Valley of The Shadow

Randall’s flight touched down at Heathrow just short of noon, more than four hours late. The pilot said a couple of times it could have been worse for them. The Iranian hostages, for instance, had now been cooped up for exactly one hundred days. When Randall cleared Customs, Dave was waiting for him at the cattle chute that spilled its rumpled travelers out into the main concourse. He slouched there powerfully amid the press of dark-suited drivers and corporate gofers, most of them chesting signs with the names of whatever “Mr.” or “Ms.” they’d been sent to collect. A surprising number of the names were African or Asian. Dave’s sign read, “Dr. Bad Ass.”

“Thanks for waiting. How are you?” asked Randall, matching Dave’s hard grip.

Dave held his gaze for a beat. “Fair enough. You?” His eyes were as deep-set and intense as ever. Maybe more guarded.

“Pretty beat, actually. Right this moment. Nice sign.”

“Yeah. Well, I wasn’t so sure we’d recognize each other after all these years. Nice hair-line!”

Dave grabbed Randall’s pack and led him briskly past the rent-a-car desks and currency exchanges out to the parking garage. He popped the trunk of his Rover and tossed Randall’s gear in next to his own, slamming the lid hard enough that it echoed through the concrete maze. He stared at Randall, standing on the right side of the car, waiting to get in. “So, you wanna drive, then?”

“No way!” exclaimed Randall. “Want me to kill us both?”

“Then how about going around to the passenger’s side?”

“Oh, right. We’re in England.”

“Yeah.”

“Like I said,” sighed Randall as he pulled his door shut. “I’m pretty beat. Dr. Bad Ass! Maybe Dr. Numb Ass is more like it.”

“Whatever” said Dave, squeezing in behind the wheel and locking the doors before he even stuck the key into the ignition. “Don’t worry. We’ll sort you out real good here.”

“Yeah?”

“Damn straight. Your, uh . . . girl? She’s not gonna recognize what I send back to her.”

They headed straight north from the airport. As the sporty sedan sped up the M-roads towards Worcester, Randall tried to read Dave’s manner and mood. If he’d been expecting any play for pity, he waited in vain. Dave asked how Liz was doing, asked about the pregnancy, even made one or two remarks that hinted he wouldn’t mind moving back to the States, finding another woman, maybe even starting a family. But no angling for sympathy. No real or put-on disdain, either, for the life Randall had made for himself. At the same time, there wasn’t the slightest opening for the conversation to cut deeper, for the kind of baring and soothing of souls Randall had finally admitted to himself he was wanting. It almost felt like they’d just been whisked away from each other by some random force, without the way they felt about each other or about climbing having anything to do with it. Now after all the years they were headed for the crags again, and Dave was tying back in to his end of the metaphorical rope with all the blankness of habit. Where his real thoughts lay, if they were anywhere other than on the cliffs of North Wales, Randall didn’t have a clue. He wondered if he’d made the right decision in coming.

On the heels of seventeen hours in transit, Randall found the ride exhausting. Dave worked the fast lanes of the motorway like they were late for the Ark. Off on the A-roads, he observed the harrowing British custom of making the center strip a full-time passing lane, on-coming traffic be damned. When Randall flinched the third or fourth time, phantom-braking and all, Dave joked that his new road mantra was “Over-taker today, undertaker tomorrow.” Snow dusted the pavement by the time they reached the Welsh Marches and Wrexham, and when they pulled into Betws-y-Coed for a bite, the skies had been dark for an hour.

Over big plates of bubble and squeak – Dave’s half-flip recommendation – Randall asked about his job and got simple but adequate answers. Not exactly cold, but without real affect and nothing that wasn’t straight to the point. The pay was good by British standards, he had the time to keep his name current in climbing circles, and he certainly kept company with some international players. He’d actually been in charge of production safety when they filmed The Eiger Sanction. When he reminisced about late-night drinking bouts at Kleine Scheidegg with Eastwood, George Kennedy, and assorted promiscuous groupies, he spoke with some of the edgy animation of their Stanford days, when the two of them had jabbered endlessly about wine, women, and their next hard route. Then he bitched for a while about getting pinned behind a desk. Dave picked up the tab for the meal, but when Randall thanked him, he said not to count on that kind of thing forever.

By seven they were back on the road, climbing towards Pen-y-Pass on the shoulder of Mt. Snowdon, then down the break-neck bends into the dark defile of Llanberis Pass. High on the north slope, Randall could just make out Dinas Cromlech and its huge dihedral, silhouetted against the skyline like giant tablets waiting for the next Moses. Dave saw him craning his neck and mentioned that he had Cenotaph Corner, the elegant inside line, high on their short list. Then he asked Randall if he felt like a drink. They’d booked a couple of rooms in a B&B down in town, but since the landlady had promised Dave she’d wait up until at least 11, they decided to make the obligatory stop at the climber’s pub in Nant Peris, half-way down the Valley. Maybe a beer or two, thought Randall, would loosen Dave up.

“The Gray Shepherd” is a squat, stone edifice that huddles there under the beetling north ridge of Snowdon. By day, it looks more like a pock-y monolith than a building. Like, maybe, some huge slab that split off Crib Goch and skidded down the scree slopes back before Merlin had ever given Stonehenge a thought. Primordial by day, its aspect come evening is more cheery, watering hole as it is for the hard-drinking fraternity of climbers. As Randall stepped out of the car and sloshed across the muddy parking lot towards the warm lights of the pub, he recalled the legend that gave it its name.

