Graham Joyce: The Silent Land

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.