The helicopter comes up and the report carries her full name

Previously: on the eleventh day the geologist Fani Quiroga went down the Larrondo couloir alone and at 11:15 signalled with three clicks.

The twelfth day began with one left on the count and with the last armful of good firewood inside the stove. It was half past midnight. Aitor Sein, seventeen, warden's apprentice that season, was standing by the long table with his notebook open, because it was his turn to call the hour.

"Half past twelve. That was the last of it."

Idoia Bergara, thirty-nine, warden of Iratxeta and an emergency nurse until 2019, took the two keys to the generator room out of her apron, her own and the 2013 one, and laid them on the table so that everyone could see them before she used one.

"Ninety-five point seven litres. At five an hour, nineteen hours of engine. We need eight. We are going to spend five and twenty."

What they had agreed the night before she repeated out loud, in front of the eight of them, and Aitor wrote it on the page he had prepared with hand-ruled columns. Forty minutes of engine and twenty of open door. At every open door, a count of the eight out loud, one by one, each saying their own first name and not "here". And Lena's three questions.

Lena Bouzas, forty-one, anaesthetist, mountaineer, Ramiro's sister and the first person poisoned in that house, had written them on the inside back cover of the logbook, under Mercedes's accounts.

"What day is it. How many are we. What is my name."

"That is a three-item orientation test," said Mercedes Arriaga, fifty-five, retired justice of the peace, who has kept the fuel accounts on the inside back cover of the logbook since the third day. "I have seen it in the duty court reports."

"That is exactly what it is. And it works because carbon monoxide gives you no chest pain and no fever: it gives you a headache, it makes you want to be sick, and it confuses you. The first thing you lose is the answer to the second question."

"Why the second?" Aitor asked.

"Because counting means holding a number in your head while you look at eight people. Sleep can be faked. Counting cannot."

They were blind and they knew it. The logger that had been recording the temperature and the carbon monoxide of that house every ten seconds since the sixth day had been, since five past eight the previous morning, in the pocket of Fani Quiroga, geologist, twenty-eight, who at a quarter past eleven had sent three clicks from the beech wood and at ten past twelve had reached the forest track. The club had known since twenty-five to one. The flight was set for first light on the twelfth day, because the cloud base did not rise above one thousand eight hundred metres until dawn and the refuge stands at two thousand one hundred.

Idoia started the engine at ten past one, forty minutes later than they had said the night before, because the arrangement and the three questions were gone through twice.

Sabino Amantegui, sixty-six, warden of Iratxeta until 2022, who had spent nine days in that house after two inside the woodshed, waited for the noise to steady before he spoke. He spoke little and always about things with a measurement.

"The shutter in the upper dormitory and the firewood hatch. Both at once."

"The hatch is eight steps below," said Ramiro Bouzas, forty-four, mountaineer and boatbuilder.

"That is why. If you open above and you open below, the air goes up the corridor and takes away what comes down from the roof cavity into the small dormitory before it reaches us here. That is not ventilating the house. That is giving the house a chimney."

"And the temperature drops," said Lena.

"Seven degrees in twenty minutes. I measured it three winters running."

"And why didn't you do it?" Aitor asked.

"I did do it. At every start-up, the last two winters. That is why the 2021 report asked for the pipe to be changed, and not for windows to be opened: this is a patch and you pay for it in degrees."

They did it. At a quarter past one, Txomin Elordi, sixty-two, shepherd, who has carried the club's post up to Iratxeta since 1994, opened the shutter of the upper dormitory a hand and a half and went down the eight steps to open the hatch. The corridor began to pull upwards with a sound that was not wind, deeper than that, and in the dining room the smell of burning they had been breathing since the engine started again went down.

At ten to two, count. Eight names. Three questions, eight times. Casimiro Lete, seventy-one, a club member since before the new refuge existed and thirty winters of walking up to it, answered all three in the thick voice of someone who has been asleep two hours and gets up to answer.

At ten to three, count. Eight names.

At ten to four, Casimiro said it was Thursday, that there were six of them and that Lena's name was Elena.

"Engine off," said Idoia.

Ramiro cut the engine and Txomin threw the corridor door wide open. Lena took Casimiro's pulse with Idoia's watch, a hundred and two, looked at his nails with the head torch, and put the three questions to him again four minutes later with the door open. He said it was Saturday, that there were eight of them and that Lena was Lena. They sat him in the chair by the entrance, with one of the dry blankets and his face three metres from the open door.

"This is what I cannot keep watching in the dark," said Lena. "It happened to him three quarters of the way through the third cycle. Next time it could happen to me, and I am the one doing the watching."

"Then the engine does not go on again," said Idoia.

"Then the engine does not go on again."

"It is going to be eight below in here," said Ramiro. "Like the corridor, right now."

"On the ninth day we had four days ahead of us. Today we have four hours and ten minutes."

Mercedes did the sum out loud, with the pencil, on the inside back cover.

"Twenty past eight minus ten past four. Four hours and ten minutes. And we have the two wet rows."

The two wet rows were the firewood Casimiro and Aitor had brought up from the woodshed on the tenth day, which had been standing against the stove wall ever since without quite drying out. Nobody had counted on it because wet wood does not heat: it smokes, it spits, it tars the flue and it gives half. But the Iratxeta stove has its own pipe, the one that comes out through the western pitch, double-skinned and intact, and it is not the broken flue of the generator. That was the difference they had not been able to use since half past twelve, when the good wood ran out and all that was left was the wet, which is no good for heating a house.

