Her stillness terrified me. I stopped, lungs burning, and pushed the blankets away from her face. Her skin had taken on a waxy pallor. Her lips were tinged blue. Her breath was shallow, barely visible in the air.
Bess stood nearby with her head low, shivering so violently that her whole body seemed to tremble. The animal understood what I understood: if we stopped here, we would die here.
Panic pierced through my exhaustion like a blade. This was the moment of failure.
Mr. Davies’s words echoed in my mind. A liability. A burden.
Perhaps he had been right. Perhaps this climb was nothing more than a fool’s errand, a stubborn march toward a frozen grave. The thought of lying down in the snow, of surrendering to the soft sleep of cold, whispered seductively. It would be so easy to stop.
I looked at my mother’s face and saw the faint flicker of life still there.
Something inside me broke—but it was not my will. It was the despair.
Rage rose in its place, hot and fierce. I would not let her die because of a signature on a document. I would not allow this mountain to become our tombstone.
I screamed into the wind—a raw, wordless cry of defiance.
Then I bent down, untied my mother from the sled, and lifted her into my arms. She weighed almost nothing. I half carried and half dragged her through the deepening snowdrifts, stumbling forward while shouting her name, shouting Martin’s name, shouting at the uncaring sky.
Bess followed close behind, her low mournful call echoing my own cry.
Then I saw it.
A shadow against the rock face. A darkness deeper than the gathering dusk.
A hole.
The entrance to Fool’s Hollow.
It was not grand or welcoming. It appeared as a jagged black mouth in the stone, exhaling a faint mist that felt noticeably warmer than the air outside. We staggered inside, escaping the wind, and collapsed in a heap just beyond the entrance.
The sudden silence was overwhelming. The constant assault of wind vanished, replaced by deep subterranean stillness.
I laid my mother gently on the rocky ground. My body screamed with exhaustion. We had escaped the wind, but we were not yet safe. We had traded a swift death for a slower one.
With numb fingers I searched for my lantern and a match.
The first match snapped in half.
The second flared briefly before dying beneath my shaking breath.
I cupped my hands around the third. The tiny flame caught and held. A small steady light bloomed within the darkness.
I lifted the lantern.
The glow pushed back the immense blackness of the cave.
The floor was rough stone. Moisture slicked the walls. The air smelled of damp earth and ancient minerals. We stood within a small chamber, but a narrow passage extended deeper into the mountain.
A faint current of warmer air flowed from it.
I helped my mother to her feet, supporting most of her weight, and together we shuffled forward. Bess followed behind us, her hooves clicking nervously against the stone.
The passage opened suddenly into a larger cavern, perhaps 30 feet across, with a ceiling high enough that the lantern light barely reached it.
And there we found it.
Against the far wall lay unmistakable signs of a life lived long before ours. A stack of wood rose nearly to my shoulder, neatly cut and seasoned. The timber had aged to a gray color but remained dry. Nearby stood a collapsed ring of stones—an old hearth long gone cold, its chimney a dark fissure winding upward into the rock.
Beside it lay several abandoned tools: a rusted axe head, a bow saw with a broken handle, and a crude wooden crate.
It was the ghost of someone else’s home.
