Dorje · Eleven Steps From the Edge · Pulse Beat
Dorje was the best climber Tashi had ever known, and the worst at being careful. They had grown up in neighbouring villages, in a country where a boy's first job was to carry a load for foreigners…
Dorje was the best climber Tashi had ever known, and the worst at being careful.
They had grown up in neighbouring villages, in a country where a boy's first job was to carry a load for foreigners, and the two of them had graduated together, a few years apart, from porter to icefall doctor to guide. Dorje was larger than life: a booming voice, a golden tooth, a gift for joking at altitude when everybody else could barely breathe.
He also had, Tashi knew, a weakness: he could not turn around. "I don't like going down with nothing," he would say. And he would look at the summit like a man looking at a woman across a room.
"You have two children," Tashi had told him once. "Your daughter is five."
"Exactly," said Dorje. "I am showing her that a man can do hard things." And he'd laughed, and clapped Tashi on the back, and Tashi had let it go, because it was not the kind of thing you could argue with a man like that.
He thought of it often, afterwards.