Margen
Previously: an avalanche shut eight people inside the Iratxeta refuge. The tank is three days of diesel short and sixty litres of water over.
The fifth day dawned with eight days of diesel, and only because Idoia Bergara, warden of Iratxeta and an A&E nurse until 2019, went down at seven to remake the dipstick.
The dipstick is a steel strip a metre twenty long with twelve marks twenty litres apart, one for each day of the old ration. Idoia crossed out all twelve with two crossed passes of the file and left eight marks, one every sixteen litres: 112, 96, 80, 64, 48, 32, 16 and the bottom. Seven of them she opened herself that morning; the 80 was already there, because it is the only number the two scales share, and she left it where it was.
"New ration," she said. "Sixteen litres a day. Three hours and twelve minutes of engine. An hour and a half at seven, an hour and a half at eight in the evening and twelve odd minutes to pump water up to the top tank."
Mercedes Arriaga, a retired justice of the peace, wrote it on the back cover of the signing-in book, which is where she has kept the fuel accounts since the third day, and she said it out loud so that nobody would have to ask her again.
"With the old ration we had six days. With this one, eight. A hundred and twenty-eight divided by sixteen."
"A hundred and twenty-eight point three three," said Casimiro Lete, seventy-one years old, a member of the club from before the refuge had electricity, who writes down every start and every stop of the engine on the back of an envelope.
"The thirty-three centilitres I am leaving out, Casimiro, and let nobody come looking for them on day eleven," said Mercedes.
Yesterday Idoia had called out the rounded figure, fifty-one and a half. Today Mercedes set it down exact: ten hours and twenty minutes at five litres an hour make fifty-one point six seven litres. Two hundred and forty minus that, a hundred and eighty-eight point three three. Minus the sixty of water, a hundred and twenty-eight point three three.
The ten hours and twenty minutes do not come out of one place either, and that is why Idoia takes them as good. The drum of the hour counter bolted to the engine block shows only whole hours and cannot be reset to zero: on the day of the avalanche, with the engine already switched off and the tank just measured, Idoia wrote down its reading — four thousand six hundred and twelve — on the first page of the red-covered notebook. That morning it read four thousand six hundred and twenty-two. Ten hours. The twenty minutes come from Casimiro's envelope, which records the starts to the minute.
And on the fourth day nothing was lit at all. On the third Idoia had promised to give back the two hours she had run over; she gave back four, the whole day, and the refuge spent it in the dark and at six degrees indoors, everyone eating with their anorak on. Nobody complained, because at eleven in the morning Aitor Sein, seventeen years old, on a warden's traineeship that season, had called out three jerrycans of water drawn off through the drain tap, the one that empties the bottom of the tank.
Eight days reach day twelve. The helicopter window, according to the first day's forecast, is the eleventh or the twelfth. The margin is one day or none.
The other thing still did not add up.
Ramiro Bouzas, forty-four years old, mountaineer and shipwright — he makes his living repairing wooden boats on an estuary —, had spent the afternoon of the fourth day with Aitor looking for sixty litres of diesel inside a house sealed by the snow. Three twenty-litre jerrycans do not evaporate. They looked in the woodstore, the bunks, the larder, the stairwell and the room with the old boiler, dismantled since 2011.
"This house has two openings that can be opened from outside without going through the dining room," said Ramiro at breakfast. "The west hatch of the woodstore, the one the firewood goes in through, and the door of the equipment store. He came in through the hatch on Tuesday. None of us has opened the store."
Txomin Elordi, sixty-two years old, a shepherd, who has carried the club's post up to Iratxeta since 1994, said that on the west side you could still walk with crampons, that the avalanche had come down the north face and that flank had been left clean.
Fani Quiroga, geologist, twenty-eight years old, wanted to go with them to open it. Idoia said no.
"As soon as I'm done with him, the three of us go down. Right now the morning is for something else."
The something else was in the bottom bunk of the small dormitory, covered with two sleeping bags and a survival blanket, with its eyes open since seven.
