St Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

Accident Brief, Occurrence # 00/422

“Hooey,” Mr. Oamaru says, working his fork with a silly urgency. A single pea is caught between his square front teeth. “That boy can sing. The boy just needs a friend is all. You be that, Tek. You be that friend.”

My mother’s prim smile confirms that I should be that friend. My Christian sisters nod their earnest, brunette heads. Makeup is forbidden in our household, but my sisters have slathered their lips with beeswax so that each syllable emerges at a blinding wattage:

“Be that friend!”

My sisters all have Bible names that start with a pious growl, “Rrrachel, Rrrebecca, Rrruth.” They eat unbuttered peas and fatty gristle and leave the choicest, glaziest cuts of the ham for Mr. Oamaru and me. They are pretty, and this means that charity comes easy to them. They don’t understand the real cost of what they are asking me.

There is a long silence full of bright, expectant stares and chewing sounds, gulping sounds, tiny metal clinking sounds. Jesus. Peas roll around and around my selfish mouth. Outside, I can hear the reindeer rubbing antlers against the fence wood. Snow waits in the high clouds. Our kitchen window fills with cold early stars.

“Why should I have to do it? Rangi is creepy, Mom. He’s Moa. He’s mute.”

“Son,” Mr. Oamaru answers for her. I don’t look over at him, but I can feel his radiant disapproval. “Why shouldn’t you have to do it? The boy is very nearly your cousin.”

That’s a cheap trick. Everybody in Waitiki Valley is almost a cousin. Marriage here requires an actuary to make sure you’re not blood kin.

“Rangi Gibson is not my cousin.”

“He’s your brother,” Rebecca says unhelpfully, “in Christ.”

“He hasn’t had your advantages, Tek.” Mr. Oamaru twirls a pea on the tine of his fork. “To be orphaned at that age! And Digger Gibson is a heathen and a drunk. He can’t even keep the cemetery grass mowed, much less care for a bastard child.”

My mother winces at the word “bastard.” Some advantages, I think angrily.

“Why should I have to be part of the stupid Avalanche at all? Why should I have to freeze my ass off and pop my ears to sing a shitty untrue song about pirates?”

“Don’t curse, Tek.” Mr. Oamaru raises his eyebrows at my mother. “I wonder who he learned that language from? Nobody in this family, that’s for sure.”

There it is, the rustle of dead leaves. Dried sap, a branch crack, the whirring teeth of Mr. Oamaru’s saw. My father — my real father — is a limb that got axed off the family tree a long time ago now. My mother coughs and cleans phantom juices off her silver with a cloth doily. My sisters clench their knives.

“Listen, don’t you bring my father into this….”

“The Avalanche,” peacemaker Rachel recites, “is very important. It’s a privilege to sing it. It’s a celebration of our past.” Everybody around the table smiles at her.

“Yeah? Well, I’ve seen how easily the past can get rewritten.” I glare at Mr. Oamaru. “Lyrics change. New authors come along.”

We are flying to the Aokeora Glacier to sing down the snows. It’s one of those rituals whose true meaning is lost in antiquity, a ritual that we continue because of blind tradition and our parents’ desire to booze. You can see the Aokeora Glacier from the red roof of our silo, rising some thousands of feet above our valley. We bake and sell moonpies all year to pay for our trip to the top. (The Waitiki Valley Boys Choir is fiscally dependent on the pity of mothers. Our moonpies look and taste like shoe heels.) The ice planes we hire are four-seaters, and it takes several trips to fly the entire Waitiki Valley Boys Choir up there. It’s a funny sort of concert. We leave our audience so far below us, out of earshot.

Our families gather at the base of Aokeora and synchronize their watches. They can’t hear us, of course, and they certainly can’t see us, but they crane their necks and imagine. At precisely ten o’clock, the crowd slurs along in rough jolly voices: “Ho! Ho! Ho! Ho! The Piii-raates’ Conquest!” For our finale, the choir hits the high C that triggers the Avalanche. We hold that single note for as long as we can. Sometimes the weather cooperates. Then our voices send rocks crunching down the side of the glacier. Snowbursts explode off the cliffs like white fireworks. Chunks of ice plummet into the moat around Aokeora, shooting up whale flukes of water. Two years ago, we sang so well that melt-water hosed our parents’ faces. It’s a way for the parents to hear us, I guess, albeit indirectly. Everybody gets a little sniffly about it, especially the mothers. For some of us, it’s the last year that we can goad our voices to that altitude.

