Snowfall Read online

  ‘Well,’ I said, making myself sound cheerful, ‘we’ve certainly been lucky, haven’t we? We might have been swept down the mountain, hut and all, if it hadn’t been for those trees. It looks as though their top branches fell across the hut, and they’ve kept us securely anchored. We’re in a sort of cave – I can’t quite stand up, but you can. We’ll be perfectly safe here, until the rescue party comes.’

  And then I added quickly, ‘Better switch the torch off, Bruno. We don’t want to waste the battery.’

  It wasn’t the battery I was concerned for. The dim light had revealed all too clearly that, far from keeping us safe, our cave was letting in snow like a sieve. The stuff was dry and powdery, but it had begun to build up thickly all about us. Heaven knew how much of it there was, piled up on the tangle of trees and smashed timbers above us, but it wouldn’t take much to fill our space completely.

  I had told Bruno that the trees had saved us from being swept away, but I wasn’t at all sure that death like that, terrifyingly sudden, might not be preferable to slow suffocation in this inexorably filling tomb.

  Already, despite the intense cold, the air seemed stuffy. Already we seemed to be breathing snow.

  Bruno had gone very quiet. He was sitting with his back pressed close against mine, and I hoped that my own flutter of panic had not communicated itself to him.

  ‘Toni is an expert skier,’ I reassured myself aloud. ‘He would have raced down to the bottom of the valley ahead of the avalanche and raised the alarm. And he’ll know exactly where to find us, so it won’t be long before someone comes to our rescue.’

  ‘And Papa will be looking for us, anyway,’ said Bruno uncertainly. ‘He’ll come too.’

  ‘Yes of course.’ I turned and put an arm round him for a moment. While I had Bruno, I had Jon; that was the thought I clung to. Jon would be doing everything he could to find us, and it was my responsibility to keep his son alive until help came.

  If help came.

  Without thinking what I was doing, I had begun to push the snow away from my body and pack it down in the corners of the cave. Compressed, the snow took up far less air space; then too, the activity helped to keep my circulation going. I urged Bruno to do the same, and tried to occupy his mind with jokes and riddles. My own mind, though, beneath the superficialities of our chatter, was calculating the odds against our being rescued alive.

  Perhaps no one knew we were here. Perhaps Toni hadn’t reached the foot of the mountain. I have no idea how fast avalanches travel, except that it is fast. Poor Toni might have been overwhelmed before he reached the main road. And even if he had got through safely, and had raised an alarm, it would be a long time before any rescuers could reach us.

  And then – then, even if Toni could pin-point the spot where the hut had stood, even if a rescue team assembled above us, there were goodness knows how many feet of snow to be dug through before they could reach us. We might be here for twelve hours, twenty-four …

  But surely not alive, after that time. I doubted if we could survive the cold for a single night, even without the problem of the falling snow. We were both working away frantically, on hands and knees, trying to pack down the snow as it fell, but I knew that we were losing. It was coming in faster than we could hold it at bay.

  I rose to my knees and lifted one arm above my head. Before I could straighten it, I had touched the jumble of logs and branches that roofed us in. Last time I tried it, I had been able to straighten my arm. Already we were a good six inches nearer the roof.

  There was a creaking from above. It had happened before, as the timber shifted under the weight of the snow. Now a branch snapped, suddenly, and Bruno and I were battered by a heavy fall. It stopped as abruptly as it had started, and we fought our way out of the pile of snow and began to push it aside; but now I could sense that the roof was no more than a few inches above my head.

  Another creak. We both flinched, and Bruno held tightly to my arm. ‘I’m not frightened, Kate,’ he gulped. ‘Are you?’

  I matched his lie as boldly as I could. He took out his torch, and we were both shaken when we saw how far our cave had closed in on us. I put my arm round him again, as much for my comfort as his own.

  He scrubbed the back of his hand across his eyes. I knew that he was trying hard not to cry. ‘Sometimes,’ he said unsteadily, ‘the mountain rescue teams send dogs to find people who are buried in the snow.’

  I tried to make a joke of it, though my voice was as wobbly as his: ‘St Bernard dogs with kegs of brandy round their necks?’

  ‘No,’ he answered seriously, ‘tracker dogs, specially trained. Alsatians, I think, or Dobermen. They fly them in by helicopter after there has been an avalanche. Papa told me.’ He began to shiver.

  I hugged him. ‘That’s good news. We’ll listen for the dogs then –’

  ‘I think we’d hear the helicopter first,’ he said. Then, ‘Kate, listen!’

  I lifted my head, hardly daring to hope. ‘I can’t hear anything.’

  ‘That’s what I mean. The snow has stopped coming in.’

