The dismissal carried the number of the report he signed

Previously: Fani's logger read 140 parts per million beside Lena's bunk. Sabino warned the club about the flue in writing in 2021.

Five days of diesel were left when Mercedes Arriaga asked, for the first time in seven days shut in, to have a cupboard opened that was not hers.

She asked at a quarter past eight in the morning, with the engine off since midday the day before, eleven below zero outside and the nine of them still wrapped in the breakfast blankets. Mercedes is fifty-five and was a justice of the peace in her valley for nineteen years, until she retired; she has spent five days writing litres of diesel on the inside back cover of the signing book because it was the only thing she could think to do on the third day.

"Idoia, I need the warden's cupboard. The green metal one, behind the counter."

Idoia Bergara, thirty-nine, warden of Iratxeta and an A&E nurse until 2019, was filling the big pot with snow. She put the pot down on the floor.

"In there are the signing books from 1986 and the club's correspondence. There is no food and there are no blankets."

"I am not after food. I am after a number."

Sabino Amantegui, sixty-six, warden of this same hut from 1991 until May 2022, was sitting on the bench in the corner with the survival blanket over his knees. He did not lift his head. He said the whole number straight through, the way you say a date you have looked at many times.

"Ref. slash forty-seven slash two thousand and twenty-one."

Mercedes put the sharpened pencil down on the long table.

"Say it again."

"Forty-seven, of the year twenty-one. It was in the top corner of the dismissal, on the right, after the word Ref. The paper had three lines: the date, that my services were appreciated, and that number."

"And what did you take it for?"

"For the number of the dismissal."

"It is not," said Mercedes. "Ref. means reference, and a reference does not number the paper that carries it: it numbers the paper it answers. You have had another document's number in your pocket since 2022 and you could not read it. Neither would I, if I had not been paid for nineteen years to read papers like that."

Idoia took the whole bunch out of her apron pocket, found the flat key and opened the warden's cupboard. In Iratxeta the only room that locks is the generator room; the only piece of furniture, that cupboard. Inside there are four metal shelves. On the top two, the signing books, stitched by spine and by year. On the third, cardboard boxes with the receipts for overnight stays. On the bottom one, two folders with elastic bands and the pads of service reports, one per year, on carbonless paper, in three colours: white for the club, pink for the hut's archive, yellow for whoever signs.

"The pads are mine up to 2022," said Sabino. "The pink one stays here always, it never goes down. That has been the club's rule since before I started."

Ramiro Bouzas, forty-four, mountaineer and boat carpenter, had spent two days asking to go down by any route at all and saying little about anything else. He spoke from the doorway.

"And what good is this to us today? Today what is good to us is the couloir."

"Today what is good to us is knowing whether the club knew about the flue before we did," said Lena Bouzas, forty-one, mountaineer and anaesthetist, Ramiro's sister, the one who slept inside the hundred and forty and who had spent two days with her voice lower than usual. "Because if it knew, on day eleven it is not just a helicopter that comes up. A helicopter comes up, and behind it a lawyer."

"And because today we cannot do anything else," said Mercedes. "Idoia said last night that today nobody goes down, nothing is lit and nothing is eaten hot until tonight. Reading burns no diesel."

She put the pads on the table, opened the current year's and started from the last used sheet, working backwards. The pink ones are numbered in print in the bottom corner, so a torn-out sheet leaves a gap you can see; not one was missing. She read out the subject of each one, slowly, so that the nine of them would go down through the years with her the way you go down a staircase in the dark: a leak in the porch, two mattresses replaced, a warning about a bare cable in the generator room, the autumn firewood share-out.

On sheet 12 of 2022, dated 4 May, Sabino had written: "Removal of material belonging to me. Handing over the main-door key and the signing book to the club." And below, in the observations box, three words: "No works executed."

