Note: I originally wrote this in 2006 for a creative writing class assignment. The assignment was to write a short story using the letters of the alphabet in order, each subsequent sentence beginning with the next letter. I wrote this while I was at the Army Cold Weather Leader's Course, a training school in Alaska about 120 miles south of Fairbanks. One of the classes we took there was on avalanches.
Avalanches happen over a million times a year worldwide. Because they're essentially unpredictable, and because they rarely kill more than a couple of people at a time, they aren't a general concern. Compacted snow from the barreling slide forms an airless pack around the body. Don't breath, because your breath will melt the snow and form a mask of ice and suffocate you. Everybody dies, of course, some day. Forget about going peacefully, though. Gather your last breath and hold onto it like a string of rosary beads, praying. Hope your friend is digging for you, and digging in the right place. In fifteen minutes you will have a fifty percent chance of survival. Just hold that breath, though. Keep hoping, you could be just below the surface. Listen to the sound of the snow settling, a constant groan. Move, try to scratch at the unbelievable weight. Nevermind the cold, you can live without fingers and feet. Only your friend can save your air, your life, scraping his gloves into the crust above you. Picture the scene unfolding there. Quiet sun, the settled snow, mounds of it each the size of a pickup. Rocks and uprooted spruce trees with their trunks exposed, roots opened to the sky like arms in praise. Somewhere nearby the noise of your friend. Two million tons of snow and here you are, beneath him. Up there the world is as peaceful as ever, the din of the rolling snow long since echoed away. Very close now; you hear him coming. When he finds you, how will you feel, what will you say, when you devour the blue air? X your heart and tip your hat to fate? You think, for a second, of what you will do if you live. Zero in on that thought, hold it like a rosary bead, like a last breath.
