Four bodies pushed past him and broke the invisible beam. For about five or six seconds those pale blue eyes were blocked from Sam Hunt’s view by woollen hats, anoraks and the sullen slack-jawed faces of Canadian youth. Sam suddenly discovered he had the power to take air into his lungs again. He gasped in a shuddering breath, turned and ran.

Neil looked up from a tray of omelettes and mineral water to see his customers scattering as if about to be mowed down by a buffalo, and the buffalo looked like Sam Hunt. The big crazy guy was careering through the crowds like his shorts were on fire and Neil watched him, open-mouthed, until he crashed out of the restaurant through the wooden swing doors, leaving a group of indignant people in his wake who shouted, ‘Hey!’ and brushed their arms as if his rough contact had left them marked. Neil shook his head, shifted the cocktail stick to the other side of his mouth and went back to adding up food.

Nowhere to run. Sam stood with his legs apart and his arms by his sides, staring at the skiers around him as though surrounded by dangerous lunatics. The restaurant here at the top of the mountain was always busy last thing, as people congregated to have a snack before the last full run of the hill, happy that they were good and high, even if lifts closed.

They slid around outside the restaurant, finding their skis from the forest of bright plastic and wood stuck in the snow or leaning against racks, and they shouted greetings and happy words to companions, the sounds making that deadened flat noise that shouts always do in the open air.

Far below, the valley was already filling with evening mist, a thick white mantle settling on the pines, punctured occasionally by a rogue tree, that pushed through the cloud as a reminder of the rugged grey-green texture the cloud concealed. It was snowing on the other side of the valley, and the massive glacier that crowned Mount Fraser, usually glittering with green and blue, had turned a grey that rendered it indistinguishable from the leaden sky. It made it seem all the more colossal, the way its bulk was swallowed up by the sky. Sam had seen it in every conceivable light and weather, seen its summit tipped by a delicate roseate light at dawn, watched the full summer sun glancing on its broken ice like a laser on diamonds, and the purple shadows creep along the jagged crags with the fading of the evening light. Even in this oppressive unstable weather, it was a ragingly beautiful sight, but as if to tip the balance of the view from savage grandeur into melancholy, a train’s horn sounded below, long and low in its chord of three mis-matching notes, as it left the valley and headed west.