Aitor counted them: six wet armfuls. At half the heat, three. Three armfuls are six hours of stove, and four hours and ten were needed.

"The half armful I said on the tenth day was for heating the house," said Idoia. "And what I cared about was the tar in the flue. Today I do not care about the tar."

They shut the dining room door. The eight of them had been sleeping in there since the ninth day. Nobody had to be moved. They had to be packed in. Txomin closed the lower hatch and left the upper dormitory shutter open two fingers, because with the engine off what had to be got out was no longer the generator's smoke but the breath of eight people. Ramiro ran the small axe again over the kindling Casimiro had split on the tenth day, which is the only thing that makes green wood burn, and Aitor called out the hour and the count every twenty minutes, and Lena put the three questions every half hour to Casimiro and to herself.

At twenty to five Txomin said the only thing he said all night without being asked.

"Casimiro has to be moved away from the door."

"He is by the door because that is where the air is," said Ramiro.

"He was. With the engine off, what kills him is no longer the bad air. Now it is the cold, and he is seventy-one. By the door he gets eight below in the face. You do this the way you do it with sheep: the weak in the middle and the strong on the outside."

They moved him. They put Casimiro Lete and Lena Bouzas on the bench against the stove wall, with the two dry blankets, and the rest around them in two rows, sitting on the floor and on the stools, touching. Txomin and Ramiro, the two biggest, took the side nearest the door. Sabino they put in the second row without discussing it with him.

Aitor ran out of columns in his notebook at five past five, because he had prepared the pages for hourly counts and they were doing them every twenty minutes. He ruled ten new columns with the edge of the pencil and a wooden rule from the workshop, and numbered them up to twenty past eight.

"And if the helicopter is late?" he asked.

"Then you go on ruling columns," said Idoia.

At half past five the wall thermometer read four below inside and the stove was smoking in a way that made your eyes water.

At twenty to seven Sabino Amantegui spoke for the second time all night.

"The litres are missing."

"What litres?" said Aitor.

Mercedes had spent the last hour with the pencil and had the sheet ready, and she answered because it was her sum.

"Sixty litres. The ones missing from the dipstick on the fourth day. Twelve hours of engine that were never burned in this house."

"And if they had been burned," said Lena, slowly, because she wanted to say it properly in front of the eight of them, "that would be twelve more hours of smoke coming down from the roof cavity into the small dormitory. I slept six nights a hand's width from a hundred and forty parts per million and I am sitting here counting. With twelve hours more I would not be sitting, and nor would Casimiro."

Nobody said anything for a while. Ramiro put in two sticks and closed the stove door.

"On the sixth day I told you that you had taken three days of heat off us," said Ramiro. "And I thought worse of it than I said."

"You all thought it," said Sabino.

"And why didn't you explain before?" Aitor asked.

"I did not say why until the sixth. That is mine. In 2021 I said it in writing and with my full name, and what happened is that they dismissed me and the pipe stayed where it was. The second time you say a thing you no longer say it the same way."

At seven o'clock exactly Idoia opened the big radio, the one for one and eight o'clock, with the battery in place, and the club answered first time. On the other end was the mountain officer, and the first thing he did was give her a fact she had not asked for: Fani Quiroga had reached the forest track at ten past twelve the previous day, she was at the valley health centre with her toes in good shape and she had asked twice about Casimiro.

"Tell her Casimiro goes on the first lift," said Idoia.

Then she asked for her two things and nothing else: oxygen on board and a scoop stretcher. The pilot was leaving Pamplona at twenty to eight, the cloud base had risen to two thousand four hundred metres and the refuge's altitude was clear. Idoia said eight to be lifted, and then she gave the nine names on the report, and she spelled out all nine, surname by surname, including the last one.

"Amantegui. A for Ávila, M for Madrid, A, N, T, E, G, U, I. Sabino. Warden."

"Received," said the officer. "Warden in active service?"

"Warden."

At twelve minutes past eight they heard it. Txomin, who was upstairs at the shutter, said so from the corridor before it could be heard downstairs.

At twenty past eight the aircraft took up position over the eastern meadow, fifty metres from the door, and did not land: it dropped the rescuer on the cable and climbed again so as not to load the snow. Lena and Casimiro went down on the first lift, Casimiro on the stretcher and Lena sitting with the mask on, because that was the list Idoia handed to the rescuer in writing at the door. Then Aitor, Mercedes and Ramiro. Then Txomin and Sabino. Idoia went out on the last lift, as she had said she would, and before leaving she put the stove out with the shovel, closed the upper dormitory shutter, bolted the firewood hatch from below, took the logbook off the lectern in the hallway with Mercedes's accounts on the inside back cover, and opened the warden's cupboard with the flat key to take the two stapled pink sheets from the 2021 pad off the bottom shelf.

At the Pamplona base there is a counter of pale wood with a glass top and a plastic tray where reports are left. At twenty to eleven, in somebody else's clothes and with a coffee she did not drink, Idoia filled in the incident report for the Iratxeta refuge: the dates, the nine names, the flue broken under the tile on the eastern pitch, the hundred and forty parts per million beside the upper bunk of the small dormitory and the hundred and twenty-one that the same spot went on reading after the patch, with the hour and the day, exactly as they stood inside the logger that went down in Fani Quiroga's pocket. In the last box, the one for observations, she wrote the number of file 47/2021 and the date of the 2022 dismissal, and attached the two stapled pink sheets from the pad, the copy that had not gone down with Fani.

Idoia signed the report with her full name, left it on the counter and, underneath, in the refuge logbook, wrote the entry for the day: Sabino Amantegui, warden, came up to warn.