The wave of particulate ice pounded the tent for half an hour, a raging, howling force that screamed its frustration at not being able to get at th
em. The tent was sealed shut and still the inside was filled with tiny, whirling bits of ice. All Kate could do was lie there, draw as far back into the hood of Bobby’s sleeping bag as she could get, and wait it out. She wondered if the avalanche would run out of steam before it got to her, but it seemed to be too much to worry about at the moment, and she stopped thinking about it almost as soon as she started. She curled up in a ball inside the tiny tent, Mutt huddled close beside her, and waited it out.

  The silence jerked her awake. It took a moment to orient herself, to accustom herself to the quiet. Incredibly, she must have dozed. She raised her head and met Mutt’s alert yellow eyes. The dog gave a soft, questioning whine. Kate raised her head, neck stiff, shoulders tense. The length of the sleeping bag, the pack, the inside of the tent, all were covered with a layer of fine, crystalline snow. She kicked her sleeping bag clear, unzipped it, then the tent flap. Crawling outside, she rose to her feet on legs that trembled a little.

  Everywhere she looked the features of the Quilaks had changed, and changed radically. The southeast face of Mount Kanuyaq had been swept clean of snow and ice, scoured down to bare rock. The mouth of Sisik Glacier was filled from wall to wall with a flow of snow that reached out a mile and a half into the Valley of Death.

  The only way Kate recognized the Barnes Wall, a five thousand-foot drop from Angqaq Peak to Sleighter Glacier, was by its location. Every feature, every fissure on it had been altered, shifted, broken. Carlson Icefall’s once tiered, stairstep surface had been polished smooth by a gigantic hand and now gleamed in the twilight like a marble flagstone.

  The Valley of Death itself had been ripped open in every direction. There wasn’t a cornice left intact on top of a glacier wall as far as the eye could see. Everywhere, the fresh blue of newly exposed glacier ice gleamed coldly in the setting sun’s refracted glow.