EGRV 16 | 457 kHz

【One side of his face was quiet and well-behaved, the other ferocious, with blood gushing from his temple.】

At six in the morning, nearly eight thousand feet above sea level on Blackcomb Mountain, the trees were sparse, the wind howled, and flurries of snow danced in the air. Chi Yu reached up with his right hand and adjusted the position of his hearing aid.

He first encountered skiing when he was five years old. His father, Chi Mian, was a university professor. The year he was a visiting scholar in Montreal, a fleeting affair resulted in Chi Yu’s birth. Chi Yu had never met his mother; his father told him she was a student at a dance academy. At the time, she had apparently been hoping for a daughter. It was only when the baby cried that she discovered her wish had not come true. As for who his mother was, what her name was, whether her departure was a spur-of-the-moment decision or long-planned, Chi Yu didn’t know.

Throughout his youth, he was obsessed with finding his mother. All of his school creative projects related to “family” were dedicated to this pursuit, with a stubbornness that bordered on foolish. Chi Mian couldn’t reason with him; he couldn’t even get a word in. Chi Mian would yell at him, curse at him, and tear up his notebooks, but it was no use.

Chi Mian had never hit Chi Yu. On the contrary, he considered himself a loving father. Because of Chi Yu’s birth, Chi Mian had given up an invitation back in his home country and instead accepted a teaching position in Canada, where he stayed for ten years.

When he was five, Chi Mian went skiing at Mont Tremblant with his university colleagues. With no one at home to look after Chi Yu, Chi Mian decided to bring him along at the last minute. But when Chi Yu saw the snowy mountains, it was as if a fish had leaped into water; he showed an astonishing talent.

Because Chi Yu was very quiet as a child, Chi Mian had always suspected his son might have autistic tendencies. But after seeing his performance at the ski camp, he completely dispelled those worries. Chi Yu would horse around with a group of other little skiers and snowboarders from the top of the mountain to the bottom, constantly laughing and talking, throwing snowballs, having snowball fights, and doing tricks. On the night before they were to go home, he clung to the hem of a good friend named Max’s clothes and cried his eyes out, not wanting to leave.

After that, Chi Yu begged him to send him back to the ski resort. But skiing was such an expensive sport. At first, Chi Mian dismissed it, thinking that for such a young child, the enthusiasm would last three minutes and then be gone. But after returning from the ski camp, Chi Yu seemed possessed. He took the wheels and trucks off his old skateboard, then used waterproof duct tape to strap his boots to the deck, creating a makeshift snowboard. After the winter snows in Montreal, he would slide down the snowy slope in Chi Mian’s backyard, playing alone from dawn until dusk.

But this makeshift snowboard was, after all, the creation of a five or six-year-old. One day, the tape broke. Chi Yu fell down the slope, breaking his nose and getting a large, two-finger-wide gash on the side of his face from the edge of a branch on the ground.

When Chi Mian got home from the university, he found Chi Yu sitting there waiting, hands hanging at his sides. One side of his face was quiet and well-behaved, the other ferocious, with blood gushing from his temple.

They rushed him to the emergency room, where the doctors stitched him up and ran a series of tests. The results showed that there was nothing wrong with his eyes, but the doctors astutely discovered that Chi Yu had a congenital hearing impairment. His right ear had only about thirty percent of a normal person’s hearing, and it had somehow never been diagnosed before. In an instant, everything made sense.

The following year, Chi Yu successfully returned to the ski camp at Mont Tremblant. At six years old, wearing a hearing aid for the first time, the world had a different wave, rhythm, and drumbeat for him. He could clearly hear with both ears the wind that sped through the trees on a snowy Tremblant night.

Whistler’s two great mountains, Whistler and Blackcomb, are geographically adjacent. Between the two, Whistler has more varied terrain and more runs suitable for beginners, while Blackcomb has more steep, vertical descents, making it more suitable for advanced riders. Chi Yu always took beginners to Whistler Mountain for lessons, but when he was riding for himself, he was mostly in the “expert only” double black diamond areas of Blackcomb.

After arriving at the rescue center, the professional personnel in charge of the rescue did not let him go up the mountain overnight. In fact, they themselves had no plans for a nighttime mountain rescue. This was within his expectations. It was a rational decision. Visibility at night was too low for helicopters to see anything, and the risk of a secondary or even tertiary avalanche couldn’t be assessed. Backcountry rescue must first ensure the safety of the rescue team itself, not to mention Chi Yu was an outsider.

He spent the night huddled in the patrollers’ cabin at the base of the mountain, unable to sleep a wink. The alcohol had mostly worn off, and the cold kept him wide awake. The hours just passed like that. Just as dawn was breaking, someone finally handed him a liability waiver to sign, saying apologetically that it was a procedural requirement from above. He knew what it meant. Without even looking at it, he signed his name, then grabbed his board and followed the rescue team up the mountain.

The Blackcomb side has several “Gem Bowls,” all double black diamond areas with one cliff after another, a gathering place for freestyle experts. Before they parted ways yesterday, Gao Yi had told him he was going to ski Garnet Bowl. At 1 p.m., some skiers had also seen Gao Yi from a high point on a nearby chairlift.

