Fani goes down with the datalogger in her pocket

Previously: on the tenth day Txomin marked out the Larrondo couloir, with a forty-centimetre slab up top and four hours down to the forest track.

The eleventh day dawned with two on the count and with a single question on the long table, which was who would go down. Eight armfuls of the good firewood down in the woodshed, and against the stove wall the two damp rows Casimiro and Aitor brought up yesterday, still not dry. Ninety-five point seven litres in a tank locked with a key, and one single open route in the whole mountain.

Aitor Sein, seventeen, a trainee warden that season, read out his notebook at ten past seven without anybody asking him to, as he had every morning since the first day.

"Eleven armfuls a day. With eight we've got seventeen and a half hours. Counting from seven this morning, the stove goes out at half past midnight."

"The small hours of the twelfth," said Mercedes Arriaga, fifty-five, a retired justice of the peace who keeps the accounts on the back cover of the signing book. "That's the hour my division gave yesterday."

"It hasn't moved," said Idoia Bergara, thirty-nine, warden of Iratxeta and an emergency nurse until 2019.

Ramiro Bouzas, forty-four, mountaineer and boatbuilder, had been on his feet before she was.

"I'll go down. I asked on the first day and I'm asking today."

"No," said Txomin Elordi, sixty-two, a shepherd who has carried the club's post up to Iratxeta since 1994 and who marked out the couloir yesterday and came back saying he wanted nobody going down it.

"Txomin."

"Yesterday I said I didn't want it and it got us nowhere, Ramiro. Today I'll tell you the other thing: you don't fit. The slab on the top third is forty centimetres thick over a layer of faceted grains that doesn't hold, and what breaks a slab like that is the weight you put on it at the point where it's most strung. You weigh ninety-two kilos with your pack. I know because you weighed yourself on the club scales in November and because I've watched you carry loads for ten days. And you've had your trousers torn from the knee since yesterday."

"They can be sewn."

"The trousers can be sewn. The ninety-two kilos can't."

"And who puts fewer on it?"

Fani Quiroga, twenty-eight, a geologist who came up to change the slope sensors the day before the avalanche, was already on her feet by the door with her boots on.

"Fifty-seven with everything on me. I weighed myself on Thursday on the sack scales, out of curiosity."

"Fani, no," said Ramiro.

"Fani yes," said Txomin. "And I'm not saying it just for the kilos. That layer of grains has to be read while you're crossing it, not beforehand, and the only person here who can read it apart from me has spent two seasons measuring that slope. I'm not going down there again. What I can do is tell her exactly where not to tread."

"Say it in front of everyone," said Idoia.

"On the left, tight against the rock, along the four poles I planted. And between the second and the third there's a two-metre gap where the pole wouldn't go in: the snow sounds hollow there. That bit you cross over the rock, with your hands, not over the snow. Cross it over the snow and it breaks."

"Yesterday I said with a rope," he added. "With a rope means two of you, and the second one waits on top of the slab. Alone there is nobody to belay, so the rope stays here: if we have to come out for you, I want it at the door and not under the slab."

Lena Bouzas, forty-one, mountaineer and anaesthetist, Ramiro's sister, looked at Fani's pupils with the head torch and counted her pulse on Idoia's watch.

"Fifty-eight. She's better than I am and better than everyone who's been sleeping by the stove. She can go down."

What Fani took with her was said out loud, because in eleven days they had learned there that whatever was not said out loud ended up missing.

Mercedes's three sheets, the handwritten copy of file 47/2021 and of the two pink pages, inside a freezer bag closed with two rubber bands. The crampons, her own, work ones, and the boots she already had on, the only ones in the house with an intact sole. Txomin's aluminium probe, which he laid on the table and pushed across with two fingers without saying anything. The club's handheld radio from the first-aid box, with fresh batteries from Fani's sensor box, the same ones the recorder runs on; the big radio's two batteries were not touched, the twelve point one still fitted and the eleven point four still on the north windowsill, because they are the ones that have to talk to the club until the twelfth. And the recorder, a grey box the size of a paperback with the word DATALOGGER moulded into the lid, which had been noting down the temperature and the carbon monoxide of that house every ten seconds since the sixth day.

"I'm taking that," said Fani.

"That leaves us blind," said Idoia.

"Yes."

"I know," said Idoia. "I decided it last night and I'm going to write it down with my name on it. Inside that thing are the hundred and forty by Lena's bunk and the hundred and twenty-one that same bunk was still showing after the patch, with the hour and the day, and that's what will make the helicopter come up with oxygen instead of blankets, and what will put the 2021 file on somebody's desk. Down here we already know what we know. When we light the engine at half past midnight, we open the corridor door every hour and count ourselves, and I keep the count."

The handheld took thirty seconds to discuss, because it had already gone out of that door yesterday. Txomin and Ramiro carried it to the portillo and brought it back without ever switching it on, and Txomin put it back in the first-aid box saying the only thing that mattered: from the portillo the refuge hears you, and from the refuge the club hears nothing. The club is eighteen kilometres away and behind two ridges, and that is why for eleven days the radio that mattered was always the big one, the one at one o'clock and at eight in the evening. But the Larrondo couloir starts a hundred metres below the door, and the first two thirds are visible from the shutter of the upper dormitory, the one Idoia opened on the first day.

"I'm not going to talk," said Fani. "Talking drains it, and with gloves and wind you can't be understood anyway. I'm going to press the button and say nothing. That opens the carrier, which travels much further than a voice you can make out. And listening costs thirty times less than talking: three hours with the loudspeaker open cost less than one seven-minute turn. Even so, today you make the one o'clock call in three."

It was agreed that way, and Aitor wrote it on the first page of the notebook in large letters so that everyone could see it from the table: one click every half hour while the refuge can see her, I'm carrying on. Three clicks, I'm in the beech wood. One hour with no click at all, Idoia and Ramiro go out along the poles.

She left at five past eight. She shut the door herself and nobody went out to watch, because Txomin said nine people standing in the snow by the door were no use to him.

At eight thirty-five, one click. At five past nine, one click. At nine thirty-five, one click, and in the dining room somebody laughed at nothing.

At five past ten there was nothing. At seven past ten, nothing either. Idoia put her boots on at nine past ten without a word and Ramiro took the eight-millimetre rope off the hook by the entrance. At fourteen minutes past ten, nine minutes late, the loudspeaker opened once, short, and closed.

"She's in the gap," said Txomin, who had spent two hours upstairs with the shutter open a hand's width. "That bit takes time. It took me time, and I was bringing Fermín down."

At ten forty-five, one click.

At a quarter past eleven, three hours and ten minutes after Fani had shut the door, the loudspeaker of the radio opened three times in a row. Aitor wrote the time on the line it belonged on and underneath it he wrote what they had agreed it meant, because nothing needed interpreting: Fani is in the beech wood. Past the slab and past the ice.