“Oliver Cone and the McKee brothers. Maybe a few more men from the quarry.”
“Would they know about this hut?”
“Oliver hunts here all the time. They’ll try the hut first before they do anything else.”
They’ll be close, Dennis thought. And closing in.
“What will they do when they find us?”
“You want to know?” Harry stretched out a gloved hand to tap Dennis’s knee. “They ain’t come up here to negotiate. You heard them say they were going to cain me—do what their daddies did to Julian Rice in Mexico. And since you’re here with me, trying to keep me alive, they’ll do it to you too.”
Dennis looked at Sophie. Unhappily, she nodded in agreement. Oliver Cone was a killer. He knew that.
“But not you,” he said. “Not my kids.”
“I’d be a witness,” Sophie said. “So would Brian and Lucy.”
“Sophie… they’re just kids.”
She turned her head away, turned back to the children. They were leaning against her, eyes closed, deep in a merciful asleep.
He saw that the strength had ebbed from Sophie. She had acted against the needs of the people she had known all her life in favor of Harry and Dennis and his children. She had battled through the storm to lead them here to safety. She had done all she could do. The failure of the radio and generator had sapped her will to act. Dennis saw her head droop, her eyes flutter, then close. It struck him like a physical blow: she had given up. Surrendered to defeat and exhaustion and the cold.
Dennis clambered to his feet, took deep breaths for a minute. Then he crossed the room and squeezed into the closet through the smashed door. There he surveyed its contents of avalanche control and rescue equipment.
Harry had followed and peered in over Dennis’s shoulder. “You know how to use this stuff?”
Nodding, Dennis laid a hand on the steel stock of the recoilless rifle. “Second World War. The howitzer is probably vintage 1925—a good year for howitzers. These charges are full of TNT. TNT is older than you, Harry. And it doesn’t need batteries or gasoline.”
Sophie and the children still slept. It had stopped snowing, and patches of pale blue sky were working their way down from the zenith toward the mountaintops.
Warming his hands over the stove, Dennis studied the topographical map. The men in the Sno-Cat knew these mountains well. They were hunters. There were only two routes they could use. One was straight down the North Fork of the Crystal from a southerly direction, but if they did that then above them would loom the wild monuments of the Bells with their unstable multiple layers of the long winter’s snow. The safer way to the cabin would be the slower one along the route of the pack trail, the way Sophie had chosen.
Dennis picked a point on the map where the trail and the North Fork of the Crystal seemed to nearly converge, where the hunters would be forced to pick their final access route. It was at the southern entrance to Lead King Basin on the edge of a mountain called Devils Rockpile. Sophie and he had passed it without looking up; they had been battling wind and snow, keeping the children on the move.
“Harry, before you got blown out of that trench in Cháteau- Thierry, did you fire a weapon?”
“Not at anything that moved,” Harry said.
He showed Harry how to load and fire the recoilless rifle, which was meant to be fired from a pedestal mounted on a flatbed truck but could also be handheld over the shoulder or propped on a window ledge. It had no recoil, although its back blast was equal to the force that propelled the shell from the barrel.
“If it’s loaded, Harry, and you stand behind it when you pull the lanyard, you never get to see that hundred-and-first candle on your birthday cake.”
Dennis assembled the TNT canisters, crimped the caps and cut the safety fuses to one-minute lengths for a margin of retreat. He tried on some old cross-country boots left in the clothes chest by the ski patrol. One pair was too tight, another too big. With an extra layer of wool socks, the big pair would do. The boots were sized for one of the two pairs of cross-country skis standing in the rack.
Watching him carefully, Harry asked, “What are you going to do?”
“There’s a mountain called Devils Rockpile. They have to go there, and I’ll meet them.” He spoke softly. “I’m not going to wake Sophie and the kids. If I’m not back yet when they get up, tell them where I went.”
Harry hugged him fiercely. “None of this was supposed to happen, Denny. You didn’t need to get involved. If they show up here, I’m not going to fire that goddam weapon. I’m going out to them. It’s me they want, not Sophie and your kids. The world doesn’t need another artist.”