The Waitiki Valley Boys Choir Proudly Presents

10:00

A Stirring Rendition of

“The Pirates’ Conquest,”

Conducted by Franz Josef

10:12

Avalanche

10:13

Punch and Moonpies

In Waitiki Valley, most everyone is a descendant of the Inland Pirates. Our great-great-grandparents sailed along the glacial river, burned their thieving boats, and then moved inland to meet the locals. The Moa were a peaceful, stationary people, who only killed one another. And then our pirate forebears arrived, swilling brandy and sneezing Mainland diseases all over them. We sing a ra-ra tribute to the pirates every year at the Winter Concert, “The Pirates’ Conquest.” It’s our local anthem, these squirrelly arpeggios that celebrate our pirate forebears’ every ancient offense. Verse 1: The quick extinction of the Moa’s sacred red penguins. Verse 2: The depletion of their greenstone quarries. Verse 3: The invasion of their mothers’ bodies. Verse 4: Their stolen treasure. And what did we bring the Moa in return? Grog and possums. Quail pox. Whores.

It’s a weird thing to harmonize about.

Verse 4 is the worst. It’s a lamentation for the pirates’ lost treasure. (Formerly the Moa’s holy relics, although we downplay this detail in “The Pirates’ Conquest.”) Captain Walley and his men hid the profits they’d swashbuckled in the mountains. These pirates assumed, with typical pirate arrogance, that their plunder would stay safely frozen away for an eternity. But maps don’t work in a country of glaciers. The treasure got lost on calved icebergs and crushed into the impasse of moraines. By the time our great-great-grandfathers returned to recover the treasure, X marked a spot that had long since melted into the sea. Bar fights still break out over it every once in a while, the product of our grandparents’ bloody and useless nostalgia.

The grandparents, hoarse and contemptuous, like to remind us of the true Avalanches, their Avalanches, from the early century. They have a knack for making you feel like you are betraying your pirate lineage just by sitting in a car. “How do you like that city-boy juice, city boy?” they’ll ask, watching you pour berry cocktail from a carton. Our grandparents juiced frozen berries with their own teeth. They sang more sweetly than we ever will. They never sold a single moonpie. They got to the top of Aokeora with blood and gumption, crescent axes, and it took them five days. It wasn’t uncommon for boys to die.

All you have to do, they wheeze, is nudge a snow lump over the edge with your voice. Easy.

Our Avalanche is a setup. It’s a show for the cheap seats. The choir director, Franz Josef, flies up a few days in advance and takes a hatchet to the powder. He picks out snow that’s survived the melt season: loosened with crampons, in regular contact with sunlight, eager to be sung apart or sunk into our valley. We sing, and we pretend that it’s our frail voices that fracture the glacier. Theoretically, the snow could ball up and fall on us, but our parents encourage this death risk with words like tradition, heritage, and rite of passage. They like to believe in the old, boulder-rolling power of our songs. They like to see the evidence of our voices, even if they can’t hear them.

With any luck, this will be my last Winter Concert. I’m hoping my voice will change later on this summer, and then I will never have to sing down another Avalanche. I ask God to grant me this wish every night. “God,” I pray, “please deliver me from the choir.” I kneel beside my attic bed on bare, hairless knees, and tune a hopeful ear for damage in my voice. I can hear my prayer coming true in the shower, where I sing test syllables. My voice sounds like the doorbell to a condemned building. Shrill, with a new hollowness behind it.

When I was a much younger boy, my mother was beautiful, but it was a sewn-up tulip kind of beauty. Then my father left. We curled in and blackened. We were heathens, you know, before Mr. Oamaru and his piratical, body-soul conquest of my mother. Mr. Oamaru has had a soft opening effect. He paid her mortage and made my sisters. He made her beautiful again. Everyone notices. Other mothers pay her incredulous compliments, peppered with real jealousy: “Why, you look like a new person, Leila. You look so happy.”

And you know what? I hate him for it.

If you’ve seen me in town, I guarantee you don’t remember. Dark eyes, a red lick of hair under a dark hat. I’m not a lacy saint like my sisters, but I don’t think I’m an exceptionally bad kid, either. I love my mother and my sisters, and I do my barn chores enough of the time. My stepdad, Mr. Oamaru, seems most proud of me for the sins that I resist: I don’t chew tobacco, I don’t fake sick, I don’t vandalize silos. Once, he actually complimented me for not “diddling with” the reindeer, as the Tau boys have been rumored to do. These are tough victories to take pride in.

Like most men in the valley, Mr. Oamaru is a reindeer farmer. He grazes his blue-gray stock on ancestral Moa land. He is a good man who takes good care of my mother. He claims he loves to watch me sing. When we sang down the Avalanche last year, Mr. Oamaru collected an eyedropper of the glacial snow. He wears it under his plaids on a fraying noose knot, a vial of melted time. “You sang well, Tek. You make a father proud.” I wanted to smash that vial on sight. Everybody knows that I’m a lousy singer. On my best days, my voice melts into the other boys’ and I swallow my mistakes.

“Dad sure loves your singing,” Ruth told me once, her own voice squeaky with jealousy. “He wears that eyedropper everyplace.”

“That’s just faucet water, dummy,” I heard myself lying. “That eyedropper stuff is all an act. Your dad thinks his pregnant cows sing better than I do. Your dad couldn’t pick my voice out of the choir.”

