It was her silent affirmations that kept her from going completely insane. The cold and darkness were overwhelming, and she didn’t have any breath to spare; but she had to keep telling herself that the light and the air were only a few feet away. She had to or she would collapse where she was and succumb to the frost bite that was slowly taking hold in her extremities and threatening her very life.
The avalanche had come down on her so fast that she had barely had time to throw herself behind the giant pine tree that she had been about to scale in order to try to get her bearings. As far as she could tell, the ancient pine seemed to have survived the impact of hundreds of tons of snow falling from a nearby ridgeline, or at least it hadn’t collapsed on top of her. The tree had been so massive that the ridges in the bark would have provided decent handholds leading up to the first branches 30 feet off the ground. Thus, it had provided at least some protection from the onslaught of snow that had come down on her so unexpectedly.
…
She had taken her gloves off in order to scale the tree, and her movement was too limited to do anything with her pack to get them back out. So, she had scratched with bare fingers and then dug at the snow in front of her with bare hands that had started to bleed. Her hands had grown so numb that if it hadn’t been for the snow that was falling at the sides of her face, she wouldn’t have known that she was still digging. But she pushed on.
The above are some excerpts from the short story Off Belay published in the Winter 2006 edition of The First Line. To buy a copy of the Winter 2006 edition click here.