Most climbers knew it, at least anybody who knew anything about hard British rock. High on the shoulders of Snowdon—above Clogwyn D’ur Arddu, the infamous “Black Cliff” Dave and Randall had come to climb—lurked the ghost of a shepherd who’d died cursing all strangers to the valley. Cursing, more particularly, all “sportsmen.” The legend claimed that his daughter, toyed with by a careless young climber from London, had pitched herself in misery down from the highest crags, and that her poor father had perished in a blizzard searching for her broken body. Now there were half a dozen stories of climbing parties benighted up on Cloggy, struggling to the top of the cliff in the darkness, near exhaustion. Some of them, the raconteurs said, vanished without a trace. More to the point, some survivors told of meeting up with an eerie shepherd in a gray cloak who offered to show them the way back down to Llanberis and safety. Those who’d lived to tell the tale refused his help. Too late, the story went, the others learned the shepherd’s “way” led straight off the dizzy lip of the precipice down into the jumbled rocks below. Randall shuddered at the thought of that final, lethal acceleration, then he trailed his old rope-mate into the smoky cavern of the public bar.

By 1980, Dave and Randall had known each other for more than a dozen years. For three of them, they’d arguably been the hottest young climbing duo in Yosemite, maybe in Valley history. They met in the Outing Club freshman year at Stanford and, from the time they first roped up that September, Camp Four buzzed with their exploits. First came a very rapid ascent of Sentinel Rock, climbed free and clean—no hanging in “aid” from any hardware, no protection hammered in to fracture the linear beauty of the rock. That was their ethic: exacting no more toll on the cliffs than the wind and water that had shaped the Valley from the beginning. Next, the second clean ascent of the northwest face of Half-Dome—Ansel Adams’ starkly vertical “Monolith”—up 2,000 feet of sheer granite without a single piton, anchoring their rope to nothing more than newfangled metal wedges they slotted into the subtle cracks that laced the rock. Finally, even though their repeat of the classic Nose Buttress on El Capitan involved a little dangling from pegs left in place by previous parties, they freed over 80% of what was still considered one of the world’s most imposing aid climbs. Veterans of the route were simply incredulous.

Even with the brilliance of that first Fall, though, they were still in a kind of apprenticeship, repeating and freeing classic routes put up by the likes of Royal Robbins, Tom Frost, and Warren Harding. But the Spring was different. Starting with a new line on El Cap, half way between the Nose and the old Salathé Route and surging up the blankest sheet of granite on the 3,000-foot face, they put up climbs that left Valley cognoscenti sputtering. Between April and July, when Randall flew back East for a family reunion, they established half a dozen bold, new routes on walls the previous generation had written off as un-climbable. Almost inevitably, rock pundits divided into two camps. Some welcomed the leap in standards. Others were galled and opposed it. Of the latter, a few were angry seeing their own accomplishments overshadowed by the new climbs, and many others were simply jealous. What you tended to hear, though, was that climbing without pitons on routes this severe was suicidal lunacy. Even a moderate leader fall on vertical granite, claimed the detractors, could pop small wedges out of the rock like buttons out of buttonholes, leaving the climbers in the not-so-tender mercies of gravity. And, they argued on, even if Dave and Randall somehow managed to survive for a year or two climbing the way they did, their example would inevitably tempt less able ropes to take the same risks. Before too long, the Valley would be packed with more hearses than tourist buses. The pair were bad for climbing, many folks claimed, and the rangers should just close the park gates to their rusty VW van.

Like the climbers who watched them, the wunderkind reacted in different ways. Dave, the more emotional one, lashed out at nay-sayers in print and in deed. Randall, more self-possessed, took a longer view. He predicted time would prove them heralds of a new age of climbing, and he said the smart thing to do was just to plug up their ears to praise and blame alike, concentrating on what they loved and did best. Back East that summer, Randall was disturbed by the few, scanty communiqués that trickled in from his partner. There were a couple of bitter arguments-turned-brawls in climbing bars at Tahquitz and Suicide Rocks. There was even an arrest. But he was strangely pleased that Dave wasn’t making it up to the Valley very often, and he certainly wasn’t doing any interesting climbing while his habitual rope-mate stewed on the beaches of Long Island, smeared in Bain de Soleil instead of sweat and climbing chalk. Both the hard routes and the firestorm they stirred up made the two as tight as a rock shoe. If Dave had done anything inspired on El Cap, say, with anyone else, it would have been like cheating on a marriage.

Late August brought the odd couple back together and kicked off their assault on every “last great problem” in sight. Friends joked the Sierra Club would either have to kill the two off or resign themselves to putting out a revised edition of the Yosemite Climbers’ Guide every two months. The jokes soured in February, though, when the pair got caught in a freak storm on the Lost Arrow. Freezing rain iced their ropes and gear and forced an unplanned hanging bivouac half a mile above the Valley floor. Going for speed, they’d been hauling minimal food and gear. And Dave, dangling there in his seat harness through a night when temperatures dipped close to zero, lost all feeling in his feet and lower legs. Dawn brought clearing skies and, after the ropes thawed and they’d stolen back a little of the judgment and muscular control they’d lost to hypothermia, Randall babied his injured partner down ten of the hairiest rappels either of them had ever done. Once off the route, he lugged Dave piggy-back down the boulder slope to the van, hoping to spare his partner’s feet as much damage as he could. Incredibly, the old VW started at the first crank, and Dave was in the ER at Modesto in less than two hours. Still, the frostbite was bad enough to keep him in the hospital for close to three weeks. He ended up losing the first joint of his left big toe—a pretty lucky outcome, under the circumstances. When Randall gave him a silver Bigfoot charm to commemorate the escape, Dave took it as an instant talisman of his good fortune. From then on, he wore it around his neck threaded on a spare bootlace. On or off the crags, he was never without it. His girlfriend Liz claimed if she ever got as close to his heart as that tacky little blob of metal, she’d be a blessed woman.

