The Red Mitten by Montgomery Stuart

Author:Montgomery, Stuart [Montgomery, Stuart]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2015-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 23

Cally had been skiing for a long time before she chanced upon the tracks. By then her head was feeling strange again, as if the mist that swirled around the mountains had somehow found a way into her skull and fluttered like wispy ribbons in the space behind her eyes.

Everything seemed unreal.

Except her relief in finding the tracks.

Her wind-in-the-face navigational system had been fine for a while. But then the wind began to gust from all directions, and soon afterwards it died down altogether. She hadn’t been sure what to do, but had decided to keep moving through the fog. It had seemed a better idea than just standing still.

The ski-tracks were the ones that she and Neep and Richard had made earlier in the day. She was certain of that, because of Neep’s lop-sided pole plants. Only now there were also the pole plants of the man who had chased them; they were deeper and further apart, as if he’d been skiing hard. Cally had forgotten about him again. She hoped he was dead. Or maimed. Or both.

Whatever the gunman’s condition, he was now far away. She was convinced of that. Since starting into the wind she had covered a lot of ground, not just gone round in circles. The terrain had changed, and in the occasional thinning of the mist she could no longer see high mountains, but only flat ground. The surface had changed, too - there was less ice and the snow was better. So, even if she had no idea where she had gone, she had definitely gone somewhere.

And she had definitely lost altitude. Now, after two long days on snow she found herself moving on auto-pilot, trusting her skis to find their own way, reflexively sliding them out into a wedge when the ground tended gently down, as it often had, or turning them across the slope and side-stepping when it fell more steeply.

When the visibility was really bad, she had closed her eyes and had somehow felt the shape of the terrain under her skis. She got the idea after remembering one of Richard’s stories, the one about a blind skier, a British Paralympian who did all his training at a place in western Norway. To begin with he went around with a sighted guide, but after a while he knew the tracks so well he could go out on his own. Every now and then he would whistle, and from the direction of the echo he would know where he was.

Richard had lots of stories like that, as if they were sermon fodder that he was collecting in case he ever decided to leave the university and get a job as a church minister. The other day I went out skiing and it reminded me of Life.

Still, she liked Richard. This trip had changed her mind about him, had shown her that he was one of the good guys. She hoped he was alright. And Neep. She was worried about Neep.

She forced herself to concentrate.

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