The sledge tracks north from Ivdel were older than the horse pulling them, cut and recut by generations of forestry teams into the black spruce. Pyotr sat with the box across his knees and did not look at it. He had inventoried its contents twice in the office at Sverdlovsk — the folded shirts, the watch that no longer wound, a private diary he had catalogued without reading past the first line — and once was more than his stomach had wanted.
He was an assistant investigator, which meant he logged what others decided. In February he had gone up because someone junior had to. He remembered the tent most clearly of all of it: found on the twenty-sixth, partly fallen, the canvas torn, and inside it the boots and the padded coats and the equipment all set in place as though the occupants had only stepped out to look at the weather. That orderliness had unsettled the search party more than any wound would have. Men who flee do not stack their boots.
The case file recorded that a forensic garment expert, consulted later, had concluded the tent was slashed open from within. Pyotr had held the fabric himself and had not been able to say. But he believed the expert. He had turned that conclusion over on the long train and could make it mean only one thing: whatever was inside the tent had become worse than the slope outside it, and quickly.
And then the footprints. Eight or nine sets, walking — not running — down the slope toward the treeline, most of them made by feet in stockings or bare, pressed into the crust and raised on their little pedestals of packed snow as the wind wore the loose snow away around them. They descended several hundred meters in a line and then the drifts took them. Pyotr had walked beside that line with his notebook and felt, even then, that he was reading a sentence whose verb had been erased.
He stopped at a forestry outpost a half-day short of the pass because the horse needed rest and because he had been told an old woodsman lived there who had gone up with the first searchers.
Grigory was thin and unhurried, and he made tea without asking whether Pyotr wanted it. They spoke of the ruling first, because it was the easiest thing to speak of. The case had been closed at the end of May. The wording, Pyotr said, was "a compelling natural force," and nothing further.
"A door with no room behind it," Grigory said. He did not seem angry about it.
"The villagers talk of lights," Pyotr offered. "Orange spheres, that winter."
"People saw what they saw in the sky. It has nothing to do with the slope." Grigory tipped his head. "And they will tell you the name means Dead Mountain. The scholars argue about the words. The old stories are older than the words." He waved this away too, as a man waves smoke. "None of that killed anyone."
"Then what does the mountain do?"
Grigory considered him for a moment, deciding, perhaps, whether Pyotr was the kind of official who wanted an answer or the kind who wanted to be agreed with.
"It breathes downhill," he said. "Up on the high flat, the air lies still and grows heavy with cold. Heavier than the air below it. It builds and builds until it cannot hold, and then it falls — down the slope, all at once, like a stone off a shelf. Silent. You do not hear it coming because it is only air. Then it is on you, and it is colder than anything, and it is moving." He set down his cup. "It would flatten a tent. It would take the warmth out of a man in the time it takes to lace a boot. So you do not lace the boot. You go, downhill, away from the open, toward the trees, in a line, because there is no time to be anything but orderly."
Pyotr said nothing. In his mind the erased verb of the footprints was filling itself in, and he found he did not like knowing it.
"They went down to the trees to get out of the wind," Grigory said. "That was the sane thing. The trees were not enough."
At the outpost that night Pyotr opened the box a last time by lamplight, because he could not sleep and because the thing had to be done before he handed it over.
There was a pair of felt boots that had never been worn out into the snow — left behind in the tent, undamaged, useless now. He set them aside. Among the coats he caught again the faint metallic scent he had noticed in the office and could not name, and he did not try to name it now. Under the clothing lay the copies of the autopsy findings for the four recovered in May, seventy-odd meters past the great cedar, brought up out of the ravine from beneath four meters of snow.
He read them slowly. The examiner had recorded, in three of the four, major internal injury — crushed chest, a broken skull — with no wounds to the skin above them, and had written that the force resembled a motor-car collision. In the office men had whispered that this proved a blow, an attack, a thing done by hands.
Grigory, when Pyotr had described it, had only nodded toward the window and the dark. "They dug in below the trees, out of the wind. Into the snow of the ravine. And the snow above them, loaded, came down. All that weight at once, on people already spent." He had shrugged. "The snow does not bruise the skin. It presses everything from every side. Like water closing over you."
Pyotr set the papers back in order. He understood, sitting there, that he would file nothing. There would be no addendum in his hand appended to a ruling signed and closed by men above him; the ledger was shut, and no signature of his would open it. And even if it could — the wind that Grigory described left no track of its own. It broke no tools, dropped no thing to be photographed and tagged. It arrived and departed and took only the temperature of the air with it, and afterward there was nothing in the snow to inventory. He had spent a winter and a spring gathering evidence for a cause that, if it was the true one, could by its nature leave none.
He believed Grigory. He decided that he believed him, the way a man decides to set down a weight he has been carrying without meaning to pick it up. It was not the answer the file would ever carry. It was only his.
In the last of the twilight he stood outside the cabin. The pines began a few paces off and closed quickly into dark. Far to the north he could make out the pale shoulder of the mountain, low and broad against a sky going the color of ash, and he looked at it because it was easier than looking at the box he had left inside.
The cold came down off the heights while he watched. He felt it arrive at his collar and then at his ankles, a slow draft sliding down out of the dark plateau, silent, moving as if it had somewhere to be. It reached the pines at his feet and turned them over with a long dry sound, needle against needle, and passed on down the slope below him toward the treeline and the ravines he could not see.
He stood until it had gone by. Then he went in and shut the door, and left the mountain to breathe as it did, over ground that would keep its own account, or none.