If surgery left his partner disadvantaged, Randall never knew it. Dave jammed a wad of Silly Putty into the toe of his EB’s, and within four weeks of being discharged he was climbing more creatively than ever, not just on Yosemite’s bread-and-butter jamming cracks but also on the delicate face moves that connect the major fault lines. In fact, the tandem seemed to take new life from their brush with the Great Leveler: the rest of the year they pushed their standards even higher. July saw a Stanford expedition to Moose’s Tooth in Alaska. Even though the weather turned foul and they had to back off the ambitious route, the duo’s neck and genius in legitimate alpine conditions kept their colleagues doubting they were wholly mortal. The trip whetted their appetite for the Alps and, beyond them, the Himalayas. Although junior year at Stanford kept them inside the walls of Yosemite, they planned a summer in Chamonix and harbored even more distant hopes of joining an expedition to the Trango Towers in the Karakoram, something that was just getting put together by the Harvard Outing Club. Although their experience on ice and snow was limited, the two had a reputation on rock that was certifiably international. And, especially since it was one of Randall’s Andover buddies who headed up the Harvards, it seemed like a done deal they’d get a bid to tackle the vast spires dreaming over the Braldu gorge at the western end of the Himalayas. Their only concern was how they’d handle the heights. Over the years, more than one young tiger had found out that skills honed on the warm rock of California can turn out to be useless when your body rebels at the scanty oxygen above 20,000 feet. They were sure, though, it would work out.

They hadn’t bargained on Liz. After three years putting up with the peaks and valleys of Dave’s temper and remove, Liz called it quits. He made an effort to win her back, promising he’d start seeing somebody about his emotional flare-ups. He’d cut back on the long weekends in the Valley so they could have more time together. It was clear soon enough, though, that she’d already paid out all the slack she was willing to pay out and her only thought was to cut their ties before something really nasty happened. Randall’s few conversations with her on Dave’s behalf were fruitless. And, to be honest, he couldn’t bring himself to argue they were really right for each other. True, she was definitely the kind of person who could share her mate with an obsession like climbing. She even joked with Randall she could have been happy with Victor Frankenstein, as long as he hadn’t brought his work home with him. But Dave’s moodiness kept her permanently on edge, and Liz deserved a whole lot better than that.

Gradually, subtly, Dave’s upset told on the partnership. Maybe predictably, he started taking risks even a necky climber like Randall couldn’t justify. It wasn’t just a question of the desperate routes Dave wanted to tackle. He could be a little too sloppy for comfort when he was actually doing them. There were too many shaky belays, too many long, unprotected run-outs. Seconding Dave on another new route on the Salathé Wall, for example, Randall was free-climbing a ten-foot overhang Dave had had to lead in aid, hanging from webbing stirrups clipped to wedges he’d cammed into the crack that split the roof. The move at the edge of the thing was one of the toughest Randall had ever tried—a long throw for a tiny handhold, then a swing on exhausted arms to lock a heel on a small lip of granite. The briefest pause—no place to chill, here, scoping the sentinel pines and boulders in the scree slope 1,200 feet below—then left hand up onto a tiny rugosity, left foot in balance, and a stomach-wrenching pull up onto the face above, right calf bobbing with the strain like a Singer gone berserk. Randall was furious to find Dave belaying him from two thin footholds ten feet farther up, no anchors in the rock at all. What was worse, Dave wouldn’t even admit it was a dumb-ass thing to do. For Randall, it was bad practice compounded by worse judgment, and he finished the climb in his own dark mood.

They climbed together much less often after that. Dave eventually found a new partner and, after graduation, he moved off to Boulder, where he made a name for himself soloing on the red rock of Eldorado Canyon. For Randall, the notices in Climbing or even Mountain were sad reminders his friend had gone over the edge. Climbing severe routes solo was the straightest line to the obituary column. Randall fully expected to find Dave’s name among the Honored Dead every time he cracked a climbing rag. In fact, though, Dave’s widened notoriety earned him his bid to the Karakoram, and he was part of a successful three-man ascent of Trango Tower which, claimed the climbing press, finally introduced all the radical advances of Yosemite to the Himalayas. His name mattered to people.

For his own part, the last few climbs with Dave put Randall right off the sport. If you’d asked him a few months later if he were a climber, he’d probably have said no: he just bouldered a little to stay in shape. He also started medical school in Los Angeles, which took up all of his time and more. Maybe more significantly, medicine promised a future with a certain allure—one for which he’d likely need all his fingers and most of his toes. He began to see the commitment he’d brought to hard climbs getting channeled in new directions, now, and the risks he’d always been willing to assume smacked to him of adolescent irresponsibility. Somewhat to his surprise, accounts of Dave’s triumphs in the highest ranges of the world left him without a twinge of envy. He just hoped his old friend was at peace with himself and happy. But, it made him sad to realize, he doubted it.

