‘All of them were,’ said Ballard bleakly.
Turi Buck came up and silently held out a piece of paper. Ballard took it, then looked up. ‘The Marshall family, all four of them?’
‘We’ve just dug out the house — or what’s left of it.’
‘Dead! All of them?’
‘Yes.’ Turi went away, his back bent.
Ballard made four violent slash marks on the list before him. ‘Seventeen.’
‘We’ll be able to get bulldozers in this afternoon,’ said Rusch. ‘That should speed things up.’
‘And it could be dangerous,’ said Ballard. ‘A bulldozer blade could chop a man in half.’
‘We’ll be careful,’ said Rusch. ‘We’ll be real careful. But speed is important now. If anyone buried is still alive now they can’t last much longer.’ By the tone of his voice he doubted if anyone could possibly be still alive.
Cameron was almost totally exhausted. He had been asleep or perhaps unconscious — it did not matter which — but now he was awake again. His whole body was racked with pain and the fierce headache was still with him. He had been sick during the night and had been afraid of choking on his own vomit, but he had managed to twist his head to one side and so had not suffered that particularly ugly death. Also during the night he had uncontrollably voided both urine and faeces and now the stench of himself sickened him.
He became aware of a sound and, at first, thought it was human and his hopes rose. It sounded as though someone was chuckling quietly. Cameron called weakly and then listened as the distant laughter went on. He thought he was going mad — who would be laughing in the middle of a snowdrift?
His senses swam and he passed out for a few minutes. When he awoke again he heard the sound but it had subtly changed. It was now more of a gurgle than a laugh or a chuckle, a sound such as might be made by a contented baby in its cot. After listening for a long time he knew what it was and again became afraid. He was listening to the sound of water.
Presently he was aware that his head was becoming wet. A trickle of water had entered the cab and swirled about his scalp as he hung there suspended upside down, and now he knew that he would drown. Not much water need come in to cover his mouth and nose — no more than six inches.
On the surface two young men were piloting a bulldozer through the hummocky snow alongside the river. The driver was John Skinner, a construction worker from Auckland; he was also a member of the Alpine Sports Club. His companion was a university lecturer and a member of the Canterbury University Ski Club called Roger Halliwell. Skinner stopped the bulldozer by the river, and said, ‘The flooding upstream will stop as soon as the river clears that snow away.’
‘I hear a lot of cattle were drowned,’ said Halliwell.
‘No people, though. That bloody avalanche must have been bad enough without the risk of drowning.’ Skinner looked around. ‘Now where was it that the Yank wanted us to dig?’
A section of snow in the river bed slumped as it was undercut by water and Halliwell looked at it idly. Then he said, ‘I think I saw something down there.’
‘What?’
‘I don’t know. Something dark. It was round.’
‘A boulder, maybe.’
‘Perhaps.’ Halliwell frowned. ‘I’m going to have a look.’
He dropped from the bulldozer and walked to the edge of the river and then put his foot delicately on to the snow. It was soft but bore his weight without him sinking too much. He walked on slowly, lifting each leg high. As he progressed the snow became more slushy because it had been penetrated by the river water, and suddenly he sank up to his waist. He had a nightmare vision of going right down, but he found himself standing on something.
He put his hand down into the snow and encountered a shape which he explored. It was a wheel with a tyre on it. ‘There’s a car in here,’ he yelled.
Skinner jumped down and undipped a wire rope from the rear of the bulldozer. There was a big snap-shackle on each end, one of which he clipped to a stout bar on the bulldozer. ‘Can you catch this?’ He whirled the other end of the rope around his head.
He missed on his first cast, but Halliwell caught it the second time. There was some difficulty in finding somewhere to attach the shackle. Halliwell knew it had to be an integral part of the chassis of the buried vehicle and he groped around in the snow for some time quite unsuccessfully.
In the cab Cameron was close to drowning. The water covered his nose even though he withdrew his head into his shoulders like a tortoise trying to retreat into its shell. There was only a matter of an inch to go before it covered his mouth. While he could do so he took a deep breath.
The truck lurched and water washed over his head. When the movement had finished Cameron’s head was completely under water and he battled to keep his breath. The truck moved again, this time upwards, and Cameron screamed at the pain and thought his back was being broken. The bulldozer hauled the truck bodily from the river bed and on to the bank where it lay on its side.
Halliwell ran up to it. ‘There’s someone in here,’ he said in wonder. ‘And he’s alive, by God!’
Within the hour Cameron was in a helicopter on his way to Christchurch. But he was a badly broken man.
Newman was unlucky.
All night he had been digging upwards in total darkness. He had to dig a hole at least two feet in diameter to accommodate the shoulders of a broad man. There had also to be steps cut in the side where he could stand. For digging he used whatever came to hand. His most useful tool was a ballpoint pen which he jabbed repeatedly into the snow above him, breaking it out, chunk by chunk. Often the snow dropped into his eyes, but that did not matter because it was dark anyway. Twice he dropped the pen and that did matter because he had to go down and grope with gloved hands until he found it. He lost time there.
In one sense he was lucky. He did not know how far he had to dig and had he known it was as much as sixty feet it is doubtful if he would have ever begun. But during the time he was under the snow it had begun to settle and compact as the air was squeezed out of it. While this made it a harder material to penetrate it also meant that it lessened the distance he had to dig to a little over fifty feet.
He dug alone because the others in the cave had lapsed into total apathy.
Fifty-two hours after the avalanche the sky was darkening and Sam Foster, a Ranger from Tongariro, debated with himself whether or not it was worth while having his team continue the search. There were still a few men missing but it was inconceivable that any would be alive even if found. Perhaps it would be better to call off the search until the morrow.
He strode into a gently sloping cup-shaped hollow and was somewhere in the middle of it when the snow gave under his feet. Newman had dug to within a foot of the surface, and when Foster’s weight broke through one of Foster’s boots slammed into his head. He fell down the hole he had made. It was not a long fall because the bottom of the hole was packed with the debris of his digging. But it was enough to break his neck.
The others, of course, were rescued, excepting Haslam who was dead already. Newman was the last person to die in the valley. The last person to die as a result of the disaster at Hukahoronui was Mrs Jarvis, the oldest inhabitant, who lingered tenaciously in hospital for a week before she succumbed.
There was a second avalanche on the west slope of Hukahoronui that year but it happened in the spring thaw. There was nobody there to kill.
Thirty-two
At three-thirty in the afternoon McGill parked his car and hurried across Durham Street towards the Provincial Government Buildings. Instead of going into the chamber where the hearing was being held, he went upstairs to the entrance to the Press gallery and had a word with the usher. Presently Dan Edwards came out to see him.