by Katie Berry
“I’ll fill you all in on all the gory details back at the bottom of the mountain. But for now, let me say it looks like Lawless might need to have a by-election for a new mayor and chief of police very shortly.”
The group moved carefully down the jumbled, rocky staircase to the ridge below. The glistening starlight aided their descent, and soon Christine found herself next to the scree outside the cavern near the snowmobiles. She marvelled at the immense size of the boulders that had piled up outside of the entrance. Millions of tonnes of rock and ice blocked it, sealing it closed forever. “At least we don’t have to worry about what to do with this cavern here.”
“Yeah,” Trip said, shaking his head, “I don’t think we would have dug you out of there any time soon.”
Christine shuddered as she spoke, thinking of all the people who had lost their lives over the golden fortune contained within the cavern, and almost all of them were now entombed along with it. “I don’t think anybody is using the front door there ever again,” she said.
Jerry interjected, “But we need to map this cavern somehow! I think they should be able to dig that rock away no problem! The scientific discoveries inside that place must be amazing! Some of the systems at work in that cavern have possibly been going on for tens of thousands of years and could help the world’s…” Jerry snapped out of teacher mode as the ground started to vibrate beneath his feet.
“Aftershock!” Austin shouted, grabbing Christine by the shoulders. He whisked her along to his snowmobile, saying, “Move, move, move!” He jumped aboard the sled first, grabbing the controls. Christine followed suit and climbed on behind Austin, wrapping her arms about his middle. Alex clamoured on last and latched his hands onto the chromed safety bar at his back. Christine looked across to the other snowmobile and was relieved to see the other two men already aboard with Jerry clinging to Trip’s rounded back like a stuffed Garfield on a car’s rear window.
Austin and Trip gunned their snowmobile’s engines, and they shot away from the mountainside. The machines flew along the ice-slicked snow, jumping and skipping over its surface as the ground trembled beneath them, not slowing until they were almost a kilometre from the cavern. They pulled the sleds around to face the mountain, killing the engines.
In the distance, massive sections of the Kootenay Glacier sheared off and plummeted onto the house-sized boulders at its base, exploding into thousands of huge, blue-hued chunks. Parts of the mountainside caved inward like a monumental souffle deflating from the quake’s jarring motions.
None of the group spoke as they watched the destruction, awed by the power of nature on display before them. The cavern, already inaccessible from the rock slide, now lay buried underneath millions of tonnes of time-worn ice.
As the ground beneath them gradually calmed its tectonic tremblings, Jerry smiled grimly. Whatever other secrets the cavern contained were now lost to the world forever. “Well, that’s one thing we can scratch off our to-do list,” he said, shaking his head.
The sled’s engines revved up once more, their wasp-like drone slicing through the cold night air as the group continued their journey. The swirling fog hungrily gobbled the snowmobile’s tail lights as they disappeared into the icy grey void, descending toward what remained of Lawless and whatever their future might bring.
At their backs, the Kootenay Glacier’s newly exposed ice sparkled in the starlight. Its reign over the valley below continuing for the moment, a silent testament to the power, beauty and impermanence of nature.
Fin