Then, after losing touch with Liz for well over a year, Randall ran into her at a friend’s wedding in Palo Alto. Without either of them really pushing, they began to see a lot of each other. She worked at the Bay-Area headquarters of Pacific Airways, so she was able to fly down to L.A. for weekends on free passes. As they both confronted challenging new careers, their common experience came to seem more and more valuable to them. So, when they finally acknowledged there was also a real spark between them, they resolved to make a life together. The wedding was set for June, two years after they’d finished at Stanford, and lots of their friends came back to the coast for the twin attractions of the nuptials and a mini-reunion. Randall toyed with inviting Dave, but finally thought better of it. Still, he sent him a long letter that March, breaking the news and trying to make a kind of peace. It went unanswered until the night of the rehearsal dinner, when a florist arrived at the last minute with roses and a bottle of Dom Perignon. “Hoping you’re both happy with each other!” read the type-written note. “Just Dave.”

By the time they heard from him again, Randall had finished medical school and was well into his residency in Seattle. Liz discovered in October she was pregnant and made plans for a leave from her job in March. A Christmas card arrived with a London postmark, and when Randall opened it, a longish letter from Dave fell out. It said some of the things Randall already knew. His old partner had used the royalties from his Trango book to start up a business in Boulder, manufacturing specialty equipment for extreme mountaineering. He should have been able to make a go of it. Randall had seen the stuff—even used some of it back-country skiing in the Sierra—and it was first-rate. Only someone with Dave’s experience could have designed it. But, for reasons which never came fully clear, Nordwand Equipment went belly up after just a year and a half and Dave had taken a job with a British firm, endorsing their products and holding down a middle-level management position in London. He still climbed during the Himalayan season, but he found himself more and more tied to a desk—and, he said, more and more discontented. After several abortive relationships with British women – “bints” it both pissed and reassured Liz that he called them – he’d basically resigned himself, in his own words, to “irregular monasticism.”

When he invited Randall to fly over in February to pursue one of their earliest dreams—winter ascents of the best of Joe Brown’s routes in Snowdonia—a bunch of factors made the offer irresistible. The hospital was moving to new quarters, and the administration jumped at the chance to lay off staff while the patient load was reduced to facilitate the process. He finally had some money. Liz could spare him better in February than a couple of months later; and, besides, she had plans to spend an extra-long week-end with her parents in Arizona. Most importantly, though, Randall would have a chance for what could be some healing time with as close a friend as he’d had. Medical school and residency had changed him. Maybe predictably, the more life’s fragilities were forced on his notice, the more he’d learned to value the intangibles it offers in its brief span. Like friendships. He booked a flight the next day.

During the regular season, “The Shepherd” is packed with climbers every night until closing. Local rock-hounds call it “The Registry of Misdeeds.” You haven’t really finished a climb on Dinas Cromlech or Dinas Mot until you’ve lied about its desperate difficulties over a pint. When he and Randall stumped in out of the deep January chill, the place was only sparsely filled. A fire blazed on the hearth, though, and the meager company was congenial. A pair of dour-looking men acknowledged Dave and exchanged rough pleasantries. When he’d bought the first round and mentioned the first route he and Randall had planned on Cloggy, the two caught eyes and nodded appreciatively. It was hardly a walk-up in the best of weather, and in the snow squalls predicted for the next day it could be “a ruddy classic,” said the one. “A right bollock-buster,” chuckled the other. Randall wondered if he was up to it.

Leaning up against the bar next to his old friend, a pint of Guinness cradled in his hand, Randall searched his mind for a gambit that might open things up between them. It was early days yet, but there just wasn’t enough renewed comradeship going on here to justify Dave’s inviting him on a six-thousand-mile climbing junket. Randall was way too out of shape to make him a decent partner on a climb of any real interest, and so far this definitely didn’t feel like it was designed to be either a joyous reunion or a mending of fences. As lead after lead failed either to rile or to soften Dave’s stiff demeanor, Randall’s imagination began to take some fairly ugly turns. A right bollock-buster! Suppose that beneath the calm veneer, Dave harbored a consequential grudge towards the man who’d ruptured their miraculous partnership: the man who had found the peace and security he himself was lacking – and found it, worst of all, with the woman he had loved. Sure, Dave would be crazy to think Randall had somehow stolen Liz away from him. But there was no reason to think he couldn’t and wouldn’t resent their ending up together. Hoping you’re both happy with each other! Randall couldn’t shake the suspicion that the real motive for this kind of un-companionable reunion was some sort of come-uppance through humiliation. Randall’s climbing standard was bound to be disgraceful. He might well flounder on the route. He might not have the balls to take any leads at all. He might literally have to depend on Dave to get him up and down alive. And from there, he cursed himself to admit, it was shamefully easy to fantasize that a man who both climbed and drove now as though life hardly mattered to him anymore might have lured him over here for a variation on the Gray Shepherd legend – to lead his victim up onto the buttresses of the Black Cliff for the ultimate repayment of another betrayed trust.

For the second time that night, Randall shuddered—then he pulled himself up straight. He was being a fucking fruitcake here, an hallucinating loony like the psychotic governess in The Turn of the Screw. It reminded him of the panic he used to feel some nights in the Valley before big climbs, when he’d read a knocked-over Coors bottle or a crumbling joint as some kind of augury of imminent doom. Or the way his first year in med school made him so sure he’d contracted every disease he was reading about that his lymph nodes actually did swell to plague-sized buboes, if only from his constant, poking self-examinations. Get real! Why should he expect this get-together with an old friend to involve any kind of deep confession or forgiveness—either as soon as they saw each other or, in fact, at all? And why, failing that, should he go straight to assuming that Dave wanted to give him the chop? Here, in The Gray Shepherd, he was thinking in pure black and white. He cursed himself for the stupidity of it, and for the injustice to Dave. He tossed back the Guinness, slid out his glass for another, and relaxed into a perfectly acceptable evening.