Chi Yu was extremely familiar with the terrain around the Gem Bowls. He had seen the topography of the various backcountry lines here in all kinds of weather conditions and at all times of the year. After they searched Garnet Bowl for half an hour with their transceivers set to the right frequency and found nothing, Chi Yu immediately thought that perhaps Gao Yi, standing at the entrance to Garnet Bowl, had decided to challenge Sapphire Bowl.

So, the search and rescue team then entered Sapphire Bowl.

Sapphire Bowl is one of the most difficult freestyle skiing areas in all of Whistler to access. The entrance is a sheer cliff drop of several dozen meters, with greater exposure and a relatively higher risk of avalanches. Chi Yu himself had ridden here for two years and had heard of one Class 2 avalanche incident.

At 7:40 a.m., one of the rescuer’s transceivers started to beep. Everyone’s spirits lifted. Subsequently, they found a hypothermic Gao Yi at the bottom of the bowl. He was sitting next to a crooked tree, his bright orange avalanche airbag already deployed, providing an excellent visual reference for the rescue team—it was very likely this airbag that had saved his life.

They had triggered a Class 2 avalanche* in the backcountry. Gao Yi had broken his leg and couldn’t move. After waiting a long time for Zhang Chenxiao, who never came, he could only wait where he was for professional rescue.

Fortunately, apart from being temporarily disoriented from hypothermia in the mountain cold and a fractured femur, Gao Yi was not in serious danger. The rescue team called in a helicopter within ten minutes. After placing Gao Yi on a stretcher, the helicopter took off swiftly, flying out from Whistler’s snow-covered mountains and clouds, straight to the city hospital.

At almost the same time, other freestyle skiers who had entered the backcountry found the lost Zhang Chenxiao in an area a few hundred meters below.

“That buddy of his didn’t run uphill, he ran downhill instead, got swept more than thirty meters away. Then he got lost, and the more he walked, the more lost he got. That’s when he finally decided to take out his transceiver to look for people, but when he took it out, he found the battery was dead. I’m serious…”

On the way back, Liang Muyi picked up Chi Yu and listened to him recount the day’s events. When he got to the critical parts, Chi Yu was fuming.

Liang Muyi noticed that Chi Yu was in a very strange state this afternoon; he was much more talkative than usual. On their previous drives, it was always Liang Muyi who had to find topics and lead the conversation. But this time, ever since picking Chi Yu up, he had been talking non-stop like a little machine gun, and Liang Muyi couldn’t get a word in.

At first, Liang Muyi thought it was a good thing that he finally had the urge to talk after going through something. But within five minutes, he realized that the other’s emotional state was less a desire to confide and more a kind of agitation and hyperactivity. He would get hung up on insignificant details for a long time. It was as if, in the state of emergency, some internal switch had flipped on, continuously feeding a kind of energy to his central nervous system, severely overdrawing his mental and physical reserves. Now that the matter was resolved, he couldn’t seem to turn the switch off.

In the end, after finishing his story about the day’s events, Chi Yu started talking about Liang Muyi. “You don’t have to pay me for lessons anymore. If I’m on the mountain and riding on the groomers, and I have time, I’ll let you know the day before, and you can just come find me. Or if you need a ride, just let me know in advance. I’m here every week, whenever I’m not at the shop.” After saying that, he remembered something else and started rambling again. “Oh right, I haven’t told the shop yet…”

Liang Muyi first refused. “You still have to take the money. You need to go abroad for competitions.”

Chi Yu was stubborn and insisted, “Then don’t pay me for today. I’ll reimburse you for the hotel. Oh—” He leaned over again, saw the dashboard on the driver’s side, where the fuel gauge needle was pointing steadily at the letter F, indicating a full tank. “I’ll reimburse you for the gas too. It was only a quarter full when I drove over, right?”

Liang Muyi didn’t answer him directly. After a moment, he finally spoke, his tone a bit serious. “Chi Yu, it’s already the second day.”

“Second day?”

“Our lesson was yesterday morning.” Over thirty hours had passed since they had met. Liang Muyi calculated it himself—Chi Yu had been awake for a full forty-eight hours. He had skied for eight hours, driven for two, and then spent several more hours in the cold wind at the summit the next day. After such an ordeal, even a man of steel would collapse.

Chi Yu fell silent.

The man said again, “Recline your seat. Get some sleep.”

Chi Yu said he was fine, but he still listened and reclined the seat.

His phone battery was almost dead. He plugged it in to charge while calling the owner of the ski shop. The shop was about to close and was doing its accounts, so Boss Yu asked him to wait for two minutes and put him on hold. The hold music was Boss Yu’s favorite, Tom Chang. Chi Yu hummed along to the song and waited with his eyes closed.

The charging cable wasn’t long enough, so he temporarily placed the phone on the center console. But within a minute, his head tilted to the side and he fell into a deep sleep. The phone slipped from his hand and didn’t even wake him.

Boss Yu was still calling his name on the other end. Liang Muyi, steering with one hand, bent down, picked up the phone, and ended the call.