There was no time to debate it. Dennis looked once at Brian and Lucy, and then at his wife. He dared not bend to kiss them for fear they would wake.
He slipped out the door into the cold morning.
In snowshoes, the slender cross-country skis slung over his shoulder, binoculars snug against his chest, Dennis worked his way southward along a series of gullies and a feeder canyon. He had taken off his mittens and wore Thinsulate ski gloves with two pair of silk liners under them. In his backpack he carried two of the four-pound gelatin dynamite canisters. He had armed them in the hut; it might never be possible to do it on the icy peak he was bound for. He packed two safety flares. He had thought of taking a rescue beacon, but if an avalanche caught and covered him, whom would he signal? He would be alone in the Bells.
Devils Rockpile soared to 11,000 feet. In the white heart of winter the rocks for which it was named were barely visible. Dennis plodded steadily and slowly up a bowl on the steep north face, trying to traverse and keep clumps of trees between himself and the peak in case somehow, above him, the snowpack fractured. His breath was ragged. The higher he climbed, the colder it grew.
The snow had eased but the wind swirled. Even in the gloves his fingers felt as if they were resting on a block of ice. His lungs ached from cold that could drain strength from muscles and will from the mind. The cold commanded you to obey. You could bend into the wind and by that fraction of angle shield your face from its force, but there was no way of evading the motionless cold that invaded from all directions, sucking out your warm core. You could give in to it, Dennis knew, could feel conquered by a power so strong there was no shame in defeat. He had heard that men, when they froze to death, in the last moments before sleep felt warm, peaceful, enwombed. Now he understood why. There was a moment when you felt you could not be any colder: you and the cold were one. Death, although not quite welcome, was no longer shunned. To surrender to the cold was purpose enough, and in that surrender was a form of glory.
The wind eased a little. He had to halt climbing to steady his breathing. For a few seconds he raised the flap of his ski hat so that one ear was free.
The faint deep chug of an engine broke the silence. It was coming from the other side of the tree line at the crest of the peak. He pulled the hat down again; he believed that in another few seconds his ear would have frozen.
But now he knew where the pursuers were—just where he had assumed: on the far side of Devils Rockpile, below him in the drainage canyon formed by the North Fork of the Crystal. He had been there in summer on a fine day with blue sky and green meadows; today it was unrecognizable.
He kept climbing, tramping through drifts below the tree line, staying away from the trunks where he knew the living warmth of the trees could create hidden pits into whose softness a man could sink up to his neck or vanish.
He emerged at the top of the Rockpile near a horizontal cornice of nearly frozen snow, and dropped quickly to a prone position.
Only a few hundred yards below him on the frozen riverbed he saw the hulk of the Thiokol Sno-Cat—6,000 pounds of bright-orange aluminum constructed like a giant tractor with an oversized plow in front. A heated cabin towered above the plow and on either side of it were huge black tractor treads to crush relentlessly through the snow. In the bed behind the cabin Dennis could see two
men.
With one hand he unslung his binoculars from under the parka, and with the other hand he lifted his ski goggles from his forehead. The sudden brightness nearly blinded him. The binoculars clamped to his eyes felt like circles of ice. Made clumsy by the cold, his fingers spun the dials. The image shimmered, then cleared.
He focused on the faces of the men riding the Sno-Cat. He saw Oliver Cone and Peter Frazee. Frazee carried a hunting rifle with a scoped sight. Strapped to the back of Oliver Cone’s parka were a steel bow and quiver of metal arrows.
These were the descendants of Larissa McKee and William Lovell. They don’t hate me, Dennis knew, but they believe Harry and I stand in the way of their survival. And blood lust would also have taken hold. The hunt and the savagery of the mountains themselves would plunge these men back into a primitive world. Dennis saw that world in the machine chugging brutelike along the river toward the hut where their quarry—his friend, his wife, his children—waited. The Sno-Cat grunted like a beast in rut.
He remembered the night long ago when he chased away the bear and felt like an adventurer, a city boy happily out of his element. A year ago he had been sheltered with his family in a world where no harm could penetrate. A week ago in court he had played civilized games. That world had vanished. This was no game.