And then Ruth was crying and I felt like a monster. But everybody knows that Mr. Oamaru is not my real father. Mr. Oamaru is my mother’s husband. He is my sisters’ father. Not mine.

Your father left us because he was in a bad way, my mother used to tell me.

Tek’s father left us because he is a bad man, she tells everybody now. She says it again and again. She’s snowing down a new past for Mr. Oamaru, a tough rock of ice in a sea of time. A new memory for our family to stand on. Tek’s father is a bad, bad man. It was hard enough to lose my father the first time. Now I can’t even hold on to my memory of him as a basically good person. Mr. Oamaru has taught me that loss isn’t just limited to the present; it can happen in any direction. Even what’s done and vanished can be taken from you. Other, earlier memories that we made of my father sink and revert to water. The past shifts its crystals inside me.

To be in the Waitiki Valley Boys Choir, you need a good attitude, and the ability to sing in a pleasant, undamaged, unchanged singing voice.

— Franz Josef

On Saturday, Mr. Oamaru drops me off on the tarmac in the purple-gray predawn. We argue about “The Pirates’ Conquest” on the car ride over:

“Honestly! Half that stuff is only in there because it rhymes with conquest.”

Any fool can hear, from the first verse onward, how Waitiki’s history has been retrofitted to the demands of rhyme and meter.

“Bronze breast, ice chest, crow’s nest, laid to rest, Captain Walley’s scarlet vest. Do you really think that Captain Walley wore a vest?”

“That song’s truer than you are. Why, we’ve been singing it for longer than you’ve been alive! It’s history….”

It’s freezing out. A wreath of icicles forms on the dash. We reach a short airstrip where a bunch of sullen, sleepy choirboys are huddled together, flanked by a small fleet of ice planes. The choir director nods at me and checks a box. Franz Josef has a thick, twitchy mustache and no wife. There’s no magic to his conducting. He waves the metal wand with a grim, efficient panic, as if he’s directing traffic. I miss my cue again.

“Tek Oamaru! You’re a beat behind us. Chin up, eh? Enunciate, eh? You’re singing down into your chest.”

Just Tek, I whisper under my breath. I hate rehearsing this evil stuff. It makes me feel like “The Pirates’ Conquest” is still happening. Usually I just lip sync the part about the rapes and fires. If I were braver, I wouldn’t sing at all. I have a secret admiration for Rangi, his genius refusal to carry the tune.

Rangi’s been in the choir longer than any other boy. If his voice has changed, it’s done so in secret, with the stealth of wine in a dark bottle. If you ask me, it’s a perverse charity to make the mute boy rehearse with the choir. But Franz Josef says there is music like water frozen inside him. He says he wants the Waitiki Valley Boys Choir to be the heat that melts the blocks of song in Rangi. We think that Franz Josef has fantasies of a TV special, or at least a write-up in the Waitiki Gazette:

Local Choir Director Hailed as Miracle Worker! Mute Moa Youth Has the Music in Him!

“Sing it with us, Rangi!” Franz Josef says now. He kneels down and pushes his gloved hand into Rangi’s diaphragm, as if he is a doctor fighting for the life of an infant sound. “Me-me-me-ME-me-me-me!”

Rangi looks as if he might bite Franz Josef.

Rangi’s a Moa orphan. His adopted father, Digger Gibson, is the cemetery warden. Digger never comes to our concerts. Most days he spends dreaming in the ditches. White face, gray knuckles around a bottle. On his chest you can watch the shovel rising, the shovel falling, a graveyard metronome.

We know that Rangi can at least mutter because Digger Gibson says he used to talk to the bear. In his group home for orphaned Moa boys, Rangi had a pet cinnamon bear. I saw her once. She was just a wet-nosed cub, a cuff of pure white around her neck. Rangi found her on the banks of the Waitiki River and walked her around on a leash. He filed her claws and fed her tiny, smelly fishes. They shot her the day his new father, Digger, came to pick him up.

“Burying that bear,” I overheard Digger tell Mr. Oamaru once. “The first thing we ever did together as father and son.”

Rangi’s given us this global silent treatment ever since, a silence he extends to people, animals, ice. Doctors say it’s an elective mutism; they can’t detect trauma, can’t find a gauze of sickness on his tongue. Rangi has tried to run away from our choir four times now, although he never gets very far — the Valley is walled in on every side by glacial mountains. We think he’s on an insane quest to unearth the bear. He always gets “rescued” at some anonymous spot in the forest, spading up dark triangles of dirt. There are no physical markers to help him to locate the burial mound, no clues to the bear’s whereabouts outside of Rangi’s childhood memory. Digger never put down a stone. Rangi could dig forever and find only yellow bromide and shallow roots. Stubborn, the grandfathers say. Ungrateful. Typical Moa. This diagnosis has always troubled me. Sometimes Rangi’s gaze darkens and rolls inward, and then I think he must be seeing something that nobody’s invented the words for yet. A slick world that no sound will adhere to.

