The next morning dawned clear and bright. Birds were singing, the sun was shining. The cheerfulness of the day seemed to mock the black mood Jack was in as he readied his plane.

“Taking another run at Elias?” Otis asked on his way past to his own plane. “I heard they're getting severe winds out there later. Be careful!”

Jack gave a grunt of acknowledgment but didn't answer. He was not in the mood to talk right now. Neither was Calder apparently, who stood not far away, his back to the plane and his hands in his pockets, his gaze as stormy as the sky was not and his jaw set with a bitter determination. He hadn't spoken to Jack except in clipped, angry orders all morning. Jack couldn't exactly blame him for being upset, but he'd hoped by the morning Calder would have calmed down more. Calder being in this kind of mood wasn't going to make the flight pleasant.

After getting caught in that storm he was going in a little better supplied this time. He'd even dragged a passenger seat out of the mess hall and reinstalled it for Calder's comfort, though he resented the extra weight. It wasn't like he was hauling packages or a big group though, so he figured it would be fine. The bay was empty except for a few extra canisters of gas and the emergency gurney he kept strapped to the wall.

When the plane was ready, Calder climbed silently into the passenger seat and proceeded to ignore him throughout take off and the entire flight. Jack was used to flying in silence. He didn’t press Calder to talk to him. But the steady, angry presence to his right was a continuous, low grade distraction that he couldn’t shake. Part of him desperately wanted to talk this out. But he knew it was for the best that he didn’t. Calder would calm down eventually, but the distance between them would make it easier when it was time for them to part permanently.

As they neared Mount St Elias, Jack turned them toward the treacherous Abruzzi Ridge. He felt Calder tense as soon as the mountain was in view.

“Are you going to be all right today?” Jack asked, unable to help himself from worrying about the other man.

“I'm fine,” Calder said, not looking at him.

“I'm serious,” Jack insisted. “I can't have you flipping out or running off today. It's too dangerous. Whatever happens, I need you to stay calm.”

“I'm fine,” Calder repeated. Jack sighed, realizing he wasn't going to get any more out of the other man.

Using the information he'd gathered yesterday, Jack followed the previous rescue pilot's last recorded headings, sweeping low over the climber's projected routes, angling toward Abruzzi as the other pilot had. He began doing slow passes, working his way over the mountain with thorough patience. He was going to do it right this time. No half-assing it just because he still didn’t think there was much of a chance of finding Avery alive.

An hour or more passed as they searched. He watched the snow carefully for some sign of whatever had caught the other pilot’s eye. What had he seen that had made him fly in this direction? If it had been a person, a climber, he would have said so in the logs. It was unlikely to have been fresh with the amount of snow and wind on this ridge. So then, what…

A splash of color caught his eye and he saw Calder lean forward in his seat at the same moment.

“Do you see that?”  Calder asked.

“Yep,” Jack confirmed. “And I bet the other pilot did too. We’re on the right track.”

A strip of bright red nylon fabric, probably torn from a sleeping bag, was tied to the bare black branch of a stunted lone spruce growing from between the rocks. A clear signal. ‘I went this way.’ Whatever had happened during that storm on the mountain, Avery had survived it, at least long enough to end up over here, tie up this marker, and try his luck on the Abruzzi Ridge.

“Keep your eyes peeled,” he told Calder. “The pilot lost contact right around here and they think he crashed not long after. Tell me if you see anything that looks like wreckage. It might be mostly buried by the snow by now.”

Calder nodded silently, but Jack didn’t think he was being silent from sullenness now as much as concentration. He was staring hard down at the snow, looking for any sign of Avery.

The clear morning light cast soft shadows on his face, his intense frown of focus, and the material of his seat creaked under his white knuckled grip, his whole will bent on the task. Jack couldn’t help thinking he was beautiful, though acknowledging it made guilt squirm in his stomach.

Jack had no data on where over the ridge the other pilot had gone down, so they flew slow passes over the ridge, working their way down, and hoped for the best.

“What do we do if we find the wreck?” Calder asked, clearly getting restless though they’d only been searching the ridge fifteen minutes or so.

“We’ll make a note of its location and tell control when we’re back in radio range,” Avery replied. “So they can see about sending someone out to retrieve it in spring. We’ll get as low as we can, try to get a good look at it. Maybe there’ll be something to point us in the direction Avery went.”

“Or maybe he’ll be there,” Calder said. “With the wreckage.”

There was something in the way Calder said that which made Jack think the other man, for once, didn’t mean alive. Was Calder finally giving up?

“Maybe,” Jack said, not willing to encourage Calder in either direction at the moment. “Assuming we can find the wreck at all. This ridge is known for its frequent storms. The plane could be totally covered. Or maybe he turned around and headed off somewhere else before he crashed and just never reestablished contact.”

“You really don’t like to let anyone get their hopes up, do you?” Calder asked dryly.

