Part 1
On the third night of the big snow, Bertha Vogel heard the mountain above the Wren Mine make a sound like a great slow breath.
It was February 1884, high in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado, two miles above the little town of Ophir, at a silver mine that clung to the side of a gulch at eleven thousand feet. There was the mine tunnel, a blacksmith shop, a long log bunkhouse for twenty-two men, and the cookhouse, where Bertha cooked three meals a day and slept in a narrow room behind the stove.
She was sixty. A widow, born in the Tyrol, in the high Austrian mountains, who had come to America in 1849 and followed her husband from one mining camp to the next until his lungs gave out in Leadville. She had a broad, red, patient face, a gray braid pinned around her head, and arms like a stevedore's from forty years of bread dough.
The miners called her Mother Vogel. They liked her. They liked her bread most of all.
It had been snowing for three days.
Not the light, dry snow of December. This was heavy snow, wet and thick, falling straight down out of a low gray sky without a breath of wind, day and night. Six feet of new snow lay over the old. The trail down to Ophir was gone. The roofs groaned under it, and the men took turns climbing up with shovels to clear them.
On the evening of the third day, Bertha went out to the woodpile behind the cookhouse with a lantern.
She was halfway there when the snow under her feet dropped.
Not much. An inch, perhaps. But all at once, everywhere, as far as she could see in the lantern light, with a deep, soft sound like a giant letting out his breath. Whumpf.
Bertha stood very still in the snow with the lantern in her hand.
She had heard that sound before. She had been nine years old, in the Tyrol, in the winter of 1833, walking home from church with her brother Anton. The snow had dropped under their feet with that same sound. And three hours later, in the night, the whole white face of the mountain above the village had come down.
They found Anton in the spring.
She went back inside and stood at the cookhouse window and looked across at the bunkhouse.
She had looked at it every day for two years, and never really seen it.
The bunkhouse stood at the foot of a long, steep, open slope that ran straight up the mountain for a thousand feet. All the rest of the gulch was dark with spruce trees. But on that one slope, above the bunkhouse, there were no trees at all. Not one. Only a long smooth stripe of white, like a road going straight up into the sky.
Bertha knew what a mountain with no trees on it meant. Her father had taught her that before she could read. The trees do not grow where the snow comes down. The snow takes them every winter, before they can grow.
The cookhouse stood fifty yards away, back among the spruces, on a little knoll.
She put on her shawl and walked across to the bunkhouse.
The men were playing cards by the stove, and mending socks, and arguing, the way they did every night. Twenty-two of them. Cornishmen, mostly, Cousin Jacks from the tin mines, and a few Irish and Swedes. They looked up when she came in, stamping the snow off her boots.
"Mother Vogel," somebody called. "Is it bread pudding tomorrow?"
"Listen to me," said Bertha. "All of you. I want you to bring your blankets to the cookhouse tonight. And sleep on my floor."
They laughed. They thought it was a joke.
"I mean it," said Bertha. "The snow dropped tonight. Did you hear it? A sound like a breath. That's the snow breaking, deep down, all over the mountain. And there's no trees on that slope above you. You know why there's no trees? Because the snow comes down there."
Some of them looked at each other.
Then the shift boss put down his cards.
His name was Jory Penhallow, and he was a big, slow, square Cornishman of fifty with a gray beard and forty years underground. The men called him Cap'n. He had never been wrong about rock in his life.
"Mother," he said, not unkindly, "this bunkhouse has stood here two winters. There's never been a slide on that slope since the mine opened."
"Two winters," said Bertha. "The mountain is older than two winters, Mr. Penhallow."
"There's twenty-two men here who go into that tunnel at six tomorrow morning," said Penhallow. "Every man who sleeps on a cold floor tonight is a man who's worth half a shift tomorrow. That's not me being hard. That's the mine." He picked up his cards again. "Go to bed, Mother. We'll want our breakfast."
A few of the young ones laughed again, but not as loud.
"I'll keep the stove up all night," she said. "There's coffee. There's room on the floor for every one of you. The door won't be locked."
She went back to the cookhouse through the soft, heavy snow.
Behind her, she could hear Penhallow dealing the cards.
At ten o'clock, the door of the cookhouse opened, and a young Swede named Gus Fjellman came in with his blanket under his arm, looking embarrassed.
"My mother was from the mountains too," he said. "In Jämtland."
At half past ten, two of the Irish came. At eleven, four more. By midnight there were seventeen men asleep on the cookhouse floor, in rows, between the tables, wrapped in their blankets, with Bertha's stove roaring and her coffee pot going.
Five men stayed in the bunkhouse. Cap'n Penhallow, and four of the older Cornishmen who would not shame him by leaving.
Bertha did not sleep. She sat by the stove with her shawl around her, and fed it wood, and listened to the mountain.
At a quarter to six, the gray light came up over the gulch.
And far up on the white slope above the bunkhouse, something cracked like a cannon.