“Me-me-me-ME-me-me-me!” Franz Josef keeps prompting. His hand pushes down with more encouragement. “Me-me-me-omph!”

Franz Josef’s head snaps forward. His wire spectacles and conductor’s wand go flying. There’s a moment of shocked silence, and then the clearing erupts with laughter. Brauser has nailed Franz Josef in the back of the head with a mammoth snowball. Brauser’s a sociopath with a pleasant tenor. He spends most rehearsals around back, torturing stray penguins or pissing his name in the snow. Now he’s smirking at us from the treeline, scooping up more powder. It’s unclear whether Brauser was trying to hit Franz Josef or Rangi. I hope it was the former. That’s one difference between a bully and a hero, I guess: good aim. If Brauser was trying to hit Franz to help Rangi, then maybe there’s more to his malice than I thought.

Then Brauser starts pelting the altos with indiscriminate glee, making my hero theory less tenable. They cry out in terror. Franz calls a stern halt to our rehearsal. He searches the snow for his wand.

Rangi, meanwhile, has wandered away from the choir. He is sitting on a low fence at the edge of the airstrip and staring off into the trees. I take one step towards him, then another. Be that friend becomes the wind pushing me forward.

“Hey Rangi? Listen, I’m sorry for…you know, I have this stepfather, too….” I trail off. Rangi turns and stares at me with a mirror’s flat assessment, merciless and impersonal. I can see how stupid I must look to him. “I just wanted to say that I’m sorry.” I shrug. Then some secret life flames in Rangi’s eyes and for an instant I feel an identical ache quivering between us. It’s over so quickly that I wonder if I imagined it. Rangi goes back to studying invisible symmetries in the snow. I jog through the light flurries, hoping that Brauser and the others didn’t see me back here.

A few minutes later, the planes begin to roll forward, the white egg of the sun reflected in their dark windows. On the glacier, the sun is so violently bright that, without special lenses, ice pilots can burn through their corneas within half an hour. Today there are four pilots on the tarmac, all with matching ski suits and identical lavender eyes. Each ice pilot walks around and whumps the red belly of his fuselage. They introduce themselves: Steve and Steve and Steve and Hone Te Kauriki-himi. “Call me Steve,” Hone says, with a bitter curl to his lips, and we all laugh with relief. Hone’s eyes are lavender, too, but you can see their true tea color behind the contacts.

Hone comes around with a bucket of eel-yellow transponders. He goes from boy to boy and loops them around our necks.

“These willies need to be jiggered at all times.”

“Why?”

“In case something goes less-than-good with the Avalanche.” The cold, calloused pads of Hone’s fingers brush my neck. He flips the switch to ON. “We need to be able to find you boys if you get buried.”

The transponder feels stone-heavy around my neck. I wish that Hone would make just one more joke.

Steve #2 hands us an ice axe and a sack lunch. My ice axe is crusted with triangles of rust or blood. My sack lunch is salami. The ice pilots start to load up the planes. Steve #3 does a head count and frowns down at the manifest.

“Franz Josef? There are some names missing on the manifest.”

A whispered conference. Brows furrow in our direction. Franz smiles at us, and I catch a whiff of conspiracy.

“Mr. Gibson, Mr. Oamaru, Mr. Brauser, there’s been an, ah, error of logistics. You boys don’t mind waiting for an extra plane? Very sure? Most certain? Well.”

The substitute pilot forgot his contacts at the lodge. He seems momentarily flustered, blinking out the cockpit window. Then he winks one naked blue eye at us and flashes us a terrifying grin.

“Can you boys keep a secret?”

“Rangi can!” Brauser laughs. He is rendered apoplectic by his own wit. “That’s the only thing Rangi’s good for! Because he’s dumb.

“Ritardaaaando!” He flicks at Rangi’s left earlobe. “Figaro, figaro, you fuckin’ psycho…”

“He’s not deaf, you know.” I am careful to say this in a coward’s voice, too soft for Brauser to hear.

“It’s okay for me to call Ritardando dumb”—Brauser’s face goes crumple smug—“like how it’s okay to call a female dog a bitch. Because it’s the truth.”

The substitute pilot’s smile broadens. “Good news! Nothing wrong with keeping your quiet.” He gives Rangi a friendly thump on the back. “Same goes for you two. No reason to go blabbling to the Steves that I flew you up without my lenses.”

Rangi’s expression remains flat and illegible.

“Dumb-dumb-dumb-dumb biiitch!” Brauser really does have a lovely contralto. He can hit, color, and hold a note like a buxom Viking princess. Otherwise Franz Josef would have kicked him out of the choir a long time ago. I’m sure it’s no coincidence that Brauser, Rangi, and I got volunteered for the last flight up here. Franz often refers to us as his “problem” voices. He’s probably overjoyed for an excuse to begin the concert without us.

Brauser’s melodic insults fill the cabin, dumb-dumb-dumb-dumb, a song that thuds into us like a steady rain laced with hailstones. He sings it until I want to scream. Rangi listens like someone locked indoors, watching the weather outside his cell window.