  He switched on his torch again. For the first time, the air about us was still. The snow had stopped its hissing fall. We were buried deep in silence.

  We waited, huddled together.

  Alarming as the incoming snow had been, it had at least given us an occupation and helped to keep us warm. Now there was nothing we could do.

  We discussed the possibility of digging ourselves out, but we were too exhausted to attempt to put any of our theories into practice. It was as much as I could do to keep us both awake. Lethargy had begun to creep over us. I knew that we must stay alert, and move as much as possible in our confined space, but my brain was too numbed to reason with my limbs. All I wanted to do was to drift off to sleep; and to sleep in the snow is to die.

  No. I forced my eyes open. Whatever my own inclinations, I had to keep Bruno alive. He was worn out and tearful and resentful, but I was responsible for him to Jon, and I forced him to stay awake.

  Jon … Jon. I kept saying the name over to myself, as though it were some kind of incantation that would ward off death. I think I must have become positively light-headed. Certainly the drumming noise that eventually began to penetrate our coffin meant nothing to me at all.

  It was Bruno who identified it. He stopped suddenly in the act of clapping his hands wearily against mine. ‘It’s a helicopter,’ he breathed with rapture. ‘Oh, Kate, it is a helicopter!’

  It took them some time to get us out, because of the danger that a tree or the remains of the hut might fall and crush us. Bruno, wide awake now and excited, shouted to guide the rescue team. For me, the relief was so overwhelming that my throat was too swollen to shout. I just sat there, with tears streaming down my face, while Bruno gave an ecstatic running commentary on the voices above us.

  ‘That must be a rescue man. That’s another rescue man. And that’s Toni! Good old Toni, he must have fetched them here. Hey, Kate, do you think he knows that I stopped Mr Sloan from shooting him? I did, didn’t I, with my snowball? And that’s Stephen Marsh from the university – oh, and that’s Papa!’ He thumped my arm excitedly.

  I could hear Jon’s voice too. And what he was saying was, ‘Quiet a minute, Bruno, please! I can tell you’re not hurt – but what about Kate? Speak to me, Kate. Are you all right, my love?’

  I tried to answer, but couldn’t. Our roof had been lifted away and a ring of faces, dark against floodlighting, peered down at us as we sat waist-deep in snow. I closed my eyes against the light and wiped my face inelegantly with my fingers.

  ‘Oh, Kate’s all right,’ I heard Bruno tell his father confidently. He stood up, reaching for the hands that came down to grasp him. And then, as he was lifted out, I heard his voice take on a querulous note. He seemed disappointed. ‘Didn’t you bring a tracker dog with you?’ he demanded.

  Later that evening, at Frau Hammerl’s insistence, we gathered for a meal in a private room at the Gasthof Alte Post in K
irchwald: Jon and I, Bruno, Stephen Marsh and his friend Christoph, Frau Hammerl herself, and Toni. Old Otto shambled in, shamefaced, to shake hands all round, and then took himself off. From what Frau Hammerl told us, her husband’s days as a conspirator – in whatever cause – were definitely over.

  The rescue, the men agreed, had been a matter of teamwork. When Stephen saw me deliberately drop my bag, he realized that something must be badly wrong. He had decided to telephone the Italian police, to try to get in touch with Jon; they had informed the Austrian police, and the hunt for us had switched over the border. The subsequent report from Toni had brought the mountain rescue team in as quickly as possible, while Christoph and Stephen had picked up Jon and were given a police-car escort to the place where Toni had found us. They were all extremely pleased with themselves, and drank to the rescue in the local ruby-red wine, though no one was tactless enough to put a name to the region it came from.

  Sloan and Ulrich had been found by the rescue team, too. Their car, standing exposed on the mountain road, had caught the full force of the avalanche. It had been swept hundreds of feet down the mountainside, and the bodies of the two men had been found beside it.

  The hero of the evening was of course Bruno. He should have been in bed, but he had already slept off his initial exhaustion. Now, flushed with warmth and excitement, he was packing away a huge meal of crisp fried chicken and fluffy rice, and revelling in all the attention. He was, I thought wryly, going to have a very swollen head and most probably an upset stomach; but then, it isn’t every day that an eight-year-old is directly responsible for saving a man’s life.

  Bruno sat opposite me and Jon, between Toni and Stephen, telling and re-telling our adventures with constant appeals to me for confirmation: ‘Didn’t we, Kate?’ ‘Didn’t I, Kate?’ Fortunately he was far too preoccupied to notice that his father was eating with his left hand only, while I ate with my right; and that neither of us was interested in food.

  ‘He’s become very much attached to you,’ observed Jon quietly.

