The Silent Land

1

It was snowing again. Gentle six-pointed flakes from a picture book, settling on her jacket sleeve. The mountain air prickled with ice and the savour of pine resin. Zoe pulled the air into her lungs, feeling the cracking cold of it before letting go. And when the mountain horn seemed to nod and sigh back at her, she almost thought she could die in that place, and happily.

If there are few moments in life that come as clear and as pure as ice, when the mountain breathed back at her, Zoe knew that she had trapped one such moment and that it could never be taken away. Everywhere was snow and silence. Snow and silence; the complete arrest of life; a rehearsal and a pre-echo of death.

But her breath was warm and it said no to that. She pointed her skis down the hill. They looked like weird talons of brilliant red and gold in the powder snow as she waited, ready to swoop. I am alive. I am an eagle. Several hundred metres below lay the dark outline of Saint-Bernard-en-Haut, their Pyrenean resort village; across to the west, the irregular humps and horns of the mountain range. The sun was up now; in a few minutes there would be more skiers to break the eerie morning spell. But right now they had the powder and the morning entirely to themselves.

There was a whisper behind her. It was the effortless track of Jake’s skis as he came over the ridge and caught up with her.

He cruised to an elegant stop beside her. In contrast to her fashionable ski suit of lilac and white he wore black, and the morning sun burst on his bulbous black sunglasses in an iridescent flare. He stood still, sharing the moment with her. She fancied she could see his breath rising from him like a faint oyster-coloured mist. He took off his sunglasses and blinked back at her. Jake had close-cropped black hair and baby-blue peepers that she’d fallen in love with instantly, even if his large ears had taken her a little longer. A single, enormous snowflake floated onto his eyelashes.

Jake fractured the silence with a whoop of pure pleasure. ‘Whooo-hooooo!!!!’ He held his ski poles aloft and offered his dancing arse to the mountain. The sound of his shriek echoed around the crags, a celebration and a violation of nature all at the same time.

‘You shouldn’t do that. You don’t show the mountain your arsehole, arsehole,’ Zoe said.

‘Why not, arsehole?’

‘I don’t know why, arsehole. I just said it.’

‘Couldn’t help myself. This is perfection.’

It was. It was flawless. Immaculate, shrink-wrapped perfection on sticks.

‘You ready to go?’ she asked.

‘Yep. Let’s do it.’

Zoe was the more accomplished skier of the two. Jake could be faster, but in a reckless way, skiing right at the razor edge of his ability. She could always thrash him over a distance. To ski down to the village without a pause would take fifteen minutes. An hour and a half to get up on the combination of chair- and drag lifts, and fifteen minutes to get down. They’d got up early to beat the holiday-making hordes for this first run of the morning. Because this—the tranquillity, the silence, the undisturbed powder and the eerie feeling of proximity to an eagle’s flight—was what it was all about.

Jake hit the west side of the steep but broad slope and she took the east, carving matching parallel tracks through the fresh snow. Her skis whispered to the powder in thrilling intimacy as she plunged down the slope. Just the sound coming from her own skis was like having some creature or supernatural being racing behind her, trying to speak a story into her ear.

But at the edge of the slope, near the curtain of trees, she felt a small slab of snow slip from underneath her. It was like she’d been bucked, so she took the fall-line to recover her balance. Before she’d dropped three hundred metres the whisper of her skis was displaced by a rumble.

Zoe saw at the periphery of her vision that Jake had come to a halt at the side of the piste and was looking back up the slope. Irritated by the false start they’d made, she etched a few turns before skidding to a halt and turning to look back at her husband. The rumble became louder. There was a pillar of what looked like grey smoke unfurling in silky banners at the head of the slope, like the heraldry of snow armies. It was beautiful. It made her smile.

Then her smile iced over. Jake was speeding straight towards her like a dart. His face was rubberised and he mouthed something as he flew at her.

‘Get to the side! To the side!’

She knew now that it was an avalanche. Jake slowed,batting at her with his ski pole. ‘Get into the trees! Hang on to a tree!’

The rumbling had become a roaring in her ears, drowning Jake’s words. She pushed herself down the fall-line, scrambling for traction, trying to accelerate away from the roaring cloud breaking behind her like a tsunami at sea. Jagged black cracks appeared in the snow in front of her. She angled her skis towards the side of the slope, heading for the trees, but it was too late. She saw Jake’s black suit go bundling past her like clothes in a laundrette as he was turned by the great mass of smoke and snow. Then she too was punched off her feet and carried through the air, twisting, spinning, turning in the white-out. She remembered something about spreading her arms around her head. For a few moments it was like being agitated inside a washing machine, turned head over heels a few times, until at last she was dumped heavily in a rib-cracking fall. Then there came a chattering noise, like the amplified jaws of a million termites chewing on wood. The noise itself filled her ears and muffled everything, and then there was silence, and the total whiteness faded to grey, and then to black.