The next day dawned blustery and cold. Looking up into the pass through the rattling tableside window, munching his last piece of cold toast, Randall was anxious again. He told himself it was just the nerves he’d always felt before he roped up for a major climb. True, the route they were planning wasn’t tough by current standards. But in the prevailing conditions, and after the lay-off he’d had, it would take all his ability and determination just to second Dave. Only after the pair of them had trudged the two-odd miles of cog-railway roadbed and the rocky track that skirted the tarn at the foot of the remote cliff did Randall finally warm to the task. He took off his rucksack and swapped his down jacket for the windbreaker and climbing gear inside. It felt good stepping into his old sit-harness, and his hands tied into the rope as effortlessly as if he’d climbed last week-end.

The first pitch of the 850-foot climb wasn’t much of a problem. The route started up a slightly flaring, four-inch crack, and Dave moved up it with the graceful ease Randall well remembered. Some of his Yosemite admirers had dubbed him “Señor Gecko” – which, among the more persistent Valley groupies, quickly mutated into “Love Lizard.” The golden girls who turned Camp Four into Woodstock West, what with their skimpy tank tops and cut-off jeans, regularly ogled Dave and tittered about his legendary “finger strength,” his “jamming,” and his “reach,” all in conspiratorial tones designed to cloud the distinction between wishful thinking and lustful recollection. They even did it when Liz was there, Randall grimaced to recall. The first pitch of the climb was actually more settling than the memories. It was easy enough for Randall to follow that he didn’t give a second thought to Dave’s running out 100 feet of rope without putting in a single point of protection. It really wasn’t called for.

The next rope-length, however, rose closer to vertical, and the crack flared enough that jamming hands and feet securely inside wouldn’t be easy. Add the clouds hanging darkly over the cliff, spitting down intermittent flurries of sleet, and Randall’s elation started to wane—even though the ice shower was simply hissing off the holds for now, and Dave, forced out of the crack onto the smoother rock of the face, still moved with style and assurance. But there were few spots to slot in runners, and the pitch ended with another long, unprotected run-out. It occurred grimly to Randall that it wasn’t for nothing, after all, that he’d stopped climbing with Dave all those years back.

* * * [Break for Serialization?] * * *

The second belay stance was over 200 feet up the wall – “sportily situated,” as the guidebook so Britishly put it. Pulling up next to Dave, gasping for breath, Randall was hard pressed to decide whether the exertion or the exposure were taking more out of him. He swallowed purposefully and, as his pulse settled in his ears and his wind returned, he commented on the sparseness of the protection his old partner had put in.

“Well,” Dave countered, “I honestly thought of you, old pal, but nothing was small enough to fit in. Maybe you’re suggesting I could’ve jammed old Bigfoot into some willing little crack, eh?” A deadpan mask warped into a lewd smirk. Dave reached into the neck of his shirt and pulled out the talisman on its frayed blue cord, dangling it out towards Randall. “Not sure me bootlace would have held much of a peel, though, don’tcha know?” He spun the little charm in tight circles until it caught his wrist and jerked to a halt. “Ooops,” he said, with mock concern. “Easy, now.” He tucked the thing back in his shirt. “So!” He skewered Randall with a hard gaze. “Like crazy Yeats said, mate: ‘Things fall apart.’”

Randall winced at the snide gestures. At the way they profaned the spirit in which the little charm had been given. Profaned, in fact, most of what he’d thought he and Dave might still share. He just managed a half-laugh and got ready to belay his old partner up the next pitch.

The next two rope-lengths were straightforward. Dave moved steadily upwards, stopping occasionally to put in protection, but not nearly as often as Randall would have liked. A fall here on a long run-out would probably leave the Shepherd carving up two more notches on his crook, without his even having to out in an appearance. Randall wasn’t sure the day was really getting darker, or whether his dwindling confidence just made him more sensitive to the conditions. But the wind was picking up. When Dave completed the fourth pitch, Randall could barely hear him yell “Off belay,” and it was only a brisk double tug on the rope that told him he could start climbing up through the stinging sleet. He reached the stance sweating with exertion and some little fear. Dave’s sole greeting, a twisted grin, did little to calm his fraying nerves.

“Shades of Lost Arrow, no?” chuckled Dave. He didn’t wait for an answer before he turned to prepare for the next lead.

One more pitch and they reached a point of decision. The crack system they’d been following, up and to the right, petered out into slatey blankness. To continue, they’d have to swing over to another line of weakness, almost parallel to their first line but thirty feet to the right. The only problem was this new crack stretched down no closer than four hundred feet to the scree at the cliff’s base. Once they’d committed themselves to it, there’d be no retreat, given the right-hand trend of both lines. The wall below was void of any natural anchor points, and they hadn’t brought along a bolt kit. Even rappelling on both ropes tied end to end – an unusual move which would give them no chance of retrieving their lifeline – they’d run out of elevator a hundred feet above the patient boulders. A little too high to let go, even if you were in the kind of shape Dave was!

The two paused for a couple of minutes, leaning into the wall on a narrow ledge as the wind tore at their packs and clothing. Their faces were no more than a foot apart. As Randall stared at Dave’s eyes, sparkling fiercely under his frosted brows, it occurred to him he’d never give voice to the caution crying to him now from all the more sensible corners of his brain. This is just another Lost Arrow, he thought to himself; we’ll make it no sweat and laugh about it back in the pub. If he’s trying to stick my face into how soft I’ve gotten while he’s still the hard guy, welcome to it. Anything the son of a bitch can lead, I can sure as hell follow. Then again, he allowed himself to counter with a wry smirk, if the bastard’s trying to kill me, I’m sure as hell not going to give him the satisfaction of begging for mercy.