During the flight up, I close my eyes and try to ignore the tremors of the cabin. It’s a perilous ascent. We rise through a low, gold-limned dross of clouds. The valley falls away from us in waves. Then nothing but frost and seracs, freckled with shale. The plane has to do all sorts of dubious maneuvers to enter the openings in the Southwest Icefalls, a dozen squint-thin eyes in the glassy rock face. Up here it’s cratered and lifeless terrain. Mount Kei looks like a cloud volcano in the rising sun, bubbling ocher and maroon. Brauser is telling some stupid joke about my father and a female reindeer. Rangi’s staring into the cockpit at the giddy, spinning controls. He gnaws on all four of his fingers. Clouds stream around the small windows. The substitute pilot is massaging his temples with his two free hands.

Everybody is injured in the crash. The wind screams across the flat snowfields. Both skis snap off on impact, and the plane slides to a stop on its belly. The substitute pilot makes it out first, kicking through the cockpit door. I ignore the pilot’s outstretched hand and tumble face-first into the snow. It’s four feet of fresh powder. There is nothing up here, no points of reference. Just snow forever, pocked with these turquoise holes like painted whirlpools. Crevasses, I shudder, deep enough to gulp us whole. On a glacier, the ground is just an illusion, a slick disguise for a million chasms. I try to get up on my knees and let out a whimper. Brauser has rolled a few meters away from me, and I wait for him to resume cursing. But Brauser is lying fish-eyed in the snow. Not moving. Not blinking. I follow his blank gaze and see nothing. No choir director, no altos, no tenors, no planes.

We are alone on the glacier.

“Excuse me, sir…?” Etiquette and panic duel in each syllable. “Where are, um, the other planes?”

Is it possible, I wonder, that we have wrecked on another glacier, the wrong glacier? Usually, the planes do a smooth glissando right into the Ice Amphitheater. Franz Josef conducts during touchdown, keeping ¾ time. When I turn around, I see that the substitute pilot’s smile has started to run like gravy. His face looks sick and yellow in the light. He yells something and points behind us.

As we watch, the ski plane starts to slide backwards.

“Fuck.”

The substitute pilot stands there for what feels like a very long time. Then he starts running, falling and running and running and falling, so slowly, through the deep virgin snow.

“Fuck. Fuck.”

The plane skids faster and faster. It slides at a whistling speed. A dazzling wake of frost explodes up around the body of the plane.

“Fuck!”

And then it slides, soundless and dreamlike, over the ridge.

On his way back to the boys, the substitute pilot falls into a small blue crevasse. He has to lift one leg out and then the other. Even at this altitude, the substitute pilot’s bathed in sweat, sweat running down his chin and neck. Fear must be the fountain of youth, because the substitute pilot now looks younger than any of us, doughy and flushed with horror.

“Help!” The substitute pilot waves his arms. He’s up to his waist in snow. At a lower altitude, this would have made me laugh out loud.

“Help me! Don’t just stand there, kid.”

I just stand there. I know better than to walk over there. Somehow, I intuit that if I extend my hand now, I will get infected by the pilot’s helplessness, his gibbering fear. The help can’t be me; the help needs to come from some other direction. I hear myself barking orders, full of an iron contempt for the pilot. What a crybaby. What a true fuckup. It’s an angry feeling that I used to use on the farm when my father first left, late at night, to immunize myself against my mother’s terror.

“Just lift your legs, one at a time. We need your help over here.”

Behind us, Brauser is moaning. His cries swell and sky-crawl. It’s a wordless sound, a wild sound, this animal pain that can’t be haltered and led to meaning. It reminds me of the time that Mr. Oamaru had to shoot a two-headed reindeer calf, and for a horrid instant both heads lowed in tandem. They sang their way across some abominable threshold. I still hear them screaming in nightmares. For months afterwards, I plugged up my ears with my mother’s Dolly Nutmeg Reads the Bible! cassettes and refused to enter the barn alone. This is the worst sound, I think, the very worst sound in the whole world.

Then the moaning stops. Brauser’s movement stops. And I regret all my hastier judgments. Any sound is better than this.

“Brauser? Brauser!”

Where are the others? My head is throbbing. Where are the other planes?

“Where’s your hat, Brauser?”

Already, Brauser’s marigold hair has become hoary with snow. With his bare white head and his curled-in spine, Brauser looks like a rapidly aging man. He blows crimson spit bubbles that I pop immediately, scared and weirdly embarrassed. Rangi sits in a shocked, straight-backed silence in the bowl left by the vanished wreck, still holding tight to his sack lunch. The soggy bottom’s torn apart. His sandwich bread and apple slices litter the snow.

The substitute pilot manages to hoist himself out of the crevasse and stumble over. “Boys,” he says, but he directs every word at me. He holds up a hissless walkie-talkie. “I need to slide down to where I can get reception. I’m going to call for a helicopter rescue. Don’t go anywhere until that heli comes, eh? Don’t move a muscle.”