Total silence, total darkness.

She tried to move but couldn’t. Then she felt herself choking, because her mouth and her nostrils were packed with snow. She hawked some snow out of her throat. She felt the snow trickling cold at the back of her nasal passage. She coughed again and was able to gasp a lungful of air.

If she had expected to come round in the whiteness of snow, everything was black. She could breathe, but could barely move. She flexed her fingers inside her leather ski gauntlets. There was micro-movement. She sensed her hands were locked in position about twenty or thirty centimetres in front of her face. Her fingers were splayed wide inside the gauntlets. She tried to wriggle her fingers but nothing would move beyond that micro-flexing inside the glove. She stuck out her tongue and felt cold air.

She heaved her body with no result; and instantly descended into a panic in which she was hyperventilating and feeling the booming of her own heart. Then it occurred to her that she might have only a pocket of trapped air to depend on, and so she slowed her breathing right down. She told herself to be calm.

You’re in a snow tomb, be calm.

She breathed gently. Her heart stopped banging.

A snow tomb? You think that’s good?

There was almost a split inside herself as the part of her that wanted to give in to panic made an argument with the side of her that knew if she wanted to survive she should stay composed.

Are you calm now? Are you? Are you? Right, when you are calm, call for your husband. He will come.

‘Jake!’

She shouted his name, twice. Her voice sounded alien, distant, muffled, like something down a poor telephone line. She figured that her ears were plugged tight with snow.

She flexed her fingers again and still nothing gave way. She tried every joint, like a warm-up exercise in the gymnasium, starting with her toes, moving on to her ankles and her knees, hips, elbows, shoulders. There was no relief. The snow had packed her hard.

There was a tiny movement at her neck. That and the clearway around her mouth made her think that her instinct to fold her arms in front of her face had saved her thus far. She figured that she’d made an air pocket.

Call him again. He will come.

‘Jake!’

You’re going to die. In a snow tomb.

She didn’t even know which country she was going to die in. They were right on the mountain border between France and Spain and the local people spoke a language that belonged to neither. She remembered that the Pyrenees were named for a tomb by the Ancient Greeks.

No, you’re not in a tomb. You’re going to get out. Call him again.

Instead of calling again she tried to move the fingers of her left hand, one by one. Her thumb and fore-finger were paralysed, as was her middle finger, but as she pressed with her ring finger she sensed a minute crumbling and a tiny movement in one fingertip. Something infinitesimal gave way, and she was able to retract her finger perhaps a centimetre. The movement was matched by a strontium flare at the back of her retinas. Then a rainbow of sparks. Then blackness again.

But the message of tiny movement flew from the nerves in her finger to quicken her heartbeat.

Calm. Calm.

She continued to work her ring finger and after a while she found she could move it against her middle finger in a scissor-motion. She exercised this scissor movement between her wedding finger and her middle finger. That’s right; you’re cutting your way out. Snip snip snip. Good girl. Cutting yourself free.

She had no idea how long she would be able to breathe; how much air she had. She tried to be economical with her breathing, keeping it shallow, sipping at the air. Her head was banging with pain.

She continued to try to scissor away at the snow around her fingers until the muscles in her fingers cramped. She rested them, flexed them and began again. Snip snip snip. Good girl.

And with no prospect of movement something suddenly fell away and her other fingers became free, until she was able to flex all of them, back and forth. Then she felt her moving fingers brushing the side of her face.

Now she made tiny karate-chopping motions with the upper extent of her now flexible fingers, trying to find her other hand, hoping it had also come to rest close to her face. She was able to extend into and retract from the small space she had made. At last the free hand made contact with the other. She worked away until she was able to lay the palm of her free gauntlet over the back of the other. Then she pushed back into the snow, full force. Her first guess had been about right. She’d cradled a small pocket of air in front of her. She still had no idea how long this air would last. A minute? Three minutes? Ten minutes?

Don’t think about that. Good girl.

She tried to wriggle her hand out of the gauntlet, knowing her fingernails would make the best tools for scraping her way out. But the gauntlets were strapped tight at the wrist to prevent the ingress of snow. In the immovable dark she tried to loosen the wrist strap of her right gauntlet, but the gauntleted fingers weren’t sensitive enough to allow her to grab the strap.

