Add The Rattlejaw - #508

Opening 1, close third person

There was still a little sun in the fork of the far cliff, enough to show the round white stone the packers kept on top of the cairn. Marlis wanted to be there while that stone was warm. She could picture the look Delk would give her if she were to greet him lying at ease on her back with her head on the stone, doing an impression of somebody kept waiting for hours. He might even laugh before he decided what to do about losing.

The packers' way across the Rattlejaw went out along a black rib of stones that the ice had brought down from somewhere higher on the mountain. Where it curved uphill, a strip of old snow cut straight on toward the cairn. Her right boot was hanging open at the ankle. Marlis knelt to lace it, and a little pop came up through the knee she had on the ice. On a warm evening there was no end to the noises the Rattlejaw could make. The smallest ones were her favorites. They came from places men had crossed a thousand times on the strength of never having heard a thing.

“Look,” she said to Delk. “While there's sun on it. I'll put my hand on that white stone before the shade reaches it, and if you beat me I'll say I took the wrong line on purpose. I'll say I was distracted by your beauty. That's for nothing. Imagine what I'll say if I win.”

He had the rope out of his bag already. He began laying the coils on a ledge in the rock. “If I stand with my back here,” he said, “I can let you out as far as the turn without setting foot on the snow. Come put your fingers in this first.”

Marlis grinned at him. Any fall Delk could name, she'd had it, and it wasn't in his power or the glacier's to break a bone of hers. They could have spent every second of the last of the light going over the ice. He was going to make her come back three perfectly good steps.

Opening 2, first person

Delk and I used to play a game on scree in which the first person to shout *Rock!* owed the other supper. It was generally Delk who ate for free. I liked to send a stone bowling down first and get the full length of the slope out of it. Since nothing could so much as bruise either of us, I thought this ought to make the game more enjoyable for him. He said I had got it the wrong way round. I remember telling him I was happy to play for lunch.

At the Rattlejaw the packers had built their cairn in a fork of the far cliff, where a little of the evening sun always got in. In a good year their ponies went over the black stripe of stone the glacier had picked up somewhere higher on the mountain. It took the stripe half the width of the valley to go a quarter of the way across. I could see a patch of old snow broad enough to take me from the first bend straight to the far side. I had a beautiful view of the whole absurd journey from the place where Delk was unwinding our rope.

“Let me get there first,” I said. “You can come up to the cairn and find me doing anything you like. Asleep. Taking a little supper out of my pocket. Say what you'd most dislike to find me doing and I'll have a go at that.”

He set the coils down on the rock between us. The last one smelled of warm hemp. “Come over here and put your hand in this,” he said. In the lee of a stone he had found a crease in the snow. There was ice on one side. On the other, even with my cheek against the stone, I couldn't see the bottom. I made a show of looking all the way down. There are all kinds of things a person can pretend to look for when she wants someone to take his eyes off her hands. Delk left the loose end of the rope beside mine.