To the Back of Beyond(31)

Thomas awoke with a headache. It was dark in the room, but a few slivers of dazzling light pierced the cracks in the shutters. When he got up, he felt faint and was forced to sit down again. After the dizzy feeling had left him, he got up again and walked slowly and carefully down the stairs. Every step he took seemed to hurt his head. He lit the stove and put water for coffee on the gas burner. He put away the half-empty bottle of tr?sch; the very sight of it seemed to bring on his headache.

After drinking two cups of coffee with a lot of sugar, he felt better and stepped outside. The sun was shining, but a foot of snow had fallen overnight. Thomas’s footprints from the day before were covered, the landscape shone white and intact, as though it was a new world that had come into being overnight. He started to wonder what it would be like to spend the winter here, with the lake frozen over and snow to a depth of many feet. He would only be able to leave the hut via an upstairs window and couldn’t move without the help of skis or snowshoes. His supplies of food would only keep him for two or three months, and the wood and gas would probably run out long before that. He studied the map on the wall. Even going back to the pass now would be treacherous, with snow blanketing the cloven limestone karst and concealing the holes, and yet not firm enough to take his weight. All he could see around him were mountains and uninhabited valleys, the nearest village was a day’s walk away. He had every reason to feel anxious, but he was happy. The hut didn’t feel like a prison to him; on the contrary, he felt free here in a way he had rarely felt before. And he had the absurd feeling he could survive the winter even without food, so long as he moved quietly and unobtrusively like the animals who stuck it out here, somehow, and lived on god knows what.

The days passed imperceptibly in aimless busywork. Thomas was never short of things to do. He carried wood to the hut, fetched water from the little lake, made sure the fire never went out. He cooked on the gas burner, and after the gas ran out, on the wood-burning stove. He cleaned the hut, got more wood from the cow barn, mixed up dough, and after several failed attempts, managed to bake a sort of flat-bread. It was cold, but when the sun shone, its warmth was so intense that he could sit in front of the hut in his shirtsleeves, whittling crude figures from firewood or reading one of the books he had found. The fantasy worlds of novels did nothing for him, but he studied the books about plant and animal life, and learned that marmots and chamois lived around here, and snow hares, eagles, black grouse, and Alpine snow grouse. The male of the snow grouse, so he was informed, molted four times a year, the female three times. They put such faith in their perfected camouflage that they didn’t take flight until the very last moment, when you were about to step on them, and then they would pretend to be injured, to lure the invader away from the nest. They mimed their injury so well, wrote the author, that even he would fall for it every time. In a book about the valley, Thomas read that hunters must have come into the area shortly after the last ice age. In some of the innumerable caves thousand-year-old animal bones were found, bearing traces of human workmanship. Some of the Alps had been planed away for hundreds of years. The book had stories of folk customs, freak weather events and natural catastrophes, and life in the Alps. Sometimes it might happen, he read somewhere, that herdsmen would forget a goat in the Silberen or be unable to find it. If the animal managed to survive the winter, then, come spring, it would have lost its entire covering of hair through lack of salt.

Thomas hadn’t been keeping track of the days, but he must have been on the mountain for a week when the foehn winds set in, and the temperature leapt up overnight. In the space of a single day the snow almost completely melted away. Everywhere now were the sounds of thaw, a dripping and gurgling from the roof, a plashing and rushing and pouring. In among it were the distant occasional clangs of cowbells from a pasture much lower on the mountain. Once, when he smoked his very last cigarette outside the hut before going to bed, he heard a long-held yelping and shortly afterward the murmured benediction of the Alpsegen.

Every day Thomas had rubbed his sprained ankle with schnapps. The swelling had gone down, the pain had eased, and he felt sufficiently strong to begin to reconnoiter. His circles grew wider by the day. The hut lay at the edge of a flat hollow from whose edge one could see far down into a barren valley. Thomas climbed a narrow side valley, bounded on one side by a tall, apparently unscalable cliff. At its foot was a gigantic scree, and in the valley bottom, perhaps half an hour away, was a substantial lake with turquoise water that was so clear when you approached that you could count the stones on the bottom. By the lake’s edge were scraps of snow, but the water was less cold than Thomas had anticipated. He swam a few strokes and then sat on a rock to dry out. A gentle breeze cooled his skin, burning in the sun. While he ate his pack lunch, he looked around. On the horizon, between the limestone peak in the north and the cliff to the south, there was a crossing, a broad saddle of moraine. After Thomas had rested, he walked on in the direction of the saddle. The path was longer and steeper than he had thought, it was hard to judge distance in the treeless, featureless terrain. Even before he had reached it, he heard a gunshot ricocheting off the rocks and seeming to rumble at him from every side. He scanned the area, but saw no human being, no animal, nothing moving. Even so, he turned around and set off for home. He was almost there when he heard two more shots, one after the other. The last stretch he was almost running. He was afraid the hunter might track him down to his hiding place like a wild animal.