Perhaps Jake would come. Unless he too was trapped. Perhaps someone else would come. Perhaps they had helicopters circling overhead even as she thought these things. But no one else had been on the slope. It was likely that if the avalanche had been quite small no one would even know that it had happened.

Tomb. Greeks. Pyre means fire. You know. You know. Pyrenees. Shut up shut up.

‘Jake!’

Her voice sounded a little louder in her own ears this time; but it also sounded helpless.

She tried again to grab at her wrist strap in the blackness. She heard the sound of Velcro parting, and the strap loosened. Grabbing the tip of her right gauntlet with her left hand she managed to inch it off. There was nowhere for the gauntlet to go: the thing was scratching her face, but she released it anyway and began to scrape with her fingernails at the snow just above her head.

Her breathing was coming shorter now. She was scratching at the packed snow but making no progress. The snow came free but didn’t move. It had nowhere to go. She scratched harder.

She coughed again. There was something trickling at the back of her throat, making her cough. Then she stopped scratching and focused on the trickling. The fluid, the melted snow or saliva or whatever it was, was running from her nose into her throat. Instead of snot falling from her nose it was running backwards.

You are upside down.

She knew now with absolute certainty that she had been buried upside down, and vertically. Her feet were nearest to the surface of the snow, not her head. This meant that by scratching on the snow she’d been digging down, deeper into the snow, not up and out. That was why the snow wasn’t flaking free. She’d been digging the wrong way.

She tried flexing her toe inside her boot. It moved a fraction, but the snow around her leg was too hard-packed to let her move her leg. She inched her ungloved hand to her neck and found she could reach her hand through the snow to her chest. By scratching she could push her hand to her hip, and the snow fell in clumps towards her face. Then her hand hit a solid object.

It was her ski pole.

The handle of the ski pole rested at hip height. She grabbed it and discovered it lay exactly in line with her thigh. At first it wouldn’t move but by making a gentle sawing motion she could release a trickle of snow above her.

Saw it. That’s right. Saw saw saw. Good girl. Saw your way out of this coffin.

Her arm cramped and her muscles spasmed, but she kept up the tiny incremental sawing motion. With mounting excitement she felt the pole jag on her ski boot. Almost hyperventilating again, she sawed the pole back and forth, and felt a tiny pop as the pole broke the surface of the snow. A pencil beam of brilliant sunlight penetrated her tomb as the pole acted like a conduit for electricity. Something indeterminate between a laugh and a cry bubbled from her lips. Her lungs sucked in the icy air and a sob erupted from her.

‘Jake! Anyone! Help!’

She continued to saw away with her pole, trying to widen the narrow shaft to suck in some air, some sunshine, some life. But the effort exhausted her. When she stopped sawing all she could hear was her own ventilating lungs, a scratchy, underwater sound. Now her arm was cramping badly. She tried to ease it, but the ski pole twisted and the plastic basket at the end of it only dragged snow down into the aperture she’d made, closing off the pencil beam of light all over again.

She hung immobile, trying to steady her breathing, but she felt the pocket of air warming and thinning all over again. She felt dizzy. She felt her breathing drop through the gears and then a terrible surrender passed over her as she felt her consciousness shutting down.

Dimly from somewhere she heard a faint sound, like that of fingers sifting flour in a bowl. It was far off. Then it became a scratching, nearer.

And then she heard him.

‘Zoe! I’m here! I’m here!’

‘Oh God oh God oh God oh God!’

‘I’m here. It’s all right.’

She couldn’t see him, but his voice was like light through a stained-glass window in a cathedral. She could feel him digging frantically around her boot. She could hear his panting and gasps of exertion

‘It’s no good, I’m going to have to get someone!’ she heard him shout.

‘No, Jake! Dig me out! Dig me out now! Don’t leave! Don’t!’

There was silence.

‘Okay. I’m digging you out.’

‘Work on one side.’

‘What?’

‘One side!’

‘I can’t hear you. I’m digging you out.’

It took Jake an hour to dig Zoe free of the snow. No one came by. First he dug her right leg free and then cleared a deep shaft down to her head, so that she was out of danger of suffocation even if she still couldn’t move. Then at last he freed her arm and she was able to help him.

He barely had the strength to hoist her out of the snow-hole when she was clear. But together they got her out.

On their knees, they hugged for a long time; almost hugging the life out of each other.

‘Look at your eyes!’ she said. ‘They’re completely bloodshot!’

‘The snow walloped me in the face.’ He looked up and down the slope. ‘When you want the piste to be teeming with people there’s not a bastard in sight. Do you want to wait here while I go get someone?’