I nod. Brauser twitches once, then stops.

The substitute pilot is already half crawling, half sliding down the empty snowfield.

“Wait up, I’ll come with you!” I start after him, unsteady in my boots, and fall sideways into the snow. “Wait for me!”

Halfway down the run, the ice pilot turns around and shouts something:

“——!”

His words break apart on the ice. Then he scoots down the gentle snowfield on his back, shooting into a sterling ice cave like a pinball.

“What? What was that? Hey, buddy, we can’t hear you….”

Brauser is slumped half dead in the snow. Rangi exhales plumes of silence. I crawl a few feet away and slam a shallow hole in the powder. I open the cramped fist of my stomach, squeeze my eyes shut, and retch.

Music is pleasant not only because of the sound of many voices, but because of the silence that is in it.

— Franz Josef

Weep! Weep! All of our transponders beep in tandem. There’s a silence of five seconds between each tiny sonic burst. I fiddle with the black knob. Together, the transponders sound like panicked crickets. How, exactly, will the rescue helicopter use these tiny chirps to find us?

“Brauser?”

Something necessary is ebbing out of Brauser’s eyes. Snow collects between his lashes. A trickle of strawberry-red blood dribbles out of the corner of his mouth.

After some experimentation, I discover that if I poke Brauser to the right of his belly button, he’ll make a sound. A gargle. Poke! A burp of despair. There’s something pitiable and terrifying about the unconscious bully. His crumpled nose and hat.

Brauser opens one blue eye and stares at me. I look away. I brush the snow off Brauser’s cold earlobes. This is the first true thing that Brauser and I have ever shared, this fear, besides dog-eared songbooks and cafeteria noodles.

“Hold on, Brauser,” I say without conviction. “Help is on the way.”

I wonder, briefly, if I could eat Brauser if it came to that. At this point, we have been alone on the glacier for fourteen minutes.

Brauser’s face is a raw, freckly pink. I fix his hat. The shadow of my hand moves back and forth over Brauser’s open eyes. Pupils expanding, pupils contracting. A dark blue ring around the world. In between breaths, I realize that something incredible is happening at this new elevation. Up here you can hear everything — the orange ping of light on metal, the purr of water melting. These blue ocean contractions in Brauser’s eyes. His pupils make a faint tidal whoosh-ing. Shadows sound like feed pouring out of a cloth sack. When I move my hand, millions of shadow grains bounce along the hard snow. That’s my sound, I think, birdseed raining out of a sack. It shakes out across the empty snowfields. I look up at the sky, nervous. What sort of bird, I wonder, is my shadow designed to be food for?

Above us, the sun bounces orange and yellow. The silence changes. We bump noses, but I can’t hear Brauser’s eyes anymore, or his shadow. I tug his hat down harder.

Rangi’s air pulses red like a swallow’s breast. Brauser’s quiet is coma white. My own silence hums with these black-and-yellow bee stripes of fear:

YOU ARE

GOING

TO DIE UP

HERE

NOBODY KNOWS

WHERE

YOU ARE

THERE IS

NO MORE DOWN

THERE

I snap out of it when I realize that Rangi has started walking away from us. He pushes through the shallow crater left by the ice plane, stabbing his crampons into the jellied snow. Then he climbs over a ridge of wind-scoured shale and disappears.

“Rangi! Wait up!”

It takes me a full five minutes to cover the short distance between us and clamber over the wedge of shale. Rangi is waiting for me on the other side. “Why did you—” The question dies on my lips. No explanation is forthcoming from Rangi. We lie flat on our bellies, taking labored breaths and watching the sky, two soldiers in the trenches. Then Rangi starts making a sound. Nothing quite so deliberate as speech, but a dense fizz of noise, like bubbles zipping up to the surface of a tall glass.

“— —…— —,” he says, pointing into the clouds.

We both look up. A helicopter is coming for us, the sun pinging off its blades.

“We’re saved!”

Rangi and I peer over the ridge and watch as the helicopter touches down on the glacier. Two men leap like flames out of the cockpit. Their vests glow red against the pure white backdrop. The glare off the snow makes their faces look like taupe holes.

The men unload three stretchers from the helicopter and lay them flat across the powder. They heave Brauser onto the first stretcher. One of the rescuers is whistling a cheery tune. It’s a scary, incongruous sound in this landscape. Each whistled syllable hacks flat into the wind like a cleaver. I can see the dark fissures between his teeth.

“Help!” I jump up and pull Rangi out of the powder, puppet-jerk him to life. “Here!” I start to wave and shout. “Here! We’re over he-e-ere!”

The ice pilot is still whistling, oblivious of us. I think I can just make out a softer, inner whistle, under the word: Run.

“Run,” Rangi says.

