Free Snowblind by Daniel Arnold Page B

“Imperialism falling apart, sure. That only seems fair. But I’d prefer to call a coolie a coolieand not pretend otherwise. After the first World War, but with good years to go before the second. A year before Mallory and Irvine died on Everest. The mountains still all brand-new. That would have been the time to be in the Himalaya.”
    And I was implicated in this. Wasn’t I using the locals the same as him? Sure, shower them with paper currency, Tylenol, antibiotics. If the pills don’t work, they can wipe with the paper. Did that change the fact that we were driving them like glorified donkeys?
    We were a small country. The rich and powerful doing bizarre stuff at the top while the workers labored at the bottom. And it worked, just like in real life. The porters never said: Screw this, what a waste, I could feed my family for three months with what I’ve got on my back. They wouldn’t even have had to riot. They could have just walked home. What could we have done to stop them? And our little republic of America wasn’t alone. Germany was on the move that day, too, and we caught up with Italy the next day. So it was complete chaos. A few dozen white people all speaking different languages trying to herd hundreds of brown people down a trail six inches wide and five hundred feet above a river like a roaring freight train.
    My fever spiked somewhere along here, and I started shitting green goo. Hubert tutted over me, fed me pills, scolded me for exerting myself so pointlessly. I stumbled along during the day because I didn’t want to be left and because I was certain that somewhere up ahead was a mountain that I had come around the world to climb. Wind stuck with me in those days. He helped me along when I was in a bad way. Kept me steady when the path was crumbling right into the Braldu Gorge. “Careful there, chief,” he’d say, and he’d keep hishand on my shoulder. Tucked me in at night when I was half out of my mind with fever dreams. Kept me drinking water and eating rice, which was the one thing that seemed to stay in me. I was grateful, but it was also embarrassing. Here I was, the mighty mountaineer, come to duke it out with the most dangerous mountain in the Himalayas. And I could barely stay on the trail on the approach. And there was Wind, looking like a lumberjack dressed as a court jester, with no plan or experience—he’d just decided it would be cool to see the mountains. And he was the one taking care of me.
    Of the bad nights, I only remember things in snatches. We roasted one of the goats, and Bill cut it up, giving the porters each a sliver of meat. Bill waved this giant knife around and bellowed enthusiastically and asked each porter what cut he’d like, even though they couldn’t understand him and he didn’t care anyway. There was a huge fire—flames ten feet high, shadows, glowing faces, singing and dancing. Gregor stomped out some kind of Russian jig that made the porters wild. Even Luther and Alan got up and pranced around. Wind was sitting shoulder to shoulder with the porters eating goat. I don’t know how he got his hands on a portion. I don’t think he knew more than six words of Urdu, but it didn’t seem to be a problem. Somehow he was still joking with the porters, slapping them on the knees and getting the same in return. But he never forgot himself, either. He always had twenty yards’ separation from Bill and the Captain. During the dancing, Captain charged him from the other side of the bonfire, like some kind of flanking maneuver, winding up his stick like he was going to impale Wind, but Wind rolled backward into the dark and disappeared while the porters cheered.
    There was trash everywhere from past expeditions. Maybe some of them didn’t care, but most, I think, were just too desperate to get away to pay attention to their garbage. Anyway, Wind had been scavenging. He found a shredded