The slab came off the north face at ten past two, and by three I had him out of it: one snowboarder, alive, furious, with a wrist that will need setting and a mouth that hasn't stopped. I am Bastian, thirty-six, mountain rescue for fifteen years, and my station is the only roof for six kilometres, and the road below it is now under four metres of snow.
Tobias sits by the stove with his wrist splinted and my second-best jumper on, and he has spent the last hour telling me what he thinks of the avalanche warning system, the resort, the mountain, and me.
“You could have left me,” he says. “You'd have had the hut to yourself.”
“I could have.” I hand him tea. “I'm not built like that.”
“How are you built?” He asks it like a challenge. Everything with him is a challenge. He is thirty perhaps, all edges, and I've met enough of his kind on this mountain to know that the noise is where the fear goes.
I don't answer. I check the radio, which is dead. I check the supplies, which will last three days if he eats like a normal person, and I have my doubts. Outside, the storm has settled in for the night, and in here there is one stove, one bed, one bench, and a man watching me the way you watch a door you're not sure is locked.
“You don't talk much,” he says, quieter now. “You do enough for both of us,” I tell him.
That earns a laugh, the first real one, and it changes his face completely, and I look away from it because that is not why I came up this mountain. When I look back, he's holding the tea in both hands and the challenge has gone out of him. “Three days,” he says. “In here. With you.” He isn't complaining. He's asking me what we do about that, and I'm the one who's supposed to know.
