experience that it required perfect timing not to arrive hurried and winded, and not to have to wait for too long on the summit of the freezing mountain.
He frowned at the snow as he climbed steadily beside the downhill route. It had been unseasonably warm and wet at the beginning of February, but fresh heavy snow had fallen on the slippery base in the last week. He prodded his long pole into the glistening powder as he tramped upwards. When he glanced towards the heights above he could pick out the figures of other competitors, black and grey specks against the snow.
Julia and the others clambered out of the funicular just before midday. A handful of spectators was already clustered in the lee of the station hut, cheerfully passing flasks amongst them. Belinda produced the provisions Frau Uberl had sent and they gulped thankfully at hot chocolate laced with plum brandy.
Sophia looked at her watch. ‘Exactly twelve.’
Josh was number fifteen. In seven minutes, he would be on his way down. Julia felt her heart knocking painfully in her chest.
Josh was waiting in a silent line of skiers. He knew most of them, although they were barely recognisable beneath their caps and yellow-lensed goggles. No one spoke. The Swiss official at the head of the line raised his arm and then dropped it. The first competitor plunged away. Josh heard the thrilling swish of skis through the powder, but he didn’t look. He was breathing slowly and evenly. His fingers flexed in the loops of his poles. He was following the course in his head, every twist and dive of the endless, treacherous fourteen kilometres.
Swish. Swish. Starter after starter.
Josh moved forward in the line. Swish. Two people ahead of him. He eased his goggles over his eyes. In a little more than thirty minutes, with luck, he would be at Lauterbrunnen, nearly three thousand feet below.
Next but one. The Scot, Alex Mackintosh, was just ahead at number fourteen. The raised arm fell again and Josh was at the head of the line. He had taught himself never to feel nerves, Fear was one thing, it was a safeguard, but nerves were simply destructive. The seconds ticked off. In the last two or three, as he crouched ready for the arm signal, he wondered where Julia would be watching.
Swish.
Josh didn’t hear the rasp of his own skis. He was off, traversing the opening slope that was as steep as a roof. Down, and down, with the powder spurting up behind him. So fast that it was gone while the starter’s arm still flickered in his head. At the bottom, a sweeping left turn and into the Engetal, the Happy Valley. Ahead lay a great schuss, a huge S-shaped sweep that dropped more than a thousand feet.
Josh was travelling like a bullet. The speed pinned the flesh of his face to the bones, carving a white smile beneath the blank goggles. But behind the yellow shields his eyes were like an eagle’s. They saw every bump and turn and carved out a path for him before his skis sliced over it. He had become a machine, as he always did when he skied at his best. His blood froze and his body fused to the skis.
Down. The wind and the snow plumes and the sweet slicing turns.
On down. Like flying, but rawer. Like diving, but faster and fiercer. Like sex. Like death itself.
Almost the bottom of the Happy Valley. A right-hand turn and ahead a flat traverse, then a rise to the Mürren ski hut, and the control point.
Josh’s head jerked up.
He heard the roll of thunder before he saw anything. But he knew that it wasn’t thunder. It was a crack and a spreading roar that came from the Schwarzgrat, high overhead. The noise rose up to choke him, indistinguishable from his own fear. Then he saw the snow falling off the cliffs. Only it wasn’t snow any more. It was vast white monuments that dropped and sent up billowing clouds and brought rocks and trees and churning debris racing towards him.
Josh turned with such violence that spraying snow lashed his face. He shot away at an angle with the avalanche clawing at him like a nightmare. And out of the corner of his eye, in one split second, Josh saw Alex Mackintosh. The ragged white wall swept him up and threw him over and over like a twig, and then he was gone.
The leading edge of the avalanche caught Josh at the same instant. It smashed him down and punched the breath out of his body. He folded his arms helplessly around his head as the snow gagged him, blinded him and sucked him down. His skis were torn off and he was pitched into blackness, uselessly clawing and fighting against its brutal strength.
Then, after what seemed like an eternity of suffocating terror, it was suddenly quiet. Josh opened his eyes, very slowly, as if his eyelids were weighted. There was blue sky above him.
He was gasping for breath and whimpering like an animal, but even as he lay there he knew that he had never seen anything so beautiful as that pure, ice-blue sky.
He stared at it, fighting for his breath, with the euphoric realisation Pm not buried singing in his head. For a long moment he couldn’t move, and he looked up into the wonderful space above him as content as a baby. And then he remembered Mackintosh. He sucked more air into his burning lungs and tried to struggle on to all fours. Pain throbbed down his left side and Josh swung his head from side to side, trying to clear the mist of it. He saw then that the snow had engulfed him up to his thighs. He kicked and writhed, hauling at the debris with his hands to pull himself free. At last he lurched to his feet and saw his skis sticking out of the snow behind him. Josh lunged towards them, one hand pressed to his side, jerking like a clumsy marionette over the snow blocks.
It seemed to take hours.
With each step Josh was trying to work out where in the hideously changed landscape he had last seen Mackintosh.
At last the skis were within his grasp. He wrenched them out of the snow and jammed his boots into the bindings. The way ahead looked almost impassable but he pushed forward, staring into the hollows for any sign of the other skier.
He fell and fell again as he plunged down the slope, and then as he scrambled up again he saw the aluminium basket of a Tonkin pole identical to his own sticking up out of the tumbled mass. Josh hurled himself down next to it, kicking off his skis. He scrabbled at the snow, cursing his hands that seemed so ineffectual against the avalanche debris. He began to gasp with the effort as he worked and sweat ran down behind his goggles, almost blinding him. He glanced up once in desperation and saw black figures bouncing and sprawling over the snow. Help was on the way from the control point at the Mürren hut. He bent down again, working faster, and the ice tore through his knitted gloves.
Then, suddenly, his hand broke through into space. His bare, frozen fingers felt the smooth canvas of a ski-jacket. Josh hauled at the snow, dragging it in chunks away from the man’s body. He was shouting, without knowing what he said, ‘It’s all right. You’re clear. You’re okay.’
And then, like’ a miracle, the body was moving too. It shuddered convulsively and one shoulder appeared. Mackintosh was lying curled on his side, his arms raised in front of his face to make an air pocket, and his Tonkin pole thrust vertically over him.
Josh stuck his hands under the man’s armpits and hauled at him. The Scotsman’s head broke out of the snow and ice as the first of the rescuers reached them. His face was grey and ridges of snow and ice clung to his hair and eyebrows. His blue lips hung open, and he was breathing.
‘He’s alive,’ Josh yelled. His shout rolled over their heads, echoing briefly and then swallowed up by the heights. The rescuers flung themselves forward. There were shovels and ropes now, in place of Josh’s hands. He stood back, shivering a little, looking at Mackintosh’s face.
One
