Up near the top where the snow got a little steep and the air a little thin, where the mountain curved round them and squeezed out the lower world. That’s where clients got scared. Where they started huffing and chuffing like mired horses and leaning into the ice, which was the worst thing they could do. Lisa felt for them, but it was no joke to catch a 250-pound galoot whose crampons had sheered out because he wanted to give the ice a hug, like the ice would hug him back. Catch him with no running belays, because they were guides and guides were freakin’ omnipotent mountain demigods who hadn’t needed running belays since the eighteen-whatevers in the Alps. Of course, those guides got pulled off and killed just the same as the current batch of pros, and if you did get pulled off, you might as well just let go and tumble yourself down into the bergschrund, because any guide who got yanked by a client must die of shame—it was written in the bylaws. Ice axe seppuku, right there in the snow.