“Lemme do the pendulum,” Randall shouted. “I need something to spice up this bloody cakewalk.”

As Dave slotted in two big wedges to anchor the ropes, Randall unclipped his figure-8 descender from his equipment rack. Looping the rope through, he snapped it into his harness carabiner, screwing down the gate lock, then double-checked the whole rig. Reassured, he rappelled forty or fifty feet down through the thickening sleet, then tied himself off. First with slow, tiny steps–his toes skidding for purchase–then with larger and larger strides, he ran back and forth across the slick rock face, coming closer to the second crack system with every rightward swing. He was almost exhausted by the time he jammed his right hand and elbow into a large fissure, and his head spun with the exposure. Resting just long enough to collect his wits, he unclipped from the rappelling rope and started wrestling his way up the crack, fitting in wedges about three times as often as Dave would have done. He set them with extra care, so a fall with Dave belaying him above and off to the side wouldn’t let the climbing rope lift out the wedges and leave him winging through a second, unplanned pendulum.

Blessedly, given Randall’s general level of fitness and confidence, the crack was fairly easy. He could scrunch his entire body inside it and wriggle steadily upwards without worrying too much about the airy reaches below his feet. Twenty minutes later, he was forty feet higher in the new crack system than Dave was in the old. He rigged a belay and, as his partner rappelled down the free rope, he hauled in on the climbing rope to help him over to the new crack. Once across, Dave retrieved the rope he’d descended and, in what seemed like only a second or two, surged up to the belay stance, collecting the protection as he came.

“Guess you haven’t lost it all, mate,” he yelled to Randall with another smirk. “Guess I gotta think up something else to make this really interesting.”

“Don’t put yourself out,” Randall shouted over the wind. “Mate.”

There was enough of the old humor in the exchange to make it familiar. But there was a new adversarial quality that disturbed Randall. They weren’t climbing as partners. Dave was in control, putting him through something. Or maybe he was just over-reading. Randall struggled to rein in his imagination. It was getting to seem like a pretty constant occupation these days.

By now, the clouds had swept down over the crag, blotting out the view of the tarn 500 feet below. It occurred to Randall that the moisture in them would soon begin to freeze on the wind-chilled rock. He tugged the collar of his parka up around his neck as Dave got set for the next pitch. If it got any colder, he’d have to trade his fingerless gloves for mittens, maybe even climb in them.

The crack drove straight up for another thirty feet, then leaned back into the overhang that was the crux of the climb. Dave negotiated the first section quickly, pausing only when he reached the start of the roof to put in some solid protection. At least he’s not wacko enough to try the crux with no runners, thought Randall. “Climbing again,” came a shout over the roar of wind, and Randall began to pay out rope. As he looked up, the sleet needled his eyes but he was gripped by the sight of his partner swinging up under the roof, hands and boots jammed into the three-inch crack and his gear sling hanging straight out from his back with the pull of gravity. A friendly bat, thought Randall, looking for a comforting image. A funky chandelier. That made him think of Liz. He could imagine Dave grunting with the effort, but he could hear nothing beyond the howl and hiss of the elements. He watched intently as Dave, safely ensconced in the one resting spot, quickly placed two more chocks—this time a couple of Ray Jardine’s new-fangled cams that spread out and hold under a load. “Friends.” Randall had heard people rave about their bomb-proof security. The caution was reassuring. Three or four more minutes and Dave had reached the lip of the overhang, pulling strongly up and disappearing from view. The crux was in the bag. Fifteen more feet of rope paid out, a short pause, and then two faint tugs. Randall recalled the route description and thought it was maybe a little soon for Dave to have reached the next belay stance. But when the rope came up firmly, he began to unrig his belay plate, getting ready to climb.

He didn’t hear or feel the first clues of the fall. The storm had deafened him, and Dave apparently hadn’t slotted any wedges between the roof and his high point. Just the ghost of something more substantial than sleet hurtled out over the edge and then the rope whipped taut like steel cable, wrenching Randall upward on his anchor. His head slammed into the rock above and the rope tore through his hands, shredding the half gloves he was wearing and ripping deep into his flesh. Without thinking, he tightened his grip, trading agony for a life, and the searing line began to slow. When it jerked to a stop, he looked down through the mist to Dave, bobbing upright on the thinly-stretched perlon some thirty feet below. “Whee-doggies,” he shouted. “Such a ride!”

“You okay?” yelled Randall.

“Think so,” came the reply. “Well, no. Shit. Lost the damn traveler’s checks.”

Randall didn’t smile. “Can you prussik back up? I ain’t haulin’ ya in, you clumsy fuck head.”

“No sweat.” Dave un-racked two loops of nylon cord and rigged them into the sliding knots he could use to inch up the taut lifeline back to the rock.

Randall’s gaze fell to his hands. The blood had started to ooze out of his flayed palms. It ran with the melting sleet through his fingers and off into the mist below. With the fall held, his body began to assess the damage, and the attention brought on the pain. The good news was he wasn’t in shock. His gorge rose, but he choked it back. His eyes closed with the throbbing in his left temple, where he’d crashed up into the rock. Then he could hear Dave working his way up, hardware clanking, breath coming in sharp gasps. When he opened his eyes again, his partner dangled just ten feet in front of him, spinning slowly on the rope, spotting Randall with his head like some kind of macabre aerial dancer. Barnum and Bailey Go Arctic.

