“Keith!” Sam yelled when I stepped in the door of the cabin. It was just after three o’clock. It had taken me over an hour of falling, swearing and heaving the stupid dummy to get to the cottage. A journey that likely took the rest of the Backcountry Patrol hopefuls about fifteen minutes.
I dropped the dummy on the ground, face-first, and stepped on him.
“Have some respect,” Sam said. “The man is an artist.”
“What’s he talking about?” Dave said. He and Hope and Bryce were seated around a table, steaming bowls of stew in front of them.
“Yeah, Alex, what’s going on?” Bryce asked. “Sam said you won the prize, but he wouldn’t tell us anything else.”
I gave Keith Richards a kick in the head. Then I walked across the room to where a woodstove was pumping out heat. “The object,” I said, “was that. A dummy.”
“Ahh, man, what did I say about that? He’s no dummy.” Sam had gathered the dummy up in his arms and was cradling it like a baby.
“The prize was carrying that stupid thing all the way down here,” I continued. Sam placed the dummy in a chair, stroked his painted-on hair and shook his head.
“Who told you that?” Sam said.
“You did.”
“I said no such thing. I said you’d found the object. I said you screamed like a girl. But I never said carrying Keith Richards was the prize.”
I knelt in front of the stove and rubbed my hands together. I was sure some part of me must have frostbite. Maybe a few parts. But I wouldn’t know which ones until I started to thaw.
“So what is the prize?” Dave asked.
Sam smiled. “Alex doesn’t have to haul Keith down the mountain tomorrow.”
“Great prize,” I said. “Seeing as I just did that.”
“Ahhh, but you see, it is. Because tomorrow these three”—he gestured at Hope, Bryce and Dave—“will be carrying the Jonas Brothers downhill. And those three are certainly dummies. The plan for tomorrow is as follows.” Sam turned to the other three. “I will go out early and hide the Jonas bothers. You will go out and find them.” Sam went to a built-in closet and opened the door. Three identical dummies hung from hooks. It was kind of spooky. “When you each find your victim, you will perform cpr. Then you will carry your victim to a designated location farther down the mountain. A spot, I will add, that is double the distance Alex just carried Keith Richards here.” Sam slammed the closet door and sat down beside Keith Richards.
“That’s not fair,” Hope said immediately. “They look really heavy. I mean, I’ll try to carry one, but…”
“They are heavy,” Sam said. “Well, not that heavy. Not as heavy as a real person. Likely half the weight of anyone you’d ever have to haul off this mountain, unless garden gnomes suddenly take up extreme sports.”
“I still don’t know if I’ll be able to carry that kind of weight,” Hope said.
“And I know you can.” Sam tapped his head. “It’s all in your head. If you know you can do something, you can.”
“The heaviest thing I have ever carried on a board was that stretcher last week with the first-aid kit.” Hope looked worried. She stuck a finger in her mouth and started chewing the nail. “Carrying one of those dummies all the way down the hill. That’s tough…”
Sam stared at her for a moment, then grabbed a large satellite cell phone off the table beside him and began pressing buttons.
“What are you doing?” Hope asked.
“Calling base camp. I’ll have them send a chopper up in the morning to get you out of here.”
“Why? What did I do?”
“If you can’t carry one of the Jonas Brothers down the mountain, then you may as well quit now.”
“But what if I ca…?” Hope’s voice trailed off.
Sam put the phone back on the table and glared at Hope. “What did I tell you last week about that sentence? Huh? Anyone?”
“If you say you can’t,” Bryce said, “you won’t.”
Sam pointed a finger at him.
“Exactly. Say you can’t and—guess what?—you can’t. That simple. So, Hope, if you want to give up, give up. Drop out. Go home. It’s fine with me. I can put in a recommendation to the lift operators or, I don’t know, maybe the Baby Bushwhackers. You can help five-year-olds bang into poles all day.”
“No way. I’m going to be a Backcountry Patroller,” Hope said.