  ‘Understandable,’ I said, ‘after what we’ve been through together. And it’s mutual. You were right, it’s difficult not to become fond of children when you know them as individuals.’

  Jon’s grip on my hand tightened. ‘I’m glad of that.’

  I tried to damp down my euphoria; it was difficult to tell how much the fervour of Jon’s embrace after the rescue owed to simple relief at finding his son safe, and I daren’t read too much into what he was saying now.

  ‘I’ve been meaning to ask,’ I said, trying to find an impersonal topic, ‘what happened to the Austrian girl who was so fond of Bruno?’

  ‘Anna? Oh, I happened to see her in Innsbruck a couple of weeks ago. She’s very well, and married to a local business man – a widower with three children, so her maternal instincts will be put to good use. She looked very happy, too. I fancy that it wasn’t just the children who were the attraction this time.’

  ‘Good. It can’t be easy for her to take on a ready-made family, however fond she is of the children. But as long as she and her new husband are in love, that will make all the difference.’

  ‘You think so?’ Jon asked, looking at me soberly.

  ‘I’m sure of it. If she loves their father, the children will be a bonus – however maddening they may sometimes be.’

  ‘Kate!’ called Bruno across the table. ‘Kate, don’t you remember when we –’

  ‘Bruno,’ said his father sternly, ‘quieten down, or I’ll take you straight home to bed. We’ve all heard more than enough about your adventures for today. And he’s not to have anything else to eat, Frau Hammerl, thank you …’

  He turned to me again, with a rueful grin. ‘As you say, it can’t be easy for a girl to take on a ready-made family.’

  ‘It would be silly to underestimate the problems,’ I said. ‘But then, life isn’t easy anyway, is it?’

  ‘We both know that,’ he said quietly. His fingers tightened on mine. ‘We are talking about ourselves, of course – aren’t we? In general terms, I mean?’

  I agreed, with soaring hope, that in general terms we were.

  There was one thing I wanted to do before I left Kirchwald for good. Jon and I decided to walk from the Alte Post, while Stephen and Christoph tactfully took Bruno ahead in the car to wait for us.

  Snow was drifting down gently at the end of a recent fall, but otherwise the village looked much as I had seen it on the first night of my visit. The softly illuminated onion spire of the church reared high above the square, and yellow light spilled on to the snow from the frescoed windows of the inn. There was a good Alpine smell of wood smoke and spices and tobacco and trodden snow.

  Jon and I walked slowly, hand in hand, with the snow creaking under our boots; establishing, during the meandering course of our walk, that what we had suggested in general terms had a specific and breathlessly happy application.

  ‘Jon …’ I said presently, remembering the times I had comforted myself with the name when Bruno and I had been buried under the snow. ‘Jonathan?’

  ‘No – Johann, actually. My father was very musical.’

  I tried it on my tongue: ‘Johann … as in Strauss?’

  He sounded apologetic. ‘Well, no. My father preferred classical music. He was thinking of Bach.’

  I stopped dead under another lighted window. ‘Heavens! Not Johann Sebastian?’

  ‘In full, I’m afraid. Do you think you could get used to it?’

  I thought that I might well be able to, especially if he often kissed me like that. We moved apart for a few moments, and then found ourselves irresistibly drawn together again. I tried to smile into his eyes, but found it unexpectedly difficult.

  ‘There is snow on your eyelashes, Johann Sebastian,’ I said.

  I went into the cemetery alone, and stood by Matt’s grave as I had stood on the first evening of my visit to Kirchwald.

  I had no intention of forgetting Matt. There was no reason why I should. I had loved him once, just as Jon had loved his wife; the person I was now – the person Jon said he had fallen in love with – had been shaped by that previous experience. Jon wanted me, he said, for the Kate I was now, not for the immature Katy I had once been.

  And so I had no intention of deliberately trying to forget Matt, or of pretending that he had never been a part of my life. Already, though, his image had receded from my mind; I could think of him now with nothing more than affection and a gentle sadness.

  I said goodbye to him, taking from my pocket his climbing disc on its leather thong and placing it round the stone that bore his name. Then I turned and walked out of the cemetery.

  Jon and Bruno were standing a short way down the road, waiting for me near the car. As soon as he saw me come out of the gateway Bruno ran forward, and seized my arm.

  ‘Oh come on, Kate,’ he said impatiently, ‘let’s go home.’

  Jon took my other hand, and we went. The snow clouds had cleared, and the dark blue night was tacked to the sky with pinheads of bright gold.

  Copyright

  First published in 1978 by Collins

  This edition published 2012 by Bello an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR Basingstoke and Oxford Associated companies throughout the world

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  Copyright © Hester Rowan, 1978

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