The Last Ridge, Part 2: The Notebook in His Rucksack
advancedsports305 words
Part 2 of 5. On the long walk to the mountain, a retired guide in her fifties counts the days to Camp Three and finds a small black notebook hidden in her young client's rucksack.
Monday, September 8th
By Thursday we will have been walking for four days, and I still won't know why Tomas chose me. He is nineteen, strong, polite, and so careful with his words that every conversation feels like a form he is filling in.
Today we walked from the valley to the old shepherds' hut at 2,100 metres. He was faster than me on the steep part and pretended not to be, slowing down whenever I fell behind. I hate being looked after. I used to be the one doing the looking after.
At six tomorrow morning we will be crossing the moraine, and if the weather holds, we will have reached the glacier hut by early afternoon. Then two days on the ice, then Camp Three, then the ridge. I have been climbing this route in my head for twenty years, mostly at night, mostly backwards.
Something happened this evening that I can't stop thinking about. While Tomas was outside filling the water bottles, I moved his rucksack to make room by the stove, and a notebook slid halfway out of the top pocket. Small, black, the cover soft with age, the kind of notebook climbers carried before phones. On the front, in faded silver pen, two initials: P.B.
I pushed it back before he came in. I didn't say anything. Neither did he.
Paul always carried a black notebook. He wrote down everything: times, temperatures, what we ate, who complained. I used to laugh at him for it. 'In twenty years,' he said once, 'someone will be reading this and thanking me.'
By this time on Friday, I'll be sleeping at Camp Three, a few hundred metres from where I last saw him. I wonder whether Tomas will have told me the truth by then.
Or whether I will have told him mine.