Patrollers knew different. The boy could have skied past without being seen if the clown was looking the other way for even a second, or could have cut through the trees onto the green run. But they had to check anyway. His gang were getting concerned. Mike had skied the trail a couple of times, but there were no signs of a wipe-out and no stray poles, gloves or goggles which usually told a tale of woe.

The thing to do was to leave it until the end of the day, just in case he was chilling out in a mountain restaurant, and if the kid still didn’t show they’d start getting serious about a search.

He hadn’t appeared by three and they got serious all right. The trail was at least a mile long. A lot of trees to search, but that’s where Mike’s instinct told him to look. The kid could have crashed into the pines and, God forbid, be lying there with a broken back. The snow had started again just as the fun-run ended, and that would have covered any signs of a major wipe-out, but if he was in there, Mike was going to find him.

Betty and Lachlan took the east side of the run and Mike took the west. He side-slipped down the first hundred yards, where you could at least see right through the pines to the other side. Then it got thick. Nothing for it but to get in there and poke about. Mike unhitched his pack and swung it round in front of him. He unbuckled a pair of snowshoes he took from the patrollers’ hut, and stepped out of his ski bindings while there was still hard pack to support his weight. One step off the trail and you were up to your waist in snow that held you like a man-trap. He strapped his long skis on his backpack where the snowshoes had been, and legged it into the forest.

There was a strange kind of silence in amongst the trees. When his radio crackled it was like swearing in church. Almost like life became muffled for the time you were in there, softer round the edges, like it didn’t matter what went on out there in the other world you could glimpse through the branches. This primeval place sat secretly like a sanctuary beside the highway of snow that carried tourists up and down the mountain every day. A green-and-brown secret full of twittering birds, scuffling animals and that thick syrupy silence.

It was Mike’s favourite place to ski, in between these massive old grey-green gods, and when the spring powder fell in April he and his buddies would slice through the pines, leaving their ski tracks like autographs, watching nervously for submerged branches and roots that would rip their feet from under them.