Sabino Amantegui, sixty-six years old, warden of this refuge from 1991 until they dismissed him in 2022, had been forty-eight hours in that bunk and had not said a word: not his name, not how he had come up, not what he was doing inside a woodstore at 2,100 metres with an avalanche on top of him. He was in there two whole days before Aitor came through the gap in the plank door and found him.
Lena Bouzas, forty-one years old, mountaineer and anaesthetist, Ramiro's sister, put the matter on the table before Mercedes did.
"On the third day I told you he would need a couple of hours before he could answer. That was true on the third day." She sat down with the mug between her hands. "Severe hypothermia leaves your speech thick while the body rewarms, and with your sugar on the floor you cannot hold a sentence together. Yesterday at four in the afternoon he ate, he drank, he sat up on his own and he squeezed my hand with normal strength. Since four o'clock yesterday, medically, he can speak."
"Then he isn't speaking because he doesn't want to," said Mercedes.
"That part is no longer mine. I tell you what the body does."
Mercedes wanted to take a statement from him: the time, two questions written down before starting, the answer recorded in front of a witness. Idoia said no.
"Mercedes, that man spent two days in a woodstore at five below. If you go in with the book open, he'll say nothing until the helicopter comes up."
"And what do you suggest?"
"That I give him his breakfast."
What Idoia did that morning takes up one line in the notebook: "08:10, with S." She sat on the floor, her back to the bunk, the notebook closed on her knees and two cups of broth. She asked nothing. She told things. She told him about the water at the bottom of the tank and how you can see against the light that it is two liquids and not one. She told him about the three jerrycans. She told him there were a hundred and twenty-eight litres left and that she had remade the dipstick at sixteen litres to stretch them to eight days.
At half past nine she took the cups away, came back with the broth hot and sat down again. At eleven, Aitor heard her in passing talking about the snow in the Larrondo couloir. At a quarter to twelve Lena came in to check his pulse and went out without saying anything. At twelve, Txomin heard her explaining how you file a steel strip so that the notches come out even.
Sabino did not open his mouth in four hours, but he did two things. At ten he drank the second mug down whole, on his own, without anybody handing it to him. And at half past eleven, when Idoia described the clean line that separated the water from the diesel inside Fani's jar, he turned his head towards her and went back to looking at the ceiling.
At a quarter past twelve, four hours and five minutes after she sat down, Sabino Amantegui spoke for the first time since the woodstore.
"Sabino Amantegui," he said. "Warden of this refuge from ninety-one to twenty-two."
Idoia did not turn round.
"We already knew that. It is in the book, the club's compulsory register, on the seventh line, dated Tuesday."
"I wrote it myself." He pulled the blanket down to his chest. "How many hours a day have you had the engine running since Tuesday?"
"Ten hours and twenty minutes in four days. From today, three and twelve."
Sabino did the sum looking at the ceiling. He moved his lips, wiped them with the back of his hand and propped himself up on his elbow before speaking.
"The sixty litres, I took them out. On Tuesday. I signed the book at twenty to seven, went out through the main door, came round by the west side and went into the generator room through the landing door. From there I went down to the woodstore before eight, with you lot still in the kitchen. That room has two doors: the one to the dining room and the one to the landing of the woodstore stairs, which is the one I came in by and the one I went out by, and that way you do not cross the dining room. I have had a key since 2013 and nobody asked me for it when they threw me out."
Mercedes Arriaga had appeared in the doorway and opened the book.
"I didn't carry the water up in buckets," he went on, "which is what you'll be thinking. The pump for the top tank is in that same room and it has a drain cock on the elbow. I opened that one, filled from there and never went out onto any stairs. And I took the jerrycans out one at a time through the west hatch, with my head torch on because it had not got light yet, and I put them in the equipment store, behind the shovels and the rescue sledge. All three are untouched. Back then you could still walk about outside."
Idoia threw the bunch of keys to Ramiro without turning round. Ramiro went out and was back before Sabino had finished: the pump had the elbow where he said it did, and the water from the top tank comes down there on its own.
Mercedes wrote down every word and lifted her pencil.
"Why?"
Sabino lay back down, pulled the blanket up to his chin and said nothing more all day.