Txomin Elordi, sixty-two, a shepherd, who has been carrying the club's post up to Iratxeta since 1994 and carrying down whatever needs carrying down, was standing by the stove with his hands in his pockets. He spoke without taking them out.

"At the start of May that year I brought you up an envelope. A big one, the kind with a flap, with the club's stamp on the seal. I gave it to you at the counter and you did not open it in front of me. Three days later you came down with me with a sports bag and a rucksack, and you said nothing in four hours of walking."

"That was the envelope," said Sabino.

Casimiro Lete, seventy-one, a club member since before the new hut existed, has come up to Iratxeta for thirty winters and that morning was wearing his hat indoors, as on every other morning. He got up from the bench, went over to the long table and spent a while looking at the pads without touching them.

"I was on the committee in 2022," he said. "Until December."

Nobody said anything. Lena sat down.

"No dismissal was voted on. A reorganisation of the wardens of the three huts was voted on and it was approved by assent, in ten minutes, at the end of a three-hour meeting. The equipment officer brought it. And no report was read out loud, because reports are not read out at meetings: they are summarised. I had never seen one of these papers in my life until today."

Aitor Sein, seventeen, a trainee warden, a guide's son, came over to the table and asked the one thing none of the adults had asked yet.

"If this is done in triplicate, where is the white sheet?"

"At the club," said Sabino. "Registered, with its entry number. They always answer in writing: there are twelve hundred members, not a work gang."

Idoia Bergara heard that, took the pen from the counter and wrote in the signing book, in the day's entry, in front of everyone: "08:20. The hut's archive is opened at the request of M. Arriaga, in front of the nine people here." Then she told Aitor to write the time down as well in his notebook, the same one in which he noted the engine starting and stopping yesterday while Fani was measuring.

"Why twice?" asked Aitor.

"Because from here on everything we do is going to be read by somebody with these papers on the table," said Idoia. "And I want it read in the order it happened."

Fani Quiroga, twenty-eight, a geologist, who came up to change the sensors on the slope and who brought down off Lena's bunk the number nobody has argued with since yesterday, was keeping the count on her own side, under her breath, looking at the dates and not at the people.

"From the autumn of 2021 to the Tuesday of the avalanche there are four full seasons of people sleeping in the small dormitory with a north wind."

"Five," said Sabino. "I count the one in 2021."

Mercedes had already reached the 2021 pad and said nothing for a whole minute. She turned past sheet 49, of 14 November: end of the high season, blanket inventory, nothing else. She turned past 46, of 3 October: failure of the water pressure unit, sorted in two days with a gasket and a clamp.

Between the two there were two pink sheets stapled together, thicker than the rest because they had something behind them.

Date: 7 November 2021. Signature: S. Amantegui, warden. In the subject box, handwritten in the hand of someone leaning on a counter: "Flue overlap of the generator, section under the tiles, east pitch. Open. Urgent."

On the second sheet, the description, which Mercedes read out in full and slowly because she wanted the concrete part to be heard: one metre sixty from the eaves, the second elbow, the overlap open by a finger, the channel tile broken at the corner, the smoke coming out of the gap and coming back in through the roof space of the small dormitory when the wind is from the north. It asked for two days of work and materials. It costed the materials at a hundred and sixty euros: double-wall pipe, two clamps and a cartridge of refractory sealant.

Stapled behind it, a ten-by-fifteen print, developed at a shop, with the shop's stamp and the date of developing: 11 November 2021. The photograph is of the overlap, taken from the eaves. Next to the overlap, to give the scale, a man's index finger.

"Forty-seven slash two thousand and twenty-one," said Mercedes, and she put her finger on the printed number in the corner so that it could be clearly seen. "This is the complete file, and it has two papers. This one, in which the warden Sabino Amantegui asks for a hundred and sixty euros and two days to close the flue, dated 7 November 2021. And the dismissal that reached him almost six months later with the number of this paper in the top corner. His sacking is registered as the answer to this. In between there is nothing."