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the slope fell away. There were no more chances after this.
He gathered his strength. He pushed with his hands and catapulted face out
toward the dike of scree. He flew, arms wide, sacrificing himself to wild
luck.
The rocks struck hard. They tore at him. He opened himself to their
talons.Hold me, he prayed.
They did. He came to a halt.
In the sudden tranquility, arms wide, he felt pinned to the mountain. His ears
rang. He looked, and the hungry glacier still waited below, its jaws wide
open.
H
E PASSED OUT
and revived in waves. The earth seemed to rise and sink beneath his back. He
didn t move.
Nathan Lee wasn t quite sure if he was alive or not. There were reasons to
believe he might have died.
For one thing, the limbo sky was dropping ash. Squinting, he realized they
were snowflakes.
Next time Nathan Lee opened his eyes, he saw Ochs in the long distance,
descending the switchbacks at a brisk pace. He d gotten himself to safer
ground and was practically trotting through the storm. Nathan
Lee didn t call out. The man had already done his best to kill him once. After
a few minutes Ochs vanished down a rise.
The horizon dimmed. Rock and ice, heaven and earth, everything was merging
into one. The snow began to stick. He opened his mouth and it seared his
tongue. The melt ran from his face like teardrops. Body heat, he comprehended.
He was alive.
At last he made the effort to raise one arm. It lifted slowly. The glove had
skinned off. Some of the skin, too. He brought it closer to his face and
stared at the fingers, flexing them. Bit by bit, he assembled himself. He
struggled to sit. He freed the strap under his chin and the red helmet was
scraped and battered, with a crack running from brim to crown.
His left leg was bent and bulging at the knee.
Nathan Lee groped at his leg. He tried pressing it straight. Each time the
pain drove him back. He cowered from his own body. Finally he lodged his foot
between two rocks and pulled. The joint gave a meaty pop. The knee came
together again with a scream.
W
HEN HE OPENED
his eyes again, night was coming on. Snow was falling in thick curtains.
Lightning slid overhead like electric serpents. Nathan Lee dozed off.
His next awareness was of the sound of snow hissing off plastic. A few minutes
later, the sound repeated, unmistakable, the slither of snow shedding off a
tent wall. For a moment, he thought Ochs must have repented and come and
carried him down the mountain and laid him in their tent. Then he saw that he
was still stranded upon his dike of stone. He was very cold.
Off to one side, a ghostly shape moved in the gloom. Snow hissed off fabric
again. He pulled himself closer to the thing. It was the body bag, still
partly inflated, tethered here by a few ounces of snow. It looked ready, in a
moment, to fly off again. Nathan Lee snatched at it.
Nauseated and shocked, with fingers like thumbs, he pawed at the zipper and it
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slid open. With the last of his strength, he crawled onto the plastic and laid
it over his legs. He zipped the bag closed, leaving a hole for air.
* * *
H
E WOKE GASPING
for air and blind in the darkness. A monster was crouching on his chest
tearing him with claws. In his panic, he had no memory, no idea where he was
or what had happened. He thrashed.
His hand caught on the zipper hole and he ripped it open. He flailed at the
covering of snow, and there it was, open air. Light. He filled his lungs.
He dug wider through the covering of snow and elbowed his way to sitting.
Blinking, he found himself in a netherworld pitched at a tilt and paved with
leaden snow. The sky was greasy. There was no color.
None. Mountains hulked on every side. Their summits ran into void. The light
was so flat he felt blind. His watch read one. It was after noon of the next
day.
He sat there with his arms resting on top of the ruptured snow. His head
pounded. His throat was raw.
The fingers of one hand were fat as sausages. He tried moving his leg under
the blanket of snow, and the pain nailed him flat.
He quit testing things. He began weeping for himself. Remembering a snapshot
of Grace in his shirt pocket, he fumbled inside his jacket. Most of his
fingernails had pulled away. It was clumsy work. He got the photo from his
pocket.
Suddenly the world took on color. She was standing in a field of yellow
sunflowers and wearing tights with red hearts. The sky was clear blue. The day
came flooding back.
He d asked her to smile. As usual Grace had chosen grave intensity. Her slate
blue eyes seemed to stare right through the lens. There was no mistaking her
heart.
Nathan Lee brought the picture closer. He swiped at his tears. He touched her
face, then looked down at himself. Was this the legacy he was going to leave
his daughter? Half buried, baked black, a jack-in-the-box mummy. All because
he d quit?
He carefully returned the photo to his pocket, then began chopping himself
loose, furious at his self-pity.
One handful at a time, he excavated himself. It took two hours to open the
tomb and roll himself out.
His knee had swollen to the size of his thigh. Nathan Lee started crawling. He
arranged the body bag under his bad leg as a sort of sled, and pulled himself
along.
Around three, Nathan Lee reached flatter terrain. By holding the knee with
both hands, he could manage a sort of shuffle.
He found the gully leading down to camp and came within sight of the yak
herders stone windbreak. He armed himself with a rock and made himself
resolute. If Ochs threatened him, he would break the man s leg. Then they
could both exit as cripples. If that didn t stop him, Nathan Lee was ready to
brain the bastard.
He reached the windbreak. He peered over the wall.
Their blue tent was gone.
I
T TOOK HIM
five days to cross a half-day moraine. Nathan Lee found a porter s stick among
the boulders, and that became his crutch. Even as hunger whittled him down,
his knee swelled larger. The first tide of monsoon weather receded, and the
snow melted, providing him thousands of rivulets to drink from. The threads of
glacier water braided together to form a stream, then a small torrent.
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The sterile, bony moraine gave way to a valley with wildflowers. He covered
six miles in three days,
steadily losing altitude. The air grew rich. Rhododendrons glistened among
pines. He sampled the green leaves and strips of pine meat. It made him sick.
He filled his stomach with milky glacier water. Despite his famine, Nathan Lee
felt more and more lucid. That was a bad sign, he knew. The visionary s
conceit.
On the next day, the hermits cave appeared on a hillside. It was empty, of
course. Ochs had looted their cache, resting and gorging on their food before
heading on. The one thing Ochs had not taken was a five-pound sack oftsampa.
Early on, he d declared Rinchen s roasted barley meal inedible. Mixed with
water, it formed a sticky brown paste. Nathan Lee took it like a sacrament.
One more pass loomed. Shipton Pass was less than 18,000 feet high, but Nathan
Lee was weak and his head ached all the time. It took a week to climb through
the cold fog, another week to descend. He could judge the altitude when the
leeches began bleeding him.Hirudinea suvanjieff did not live above
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