Descent: A Novel by Tim Johnston

Author:Tim Johnston [Johnston, Tim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2015-01-05T14:00:00+00:00

38

Some unknown hours later, unknown distance, she becomes aware of a change in her stride, in the nature of the effort it takes to keep moving forward, and in the sound of that effort.

She stops and looks around at the valley she’s come into. A mountainous small amphitheater. The angle of the trees confirming what her body has been telling her, that she is no longer going down but is crossing snow that has massed evenly on level ground. Without the feeling of down in her legs, a stone of fear rolls from its place behind her heart. All she knows, all she counts on, is down. Without down, and without a thing in the sky to go by, with no horizon to lock onto, she might walk and walk until she arrived suddenly in the cold night at her own tracks.

To either side of the valley the banks of the mountainsides rise into the gray. Whatever lies ahead at the far end of the valley lies behind the veil of falling snow and the dusk, and there’s no way to know but to go there. It seems very far away and I wanted to stop, says the girl in her head, the girl in the gymnasium, I wanted to dig into the snow like an animal, bury myself, listen to him pass over me in the dark. Sleep. Wait for the spring. But I didn’t. I knew if I stopped, I died. I asked my legs to keep moving and somehow they did.

She goes down the center of the valley in the failing light and there is more valley here, though narrower, the wings of mountain drawing steadily closer, moving toward a fusion she can’t see. She notices the shifting, scuttling snakes of powder at her feet and then notices the tailwind that drives them. It whips up and gains strength the nearer she comes to what she expects to be the convergence of the two mountainsides—the hard inevitable slamming that will crush out any passable trail and leave nothing but a steep rocky crotch, a dead end. It will almost be a relief.

The wind plays a cold note in the boughs of the trees, in the needles; the sound of absolute aloneness. She moves forward and the mountains move together and she is under the trees again, their laden arms dragging against her, the snow spinning up from the ground and littering the back side of her lenses with a distorting rash of crystals. She removes the glasses and stows them and works her way through the dark underworlds of the boughs, the wind rocking her on the snowshoes one way, and then the other, and finally forward, only forward, like the current of a river. It pushes her onward through a pair of low boughs crossed like swords, and stepping through these with her arms raised to protect her face she almost does not see, and nearly goes over, the edge of a sudden drop in the mountain.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.