“I always do that when I’m nervous.” I lowered the binoculars. “That’s the funnel that leads up to the Maudit, isn’t it?”
The chalet stood on a steeply declining stretch of ground and the master bedroom downstairs bordered on the lower terrace, which looked out on the slope in the west. Cécile, as she’d gone out to close the shutters, had shivered from the phantom electricity in her neck and turned around. Stared up. Something had moved, she said. In the funnel. Against all that whiteness. Barely distinguishable. She first thought it was chamois. An ibex maybe. Then she realized it was a person. A dot, plodding upward in the snow.
November, avalanche risk level 4, storm coming—this was so not climbing season.
Meanwhile, on WhatsApp, a gazillion messages from Julia. I read only the last one, which said, I really hope nothing has happened to you bro
and I texted back,
I’m OK, CALL ME.
One fucking gray tick, that’s all I got.
So the two of us with the binoculars from the drawer in the hall, bringing that figure up close.
“It’s a woman,” Cécile pondered. The wind biting our cheeks, the curtains billowing out of the house.
Peering toward the slope, I said, “Lemme have a look.”
Once you located the spot, once you synchronized reality with the prism image, you couldn’t not see it anymore. The stooped figure, progressing with slow, weary steps, zigzagging a trail through what looked like knee-deep snow. You thought you saw a walking stick. You thought you saw a flapping cloak. You couldn’t say for sure, but there was something about the posture, about the grim perseverance against the elements, that made you convinced you were looking at an elderly woman. She seemed to crouch against a gust of powder snow. Then she went on. As if she were under some spell.
“What’s she doing over there?” I mumbled. “She’ll never make it back down before the storm.”
And Cécile stating the obvious: “I don’t think down is where she’s headed, Sam.”
Oh, fuck. The procession I’d witnessed this morning above the village. The alpenhorns. The crying folk.
Christ almighty.
I told Cécile about it, and that’s how we got here.
“In Japan,” I said, “they call it ubasute, which means ‘abandonment of the elderly.’ ” I noticed that my fingers were starting to shake. “We can’t just leave that poor woman to her fate, right?” Cécile yanked the binoculars out of my hands. “She’ll freeze to death up there or die of exhaustion. If it’s true, she climbed up at least 2,000 feet.”
As if she were under some spell.
“What do you want to do, go after her?”
“Can’t we call that helicopter pal of yours? That . . . whatsisname?”
“They’ll never come, Sam. Don’t you get it?”
“But we have to do something.”
“Fine, so call 1414. That’s the Rega’s emergency number. But I’ll bet you anything they won’t fly out.” She licked her lips and said, “Waitaminute, I lost her . . .”
Nick’s phone still in my hand, I tapped the number and put the phone on speaker. Up there, you didn’t need binoculars to see that the funnel-shaped incline where we’d seen that dot move before was now hidden from view. The storm had swallowed her up.
Ten points for dramatic timing, but at that exact moment, the first snowflakes started to fall from the sky.
“Rega, wie cha ich dia helfen?” a woman’s voice asked in Schwyzerdütsch—a language not in my repertoire, for a change. Switching to French, I said that there was an elderly woman in the mountains who needed help.
“What is your location?”
“In Grimentz. She—”
“One moment, please. I will put you through to the OCVS in Valais.”
Cécile blinked the snow away and stared into the storm. Rubbing herself and her cast arm warm, the only thing you could catch a glimpse of on the slope was gray rock quickly taking on that legendary “hazy shade of winter.” Cécile herself going that good ol’ “whiter shade of pale.”
“Opération des secours Valaisanne, s’il vous pla?t?” A man’s voice this time. The same spiel about a woman in trouble above Grimentz. We’d seen her struggling through the snow, hundreds of yards up from the village, all alone, and the storm was coming.
“Above Grimentz, you say?”
“Yes. We’re afraid she’s lost, because she’s in the clouds and the weather is getting worse by the minute.”
“Are you able to indicate the exact location of where you saw her?”
Cécile leaned toward the phone and said, “On the southwest side of the village, there’s a stream that flows through a steep funnel, which is called the Torrent de Maudit. This funnel extends all the way to the Vallée Maudit.” She looked at me. “We saw her there.”
“Did you say Vallée Maudit?” Even with the speaker’s tinny sound, you could hear something about his voice had changed.
“Yes,” Cécile said. “But not too high. I think at around 7 or 8,000 feet.”
“And what is your location?”
“Grimentz.”
Silence. So we’d seen her from the valley? Yes. And did we know her? No. Silence again. Above us, the wind was whistling through the frame of the roof.
“Can they send a helicopter?” Cécile asked.
“Well, I’m afraid we can’t just do that, you see. We don’t fly out in this weather. Too dangerous.” Hesitation. “Are you absolutely certain you saw it right? It sounds like it was quite a way away from you . . .”
Flabbergasted, I said, “We have binoculars . . .”
“Maybe you saw a chamois or something.”
“A chamois with a rococo walking stick?”
Cécile snatched the phone away from me and said, “Listen to me, pal. I’m a doctor. You are losing valuable time. You must send a chopper, or I’ll guarantee you this woman will die up there.”
Defensive spluttering. He’d see what he could do. Asked if we could be reached at this number and said they’d call us back. Hung up.
I looked at Cécile. “Do you think they’ll send a chopper?”
“’Course they won’t. I just wanted to know if he knew. And he did. It’s exactly what Benjamin said. They don’t fly out to the Maudit.”
After the call, we went back inside. Closed the shutters in front of Nick’s bedroom windows. Nick in pitch-dark, his earplugs and his headphones and his bandages—maybe it was the storm, but suddenly it didn’t feel like enough of a safety net. Maybe it was the fact that there was someone out there, lost and wandering in that godforsaken wilderness, but all of a sudden my face felt heavy and it was like all the chalet’s darkest corners were moving around.
Twenty minutes later they called back. Us upstairs, the first snow sticking to the windows. Everything was all right, the operator said. There was a hut up there on one of those pastures, and they’d contacted them. Apparently the woman had been headed there and was inside by now, safe and sound and warming herself by the fire.
“No need to worry, monsieur et madame,” he said, “but thank you for your vigilance. It’s good deeds like this that save lives.”