Oren’s hand failed on a knot he could have tied in the dark twenty years earlier. Kit reached for the loose end. His father pulled it away.
“Cold,” he said.
The sun was already on the shoulder.
Mae watched without commenting. She had hired Oren and Kit to help measure the high valley. Oren knew the route. Kit would carry her instruments and help with the measurements.
Their paid work stopped here, on the broad, flat shoulder below the last ridge. No one had climbed the peak above it. Oren wanted to be the first.
Oren had promised to try. Newspapers still called him the Mountain King. The title had survived his last three abandoned expeditions better than his savings had.
Kit wanted his own pay for this job. He had stopped working for his father for nothing. Oren kept promising that fame would make them both rich later. Kit needed wages now. His father believed reaching the summit would settle the argument.
They had come up through a shaded gully before dawn. On the ascent Mae had marked the broad turn where they could leave the gully and follow a longer path down the ridge. When sunlight melted the ice in the narrow gully, loose stones could fall from its walls. Then they would need the longer ridge path to get down. Oren had agreed to watch it.
Now the gully carried a thin, continuous rattle.
Mae set up her instrument case on the shoulder. Kit unpacked the spare rope they had carried for the steep step below. Oren looked past them toward the last steep stretch, where a narrow ridge of rock led toward the summit.
“An hour,” he said.
Mae looked at clouds rising from the far valley. Her barometer, which measured air pressure, had dropped since camp. That could warn of worse weather. Neither the clouds nor the pressure reading told her exactly when bad weather would arrive. But she could already hear stones falling in the gully.
“I need forty minutes here,” she said. “Then we use the long way down.”
Oren asked Kit to come above and hold the line. Kit stood up before deciding to. His father’s requests still entered his body quicker than his mind.
They moved to the base of the narrow ridge. Kit set up the safety rope from a firm place at the bottom of the steep rock. His job was to hold that rope while Oren climbed. Above lay a ledge where Oren could secure the rope around sound rock. Beyond that ledge, Oren meant to climb without it. Kit would not follow him there.
“Your hand,” Kit said.
Oren flexed his fingers. “It holds.”
“It didn’t hold the knot.”
“You tied it. That is why we come together.”
Kit looked back at Mae, kneeling beside her case. His paid work lay on the shoulder. His father wanted the old arrangement: Kit would help reach the summit, or be blamed for leaving him alone.
“I’ll hold this section,” he said. “I won’t go above the ledge.”
Oren turned toward him. “Then what do you think we’ve come for?”
“You know what I’m being paid for.”
For a moment Kit thought his father would take the rope away. Instead Oren nodded, and started climbing.
The first moves were familiar enough to make Kit doubt himself. Oren placed his feet with the delicacy Kit had loved watching as a child. He used the strong hand to gain the ledge. They had seen a firm point of rock above the ledge. Oren secured the safety rope around it. The rope now ran from above him down to Kit.
Then a fragment broke beneath his boot.
It fell past Kit and bounced into the gully. Oren kept his stance, but he could no longer use that foothold to reverse the last move. His stiff hand would not hold long enough to search below it. Kit could see him testing the rock, withdrawing, testing again.
“Come back,” Kit said.
“I am trying.”
Those words sounded smaller than the distance between them.
Mae brought their spare rope to Kit. She did not ask who had been right. Kit showed her the broken foothold. Oren could not climb back down past it with his weak hand.
The rope secured above Oren could hold his weight while they guided him down. Their first rope was too short to lower him all the way to their safe place below. The spare line gave them the length they needed. They checked the ropes together. Oren would have to trust them rather than keep trying to climb.
He wanted Kit to tell him where to put his boot. Kit could not see the far side of the ridge. He said so.
“Then I need to turn,” Oren said.
“Slowly. We have you here.”
Mae helped Kit stay firm on the lower ledge while he controlled the rope. Oren moved with his weight supported, feeling for each contact and calling before he changed position. Once the weak hand opened altogether. The rope took him against the rock. Kit heard the breath leave his father and kept his own hands where they belonged.
Oren reached their lower ledge with a torn sleeve and blood across one knuckle. He sat down. Above them the summit remained clear for several minutes, which made retreat harder than a storm would have.
Kit wanted to say they could have avoided this. He wanted his father to apologize while the scrape was still new enough to count as evidence. Mae handed Oren water and asked whether he could walk the long descent.
“Yes,” he said.
“Tell us if that changes.”
They returned to the shoulder. The rescue had cost them time. Mae and Kit could still finish the measurements without Oren. Kit carried the instruments between the marked points while she recorded them. Oren sat beside the cases, watching the ridge.
The last observation was complete as cloud reached the summit. They packed and left by the longer path. Small stones were now falling freely down the gully they had climbed that morning.
At the valley station Mae paid each guide separately. Kit signed his receipt. His father looked at the two envelopes, then asked Mae whether she would return.
“For another survey, perhaps,” she said. “Not for that summit.”
Oren did not offer to persuade her.
The station porter came for the instrument case. Kit bent to pick up the coiled rope, but his father took it with his sound hand.
“I’ve got it,” Oren said.
Kit let him carry it to the platform. They stood waiting for the train, with room between them for the coil and neither name yet in a newspaper.
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