Yes! Beck’s fingers closed around something hard and round. He brushed away the snow. Dark, twisted wood: some kind of bush that was waiting for summer’s thaw to put out new shoots. He wrapped his fingers around it and tore it up from the earth, then scrabbled through the snow around it, clearing away more potential fuel. He snapped one of the twigs and it broke with a very satisfactory crack. It glistened with flakes that melted in his hand. It had spent the winter under the snow, but inside it was dry.
Beck used the knife to fluff up the bark, exposing the dry wood inside so that the twigs would catch fire more easily. For kindling he used bits of cotton wool that he’d taken from the plane’s first aid kit. He kicked aside more snow to clear a patch of ground in the lee of a boulder and used his fire iron to strike the first sparks. A fully-dressed Tikaani crouched down beside him.
‘No way,’ Beck ordered. ‘Until this fire’s going, you walk.’
Tikaani looked up at him. ‘I what? Where?’
‘You walk. Round and round in circles if you have to. Make your body generate its own warmth. Your core’s frozen – you have to give it a hand. Go on! Walk! And bring your knees up high with each step.’
Tikaani glared at him with something like hate, but he slowly began to walk round and round the fire, rubbing himself, while Beck coaxed a flame up out of the cotton wool and a few lengths of cloth that he’d cut from his home-made rope with the Bowie knife.
‘And don’t rub your arms like that,’ he said absently, concentration still fixed on the fire. ‘It draws blood away from your body core and cools you down. Wave your arms around fast instead. That will force blood into your hands and warm you up. It works, I promise.’
Tikaani stopped, glared at him, and started walking again. He wheeled his arms around as he walked now.
‘Once there was this guy called Ernest Shackleton,’ Beck told him as he trudged. ‘Went on an expedition to the South Pole before the First World War.’
He knelt and blew gently onto the fire. A tiny lick of flame was spreading across the rope. As it went, it grew. Beck finished his story:
‘One of his crew fell into the water there. They were on an ice floe – nothing to burn at all. He just had to walk round and round the floe for twelve hours. Just walk, and walk, and walk, until eventually he was dry. Twelve hours! But it kept him alive. No one died. They all came home again.’
The fire was taking. The flame seemed to rub shyly against the wood, as if it really wanted it to join in the fun. The wood didn’t seem to know quite what to make of it. It had been expecting a few more weeks beneath the snow before it emerged into the world again for the summer. But it let itself be persuaded. The curls of bark began to join in with the kindling. A wisp of smoke rose up into the mountain air.
Beck continued to blow until he was absolutely sure. It wasn’t a fluke; it wasn’t just going to burn out in a couple of minutes. Then he sat back on his haunches and sighed with relief.
‘OK – come and sit down, Tikaani,’ he said, while he stood up to search for more wood. Immediately Tikaani was on the other side of the fire, crouching down, holding out his hands to absorb the heat. This was never going to be a raging bonfire but it tipped the balance. Tikaani would live.
Beck grinned in sheer relief. Tikaani smiled back.
‘Hold your feet out as well,’ Beck suggested. ‘You can warm up from both directions . . .’
There was more fuel like the first load, buried under snow in drifts around rocks. Beck gathered as much as he could find. Then, while Tikaani thawed out, Beck stuffed his boots with more cut-off lengths of rope. They were going to be walking through ice and snow; damp boots would just suck the warmth straight out of Tikaani’s feet, asking for frostbite. Beck held them out, upside down, over the fire so that the warm air could add to the drying out.
‘I think I can do that,’ Tikaani said. He took the boots off Beck and held them out to dry himself. His voice was fully back to normal – no chattering teeth, no bouts of shivering. ‘I do have other skills apart from falling into water.’
‘Of course you do,’ Beck agreed with a smile. ‘That’s world-class holding, that is.’
Tikaani looked abashed. ‘I’ve held us up, haven’t I? I mean, you wanted to press on, get over the top before sunset.’
‘Hey, we still can.’ Beck glanced up at the peak. ‘OK, we’ve lost a couple of hours, but it stays light late. So we’ll just be walking a bit longer, that’s all.’
‘Yeah. But I’m sorry.’
‘No worries.’ Beck bit his lip. ‘It could have happened to me too.’ He added, half to Tikaani and half to himself: ‘I should have noticed the lake didn’t end there. I need to be more careful.’
He stood up, more to end the conversation than anything else. He didn’t want to dwell on this but he had to face up to it. It had been one small mistake, but they were in a land that didn’t tolerate any mistakes at all. Beck resolved there and then that he wouldn’t be making any more.