He felt they’d talked enough now, and for the next half-hour they progressed in silence. ‘And what if I don’t want to hold on till we get to the village?’ ‘All I mean is, you have to hold on till we get to the village. ‘No, you limping devil!’ came the reply, with surprising clarity. Behind him Horned Hannes stirred less and less frequently, until at last he didn’t move at all and Egger feared the worst. After each bend in the path the snow seemed to fall even more thickly, relentlessly, soft and entirely without noise. ‘Not on my back,’ he repeated, and walked on.

It was the silence of the mountains that he knew so well, but which still had the capacity to fill his heart with fear. For a moment he listened out into the soundlessly falling snow. ‘But not on my back!’ said Egger, stopping to adjust the leather straps on his shoulders. However, after he had been walking for almost half an hour with only the sound of his own panting in his ears, the answer came from behind: ‘Dying wouldn’t be the worst.’ ‘Just don’t die on me now,’ he said aloud, to himself, not expecting an answer. From time to time he felt Horned Hannes stirring. He had enough to do keeping an eye on the path, which wound down the mountain in front of him in steep hairpin bends and was barely discernible in the driving snow. For the first few hundred metres Egger didn’t speak to the trembling man on his back. But a few days earlier it had turned icy-cold again, and the snow fell so thickly and incessantly from the sky that it seemed softly to swallow the landscape, smothering all life and sound. The snow in the valleys had melted and in the village there was a constant dripping and splashing of meltwater. The first weeks of the year had been unusually warm. When he asked him if he was in pain, Horned Hannes shook his head and twisted his mouth into a grin, but Egger knew that he was lying. He wrapped a halter around his body, tied it to the frame and pulled the knots so tight that the wood let out a crack. He picked him up in both arms like a child and placed him gently on the wooden frame, padded with dry moss, that Horned Hannes had used all his life to carry firewood and injured goats on his back over the hillside. The goatherd stared at him out of the darkness, emaciated and ghostly pale, and Egger knew that Death already crouched behind his eyes. On a February morning in the year 1933 Andreas Egger lifted the dying goatherd Johannes Kalischka, known to all the valley dwellers as Horned Hannes, off his sodden and rather sour-smelling pallet to carry him down to the village along the three-kilometre mountain path that lay buried beneath a thick layer of snow.Ī strange intuition had prompted him to call on Horned Hannes in his hut, where he found him behind the stove, which had long since gone out, curled up under a heap of old goatskins.

Robert seethaler a whole life review