A cloud moved away from the peak and without warning the April sun blazed from a patch of hard blue sky. Before Dennis could drop the binoculars, light from the lenses flashed down into the bowl, sweeping across Oliver Cone on the Sno-Cat. Cone turned to gaze upward. He lifted a red-gloved hand.
The Sno-Cat halted. Its engine idled, the sound drifting up toward the peak. Awkwardly, like a cumbersome orange beast roused from torpor, the machine began to turn toward the upper reach of Devils Rockpile. Dennis calculated that between him and the Sno-Cat lay a distance of three hundred yards. The slope the machine would climb to reach him was an easy grade of twenty degrees.
He moved awkwardly. If he took off the gloves his hands would freeze within a minute. Twisting partly out of his backpack, he hauled out the first canister, armed the charge, set the blasting cap and fuse. He was tugging at the second charge when the air six inches from his head seemed to vibrate. He heard the crack of a rifle, then a plaintive whine echoing round the peaks.
He scrambled quickly behind a fir tree—a second later a steel- tipped arrow chunked into the tree, quivering there. Sophie had told him that Oliver Cone, using a telescope sight, could hit a bull’s-eye at a hundred yards.
Dennis pulled the ignition wire on the first canister, raised himself up and slung the four-pound cylinder down the slope. When the rifle cracked again, a branch lopped off from the tree and fell silently into the thick snow at his feet, followed by the whining echo bouncing all over the Maroon Bells.
Quickly Dennis rose again, hurling the second charge over the cornice and to the right, trying to bracket the slope above the Sno-Cat.
He had the one-minute safety margin before the charges exploded. If the pack was unstable, it would slide. He feared only that the shock waves of the explosion would set off the slab on his steeper side of the peak as well. He crouched behind the fir, sucking icy air into his lungs. He was nearly at the crest. He reckoned the angle behind and below him to be forty degrees, swooping down for nearly a thousand feet to the aspen groves.
Waiting for the explosion, fists clenched, he stared at the second hand on his watch as it moved placidly on its journey to thirty seconds … forty seconds … and then a minute passed …
Whumpf! Whumpf! The canisters exploded, one after the other, the sound rising sharply in the bright midday air. Dennis waited for the following thunder of crumbling snowpack that would sweep down the slope and end his nightmare. He waited. And he heard nothing.
Then, louder than before, he heard the grumble of the Sno-Cat, ascending. The snowpack on the other side of the peak had held firm—it had not been steep enough to slide.
“Don’t panic,” Dennis told himself, aloud. “Just get the hell out of here.”
He stripped the snowshoe lashes from his boots and unslung the cross-country skis he had carried on his back. Part of his plan had been not to go down the mountain in the awkward snowshoes, but to ski back to the hut. It had not been part of the plan that a tanklike vehicle manned by sharpshooters would be at his heels. As he clicked the first metal toe cap of a boot into the lock on one ski, from a corner of his eye he caught a flash of orange through the trees. Wrenching the second snowshoe loose, he jammed his foot into the second ski—then came a series of light crackling sounds with the familiar whining echo. Another arrow skidded across the snow a foot away, skipped like a stone, and vanished. He looked up to see the machine clear of the trees and topping the crest. The hunters had him in easy range.
In a sudden fury of strength he planted his poles, shoved off downhill, and in a few seconds he felt he was flying. He could outski a SnoCat but he could not outski steel-jacketed bullets. Bent low, ski tips dangerously deep into the powder, he headed at a sharp angle for the firs on the left flank of the slope. He peered around as the Sno-Cat tipped over the cornice and bounced hard down onto the snowpack.
A familiar low clap of thunder—a deep whoosh, the growl of disturbed lions—and the cornice on the crest of Devils Rockpile collapsed.
To his left Dennis saw zigzagging cracks, as of windowpanes breaking in soundless slow motion, while to his right the surface of the snow foamed like a caldron of boiling milk. Dennis shot left along the upper angle of a crack, toward the trees. He was thirty feet from them when the snow gave way under him. He let go of his poles, jerking an arm downward to snap the release of the binding on one ski. He was reaching for the other ski when he was lifted into the air and supported on what felt like an immense soft hand. He was floating, and then something slammed into his chest and deprived him of breath. A hard edge bit into his ankle, his knee twisted—pain rocketed through his body.
