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 scanned 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.
Wearily he reached into his snow-clogged backpack and lifted out one of the signal flares. They were built to withstand any weather. He activated it and tossed it as high and far as he could. The flare landed in the middle of the slope, sputtered uncertainly... and then, with astonishing speed to the eyes of a man half dead, shot high into the mountain air in a dazzling pattern of red-white-and-blue light.
Fourth of July in the Maroon Bells! The snowpack glittered colorfully, reflecting the changing pattern, and didn't fracture.
An open-tailed Lama AS-315 helicopter, with a Plexiglas bubble and latticework boom, just like the rescue choppers Dennis had seen sweep the sky over Da Nang, hovered above him against the sun. Its rotor thudded and pounded and battered the air and he wondered for a few moments if the concussion would start another avalanche. He knew it couldn't land at an angle of more than six degrees. But it didn't need to land. From its belly there hung a fifty-foot static nylon rope, and in a cone-shaped net at the end of that wonderful rope which would neither stretch nor break crouched Mickey Karp and one other man from the Mountain Rescue team.
Ten minutes later the short-haul harness lifted Dennis into the Lama. The pilot was another stranger to Dennis. But the uniformed Pitkin County deputy sheriff working with the Mountain Rescue team to unhook and unstrap him was someone he knew well. She was Queenie O'Hare.
Dennis said, "Thank you," in a voice that seemed to him to be coming from some source other than his mouth, oddly far away.
He told Queenie that his wife and two children and a very old man named Harry Parrot were in a Tenth Mountain hut not too far from Devils Rockpile. If they liked, Dennis said, he would be happy to guide them there.
Queenie asked if any of the people in the hut were hurt, and Dennis said he didn't believe so.
"In that case," Queenie said, "we'll get you to a vehicle at the staging area first, and they can take you down to the hospital. Then we'll go back for your family. Sounds like they'll be just fine."
That was all Dennis needed to know, and he passed out. But he woke again at the staging area, on Quarry Road in Springhill, when he was loaded into a rescue van by the Mountain Rescue team. Finally he focused his eyes on Mickey Karp.
"I thought I was dead," he admitted.
"You probably would be," Mickey Karp said, "if you hadn't had appointments this morning. You didn't show, and none of your phones answered. I got worried. Lila drove up to Springhill. You weren't here, and that didn't seem right. So when the Sheriff's Office called me and said they'd had a message from you on the emergency channel from the Bells, it was pretty clear. Josh wouldn't send Mountain Rescue on land vehicles-the risk equation didn't balance. But he must have had some leftover cash in the treasury and he must like you, so he hired a high-altitude helicopter from Fort Collins. Don't worry, you'll get the bill. We took a ride with them, and you lit up the sky. Now there's only one thing we need to know, Dennis. What the hell were you all doing up there?"
"I need to sleep," Dennis said, and closed his eyes.
On the way down to the hospital in Glenwood Springs, Queenie patched through on her cellular to the Lama. They had been able to land near the Tenth Mountain hut. They were coming back with four passengers.
Dennis woke. "Everyone's all right?" he asked anxiously.
"Everyone except the old man."
"What happened to him?"
"Frostbite," Queenie reported. "He'll lose a few fingers off his hands."
"Both hands?" Dennis asked unhappily.
Queenie nodded. "But he's alive and cheerful. Tough old bird-they say he'll live to be a hundred."
Chapter 30.
The Outer Limits
IN JOSH GAMBLE'S office in the Aspen courthouse, Dennis sat on a stiff-backed chair, his knee clamped in a metal brace. Outside, the sun had begun to melt the snowpack.
The grandfather clock chimed the hour. Cracking his knuckles as he talked, the sheriff thumped back and forth on the worn, ash- stained carpet.
"Four avalanche victims, inside and around that Sno-Cat. Four! Count 'em. All of them armed. The month of April, in case you don't know, Dennis, is a hell of a long way before or after the hunting season. Sheriff over in Gunnison calls me every day-tells me no one in Springhill knows a damn thing. Bullshit is what I say. Someone knows. And I need to know too, because I don't sleep well when bullshit flows and things don't make sense. Those four men were hunting you. Tell me why."
"You wouldn't believe me," Dennis said.
"Try me."
''Give me time, Josh."
"You got Ray Bond on your tail. He calls every day too, tells me he wants to charge you with something. "
"What's he have in mind? Breaking and entering a closet? I paid the repair bill to the Tenth Mountain people. I paid for the helicopter. Those four men were killed by an avalanche. You know it and so does Ray Bond."
"And two explosive charges are missing from that hut and you know that. You used them, goddam it. We can't find any evidence of it yet, but by fucking August, when the snow's melted, we sure as hell will."
Loosening his brace a little, Dennis flexed his knee; they had done arthroscopic surgery the day before at Aspen Valley Hospital.
"But do you think," he asked, "that in fucking August you'll find any evidence that the charges caused an avalanche back in fucking April?"
The sheriff sighed. "You intend to keep practicing law here in the valley?"
"I haven't made up my mind."
"Well, I hope you do, because I'm a man who believes in letting a hen lay her egg in her own time. But if you don't tell me the truth one day soon, and you stick around this valley-friend or no friend-I'll make your life miserable."
Four men were dead, and the village of Springhill was in mourning. It took a week to recover all the bodies. The funerals were held all at one time on a Saturday morning. Dennis did not go, but took the children to an ice hockey game at Aspen High School. Sophie drove up to Springhill early that morning and parked her Blazer among the other cars and trucks on the snow-covered road by the cemetery. When she approached the groups clustered by the open graves they moved to one side or turned their heads away from her. Edward Brophy showed her his back. His nephew Oliver's body had been the last one recovered from the chaotic snowpack at Devils Rockpile.
