Page 29 of Kiwi Gold
Past Camp V, first, the journey down taking minutes when the journey up had taken hours, with New Zealand watching. Avoiding Camp IV and Camp III, because his route down was going to be twice as long as that. There was no skiing down the knife-edge of Dutch Rib, so it was all the way around to the Northwest Buttress instead. Still freakishly dangerous, but somehow possible anyway. On the North Annapurna Glacier, then, and Camp II in his sights. Nearly there.
Until the video feed was filled with a roar like the biggest freight train there ever was, growing until it seemed to be shaking the ground in New Zealand, twelve thousand kilometers away.
Two seconds.
Three.
Ashford cursing, and then his helmet-mounted camera jerking crazily. Schoolkids holding their breath, wondering if this was supposed to happen, and their teachers gasping, knowing it wasn’t.
A sea of white. And then … nothing.
The shock was numbing, apparently. I learned about it from journalists’ accounts and the endlessly replayed video, because I’d been out of the country at the time, being chased by that moose in decidedly non-heroic fashion, fortunately with nobody to film me. There’d been TV interviews with talking heads, mountaineers who used diagrams and maps to show what had gone wrong. Which had turned out to be nothing but Annapurna. The avalanches were most numerous in the afternoon, and it had been afternoon, with the warming temperatures loosening the topmost layer of snow, by the time Ashford reached the lower slopes, which meant that the Sickle Glacier that loomed over the deceptively easier terrain below had claimed another victim.
Shocking, definitely. But not as shocking as what came later.
It happened on the day of the memorial service for a body that would never be retrieved, one of the dozens entombed up there forever in the snow and ice. The footage broke away from a widow in black, her head covered by a draped white scarf and each hand clasping a little girl’s, their faces alternately lively and curious or blank with incomprehension, to show Colin Hampton, Ashford’s partner and his best mate. The man he’d carried out of that rockfall.
The story he told fell on the country hard. That there’d been one person’s ice axe biting into the snow on the way to that summit, when there should have been two, because other people were climbing Annapurna that day as well, and one of them was alone. Also in trouble. A Canadian attempting to summit solo, without oxygen, chasing his own personal best and felled by altitude sickness. He’d made that final climb somehow despite the growing edema in his lungs, proving that mountaineers were mad, but after that, things had got worse. In his weakened state, he couldn’t climb down the difficult slopes fast enough or keep his head clear enough even to keep going, and the only cure for pulmonary edema, it seemed, was climbing a long way down. When Ashford and Hampton came upon him, Hampton told the cameras, he was “already halfway gone.”
The code of the mountaineer, Hampton explained, disillusion clear to see on his face, was that idea familiar to every Kiwi. When somebody was in trouble, you helped, no matter your own plans or your own goals. The goal would be there tomorrow, but the human being might not. True if you were taking out a group of tourists on a charter boat, and true if you were racing your custom yacht, too. A concept New Zealand understood perfectly, because it was practically part of the DNA. Back to the ANZACs in Gallipoli and the Maori Battalion in North Africa, back to isolated settlements twelve thousand kilometers from home, and back to the Maori everywhere.
Mateship. Being a good bugger. You helped.
Well, normally, you helped. In this case, Hampton had turned back by himself to help the other climber get down. A dangerous and impossibly difficult prospect for one man, with the compromised climber barely able to aid himself, but needing to be lowered on ropes across those crevasses and down those rocky spines.
The job should have been undertaken by two, but Ashford had refused. There was a storm coming tonight, he’d said, and if he missed this chance to summit, who knew if he’d get another one this season? Besides, Hampton was there to take care of it.
Hampton had managed the rescue, in the end, after some pretty hairy moments, and the other fella had lived to tell the tale, though without two of his fingers and three of his toes. Hampton’s story hit harder, because he’d not only lost a friend that day, he’d lost his respect for that friend, too.
“Turned out it was a joke,” Hampton had said, staring straight into the camera. “The last six years of my life, helping Kegan do it all, nearly dying for it more than once. Telling myself that every great man has flaws. I never thought he’d leave somebody up there. I laughed, at first. I said, ‘Mate. You’re not serious.’ But he said, ‘Take him down if you like. I’ll summit by myself.’”
A pause for Hampton to collect himself, and then, “It wasn’t that I didn’t know he was driven. There was nothing more important to him than the climb. But this …”
“His family?” the interviewer asked.
Hampton turned his troubled gaze on her. “He loved Laila and the girls. He said, thank God he’d married a sensible woman who didn’t expect him to hold her hand.” He took a breath, and his voice was choked when he went on. “He liked having a family. But climbing was different. Climbing was his passion. Always. There was nobody better, and nobody more devoted to the mountains.”
Words to comfort the grieving widow. Or not.
“It turned out that he wanted the record more, though,” Hampton said. “Simple as that.” A break in his voice, now. “A hard thing to find out.”
Have you ever seen public opinion swing? I watched it happen, from hero to zero in about fifteen minutes.
It probably wasn’t a very nice funeral.
13
DATING SCHOOL
Lachlan
Right. That was Kegan Ashford. Who was gone, but his widow wasn’t, because here she was.
I did my best to lighten it up. “And nowI’m trying to work out,” I told her, “whether you have too high an opinion of men, or too low.”
“What?” She looked surprised.
“Was I meant to run screaming when I found out,” I said, “or just ghost you? Because I’m … what? A general tosser? Or because I’m perfect and have never fu— uh, stuffed up? Almost said another word there, in front of the kids and all, which shows you that I haven’t exactly led a blameless life. And youhaveled a blameless life, from what I know. Why should you hide?”
