The Mountain Guide – Part 1: Summit Rules

The blizzard had closed the pass by noon. By five, the little mountain hut, a low stone building at the foot of a glacier, was sealed in snow, with a stove, a rack of ropes, a table and two narrow bunks. The hut book said nobody else was expected. A pot of soup bubbled on the hob.

Brigitte sat at the table with a map across her knees and a pencil in her teeth. She was forty-six, a mountain guide with twenty years of command, broad-shouldered and weather-browned, with a calm, flat voice. Wolfgang was thirty-nine, her client and partner of three years, an accountant who loved the mountains and hated deciding things, and who had told her at the top of a long ridge that what he loved most about her was how she told him where to put his feet.

"Sit," said Brigitte.

He sat. She slid the pencil and a sheet from the hut log towards him. Summit Rules. His limits and hers, written in capitals: no marks, nothing painful, no real humiliation, nothing beyond the hut, no going outside. The word was Crevasse.

"Say it."

"Crevasse."

"If you say it, the Guide stands down. I am Brigitte. We eat soup and look at the map."

"I understand."

"And every half hour I ask if you wish to continue. You answer truly."

"Yes, Guide."

"Not yet." She pulled on a long red anorak and a pair of leather gloves, and her face went flat and unreadable. Her voice dropped, slow and exact. "Client. You were not roped correctly today."

"I am sorry, Guide."

"You will be." She pointed at the floor by the stove. "There. Stand. Hands behind your back. You will tell me the rules of the rope."

He stood. The stove ticked. The wind moaned at the shutters. He recited the rules of rope work, slowly, haltingly, and each time he slipped she raised a single finger and he began the sentence again. She did not raise her voice. She did not need to.

"Are you content, Client?"

"Content, Guide."

"Good. The storm is long."

Continue the story: Part 2 – Summit.