shock, his mind wandered to some frightening places. He could not
fathom where his partner was and he imagined he must have had an
accident, too; he pictured Vladimir injured at the bottom of a cliff, and
his despair deepened. “I don’t consider myself a religious man,” said
Sokolov, “but at that time I was thinking: ‘God, please take me, and stop
this torture.’ Over the course of the night, I passed through different
stages of desire to live and to die. I decided I would hang on until noon
the next day; if nobody had come by then I would take a knife and slit my
wrist—these were the kinds of thoughts going through my mind.”
Meanwhile, Sokolov’s partner was having some serious problems of his
own. He made it to the road all right, but when he stopped at the first
village, no one was willing to help him so he had to go all the way back to
the base. Once there, it took him until around five in the morning before
he managed to gather some men with a Caterpillar tractor and a hay
wagon. In this, they made the slow trip back. Not even the Cat could get
up to the ridge so they made the last mile or so on foot, carrying a
stretcher. They didn’t reach Sokolov until nine. By then, he had been on
his own for eighteen hours, and he was on the threshold, wavering
between the living and the dead. “While I was in that suspended,
uncertain state,” he recalled, “my body understood that it should fight for
life and I should be alert. I knew that there was nobody to rely on, except
myself. But as soon as I saw familiar faces, all my strength left me. I felt
very weak; I was very thirsty. I started to cry.
“I told them that they wouldn’t be able to take me to the hospital by
tractor. I told them to call a helicopter immediately because I was going
to die otherwise. As it was, I almost died on the way to the tractor. It took
them six hours to carry me because the slope was so steep. The snow was
melting and it was slippery; there were fallen trees along the creek and
waterfalls covered with ice. There were only four people on the rescue
team and they got exhausted.”