Free Frozen Solid: A Novel by James Tabor Page B

crux of a route so near its end, but the velocity of flow in this stream caused water to shoot out beyond the cliff face, forming the cornice as layer after layer froze. At some point the cornice would break off of its own weight.
    It was about ten degrees and still, perfect weather for climbing here. Everything—rock, ice, snow—was blue in the predawn, though the sun would appear soon, in an hour at most. Above him, the ice looked like giant drips of melted white and blue wax. His passage had silenced the woodpeckers and chickadees, ermine and hares, the wraith deer. The only sounds were his breathing and small, sharp cracks as the ice shifted, compressed, expanded. Every part of it that he could see was frozen solid, but deep inside there was always something happening.
    He stamped a firm circle and stepped out of his snowshoes, clipped into his Grivel crampons, took two leashless Black Diamond Cobraice tools from their holsters on either side of his climbing harness. Accustomed to solo climbing, he carried just a few carabiners and ice screws. The only other tool was a Desert Eagle Mark XIX pistol in .44 magnum caliber, black stainless steel with internal laser sight, carried under his left arm in a custom Bianchi shoulder holster, which also held two extra eight-round magazines. Bowman never went anywhere unarmed.
    He stepped to the ice, found secure placements for both tools above his head, set one pair of front points, then the other at the same level. He hung straight-armed from the ice tools for a few seconds, knees bent and legs relaxed. He stood up straight, removed and replaced his left tool higher, stepped up with his right foot, moving diagonally to center his body on the tool, set the left front points, set the right tool, and stood again.
    The ice was perfect, solid enough to be secure, with features and porosity for good penetration of the tools’ picks. Then he really began the climb, not stop-go, stop-go, but in a continuous flow, arms and legs always moving, body constantly, smoothly rising, as if he were being hoisted by an invisible cable.
    When he had climbed sixty feet, the sun rose over the treetops and he saw it strike the ice twenty feet below him. He was tempted to hang and let it catch him, because it would feel good to be there like that, sandwiched between the heat of the sun and the cold of the ice.
    He started up again, moving in that easy rhythm, and stopped at 130 feet. The cornice overhang loomed above him. Beneath that, a massive fracture had left a band of clean rock ten feet high and cutting completely through the ice column. He was surprised not to have seen the debris down at the bottom, but then he reasoned that it must have shattered upon impact with the ice column’s solid base. There had been less than full light, too, when he began. He understood that the ice section’s cracking and fall was what he had heard the night before.
    He could try to climb past the smooth swath of granite. It wasn’t the rock he was worried about, though it looked dauntingly clean.Worse, all the ice above that section was now unstable, held in place only by adhesion to the face. It might carry ten climbers his weight or come off with one strike of an ice tool. The sun was moving. Warmth touched his calves like slowly rising water. In ten minutes, maybe less, it would reach that ice hanging above him.
    He leaned back, surveyed the rock band, looking for a line. Saw two ledges the width of a guitar pick that could hold his front points and, above them, a crack that would take the pick of one tool. He could get that far, but the ice above would still be a foot beyond his longest reach. It would require a dynamic move, launching himself off those ledges and swinging the free tool all at once, to reach that ice above, with no guarantee that it would take his weight long enough for him to place the other pick.
    Two hours later, climbing gear stowed and coffee poured, Bowman added maple logs to the Defiant