He felt himself falling a second time. But there was no blow when he struck the surface of the mountain. He fell into white mist.
He began to swim. The snow was engulfing him, bearing him down the mountain at a speed he couldn’t calculate. But he knew enough to swim through it, to try and stay on top of it. He needed only to breathe—to breathe was vital. Breathe! Hurtling, tumbling downward, he commanded himself to breathe. But something prevented him from obeying. He flailed arms and legs, tried to swim, and tried to work out what wouldn’t let him breathe, until he realized that his mouth was full of snow, snow moving into his lungs, choking him, and that he was going to drown.
He tried to spit out the snow but it was a hard ball that had settled behind his teeth and bulged against his cheeks and refused to move. His nostrils were full of snow too. He heard a crunch, a convulsive settling. He had come to rest somewhere. He couldn’t move, couldn’t see. The world was completely white. Something was pressing into his chest and thighs. He felt comfortable but he knew it was death to be comfortable. He bit and crunched at the snow in his mouth. The cold assaulted his teeth and gums.
Breathe!
Chew!
Air moved minutely into his lungs. Chew! Spit! Breathe!
He flexed a hand and it touched nothing. He could move his fingers. He reasoned that the hand was up in the air. Close to the surface. I can get out, he decided, if I keep breathing and don’t give up.
Breathe!
Inch by inch, he hauled himself out of the snow until out of the corner of one snowpacked eye he saw a blue blur of sky.
Ten minutes later he lay on an icy bed of hard slabbed snow, five hundred feet down the mountain from where the avalanche had first struck him. Every muscle in his body hurt; every bone felt bruised. He had fought a battle with the mountain and he hadn’t lost—not yet. He sat up and began to drag himself painfully the remaining ten feet to the shelter of the aspen trees in case the snowpack of the Rockpile should fracture again.
He was alive, and that seemed miraculous. Not safe, but alive. He s
canned the mountain for signs of the Sno-Cat, but at first saw nothing. Then his sight adjusted to the glare and he made out a spot of orange at the bottom of the bowl. Tumbled on its back like a giant bug, the machine had come to an ungainly rest against the border of the trees five hundred feet below him and a thousand feet below the crest. It was motionless and silent. No human being was near it.
Dennis sat huddled on the edge of the aspen grove. He had his backpack, but he had lost his ski goggles and the light was a dagger in his eyes. It was a sunny, beautiful day. His knee was blown, the pain violent enough so that when he tried to stand, he toppled over and for a few seconds lost consciousness. I won’t try that again, he concluded.
His watch had been torn from his wrist but the sun told him it was early afternoon. By dark he would be asleep; by midnight, dead. But Sophie was safe now. After a while she would realize that somehow he had succeeded, that no one was coming to the hut. When she woke, she would have her confidence back. She would light a fire, leave Harry and the children in the hut, hitch a ride on a friendly eagle, and get through to Aspen. She’ll do it. Somewhere, even if it’s in Springhill, she’ll mourn for me as long as she has to, and at the same time she’ll raise my children. Raise them well.
Dennis nodded groggily; he had accepted his departure. He was not ashamed of anything he had done in the years of living, except perhaps the way he had won his last trial. But he had won it and there was a satisfaction in that. His mouth widened in a half-frozen smile.
He wondered who would find him, and when. It might take until summer. Maybe longer. Not many hiked here.
A strange thought worked its way into his fading consciousness. Both my children will probably live to be one hundred years old. That’s the legacy I leave to them. He could depart with that knowledge fixed as a touchstone in his mind.
While he was pondering and speculating, drifting toward sleep and easy death, he heard a coarse grating sound he knew well. The grating noise changed gradually to a rhythmic pounding. It was a sound that years ago in Vietnam he had learned to love and hate. The pounding grew louder. He couldn’t see its source. It was coming from south of Devils Rockpile. It was there; he was positive of it. How or why, he didn’t know, but it was there.
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