Then I am facedown in the snow. Rangi’s kneeling on my back, digging his whole weight into the base of my spine. Something thunks against the back of my head, and for a moment red stars cluster in front of my vision. Rangi grabs me by the legs and starts dragging me across the ice gully. I’m stunned but still conscious, too shocked to struggle. Then he yanks me over a snowbank and out of sight. The world goes blue-white-blue for a series of hills. I yelp and try to kick away, but Rangi’s got me. He presses me to his chest in a murderous bear hug as we roll. We slide down the slope together and bang our way into an ice cave. In the lunar shadows, it looks as if our cheeks are sweating blue light. The altitude here manifests itself as a pernicious thirst, and my throat burns in the desiccated air of the cave. Inside, a twinkling, chandelier light fills every ablation. Even seated, I can touch the cold ceiling. I touch my tongue to the cold roof of my mouth.

The helicopter is taking off without us. It makes three buzzard circles above us, and I’m surprised to find myself cowering with Rangi in the cave. I should be jumping up and down, screaming at its metal belly. I think about Franz Josef’s hand pressing hard on my diaphragm. Up here I can’t untangle it, the word-strangle of it, the twisted umbilical that binds deep panic to sound. I open my mouth and release dead air. Snip, snip! go the scissors of the wind.

Rangi holds his hands over his ears and buries his face in my side. He doesn’t speak again. The helicopter shrinks into a dense red pinprick of noise above us, lost in the sun. Then it’s gone. After a few moments, the silence reconstitutes itself. I can hear our shadows again, spilling up the walls. It’s a scary freedom.

When I look down and see Rangi staring up at me, I feel my stomach heave again.

“W-what-what the hell were you thinking?” My teeth are chattering uncontrollably. “Do you enjoy being stuck up here? Those men were here to rescue us, Rangi!”

Rangi closes his eyes and he smiles. He beams at me with ghastly relief. I move away from him, horrified.

“Who knows how long it will take before they send another helicopter? It could be hours!”

Anger flames through me and my muscles tense to hit him, a violence that clenches once and then vanishes. My fists uncurl without my conscious intervention. I stare down at my open palms with real surprise, feeling shaky and defeated. It’s as if my body knows before I do that it’s too dangerous to feel this way towards Rangi. Right now, he’s the only other human around for thousands of vertical miles.

“Rangi? What are you doing?”

Rangi is on his hands and knees, crawling towards me, his face flickering in the cavelight. His black eyes sparkle with intent.

“Ran-gi?”

My voice has a wobble in the middle — like a tightrope strung between two fears. It sounds as if a sly little demon is bouncing across it.

“Come on, Rangi!” I say nervously. “Let’s go back to the snowfield. Don’t you want to get down from here? Don’t you want to get home?”

Rangi holds a finger to his lips. His breathing comes quick and adenoidal when he reaches over and turns off my transponder. Before I can even process what’s happening, Rangi rips it off my neck and lobs it, with a casual madness, into the blue maw of the crevasse.

Then Rangi flicks off his own transponder. He slips it over his neck.

“No!”

He sails it into a narrow opening in the ice.

“Oh no — oh no — oh God—oh no why did you do that? Now you’ve done it, Ritardando, now you’ve really done it….”

I belly-squirm out of the cave and peer over the lip of the crevasse. The chasm glows with the loveliest, least hospitable colors: cold white stars, the green of interstellar vapors. It reminds me of the old stories, kids’ stuff, about sirens who swam in the deep pools and thrashed up snowstorms with their merscales. Pirate lore. X-marks-the-spot stuff. I’m in no position to appreciate the fantasy shades of white and green inside the chasm. The only color that I want to see is the plastic yellow of my transponder.

This is when I plunge my hand into the ice hole, up to my elbow, fishing around a ledge for the transponder, and come up with a fistful of treasure.

It’s really true, then, the part about the treasure. I can’t wait to tell Mr. Oamaru that I was wrong, that “The Pirates’ Conquest” isn’t all lies and stupid rhymes; there are at least a few bars of truth in our song. Verse 4.

It’s the stolen Moa patrimony: greenstone, river pearls, whale-tooth combs. The crevasse has swallowed our transponders, but the ice ledges inside are heaped with old plunder. Soon I’ve amassed a tall stack of greenstone. I wonder if I’m looking at the Moa’s holy relics, melted down by our great-great-grandfathers into these anonymous nephrite bricks. I pull out coins, too, orange and red metal. They must have been here for a century or more. The coins are frozen. Each is chiseled with a historic profile, a numismatic portrait of the old Moa leaders. Nobody we sing about in “The Pirates’ Conquest.” You can’t even make out their gender anymore, just high collars, proud noses, stout asparagus braids in the green copper. Men and women from some past that never made it into our music. I would have preferred a miracle that benefited us more directly.

“Here you go, Rangi!” And suddenly I’m laughing, I’m shaking all over now, in total hysterics. My body feels like a great chattering tooth. “We’ll split it! Fifty/fifty…”

Rangi refuses to touch the treasure. I grab him by the elbows and twist open his palms. I place a brick of the luminious nephrite in each of his hands. It’s enough that, if Rangi ever gets back to town, he could become the cemetery’s sole proprietor. He could employ Digger Gibson.

