The O. Henry Prize Stories 2011 Read Online Free

and family separated only by a waist-high divider—and by the time he was located we were already an hour behind schedule. We were led by one of the schoolmistresses who held a ski instructor’s certificate and her assistant, a twenty-year-old engineering student named Jenny. They had as their responsibility fourteen boys and ten girls.
    The ski run to which we were headed was, in summer, a steep climb along the edge of a dark forest broken by occasional sunlit clearings, before the trees thinned out and there were meadows where miniature butterflies wavered on willow herbs and moss campion. Above those meadows sheep and goats found their upland pastures. Above that were only rocks and the occasional ibex. There was an escarpment above the rocks that was ideal for wind-sheltered forts. We’d discovered it on our ninth birthday. Willi said it was one of those rare places where nothing could be grown or sold: one of those places the world had produced exclusively for someone’s happiness. In winter storms the wind piled snow onto it, the cornices overhanging the mountain’s flanks below. And the night before our Sport Week outing, there’d been strong westerly winds and heavy accumulation on the eastern slopes. Avalanche warning bulletins had been sent to the hotels an hour after our departure.
    We spread ourselves out around the bowl of the main slope. Some of us had climbed in chaps for greater waterproofing and were still shedding them and checking our bindings when ourschoolmistress led the others down into the bowl. The postmaster’s daughter, Ruth Lindner, of whom Willi and I both retained fantasies, waited behind with us while we horsed about, setting her hands atop her poles in a counterfeit of patience. She had red hair and pale smooth skin and a habit, when laughing with us, of lowering her eyes to our mouths in a way that we found impossibly stirring.
    The skiers who’d set off were already slaloming a hundred yards below. We’d been taught from the cradle that in winter, however much we thought we knew, there were always places where our ignorance and bad luck could destroy us. A heavy new snow mass above and an unstable bowl below: this was the sort of circumstance in which our father would have said: If you’re uncertain, back away.
    “Race you,” I said. “
Race
me?” Willi answered. And he nosed his ski tips out over the bowl edge. “See if you can stay on your feet,” I teased, above him, and flumphed my uphill ski down into a drift.
    There was a deep cutting sound like shears through heavy fabric. The snowfield split all the way across the bowl, and the entire slab, a quarter of a mile across, broke free, taking Willi with it. He was enveloped immediately. Ruth shrieked. I helped her pole herself farther back out of the bowl. The tons of snow roaring down caught the skiers below and carried them all away. One little girl managed to remain upright on a cascading wave but then she too was upended and buried, the clouds of snowdust obscuring everything else.
    Guides climbing up from the hotels spread the alarm and already had the rescue under way when Ruth and I reached the debris field. The digging went on for thirty-six hours and fifteen of our classmates, including Willi and the schoolmistress, were uncovered alive. The young assistant, Jenny, and seven others were dug out as corpses. Two were still missing when the last of their family members stopped digging three weeks later.
    My brother had been fifteen feet deep at the very back edge of the run-out. They found him with the sounding rod used for locating the road after heavy snowfalls. He’d managed to get his arm over his face and survived because of the resulting air pocket. A shattered ski tip near the surface had aided in his location. One of the rescuers who dug him out kept using the old saying “Such a terrible child!” for the difficulties they were encountering with the shocking density of the snow mass once it had packed in on