Sam stood up quickly and crossed the room. He grabbed a free chair and banged it on the floor a couple of times. He seemed to be overreacting. I had no idea why. Hope had really just been thinking out loud. A little encouragement likely would have been a better idea.
“Then act like one!” Sam yelled. “Say I pass you. I mean, dream with me here. Say I pass you, and you end up being in Backcountry Patrol and you’re out here one day alone.”
“Backcountry Patrollers never work alone,” Hope said.
“All right,” Sam said, a bit more calmly. “You’re out with a partner and you’re looking for someone who has gone down and hurt himself. Then your partner— whoosh—over an edge.” Sam sent a hand out before him and fluttered it off a makebelieve cliff. “Now you’re alone and you have to carry some guy down the mountain. If you don’t get to him and help him, he will die. Would that be fair to him?”
Hope looked into the murky depths of her stew.
“Would it?” Sam yelled.
“No.”
“No. Exactly. So, if you can’t do it, then don’t. We’ll get a chopper here for you. But if you want to be in Backcountry Patrol, then say you can do it. And go out there in the morning and do it.” Sam banged the chair on the floor one last time, then stormed off into the bathroom.
“Wow,” Dave said. “What was that all about?”
Hope looked like she was about to cry. I felt badly for her. Sam really seemed to have gone off the deep end for no reason.
She folded her napkin, picked up her half-eaten bowl of stew and dumped the remains into the garbage. Then she rinsed the bowl, set the spoon in the sink and went over to where her stuff was piled on the floor. We all watched her without saying a word. She pulled an iPod out of the bag, plugged the earbuds into her ears, climbed into a bright pink sleeping bag and turned her back to us.
“He’s right, you know,” Dave said in a quiet tone. “If you can’t carry a dummy down the mountain, you’re pretty much useless out here.”
“He could have been a little kinder about it though,” Bryce said.
“Why? If she can’t do it, she can’t do it. Better to get her out of here.” Dave shook his head and jammed another spoonful of stew into his mouth. “What do you think, Alex?”
I took my jacket off and hung it on the back of the empty chair. I knew why Dave wanted Hope gone. It increased his chances of getting into Backcountry Patrol.
“I think…tomorrow, it’s going to suck to be any of you,” I said.
Dave looked angry, but Bryce started to laugh.
“Now, where’s the rest of that stew?” I said. “I’m starving.”
We finished eating and sat around the woodstove, talking. Sam came out of the bathroom and sat staring at the flames through the stove’s glass front. Eventually we all got into our sleeping bags for the night. When everyone was lying down reading or listening to music, Sam went outside and came back smelling of alcohol. I’d seen him pull the little silver flask out of an inside pocket a few times during the past week. I didn’t like the idea that Sam, our only link to civilization, was drinking. But what could I do?
“Someone has to feed the woodstove in the night,” Sam said. “Alex has been through enough today. Dave helped me make dinner. So it’s up to you, Bryce.”
Bryce was on his bunk in his thermal wear, turning the wheel on his iPod.
“Okay.”
“Set your alarm. By three am the fire will be down to nothing. Get up, put four logs in, make sure they catch and then go back to bed.”
“Okay.”
“If the fire goes out, we will freeze. You understand that, right?”
“Yeah.”
There were two oil lanterns lighting the room. One sat on the dining table and another hung from a rafter. Sam shut the door of the woodstove and then flicked the two lanterns off. The glow from our iPod screens was the only light in the room.
“Good night,” Sam said. I plugged my earbuds in and settled on the song that had been stuck in my head all day long: Crowbar’s “Oh, What a Feeling.” It was old and corny, and people would probably make fun of me for listening to it. But it explained exactly how snowboarding made me feel.
I listened to it five times in a row before I fell asleep with the music still humming in my ears.
I woke once in the night to some banging. I opened my eyes. Everything was hazy. By the dim glow of the woodstove I could make out Bryce, wrapped in a blanket, staring into the depths of the flickering fire. I was going to say something, but I was too tired. I went back to sleep and dreamed about endless powder and peaks that tore holes in the sky.