Directions

She awoke with a dull pain at the back of her head, and it wasn't until she tried to move that a sharper pain in her tailbone, paired with instant nausea, told her that she probably had a concussion during the fall.

The fall. It took a moment for it to register. She was still feeling dizzy and disoriented, and so took advantage of that and pushed the terrible thoughts away.

But there was no escaping the fact that she had fallen down an ice crevasse, crashing down in a blur of broken snow into crystal blue depths. From what she remembered, she went almost straight down, gaining horrifying speed.

She remembered her last thought: the impact from the fall would likely kill her.

But it did not. She had hit her head, which would explain the dizziness and sick feeling in her stomach. She sat up slowly, feeling her wet hair, frozen into the ice she laid upon, pull back and come loose with a painful tug. There was a sickening blur of colours, and, as it passed, she looked into a darkness that was without comparison.

She sat there for a minute, stunned. Then tried yelling. A voice in response? She replied back, louder, excited. Then the same, slightly muffled, lower pitched response.

An echo. Her heart sank with the realization. Still, she tried this for what seemed a long time, until her throat grew raw from the exertion. She needed a drink.

At her hands, there was wetness, and she could stretch her feet out. She had read about ice crevasses, and cursed her proud memory for recalling it all too easily in this moment. It could be said she was lucky, having survived the fall into the glacier's several hundred meters of ice without splattering into a mess in its hulking, mysterious depths.

Or, lucky that she had not fallen into a pool of melted glacier water, forced to struggle for a short time in its narrow grave. Before her muscles refused to obey and she drowned.

She considered her current situation, moving her legs to test both her body and her location. She was not seriously injured, as far as she could tell. She got up onto her knees and ran her hands over her jacket, waterproof snowpants and backpack.

Without much difficult, she stretched her shoulders back to slip her backpack off, and searched within to find her headlamp. "Yes!" she said, when she found it worked, turning it on the lowest setting to conserve the batteries. She looked around.

She was sitting at the end of the ice tunnel she had slid into, which sloped and narrowed further into a small hole that drained the ice melt. She turned around, too quickly, so that she cursed as she nearly threw up the breakfast of flavoured oatmeal and raisins. Once the feeling passed, she inspected where she had fallen from.

It was a gradual climb on blue ice, sloping upwards, degree by degree. A thought came to her uninvited: it would have been perfect for sliding. This made her think of her children, back home in Whitehorse, who would have delighted in having these icy conditions for their toboggans.

Again, she pushed the terror that crept within, choking on it as she swallowed back her unwelcome breakfast.

She found her ice pick, still hanging from one of her pack's loops. She grasped it, and leaning forward, started climbing in the direction she figured she must have slid. The ice was slick wet with melt, it being later in spring.

She began to find a rhythm to the process: strike, step-step, brace against the wall; strike, step-step, brace. Her ascent was gradual and grew more difficult as the slope inclined.

She thought she could see the faintest light, and felt hope flicker. She wanted to see if it wasn't just a reflection from her lamp, but didn't risk freeing a hand to switch it off.