Sophie stayed for the ceremony, and then drove over to her parents' house off Quarry Road.
"It was strange," she said to Dennis later, when they were walking slowly from the Aspen post office along the trail by the side of the Roaring Fork River. "They were glad to see me but they were almost afraid to be seen talking to me. I felt that, and it was horrible. I didn't stay long. I told them we weren't coming back, and I was selling the house and I asked them if they wanted the money, because they had given the house and the land to me. They said no, they didn't want the money. I asked them, 'What do you want?' And then my mother began to cry. Because she doesn't know, Dennis. Neither does my father. Neither of them knows anymore. And no one in town knows either. They just know that a terrible thing happened and that some people went a little crazy. They don't know what was right and what was wrong about what happened. I guess they'd like to forget about it, to turn back the clock. But they can't do that. They could live nearly forever into the future if they wanted, but they can't erase any part of the past. My mother walked me out to the car and she said, 'We always thought the spring was our blessing. That's what Larissa taught us, and that's what you always say, Sophie dear. But now some of us have begun to wonder if it's become our curse.' "
Dennis was silent for a while as he limped through the mud and scattered snow. "And what are they going to do about it?" he asked.
"What can they do? The spring is there. The water is what it is. That hasn't changed, and the secret is still their secret. They asked me about that. My father wondered if you were going to tell the world, or anyone for that matter. I told him what you told me. I told him no."
"Did he believe you?"
"Yes, he did. And no one will come looking for us, he said. That's in the past."
"And they'll go on just as before."
"Of course. What else can they do? What else should they do? Their reasoning wasn't perverse or evil, it was just flawed. It bumped up against human nature. The only remarkable thing is that it hadn't happened before. I mean, it had happened, down in Mexico with Julian Rice, and up at Pearl Pass with the Lovells, but there was never any reckoning, never any terrible price for the village to pay. This time Springhill paid a price: four young men. That's a lot. It's a lot anywhere, but in a village of such small size it's worse than you can imagine-it's crushing. Everyone was related to at least one of those men. It took the heart out of everybody."
"Let's sit awhile," Dennis said.
"Your leg hurts?"
"Some. But I'm supposed to use it."
They sat on two large flat rocks near the river's edge. "What about Harry?" Dennis asked. "What do they have to say about him now?"
"That's odd too. They seem to have forgotten about Harry. It doesn't matter, now that those young men are gone. My father mentioned it to me. He said, 'We're not worried about Harry anymore. We're sorry about what happened to his hands, and we wish him well. We know he never meant to harm any of us by leaving.' "
Harry would not paint again. How long would he keep on living if he couldn't paint? Dennis wondered about that. Then he said, "How do you feel, Sophie, about never going back to Springhill?"
She held his arm more tightly. "Bad," she said quietly. "Like part of me is gone. Like Harry's fingers."
"Do you want to stay here in the valley? In Aspen?"
"I thought I did at first, but now I know I don't. It would be too close to Springhill. Let's go away, Dennis. Can we do that? Could we go back to Connecticut, where you lived? It was pretty there. The seasons are lovely-I remember in the fall the leaves turn all those wonderful colors. Could you practice law there, up in the country?"
"Yes," he said, "I could do that."
"Lucy and Brian would like it. We can go to the pound there and find new kittens for them." She smiled sadly. "Kittens that won't be taken away by horned owls."
"Yes, they'd like it." He touched her cheek with his hand; he loved its softness. "But when we met, you said if you didn't live in Springhill you would be a different person. You said your life was there. How has that changed?"
"Everything has changed," Sophie said.
"Except us. Isn't that so? You and I will live good lives now. If we're lucky, we'll grow old together."
She clasped his hand, and in that instant he saw the wise and calm Sophie he had always loved, the Sophie who had braved the storm and led them to safety in the hut: he saw her spirit emerge from the careworn woman of the last months.
She said, "You've forgotten something."
He frowned. "What have I forgotten?"
"Look ahead thirty or forty years. If you don't get hit by a bus, Dennis, or develop an incurable cancer, you'll be a truly old man. You'll need help and a lot of loving care. On the other hand, I'll be well over a hundred years old. And if I take care, I could be not very different from what I am today."
Dennis shook his head stubbornly, like a man emerging from a nightmare. "I know all that, Sophie. I believe it, and yet it still doesn't seem possible. All the business about the spring has become a myth in my mind. I wake up in the middle of the night-and I wonder if its powers really exist. Do they, Sophie? Or was it a hallucination with generations of an entire town as its victim?"
"They exist," Sophie said. "You might find it easier to deny and forget, but the myth is real, Dennis. The other reality is that human nature doesn't know how to handle the gifts the world offers. Are you worried about growing old?"
"No more than anyone is."
"And that's probably a great deal. But I'll take good care of you. Think about it, Dennis. I'll grow old-unless I have bad luck and the bus hits me, I'll grow very old. There's no one anymore to bone me or make me depart." She stayed silent for a minute, letting him absorb the idea. Then she said, "None of us knows the outer limits. No one's tried to go all the way. I could. Who knows? I could live to be older than anyone's ever dared dream. What will the world be like? Think of it. I may find out."
Rising in one supple motion, she looked down at him for a few moments with great tenderness. Then she gripped both his wrists in order to help him to his feet, the way she might have helped an unsteady old man.
"Oh, Dennis," she said wistfully-the sadness of all that had happened, all they had lost, welling up so that her eyes clouded, then blurred with tears-"what a shame you won't be there with me."