The Long Cold

An early-October storm arrives weeks ahead of anyone's plans and catches two brothers high on Cathedral, dressed for the bluebird afternoon it was. At full dark one of them walks out of the trailhead alone, saying his brother is still up there. There is one vehicle in the lot, and its hood lies under an unbroken lid of snow.

Cass Elkhorn sends the teams high, because doctrine says you search where the reporting party puts the subject and earn the right to doubt him later. Then he crouches over two sets of tracks coming down together, low, on the wrong shaded side of the mountain.

A slab breaks four hundred yards wide on Bishop's Bowl in the last week of January and takes three of a party of four. Two friends dig one of them out in twelve minutes. The second man's beacon is not transmitting — and a beacon burial is a race, while a dead-beacon burial is a search.

He is Wyatt Kell, twenty-two, and he has sold half the men on that rim their bootlaces. By the time the county reaches the debris he has been under two hours, in a terrain trap that took the deepest of the pour. Hanging over all of it is the bowl's unbroken twin, on the same buried layer, at the same loading.

A father and son sign the register for a two-day climb on Cathedral: up from five thousand feet, asleep at nearly twelve, summit push at dawn, no rest day. By seven the next morning a solo hiker has fired an SOS: the son keeps missing flat ground, and the father says they are fine, they are close.

The father is not lying. Up there the first thing to go is balance and the second is judgment, and the instrument that would notice is the one failing. The helicopter is not grounded by weather. It is thirteen thousand feet on a warm June day, and there is not enough sky in the sky.

A woman lies on a ledge eleven feet above a slot gorge with an open fracture in her leg, and everyone on the rim can see her. A hundred and forty feet down, forty feet wide, half a mile of it. The way to her is rope, and rope is what this outfit owns.

The channel has already run twice. Above it lie two and a half square miles of bare rock and century-old mine waste that absorbs nothing, and the cells over that basin are training — forming in the same place, taking the same track. The only honest instrument is a gauge three miles upstream, and a surge covers that in about thirty-eight minutes.

No rain in the valley since the last week of August, and the Red Flag sheet that morning is the third this month. Nobody does one thing differently, which is what the second week of a warning does.

By one o'clock a column is standing up out of a drainage that is another agency's. Cass Elkhorn has no standing on a fire and says so out loud, early. The sheriff owns evacuation and search — and that drainage is nine miles of gravel with one way out, eleven mailboxes six miles up it, rifle season on the forest above that, and no register at all. Every search he ever ran had a number at the bottom.

The telephone rings at twenty past six on the second of February — the telephone, not the pager, and the difference is not small. A woman at the top of the Bratton road has not come back to the house.

Her truck is at the turnaround, wipers up, locked, four inches lying unbroken on the hood. By twenty to nine Hardscrabble is shut behind a chain, and on the far side of it are two mutual-aid teams, two certified avalanche dogs, an aircraft and the sheriff. Inside the gate there are eleven people and six pieces of country, and the biggest of the six is the one Cass Elkhorn means to walk past.