“Little slick up there,” he yelled, with that cool grin. “Sorry if I scared you. Can you climb?”

Randall looked down at the mess in his palms. “Don’t think so.”

“I’ll blow on up to the stance, then. You can prussik up this . . . ” he paused, reaching back for the second rope hitched to the top of his pack. “Then we’ll see what happens. Next.” Randall looked up to catch Dave’s expression, but he’d twisted around again on the rope and was facing out into the howling void.

Dave pulled the second rope free and, uncoiling it as he spun back towards the rock, he tossed an end to Randall. Randall caught it with a sweep of his arm and set about tying into the end and rigging his own prussik knots, cringing with pain at each flex of a finger. By the time he was set, Dave had reached his stance and gave a couple of sharp tugs on the climbing rope. Randall untied himself and cautiously swung out onto the freestanding line, catching his breath until the knots held. Slowly, and with exquisite agony, he pushed the top knot upwards, stepped up into the attached sling, brought up the second knot, stood in that sling – and so moved on up through the spindrift. Just before he reached the edge of the roof, he saw the other rope snaking up through the runners as Dave retrieved it. Screw trying to collect the protection.

Once he was past the roof, the going got easier. The rock lay back at a more moderate angle and, even with the glaze forming on the holds as he watched, it was easy enough to manage with the help of the rope. He wondered how Dave could have slipped on ground this simple. He recalled the rodeo yell and the crack about the ride. Nagging doubts flooded back. Now more than ever, he was at Dave’s complete mercy.

“What now, ol’ frien’?” he asked, finally pulling up to the belay. Despite his exertion, the cold was getting to him. His own words hummed in his ears in a jumble of indistinct vowels. It was an early sign of hypothermia, he knew, and he felt both frustration and dismay. It was a hell of a time to lose his edge. His head drooped towards his chest, partly to get the sting of the sleet off his face, partly to hide what felt like despair.

“Well, I’ll lead through—you follow on prussiks. Hey. You don’t look so good. Can you keep it up?”

“S’there any . . . ‘v’I got any choice?”

When he looked up, Dave was glaring at him, his face only a hand’s breadth away. Randall found it was impossible to focus so close. Maybe it was the knock on the head. He felt he was looking out through to the back of his partner’s skull. Dave paused to chose his words – like a duelist, it occurred darkly to Randall, hefting a weapon. “Life’s full of choices, ‘old friend.’ Who knows better than you? Huh?” Then, as he pulled his head back into focal range, a wry smile. And he was humming something. Faint, half-cocked memories. Mouthing words. Shades of a jade pipe and a glass paddle of Mateus and the sun crashing into the fog out past the Golden Gate. “You take what you need . . . leave the rest. . .” two beats of nothing but the wind “but they should never . . . have taken . . . the very best . . . .” He backed farther away.

Randall froze as Dave’s barbs drove in with the frigid blast. He knew now he was utterly cooked. It was just left to be seen how Dave would do it. Finish it. The coup de grace. The wind and sleet clawed at his face, but Randall was surprised how calm he felt. Like he’d been dosed with Valium for a colonoscopy.

“Won’ be able to belay, y’know?” he muttered into the gale.

“What?” shouted Dave, still leaning back.

“No belay!” yelled Randall, showing his torn hands.

“No sweat,” came the reply, as Dave moved closer again. “I dig them desperate solos.”

“Um, yeah. So we heard.” Randall could see Dave’s jaw clench. His nostrils flared.

“You and Liz. You still think I’m an asshole, don’t you? Just a reckless asshole.”

Randall shrugged.

“Fuck you both! I mean it. Fuck you both to hell!” Dave ran his hand under his nose, smearing a line of snot up onto his sleeve. He shook his head, took a deep breath, then held up a loop of rope off his harness. “Okay, damn it! This is a long pitch. We may have wanted longer ropes. 165’s.”

“Really! Nice! Nice to hear about it now.”

“Yeah.” Again the glare. “So if I don’t reach the stance,” Dave yelled, “I signal. And you untie. I set something up higher and get back to you.” He pointed to the second rope.

Randall stared at him, looking for a trace of the truth. “Promise?” Something made him giggle, and it turned into a shudder.

Dave’s eyebrow twitched. “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that. So, no belay! Any words of wisdom, Obi-wan?”

“Like what? Las’ words?”

“Whatever.”

“Nada, buddy,” was all Randall could manage.

“Chilly fucking bastard. No Vaya con Dios? Happy landings?”

“N-Nada.”

Dave paused for a moment, peering at his old partner. He looked ready to say something, something hard to formulate. Then he just lowered his eyes and jammed the spare rope into his pack. He checked the knot at his harness, turned his back, and was gone.

Randall watched the rope trail out with that weird, drugged equanimity. In these conditions, without the warmth of movement, the end would be quick. The agony in his hands would thankfully deaden with each minute. When the rope came taut, it was almost as though he’d written the scenario himself. Dave tugged as though the rope were run all the way out without his reaching the belay point. Randall was supposed to untie now, let Dave reach a safe perch, and then wait. He knew, though, that if he untied, he’d never see either the rope or Dave ever again. He huddled there inertly as the perlon jerked again. Nothing. Again. Then Dave finished the charade. The dangling line slithered down over the rocks and fell in a damp cascade into the milling clouds below. When he reported the accident that night in Llanberis –maybe even in the morning if he felt like making extra sure – Dave would explain that his injured partner had lost consciousness on one of the last pitches. He’d had to untie, he’d say, so he could finish the route and go for help. What a tragedy it got there too late!

