Джеффри Дивер - The Final Twist

“I’m scared!”

Ten seconds. The wave is six feet high, now seven, now eight and accelerating. It’s trailed by dust swirling and thick as forest fire smoke.

“You’ll do fine. Swim, hand to mouth, arm up.”

It’s a slough avalanche — more loose snow than slabs. If they died it would be by suffocation, not a blow to the head. Colter doesn’t know which is worse. Suffocation probably.

She stares at the wave. Colter turns her around so that she’s facing downhill.

Five seconds.

Colter shuffles away so their bodies don’t become bludgeons.

“Swim!”

She does. He does too and takes a deep breath.

In the time it takes to fill his lungs, the world turns black.

Mary Dove finishes tending to the wounds on her fourteen-year-old son’s neck and cheek.

While most of the avalanche was slough — granular hoar snow — Colter didn’t escape a chunk of sharp ice. Or possibly a rock.

The damage isn’t severe.

They are in her office, which is a typical physician’s, except for the walls, which are — as everything in the cabin — made of hand-hewn logs.

“Anywhere else?” she asks.

“No,” Colter says. “Just a little sore.”

“How far did it sweep you?”

“Football field,” Colter says, though he doesn’t have much frame of reference, only pictures in newspapers or magazines. He’s never seen a game. In a home with no TV and no internet, one doesn’t have a chance to view broadcast spectator sports, and the nearest teams are those of the colleges and high schools around Fresno. When the family went there, they always had errands to run or acquaintances and family to see. None of the children had much inclination anyway. If parents aren’t excited about sports, their youngsters probably won’t be either.

Mary Dove executes some range-of-motion tests, arms and legs, which her son seems to pass. More or less.

He goes into his bathroom and takes a very hot shower, minding the rule to keep the bandages dry. He towels off, dresses and lies down on his blanket, which is brown and woven in a Native American design.

He closes his eyes briefly, picturing the torrent of snow enwrapping him.

He followed the same advice he’d given the woman.

When he slowed, though, he realized that extending his arm to signal his whereabouts would do no good. He was too far under the surface, so he’d pulled his arm back, and taken another deep breath and, using both hands, cleared a large air reservoir in front of his face.

Finally he stopped sliding and he wasted no time in attempting to free himself, kneeing and punching and elbowing. The space he opened up before him was completely black, and he was disoriented as to where the surface might be. He recalled his father’s lesson and made small snowballs and dropped them near his face and hands to see where they landed, so he could tell which way was down.

Never question gravity...

Then came the digging — scooping the snow down, packing it and then pushing upward with his feet and arms. Inches at a time.

Finally there was slight illumination over his head and he broke through, sucking in the air, which as in all snowfields gave off a sweet electrical scent.

He climbed out and rolled onto the snow surface, catching his breath. He called to his brother, who was probing the field nearby with a long branch. He dropped it and ran to Colter to help him up.

“The woman?” Colter asked. “She all right?”

His brother pointed.

The man who’d been with her, Brad, was digging her out of a deep pile of snow near the avalanche’s toe — the end. She’d been swept much farther than he’d been. Colter saw that she had survived and was helping to dig herself out. She was unhurt.

Colter struggled to his feet, with Russell helping. His brother looked up the mountain and said, “The whole pack didn’t come down. There’s more that’s unstable, a lot more. We should get them out and into the trees.”

They walked to the couple.

“We spotted her arm,” Russell said. “That’s how we found where she was. You told her that.”

Shaw nodded, and the foursome made their way to safety.

Now, in the Compound’s rustic cabin, Colter is finally warm once more, inner core warm, and in only slight pain. He rises from his bed and walks into the living room where Russell and Dorion are sitting near a soothing dance of flames in the stacked-stone fireplace. They are both reading. When Colter enters the room, Dorion, eleven, leaps up and hugs him. He tells himself to give no reaction to the pain and he doesn’t. She regards the bandage with still eyes, which means she’s troubled.

“It’s all right. A scratch.”

“Okay,” she says.

“Hey,” Russell says and goes back to his book.

“Hey.”

Dorion sits once more. “You know what the biggest one in the world was?”

She’d be talking about old-time locomotives, which, for some reason, she is passionate about.

“No clue.”

“Union Pacific’s Big Boy. Come on, Colter, look!” She shows him the book. According to the caption, the engine depicted was Locomotive Number 4014, and was an impressive piece of machinery. It had a 4-8-8-4 wheel arrangement, which, she explained to him a few years ago, was the number of locomotive wheels from front to back; it’s how the machines are classified.

“Biggest expansion engine there ever was. It weighed more than a million pounds. It’s in a museum in Los Angeles. I want to see it someday.”

“We’ll make sure that happens.”

“You’ll come too, Russell?” she asks.

“Sure.” The older brother doesn’t look up from his book. Colter wonders what he’s reading. Russell has been into spy thrillers lately.

Mary Dove is in the kitchen, preparing dinner, while Ashton is in his study, the door closed, where he disappeared an hour ago after learning that his sons were all right.

Colter stretches and happens to glance to the mantel, where he sees a trio of framed pictures — two artist renderings and one photograph. The picture to the left is a sketch of a woman who has some Native American features. A handsome face, black hair parted severely in the middle, the sides dangling to her shoulders. She is Marie Aioe Dorion, the nation’s first mountain woman. She was of Métis heritage, indigenous people in the central part of the United States and southern Canada. Widowed early, Dorion survived in the wilderness for months with two small children, in hostile territory.

The center picture is a reproduction of a painting of a handsome, rugged man wearing leather and a raccoon hat that encompasses much of his head. He is John Colter, an explorer with the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

The photograph on the right is of Osborne Russell, the explorer, politician and judge, who was in part responsible for founding the Oregon Territory. He is the most recent of the three, surviving into the late 1800s; hence the photographic image.

These three individuals were the sources for the Shaw children’s names.

The study door opens and Ashton walks into the living room. He has changed a lot, Colter thinks, in the years since the family left the Bay Area for the Compound — to escape some threats that troubled him greatly but that he hasn’t discussed much with the children, other than to warn them to be on the lookout for strangers on the Compound. His hair has gone mostly white and is often, like now, mussed. He wears jeans, a white shirt with pearl buttons — Mary Dove made it — and a leather vest. On his feet, tactical boots, the sort a soldier might wear.

He is carrying a cardboard box.

“Everyone,” he says.

The three children look up. Mary Dove remains in the kitchen. The word was uttered in his speaking-to-the-children tone.