‘I don’t want to be left here, Jake.’

‘Can you ski down?’

‘No, I lost my skis. They’re somewhere under the snow.’

‘Mine too. We’ll have to walk down to the next lift station. I’m frozen. I need to move to get warm. Are you up to it?’

‘I feel okay. Really. Maybe it’s the adrenalin, but I feel okay. Come on, let’s go.’

They put their arms around each other and, trudging along the edge of the slope, they made slow progress down the mountain. Alive. Alive.

With light snow still falling around them it took maybe three-quarters of an hour of struggling through the deep snow in their heavy ski boots before they saw the overhead cables of a drag lift, with an intermediate station cabin about three hundred metres down the slope. The drag lift had been stopped. Neither was there any sign of activity on the slopes above or below them.

Zoe was shivering. Jake talked, mostly just to distract her. He told her that the trees had saved him. He’d been thrown against a slender pine and had flung his arms around it, swimming up its trunk as the snow deepened under him. Zoe grinned at him and nodded as he chattered about their escape. She recognised that he was in a state of shock. She knew that when they reached the drag-lift cabin the operator would radio for first-aiders and they would soon be whisked off the mountain.

But when they reached the cabin, it was empty. Through the smeared glass they could see one red and two green electronic lights shining under a row of switches on a console. The engines to turn the drag had been powered down. The glass door to the cabin stood very slightly ajar and heat was coming from inside. Jake pushed open the door.

‘Come on, darlin’ girl. We need to get you warm.’

‘You think they shut down the mountain?’

‘Likely. They maybe saw the avalanche and sent everyone down. Let’s just sit here a while until you get some warmth back in your body.’

There was a seat with torn leather upholstery, and Zoe slumped into it. Jake had a quick look around the cabin.

‘Hey!’ She’d found a hip flask on the desk by the console.

‘Gimme that!’ Jake grabbed it, twisted open the cap and took a slug from the flask.

‘Don’t snatch! What’s in it?’

‘Dunno. It’s fuck-awful. Have some.’

Zoe sniffed it, and took a slug herself. ‘They won’t mind. Look—here’s some chocolate. I’m gonna munch it. Want some?’

‘Naw, just give me the flask.’

There was a ski coat hanging behind the door with a rolled-up newspaper in the pocket. Two wide shovels and a snow brush leaned against one wall of the cabin. Though the engines were powered down, the glowing lights suggested the machinery all seemed to be switched on. An old-style walkie-talkie radio receiver hung from a peg. Jake took it down and flicked the switches. He got the sound of static but nothing else. He tried speaking into it a few times, but was only rewarded by more static. There was not much else in the grimy cabin, but at least it was warm. Outside the snow had started to come down heavier. They decided to sit and wait until someone came.

Jake took another swig from the hip flask, wincing. ‘That was close,’ he said. ‘Close.’

‘Very close. Too close.’

‘We were lucky to walk away.’

Zoe looked at her husband and said, ‘You know what? We’re just a snowflake on God’s eyelash. That’s all we are.’

‘What? If you’re getting God just because you survived an avalanche I’m divorcing you on religious grounds.’

‘Can I have another hug?’

‘Come here. Have two. Have three. You can have all the bloody hugs you want.’

An hour later, still no one had turned up at the cabin. They finished what was in the hip flask and polished off the chocolate. They tried the walkie-talkie again but heard only the same static on the airwaves. Jake started flicking switches on the console, and with a great rumble and whistle of turbines, the engines powered up and the big wheel overhead started turning.

‘Shut it down!’ Zoe shouted.

‘Why?’

‘I dunno! Just shut it down! You don’t know what you’re doing!’

Jake shut the machinery down. ‘Come on, we’re going to have to walk all the way down the mountain.’

‘Are you up to it?’

‘I don’t want to sit around here any more.’

They zipped up their coats and pulled on their hats and their gauntlets, and prepared to trudge down the mountain. Then Zoe noticed a set of skis leaning outside the cabin.

‘Do you think we can take them? I mean, does that mean someone is still up here?’

‘I dunno. Do they look like they’ve been used this morning?’

She inspected the skis. The fresh snow had fallen on them. ‘No way of telling. Listen—I just had a bad thought. You don’t suppose the lift operator was caught in the avalanche, do you?’

‘What? In his cabin?’

‘No. I mean, say, he was out inspecting the slopes. I don’t know what they do exactly, but say he was on the slope, shovelling snow or inspecting the drag lift or something, and he got caught, like we did.’

‘But they’d know. They’d be here. Looking for him.’

