The big man from New York in a lemon yellow one-piece ski-suit was not pleased that the chairlift station was unattended. He turned to his wife snowploughing to a halt behind him with their daughter and made a face. ‘Guess they don’t go big on safety or service in Canada.’

He unhooked his poles from two fat wrists and ushered his equally fat, sullen daughter towards the clanking chairs, turning solemnly on their own round the pylon and jerking empty back up the hill. The tiny wooden hut was deserted. There was no one around at all. No one to shovel the snow onto the mounting platform. No one to wipe the snow from the seats. No one to say have a nice day and ski safe.

‘I tell you, Marsha, if any of us fall getting on this contraption I’ll sue the balls off this resort.’

Marsha nodded in agreement, too tired from following her portly partner around the mountain all day to argue or disagree. She and her daughter stepped herring-bone fashion, clumsily like ducks, up to the snow-covered wooden plank that was the primitive mounting platform. Heads turned to look behind them, they waited for the next chair to scoop them up.

It did so without incident, and the father slid forward to catch the next one.

Out of the trees a man in a Silver Ski Company jacket stumbled towards the station. The father stepped back from the chair and let it go. He had a few words to say to this guy all right.

Sam Hunt gasped as he made it to the snow fence surrounding the hut, his head still spinning, his vision trying to sort itself out as his eyes swivelled in their sockets. He was going crazy. He didn’t even remember blacking out this time. Just waking up staring at the odd shapes of sky made by the gaps in the tree-tops above him. The branches had swayed and bowed, changing those shapes of sky for a least a minute, accompanied by Sam’s breathing and the sound in his ears of blood coursing round his body, before he had realized that he was on his back in the snow, in the trees above the Beaver chairlift station.

Sam had felt like screaming. He had sat up and looked wildly around him as though something might be waiting for him to stir. But he had been alone. Alone and cold.

He had stood up with difficulty in the thick drift and stumbled towards his station, tripping and being whipped by low branches as he’d waded through the snow-covered deadfall to where he was last conscious. When he saw the chairlift station and its one customer in a yellow suit, his vision was still swimming, and his heart was battering in his chest.