As he sat there, collecting himself for the end, Randall caught sight of something else spinning down out of the clouds. In the split second it took to rocket past his smarting eyes, he could tell it was a body, plunging with awful finality down through the swirling mists. He could hear nothing above the screaming wind, and the image of his rope-mate, pin-wheeling down in roaring silence, was like a nightmare sequence in a B-movie. Well, Randall thought, I guess we’ll end it together after all. Weariness consumed him.

He might have slumped there for hours because it was getting dark when his mind shuddered back into focus. He was trembling uncontrollably, but, the more he racked his memory, the more he knew something else had roused him. It made sense, if a crazy kind of sense, that Dave could have staged that first fall to set the thing up; he’d taken an awful lot of care placing those runners under the roof. He couldn’t exactly have counted on Randall’s hands getting trashed, but they sure as hell had gotten trashed, and he couldn’t do a thing with them. But how about the second fall? While still tricky in winter, the last pitches of the route were supposed to be the easiest on the cliff. With growing panic, Randall heaved himself up to his feet, shaking off the rime and new-fallen snow that coated his clothing. His hands were completely numb but, ironically, that meant he could use them some without fainting with the pain. Slowly at first, then with a little more speed and assurance, he worked his way up the face, clumsily dusting off holds, stepping up, repeating the motions. There were some moves he had no right to make, especially injured the way he was, and in this weather. But he was driven, and his stiffened hands sometimes served as wedges where warm fingers might not have held. After twenty minutes, looking for anchor points but seeing none, he approached what must have been the spot where Dave signaled he’d run out of rope. Then, through wraiths of spindrift, some fifty feet above, he saw Dave’s pack with the extra coil of perlon, wedged with unmistakable purpose and care into a widening crack. The truth bloomed like blood in snow. If Dave really meant to leave him to freeze on the cliff, why would he have left both his pack and the rope behind? He’d either have hung onto one or both for safety’s sake or tossed them down, claiming he’d lost them in the accident. It could only mean one thing, and it dashed Randall’s heart.

Dave really had run out the rope without finding a good belay, and then he’d signaled to be untied. When he felt the continued resistance, he must have assumed Randall was much worse off than he really was, probably unconscious. He’d have known he didn’t have much time to act. Scrambling up to this crack, he must have stashed his gear for speed of movement and to mark the spot below which his old friend could be found. Then he must have rushed himself moving up the slick rock and made his second mistake of the climb. This time, however, there’d been no rope to stop his fall, no partner to hold him. So there had been a betrayal after all that day on Clogwyn D’ur Arddu. And it wasn’t Dave’s.

Randall reeled with the insight. He crouched there longer than he knew, sobbing as the wind made to pluck him from his holds and sweep him off to oblivion. It was only with instinct that he began to move again, hauling himself up fifty more feet of the cliff, then staggering out of balance as the gradient eased. The snow deepened, obscuring the rock, and Randall floundered upward in a blind reflex of anguish. When he could go no farther, he dropped to his knees, then went chest down in a shallow drift. The cool of the snow soothed his stinging eyes and, with each breath he took, a trace of moisture found its way to his parched tongue. “Taken . . . the very . . . best . . . .”

Life, now, was just a tiny silver ball in his outstretched hand. He decided he’d let it fall.

Some time then, with the touch on his shoulder, he raised his head, drunkenly, dreamily. Through his frozen lashes, he could just make out a form bent over him, a face pressed close to his. Words – Welsh were they? – sang distantly in his ears. He was wrestled up in strong arms, standing once again in the blast. His body heaved with a bone-deep chill, and he shook so hard his knees almost buckled. An easy weight fell on his shoulders, and rough fabric grazed his cheek. Hands tugged at his neck, twisted his shoulders, wrenched him about. More distant phrases, undecipherable, siren-like, and he let himself be led back down the snowy slope, back towards the Black Cliff, the long drop, justice.

When Randall awoke, he was in a bleak, white room, sparsely furnished. The shade was drawn, but he could tell the sun was lighting it from behind. Resting on the spread covering his chest were huge, gauzy mitts. He made out that his hands were inside. He could just detect some feeling in them, and it wasn’t pleasant. A crisply-dressed young woman opened the wide door and walked in. When she saw he was back, she told him he was in the hospital in Caernarfon. A couple of climbers had literally stumbled on him early that morning, crumpled on the railway tracks opposite Cloggy, almost a mile from the rock face. Mountain Rescue lugged him down to Llanberis, where the ambulance was waiting for the hospital run. They’d called Liz and she was flying over the next day. The doctors thought he’d keep his fingers.

As the nurse left, Randall looked slowly around the room, trying to piece things together. Except for the indelible image of Dave whirling silently down—that and the deadening guilt that swelled in his wake—he could almost have convinced himself they’d never set foot on the Black Cliff. Then his eye fell on something that riveted his attention. Draped neatly over the back of a chair holding his folded clothes, something bulky. An overcoat, it looked like. Nothing of his. He craned his neck. Shoving off the covers with the back of his hand, he swung his legs painfully off the bed and sat there grimacing until his vision cleared. He rose to his feet and shuffled unsteadily over to the chair. Using his forearms like pincers, he gathered the thick woolen garment to his chest and embraced it. The rich scent of its oil filled his nostrils. Moving back to the bed, he sat again and stared intently down. It was indeed a coat he held in his lap, the rough, gray coat of a shepherd. The kind of stout garment that could save a life in the deadliest weather.