‘You think?’

‘Yeah. They’re in radio contact all the time. In case of problems. They’ve shut the whole mountain down and he’s gone. And no one is coming back until they open up the mountain again. Which may be tomorrow.’

‘So why are the skis here?’

‘Maybe they leave a spare set here all the time.’ ‘You don’t suppose there’s someone, you know, lying under the snow, do you?’

Jake tugged at an earlobe. ‘Be realistic. If there is, he’s dead. We’ve been here nearly two hours now.’

‘We should make sure,’ Zoe said. ‘We should help if we can. We have to do everything we can.’

Jake nodded. ‘Right. Right. Listen, this is what I want to do. I’m gonna put the skis on. This is a short lift. I’ll take the drag to the top. If he’s around, if he was out doing maintenance, he’ll be somewhere close to the track of the drag.’

‘You think it’s a waste of time?’

‘We couldn’t live with ourselves if we didn’t try. He might be lying there injured.’

Zoe took her lavender wool hat and put it on again. ‘Okay. I’ll come with you.’

‘No. You’re exhausted. And it will be quicker for me on skis.’

‘I want to come.’

‘Zoe, I don’t mind telling you, you look terrible. Your eyes are red bloodshot, too. I didn’t want to upset you. Maybe it was the pressure of the snow. But you look shaky. I’ll just satisfy myself that there’s no one lying on the track. If he’s underneath the snow, there’s nothing I can do anyway. Okay?’

Zoe blinked. They knew each other well enough. They both had a strong sense of the right thing to do, and she knew Jake would go ahead and do it.

Jake kept a small screwdriver in his bumbag for adjusting the bindings on their skis and he was already employing it to adapt the found skis to fit his boots.

Jake hit some switches until the machinery started up again and the steel wheel overhead began rotating. Zoe went outside to where the T-bars were stacked up on the drag loop and tugged one of the poles around, waiting for him to shuffle into place. She handed him the T-bar and he took it without a word. Suddenly she didn’t want him to leave her. She watched as the lonely drag pulled him up the slope and out of sight. It was still snowing. She went back inside the cabin.

The cabin was warm but she was shaking. She tried to close her eyes but when she did so violent images of the immediate impact of the avalanche came at her like hissing snakes. She felt her stomach squeeze.

Very soon she wished she hadn’t allowed Jake to go out. It occurred to her that there could easily be a fresh avalanche. She got up and looked out through the dirty window of the cabin. Then she sat down again.

Jake was gone a long time. She felt hot. She pressed her hand to her brow, wondering if she had a fever. A sob broke out of her, completely unexpected. She got up and went to the window again, but all she could see was the vast whiteness of the mountain and the snow-bearing trees. She strained her ears to listen. There was nothing. The world out there was silent. The cabin felt tiny and vulnerable.

She’d almost fallen into a doze when a grey shape loomed outside the window. It was Jake, stepping out of his bindings. He came into the warmth of the cabin stamping his boots and shaking his head.

‘Nothing at all?’

‘I had a good check round at every pylon. If there is someone there, he’s deep under the snow.’

‘That’s a creepy thought.’ Zoe started crying.

Jake put his arm around her and kissed her. ‘Hush up,’ he said. ‘Hush. You don’t know there’s anyone there! It was just an outside chance.’

‘I know. Let me cry. I’m crying for us. It could have been us. It’s the relief.’ She sniffed and wiped her nose with the back of her gauntlet.

‘Listen,’ Jake said, after a few moments just holding her, ‘I’ve had one of my great ideas. We can get down on the skis. There is a way.’

‘On one set of skis?’

‘You stand on the back of the skis and hold me around the waist. We make really slow traverses across the slope. We might fall over a few times but it’s better than trying to walk through the snow. Honestly, it comes up to your balls in places.’

That’s what they did. It was slow skiing, but it wasn’t too difficult and it got them down. The entire slope, all the way, was empty of people and it was clear that the mountain authorities had evacuated and closed the slopes because of further avalanche risk.

They could see their hotel directly ahead of them. Even though it was only a little past midday, all the lights were on. It looked cosy, and inviting, and safe.

‘I’m going to have a hot bath,’ said Zoe.

‘Yeah, you stink.’

‘Thanks. And a sauna, cos I’m chilled to the bone. But you’re not getting in with me.’

‘And a glass of wine. Red.’

‘And a steak. Rare.’

‘Oozing with blood. And with mustard.’

‘And ice cream.’

‘What, on the steak?’

‘And we’re going to drink the bar dry.’

‘Come on. Let me take these skis off. We can walk from here.’