“Take it!” I scream. “It’s yours, it’s yours, take it!”

What a small, cold fortune. Rangi lets it sink into the snow. He just wants a fistful of bear fur. I want my father.

I try to remember the chorus of “The Pirates’ Conquest,” and I’m frightened to discover that I’ve forgotten how it goes. No words, no melody, just a white, blank space. Sun sparkles above us. The walls of the ice caves are melting together — too softly, this time, for me to hear. I touch a drop of the wall to my tongue. A clear braid of liquid trickles across the caves, snow that fell in 1947, 1812, earlier still, released all at once like tears from a body. Rangi crawls over and crouches in front of me. The solar glare is sculpting the ice into glass fangs and tall blue scythes.

“Well, I hope you’re happy,” I hiss. “No one’s going to save us now.”

Rangi doesn’t look happy; his face is still a mask of old fury. I wonder what it feels like to be angry at everyone except for a dead bear. It scares me to think about it. I picture the dead bear loping and slathering forever inside of Rangi, a long-toothed loyal animal, his one memory of love. Digger Gibson should never have adopted him. Who wants salvation when it just orphans you further?

I lean my cheek against the translucent outer wall of one of the caves. Water whispers inside: You are going to die up here — nobody knows where you are…. Any place, then, can become a cemetery. All it takes is your body. It’s not fair, I think, and I get this petulant wish for ugly flowers and mourners, my mother’s old familiar grief. Somebody I love to tend my future grave. Probably this is the wrong thing to be wishing for.

I jerk away from the trickly whisper of the snowmelt. This is the wrong thing to be wishing for. I don’t want to die on this glacier. This accident is nothing I volunteered for. Below us, the ground rolls with sluiced water. In the Valley, it’s easy to forget that the ground is moving, that we’re traveling on a frozen river. But up here I can hear it happening. Centuries of water are melting in the heart of the glacier, a constant interior roar that calves icebergs into the black sea. Even now, we’re moving away from Waitiki Valley. And suddenly I’d give anything to be back in my kitchen with Mr. Oamaru, swapping lies about my father. I’d pay any price to open my eyes and find myself in the Ice Amphitheater with the boys choir, all of us holding that single note.

And then I get a hero idea. This is my solo. If I can sing down an Avalanche on my own, the families at the base of the glacier will see it and send help. Mr. Oamaru’s weathered face floats in front of my vision, and I make it a target for my anger. I pitch my voice so high that my forehead starts throbbing. Higher, and higher still. Breath floods out of my lungs. The note beckons and retreats above me, a round luminous note, like the sun viewed from the bottom of the Waitiki River. My voice rises like a hand struggling to break the surface of that water. I wonder if it’s like this for Rangi, too; if Rangi’s mutism just means that he has sunk several fathoms farther down than the rest of us, and given up on swimming.

If this were a local interest story, some square of uplift in the Gazette, I’d send down a tremendous Avalanche, an S.O.S. I’d hit that high C, or, in a fluted miracle, the C above it. Somebody below us would see it and send help. But that’s not what’s happening. My voice is cracking. It suffers up and fails and surges again. It breaks eons before the ice ever will. Now I’m breathless and covered in freezing spittle. Rangi watches and never even opens his mouth.

I hear myself echoing Franz Josef: “Sing it with me, Rangi! Forget Franz. Forget Digger. It’s okay to sing now, Rangi. Or scream if you have to, anything….” Our voices are the only hatchet that we have up here. But Rangi, if you can believe this, has fallen backwards into the snow. He’s settled into his own snow angel. When I kneel and shake him, Rangi looks up at me with a mild surprise, as if he’s forgotten that I am still here. Then his gaze shifts inward. A new shape is running in Rangi’s eyes now. A brown-gold speck, at such a distance. Its black snout opens in a soundless, joyful roar.

Somewhere, an Avalanche is about to happen without us. Rangi must know this before I do, and the dead bear in his eyes comes racing towards us across old snow. At the base of Aokeora, Mr. Oamaru is fiddling with the flashbulb, the black drape of the box camera billowing around him. He is snapping picture after picture of white sludge rolling down an ice shelf. My mother is pointing to the ridge where I’m supposed to be and making good-natured jokes about my weight gain. Ruth, Rachel, Rebecca are sending up a prayer for my success. They’ll eat stale lemon moonpies and listen for a happy hallucination of my voice. In a few minutes, the town will stand up and applaud. I feel as if I’m looking down at my own funeral, only nobody knows that I’m dead. It’s a frightening, lonely feeling.

Even so, I can’t silence a small chirp of hope. Who knows? Maybe my transponder hit a ledge that jarred the switch back to ON. Maybe it’s still emitting a signal. A part of me feels certain that my family will hear my absence at the bottom of Aokeora, thousands of feet below us, and know that I am lost.