Nine on the dipstick and ten on the counter

Previously: an avalanche shut eight people inside the Iratxeta refuge and a ninth turned up, Sabino Amantegui, warden until 2022, who still cannot speak.

The fourth day dawned with diesel for nine days, and at ten past seven Idoia Bergara, warden of the refuge and an emergency nurse until 2019, went down to the generator room to check it with the dipstick.

Sabino Amantegui had spent twenty-four hours in the bottom bunk, under two sleeping bags and a foil blanket, and had not said a word. Lena Bouzas, forty-one, an anaesthetist, would not let anyone question him: a body coming out of hypothermia takes time before it can hold up a sentence, and Sabino's hand was still shaking when he picked up a glass.

The Iratxeta dipstick is not factory issue. It is a steel strip a metre twenty long that Idoia filed on the day of the avalanche: twelve notches twenty litres apart, one for each day of rationing. Four hours of generator a day, five litres an hour, twenty litres a day. You push it into the filler neck, pull it out, look at how far the stain reaches and read off the number of the notch. It is the stupidest instrument in the refuge and the one that breaks down least.

That morning the stain came a finger's width past the ninth notch.

Idoia wrote it in the red-covered notebook and went to cross-check it against the other number, the one on the hour counter: a five-digit mechanical drum bolted to the engine block, which turns when the engine turns and does nothing else. It read ten.

She did the sum out loud in front of Mercedes Arriaga, a retired justice of the peace, who had come down with her because since the third day she has kept the fuel accounts on the back cover of the register of signatures.

"Ten hours twenty times five litres, fifty-one and a half litres. Two hundred and forty minus fifty-one and a half, one hundred and eighty-eight. The ninth notch is one hundred and eighty, and the stain is a finger past it. It adds up."

"It adds up," said Mercedes. "And it's the first thing that has added up in four days."

The ten hours twenty also added up on their own account, and that is what made Idoia take them as good. The two hundred and forty litres of the day of the avalanche were measured with the engine already off: the two hours at dawn that day had been burned before that line and do not count. After it there were only the twenty minutes of pumping water to the upper tank. The second day, the four of the ration. The third, the day of the man in the woodstore, six: the four plus the two Idoia had run over the limit in front of everybody, the ones she promised to claw back by cutting an hour off this day's afternoon and another off the next. Twenty minutes, plus four, plus six: ten hours and twenty minutes. The drum only shows whole hours.

Three independent numbers saying the same thing. That is why nobody had opened the tank again in three days.

Casimiro Lete, seventy-one, a club member, confirmed it from the doorway without being asked. On the first day he had requested a pencil and timed the consumption from the first turn of the engine, and since then he had been noting down every start and every stop on the back of an envelope.

"Ten twenty," he said. "I get the same."

Ramiro Bouzas was leaning on the frame, watching Idoia wipe the strip with a rag. Forty-four, a mountaineer, a boat carpenter: he makes his living repairing wooden boats on an estuary, and he had spent twenty years opening the diesel tanks of small craft. He waited for her to roll the rag up.

"Idoia. The dipstick tells you how far up the liquid goes," he said. "It doesn't tell you which liquid it is."

"It's diesel."

"On top it's diesel. I'm talking about the bottom. In twenty years I have not opened a single boat tank without water in the bottom. It gets in by itself, by condensation, and it doesn't mix: diesel weighs less and floats. What wets the dipstick is always whatever is on top."

Idoia stood there with the rag in her hand for as long as it takes an orderly person to admit she has measured the wrong thing very well.

"This tank has a drain tap," she said. "On the elbow at the bottom, two fingers off the floor. That's what it was put there for."

"Then open it."

Fani Quiroga, a geologist, twenty-eight, went up for her sensor case and came back down with a graduated half-litre glass jar and a pipette. Ramiro held the jar under the elbow, Idoia opened the tap a quarter turn and closed it when the jar was half full.

They set it on the long table, against the light of the battery lamp, and waited the minute it takes two liquids to decide which one goes underneath.

They separated into two layers with a clean line between them. The lower one clear, colourless. The upper one amber.

"Water," said Fani. "And a fair amount."

"That is not condensation," said Ramiro. "Condensation is two fingers at the end of the winter. This is a third of the jar."

What they did next took them an hour and a half, and Idoia did it with Ramiro and with Aitor Sein, seventeen, a trainee warden, who kept swapping jerrycans and calling out the litres. They opened the drain tap and drew from the bottom into a twenty-litre jerrycan, until the stream stopped coming out clear and started coming out amber. They closed it there.

Aitor called out the count: three full jerrycans.

Sixty litres of water in the bottom of the tank.

Mercedes Arriaga wrote them on the back cover and did the subtraction in front of everyone, in the large hand of someone drawing up a record. One hundred and eighty-eight litres was what the dipstick showed. Sixty were water. One hundred and twenty-eight of diesel were left.

One hundred and twenty-eight litres divided by twenty litres a day is six days. The dipstick had promised nine.

Fani did the calculation from the other end, because that is what she does with everything:

"Sixty litres of water do not walk into a closed tank on their own. Either you carry them up in buckets from the upper tank, which is six trips on the stairs with a full bucket, or you melt them out of snow, and that is three or four hours of the big pot on the stove. Both of those happen in front of people."

"In front of people, yes," said Idoia. "Pouring them in, no. The filler neck is in this room."

The generator room is the only place in Iratxeta that locks. The key hangs on a bunch that Idoia does not let go of, and Idoia let go of it once in four days: on the third, when she passed it to Ramiro through the gap in the woodstore door so they could start the generator forty-five minutes before the hour, with her kneeling below, her back turned, and eight people going up and down the stairs.

Ramiro put the jerrycan down on the floor and stood looking at the bunch of keys, which was back in Idoia's pocket.

Aitor looked up from the jerrycan.

"And where are the sixty litres of diesel? Three jerrycans do not walk out of this house. The bottom door has had packed snow halfway up it since the first day."

Nobody answered.

Mercedes opened the book at the back cover and read out what she had just written.

"Three days of diesel have left this tank and have not left this house. And on top of that somebody poured in sixty litres of water so the dipstick would keep reading nine. Who has opened this room since the avalanche?"