“Optimism is a fatal flaw in this line of work.” Jack banked to make another sweep a little lower down. “Delusional over confidence and alcoholism are what you look for in a bush pilot.”

“I can see why you’re so good at it,” Calder replied and Jack chuckled, not minding the barb as long as Calder was talking to him again.

Mile after mile of snow and ice and bare stone passed under the plane as they made their way down the ridge, staring until their eyes itched for any sign of something amiss.

“You know, you couldn’t do this on Everest,” Jack said after a moment. “Just fly by looking for a body I mean.”

“Why not?”

“There’s too many to tell them apart,” said Jack. “More than two hundred. They’re too high up and too frozen to recover safely, so they just get left there. Some of the guides use them as trail markers.”

“That’s too morbid,” Calder said with a shudder. “How can they be left there? What about their families? There has to be a way to get them back down.”

“Unfortunately, no.” Jack shrugged, used to this fact of life when you lived and worked in such terrain. “You die at those kind of altitudes, trying to recover the body is just going to get more people killed. Plenty of people have tried to recover the bodies of loved ones, or of explorers of particular note, like George Mallory. He died up there in the 1920s, and they didn’t even find the body until 1999. Plenty of people try to recover the bodies on Everest. And nine times out of ten, they just end up adding to the count. What’s the point in bringing back one dead body if you leave two more to take its place?”

“Knowing that,” Calder said, his frown deep and his eyes troubled, “why would anyone ever do it? Why would anyone risk not just dying, but never being found, being left forever on the mountain while your family mourns at an empty grave. Who would chance that just to stand on top of a mountain? Just to say they had done it?”

“Statistically speaking, about a thousand people a year,” Jack answered calmly. “About half of them make it to the top.”

“But why?”

“Couldn’t say.” Jack squinted down at the rocks, thinking he had seen something for a moment before he recognized it as a bush. “I’m a flier, not a climber.”

“But you do spend a lot of time risking your life when you don’t have to,” Calder pointed out.

“True,” Jack admitted. “Some of the guys I know, other pilots, it’s because they genuinely don’t think they can die. Not like, consciously. They don’t go around bragging that they’re immortal and I know on some level they have to realize how death works. But it never seems to occur to them. Their own mortality is so abstract to them that they never really grasp it. They’ll get in crash after stupid, preventable crash and it’ll never even phase them. They just say they could have handled it and go right back to what they were doing. And, I mean, if you genuinely didn’t believe you could die, why not climb the highest mountain in the world just to say you did? Why not, right?”

“You’re saying they do it because they’re stupid?” Calder clarified. Jack laughed a little.

“Pretty much.”

“What about you?” Calder looked a little exasperated. “You do this every day and get right back in the plane every time you crash.”

Jack winked and gave Calder his best roguish smile.

“Maybe I’m stupid too.”

“I don’t believe that.” Calder crossed his arms over his chest. “You’re too much of a smart ass to be that dumb.”

“I’m flattered.” Jack laughed, then sat silently considering it for a moment. “You’re right though. It isn’t that everyone’s dumb. Maybe for some people the fact that they might die is why they do it.”

“What, like they’re suicidal?” Calder asked with a worried frown.

“No, no,” Jack said quickly. “Well, maybe some of them. But I think it’s more like… After you’ve almost died, everything feels sharper, more real and immediate. That abstract concept, dying, is suddenly very real and physical and in front of you, and you remember how goddamn amazing it is that you’re alive at all. That you’ve lived long enough to die, or almost die, in this spectacular way. It makes you rethink everything. It makes you reexamine your whole life. If you aren’t happy with what you see, well maybe you take that second chance and you change things. Make a life you won’t be disappointed to look back on the next time it looks like you’re about to die. Or maybe you just keep going back and doing it again, hoping this time it’ll be dangerous enough, close enough, to make you take that leap, make that change you’re still too afraid to. If I can do this, if I can survive this, I can do anything. Or maybe they’re just junkies chasing an adrenaline rush, getting off on that primal urge to eat, fuck, survive.”

“And you?” Calder asked again. “Which one are you?”

“Oh, definitely the last one,” Jack replied, putting a toothpick between his teeth and wiggling it at Calder suggestively.

Calder shook his head, disgusted, and turned away. Jack felt a mixture of guilt and relief. Calder was talking with him, joking with him again. But he shouldn’t be. Jack shouldn’t be encouraging it. It would be better for both of them if they stayed cold to one another.

“Got anymore weird Everest trivia?” Calder asked, not looking at him.

“Always,” Jack said at once. “Want to know the highest number of deaths on Everest in a single day?”

“Sure, hit me.”

“Nineteen people.”

“God damn.”

“It’s a bit of a cheat, though. 7.8 earthquake triggered an avalanche that buried the base camp, back in 2015.”

“Base camp? Tthey hadn’t even started climbing the mountain yet?”

“I know, right? I would have been mad as hell.”